Category: Perspective

By Matthew Dodd

Wes Anderson’s 2023 feature Asteroid City begins with a stark clarification: ‘Asteroid City does not exist’. A television presenter, played by Bryan Cranston, explains to us that, within the context of the film, ‘Asteroid City’ is a fictional play, the production of which has been dramatised for the purpose of a television programme on contemporary American theatre. Its characters are fictional, as are its actors, its writer and its director. As the audience, we fill in the implicit additional reminder: we are watching a film, this is not real. Wes Anderson has always toyed with the conscious artificiality of his films – The Royal Tenenbaums presenting itself as a novel, Rushmore as a play – but Asteroid City sees the director take this notion to its logical extreme. It is a film which plays on at least three narrative levels at any given time, revelling in the complexity of its construction. It’s easy to get lost along the way: we follow Augie Steenbeck, a recently widowed photographer who suddenly meets an alien at a junior stargazing event, as well as Jones Hall, the actor playing the part of Augie Steenbeck. At one point, Bryan Cranston’s television host erroneously appears within the play and questions ‘am I not in this?’ On a first watch, Asteroid City may appear a disorienting and ultimately pointless venture, wherein emotional truth is submerged in a mess of muddled narratives and overly quirky stylisation. Yet, it is precisely because of its deliberate artificiality that the film works so well and, in truth, bears such a sincere emotional heart.  

Throughout the film, characters hold the reality of their feelings at a strange, syntactical remove. Tilda Swinton’s Professor Hickenlooper remarks that ‘I never had children. Sometimes I wonder if I wish I should’ve.’ This kind of overwrought dialogue is typical for Asteroid City. In classically Anderson-ian style, lines of this sort are delivered in a macabre monotone, as though these Oscar-winning actors were amateurs in a small-town production. It is this register of unreality which imbues Asteroid City with its special strength. What could be read as overt quirkiness – something Anderson is regularly accused of – is in fact representative of something deeper, an emotional detachment which dogs the film as a whole. Characters hold their emotions at arm’s length, plays exist within films, nothing is quite what it seems and nobody quite says what they mean. 

Things happen in Asteroid City for no apparent reason. First, it’s a car exploding, then it’s an alien coming to steal an asteroid, and then that same alien coming back to return said asteroid. When faced with the unexplainable, humans are troubled. We like to rationalise and we like to understand. The other major event to take place in Asteroid City without a reason, prior to the events of the film itself, is the death of Augie Steenbeck’s wife, the mother of his four children. The alien’s pointless invasion becomes a symbol of her death, a moment in time with no motivation or purpose but which fundamentally alters life as we know it. Photographing it, Augie hopes to have some kind of closure, some elucidation of this bafflingly pointless event, but he doesn’t find it. 

Grief can be a destabilising force, rendering the world a soundstage and the rest of humanity actors. And so, when Augie Steenbeck, in the midst of the heady commotion on screen, turns to the camera and says ‘I still don’t understand the play’ before, quite literally, walking off the set, the layers of over-drawn hyperreality are levelled, and this moment of meta-theatricality becomes, instead, an intensely human moment of derealisation. In the face of grief, he becomes an actor in the play that is his life and, noticing this, decides to leave the stage. The audience’s confusion over what is actually happening – where in the film/play/television programme are we? – is mirrored by Augie’s confusion over what the play is actually about which, in turn, mirrors that deeper, nagging confusion that we all feel throughout our lives: why do things happen the way they do? The exchange between Augie/Jones and his director is, understandably, read as the central illuminating moment of the film. After 90 minutes of confused, deliberately ambiguous drama, our protagonist sits down with the director of his own story and asks the question that we, as audience, feel equally drawn to, what is actually going on? Except, this isn’t quite the question Augie ends up asking. Though he dwells on his confusion – ‘I still don’t understand the play’ – his real question is a much more direct one: ‘am I doing him right?’ 

By now the walls of meta-theatricality have collapsed into a central emotional truth. Jason Schwartzman’s role is, at this point, not quite Augie Steenbeck the character, or Jones Hall the actor, but rather a strange amalgam of the two. He asks his question, ostensibly, as an actor, but on a truer emotional level as a widower, a lost and frustrated man left to care for his children, alone. It is the genius of Asteroid City that these disparate roles are pressed together as one, setting the performance of an actor trying to convincingly play a role alongside the performance of a single father trying to behave as though everything is alright. We search for meaning in life how we search for meaning in a play; we want the alien to mean something just how we want death to mean something. As he walks through the backstage, Augie runs into the actor playing the alien – a magnificent cameo from Jeff Goldblum – explaining how he plays the alien as a metaphor. ‘Metaphor for what?’ Augie asks; ‘I don’t know yet’, the actor responds. Asteroid City very deliberately plays with its own apparent meaninglessness, a parody of a Wes Anderson film, dollhouses within dollhouses. Yet, it is precisely because Wes Anderson constructs Asteroid City so artificially that it is able to be so sincere. Raw human emotion is buried under an endless veneer of obfuscation and detachment. Asteroid City is confusing because the world is confusing. We are all actors in plays with no obvious themes. The question, therefore, isn’t what the play is about, but rather how good our performances are. The simple, revelatory answer that Asteroid City provides, through the animus of Adrien Brody’s role as director, is that it doesn’t matter, as long as you ‘keep telling the story’. 

The emotional linchpin of Asteroid City lies just beyond this moment, however, in the immediately succeeding scene. The actor Jones Hall, having gone for the fresh air his director assures him he won’t find, runs into the actor cast in the absent role of his deceased wife. ‘It’s you’, he says, ‘the wife who played my actress.’ By this point there is no illusion of specificity in the players at hand – both characters are at once the actors and their roles. Whether this is an actress playing a wife or a wife playing an actress is of little relevance, the lines read the same. The two exchange a few words before the actress/wife, played by Margot Robbie, delivers her lines, cut from the play. Robbie, simultaneously the actress and the wife, announces the central emotional torment at the heart of the film in a strange, surreal soliloquy about alien planets and the secrets of the universe: ‘maybe I think you’ll need to replace me’. We know Asteroid City isn’t real, we know the characters are illusory, we know these are just lines being read by actors, and yet none of this makes any difference. This moment is as emotionally direct as they come, a wife giving her husband permission to move on. ‘I can’t’, Jones/Steenbeck responds, to which the actress/wife replies, ‘maybe I think you’ll need to try.’ The camera, having held both characters in a balanced side-on shot now cuts brusquely to Robbie’s face. ‘I’m not coming back Augie.’ This focal exchange is held at a distance, both by the myriad of meta-narratives and the dialogue’s own modality of detachment: the truth – ‘you’ll need to try’ – is qualified by these separations – ‘maybe I think’. There is a desensitisation, an alienation from reality which pervades all the characters and their interior lives. The painful, shameful, impossible decision to journey through one’s grief, to allow oneself to move on, is hidden beneath this labyrinth of confusion. The exchange is, textually, just a recitation of some lines by two actors, and yet it transcends the layers of meaning becoming, out of something wholly artificial, something wholly earnest. Augie Steenbeck, like so many of us, buries his grief deep within and so it only follows that the truth of his feeling should be buried so similarly in this narrative sprawl. Asteroid City is unreal because grief, pain and life are unreal. The effect of the meeting on Jones Hall, the actor, is unclear, but that doesn’t really matter, its relevance is clear, the heart of Asteroid City unlocked.

Asteroid City – the city itself – takes on allegorical relevance as a kind of purgatory for its residents. Every character, excepting perhaps Steve Carrell’s motel owner, is there visiting, and yet none are able to leave. It is a neutral zone in which to deal with traumas unseen. Midge Campbell bears pretend bruises which become an avatar for the implied abuses suffered at the hands of her second-ex-husband. As she runs lines with Augie, she works through the pains of a failed marriage held at the remove of dramatic artifice. As it does throughout the film, art becomes a useful intermediary between ourselves and our emotions. Both her and Augie are afraid to move on from the events which have scarred them: as long as they are stuck in Asteroid City, they are stuck with them. To move past their unexplainable traumas, they can’t just sit with and try to analyse them, they must acknowledge them and let them go. You can’t expect to overcome your pain if you don’t first accept it. Or, more simply, as Willem Defoe’s drama teacher endlessly chants, you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. Visually, Anderson employs a register of oversaturated detachment, evoking the paintings of Edward Hopper, the preeminent visual documenter of mid-century American alienation, trapping characters in frames-within-frames, focally positioning the endless flatlands that surround each of these characters. In the end, the characters leave Asteroid City overnight, with little ceremony. Our final image is of that unending desert into which our heroes recede, as an upbeat skiffle cover of Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train plays us out. There’s no true conclusion to Asteroid City in the same way there’s no real conclusion to the desert as it drifts on endlessly, in the same way there’s no true conclusion to grief and no true answer to life.

