On cowering indoors, Tadao Ando bowling alleys, Black Mirror, Ottessa Moshfegh, Lauren Oyler and Bo Burnham
Hello blossoms!
What’s new? I’ve just returned from a holiday to Phillip Island which involved quite a lot of cowering indoors and staying out of the tempestuous weather. This might sound bad to you, but it was delightful to me. I love cowering indoors! In fact, if I were writing a dating profile for myself, I would probably include ‘cowering indoors’ as one of my top five favourite activities alongside ‘playing online boggle’, ‘obsessively googling my enemies’, ‘reading one star Goodreads reviews of immensely popular, award-winning novels’ and ‘not cooking’.
Sorry boys, but I’m already taken
In case you are thinking of reporting me to child services for failing to LIVE LAUGH LOVE enough on my family holiday, I did take my kids ten pin bowling, and we also visited the Phillip Island Chocolate Factory. I would definitely recommend both these activities, but only to a very specific group of people, ie, those of you who are keen to achieve the level of acute psychiatric distress required to be involuntarily admitted to a public psych ward. Like, if you’re currently teetering on the brink of insanity and are looking for that little push to get you across the line into full-blown psychosis, please get in touch and I’ll send you all the deets.
It is actually quite impressive how these modern commercial spaces targeted at attracting children seem to be perfectly designed to overwhelm and disgust all five of your senses simultaneously. The music is loud, the colours are garish, the surfaces are sticky. The air smells of chemicals and tastes of old grease. I have to ask: does it need to be like this? Couldn’t there be a better way? I mean, I’m not one of those beige toy people, I’m not demanding that every space I spend time in must be a tranquil haven of muted sensory pleasure, personally designed by Tadao Ando—but surely there’s some kind of middle ground between this:
And this:
Every bowling alley/play centre I’ve ever been to
Television
I started watching the new season of Black Mirror this week. If you haven’t seen it, Black Mirror is an ‘anthology’ show where every episode follows new characters and a new story, with each exploring some gloomy theme about modern life/technology taken to extremes. I have previously admired it, but have never entirely enjoyed it, mainly because it’s so grim. As I’ve said before: life is grim enough, baby! Most of the time, what I want from a TV show is for it to apply a kind of local anaesthetic to the part of my brain that is responsible for dealing with the never-ending news of doom we are bombarded with, day in, day out—I just want to enter a kind of TV coma in which nothing matters and nobody gets hurt. This is not the kind of entertainment Black Mirror provides.
That said, I did really love the first episode of this season, ‘Joan is Awful’, in which Joan, an ordinary woman, discovers that a Netflix-type streaming service is making a series based almost exactly on her life. Worse, in the show, she is presented as being—as the title suggests—awful. The episode was dark, but also very funny, and it did make me think about how strange and unpleasant it must be to have a movie or a TV show made about you while you’re still alive. This is something that happens to people who have sought fame (eg Pamela Anderson, who has spoken out about being traumatised by the retelling of her story in Pam & Tommy), people who were born into it (ie, the British royal family, whose lives are depicted in such intimate detail on The Crown) and even to people who are not famous at all (eg the family of victims of Jeffrey Dahmer, several of whom described the recent Netflix series about him as re-traumatising).
I don’t think there’s any clear, ethical pathway through this kind of thing. I feel uneasy about the lack of control we all have over our life stories, and the laws around defamation seem like a pretty unsatisfactory answer to this problem. And yet, I don’t think I would advocate for requiring consent before TV shows or movies can depict real people involved in real events—we’d end up with nothing but hagiography. Maybe we just have to accept the risk of unflattering biopics as one of life’s unavoidable hazards, up there with the risk that one day we’ll accidentally become the main character on Twitter (or whatever replaces Twitter once that platform completes its drawn-out death throes).
Other TV recommendations: you’ve probably seen these already, but I loved and would highly recommend the second season of Slow Horses on Apple+, and the final season of the funny and charming Never Have I Ever on Netflix.
Books
While I was cowering indoors last week, I read two somewhat similar books: Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts, and Ottessa Moghfesh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
They're both clever, hateful novels about clever, hateful people being self-absorbed and miserable in New York (and, in Fake Accounts, also in Berlin). In Oyler’s book, the narrator discovers her boyfriend runs an Instagram account pushing conspiracy theories, and then something shocking happens and she moves to Berlin and goes on various dates, inventing a different persona/life story for herself each time. In Moshfegh’s book, the narrator decides to spend a year taking as many prescription drugs as she can with the goal of sleeping as much as possible.
