Quick, quick, quick

Hey, friends:

Welcome to the weekend! I’m very, very excited to have a few god-damn days away from my fucking job.

(The job is basically fine but not only am I bit burnt on it, I’ve got a larger than usual number of ‘I’m going to make your job harder, Jeff, because I’m really committing to my bit of a being an asshole’ people in my sphere of interaction…)

So yeah—a holiday weekend! I’m very excited to have one extra day, and I thought one of the best ways to celebrate would be to drop you a quick note wishing you well and blabbing about, uh, stuff? You know, that dumb stuff I tend to blab about…

For example! Remember when I mentioned I’d just gotten through playing Hades, and was ready to start in on another game? Wellllll….I’m still on Hades. I think even though I’m a bit bored with it, and the game has moved into the stages of “oh yeah, here’s a whole level of super-hard stuff you can mess around with since you’ve stuck around and are clearly one of those 100% completion guys.”

(I’m totally not.)

But for whatever reason, whenever I start digging into the backlog of highly acclaimed games I’ve got loaded up, none of them are really scratching the itch. I fussed around with Persona 5, which is one of those games people I trust talk about as an “oh my god, this game totally changed my life and also really popularized the ‘hang with your virtual friends’ dynamic” experience…and all I’ve experienced so far is just a kind of exasperating RPG, point & click “OK, here’s the tutorial so it’s things you’re going to find boring combined with cut scenes you will also find boring” so I just kept going back to the stale-but-still-passable dopamine rush of Hades.

Then I tried another “couldn’t be more highly acclaimed” Disco Elysium? And, uh, I dunno–I’m sure it gets better but it was so deep in the depths of “it’s Warren Ellis The RPG” that I just bounced off it hard.

So that’s the videogame front. For movies, I’m doing a very lazy rewatch of Nosferatu which I adored the first time and this time I’m…just not as in tune with. It was my first Robert Eggers movie, and I’m wondering if what will really deliver the goods for me is watching a different Robert Eggers movie I haven’t seen?

I had a moment last week where I was talking to Graeme about the Mission: Impossible movies (the McQuarrie ones) and he mentioned they were all the same movie. And I said something along the lines of “you know, those movies and David Lynch movies are basically the same thing,” and Graeme said, “ooo, I want you to unpack that in your newsletter.”

But, sadly, there’s not that much to unpack: I just meant that, basically, the McQuarrie M:I movies offer you the exact same experience you want from watching them the first time….and in order to have that same experience, you have to watch another movie for the first time.

Similarly, David Lynch movies, when you watch ‘em for the first time, they’re absolutely spellbinding…and even though you can rewatch them, they’re not the same because such a big chunk of the experience is “what’s going to happen next, anything can happen.” And of course, the second time through that’s just not the same. You’ve got to watch a new David Lynch movie to have the same experience you did the last time you watched a David Lynch movie.

And, you know, when you rewatch Lynch’s movies, they are, in many ways, there’s a lot of the same stuff again and again, the same way Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies are. Not the same stuff in Lynch’s movies and in Cruise’s M:I movies.

Although…one of my theories about the first Mission: Impossible movie, which was directed by Brian DePalma, is that you could turn it into a very good David Lynch movie with just a few tweaks?

I apologize if this is something I talked about on the podcast but—and spoilers for the first Mission Impossible movie which is…thirty years old next year? Jeezis—the first Mission Impossible movie has, in essence, Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) betraying the team and having them killed because, among other things, he thinks Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is sleeping with Phelps’ wife, Claire (Emanuelle Béart).

This being a Tom Cruise movie, Ethan Hunt is of course not sleeping with his mentor’s wife. But because this is a Brian DePalma movie, Ethan Hunt absolutely should’ve been sleeping with Claire. Not only does a lot of the movie make much more sense emotionally, it gives more stakes to Ethan’s character in the film—in the early scenes, he’s kind of an arrogant hotshot and there’d be a lot more valence to the rest of the film if his arrogant assumption he could do anything he wants ends up getting his whole team killed but in the most unexpected (to him) way possible.

And! Honestly, it would really add a bit of shading to Cruise’s character in all the movies after the third where he has less and less of a personal life and he makes larger and larger sweeping statements about the lengths he’ll go to to protect the other members of the team.

But! With that in place and a bit of judicious editing, you’ve got pretty fertile grounds for a David Lynch film. Imagine—you have Jim Phelps, a jealous husband with a hot wife; you have Ethan Hunt, the young apprentice cuckolding his mentor; you have Prague at night; you have a nonsensical bewildering plot; and you just have all those scenes of people pulling off their mask and being somebody else entirely that you know Lynch could’ve made hay with. (You have a scene in the movie of Jim Phelps pulling off his face and really being Ethan Hunt underneath! Just do that three or four more times!)

Mission: Impossible comes out in 1996; Lost Highway comes out in 1997. They’re not the same movie at all but…what if they had been?