The characters in Asteroid City are lost, bursting out of the seams of their text to find some answers to the grand mysteries of life. We might imagine ourselves as characters in plays: wouldn’t we want to walk offstage and ask our directors what the central theme of our existence is? Asteroid City understands and sympathises with such a desire but knows all too well that these sorts of questions don’t matter. We’re all playing characters just how they were written, and there’s no point trying to fight that. There is no scholarly consensus on the thematic relevance of death and loneliness. For much of his career Wes Anderson has placed real characters inside doll-house existences, drawing out the rich humanity that can only be truly realised in these hyperreal scenarios. In Asteroid City, he takes the characters out, plays with the fakeness of their existences, before returning them to the dollhouse, accepting after all that life is an incomprehensible play, devoid of morals and structure, but that this is no reason to give up on it. 

By May Thomson

There remains an oddly enduring idea that queerness – and particularly Sapphism – came bursting into existence with all its rainbow ribbons at the precise turn of the nineteenth century. With the exception of Wilde, Victorian LGBT literature seems utterly elusive – lost, if it is there at all. 

This is, of course, a myth. And manifold factors work to mystify, omit, and  revise queer literary history. Saliently, many pieces of literature were never actually written, with the queer Victorian fearing the consequences of inhabiting a space beyond contemporary notions of virtue. That said, the Victorian era saw the beginnings of a movement towards sexual emancipation and, despite the dominant current of sexual repression, nineteenth-century sexologists like Havelock Ellis became pioneers in gender and sexuality studies. 

Victorian queer invisibility also arises from modern impressions in the enduring critical hesitance when interpreting literature and primary sources as in any way LGBT. This is an idea Susan Koppelman articulates compellingly in the preface to Two Friends, a brilliant collection of nineteenth-century lesbian short stories by American women. In opposition to queer denialists, who claim that queer identity is being retroactively imposed, she writes: ‘if we read about a man and a woman loving each other in the way… that Abby loves Sarah in “Two Friends” … we would not wonder what the story was about or quarrel about how to label the relationship. We would know.’ Her frustration is clear, and her stance invites a shift in reading practice. She later says, of the stories in the collection, that they were chosen because ‘they feel like lesbian stories to [her]’, encouraging readers to trust their own affective responses – an approach that borders on a reader-response, even phenomenological, reading of literature, with meanings emerging from lived experience and perception rather than rigid taxonomies. 

As a result of both the uneasiness with calling texts queer and the underrepresentation of explicitly queer voices in the historical record, the practice of archiving becomes crucial for the preservation and restoration of this overlooked part of literary history. Creating and engaging with banks of primary sources is essential to the work of LGBT literary recovery, offering the possibility not just of uncovering lost texts, but of contextualising, interpreting, and learning from them. Rooted specifically in the Dickinson College archive, this article will trace some forgotten queer literary fragments and ask what it means to remember that we have always existed – loving, creating, and leaving traces where we were not meant to. Queer love and identity were not absent from the Victorian world but rendered illegible by dominant moral standards. The practice of queer archival recovery, as exemplified by this archive, offers not just historical restoration but a radical reimagining of how we read, remember, and recognise love.

‘The world was on us, pressing sore;
My Love and I took hands and swore,
     Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers evermore’

Written in the shadow of Victorian respectability, these lines declare an unwavering commitment to authentic love in a world that refuses to see it. They honour devotion and literary vision seemingly powerful enough to fuse two beings into one: indeed, the vow above belonged to Michael Field, the shared pseudonym of lovers and writers Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley. The pair, though now largely obscure, were acclaimed by contemporaries Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and George Meredith, with Field deemed a promising talent before ‘his’ womanness was erroneously revealed. Whilst analysis of the literature of Michael Field could (and, in my view, should) fill thousands of pages on its own, this fragment is just one of tens of documents in Dickinson College’s Victorian Queer Archive. The archive, established by Professor Joanna Swafford, Professor Sarah Kersh, and teams of their respective students, aims to address the lack of publications of queer texts and to contribute to a fuller picture of Victorian literature. Accessible to anyone and fully digitised, it is one of the very few archives that seek to document and celebrate the often overlooked but certainly extant records of homoerotic desire, love, and identity. 

   ‘There was a very nice pretty young lady, who I (a girl) was going to be married to! (the very idea!). I loved her and even now love her very much.’    

This extract, from 1844, comes from the diary of ten-year-old Emily Pepys, recounting a dream she had the night before. It is an extraordinary little artifact – seemingly unremarkable, yet brimming with emotional and historical complexity. Notably, Pepys recounts her engagement not with shame, but with curiosity and warmth. However, she also makes a specific note of her gender (‘I (a girl)’) in a parenthetical aside, as if trying to reconcile the dream self with the waking self. This seems a moment of cognitive dissonance – a flicker of questioning that complicates gender identity and desire alike. This demonstrates that queer feelings do not emerge from cultural indoctrination or some ‘modern ideology.’ They are – they always have been. But, instead, are often complicated or diminished by the world of heterosexual norms and expectations. Indeed, she later describes hoping she will be ‘let off’  for her dreamy, forbidden affection. 

Whilst from a constitutional perspective the story of Queen Victoria refusing to criminalise sexual relations between women as they ‘did not do such things’ is impossible, lesbianism has been particularly overlooked throughout modern history. This text is a study in the consequences of ignoring queer love and existence, serving as a time capsule of a world that could not conceive of love between women.

‘THE VOICE OF SALOME: Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokannan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? . . . Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love. . . . They say love hath a bitter taste. . . . But what matter? what matter? I have kissed thy mouth, Iokannan, I have kissed thy mouth.’

In this brilliant fragment, Oscar Wilde offers us a different but equally rich example of queer desire, existence, and resistance in the nineteenth century. Wilde is a central figure in the gay literary canon, not simply because of his sexuality, but because queerness permeates his work. Although Salome’s desire here appears heterosexual, Wilde saturates his play with queer longing and aesthetics: gender inversion, camp excess, and erotic obsession. Her desire – exemplified through her stream of excitable interrogatives – is excessive, theatrical, and repetitive, even bordering on self-parody in its sheer sensuality. Salome has also been reclaimed in queer readings as a gender-transgressive figure for unapologetically commanding male attention, sharply refusing passivity, and ultimately dominating the male body. Indeed, Wilde’s rendering of Salome was deemed scandalous at the time for disrupting Victorian gender roles and sexual decorum. This is an excellent example of Koppelman’s idea about the ‘feel’ of text. Whilst not explicitly describing a queer relationship, this text exudes the flamboyance and theatricality often integral to gay culture. One example of Salome being viewed through a queer gaze is Richard Bruce Nugent’s artwork. Nugent, a gay writer and painter, depicted Salome as a queer symbol of sexual defiance. Ellen McBreen argues that he was influenced by a ‘widespread gay understanding’ of Wilde’s version, further evidence of the value of perception and queer readings.

To trace queerness into the Victorian archive is not to impose modern, anachronistic categories, but to recognise what has long been obscured, silenced, and missed out of history. These texts, however veiled or fragmented, do not simply gesture towards queer existence but assert it, often with more clarity and courage than they have been appreciated for. 

The art of queer archiving is about both recovery and reanimation, making visible that which dominant histories have rendered unreadable. In reading these fragments, we not only challenge a heterosexual canon but honour the reality that queer people have always been here. This archive isn’t quiet. It hums with coded longing, risk, beauty, and defiance. To read – and, indeed, to create – archives of this sort is to remember that queer people were not just present: they were passionate, prolific, and determined to write themselves into eternity.

By Poppy Reed

saudade

/saʊˈdɑːdə/

noun

1. (especially with reference to songs or poetry) a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament.

I am often caught in saudade. Never having heard this word before, I now feel like something has shifted, and I share it with you now. A Portuguese sentiment, an untranslatable word. But I think in its bleakness a sense of solace can be found, and, paradoxically, an understanding.

I feel it in the folkish melody that lingers long after the old busker on the bridge has finished playing, it is the sound of a lover’s breath that echoes in your ears long after they’re gone, it lives in the spaces in between. It acts as a tender reminder of what is lost, but somehow will remain in the fabric of your mind. New faces remind me of old ones, I am often stuck in past time.

The children are shrieking in the playground opposite my window, and suddenly I’m there. This longing and yearning for something I once had is consuming. But it’s more than just missing something. What I miss can never return to me, this is the melodramatic melancholy of it all. Saudade.

It feels like the timid sorrow that blooms in moments of small joys. I feel love and I rejoice in the remembrance of these memories, and slowly I begin to enjoy the dance I have in these spaces between time.

The way that the wind sifted through my hair that one specific day last year, and the beep…beep… beep of that Australian traffic light reminds me of this one 80s song I first heard a while ago. Now when I look above at the deep cerulean abyss, the sky suddenly morphs into the ocean and a wave comes crashing over me and I am engulfed in my own memory. Saudade.

Bittersweetness, a cold yearning intertwined with a warmth for what once was. Growing up can seem like a morbid experience, seasons fly by faster and each time they appear more and more fleeting. Life no longer feels infinite like it once did. My dog’s hair greys, and his eyes cloud over, people I know have died.

