Complaining about the weather is our national pastime, as ancestral as a hot cup of tea, but these days, ‘terribly tense’ applies equally to the afternoon forecast and the morning headlines. As an unusually hot September day blurs the line between a changing climate and a turbulent political arena, it is time to look closer at how we talk about both spheres and find that they are not as separate as we have been socialised to believe. Through literature, film, and so many of the creative arts, there is a solidified dichotomy between the greys of metropolitan and the greens of Eden. Take, for example, the rise of Romanticism; William Wordsworth wrote an almost 10,000 line poem describing the natural environment as an otherworldly place that is entered through a deep spiritual understanding. I may not have reached the same development of my prefrontal cortex at the humble age of 20, but can I not claim connection with nature without having undergone some sort of spiritual psychosis? Or is the reality far simpler, and that the boundary between the human and natural worlds is entirely artificial, and everything we do is inherently natural, because we are? In exploring this question I’ve leaned heavily on Timothy Morton’s ecocritical work, The Ecological Thought and how the boundary between contemporary and natural are explored within the fields of creative works, particularly Seamus Heaney’s Field Work and director Martin McDonagh’s film The Banshees of Inisherin.
In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton argues that the modern climate crisis can only be resolved if humanity awakens to the reality of the deep, inescapable way in which we are connected to other beings. This perspective stands in direct contrast to William Wordsworth’s Romantic ideal, which relies on a lofty spiritual pilgrimage to access a sentient, separate, and capitalised ‘Nature’. To truly embrace Morton’s philosophy and reject this romanticised illusion, we must turn instead to the visceral poetry of Seamus Heaney. Written against the tumultuous backdrop of the Troubles, Heaney’s work shows a landscape entirely entangled with human conflict. In his poem “Glanmore Sonnet IX”, Heaney reflects on his retreat to County Wicklow. Seeking refuge from the violent political climate swarming Belfast, Heaney relocated his family in 1972 where they stayed until 1976, under the assumption that fresh immersion in the rural world would offer a sanctuary. The speaker becomes confronted by a rat, and promptly kills, following which he is wracked by guilt and shame for doing the very thing he moved for four years to escape from. As the speaker laments on line 5: ‘Did we come to the wilderness for this?’, the unanswered question underscores his guilt. By using the word ‘wilderness’ to imply a total removal, the speaker desperately aims to draw a line between human savagery and natural peace, instead revealing the boundary already collapsed. By fleeing Belfast for County Wicklow, Heaney tries to cross an imaginary border from a political world into a natural one, treating nature as a passive, neutral sanctuary where human conflict cannot and should not exist. However, the intrusion of the rat and an immediate resurfacing of violence smashes the speaker’s illusion and reinforces how human politics and natural ecologies are completely interconnected, just as Morton argues. Through the speaker’s lament and the penultimate positioning of the sonnet, Heaney presents the escape to Glanmore Cottage as a failed one, as it proved that human politics of violence, trauma, and choices are entirely native to the natural world. Such concepts are not alien to the ‘wilderness’ but are instead interconnected, as Morton emphasises.
The idea of violence, traumas, and petty social politics being native and interwoven into rural spaces is explored further in the film Banshees of Inisherin. If Heaney proves human politics cannot be left at the boundary of the ‘wilderness’, Martin McDonagh’s 2022 film The Banshees of Inisherin completely annihilates the boundary itself. Set near the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923, the film takes place on an island off the west coast of Ireland. While the fictional remote island of Inisherin is isolated from the actual fighting, gunshots and explosions from the mainland conflict act as a backdrop to Colm and Padraic’s trivial arguments. In McDonagh’s narrative, such an ambient and violent backdrop completely infects the seemingly romanticised, spiritual sanctuary from the distant gunfire on the mainland. The isolation in fact becomes a claustrophobic stage where any artificial divide between human affairs and the natural world is completely torn down. The feud between Colm and Padraic becomes trapped within their own geography, escalating into arson and mutilation, proving that the island’s sweeping cliffs and rolling hills offer no romantic peace, but instead a catalytic cage. Passive background elements become intimate casualties of human pettiness, when Padraic’s donkey Jenny dies from choking on Colm’s mutilated finger. By showing the physical toll our ideological conflicts take on the supposedly ‘separate’ natural world, McDonagh captures the ultimate reality of our ecological existence: our politics do not happen apart from nature, but happen within it, with catastrophic consequences for the entire living ecosystem. McDonagh’s narrative therefore runs parallel with Timothy Morton’s insistence on changing our outlook on the natural world as one that enshrouds and is enshrouded by the human experience.
We return, then, to our unseasonably warm September afternoon and our polite complaints about the weather. Our instinct to separate the natural world from our political structures has always been a comforting lie, a way to pretend that the ecosystems we inhabit are merely passive backdrops to our human dramas. But as Timothy Morton’s interconnected thinking reminds us, there is no separate fortress of the realm called ‘Nature’ to escape to. We cannot leave our trauma at the threshold of Heaney’s wilderness, nor can we pretend our ideological violence does not bleed into the rolling hills of McDonagh’s Inisherin. If everything we do is inherently natural simply because we are, then ecological responsibility is not a spiritual luxury for the enlightened few, but the crux of our political reality. It is time to drop the illusion of any boundary and admit that the storm inside Westminster and the storm outside our windows are parts of the exact same sky.
‘When I get to heaven, I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting.’ These are the words of Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister through the Second World War and again in the early 1950s. Yes, I know. I was thrown too on discovering not only that Churchill painted, but that he painted rather well, and prolifically.
Some reviews have dismissed Churchill’s canvases as amateur and short on technique. Yet there is more to learn from our former prime minister than the limits of his technical abilities as an artist. The exhibition, Winston Churchill: The Painter, housed in The Wallace Collection in London until 29 November 2026, is a heartfelt defence of the amateur, a reminder of the importance of stepping away from the real world into the realm of creative sublimity.
For me up until this point, Churchill has been the prime minister of VE Day, the booming voice on the wireless, the bald, cigar-chomping, hunched figure of The Crown. This exhibition pulls the pedestal out from under him and he comes down to earth to meet us face-to-face. Not only are Churchill’s paintings displayed, but his personal possessions too, including his spectacles, individual brushes, and travel easel. While these objects add an interactive level to the exhibition, more significantly, they play a part in making us feel closer to the ‘human version’ of this figure who we feel we ‘know’: we see Churchill as a person rather than simply as a statesman. The cult of the politician dissolves; in its place we are gently introduced to Winston, a man we can begin to unlock and understand.
In his book Painting as a Pastime, Churchill explained that ‘painting is complete as a distraction… I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind.’ Churchill makes it clear that the goal of his painting was not to produce critically acclaimed masterpieces, but rather, he painted to escape. Churchill himself even dismissed the value of his own paintings, referring to them as ‘daubs’. This raises the question: must art be ‘good’ to be worthwhile? For Churchill, painting was not only a worthwhile escape, but essential. To put it in 21st-century terms, it was the statesman’s detox, and an addictive one at that: the almost sixty works on show at The Wallace Collection make up only about a tenth of his estimated total output. The exhibition makes an affecting case in defending creative impetus as a vehicle for increased productivity. Our time away, absorbed in creativity, is key for enhanced performance. Seemingly, some of the apparently useless things we do might well turn out to be the most useful.
Perfection is not always attainable, nor always the height we should be striving for. Churchill valued the simple pleasures associated with his creative hobby: ‘we cannot aspire to masterpieces,’ he said; ‘we may content ourselves with a joy-ride in a paint-box.’ Indeed, sometimes a ‘daub’ is enough, and sometimes that daub is the very thing that propels us into an elevated, ‘flow’ state.
Content warning: This article discusses grief, trauma, mental and physical health problems, suicidal feelings, sexual abuse and abortion.
My first encounter with Dame Tracey Emin’s work was at the Tate Modern this summer, at her exhibition A Second Life. A confessional, iconoclastic, and introspective showcase of sculpture, painting, photography, installation, film, writing, and textiles, Emin traverses media and, in doing so, encapsulates the female experience. It was from here that I was hooked on her story, which she details so poignantly throughout her evocative oeuvre. In viewing her exhibition, I picked up on themes of trauma and grief, and in her most recent works, physical illness, as Emin creates art reflecting upon her battle with bladder cancer. In earlier works, this idea of using bodily vulnerability and physical trauma as a subject is also present, as Emin’s two medically complicated and mentally challenging abortions in the early 1990s play a large role in shaping the narrative of her works – as well as triggering an artistic and personal reinvention.
As can be proven by her first-class degree from Maidstone College of Art, before her attendance at the Royal College of Art in 1987, Emin possesses a breadth of technical ability and prowess. In her school years, she favoured printmaking and woodcuts with a German Expressionist feel, without exploring too much the abstract; her subjects were often either dark landscapes inspired by her hometown of Margate, or representations of her turbulent relationship with Billy Childish. Her rarely seen 1980s watercolour paintings depict seascapes from her home in Kent, and interpretations of cityscapes as she explored her familial heritage in Turkey, for example, Istanbul (1989). However, while there are some differences in medium and colour scheme, Tracey’s rendering of people remains, throughout her oeuvre, Munch-like, with distorted or simplified faces, as can be seen in Disposition of Christ (1990).
