I enjoy it when something is simmering in my head, and I’m struggling to think precisely how to word it, then I stumble upon something already published that just what I need, and often worded far better.
1. On comedy and its importance, David Mitchell on an old episode of Rob Brydon’s podcast (around 40 mins) says: ‘In our culture, there is a notion that acting something [not comic] is more significant and more important than comedy, comedy is trivial… I will die on the hill that something with jokes is better than something without jokes. You say things more powerfully, and more entertainingly, through comedy… Sitcoms: every other art form is about things changing, about moments of change and transformation, which is incredibly self-important, because… the general experience of human existence for millennia has been unchanging drudgery and a sense that that spark in our soul, that thing that makes us different, is being frittered away having a boring or dissatisfying lifestyle. There is only one art form that addresses that human experience, and it is the sitcom. Films are about change, novels are about change; sitcoms are about continuity.’ It reminds me too of the famous Ursula Le Guin quote, about the ‘bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid’.
2. Speaking of unremitting drudgery, I do also ponder constantly the same handful of questions over and over again (apologies for the large handful):
Has social media made us genuinely more connected to people? Why do digital natives have off-the-charts poor mental health and self-harm? If sexuality has been liberated from all those tired old confines, why do women and girls suffer — physically, emotionally, sexually — from pornography being one of the most consumed forms of media, and normalised enough that otherwise-inclusive, teen-friendly sitcoms like Brooklyn 99 joke about it in every episode? Why hasn’t identity politics widened the sense of ‘what is acceptable’ to create a beautiful unicorn world, but instead done a wonderful job of putting up unscalable walls between social groups and between individuals? Why hasn’t our constantly connected society built stronger bonds between the people with whom we spend our physical and communal space, with the result of improved support for the most vulnerable in that space? Have computerised and contactless payments improved our personal debt levels or spending habits, or just invited us to walk into a world of financial controls that benefit only the few? Why do we accept that technology has failed to liberate us from work, and that most people you know check their work emails for many more hours than those companies pay them? How does capitalism work when we have no more resources and no money to buy the things we don’t need? What is the government plan for when we’ve run out of nurses and doctors? With all the information at our fingertips, are we more engaged with local, immediate politics, or have media owners and politicians convinced us that it’s all too much, they’re all as bad as each other, there’s no point, voting is a triviality and haven’t you got something more fun/enraging/colourful/terrifying to look at?
(Some of these I have my own answers to, others I have no idea.)
When we need, viscerally, a better world, one in which we can breathe and live and co-exist, are we treating our brains well enough to engage with discussion, debate, changing our mind, admitting our errors, finding a compromise, abandoning our ideas of moral purity and opening ourselves up through community contact, crafts and culture, fearlessness and vulnerability, being outdoors and feeling the balance of nature that exists beyond the world of our tiny screens?
Three things addressed all these perfectly: firstly, and perhaps most bleakly, this twitter thread someone sent me about terrorist and murderer Ted Kaczynski. Didn’t we all have that phase as teenagers of thinking, ‘I mean, apart from the monstrousness of the unnecessary deaths he caused… has he… got a point?’ Turns out middle age takes me back there. Secondly, and more hopefully, this extract in the Atlantic about Russian troll farms deliberately tearing apart US society, and the signs that these same tools can stitch it back together. Thirdly, this fantastic book, out early next year, which not only continues the story of why we are all so fractured, but also what we can do about it, and the simple mental vaccines we can self-administer and encourage schools and groups to share, to inoculate us against the horseshit and idiocy that turns much of the internet into a cesspit. It’s OK! We can do it! But we probably need to make better choices about how we spend each moment of the day! And also maybe a global revolution of some sort! But I’ll leave that to the better planners!
3. One day, one day, I will stop fixating on why I dislike Promising Young Woman. One day. In the meantime, and after watching Don’t Worry Darling with a film-fan housemate, I think I have a little more of it: that PYW is everything I loathe about modern life.
She’s damaged, so inflicts that pain on others; she’s hurt, so her pain is the greatest; her nightly plan of — what, revenge? — will essentially radicalise even more dudes into hating women and believing we are all liars and manipulators; she abuses other women; her suffering is somehow heroic, rather than boring and self-indulgent; she deprioritises the feelings of others (her parents, her friend’s mother, her colleague) because ‘trauma’ is fine to have as your sole personality trait and honestly fuck everyone else; and more than anything, I loathe that her plan is to hate as hard as she can before actually, men carry on doing what they were doing and there are zero consequences. Compare PYW to Don’t Worry Darling (criminally underrated and almost deliberately misunderstood by reviewers), or Fresh, or Men, or Melancholia, or Shirkers, or Shiva Baby, or, of course, Under the Skin, and its flatness, its disconnection, its cynicism, start not to seem like thoughtful reflections of the protagonist’s injured mental state, but an early 21st-century glossy belief in those choices as the only ones to convey importance. Christ, I fucking hate social media.
4. This rice pudding recipe is mind-blowing, if you don’t mind the increased faff compared to Nigel Slater’s (I can’t find that one online, but drop me a line and I’ll send it to you). Also, I assume there’s a typo in the Olive recipe; I’ve made it twice and taken the 450g of butter down to 200g, and even that’s too much. Go for 180g and give your arteries a high five if they make it through.
Take care, gang x