When I walk past the school now, I hear my little sisters giggling amongst the children in the playground and I am transported backwards again. My parents looking down on me, crawling and melting into my mother’s lap, being a part of someone else. Now as I stand alone, I feel precarious and on the verge of tipping over at all times. I often wish I had strings attached to me, so that I could be pulled in a direction without the need to decide on anything, a break from the endless crossroads of adulthood. As I grow older, I resent the uncertainty that comes with knowledge. The exuberance that I once felt waking up on a birthday, the moment just after you wake up when you feel blankness and opportunity used to spark a fire through my young bones. A moment of hope and anticipation, but increasingly that fire has put out, transforming into a black smog that hovers over my restless head.

I now welcome the whispers of saudade, I let her in and begin to worship her visits. As whilst I know what has gone cannot return, there is the relief that in my nostalgia I can be witness to these pockets of light again.

By Rosie Roche

About a year and a half ago, I lay awake at night, tears streaming down my face as I dug deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of reels about dementia. Strangers being forgotten by their families and friends, and strangers forgetting their families and friends. The thought terrified me to such a level that for just over a week I lived in a feverish state in which I wrote my ‘The Memory Bank’. It was as industrious and unromantic as it sounds. Before I went to bed, I would trace every moment I could remember from that day and write it down.

I fully expected to read it back and be bored by excessive details of the mundane. However, I was wrong. The document begins by delusionally declaring: ‘I need to wake up and revise tomorrow. But that is unimportant really compared to the story of my life […] I have started a hundred thousand diaries already with the very real intention of following through with it. This time will be different because I will.’ Naturally, ‘The Memory Bank’ goes on to span a period of precisely only 12 days, from the 31^st April – 11^th May 2023: the height of my A-Level stress. It contains 5441 words. It is utter chaos. I must have repressed this period of my life far more than I realised. In my mind, A-Levels had been full of hard work, certainly, but I also thought I was relatively calm and rational. Having read it, I can safely say I cracked a bit under the pressure. Here is an extract which is very telling of my fragile mental state at the time:

Monday 8^th May, 2023

‘I needed to come home. I had gone days consistently on the verge of crying and it was very tiring. I tearfully ranted about Miss Toe [name changed] on the way home to my mum, who had given me a sandwich. I got home and tearfully said I needed a shower. My mum said I should come and do the chickens. I tearfully declined. She made me go anyway. 

I stood for a moment watching my mum dig up a worm for Henrietta. I tried to convince Peggy to eat a potato. I then said I was going back up to the house to have a shower. My mum told me I might have to turn the hot water on, and I started crying. 

I had soup and bread, and the best shower ever while watching the office. I felt amazing, I felt refreshed, and my dad came in, asked if I was ok, and I melted back into tears again.’

…

It turned out to be a thoroughly entertaining read, at least for me. I wish I could stick to regularly writing a journal or diary, but I have always struggled to make good habits stick. For your own potential amusement, here is a further extract from ‘The Memory Bank’.

Some context first: Bob is a fat little ginger pony, Wiggle is a very stupid pug (which I call the Bug), Henrietta is a chicken (or was, RIP), and Agatha is my sister.

31^st April, 2023

‘I went to let out the chickens and say hi to them properly as I hadn’t really introduced myself yet. The gate wouldn’t open until I shoved it really hard, then I gently swung it back behind me. It closed again. Turns out the chickens had been let out already. I was trying to stroke ‘Hen-rietta’ (note: change the hens’ names, Agatha is overestimating the funniness) and to my horror saw that Bob was casually walking into the garden. Despite my best roar to prevent him, he continued meandering along. I leapt up to open the door. It wouldn’t open. I pulled and pulled and pulled with all my might. No luck. Instead, I was forced to jump like some kind of kung fu panda, and flew over the whole fence, bouncing off the hen food thingy. Grabbed the first bucket I saw, full of dirty water. Emptied it. It was full of rusty nails. Legged it to the tack room. Grabbed a big handful of nuts. Lost my bucket. Stressfully hunted for my bucket. When I finally found Bob, I lured him back, but to my horror, Wiggle stood, blatantly willing to die in Bob’s path, and Bob was not about to stop for an animal with an arse for a face. He powered through. I repeatedly flung Wiggle away by the scruff of her neck while maintaining a grip on the bucket. I did it. But it was not all over yet. There was still a pile of rusty nails to pick up which had conveniently landed in a rotting pile of horse poo. So with the Bug on my lap, I hunted through horse shit for rusty nails. All of this to let out the chickens who were already let out.’

So, there was a time when a chicken called Henrietta was an unusually dear thing in my life… which I had forgotten. If I hadn’t written these random days down in such depth then she would have sunk into the vast ocean of forgotten details in my life. In all honesty, there will be a depressingly large forgotten ocean specifically for chickens which have tragically died over the years because of the fox. I have not forgotten the pug’s death wish however, which persists without explanation to this day. She repeatedly lunges into herds of cows and yaps at their feet as they trample around her, or dives under car tyres thinking she can halt them with her sheer bulk. Small but mighty (and with a short life expectancy due to her small brain). I digress.

…

I was lucky enough to have a gap year and was again determined for this period of my life not to be forgotten. In the dreary days of October when my local friends had already sauntered off to Australia, London or University, I still lurked in the countryside with the sheep in the mud and the rain, feeling sorry for myself. A friend’s father rather morbidly looked me in the eye and said – and I will never forget it – “You will remember these days of your life in colour…  the rest of your life you will remember everything in black and white. Enjoy it. Appreciate it.” I did appreciate it and the memories are certainly colourful, and I now dread the day where my memory will fade to black and white- a very eerie thought. Anyway, these words first of all sent me bolting into London in search of ‘colour’ and to rather predictably work for F&M, and secondly, they were a motivating factor to start trying to write down my life again. 

Although I did buy several small notebooks which are stacked in a neat little line on my desk, they are all either heavily written in throughout the first pages, or maybe half full at the most. I think this is partly because when I am writing something physically, I don’t really like to be brief, as it feels inaccurate. I always find myself writing diary-like things as if someone might come and read them one day, so the tone is like a one-sided-dialogue. They are long, drawling monologues which bang on about lots of little things – like a cat I saw in the morning, or a grape I ate in the afternoon. I inevitably get bored and give up. I ended up having a note (just in Notes) which bullet-pointed each day roughly. This is not time-consuming at all and works well because even if it’s not very detailed, you remember things from it. Some of them I returned to later and tried to rewrite in greater depth from memory. 

My favourite way of writing down my memories though, which I began in August 2023, is to try and perfectly capture a single moment with as much vivid detail as possible – written in the moment itself. I normally try to write in a way that puts people reading it at as close proximity as possible to the same scene of my life. This is an impossibility, of course – one of the great troubles with writing is the inevitable incongruity of the memory of the author with the myriad of interpretative imaginations of their readers. Even the discord between public imagination and Hollywood imagination causes unimaginable irritation for everyone involved – nothing is more jarring to an adoring reader than watching a badly adapted book unfold on screen. The best adaptation of a book I have seen to date is Normal People – which I was amazed by, given that the nature of the book is so focussed on the mind; to express that on screen was an incredible feat. I also think it is an example of the book seriously lending to the experience of the film, as you know precisely what niche pocket of feeling the actors are attempting to portray. I digress… 

Here are some extracts from my ‘Words, words, words…’ notes:

18th August, 2023

‘The window faced the sleepy sun which rested brightly right against the horizon, scattering shivers of yellow out into the sky. For a long moment the plane swivelled away, and when it turned back, the sun was gone and only its ripples of orange light remained. The sky dipped quickly from being glazed with sunset, to a smoky purple, to an ever deepening blue. Now the world outside is charcoal black, and having deliberately, stupidly, picked a window seat for the views, I find myself with my face pressed against the window to see past the reflections from inside. When you get close enough though, it is quite beautiful. The only thing to be seen in the darkness is the patterns made by people’s lights. Cities smattered the black with shifting gold, making a band of land look like it was smouldering, a burnt out piece of timber in the inky sea. Tiny bursts of light are towns. When they’re splattered across a large area, the ground looks like it’s been scoured by meteors which have left glowing ember debris. They’ve dipped the lights now, so the plane is soaked with orange-pink light, and now I can see the stars peppering the sky.’ 

Another one… 

2nd March, 2024

‘The hills rise and ripple around us like a green tide, swallowing up the view of Mount Kenya. The wind whips and snaps at my hair and grey lakes loom from the grass lined with zebra and impala. Cows are herded across plains by men with colourful clothes and long sticks and the shrubbery expands and contracts with the shifting landscape like a murmur of forest-coloured birds.’

This one’s from Cambodia…

2nd May, 2024

‘The sea is lilac pink, and the sky is a soft raspberry rainbow of rippling clouds. Painted blue and white boats are scattered across the bay and the green arms of the island are extended out towards the mainland like a ballerina. The hostel is filling up, the BBQ burning away wafting the mouth-watering smell of steak across the sand. Zac’s knees knock together as he scrolls through Instagram, Kitty is plugged into her wire headphones and Ella lies on her side. Flags flap in an unfelt breeze. Purple UV lights over the bar. Waves lapping at the beach. Suki Waterhouse lilting in the background. This is tranquillity. Earlier we rented a paddle board and spent the afternoon burning in the sun, leaping, diving, flipping into the bright turquoise water before flopping over the board, faces tilted away from the light. It felt like perfect nostalgia if that makes sense. “You only realise you’re in the good old days when they’ve already gone”. Bullshit. I’m in them right now.’ 