Around 1990, after her abortions, Tracey Emin experienced what she refers to as an ‘emotional suicide’. Severely depressed and battling intense physical and psychological trauma, she burned all of the paintings which she had previously produced, in a vehemently driven attempt to rid herself of a part of her life which she believed no longer purposefully served her, or positively benefitted her. At her Tate exhibition this summer, I noted a wall decorated with small photographs, ordered in rows, of all of these destroyed works. To me, this arrangement seemed almost cemeterial and struck me in its emotional weight, while I simultaneously could appreciate there was an eerie beauty in such an homage, in Emin’s recognition of the brutality of her past. It can be difficult to comprehend the sheer significance which art has in her life, in order that the eradication of her artworks might be likened to a suicide of part of her soul, and that a material act of destruction can mirror an entirely individual and intimate mental one. In many ways this was the beginning of Emin’s effort to fracture the norms of how art is perceived: not only in the way that it is created and appears, but in the way that it resonates with all who encounter it. She meant to, and means to, challenge what art is and what it can signify – in her case, her art is a part of her very being.
A hiatus from art and creation ensued after her ‘emotional suicide’, until a return in 1993 at White Cube, with her first solo exhibition – My Major Retrospective, in which she debuted a tender assemblage of memorabilia, text, and paintings. Already, a drastic shift in style was apparent, Tracey adopted a more diaristic, honest tone, while also beginning to favour raw imagery of the female body in her paintings and sculptures, and the painting of rageful canvases inspired by her history as a victim of sexual abuse. She was experiencing an emotional rebirth, and this had encouraged an artistic switch from expressionism to a philosophical, and culturally critical, postmodern exploration.
Like the Moon, You Rolled Across My Back, 2022, monoprint
In 1998, Emin created her seminal installation My Bed, and we are thus provided with another example of how reimagination is so vital in her art and in her life. At the time, My Bed divided public opinion and shocked critics. As pictured below, the installation featured a precise replica of her room after a four-day depressive episode, in all of its uncensored and intimate reality. Despite intense initial backlash to Emin’s confrontation of taboo topics, from depression to sexual liberation, it was nominated for the Turner Prize and had immense commercial success, being sold at Christie’s London in 2014 for over £2.5 million.
My Bed, 1998, at the Tate Modern 2026
My Bed pushed what art could be to the very precipice, and is now accepted and celebrated for having done so. In Artist Talk: Tracey Emin (2025) by The Yale Center for British Art, Emin confesses that this installation saved her and opened up doors for her. There is something remarkable about the fact that a recreation of one of the most pernicious times in her life could have been reclaimed in a positive way. Moreover, in this interview, she explains her process of installing My Bed each time it is exhibited and how she subtly changes certain elements – it is constantly being adapted and reinterpreted depending on her memory and perception of the site of her depressive episode back in the late 1990s. Thus, My Bed is subject to physical alteration as well as alteration of what it means to its creator; every aspect of the installation is always morphing, and from destruction, Emin produced something insightful and resonant.
The Saddest Tomb, 2024
The End of Love, 2024
(Beds became a motif in Emin’s later works.)
In both her personal and artistic life, Tracey Emin has undergone a metamorphosis; from mental and physical turmoil, she takes inspiration and is constantly developing her style and improving upon herself. She has reclaimed her trauma by making it into beautiful, emotive artworks which evoke pathos and convey feminine rage, while remaining sharp and socially conscious.
Durham’s mining history, despite its importance in shaping the cultural identity of the North East, often is unfamiliar to the city’s term-time inhabitants. Unknown to many students is the swarm of people, who flood Durham for one day every summer. Colourful banners, brass bands, and a proud community, alien to Durham’s term-time self, transform the city into a day of remembrance, celebration, and solidarity.
It’s the 11th July 2026, and it is clear this is no ordinary day. As I approach the Gilesgate Roundabout, there is a noticeably shorter wait to cross the usually busy road. It’s only 9am, yet families are already making their way into the city centre, whilst a whisper of music crawls up Claypath. By the time I reach Market Place, the few families have turned into dense crowds, and that distant sound has amplified into the distinctive blast of marching bands. From the Market Place, to Saddler Street, to Elvet Bridge, Durham has been transformed by parades of bands, crowds, and emblematic banners. The Big Meeting has begun.
After weaving through the crowds, and dodging the banners of mining collieries and trade unions, I find the perfect spot. Elvet Bridge in front of me, and the County Hotel directly behind me, I keep hold on my ‘barriers spot’ and wait impatiently for the procession to begin.
Signalled in groups towards Old Elvet, processions converge from New Elvet and Elvet Bridge before advancing towards the Racecourse. Mining lodges, trade unions, community and political organisations pass by me carrying their distinctive banners, accompanied by the sound of brass bands and bagpipes. Many of the marchers stopped outside the County Hotel, where bands electrified the crowds and onlookers from the hotel’s balcony with renditions of contemporary hits such as FreedfromDesire and SweetCaroline. The juxtaposition of modern music and traditional instruments and symbolic banners poignantly captures this year’s 140th anniversary theme, ‘The past we inherit, The future we build,’ emblazoned across the balcony. A reminder to all that this is not only a celebration of the past, but hope and solidarity as we move towards the future.
After two hours of observing the parade, word of food and festivities at The Racecourse inspired a change of location. Following the procession down Old Elvet, we arrived at The Racecourse, except this wasn’t the familiar picnic spot many students enjoy during Easter term. The green field was concealed beneath a sea of people, lined with the gala’s historic banners, and alive with stalls, food trucks and a main stage. Transformed into a festival celebrating North East and working class culture, The Racecourse was certainly not a quiet cricket pitch today.
This festival ground offered the perfect opportunity to admire the Gala’s emblematic banners. Their symbolism, craftmanship, and detail gave the day an artistic dimension. Like wandering through an open-air gallery, each banner told a different story, reflecting both the histories and the present-day identities of the communities it represents. From mining lodges and miners’ families, to trade unionist, and campaign groups, the curation of banners created a unique representation of solidarity and community spirit.
In the midst of the activity of the day, it became impossible to see Durham only through the sheltered lens of its university prestige. The Big Meeting offers a glimpse into the region’s history, yet football chants ahead of England World Cup match that evening and brass-band rendition of Three Lions revealed how tradition and modernity coexist, allowing heritage to continue evolving. Durham Miners’ Gala is a reminder that the North East’s heritage is not simply something confined to the past. Contemporary culture slips naturally into the event through its songs and festivities, allowing tradition to evolve and be alive in the present, without losing its historic roots. Whilst the Gala preserves and celebrates working-class history, its message of solidarity continues to resonate today. Its socialist foundations continue to adapt to contemporary causes, bringing over 200,000 people to Durham each year from across the country.
Although Durham is best known for its historic landscapes, defined by its cobbled streets, cathedral and architecture, it is the annual Big Meeting that brings the city’s history to life, showing how heritage continues to live within communities today.
I was feeling rather nostalgic and decided to revisit the classic romcoms I grew up loving: Two Weeks Notice, Miss Congeniality, Jerry Maguire, Pretty Woman, Notting Hill, and 10 Things I Hate About You. The films that convinced an entire generation that love was funny, complicated and, above all, inevitable. Before I continue, I should make one thing clear: I’m no cynic. Quite the opposite. But as the credits rolled on each of these films, all I could think was…
Where did it all go wrong?
And not to sound like Carrie Bradshaw at the start of every Sex and the City episode, but how on earth did we let these films shape our idea of the perfect relationship? How did manipulation become persistence, jealousy become passion and grand gestures become the ultimate proof of love? More importantly, when did romcoms convince us that poor communication was chemistry and emotional chaos was destiny? That if someone hurts you, lies to you or disappears, they’ll eventually realise what they’ve lost, turn up at your door in the pouring rain and deliver a speech so moving that everything that came before simply doesn’t matter. Perhaps that’s the biggest fantasy of all. Not that love conquers everything, but that love excuses everything. Watching these films back, I realised that almost every one of these iconic love stories would raise more than a few eyebrows in 2026, and yet we still use them as examples in casual conversation of what we want in our own relationships.
Take Two Weeks Notice. For years, we were encouraged to cheer when George races after Lucy, finally realising he can’t live without her. It’s framed as the ultimate romantic revelation. Yet watching it now, it’s hard not to notice that he only seems to recognise her value once she’s prepared to leave. We’re taught this is love. In reality, it often looks more like someone taking a person for granted until they establish boundaries.
Then there’s Miss Congeniality. Eric spends much of the film teasing, challenging and undermining Gracie, and somehow we’re meant to interpret this as chemistry. The message is clear: if a man irritates you enough, it’s probably because he secretly likes you. That lesson has been thoroughly tried and tested, and I think we can all agree it’s aged really, really poorly.
Another one: Jerry Maguire may be responsible for one of the most famous romantic lines in cinema history: “You complete me.” At the time, it felt profound. Now it feels like an awful lot of pressure to place on another human being. The idea that one person should complete us suggests we’re somehow unfinished on our own, waiting for someone else to provide the missing pieces. And the worst part? My heart absolutely breaks for Dorothy, who has clearly been pining after Jerry the entire film. “You had me at hello”? More like, “I had my standards on the floor. You took me for granted, and now you’ve decided to give me the credit I deserved all along, which somehow excuses all of your previous behaviour.”
