Putting the "Fall" in "Follow-Up"

Hey, all:

So it’s November 1st which means I made it through my birthday and now can look forward to a time change and an election in the next five days. Yay?

Last time, I spent a bit of time talking about stuff that mostly fell on the “meh” side of things…I guess? Or maybe not even that, they were just things about which I felt had nothing to say (except for, you know, the follow-up to Hush because I just couldn’t shut up about that shit).

I’m still scratching this particular bug bite, though…in part because one of the things I sorta-jokingly said when we wrapped the podcast was, “man, was I tired of having opinions!” And, like I said, that was only half a joke: all the years of podcasting made me train myself—listen to me! “Made me…”—to be aware enough of stuff to be able to say how I felt about it, good, bad, or indifferent (but if I was indifferent, I was going to at least figure out a way to be entertaining about it. “Differently indifferent,” I guess…)

So, yeah, stuff I feel “meh” about might be good or bad; I just feel indifferently to it. Maybe it doesn’t have a lot to do about whether or not the creators involved “put in the work,” it’s just…I am no longer riding the assembly line of opinions. And stuff that stirs me is just gonna bring that out of me naturally.

Anyway. All of that said, when I finished the last letter, I was, like, “I gotta spend some time talking about the stuff that does stir me.”

And so. Without further ado.

Trap (2024): I sometimes think by not seeing The Sixth Sense, I missed the whole point of M. Night Shyamalan’s career. Hibbs dragged me to Unbreakable because he was so struck with it and that was an amazing time in the theater (as any time in the theater watching a movie with a running time of under two hours that you’d swear was three because you’re spending the whole time praying to just die), and so I took a pass on all the MNS joints with rare exceptions that would prove to me I was absolutely right to do so.

But! Trap hit HBO Max, I had nothing to do that night, I’d found the trailers compelling—especially Josh Hartnett—and I was like, “hmm. A serial killer dad takes his daughter to her favorite artist’s concert and he finds out the whole thing is a big ol’…. trap. I wonder what they can do with that?”

And I’ll be honest: I don’t know if they pulled it off, or if it was remotely believable, or really if I’d seen it in the theater with no way to pause and get a snack if I wouldn’t have also spent most of its running time praying for death, but….I really dug Trap! In part because….it’s just such a god-damned weird movie.

I mean. Ok, so you’re M. Night Shyamalan. You’ve decided to make a movie that will showcase the musical interests of your daughter, Saleka. So you…make a movie about a Dad living a secret life whose attempts to escape responsibility and being caught is to….exploit the musical interests of his daughter?

Seems weird!!

I don’t know, I’ll be honest. I read some interview with Shyamalan back when he was one of the biggest directors and he just….gave me bad vibes. Like, he kinda reminded me of Michael Jackson, just in his nearly split-personality level of self-regard. Like, he was able to talk about M. Night Shyamalan and the things M. Night Shyamalan did as if they were a priori genius, the way a half-asleep docent might tell you about, say, Starry Night. Still a fan, mind you, but it’s been years and years and years and that piece’s greatness is just…. you know, a fact. It’s just a fact that you tell people the way you might tell them that water is two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen. (Uh, excuse me while I google that to make sure that’s how the formula goes.)

But (a) that was a long, long time ago—if nothing else, The Happening had not Happening-ed to Mr. MNS—and; (b) it was reported and transcribed by someone else and who knows what that person’s bias might’ve been; and (c ) I don’t know what drugs he was doing, but when you’ve got more money than you can spend and you’ve got a limited amount of time in which you’re hot and you have access to drugs that can make you productive but also disappear beyond the event horizon of your own butthole…I shouldn’t hold that against the guy.

And yet but still! That’s a very god-damned weird way to frame a movie in which you introduce your daughter to the world, right? Like, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong but part of me thinks that five years after M. Night passes on, Saeleka Shymalan is gonna re-screen Trap and it’s gonna be….a lot.

I mean, there’s parts of Trap that are very, very not good: there are parts where people say thing to Cooper, Josh Hartnett’s affable dad/secret serial killer and it’s just straight up video game dialogue. Just no-nonsense “ok, everyone here’s some exposition that is going to clearly describe the next obstacle to the player and also mention the one way they can get through it and we’re gonna have someone say it again slightly differently just a few minutes later in case the player had put down his controller and was distracted trying to find it on his coffee table in the dark.”

But (a) Josh Hartnett really sells it; and (b) by the time we’ve made it out of the concert and Hartnett drops the facade of Cooper the Dad is Cooper the Butcher, Trap got really interesting to me.