This next one was on the final flight of my year off. Evidentially my thoughts had turned a bit darker at this point, as I seem to be picturing it crashing. 

24th August, 2024

‘Suitcases rolling. Disembodied dolls heads lolling out of glittering backpacks. Identical blonde girls in identical dresses. Walking down the aisle, scanning for the seat number. It is as if I were walking through a real-life Guess Who. Different versions of blinking bleary-eyed faces watching me. 13C – not a window seat sadly. Soft roar of the plane. ‘Seat Belts please.’ You need to put your bag in the overhead as you’re on a wing exit. Reading the instructions above the window. Letting the mind drift. The plane jolts and hisses and the door flies off. The man with the weak bladder who earlier kept getting me to stand up: dragged out of the window. The clutter of yellow masks deployed and bouncing and swinging. Hands grabbing and missing and yanking the oxygen to their faces. I read once that the oxygen simply sedates passengers, making them giddy and happy during their last moments. The blue sky tilts. What would Byron or Wordsworth write if they knew we would one day commute through the intangible mountains of white cloud, in a branded cylinder hurtling through the air, somehow more stable and smooth than rolling on rails in a train. Sinking into the glow. So vivid, so glorious, so heavenly. It would give way to shadow and rain and muddy green and grey. England. Home. 

The thud of wheels against tarmac. A familiar feeling now- how privileged is that? Tens of times. This time there is a sad finality to it. Already I want to fly away again. I can already see it coming. The murky ice of winter charging headlong towards me, even as the sun still presses a warm palm against the graffitied cheek of Bristol.’  

Anyway, I feel I have subjected you all to enough of my random moments in life. Those were a few ways that I, an extraordinarily disorganised person incapable of writing a diary, have tried to battle oblivion over the last few years. Wilde once brilliantly wrote, in The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train’. I wouldn’t call any of this sensational, but it is such fun (Miranda’s Mum).

By Tilly James

We’ve heard the stories; big break up, tears and pain, followed by an excruciatingly timed “memories” notification from your phone. The “memories”? An album of you and the aforementioned big break up, in all your happiest moments. Brutal.

A coincidence? A sign? Some slightly twisted guy in the cloud with time to kill? We will never know.

Essentially, the devil works hard, but Apple photos work harder.

I seem to be no exception. My phone just chimed “5 years ago today!”

So, lying in my bed, with perhaps a bit of morbid curiosity, I couldn’t help but click. It did not disappoint:

Ok, so not an album of loved up youths before it all went crashing down. Still, pretty brilliantly brutal though.

The poignancy, you see, is that this is the photo I took when I broke down for the very first time over my skin. When I looked at myself and begged something, somewhere, to stop what was happening to me, please.

It’s been a vicious cycle, and I’ve tried it all. Well, not all (all would be bathing in my own wee which is what a woman in the gym recommended to me, unprompted).

That’s the other thing, 5 years of unwanted advice. Of “try this, have you seen that, drink water, don’t have baths.”

But also, 5 years of incredible friends. Of champions and lessons. Of people having my back, and boosting me up. Turning the light back on. My mum, my brothers, my sisters, my family. My friends. Random people I’ve connected with; in yoga, on the street, in an audition, on the tube. Those knowing looks exchanged between allies, secret members of the club that many join but few remain in. All these people, keeping me going. Reminding me who I am, despite it all. Who I am, because of it all.

And myself. 5 years of pep talks in the mirror. A girl and then a woman on this journey. In a world where beauty is currency, and vanity is disguised as an app called TikTok.

I’ve challenged people, I’ve been bold and said, ‘why does this make me less?’ And for the most part, people say it doesn’t and they mean that. But some don’t. Some say hurtful things. Some see my strength (because that is what I now know it to be) as a weakness. And they go for it. They try to ruin me. They ask me what’s wrong with my face. They scream at me, ‘you are ugly, you are ruined, nobody wants you!’

I would be lying if I said it didn’t rattle me. Boy, does it. But, I remember what I would say if it was anyone else. I would say fuck them. To their core. I would say they don’t know me, they are small people with cold hearts and narrow minds. Keep going! I would say. Things will get better. Most importantly, remember that the world is BIGGER than this. You must add that pain to your armoury. Let it fuel you.

I am aware that this thing that affects me is so small in the grand scheme. It is a drop in the ocean in a world that is burning and on its head, where we are going backwards and we are at war.

And so I write this not for a poor me. But for a way to be seen.

More importantly. I write this as a way to see you, whoever you may be.

I write this to show it all; the big, the bad and the angry. I am not less for a superficial “impurity”. And neither are you. For whatever it may be, whichever “impurity” it is that haunts you. You are not it, you are everything and more.

And so, for the love of good writing and excellent TV, I IMPLORE you to see more. I write this, to ask you. I ask you to see more than what someone could be. See them for what they are, right now, in front of you. See you, for you are. Right now. That unfiltered person, there. THAT is beauty. THAT is exactly how it should be.

By Edward Bayliss

Rob Ager is an internet film critic and analyst

Known for his rigorous and penetrating insights into the sci-fi and horror genres in particular, Rob has been credited with pioneering the video movie critique. Starting in 2007, he has grown an impressive following of 359,000 subscribers across his YouTube channels, and has featured in the New York Times, Time Entertainment, Indiewire, and The Irish Times, to name a few.

I met Rob over Zoom for a ninety minute conversation on 30^th January. 

Rob is wearing a blue polo shirt – the colour matching almost exactly with the acoustic soundproofing panels mounted on the rear wall of his studio. A microphone arm protrudes from the bottom of the frame. He meets his mic with the question of whether his sound and lighting are okay. I smile to myself in the knowledge that these are aspects of a shot he must have considered hundreds of times. His voice clear and his face lit well, I affirm, and we begin the interview. 

I thank him for taking the time to entertain such a small publication as ours, and begin with how and why he started his film critiquing career. Rob tells me that he ‘was writing, producing, directing [and] editing short films’ and ‘had also been working in mental health for many years so there was a lot of psychology in my life’. The latter of which, he adds, ‘started to blend in with the filmmaking’, affording him expertise in breaking down the nuance of character in film. Fondly, he recalls that he ‘started studying the masters, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Lynch’, discovering that he had a keen eye for detail. He tells me confidently that he was ‘so impressed with the things I was finding in the films, that I thought I’ve got to share this to the world.’ YouTube was in its embryonic stages when Rob first began uploading videos, so for him, it was unchartered waters. Wearing a grin, Rob says that he ‘started at the channel on there thinking maybe a few hundred film makers will be interested in this and everyone else will just go ‘you’re a lunatic’ and, you know, just some obsessive compulsive nut but now, a couple of months later there were 10,000 subscribers and it all just snowballed from there.’

I congratulate Rob on his sizable YouTube following, and ask him what he owes his success to. Unexpectedly, he shrugs off my praise, and says earnestly, that ‘when you look at some other channels you’ve got on YouTube, they’ve got way bigger subscriber amounts than I have so I don’t really consider it to be all that impressive.’ He has been ‘limited by a number of factors’; namely, that his content doesn’t ‘lend itself to the click bait fast food video type’, with ‘thumbnail pictures where you’ve got a big arrow pointing at something and a big emotional word… I hate all that’. Rob trails off, lamenting the fact that ‘people are having to do things like that just to be noticed.’ I remind him of my original question.

Rob says that some of the debt of his success is owed to people’s conception of the ‘English academic’. Expanding on this, he suspects that people from abroad might assume ‘‘oh this guy is British’, and they automatically associate intelligence and being cultured but here in Britain I’m a Scouser, and I’m a scumbag, so people outside of Britain refer to my work as scholarly which it’s not because I’m not an academic.’ Though he might not be a scholar per se, Rob suggests that his work was and is ‘more sort of scholarly’ than most of his competitors. His originality, or ‘freshness’ has assured his popularity (in 2021, Esquire credited him with first developing the theory of child sexual abuse in The Shining), and though he doesn’t use ‘fancy video editing’, he reminds me that it is ‘the concepts that sell’. Indeed, Rob’s website is almost as austere as a car manual, but importantly, it’s absolutely clear in its direction. 

Next, we move on to the general practice of film criticism, with increases in democratisation and accessibility characterising the profession. Rob is aware that he hasn’t been traditionally schooled in his vocation, though he says that he’s ‘read a lot of biographies of film makers’ (at this moment, he gestures towards a spread of books on Kubrick and others atop a shelf behind him). He’s worked with ‘detailed sources, information, and interviews with people who have worked with filmmakers’, but insists that ‘most of my understanding of film basically ended up coming from making films myself… actually getting involved in the work is very important.’ I tell Rob that there’s definitely a Kubrick quote in there about the importance of picking up a film camera. Ager appeals to many sources for film knowledge; he says that it might sound as though ‘I’m sort of dismissing academia’, which to an extent he does, but still, he respects the fact that ‘there’s plenty of good that comes out of the field.’