Pretty Woman? Edward climbing the fire escape to rescue Vivian is iconic. We all wanted the fairy tale. We all wanted the grand gesture. Yet beneath the fantasy sits an idea that appears again and again throughout romantic cinema: that happiness arrives when somebody comes to save you.
Even Notting Hill, and this one I hate to critique. I really do, especially because it’s one of my favourite films of all time. I firmly believe Anna Scott’s line that love is “a violin-playing goat” is exactly right. But even Notting Hill isn’t immune. Anna’s declaration “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” is beautiful. It remains beautiful. But vulnerability alone doesn’t automatically make a relationship healthy. Throughout the film, Anna drifts in and out of William’s life whenever circumstances allow, she even cheats on her existing partner with him and yet we’re encouraged to overlook the instability and the relentless red flags because the speech is just so good and Julia Roberts… well Julia Roberts is Julia Roberts and how could you not forgive her.
Then there’s 10 Things I Hate About You, are we forgetting the central romance begins with outright deception. Patrick is literally paid to date Kat. Of course, he eventually develops genuine feelings, but the foundation of their relationship is built on a lie. Somehow, because Heath Ledger sings on the bleachers, we collectively agreed to ignore that part.
The more I watched, the more I realised they all sell a similar fantasy. Not that love should be kind, communicative or dependable, but that love should be dramatic. That the right person can behave terribly for most of the story, provided they deliver a sufficiently moving speech before the credits roll. What’s worse is that none of this occurred to me the first time around. I believed every airport dash, every last-minute confession and every grand declaration that somehow made years of emotional chaos worth it. And that’s because romcoms sold us a very particular version of love. Love doesn’t require accountability because, if two people are meant to be together, they’ll forgive each other anyway.
I found myself needing to be reminded that healthy relationships don’t make particularly good cinema, and the problem is that we started believing those obstacles belonged in real life too.
That’s how it starts. A freshers’ week tour, groups designated by alphabetised surnames; a social faux pas in a stranger’s accommodation; the first stumble into the local night club. Frantic piano clatters against an empty soundscape. A suspended A chord, rife with all the unresolved anxiety of a journey as yet unbegun. Underneath, the crawling encroach of a rumbling bassline, taming the distempered piano into a steadily alternating rhythm. A pint with a new friend; a surprisingly interesting lecture; the slow realisation that life may not have ended. Order out of chaos, reconciliation out of terror. Your first week at university.
Though I’d been familiar with their work for years before, it wasn’t until my second term at university that I really started to appreciate LCD Soundsystem. The mid-2000s New York Dance-Punk outfit, the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist James Murphy, are not, perhaps, the most natural musical accompaniment to the medieval meander of Durham but, as I wandered the almost familiar streets of the town, their music began resonating with me in a newfound way. Riverside walks were invariably soundtracked by the wryly pugilistic tones of Murphy and the lithe electronic sounds of the band at large. They came to soundtrack a mode of university living that, foreign at first, had become natural to me. Their record ‘45:33’ even had me almost considering going on a run. In particular, I was caught by the clear notion that their 2007 track ‘All My Friends’ might just be the best song ever written.
The eight-minute-long track, built on a relentless piano riff and pounding bassline, is certainly the most energetic expression of aging’s innate melancholy ever recorded. The first two verses tell a hazy story of chance encounters and wild nights – ‘if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up and we still don’t want to stagger home’ certainly reminds me of several recent trips to Observatory Hill. Against this narrative of youthful excitement, choruses stick out as reflections on the ephemeral nature of such experiences: ‘you spent the first five years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends again.’ The entire song is a kind of challenge to the listener: a diagnostic check as to whether the underlying sadness of the lyrics resonates enough to overpower the groove. Indeed, it is that urgent juxtaposition that gives the song its strength: a beat that, like time, will not stop for any reflection.
There was always an undercurrent of sadness to the song, but it’s only really in returning to it now, at the tail-end of a degree, that it has started to sink its teeth into me. I imagine that, in the not-too-distant future, I’ll retroactively understand this time as yet more of the formative hedonism which I’ll one day miss, and consider myself foolish for thinking of it as an ending. Such is the nature of nostalgia, outpacing experience by forcing us to consider everything as a memory in making. In ‘All My Friends’, these early years of young-adulthood are understood as a time where nothing matters but trying to capitulate to societal expectation. Certainly, that seems the case, recalling every night out forgone in favour of writing my ‘dissertation’. The song reminds us, then, that life is intended to be lived rather than remembered. Listening to the song across my degree, I have looked ahead with fear to the time when I, like Murphy’s speaker, will wonder where my friends are tonight. But the song isn’t a grim concession to overpowering ennui. Indeed, the existence of LCD Soundsystem’s oeuvre is a testament to the possibility for late-stage reinvention: Murphy didn’t start the band until he was 32. At 22, the age this writer must accept as his own, Murphy had already turned down a potential life writing for Seinfeld. I doubt I would’ve made the same mistake.
‘All My Friends’ is, fundamentally, a dance track. Its lyrics tell a story of ageing, of losing contact with friends, of accepting the realities of adult life – but this is only half the story. The music itself is alive with the excitement of outsized possibility. It is relentless and unforgivingly seized by motion. The 140bpm gives the keyboard player a nigh-impossible task in keeping up. The message, therefore, is not that life ends at 30, or indeed graduation, but that life is composed of farewells and transformations, and that we must keep dancing through them all. Throughout the LCD Soundsystem discography, Murphy ruminates with half-ironic detachment the possibility of clinging to youth. It’s a fool’s errand, played for laughs in ‘Losing My Edge’, but one that nevertheless grants the band their peculiar mix of ennui and ecstasy. Every moment is fleeting, no friend will stick around forever, but all of that synthesised joy and sadness makes up the grand dance of life. We might not be with all our friends tonight, but we can dance at the thought of them.
In August 2024, the summer after my first year at university, I was lucky enough to see LCD Soundsystem live at London’s All Points East festival (note to reader I think it was also fortuitous and fated that my erstwhile Editor in Chief and my esteemed co-Editor in Chief were also in attendance in the crowd). The set was incredible and, quite possibly, the most deliriously exciting act of artistic expression I’d ever witnessed. As is characteristic of them, they finished with a transcendent rendition of ‘All My Friends’. The song meant a great deal to me then. As I stood in the wilds of Victoria Park – having consciously forfeited my barrier spot to find my friends further back – I was struck by the synchronicity of the event. Amid a mass of buoyant fans, I was there listening to ‘All My Friends’ with all my friends – the mawkishness of this sentiment didn’t phase me. James Murphy’s howling refrain engenders a different feeling depending on our answer as listeners: ‘where are your friends tonight?’ Back then, I was sure: they were stood next to me. As such, the song was a revelation of the wonders of the present moment. Now, as I stand on the precipice of graduation and the grand miasma that lies beyond, I can no longer answer with such security. Postgraduate degrees, Grad Schemes, unemployment, and all other intermediate options see my friends scattered across the country and the world. As we shift from one stage of life to another, from getting with the plan to trying to be with our friends again, there is a pain in slowing down, and knowing ourselves to do so.
At their 2011 farewell concert, James Murphy paused at the start of ‘New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down’, to ruminate on the finality of the act. ‘I only get to pause an eternal amount once more,’ he lamented, ‘this is my last endless pause.’ For many, myself included, university has been an endless pause: an often terrifying but largely joyful buffer between adolescence and the adult world. Now, the final endless pause is over; the real world awaits. And yet, in the all-consuming ennui of graduation, another of Murphy’s lines come relentlessly back to me, as a balm if not a cure: ‘I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision for another five years of life.’
Hyde Park, Leeds. Perhaps the epitome of metropolitan student living. Its alleyways and occupants are of the same charming, chaotic disposition. In their fluorescent grime and friendly aggressions, the streets’ pubs, offies, and takeouts inspire a symbiosis with the students’ invariable endeavours towards absolution. Whilst only occasionally successful, such ventures are consistently characterised by absolute intoxication. By 8pm, one comes to recognise the average gait of a Hyde Park resident to be reminiscent of the flails of doggy paddle; they likely won’t drown (or fall face first into the tarmac’s recently claimed doner kebab) but they’re hardly making their way through town in style. I maintain that Hyde Park, the little corner of Leeds I have called home for the past two and a half years, operates in a similarly hindered yet resolutely resilient manner.
Aspiring to avenge their Tory forefathers’ failed austerity fuelled ambitions to cripple the town, a new generation of North Londoners have had their gentrifying aspirations similarly met with a principled and unflinching spray of Tetley’s. The soul-sucking plight of matcha coffee houses, natural wine bars and Gail’s couldn’t possibly make a dent in Hyde Park’s identity. The town’s stalwarts of grime, culture, and joy, such as Brudes, Hyde Park Picturehouse, and Pizza Canó, all have too much integrity, too much resolve to fall into the hands of corporate inauthenticity.
It is this plucky nature, this unshakable character that causes me to proclaim that I love Hyde Park. My true and honest love, fostered by the true and honest shithousery of the place itself, has made me unwaveringly loyal to my new home. Bohemia in Hyde Park is living and breathing; it is not yet lost as it is in places like Camden and Shoreditch, once made glorious by the art amongst their gunge. Anything that should threaten the sanctity of Hyde Park’s character, therefore, must be resisted. And such threats still loom over its terraced roofs and graffiti-clad walls. This time, however, they have taken shape, not in gentrification or austerity, but in the form of a different scourge: the scourge of the Uber Robots.