They're curious books, for me, because I enjoyed their prose styles—particularly in the Moshfegh’s, as she has a very clean writing style, reminiscent of Brett Easton Ellis, and can be quite funny—and yet with both books I found myself frequently feeling kind of bored. Very little happened in either book, and while I don’t mind a plotless novel, the narrators of each of these novels were so emotionally limited that being trapped in their heads with nothing much happening was not a particularly exciting reading experience. It’s possible I would have enjoyed them more when I was in my twenties, when I, too, wished to be coolly alienated and fashionably glum—but these days I get kinda impatient with books that are more concerned with being chic than emotionally alive.
Pip Finkemeyer—whose own debut, Sad Girl Novel, is named after the literary genre that both these books probably fall into—has written about this style of book in Harper’s:
‘Sad girl novel’ is a term that came from readers of the genre, talking about books they like on the internet. In general: a young woman is sad (or mad, or bad, or some combination of all three) and is railing against the hand she’s been dealt in life with the mute protest of just not being very happy about anything.
Finkemeyer thinks the appeal of these books is that the characters get to act out in a way that woman aren’t generally allowed to IRL:
People often mention the unlikability of sad girl protagonists, and that’s exactly the point. Women’s behaviour is so policed in real life, it’s a pleasure to see fictional versions of us play out all the emotions which are excommunicated from our real lives lest someone deem us unlikeable too: sadness, madness, badness.
I do get the appeal of this, but there is a bit of a line for me where a character becomes so unlikeable that I don’t really give a shit about what happens to them. I don't mind if characters are flawed, behave badly, fuck up, and hurt people, but to be invested in a character, I do need to be able to understand them. I find that difficult where the character has no ethical framework or any apparent interest in developing one.
It’s not that I think that books about awful people are inherently bad—maybe they’re just not for me. One of the things I most enjoy about reading fiction is that it’s the closest way to experience what it’s like to be another person and to see how they go about making moral choices in the world. I do love an antihero, a flawed protagonist who takes a break from fucking up their own life only to fuck up the lives of others—but I prefer it when they at least want to be good, or better than they are, even if they’re ultimately incapable of it. If a character is just an irredeemable arsehole, who truly doesn't give a shit about anyone other than themselves, it’s almost as boring to me as outright perfection. I guess what I’m saying is: give me a hot mess, a useless idiot, a walking comedy-of-errors—just don’t give me some neurotic mean-girl who makes Joan Rivers look like the Dalai Lama and expect me to care about her inner life.
Other things
For reasons unknown even to myself, I recently decided to revisit the soundtrack to Bo Burnham’s Inside, a Netflix special he made about being trapped indoors during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. I loved it when I first saw it, back in 2021, and played various songs from the soundtrack on repeat for months—and then forgot about it entirely.
Even now, when those early days of pandemic lockdowns feel like a strange, half-remembered dream, I still think it’s brilliant. It’s so funny and clever, so relatable and poignant, and also, in parts, so genuinely upsetting…although perhaps the most upsetting thing about it is how envious it made me of Burnham’s talent. Writing? Comedy? Singing? Acting? Producing? Directing? Is there anything he can’t do? He even has a song in there about how he’s bummed about turning THIRTY, as though THIRTY is somehow old, as though it isn’t incredible that he has achieved such artistic success at such a young age! I mean, when I was thirty I had achieved exactly nothing; I was spending my time drinking wine and watching Letters and Numbers and pretending my cats could talk. GET SOME PERSPECTIVE, BO BURNHAM.
Anyway, listening to the songs was an interesting reminder of how unsettled and apocalyptic everything felt in 2020 (and, to some extent, 2021). It felt like everything was ending, like nothing would ever be the same again. And yet, at this end of the pandemic, even though COVID-19 is still around, still picking people off at an alarming rate, if anything it is weird to me how ordinary life feels. I find it kind of disturbing how, other than the normalisation of working from home, almost nothing has changed. It’s as though the pandemic never happened, like it was just a scratch on a record that jerked us out of the music for a second before we went back to playing the same old song. Sometimes I feel like this was a missed opportunity; like maybe we should have let it change us more. Sometimes I think we should have put on a whole new record.
Until next time,
Eleanor xx
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