When I ask Rob if there are any critics, commentators or analysts in particular that have shaped his modes of inquiry, I half expect him to reel off the usual suspects of Ebert, Siskel, and maybe even Kermode. Instead, he says dismissively that ‘there aren’t really any film critics I would go to for that.’ He shares anecdotal experiences that inspired him such as watching fellow Liverpudlian Alex Cox, whose TV show would ‘take a classic cult movie’ and would give a ‘breakdown about the production and some interpretations’. Rob also mentions script writer Robert McKee whose series he also watched in his teens. A formative moment came when Rob watched one of Mckee’s episodes on Terminator. Smiling, he remembers the presenter drawing attention to the human qualities of the robot; ‘why would the robot fix its hair – this creature has vanity.’ The psychological implications of film were also brought to Rob’s attention by his father who would ‘point things out in Hitchcock’s movies.’ Again though, Rob reiterates the centrality of biographies to his research and understanding of film. 

The role of critics or reviews in Rob’s world seems a small one. He doesn’t care much for reviews, arguing that ‘today’s marketing involves a hell of a lot of false advertising online, and I do think there are quite a few critics out there who in one way or another are taking a backhander in order to give a positive review.’ Despite the ‘nefarious’ nature of these suspicions, Rob explains the practicalities of this process: ‘some particular film review magazine – they have relationships with the film studios and if they give a really scathing review of some movie they might not get the exclusive interviews for the next movie that comes out from the studio, and that’s true of reviewing across the board with a lot of things.’

Rob is known well for his reluctance to explain his methods of ‘decoding’ films; I ask him if this is because the industry is so competitive. In short, the answer is yes. Some of these channels he says have ‘dozens of regular writers… putting out four or five very slickly edited videos a week’, and much of their content is ‘copied across’ from other channels ‘so they can get views’. Rob draws my attention to an incident of intellectual property theft that the channel ‘ScreenPrism’, now called ‘The Take’, committed. He says that ‘one of their writers just basically lifted their entire study of The Shining from my online article and pretty much everything in it was taken from [me]’. The video was taken down and blame games were played between ScreenPrism writers and producers.     

Most of Rob’s analysis has landed on films in the horror and science fiction genres. His most famous videos have focussed on films such as The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Thing, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Exorcist. When questioned as to why this is the case, he remarks that ‘they’re allowed to bend reality a lot more than straight drama.’ Here, Rob’s investment and experience in psychology comes to the fore. For him, these genres ‘allow an exploration of the dark aspects of human nature… in a safe fiction form’.

Kubrick is often seen as the ‘king of genre’ – a jack of all trades and master of some. Not least from his well-renowned article, ‘Lessons from Stanley’ and weighty catalogue of criticism on Kubrick’s filmography, Rob’s interest in the director is common knowledge. I think Ager sees much of himself in Kubrick; not in self-aggrandising terms, but in their shared disillusion with schooling or ‘academia’ and pursuit instead of individual study. He notes how Kubrick ‘breezed into college and breezed back out in the end… and he basically became self-educated.’ Ager recognises the dizzying intellect of Kubrick, how he became ‘obsessed with self-education’, and how, amusingly, ‘it scares me to think what damage he could have done in the world if he was a bad person.’ Rob is intrigued by the ‘carefully crafted secrecy’ of the director, adding that he didn’t answer to anyone, ‘not even his collaborators’. This behaviour was spurred on by Kubrick’s experience filming Spartacus, wherein he came under a great deal of ‘nasty cast and crew members’; Rob suspects that this made him ‘think even more like a chess player’ – a telling image when we come to think of Kubrick. I bring up the Kubrick Exhibition in London’s Design Museum, and we share our awe at the mountains of cabinets which housed the director’s research for the sadly unreleased Napoleon. When Rob isn’t dissecting the films of the lofty Kubrick et al with his psychological scalpel, he enjoys ‘tonnes of movies’ where he doesn’t ‘see this kind of depth’ – the first two instalments of the Rambo franchise being examples.    

I probe further into Ager’s understanding of the psychological role of films in our culture. Cinema, for Rob, is a way to ‘learn about the world in a casual enjoyable way that is not restricted to words.’ He adds that ‘reading a published study can be fantastic […] but people like to experience something on a non-verbal level’. Fiction affords the possibility of allegory: ‘we know it’s fake, we know it didn’t really happen’, but essentially, ‘it relates to our own lives’ and ‘gives us a different way of considering our own personal lives.’ Rob leans further back into his chair, and boomerangs back to Kubrick. Doctor Strangelove is ‘as good as an academic book’ on the Cold War, though the film simply ‘communicates it in a different format’. ‘If you want to learn about the criminal mindset, watch A Clockwork Orange, or the nature of conspiracy theories, watch Eyes Wide Shut’ Rob urges. He considers the filmography of Kubrick to be tantamount to any written journal on the same psychological subjects.  

Inevitably, I too can’t help but return to Kubrick. A man who has been so often associated with myth and legend, who has been resigned to the realm of ‘the recluse, the misanthrope, the phobic, the paranoid, the museum piece.’ I ask Rob if he thinks there is a danger of sensationalising and over-speculating the character of Kubrick. I have in mind a two part video series that Ager released recently, titled: ‘Was Stanley Kubrick Killed?’ His ‘manipulative mind’ and his ‘genius’ are aspects of the director we should be wary of; Ager warns. Kubrick’s methods on set were unorthodox – Rob ‘disagree[s]’ with the mistreatment of actors, and draws attention to the strange facts that despite Kubrick’s extraordinary IQ, he killed himself with his ‘smoking habits’ and diet, and as a ‘family man’ who, while making Eyes Wide Shut of all films, failed to foresee his daughter running off to a Scientology cult. That Ager lends even a voice (while dismissing its claims) to the notion that Kubrick might have been murdered seems strange considering his otherwise concern for the mythologising of the director. I remind myself that this video series has almost 350k views.

Ager bemoans the politicisation of cinema, it being one of the ‘26 reasons why modern movies are so awful’ (another of Ager’s videos). He stresses that the public entertainment industry is not the place for party politics, yet, ‘politics has seeped so heavily into everything in our culture these days […] it’s beyond boring.’ It seems the apple is rotten, inside and out, with actors, producers and directors all ‘trying to manipulate us into supporting whatever political candidate they support.’ 

The overuse of CGI is concerning, as is the use of artificial intelligence ‘to create videos’, which Rob describes brilliantly, as ‘awesomely lame.’ AI and CGI have been ‘getting films away from reality’ where he would rather see ‘flesh and blood, people in front of a camera, in an actual room.’ Rob says that the expensive technical standards are wholly unnecessary; neither Laurel and Hardy nor the Marx Brothers had it. Too many films these days look like ‘shampoo adverts’, wages Ager, furthering his point with the proposition that a film needs only good characters and a good story to succeed.  

Another problem facing the industry is that of the ‘Easter egg’. This feature of films was once a ‘subliminal’ effort of directors to tap into the subconscious of viewers, but has now become a sickly stunt ‘for the sake of marketing’, wherein ‘people on YouTube’ can now hunt for tokenistic references and nods, according to Ager. I mention to Rob that this is how I felt about Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance with its insistence on ‘paying homage’ to just about every horror film ever made, losing all credentials of originality in the process. He nods his head in agreement, furthering the notion that there is a level of self-consciousness from directors that renders subliminal messaging void. When he made his first independent feature film in 2012 (Turn in Your Grave) Rob admits with a knowing grin that he ‘absolutely overdid the self-conscious subliminal thing.’

Rob’s expertise lies in seeing things others don’t – he is credited as the originator of the now widely accepted child sexual abuse theory of Danny in Kubrick’s The Shining, and has produced groundbreaking commentary on ‘the monolith as the cinema screen’ in the same director’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Where people have often levelled the criticism that Ager sees things that aren’t there, they often later discover that his findings are meticulously researched and stand atop a sturdy wall of evidence. 