“But they’re so sweet!” I hear some of you say. That, my friends, is what they want you to think. These godless automatons are something of a techbro’s wet dream, a horribly pristine love child of Musk and Zuckerberg, not a reincarnation of your once-loved Tamagotchis. And, oh yeah, so convenient… Not only do you no longer need to make the mighty five-minute trek down to HFC for some well-earned grub, now you’re greeted with the dulcet tones of a corporate, automated jingle. You needn’t even speak to a human being!
Am I being dramatic? Perhaps. But do these whirring little beasts belong anywhere other than the sterile glitz of Canary Wharf? Maybe… But they sure as shit don’t belong amongst the streets of Hyde Park. Here the constant burning of rubbish-fuelled bin fires and the blasting of fireworks is a staple simply because, in this dirty, humdrum nook of Leeds, you can. It is no safe place for a good night’s sleep, let alone for the commercial ventures of Uber.
Thus (perhaps unsurprisingly) Hyde Park’s anarchic disposition gives me great hope for the eventual downfall of the Uber Robots. In fact, we’re already beginning to see how the town’s penchant for chaos is claiming the droids. My recently adopted habit of kicking (and occasionally flipping) the robots on my bleary strolls home from the library is almost deferential in comparison to how many treat these little harbingers of our oncoming cyber-dystopia. Students seen replacing their signature drunken stumble with an adoption of an often-uncooperative Uber Robot as their neo-steeds, for example, is by no means uncommon. Hearing their whirs descend into mechanical moans of struggle under the great weight of human freedom sat atop their robo-backs fills me with optimism.
No act of resistance, however, could possibly inspire such extensive delight as the one I witnessed the other day. In the early hours of the morning, as I walked towards the park itself, where the Uber Robots reconvene in times of idleness, I came across the magnum opus of Hyde Park’s battles against them. Having been rudely awakened from their slumber (in which they undoubtedly dream dreams of an algorithmically-orchestrated stream of Uber Eats adverts) the robots had been fashioned to the will of Hyde Park.
Here they stood, beeping wildly in distress, one on top of the other, as little driverless cars forced to partake in a hilarious robotic rendition of the human pyramid. Standing at about seven feet tall, it baffles me how on earth anyone managed to achieve such a feat; these androids are dense little creatures for one. Nonetheless, here it stood: a farcical testament to the undying character of Hyde Park. The people and the place had, in typical unruly fashion, made their statement: bring on the Uber Robots, and the only profit that will be made will be for our entertainment, not for your pockets.
Part of the holiday ritual was always writing a postcard. Off we would set to a shop selling ice creams, beachballs, booze, and tat, to stand in front of the revolving galleries. The glossy sheen shone back at our suncreamed faces as we would choose the ones with the nicest photos of flowers or donkeys, or with the most vibrant Word Art font to attest to the fun available at the destination it read out. We always wrote them, be it to grandparents in Blighty, or school friends we had felt a particular attachment to in the school year just gone; I don’t remember a holiday without them. We spoke of the crunchyness of sandwiches with foreign bread and sand, the infinite fun a child can conjure up upon being provided with open water, all in a sprawling, phonics directed hand. Now, my handwriting is less sprawling and my excitement over water has lessened into a blissful anticipation, but my postcard writing remains. Chances are most people whose names appear on my phone’s contact list will have received a postcard from me. I still write them, and offer them as my preferred medium of communication. I never graduated past primary school postcard activities offered by my parents, the letter form never really stuck with me, but I am content with my little postcard world.
I had never given postcards much thought, attributing my attachment to them with a misquoted Virginia Woolf phrase – ‘there is no such joy like receiving post’ (which I think explains most of our Vinted habits too). These A6 tokens are dime a dozen, but they have a particular specialness to them. Something irresistible in their form keeps me coming back whenever I need to say anything. Subconsciously my habit of choosing a postcard at a young age was helping form a visual language for when words couldn’t fit. In looking for postcards with flowers and animals, I was hoping to provide the recipient with more than just the juvenile details of a holiday, but a symbol representative of my time.
Berger’s 1972 series Ways of Seeing, based on his collection of essays under the same name, scrutinises the way art has come to exist in the 20th century. Reproductions of art are everywhere. If Berger could have seen how this would evolve into being able to see Carivaggio from a tool in your pocket I wonder what he would say. As a result of all this reproduction, postcards of your favourite works are readily available at any good or bad museum across the world. ‘Pictures [are] like words rather than holy relics’ observes Berger, using the postcard epidemic as a case study. No longer contained within the sanctuary of the museums or chapels they live in, art has come to take a new meaning that is less shrouded in its uniqueness to one place. Each postcard stuck on your fridge, wall, or mantel piece, regardless of their content or the photo/reproduction on the front, helps form a ‘visual language. Used for describing or revealing experience’. The back and front work in tandem, building a vision from words and symbols that captures the moment in which you are writing, the location of where you are, the reason for your stamping the address. The postcard becomes the most ephemeral form, capturing a fleeting language of a holiday or period that necessitates the visual.
I stick the postcards I receive in return all over my walls, lodged inside my books, and wrapped in ribboned piles once the walls and books get too heavy. I can’t bear to throw them away. It would be like throwing away a little piece of the personal history of myself and the sender. ‘Wish you were here!’ is not merely just a cliched saying but an invite into the sender’s perception. The thought of you was triggered and aligned by the postcard they brought, the images on it, aspects of their perspective while abroad brought them back to you. It is very rare to see how other people actually perceive you, and is a major source of thought if you are a vain twenty-something year old (insert THAT quote from Jemima Kirk). The postcard allows us to see the visual language the sender uses for you. Pieces of art people thought I would like. Holidays people thought of me on. Designs and objects people recognised me in. While postcard writing was originally an exercise provided by my parents to ensure we wouldn’t return back to school having lost all ability to write, now the postcard becomes the relic of a moment. Its small, undaunting form can be scribbled out in the spur of the moment. Moments of thanks, longing, or simple upkeep of a relationship all compel the postcard into creation. When we write to someone while abroad, or simply just away, we are telling them through this very act, regardless of how simple or cliche the message, that we are thinking of them there in that moment. That despite the distance, our existence remains aligned with theirs, existing against these new insights and perspectives.
By writing we hope to preserve, to cross through time, and for our words to land at someone’s feet. Be it postcard form or longer form, as I am writing to you now, we hope our words capture and travel. We hope our use of language become symbols for sentimentality, symbols of a life. Laced in every postcard is the complete ephemerality of a moment and a journey. Thoughts, perspective, symbol, emotion, and weather land at your doormat, containing it all in only 105 x148 mm of space.
‘When you split me and my brother in the womb, you did not divide us evenly. He got kindness, and I got longing. He got complacence, and I got ambition. I want to kill him sometimes. I think sometimes he wants to die.’ – ‘Hevel’, Nathaniel Orion
‘You do not have a brother. You have never experienced anything this ferocious or intentional with another person.’ – ‘You Are Jeff’, Richard Siken
To be a brother and to have a brother is inherently, inexorably biblical. Brotherhood within the Western cultural imagination has historically served as arguably the most enduring structure of psychic and moral antagonism, saturated from its inception with asymmetry, rivalry, inheritance, obligation, violence and blood-guilt. The brother is never only familial: he assumes multiple roles, appearing instead as rival-double and shadow-self, intimate enemy and involuntary witness, the figure against whom identity is measured and comprehended and through whom it is displaced and dismantled. Fraternity, in this tradition, is no facile framework of mutual belonging, but a theatre of comparison, substitution, accusation and sacrificial demand. The literary canon bears the imprint of this logic: in Dostoevsky’s Karamazovs, brotherhood becomes a vehicle for metaphysical crisis staged through competing claims to divine silence, legislative punishment, erotic compulsion and rational unbelief, each brother functioning as a partial ontology belonging to the whole rather than a character unto himself; in King Lear, Edgar and Edmund recast fraternity as a juridical struggle over legitimacy and primogeniture, questioning the ideologies of inheritance and structural exclusion; for Steinbeck, Cal and Aron reproduce the schema of the first fratricide as an inherited structure of moral predestination, in which affection is metabolised through perceived grace and reprobation; in The Comedy of Errors, sibling doubling pushes identity into precarious ontological positions, whereby misrecognition exposes personhood as contingent on external attribution rather than any interior sense of coherence. It is, however, the image of Cain looming over Abel which most insistently haunts the theological, the literary and the psychic genealogy of fraternity: the brother as a node of ambivalent investment, a site of conflicting libidinal and moral investments – love, envy, resentment, safeguarding, substitution and an underlying logic of annihilatory desire. To pose the question Am I my brother’s keeper? is therefore necessarily to entrench fraternity within implications of burdenhood; it is to acknowledge that one brother is, by nature, psychically tasked with preserving, galvanising, monitoring, managing and accounting for the life of the other, even at the cost of his own singular psychic coherence.