As Cooper says at one point, “I started to think the trap didn’t start when they set up the concert…maybe the trap had been set long before that.” He’s ostensibly talking about a specific plot bit I don’t want to give away, but it was one of several moments where M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is very specifically about the trap of toxic masculinity. Behind his dad jokes and his good samaritan values and his constant espousal of love for his family is an angry guy who blames everyone else for trying to take away his family and happy life, as if his secret need to violently kill people who “seem complete, who seem too whole somehow” had nothing to do with it.

At more than a few points, Cooper talks about killing himself and/or his loved ones as an inevitiability. For a guy who is an unstoppable serial killer nobody can seem to find or catch, Hartnett’s dialogue in the movie is 100% that of the guy who kills his wife and kids and then himself because nobody can take them away from him but him; the guy who kills people and then commits suicide by cop in order to avoid jail and having to see people see him for who he is; a specific kind of American man whose goodness is performative and whose darkness can never be addressed because part of the power he gets from it is in the hiding of it.

I’m still thinking about that part of Trap weeks later. And you know what? It still doesn’t make me think Saleka Shyamalan is gonna have that great a time rewatching the movie after her father’s gone.

Animal Well (2024): Animal Well is a video game I started playing recently, not finished yet, and I think it’s fucking great.

Its only drawback is that it’s a “Metroidvania,” and really the only reasons that’s a drawback is I just fucking hate that I know what a Metroidvania is? I never played the original Metroid (well, maybe five minutes at a department store endcap or something), never played Castevania, but nonetheless I know what that fucking horrible term means. (I also hate that everyone says metroidvania is a portmanteau, when in fact both metroid and castlevania are portmanteaus (portmanteaux?) themselves, and so Metroidvania is a portmanteau squared, a metamanteau, an exponenteau.

But nobody ever talks about that because unlike other words that exist so you can say only them because they signify what they represent, the word “metroidvania” is only spoken when someone is going to explain to you what a metroidvania is and why the game they’ve referred to as a metroidvania is one.

That small failing aside, Animal Well is impeccable if you like a certain type of video game you like, which is the “wander around” game. Animal Well doesn’t explain shit to you; it literally throws you into a new, strange beautiful world and makes you figure out what to do and how to do it. So it’s a “wander around game with amazing vibes” which became a much more important genre of video game to me somewhere around the time the pandemic hit and we all got stuck inside.

I don’t know. There’s something so Monkey’s Paw-ish about video games, isn’t there? Shigeru Miyamoto programming Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda trying to recapture and nurture that feeling he had as a child exploring nature in Kyoto…and succeeded so well a significant percentage of the world sits inside and does exactly the opposite of that.

But Animal Well isn’t like wandering around in nature, it’s like wandering around in a dream, where things are significant but you don’t know why. Plus I already know my backyard pretty well. So….highly recommended!

Yakuza: Kiwami (2016/2024): I about shit when I saw the announcement this was out now for the Nintendo Switch. Like Red Dead Redemption or Arkham Asylum, this is a video game I never thought I’d get a chance to play and suddenly I can because it’s been released on the one console I’ll let myself play.

By the way, I still haven’t really gotten into Red Dead Redemption! I’m thinking/hoping I might give it another go before the end of the year, but when it first came out, I’d just finished playing Tears of the Kingdom and TOTK made Red Dead Redemption really, really show its age. (And even though Rockstar Games has undoubtedly developed the tech beyond the “triangular faced character waving their oven mitt hands around to show that they’re giving exposition” I suspect they’re still in thrall to their gameplay approach of video game sharecropping, the “I’ll let you have this portion of the sandbox if you agree to be my indentured servant and take on this flying school lesson nobody has ever liked ever, even the designer who came up with it just to punish an ex-boyfriend of his wife who said he liked flying in video games” approach.

Anyway, always wanted to play Yakuza and now I finally am and yes it’s asbolutely as fucking fanastic as everyone says. I’d be surprised if I’m even 30% through and I already think Kazuma Kiryu is one of the greatest characters in all of video games, if not, I don’t know, maybe of everything ever. Sure, sure, Hamlet’s great. But Kiryu fuckin’ Kazuma? No contest.

There’s a longish essay about what a brilliant response/callback Yakuza: Kiwami is to Grand Theft Auto III and Rockstar Games, but I should wait until, you know, I’m at least forty percent of the way into the game before I try and write it? Plus, beehiiv’s browser is being so damn slow it’s freezing up every other sentence. And I’m already nearly at two thousand words so….you’re off the hook! Even better, I’m off the hook! To play more Yakuza!

So anyway. Happy All Saints’ Day! Thanks for putting up with me.

-Jeff