Dan Leberg, of the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute, however, fails to recognise Ager as a valid film critic and analyst. His attack, in a long-form piece published in 2011 (and the most formal assault on Ager’s mode), calls out the critic as a ‘fanboy in the ivory tower’, ‘mediaphiliac’, ‘pseudo-intellectual’, ‘eccentric’, and ‘un-serious’. Leberg’s article begins anecdotally when on his first day of teaching, ‘one of my students informed me that the tutorial discussion I had so laboriously planned on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was a moot point because of a YouTube clip she had seen the night before.’ This turned out to be Ager’s hundreds-of-thousands-times-watched analysis of the same film. Importantly, Ager declares on his website (which itself has about 5000 words detailing his past, experience, and credentials – something he tells me is ‘necessary’) that it would be a mistake to put him on an ‘intellectual pedestal’. Rob explains to me that ‘some of my favourite intellectuals of all time are academics’, though there are ‘pitfalls in academia’, highlighting that the route into such a world was never accessible to him, given his upbringing in ‘poverty stricken parts of Liverpool.’ He adds that there is a great deal of ‘snobbishness’ associated with the university educated, and that there’s ‘academics who just want the title of being an academic so that they can claim intellectual superiority over others.’ Rob believes that Dan Leberg falls into this camp. Ager’s commitment to ‘self-educating’ has led him to harbour a ‘distrust’ of much of what traditional academia has to offer. Leberg accused Rob of plagiarism and copyright infringement even though Ager has persistently defended himself with the statement that ‘I’ve never said that I was the only person who had made this discovery [concerning the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey]’. Rob then brings to my attention the ridiculous notion ‘that only an academic can do a serious study of a movie that was made by a non-academic [Kubrick]’. Interestingly, Ager’s content has been used widely amongst academic institutions. A lecturer at Ohio State University used Ager’s material to teach their students in an ‘undergraduate Kubrick class’, and Ager received ‘a batch of fifteen or so thank you letters’ from their class subsequently. Rob has also, he tells me, been consulted by many academics including the well-reputed Diana Walsh Pasulka, for her book American Cosmic – you can observe the 144 instances of Ager’s work being used by media, academics, websites, and blogs, on his website. This all seems to paint a robust portrait of Rob Ager, the qualified critic.

Ninety minutes have elapsed since Rob asked me if his lighting was okay. The sun, now further along its track and beginning to settle, casts more distinct shadows on Rob’s studio wall. We finish the interview with the usual gestures of thanks and appreciation. Looking now at the mirror of my black screened laptop, I cannot help but see Ager as the most qualified unqualified critic, the film-fanatic fanboy, but also the clinically disposed and professional analyst.            

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

 – Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song

On this day, in 1963, during the coldest winter in living memory, a woman died. Her name was Sylvia Plath.

So, there she is, the American genius, sent to Cambridge on the promise of extraordinary, who by the age of 30 would change English poetry for a damnable good. Boyfriends numerous, looks renowned, tongue sharp. She is Miss America – coming to our shores to dazzle us out of post-war grey prose, and into the neon lexicon of exceptionalism. A double exposure of both catastrophe and creative flair. A bright tragedy, burning brighter, brightest now. Shadowed now, by the 1980’s answer to poet laureateship, and a gas oven.

This is not a piece of anti-Hughes venom. This is not a piece of excuses and blame. This is a piece against sensation. This is not a fairytale. There is no winner, no villain, no dastardly plot; this is vast, violent living. A prose we can only hope to grasp, with each word holding a negative side, a double exposure of intention and sight. Words left unsaid. Double Exposure, diaries, drafts burnt. This is the reality of a tragedy; we now live in the fallout. The world is utterly changed by this, yes, but this is not a world ending story. This is life in its most phenomenal form. 

It would be naïve of me to say that Plath’s marriage was complicated. It would be more naïve of me to say that it was brilliant. From the moment of its inception, on the 25^th of February 1956, in a smoky poetry-infused evening, a terrible beauty was born. Plath bites Hughes cheek, much to the dismay of Shirley, Ted’s girlfriend of the time, whilst Hughes steals Plath’s earrings. This was Hughes’ launch for his Saint Botolph’s Review, a stab in the dark for an emerging poet in an upstairs room in Cambridge that would change the course of poetry forever. Even their passionate meeting, a fatal poetry; the apple-cheeked bite that damned the soul, thwarting the fate of man. An explosive longing and ruinous sentencing, at once.  It is easy to see why the pair came together with such intensity. The pair would later marry on ‘Bloomsday’ adding further fuel to the fire of their literary perfection. Two poets, both alike in dignity, matched their courage, and embarked on a love that violently bit away for decades to come. With such intensity steeped and stewed in literary coincidence and allusion it is easy to glamourise, pine, attack, and mythologise the events that surrounded this pairing. The myth that has surrounded a marriage, a union simply brought on by bureaucratic necessities, has terrorised the literary scene since, dividing and demonstrating the passionate love begot from Plath’s prose within its captivated readers. 

To read The Bell Jar for the first time, as I did like every other lonesome 13 year old girl, is to bear the burden of a beating prose. Plath’s poetry refuses to retire when in novelistic form, each sentence upholding a thumping march towards utter depraved bleakness. ‘I am, I am, I am’ becomes not only the echo of a worn out heart, but the attitude we take on when immersing ourselves into the dazzlingly twisted light of Plath. We become Esther, we take those miseries to heart, each assertion against an unjust, wretched world clarifying our own world view. We all have a fig tree growing in our heads, whose branches have always been braying against each battled decision we must take. To be met then, aged 14, with Ted Hughes’ seismic war poem Bayonet Charge, so vastly different yet equally enrapturing as Plath’s own war of words, in my GCSE classroom and the chaotic contextual notes that come with it, shattering. The Plath I had found solace in, who’s writing resonated in such an extraordinary echoing concert of nuances, had been with him? The magical meeting I have just described is destroyed by such a crushing piece of sensation. The literary clad love is stripped and moulded into a story of abuse and blame, furthering the dramatisation of Plath’s life. The monolithic marriage glossing over the exposures that lie beneath, glossing over Sylvia herself. 

Teenage loyalty follows Plath, even in her non-teenage followers. Her mythic haunting of the canon has tormented her legacy within both pop culture, Hughes’ life, and the literary scene. The fascination with the Hughes/Plath union has spiralled into a morbid mutilation of itself, with stubborn opinions shadowing the past. The understated and overlooked element of their relationship, what to me is the Rosetta stone that unlocks the intensity of both their marriage and poetry, is their closeness. Apart from Sylvia’s Michaelmas term in 1956, when they lived apart in fear of the Newnham College seniorities, they often didn’t spend more than half a day away from each other, living during the climaxes of their marriage on the road across America together, or in a secluded part of Devon. Their writing is in constant conversation with each other – each partner lurking in the lines of the other’s, and often they were in conversation with each other whilst writing, editing and guiding each other. 

Image courtesy of James Coyne, 1958

‘Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun’  – Plath, Unabridged Diaries, March 10^th 1956

Even in its all-consuming poetic brilliance, the poetic candour of this relationship is embellished. The ‘Bloomsday’ ceremony, a coincidence. The biting encounter, a drunken flurry. Plath’s perspective on the pairing, even in the private confines of her rigorous kept journal, is ever poetic. Nothing is casual coincidence. From Plath’s private notes on Hughes, throughout their relationship, we see her use her life and mind as a way to explore the poetic boundaries of her confessional style. Her life is her muse, yet, like all muses, it was the way in which she captured it that cemented it as a grand, glowing, myth, not the object itself.  Their married life was fairly ordinary. There were holidays, work parties, and hobbies taken up in harmony. Household business went unorganised and mounted. Worries about money came and went. The marriage failed, as marriages do. People betrayed promises, as people do. They shared a closeness that couldn’t be contained in the boundaries of the ordinary marriage they attempted construct. It is a sad story, made sadder by Hughes’ attempts to reach Plath during her final days, but this is not an extraordinary story. It is a marriage mythologised and a life absorbed.

Reduced to a moment of unimaginable pain, her words misconstrued, the marriage’s pain magnified; she is yet to exist as just Sylvia. She has become a teen idol – appearing in Lana del Rey lyrics, appearing alongside Kat Stratford in 10 Things I hate About You, appearing in quotes and illusions as Angelina Jolie wreaks an effortlessly cool havoc on Plath’s own alma mater McClean Hospital. This is a lot to attach to one 30 year old, catapulting her name beyond the canon and into the canonised veneration of cultural icon. By attaching so much to a life and works, things get lost. The complicated tones of discussing Hughes and Plath are reduced into tangible volatile forces, the complicated nature of Plath’s own mind and poetry is reduced to throw away lines that carry a weight beyond their intention. Plath becomes an object, part of the make up for some aesthetic that is abstract from her and unrecognisable from her own time. Her confessional style that opened the world to the workings of her mind has now bore a life of its own, trapping her in those poetic moments, obscuring the life that existed around them. 

Attending a star-spangled poetry class with Anne Sexton and taught by Robert Lowell in 1959, Plath ventured headlong into the confessional form. The art of confessional poetry is a controversial form, one that strives to unleash the inner most perspectives and psychologies from the poet onto the world, teaching the reader about escape in a most intimate form, straying away from the abstracted, open form of poetry that came before it. Plath’s poems explore her own mind, they don’t attempt to convince us, but rather to feel beyond the surface. She captures the double exposure of humanity, the identification of the world, and the terrible beauty that brays persistently beneath it. There is no simpleness, no stillness; there is more to the world that meets Plath’s eyes. This double exposure identification has left Plath herself double exposed, with her writing being used to further prescribe her with her tragedy, condensing her to her most profoundly rapturous creative outbursts.