‘Something / Happened to me, and I can’t tell / Anyone, so it will happen to you’ – Robert Bly, ‘Keeping Quiet’
Half Man 1.06, dir. Eshref Reybrouck, 2026 / Frans Floris, c. 1531-1570
Richard Gadd’s limited series Half Man (2026) stages this question of brother-as-object and brother-as-keeper with a hand both violent and precise in equal measure. Centred upon Niall and Ruben – boys brought together through the relationship between their mothers and raised as brothers within a post-industrial Scottish milieu marked by pervasive Thatcherism, absent fathers, precarious identities and inherited familial violence – the series traces the evolution of an attachment whose intensity repeatedly exceeds the conceptual vocabularies available to describe it. Throughout the series, fraternity rewrites itself out of any stable structure of kinship and instead defines itself as a profound investment in one another’s existence as psychic objects. Each brother becomes indispensable witnesses to the other’s ego, undertaking the onerous affective labour of recognition in ways that render separation increasingly difficult to imagine. Brotherhood thus becomes a claustrophobic and internally recursive affective system in which care is reconfigured as Orwellian surveillance, intimacy as containment, dependency as a relational structure maintained by harm. The brother is simultaneously responsibility and rival, counterpart and counterbalance, object of preservation and possession, of desire and destruction. He is less a discrete subject than an extension of his kin, a living repository for his guilt, longing, resentment, obligation and projected selfhood. Niall and Ruben inhabit their siblinghood by way of enacting the retrospective effect of a prior fantasy of distribution gone awry: each is haunted by the suspicion that something essential has been allocated to the other, that identity itself has been unequally portioned at the level of origin. Gadd describes the two as ‘polar opposites’ – Niall marked by the soft-hearted, introspective self-consciousness of a fragile fifteen-year-old boy too far inside his own head; Ruben, in stark contrast, characterised by his volatility, his reckless, charming impulsivity and his comfortable physicality, present in the very way he carries himself. This asymmetry is intensified by the inverted paternal conditions under which the brothers are raised. Niall matures in the wake of paternal absence, the death of his father at the age of eight establishing a touchstone of irreparable loss which structures his later attachments as compensatory formations. Ruben, by contrast, remains ill-fatedly bound to a father whose lingering, haunting presence is no less injurious, his sense of self and relation to others organised unwittingly around an unwelcome intimacy interchangeable with violation. Stemming from patrilineal lack and ever-presence respectively, the brothers both develop a relational economy in which each appears to offer the other a kind of impossible redress. The father, in both cases, becomes what must be suffered through and survived; the brother becomes what might be lived through instead. Gadd thereby deconstructs the mainstream framework of familial intimacy, conventionally perched upon the clean promise of emotional soundness, presenting fraternity instead as a condition of psychic enclosure: a sealed and cyclical relational economy in which the distinctions between affection and abuse collapse and re-warp with increasing intensity.
Juliet Mitchell’s theorisation of sibling trauma proves indispensable here insofar as it reorients psychic injury away from the vertical axis of the Oedipal drama and toward the horizontal violence of replacement, rivalry and resemblance. Mitchell thereby positions fraternity as a constitutive rather than secondary psychosexual structure. The sibling, for Mitchell, arrives not only as a ‘second-chance child’ (Half Man, 1.04) but as a traumatic interruption of narcissistic continuity: ‘The new baby now lying in the place it occupied will be both narcissistically loved, as more of the toddler’s self, and hated, as a replacement for itself’ (‘Siblings: Thinking Theory’, 2013;emphasis mine). Brotherhood therefore originates via the friction of a profoundly unstable oscillation between identification and annihilation, between adoration and dispossession. The sibling is simultaneously the self and the usurper of the self; ‘the same’ and intolerably ‘other.’ Mitchell’s formulation that ‘jealousy is the modus vivendi for the arrival of the “other,” the one who is different but who should have been the “same”’ resonates with particular force in Half Man, where Niall and Ruben repeatedly apprehend one another less as opposite individuals than as distorted alternate selves through whom their own deficiencies are exhibited and desires are displaced. The psychic violence of this arrangement is further intensified by Mitchell’s claim that the infantile wish for ‘narcissistic sexual union with one who is the same’ is inseparable from its countervailing fantasy of destruction, such that siblinghood becomes the site at which love and annihilation are first rendered coextensive, born together as twins. Indeed, the series achieves much of its affective intensity in its persistent blurring of fraternal intimacy and erotic identification. Mitchell’s claim that ‘the narcissistic identificatory love for the baby who is the self can, via the transitivism of childhood, become the “we are as one” of adult couples’, offers a striking framework through which to read the unstable psychosexuality saturating Niall and Ruben’s relationship. Crucially, Half Man does not present incestuous possibility as aberrant deviation from safe, traditional fraternity, but rather as fraternity’s own latent logic under conditions of traumatic enclosure and collapsed relational boundaries. J. V. Caffaro observes there is no universally agreed upon definition which serves to differentiate abusive behaviour from mutually-initiated sexual encounter between siblings (‘Treating Sibling Abuse Families’, 2004); this becomes particularly significant insofar as the series repeatedly stages encounters which refuse stable categorisation within conventional binaries of coercion and consent, aggression and desire, victimhood and reciprocity and so on. The dyadic dynamic between the brothers occupies a profoundly unstable intermediate terrain in which intimacy itself has become structurally contaminated by lineages of domination, imitation, dependency and compulsive reenactment.
Half Man 1.01, dir. Alexandra Brodski, 2026
This perversion is already present in the very first episode. It is not yet clear, in these early moments, what kind of intimacy Ruben and Niall inhabit. They are not yet legible as enemies, nor as companions in any stable sense. What is discernible instead is a tense proximity which struggles to settle into category. In 1.01, Ruben restrains Niall in a harsh headlock after the latter suggests alerting their mothers to Ruben’s father’s late-night jeering outside the house (‘Why don’t you give your old man a big hug?’). The struggle quickly acquires an arguably erotic choreography: Ruben positioned behind Niall, rocking against him as the latter remains trapped between the hard line of Ruben’s body and his older brother’s mattress. Yet the scene simultaneously regresses toward infantilism, as the boys eventually fall asleep entangled together in an image oscillating between a lovers’ embrace and childlike clinging. Niall subsequently awakens to discover a wet patch staining his boxers – an image rendered deliberately ambiguous between ejaculation and the base, bed-wetting reaction of the body of a frightened child. Such moments exemplify the series’ persistent refusal to disentangle eroticism from terror and psychic helplessness, intimacy from humiliation or desire from frameworks of childhood. Sexuality and infancy become momentarily indistinguishable. Desire appears contaminated by vulnerability; vulnerability by desire. The result is a profoundly unsettling image of psychic life before differentiation has fully occurred. The body itself becomes unreadable within this libidinal economy of fraternity, incapable of clearly distinguishing arousal, fear, identification, submission or regression.
This ambiguity festers throughout the series as Ruben repeatedly mediates, orchestrates and mutilates the boundaries of Niall’s sexual subjectivity. Sexual initiation is no longer figured as a private threshold into adult relationality, but as a heavily scaffolded scene of fraternal governance in which access to desire is routed through Ruben’s regulatory presence. The sequence in which Ruben effectively ‘takes’ Niall’s virginity by proxy is particularly disquieting, arranging for Mona, the girl he himself is sleeping with, to deflower Niall (the same girl he will go on to marry) while physically regulating his somatic responses: coaching his breathing, placing a hand upon his chest to ground him, focusing his gaze upon his own face, repositioning his body when he loses rhythm. The scene’s psychosexual logic is unmistakably triangulated. What is decisive here is not only the substitution of partners, but the structural redistribution of agency: Ruben assumes a quasi-managerial position over Niall’s embodied experience. His access to heterosexuality is thus mediated through Ruben’s controlling presence, his brother insinuated in the architecture of all future possibilities. This renders Ruben simultaneously intermediary, author and witness – but also covert object of libidinal orientation and latent point of reference. The apparent heterosexual act becomes perverted with displaced fraternal eroticism, the brother the coloniser of the psyche and the body, coming-of-age’s most charged and visceral instant now irreversibly entangled with surveillance, watched by the panoptic gaze of Big Brother.
Half Man 1.04, dir. Eshref Reybrouck, 2026
Many such instances of assault take place throughout the series, though the most violent culmination of such logic is in 1.04, in which Ruben rapes Niall in a hospital bed with his car hood ornament after threatening to ‘twist it up [his] ass without lube’ should he fail to tell him the truth. Here, the series abandons euphemism entirely and reveals the latent structure underwriting the brothers’ relationship from the outset: domination articulated through penetration, intimacy through violation, acknowledgement through bodily invasion. The existing logic of the dynamic becomes fully legible: the act does not interrupt fraternity, but reveals what fraternity has already become under the pressure of the precedent of trauma. In this sense, the scene cannot be reduced to unilateral sadism, nor the explicit dialogue deployed ‘frivolously’, as Gadd makes clear in an interview. This would be to flatten its horror into pathology. Ruben’s violence serves as an inexorable catastrophic intensification of fraternal attachment, a reenacting of the incestuous logic already embedded within his own abuse history and formulation of affection. Clementine Morgan states: ‘Incest is never an isolated event. Incest is always a family dynamic.’ (The Realm of Unreality: An Incest Memoir in Essays, 2024) She clarifies ‘if there is a child that is perpetrating incest, that child learned that incest dynamic from somewhere, and somewhere along the line it was learned from an adult’. This theory proves devastatingly resonant in this narrative context. Ruben’s abuse by his father situates incest as an inherited relational mode of intimacy, a way of apprehending closeness, interdependency, responsibility and bodily access learned through coercion and molestation and subsequently reproduced horizontally within the fraternal bond. The father’s greatest legacy is not the wound he leaves marred upon his eldest boy but the architecture through which that wound comes to organise future love; you are allowed access to the body over which you are responsible. Violence here operates as traumatic pedagogy; it reproduces itself precisely because it has become indistinguishable from the very conditions under which attachment is experienced and recognised between one another (‘This is what you’ve always wanted from me, isn’t it?’). Here is the wound gouged by the father, then. Niall is haunted by a paternal absence; Ruben by paternal persistence. This parallel is cardinal. A yawning maw lodged within the youngest boy; the eldest with his interior self stained beyond cleansing. In this sense, the series proposes a horrifying inversion of paternal function: the father fails as protective authority and is replaced by the brother as compensatory psychic infrastructure. Yet this substitution only further intensifies the burden of fraternity, because the brother cannot occupy paternal space without simultaneously contaminating it. The series thus arrives at an implicit but devastating proposition: the only cure for a father is a brother, and there is no cure for a brother.