Speaking of Lynch, I just finished reading Ominous Whoosh: A Wandering Mind Returns to Twin Peaks by John Thorne about Twin Peaks: The Return. Thorne was one of the co-editors of Wrapped in Plastic, the magazine about Twin Peaks and Lynch that ran for thirteen years and 75 issues, and the years spent thinking about Lynch, along with his connections to Lynch’s collaborators, gives the book a generous smattering of insider knowledge.

The book is also kind of….The World’s Most Boring Guy Talks About Twin Peaks: The Return? I mean, not really? There’s a chapter where Thorne just goes for it and gives us thousands of unrelated words, most of which read like an audio transcription of what’s going on outside his window, so that’s not boring at all. And Thorne also has followed through and done the reading on Hindu myth and how it relates to Twin Peaks: The Return.

But honestly, I got more out of the four and a half hour Youtube video, even with that guy doing a very annoying David Lynch imitation over and over. Both Thorne and annoying YouTube guy are very good about stressing absolutely what Lynch would want—that his movies aren’t about closure and he will definitely go to great lengths to avoid giving you that closure—and yet but also, to varying degrees, can’t help but try and make a case for what they think it means.

Anyway, it wasn’t terrible…but I’m also aware part of why I read it is I’m exactly the kind of jerk who also wants to try and make a case for what Twin Peaks: The Return means, and part of why I read Ominous Whoosh (apart from that great title and cover) was, probably, secretly, to see how it’s done and if it’s possible to do.

Which leaves us with…comics!

I’m dragging my feet on my re-read of Daredevil Masterworks, in part because I’ve maybe only got another eight issues or so before Steve Gerber is off the book and I kinda want to slowly savor the stuff. I think I’ll have more to say about it when I finish that run.

The last volume of Boichi’s Origin came out and I was very sorry to see it go. As I know I mentioned here, Origin is pretty much Kirby’s Machine Man as done by a guy who loves hard sci-fi and extreme panty shots. (And somehow I missed it the first time but the penultimate volume had cameos by two of the main characters from Sunken Rock, Boichi’s previous series which is in my pantheon of fave Problematic Faves.)

I also—to the shame of both me and my bank account—made it through ten volumes of the amazingly titled Hagehiro: After Being Rejected, I Shaved and Took in a High School Runaway, which I guess was a light novel by Shimesaba that is being adapted into manga by Imaru Adachi. To the extent Hagehiro transcends its middle aged guy wish-fulfillment fantasy romcom premise (middle aged salary man takes in a high school runaway to protect her, somehow triggering the secret interest every other woman in his life has with him), it does so by having both the salary man, Yoshida, and the high school girl, Sayu, be closer to actual reality than you would ever expect. I mean, it’s still a middle aged guy wish-fulfillment fantasy romcom, but as far as the writing goes, it’s a good one?

Even less defensible but equally enjoyable is And Yet You Are So Sweet by Kujira Anan, a shojo romance that’s almost a parody of shojo romances: a girl who suffers from “one-sided romances” where she always pines for someone unattainable is invited by the ultimate unattainable boy in her school to have a one-sided romance with him until she forgets the boy who broke her heart.

Of course, the ultimate unattainable boy is actually in love with her and of course between her history, humble nature, naivete (and iffy self-esteem) she’s unable to see that. And so you get no less than five volumes of him being “so sweet” to her and her not getting it, even as she develops feelings for him (which she then feels she has to hide in order to extend their “one sided” relationship). I say it’s almost a parody of shojo romances (and I’m sparing you from talking about how exactly problematic using the term “shojo romance” is) in that a lot of the manga romances I’ve read created by and for women often have the women being the ones standing in the way of their own romantic success, either by cluelessness or a refusal to take seriously their romantic partner’s insistence of genuine feelings. There’s a lot of stuff I could (poorly) unpack her about why that is but I think one of the reasons is the authors’ and readers’ desire for shojo romance to be about more than the protagonis finding fulfillment through romance; often, the true fulfillment comes from the protagonist growing and changing, becoming more able to trust others (or more able to trust themselves).

By contrast, And Yet You Are So Sweet really has nothing more on its mind than “what if he was so into you? What if, whatever way you wanted the perfect boy to treat you, he actually treated you even better?” (And that itself is a lovely remedy to more traditional romances and their “but what if that asshole you couldn’t stop obsessing over wasn’t really that bad” and “but what if that asshole you couldn’t stop obsessing over really was that bad but you were able to cure him through the power of your total love for him” scenarios.)

I’m basically eight volumes in to the manga equivalent of peek-a-boo: a game that’s barely a game, an exercise in repetition where the point is delight, the faintest flicker of “but what if…” followed by extended giggling fits.

And that’s me! And now it’s time to start my weekend.

I hope you’re well, and you have a good weekend too!

-Jeff