All these iterations of Plath leave her in a manipulated, mutilated legacy. For some she will be dying forever. Her suicide being the morbid fascination that pins her manic adorations and depressive tirades together. After all, death has always mystified our interests more than life. For others, her bruises will never heal, as she gets wheeled out to puppet the cries against Hughes, her mouth filled with venom that corrodes the love and artistic companionship that existed alongside the bitterness and pain until the end. Sometimes, she’s a bright girl from the States who took the poetry world by storm, carefully typing away with thesaurus on her lap, other times she is the tortured poet writing in the dark in an unbreakable artistic frenzy. All of these should exist at once. Each glimpse of Plath pertains to a negative exposure –  a double exposure of a rich, verbose life. These glimmers of life should be respected for their beauty and magnitude, whilst the urge to hold them forever, to understand why the light breaks through the darkness thus, is to destroy and falsify what is there. We must learn to be content with the Plath we know briefly, be fascinated by what she is, not what she was not, refusing to let our love for her madden us to transform Plath into a figure we make up in our heads.

 

Image courtesy of Newnham College, Cambridge

If the moon smiled she would resemble you. /You leave the same impression/Of something beautiful, but annihilating’. Let Sylvia close. Let the ideal of a mythic poetess live in the imaginary. She can only resemble our hopes and dreamy projections, but her life leaves a lingering presence, ‘something beautiful, but annihilating’ its shocking, ordinary reality. 

By Matty Timmis

I embarked on this degenerate pilgrimage in pursuit of a mercurial goal, strung along by reams of seductive yarns, from a previous visit Miles had spun me over the past year. This was the promised land of free food, free drugs, and naked women, nestled in some idyllic pastoral scene. This was a teenage eden. And Miles’ descriptions weren’t too far fetched, as it turns out, we had tracked down a sort of hippy commune reminiscent of the flower power ideals that proliferated in the 1960s, that I imagined had dissipated after Charles Manson and the end of the summer of love. This established an interesting binary for us – the difference between the hippy and the beatnik, something we considered in the haze of our languorous sojourn.

Our arrival was by increments; first having to sleep in the wooded area adjoining the place the cars were parked in, for fear of making the three hour hike up to the commune in the dark. The following morning, as we were slurping up our breakfast of greasy canned meatballs and pasta, and pilfering some naive hippies’ kombucha, we were approached by a smartly dressed journalist, wanting to ask us some questions and take our photos. We consented and were elated to find, a few days later, our scruffy faces on the front page of the local paper, beneath a headline warning of a “hippie invasion”. It amused us though to think of ourselves as hippies, surely a hippy would never pinch a comrades kombucha, or entertain the thought of ingesting such grimly processed food – these people were vegan almost by definition, in a way a beatnik could never be.

We had finally made it to this hallowed ground, tramping upward through seemingly endless coniferous forests, humming with the honeyed vitality of a summer morning. As we climbed further into the foothills,  the landscape opened up in segments – little glimpses of majesty when the tree line broke and the country poured forth from the path. Vivacious bounds of swaying verdant hills and winsome chocolate-box villages stretching out to the horizon. Were we being immersed unknowingly in the hippy mindset? We were wholly beguiled by the flourishing countryside, its quaint details, and its vast scope enthralling our sundered minds. We later found out that beneath that specific area there was an enormous old Nazi munitions dump. 

Such brutality was as far from my mind as is possibly conceivable on that almost pious day. I shan’t ever forget my first glimpse of the commune. A lake lazed louche in a large divot in the foothills, reaching out into its depth were numerous gaunt fingers, little spits and abutments jutting away from the shore, heavy with wildflowers and luscious perfume. Surrounding it a gentle pine forest swelled gently, lulling its way up the rolling hills that, far in the distance, turned into more rugged ivory capped peaks. And surrounding the listless shoreline, perched on the spindly abutments, flocks of unsullied nymphs frolicking  in exaltation, in the euphoric torpor of the midday heat, jumping naked in the water as glimmers of diamonds arced across the unblemished sky. It was akin to the middle panel of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights – a naive but liberated image of emancipation from the stifling of the human spirit. Silvery wisps of incense drifted through the air, its languid smoke curling in time with the rhythmic pulsation of the strange instruments being played on the lakeside.

We stayed at the commune for three days, each one a kaleidoscopic tapestry we sunk further into, toward the flower garland centrefold. We floated through the rambling, ornate camp some 2000 people strong, stoned and inquisitive, around a strangely resplendent vision of primitive man. I cannot think of a site comparable – there was no money, nor modern technology, little clothing and, in its ideal state, no ego. Each day we would twice convene, in a communing circle round the peripheries of a meadow, to eat with our 2000 brothers and sisters. This woodland lea would then transform into a hive of activity as different people would set up workshops in their area of knowledge to collaborate on improving the body, the mind, and often the commune itself. We joined some fascinating and balmy workshops, from meditation to naked yoga to resisting policing, meeting some absorbing and unusual people as well; Dutch anarchist squatters, Google AI developers, Oxford phd students and people claiming to be in touch with cosmic vibrations and frequencies. Here we were not hippies but true beatnik, people besotted with the mere idea of living, wanting to be fully immersed in all the myriad ways one may go about that. 

The dinner circle, often occurring around 10 or 11pm, was a much more spiritual experience, illuminated by the dancing licks of flames swirling through the cooling August air. It was here, before dinner, that we would take each other’s hands, forming a pulsating chain of 4000 hands, and ground ourselves before the sacred fire. On our final night we consumed the mushrooms we had smuggled and stayed by the fire, awe struck into the early hours of the morning. At 3 o’clock in the morning I found myself in a place I could not have conceived of existing were I not then there. The fire before so brandished with exuberance was now a pile of embers pulsating two metres across in the blackness of the night. Chiselled and sweat soaked hippies would occasionally strut toward the fire and throw large logs into it, in doing so illuminating their rugged visages with a cacophony of trembling embers bounding up into the night. Gliding in ethereal, seemingly timeless robes, men and women made fluid dancing moves round the outside of the fire, their strange positions quivering in the light of sparks. The 200 or so left of us all found ourselves playing some obscure Mediaeval seeming instrument or humming deeply along to shared, primal rhythms.

The next day, my UK passport now having run out of permitted days in Europe. I had to return home – a fraught process. Miles and Rory awoke at 11 in the morning to a large crowd control policing unit systematically dismantling the community, leaving in a mass exodus accompanied by men and women with shields and batons. We were each left with the distinct feeling that the strange paradoxical course of our journey was somewhat totemic, was as close to those kids’ original blindly dreaming adventures as we could hope to get.

So tomorrow night I will watch the long long skies and think of the raw land neath it, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and see the evening star drooping and shedding her sparkler dims, on the bristled forests and the rippling meadows, the shimmering lakes and the slender blackened scars of road that sweep this world, that contain within their gap infinite possibilities, a million ways of existing in the roaring vitality of life.

So I’ve ended back at my source, the last burst of Kerouac’s On the Road, 

before darkness blesses the earth, cups the peaks and folds in the shores. I think of the road.

As a footnote I would like to add, and my friends will no doubt point this out, there is probably nothing less ‘beatnik’ than spending ages writing an article justifying how you are a beatnik!

By Matty Timmis

Now I am not trying to insinuate that being a beatnik is akin to a quasi-religion or a cult; such blind faith, such lack of curiosity, must be diametrically opposed to whatever it may be. Neither am I claiming Jesus was a promiscuous, drug taking chancer scraping together a living with his questioning ideas – that’s for you to judge. What I am trying to communicate is the strange belief in the journey you have to embrace, finding satisfaction in the fact you may never reach your destination, that whatever you are travelling toward may well be a mirage. Implicit in that piece of mind is the notion that you never look in the rear view mirror, that the visceral feeling of movement is sacrosanct, that the horizon, whipping towards you, is all that really matters. As Kerouac said, “nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road”.

We met in a very suitable jumping off place, a hostel come campground in a Munich park, heaving with hippies, faded upholstery, guitars and fire pits. Miles and Rory arrived replete with a large tin containing 400g of Golden Virginia and an ambitious quantity of drugs they had smuggled up their arses. We were down and out now, so 10 euro a night to stay in the 100 man communal tent seemed exorbitant. We schemed to pitch our tent in the adjoining campground after dark, hopefully making it free. The problems began after some hash, many steins, and a dismally German dinner consisting solely of sausages; we were hopelessly drunk and it was far too dark to pitch our tent. Luckily, a French man we had been jamming with that evening offered us the underside of his truck to protect us from German weather adversities. We settled down then, taking care not to smash our heads on the axel or the shock absorbers inches above us.

Slightly groggy and a tad grimy, we convened in the morning to formulate a plan. We had come here as ‘beatniks’, with a suitably elusive goal, to find a very special place called the rainbow. We soon learnt however that we were entirely in the wrong part of Germany, the rainbow currently taking place in the black forest in the North. We had to make our way up the length of much of the country, but buses and trains were soon out of the question on account of price, besides we had a beatniks faith, the logical thing to do was to hitchhike.    