What ultimately emerges in Half Man is therefore a vision of fraternity as unstable psychic cohabitation: two subjects trapped within an economy of identification, resentment, longing, imitation and inherited violence from which neither can fully individuate. Medieval theological discourse surrounding incest, as James Donavin notes, understood the term paradoxically as both abomination and mystical union, ‘both a sin and a way of remediating sin’. (Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, 1993) Half Man inherits something of this paradoxical logic. Fraternal intimacy within the series appears simultaneously catastrophic and salvific, violating and preservative, obscene and devotional. The brothers seek in one another precisely what destroys them: recognition, continuity, merger, absolution and the impossible fantasy of becoming whole through the body of the other.
‘I was born to watch over you / & you were born to keep my hands purposeful.’ – Bloodmercy, I. S. Jones
Encoded within every episode of Half Man is that same biblical refrain: Am I my brother’s keeper? The series’ most devastating gesture is its refusal to imagine ‘keeping’ as a benign or even coherent form of care. To keep a brother, the series suggests, is never merely to look after him. It is to monitor, regulate, preserve, possess, enable, contain and attempt to simultaneously annihilate and survive him. Can’t live with ‘im, can’t live without ‘im. Keepership is honed throughout the series as an affective relation in which nurturance becomes inseparable from domination, and whereby care mutates into a mode of psychic piloting. The brother is stewarded, and through that stewardship is loved to an abominable degree. Indeed, what renders the relationship between Niall and Ruben so profoundly discomfiting is that neither man appears fully capable of distinguishing where devotion ends and ownership begins, and neither do they seem set on drawing such a line. Gadd describes the brothers’ relationship as ‘idolatry mixed with love mixed with hatred mixed with adoration and need’. This is revealing precisely because idolatry already implies an asymmetrical structure of emotional investment: one subject becoming the site upon which another deposits meaning, reverence, dependency and psychic orientation. The brother is elevated into object-status, relic-status, transformed into something simultaneously worshipped and instrumentalised. When asked for one word to describe their dynamic, Gadd stated: ‘Contorted is one that springs to mind, but if I said loving, would you think I was insane?’ This, then, is the central tension structuring Half Man: the series does not oppose love to toxicity, but rather explores the extent to which love itself may become distorted into a coercive attachment style under conditions of childhood trauma and emotional entrapment. ‘I think for something to be toxic,’ Gadd says, ‘it has to also be intoxicating first’. What festers between Niall and Ruben is not necessarily the failure of fraternal care, but fraternal care rendered pathological through excess intimacy, asymmetrical dependency, the patrilineal wound and a sort of psychic conjoinedness from which neither brother can fully depart.
This impossibility manifests most visibly through the series’ recurrent obsession with provision, indebtedness and material subsumption. Ruben repeatedly installs himself in the role of provider despite his own economic precarity following the loss of his rigging job, accumulating catastrophic debt in order to continue financing the lives of others (including Niall) without their knowledge. When Niall confronts him over this compulsive assumption of responsibility, Ruben’s justification is startlingly naked in its ontological simplicity: ‘Because I liked it. I liked being the provider. I knew my place in the world.’ (Half Man, 1.05) To provide is to stabilise the self through indispensability; dependence furnishes Ruben with the only stable proof of his own role. Far from simple altruism, his acts of financial self-sacrifice therefore constitute an attempt to purchase recognition through utility, to render himself psychically inerasable by suturing his presence into the material conditions of others’ survival. Debt becomes an architecture of attachment through which emotional permanence might be forcibly secured.
‘We share everything!’ / Half Man 1.02, dir. Alexandra Brodski, 2026
Niall, meanwhile, increasingly comes to occupy the complementary position of the kept object. Jamie Bell’s observation that Ruben becomes Niall’s ‘life support system’ captures the extent to which care in Half Man functions simultaneously as affective captivity. Niall’s attachment to Ruben is irreducible to facile fear or coercion alone; rather, Ruben’s volatility acquires the paradoxical status of security. Because Ruben is feared by the world, he may in turn shield Niall from that world’s hostility. Yet protection here is inseparable from capture. Niall becomes psychically and materially entangled within Ruben’s systems of provision to such an extent that separation itself begins to register as mutilation, as severance, as betrayal. This logic surfaces explicitly during their confrontation over Niall’s university accommodation, when Ruben rejects the very premise of independent existence: ‘We share everything! I mean you’re wearing my jumper right now … You should’ve brought me with you from the start!’ (Half Man, 1.02) The statement initially performs as childish, even petulant, yet its insistence that ‘it’s not about the room, it’s about the fucking principle’ reveals something considerably more disquieting. It is not a two-mattress-childhood at stake but ontological non-separation: a refusal of psychic distinction itself, an epistemic in utero in which selfhood can only be sustained through enmeshment. To leave is intolerable because departure threatens the collapse of the shared psychic infrastructure through which both brothers remain comprehensible to one another and to themselves.
The series repeatedly materialises this non-separation through patterns of possession, inheritance and symbolic circulation. Everything Niall touches has already passed through Ruben’s hands first: clothes, lovers, money, possessions, social identity itself. Ruben kisses nearly every person Niall kisses; he orchestrates Niall’s first time; he steals the domestic future Niall momentarily weilds for himself. The effect is competitive, certainly, but more so incorporative, implicating, insinuating – as though Ruben compulsively absorbs every emerging site of Niall’s autonomy back into the fraternal dyad before it can calcify independently. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of male homosociality becomes especially illuminating here. Sedgwick argues ‘the use of women as exchangeable … property’ functions to cement bonds between men, revealing the extent to which heterosexual structures may conceal or serve as pretext for deeper currents of male homosocial desires, which the masculine nature deems more valuable. In Half Man, women repeatedly occupy precisely this mediating position. Mona does not inhabit the role of sexually autonomous woman within the narrative, but rather a conduit through which Niall and Ruben negotiate their own rivalry, identification, power and possession. Niall’s later affair with Mona cannot be comprehended in clean isolation; rather, it represents an attempt to access Ruben through what Ruben himself has claimed, achieved, won. To occupy his position of a man who has successfully settled in his masculinity by trespassing upon the intimate territory of his domestic life. Simultaneously, impregnating Mona (one of the few things Ruben is incapable of) offers Niall the possibility of both superseding his brother in the one way he can, and simultaneously giving Ruben the child his infertility denies him, reappropriating heterosexual reproduction itself into the convoluted economics of this libidinal fraternal economy.
The logic of keepership thus increasingly collapses distinctions between care and colonisation of the brother. Unbeknownst to Niall, during a fourteen-year-long rift between the two, Ruben pays for his bedsit, his therapy (‘The therapy I used to talk about him?’; Half Man, 1.04), his car, his Christmas presents. Debt in Half Man therefore functions past the economical and into the ontological: to owe the brother becomes indistinguishable from being constituted by him. Jessica Benjamin’s theorisation of domination as a distorted response to the crisis of recognition offers a crucial scaffolding through which to comprehend this relation. Benjamin argues ‘the most familiar conflict that arises from differentiation is between the need to establish autonomous identity and the need to be recognized’ (The Bonds of Love, 1980), and that domination itself shows its face precisely when subjects attempt to resolve this conflict without relinquishing dependency. The subject seeks autonomy whilst simultaneously refusing the separateness of the other, ‘possessing or controlling’ them in order to avoid the psychological desolation of aloneness. Ruben’s behaviour throughout Half Man repeatedly enacts this impossible negotiation. He cannot tolerate separation because separation threatens annihilation; yet he equally cannot sustain mutuality because mutuality requires recognising the brother as genuinely separate and unimplicated in one’s own self. Consequently, affection mutates into possession. Financial provision becomes a mode of management. Protection becomes surveillance. Violence becomes a means of retaining a form of closeness while repudiating unmasculine vulnerability. Benjamin goes on to claim violence operates as an attempt ‘to resolve the issues of autonomy and recognition while denying the other’s subjectivity’. This is certainly felt in Ruben’s wounded aggression toward Niall, which tends most commonly to crop up at moments when Niall threatens an independent subjecthood: leaving home, forming romantic attachments, imagining futures beyond the dyad. Violence becomes a desperate strategy for preserving a twinned continuity while simultaneously disavowing dependency itself. In this sense, Ruben’s brutality does not signify emotional absence but catastrophic overinvestment and cognitive dissonance. He requires Niall too intensely to allow him autonomy, yet cannot articulate this dependency except through domination, humiliation, sabotage, financial superiority or bodily invasion. The violence of keepership, then, is that the brother must remain close enough to guarantee psychic survival, but objectified enough to prevent abandonment. The little brother is a favourite toy one cannot grow out of and will not put down.
Crucially, however, Half Man refuses to position Niall as a poor, passive, pristine victim within this structure. Benjamin’s discussion of domination insists that both parties become organised around complementary relational positions: one asserting a joint-selfhood through control, the other relinquishing his own selfhood in favour of the safer doublet. Niall repeatedly resists Ruben’s authority and cruel hand while simultaneously relying upon the very structures which imprison him. He accepts Ruben’s money, his protection, his emotional counterbalance, his rare oblations of tenderness. It would be dishonest to describe their dynamic as one-sided when closer to truth is a reciprocal affective capture: a closed affective circuit in which the brothers require one another precisely through the mechanisms which shatter them. To keep a brother, then, is not to safeguard his happiness or to encourage his prosperity, but to direct him; blind him, take him by the shoulders and point him where you both need him to go. Keepership becomes a form of existential governance through which care and cruelty, guilt and shame, animosity and codependency, violence and validation circulate and permeate indistinguishably. One comes to find that neither brother can survive the fracturing of this structure, even as the structure itself marks survival impossible.
‘A brother is born for adversity’ – Proverbs 17:17
The distribution of suffering between Niall and Ruben is, as is evident, manifestly asymmetrical; Ruben’s violence and abuse cannot necessarily be transposed into any straightforward moral equivalence with Niall’s evasive transgressions, self-sabotages, or forms of passive complicity. Yet the series is careful not to allow this asymmetry to resolve into a sacred ethical geometry of victim and perpetrator either. Both brothers are intensely invested in the maintenance of a structure of suffering which wounds them. Victimhood in Half Man is thereby an existential orientation: a mode of self-constitution predicated upon the continual narration, citation and reopening of injury. What Richard Gadd is essentially interrogating within the series is what kinds of selfhoods are made available when one lives inside the role of the injured party.
This question is particularly acute in relation to Niall, whose interiority increasingly appears built around injury as both excuse and root cause. Upon discovering Ruben has been secretly financing significant portions of his adult life, the initial response is one of puerile moral indignation. The force of the reaction is disproportionate to the revelation itself, suggesting what is truly at stake is not simply the embarrassment of financial dependency, but the absolute collapse of a precarious and carefully maintained fantasy of autonomy. Niall stalks his converted childhood bedroom – a room he and Ruben once shared – smashing possession upon possession paid for by his brother’s pocket. Alarm clocks, CD players – all are sacrificed in his tantrum fit, accompanied by a verbal breakdown in which Niall screams at his mother: ‘I hate him! I fucking hate him! … I’m his bitch! I’m his bitch!’ (Half Man, 1.04) The oscillation between repudiation and identification is decisive. At the end of the day, he is nothing more than a little brother who has lost the game; this will always be his first and only role to play. The rage therefore originates at the point of narcissistic injury. To owe the brother is intolerable because it punctures the fantasy of self-authorship – of a life without training wheels or your big brother’s hand hovering out of sight but no less ready to catch. This anxiety recurs later when Ruben proposes Niall repay a debt through domestic labour. Niall’s immediate recoil – ‘You want me to be your bitch?’ (Half Man, 1.05) – again translates indebtedness into erotic subordination. The language of repayment is immediately converted into the idiom of humiliation, suggesting that, for Niall, dependency is never purely material but always already symbolically charged, always already inscribed within hierarchies of domination and shame.
Half Man 1.04, dir. Eshref Reybrouck, 2026
Yet the series repeatedly and consciously complicates this interpretation by demonstrating the degree to which Niall simultaneously seeks, reproduces and seemingly requires the very structures he claims to abhor. Dependency functions both as grievance and lifeline. The brother is resented precisely because he provides what is needed. Such contradictions invite a broader consideration of the relationship between victimhood, complicity and identity. Throughout the series, Niall repeatedly returns to the childhood court case involving Ruben as what he describes as ‘the turning point’ and ‘the seed of all of [his] issues’. (Half Man, 1.04) The ‘seed’ becomes a master narrative through which the contingencies of adult life are retrospectively organised into a coherent story of injury. Significantly, Niall’s mother repeatedly challenges this interpretation. ‘You’re always talking about the seed’, she remarks, before accusing him of being ‘too busy blaming everyone else’ for his problems. Her harshest attack is in her rejection of Niall’s own account of his psychotic breakdown, describing his institutionalisation as a stint in a ‘madhouse’ rather than ‘hospital’: ‘You made yourself sick … You became obsessed with it.’ When Niall shouts ‘I was ill!’, she responds with a dismissive wave of her hand: ‘You were self-involved.’ The series does not ask us to take a side here. Instead, Half Man remains deeply interested in the possibility that suffering itself can become narcissistically organised, a concept Richard Gadd is certainly no stranger to, as can be seen in his previous semi-autobiographical work Baby Reindeer (2024). Bell’s observation that Niall is frequently ‘manipulative and selfish’, and that many of his relationships revolve around ‘what he can get from people and what they can shoulder for him’ points toward a more uncomfortable truth: victimhood may become attractive because it offers coherence. To be injured is to possess a story, and to possess a story is to possess a self.
René Girard’s theory of victimage is pertinent here. Girard identifies the scapegoat as a figure through whom collective tensions are displaced, ritualised and rendered meaningful. The victim acquires a paradoxical status: simultaneously powerless and empowered by his own pain. Ruben is treated within Niall’s psychic economy as the origin point of suffering itself, the figure to whom every wound can be traced. Yet Ruben also constructs himself as a sacrificial figure: provider, protector, self-abnegating agent of care whose violence is retrospectively reinterpreted as a form of burden-bearing. This competition is rendered visible through the series’ parallel trajectories of self-destruction. Ruben externalises injury: rage, violence, destruction. Niall turns inward: drug abuse, compulsive unsafe sex, obsessive thinking. Injury thereby circulates between them, ever redistributed rather than resolved. Victimhood and perpetration thereby cease to designate clean labels and instead become positional effects within a shared system of affective exchange. What renders Niall particularly compelling in this formation is the extent to which his identity remains structurally tethered to Ruben even in moments of apparent autonomy. Bell’s description of him as ‘living as several different people and … not comfortable with any of them’ articulates this fragmentation precisely. Niall’s repeated attempts at self-reinvention – student, father, author, husband – all fail to acquire durable ontological weight because they remain shadowed by a far older and far more ‘primal’ structure of recognition, as Gadd puts it. Niall’s sense of coherence remains dependent upon Ruben’s gaze, upon his approval. ‘It pains you,’ Ruben tells him, ‘to know that all your achievements fill you with a void, whereas a smile from me fills you with all the fucking energy you need’. (Half Man, 1.04) Award, career mobility, self-reinvention – all indeed fail to provide satisfaction to Niall because they cannot replace the original structure through which meaning was first constituted in boyhood (‘It’s the only thing I’ve ever felt’, Half Man, 1.06).
This dynamic is perhaps most starkly condensed in the Freshers’ Week phone call. Isolated, miserable and struggling to adapt, Niall instinctively returns to Ruben as his primary site of regulation and comfort. The exchange is remarkable in its economy. Ruben immediately understands what Niall cannot bring himself to say. ‘You only need to ask’, he tells him. ‘Just say the words.’ (Half Man, 1.02) Eventually, after prolonged hesitation, Niall blurts out: ‘I need you’, before hanging up instantly, hand-over-mouth, unable to cope with the abominable truth of his own admission. The scene encapsulates the paradox at the heart of the series: Niall experiences dependence upon Ruben as humiliating, infantilising, self-destructive and frustrating, yet remains incapable of imagining himself outside it. The bond survives every injury because the injury confirms the bond. By the series’ conclusion, the question is no longer whether one brother can survive the other. It is whether either brother possesses a self that exists independently of the wound the other has left behind. Within such a configuration, victimhood no longer designates a position external to agency but serves as a dynamic and recursive structure through which the self is continuously assembled. Suffering ensures that neither subject within the dyad can fully exit its orbit.
‘We were the first two brothers, / I the first dead man and you the first / fratricide.’ – Inscriptions Cain Read in Abel’s Eyes, Silvina Ocampo trans. by Jason Weiss
I find myself returning to the Cain-and-Abel structure time and again, the origin of fraternity, where Gadd’s narrative logic acquires its most archaic inheritance. Abel is the first murder on God’s new earth, though he is also the one through whom fraternal violence first becomes narratable as moral inevitability, the figure whose elimination retroactively stabilises the meaning of the brother as victim. The scriptural designation of fratricidal violence is marked, in its Greek translational lineage, by the term ἀνθρωποκτόνος, a word whose semantic field exceeds the merely juridical ‘manslayer’ it is all too commonly translated as to approach the sacrificial register in which killing is already shadowed by a logic of offering and taking. In certain classical contexts, as in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, this same semantic drift allows human destruction to be incorporated into the framework of sacrifice, where the slain body persists as necessity. In Gadd’s Half Man, this sacrificial residue bears considerable weight beneath the surface of contemporary storytelling. For Niall and Ruben, injury is continually converted into justification, and justification into renewed intimacy. One is incapable of existing unimplicated in the other, as implication itself is what constitutes the boundary of the self.