Before we departed, ebullient and expeditious, we paid a visit to Aldi where, for cultural as much as economic reasons, we decided to steal as much as we could carry. Sitting at the suburban bus stop out front we inspected our plunder, tucking into a pasta-meat tin. This was not an elegant sight, necessitating a jagged stabbing through the lid, then raising the can to one’s lips, sucking up the cold oily fluid and gelatinous pasta, hoping not to choke on the circumspect white meatballs that bobbed ominous in the broth. Such slurping debauchery felt like a probing of the nihilist depths of counterculture, feeling greasy sauce dripping down from my mouth and off the end of my chin, soaking across my shirt, all whilst 4 or 5 elderly German ladies looked on in stupefied horror. We then jay walked, much to their chagrin, across the street and fixed the traffic with our salute, outstretched thumbs of faith upon the road.

We soon found our first lift, a cherry red convertible AMG Mercedes we both sneered at and revered, our driver the kind of suave, bourgeois epitome we wanted to despise. I suspect however he picked us up for our strange spectacle; 3 shambling beatnik protégés, standing on a small road in hope of a ride 500 miles north. He certainly couldn’t take us that far, apologetically explaining he was only going about 2 miles further. No matter, it was a tantalising start to the journey, top down in the afternoon sunshine,  tearing down the street, elated with the simple speed and power of a snarling engine. Thus deposited at a junction, we made our communion with the road again.

This time we were less successful. Hours went by, our food reserves depleted, and we began to feel the burn of the road in the barren afternoon heat. To restore our faith in the journey we blasted not the frantic amphetamine jazz of our bible, but Willie Nelson’s ‘On the Road Again’ and Canned Heats ‘Going Up the Country’, dancing deranged in the oozing tarmac. Eventually a Mini pulled over and picked us up, transported us a short distance, and ejected us in a cramped and now noxious smelling car at a shopping centre 5 miles further north of Munich. With the now necessary addition of beer, we found ourselves another lift, dourly confident we would still be in Bavaria in the morning.

We were dropped amongst billowing smoke stacks and gurgling, besmirched factories; a desolate industrial estate just a stone’s throw from the first concentration camp, Dachau. At least we had beers now, and the promise of a huge truck stop nearby. In our desperation to escape Bavaria and avoid bedding down in the stark landscape, we rapped on the window of any cab that showed some semblance of occupancy, enquiring in whatever languages we could cobble together if they could take us North, all to no avail. At this point we were weary, particularly tired of lugging our cumbersome packs around with us. But our faith was not to be dimmed and the road, in its clemency, now designed us with the blessing of an abandoned Ikea trolley with which we could cart our bags.

After a final, pleading attempt at hitchhiking in the ebbing sun’s hazy light, standing stately by an arcing flyover, we accepted our hobo fate. Between the autobahn and the industrial estate lay a scraggly patch of brush and woodland, into which we flung ourselves, building a fire and bracing for the night. It was not a comfortable or pleasant sleep, our tent pitched atop a bush, the air within swarming with insects, and the nerves from a recent scabies scare passing between us. A fraught atmosphere helpfully exacerbated by a feral sounding party in the nearby lorry park, it’s strange music throbbing like a ketamine fuelled nightmare amongst the clang of heavy industry.

We felt the down and out sting implicit in ‘beatnik’ when we woke. Our faith in the road was waning, and after failing to secure a lift for the entire morning we felt prepared to abandon it, deciding in anguish to catch a train back to nearby Munich. After being bollocked by a passerby for pushing our trolley off a small bridge in sacrificial farewell, we found ourselves at the station feeling wretched. Across the track was a similarly ragged figure waving at us, squinting in the midday sun. We recognised him for one of the hippies we had met in Munich, someone also planning on attending the rainbow. We regaled him with our pitiful story. Illuminating us with a wry grin he explained he was there to catch a ride north with a girl. He offered to enquire about our situation, and soon we had secured a lift exactly where we wanted to go. We repented, the road had provided.

This lady had the trusting faith of a beatnik, happily driving with 4 men she didn’t know across the country in her friends knackered 2002 Golf. Little more than an hour into the journey, she asked if any of us could drive. I was the only one who had a licence and so she asked me if I had ever driven on European roads before, and if I was happy to drive uninsured. I assured her that I was an experienced driver, but the truth was I had only driven on the motorway once, a long time ago. I was wholly enraptured with faith in the road though, setting off zealously on the derestricted autobahn in blazing afternoon sunshine. I considered it a moral obligation to drive quickly, but, at one point, emerging from a tunnel onto a soaring empty bridge in the shimmering gold of sunset, Rory put on The Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ and my foot turned leaden. I ragged that ancient old banger to 115, shuddering and groaning as if it were about to disintegrate. 

Our faith was truly vindicated, as we swept shambolic, beatific through the sun dappled valley.

By Sam Unsworth

Ridley Scott has released two major works in the last two years, that being Napoleon (2023) and the latter being Gladiator II (2024). Both have been contentious for their lack of historical accuracy that toy with the audiences’ suspension of disbelief. But I would like to question whether these are fair attacks at what are successful films or are we simply looking for ways to pick apart a once great director whose works are slowly diminishing in quality? I will warn here for spoilers. 

Gladiator II is no doubt a high-octane action thriller but perhaps what made this only a mediocre re-hashing of its predecessor is not actually because of its lack of attention to detail. Now, to start with the most obvious, the presence of sharks in the Colosseum. Quite obviously ludicrous. It is clear that this would be a logistical nightmare now, let alone in Ancient Rome. Yet I think that this is simply too easy a shot to take at Scott, the man behind Alien (1979), who is asking his audience to suspend their disbelief. Does the presence of great whites add a further jeopardy to the games? That if one of the gladiators fell from the boats then they would be killed also? Honestly, yes. I would argue that here Scott is not looking to be accurate – he is purely looking for an enjoyment factor. 

In Gladiator II Scott understands his audience and wants to provide action and violence that is there to entertain, almost like being put into the seats of the Colosseum yourself. If you had watched the first film you would have seen gladiators fighting tigers and each other, so would we ask that Scott just remade this with different characters? The different games, such as the sea battle or the rhinoceros being ridden, made the film interesting for a returning audience, as well as a newfound fan base. Gladiator II is meant to entertain so maybe we should set aside our historian’s viewpoint and enjoy the film as it is, at heart, a fiction. 

However, this, I doubt, can be said for the Roman newspaper appearing before the printing press. These kinds of throwaway inaccuracies are what harms Scott’s film as it is simply unnecessary, disengaging the audience. One of the first attacks I read on the film was about Denzel Washington’s casting; yet, I find it a weak jab at the film. Washington portrayed the villain Macrinius who ascends to the top of Roman aristocracy and was possibly the saving grace of the film, which was riddled with average performances and even more average screenwriting. The argument against casting a black man in this role holds so little water that it can really be disregarded due to the distinction between Roman and Barbarian and nothing more. So, we should also take into account who we listen to when we are told a film is inaccurate. 

In contrast, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is not a fictional tale. It is a true story with real people and real struggles, hence the inaccuracies do not aid the story but in many ways diminish it. Why was Joaquin Phoenix cast to play Napoleon at both Toulon and Waterloo? Why was Josephine presented as being younger than Napoleon himself? Setting these aside, the inaccuracies do, at times, undermine the genius of Napoleon’s military strategy, especially at Austerlitz. Scott portrays a hilly area with deep lakes where cannons fired onto retreating Russian forces, drowning the majority in the frozen lake. Now, like Gladiator II, this looks incredible cinematically; yet, it simply is not true. Where Gladiator II is a fiction so we can toy with the truth, Napoleon’s story is not. Napoleon’s tactical genius is reduced by fake geography and over-exaggeration. Moreover, the way in which his forces attack in disarray bears no resemblance to the ordered formations of Napoleonic warfare. This is where I believe accuracy matters because Napoleon is, at heart, a biopic about the life of a great person, that, in reality, does not need increasing for cinema, given how impressive a story it is in and of itself. The audience of this film, while also for the masses, would surely have appealed to historians as a homage to a great military leader, yet Scott seems to neglect this core part of the viewership. 

There are times, though, where historical inaccuracy can be done extremely well and to good effect. This is particularly evident in Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale (2001). In this film, set at a medieval jousting tournament, both the costumes and set design were incredibly accurate, and adhered to the source material of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Yet, the one distinct difference is in the music. Helgeland and Burwell, the musical director, utilised classic rock music such as Queen’s “We Will Rock You”, Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” and AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” to create a crowd atmosphere the audience would be familiar with. This is a great example of understanding one’s audience and using inaccuracy to build emotion and allow a modern audience to connect with a wholly unfamiliar world. 

Inaccuracy has its place in historical film, but I find it must be done with reason. Does it evoke emotion? Does it connect with an audience? Does it truly enhance the story? Gladiator II, for all its flaws which are many beyond its accuracy, is arguably made better by its wildly over-the-top display of the Colosseum, much like A Knight’s Tale is enhanced by its modern soundtrack. Yet, in the genre of biopic, I believe Scott takes inaccuracy too far and ultimately it is detrimental to the final work.