Half Man 1.06, dir. Eshref Reybrouck, 2026 / Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, 1619
A brother bends himself over another in a dim interior that might be a room or might be the remembered reconstruction of one – somewhere between domestic chamber and the spectral architecture of religious myth-world, where childhood objects and adult consequences are no longer separable in their provenance. The light behaves badly here – diffuse, uncertain – everything slightly overdetermined by atmosphere, the air thick with implication. The movement is slow, none of the punctuation of rupture, proceeding with uncomfortable familiarity, the gesture rehearsed so often – across arguments, silences, reconciliations that were never quite so – that it has shed all promise of surprise, a kind of weary competence clinging to it. Violence in this place is habit, is careless, is intimacy outlived and outlasted. There is a strange epistemic confusion in its stillness, an inevitability and a monumental, omnipresent waiting – as though nearness has become indistinguishable from threat, and threat from recognition, and recognition from something like care, though none of these terms quite retain their boundaries anymore. Beneath him, the younger does not resist in any register of resistance legible to you or to me. Perhaps he does not know how, or does not want to know how. His body offers no clean opposition, only a kind of compromised responsiveness, sensation uncertain of its own category. Breath contracts unevenly. The click of a glottal stop.
Elsewhere – though perhaps only the kind of elsewhere produced by retrospect and by narrative co-option – a brother lies still in a barn in rural Scotland; it is his wedding day. The stillness is not peaceable; it is too exact and too deliberate in its negation of movement to be mistaken for rest. The body is arranged with the unsettling neutrality of something which has ceased to bother negotiating its own position in the world. Nothing resolves into clarity because nothing is permitted to conclude. The circumstances accumulate themselves, layering aftermath upon aftermath until the distinctions between what has happened and what is happening and what will happen become almost ornamental. There were or are or will be two still bodies in the barn; there is no other version of this story. But for now there is one. It is a catholic and ubiquitous scene, which Rilke depicts as so: ‘The brother did something to me that my eyes didn’t see. He veiled the light. He hid my face with his face. Now he is alone. I think he must still exist, for no one does to him what he did to me. I sense my older brother lies awake as if accursed. Night offers itself to me, not to him.’ (‘The Book of a Monastic Life’, 1905)
Are bad people concerned by their own badness? Is guilt therefore what makes a person good? Philosophers have spent a great deal of time agonising over the anatomy of goodness in both character and behaviour, and I grew fond and heartily committed to this pastime at the age of fourteen when I became convinced I was an axe murderer. I had not, in fact, murdered anybody, but this did not help. I believed that on a conveyor belt deep within the body-packing district my soul was being assembled by some god, or maybe an angel, or transcendental mind-body sweatshop worker whose performance had lapsed in the assembly of me. My brain had naturally, therefore, been deployed squarely into the wrong body, a very bad body belonging to a very bad person. My mind was sure of this, connected to my new body via a kludgy workaround that surged with vague but assured notions that, unfortunately, I was indeed inhabiting a psychopath. As such, guilt was all I felt, and if guilt is indeed the measure of goodness, I, a 21-year-old pervert, killer, potential terrorist and anything else bad and ending in ‘ist’ appear to be Jesus. Regrettably, loyal disciples, your God is corrupt, and as such it is now her turn in the confession booth. Forgive me, me, for I have sinned!
Reddit (PhD), the black hole of any and every shameful bodily query bore the brunt of the majority of my mea culpa. Some very real searches spanning the past six years submitted as evidence:
(1st June 2024, 12:00am) Google: am I a bad person quiz
(1st June 2024, 12:02am) Google: am I a bad person quiz free
(22nd February 2023, 2:41am) Google: if I find a dog cute does that mean I’m attracted to it but I really don’t want to be
(19th October 2020, 3:18pm) Google: intrusive thought about hurting someone but I don’t mean it but because I thought it does it mean I secretly want to
(6th April 2026 8:26pm) Google: how likely is it for someone to plant your DNA at a crime scene
(9th May 2025 10:46am) Google: what to do when you’re so scared of your own brain
The misfortune of being palmed off with an incorrect brain, I’ve found, can be rather insulting to anyone trying to establish themselves as a functioning member of society- a degree-haver becoming an adult and a writer whose bread and butter might be aided by a coherent and unified brain. It’s difficult to find and cultivate a voice when one’s brain is garbling lies or half-truths or elusive absolutisms that are so combative to establishing any semblance of selfhood. One might console themselves by noting that the Kafkas, Bukowskis, Plaths and Woolfs of the world were on the whole, rather unwell, and perhaps, suicides aside, the odds are in my favour. Yet, their particular strains of derangement tend toward the more languid and romantic, and alas I was left to reckon with the fact that my iteration of madness is, by comparison, profoundly unsexy. In the end, the doctor alleged that I was in fact in my own body, it was just an obsessive and a compulsive one.
The most frustrating aspect of such a strange affliction is how farcical it appears to any level-headed confidante. Your body can’t really move past the bad thoughts it conjures, if any distressing thought passes (as they so often do), they cannot pass as entities separate from one’s character, the obsessive brain lurches at the live-wire thought, its fleshy neurotic muscle seizes into tetany, incapable of release until untangled and swiftly attended to. As such, loved ones will inevitably end up chewing the cud with you at one point or another, reasoning with you as to why it’s almost certainly impossible you submitted a sex tape alongside your dissertation, mostly owing to the fact one simply does not exist. Or that you’ve been composing and uploading finely-tuned manifestos detailing elaborate bomb plots to the dark web in your sleep. Perhaps even that when you’ve forgotten what you had for dinner yesterday you’ve also blocked out one of your potentially routine killing sprees, and that knock at the door was really a SWAT team and so on and so on.
(May 17th 2022 5:48pm) Google: is it normal to have the same thought over and over again
(May 17th 2022 5:52pm) Google: i think my brain is making up wrong memories
Very soon, you turn inward and stay there. Days are consumed by the sorting and resorting of thoughts until Sisyphus and Prometheus become your brothers in arms. It’s a breakless shift employed as your mind’s own crooked bathroom attendant, hunched and sour and deliberating between the noose or bottle of Prozac when you clock off in twelve lifetimes time. You may even come very close to asking a frightened stranger to take you to a nice field to gaze upon the Salinas River and dream of tending to rabbits before they shoot you in the back of the head. Because, you see, obsessive compulsive disorder is a beast fattened by shame, and I was shovelling heaps of piping hot shame into my brain’s mouth’s stomach. The particular cruelty of this symptom is that in suppressing any form of release, it becomes a self-sustaining feedback loop, transmitting the knowledge that, no, you cannot seek comfort because you certainly do not deserve it, and to speak of it would be to die of it.
This is where many are often left, chugging around a circular track miles away from the nearest doctor’s office or much semblance of real civilisation- and this is where we must castrate the beast (shame, naturally, lives in the testicles) with its only known predator, the willing ear of another. Unfortunately, this feels a great deal like seppuku, the samurai auto-disembowelment ritual, which at points feel preferable to the possibility of a doctor carting you off to a high-security prison for crimes against humanity, the likes of which never before seen by man nor beast.
(January 9th 2024 9:49am) Google: do drs know about intrusive thoughts or will they think I’m crazy
(October 14th 2025 9:49am) Google: how to talk to a dr about pure ocd
(October 14th 2025 10:02am) Google: can a gp diagnose ocd
Obsessive compulsive disorder makes little sense to most, and the prospect of becoming convinced you’re really a serial killer because you listened to a true crime podcast despite being a fourteen year old, very sensitive, very neurotic girl is superficially quite funny. But one’s obsessions do feel like immutable facts one has to coax out of themselves and attempt to disprove before the brain consents to think about anything else again, albeit temporarily. Obsessions do feel inextricable with, or definitive of, one’s character- however they tend to be the precise inverse of it, the obsessive and compulsive brain fixates on that which it fears most to be true, making the thoughts not confessions but rather fundamental contradictions of one’s core values. This is at least what the less fun BuzzFeed quiz at the doctors office and a formal diagnosis eventually confirmed.
I suspect the vast majority of readers will not be suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, and may be reading confused or acutely concerned, which is okay, this is the piece of writing I sailed the seven seas of search engines looking for, and perhaps it will be that for a few sitting somewhere someplace. Moral scrupulosity is, however, a universal dread, and so I leave you with this: bad people tend not to be concerned with their own badness. Our goodness is entirely in our hands. It is not characterised by cognitive misfires of unrelenting bad thoughts, it is comprised of curated choices, a lifelong project exacted through continuous self-examination. One must let thoughts pass, weatherlike, observed as the waste product of a brain untethered to character. As Socrates, perhaps the North star of ethical life, died positing: the un-examined life is indeed not worth living, so perhaps there is something to be learnt from the obsessive and compulsive brain? The disorder is indeed a disorder, not a moral saviour in paradoxical disguise, yet, it boils down to the purest, most potent expression of Socratic self-interrogation available to man- morally rigorous albeit factually deranged.
Featured Image – detail from Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas
