Category: Reviews

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

I hate tradition. I possess a bah-humbug approach to these supposedly ‘heart-warming’ events we must trudge through for time’s sake. However, I allow myself three indulgences, exceptions to the rule: 1) re-read The Secret History every December. 2) Listen to the King’s College, Cambridge choir carols on a blistering walk. 3)Watch a theatrical telling of A Christmas Carol. Upon hearing A Christmas Carol was descending upon Durham’s vastly beautiful wintery mood, I couldn’t help but be delighted (my student finance imposed tightfistedness, echoing Scrooge, in my refusal to see The Old Vic’s Carol this year). Upon watching, this elation hasn’t departed. Whilst Walkabout’s production doesn’t attempt to sugarcoat the obvious haunting and wrath that lies within this tale, the delicate adaptation of Dickens’ most recognisable plot, the craftsmanship of the design team, and the bravado of the actors cannot help but bring an audience to smile with pure, innocent joy. Lily Gilchrist and Harry Threapleton, the directors and adaptors, have marvelled in their sharp, poignant, and ultimately Victorian, to its truest sense, production. 

The bustle of the stage works in A Christmas Carol’s favour well. To be moved by a cast, who stop, look at you, extend their arm and holiday wishes, before moving on, retiring in their own magical scenes elsewhere, that you are privy to, is a truly magical voyeuristic experience. All whilst a superbly talented choir is fully incorporated into the momentum of the play, embellishing the scenes with further tenderness. These Victorians manoeuvre around a set, designed by Carrie Cheung and her team, that strikes a careful balance between kitsch Victoriana, and haunting minimalism. With the names of cast members upon gravestones in the corner, and a hearty dinner setup in the other, the balance is struck brilliantly between the two moods of the story and is maintained as audience moves carefully between the two, savouring in each. Charlie (Cara Crofts), our dutiful tour guide of Victorian London encapsulates this boundless energy that possess us during such festivity. The bubbly nature of a character who drives the plot, and encapsulates the cultural artifice that Carol has become, was not lost; this is an actor who understood their role to their fullest potential and brought the Dickensian prose into startling, striking life. The now diffuse and diluted term of Dickensian is often misused, not in the case of Crofts however, who elevated the practical necessity of her character to a person an audience member was delighted to see shepherd us spritely and provide us with brilliantly timed witty asides. 

Wit is often prescribed to Scrooge in order to make the shamelessly brutal character easier to digest. Gilchrist and Threapleton’s adaptation struck a considered balance with Scrooge, allowing Edward Clark to channel the disturbing miser to his fullest, whilst giving the audience moments of comedic breathing space, necessary to hammer home in the absurd, condemnable nature of Scrooge. Clark’s masterful performance delved into the psyche of such a miser at points, humanising Scrooge with pathos carefully being delivered in beautifully fraught and tender moments between Clark and his cast mates. Whilst I have often been considered as someone who enjoys the bleak moroseness that theatre can harbinger, Clark’s performance of a transformed Scrooge was simply too joyous to consider. The beauty of immersive theatre, I believe, lies in the fact the audience become less isolated, both from the actors and their fellow audience members; upon being shook by a contagiously gleeful Scrooge, I couldn’t help but smile, catching the same elation beaming out of Scrooge, and in my shock of being touched by both theatre and character, looked around to witness my fellow travellers through Victorian London beaming in the same manner. The strength of the adaptation of this complex figure, and the magisterial delivery of Clark, was something to behold.

Mark Gatiss remarks on how Carol’s “status as a ghost story has been somewhat undervalued”. This is shocking considering the Victorian preoccupation with ‘the other side’ yet cannot be said about this production; the consideration of lighting (Rory Collins) emulating the haunting necessity of the story thrillingly from the offset, despite not being utilized as fully later on. The introduction of our first ghost, by means of a howling metamorphosing doorknocker, confirms Carol’s status within the ghost story genre, with Raphael Henrion’s Marley being a startingly frightening, yet darkly humorous figure. Despite the script occasionally lapsing into the silliness that often grasps adaptations of Carol, Henrion managed to create a presence that channelled irksome impressions of the lost, tormented souls of Dante’s Purgatorio that Marley should be reminiscent of. The spectral reigns are then taken up by the Ghost of Christmas Past (Nell Hickson), who catapults us through the pangs of Christmas nostalgia with a foreboding deliverance. Her delivery and duplicity came into full force in her scathing departure from a relenting Scrooge, leaving both him and the audiences’ jaw on the floor. Bounding on stage after is Grace Heron as Present, emitting such a warmth onto stage it is hard to believe the phantom categorising of this being. A bountiful harbinger of news, we, like the marionettes cleverly chosen to physicalise the ghosts’ message, are caught up in the rapturous display of Christmas truths, forcing the message of change and charity to the forefront of the production; an understanding of the duality of this character, and the tale itself, was on full display. Finally, Future (Iphis Critchlow), who’s silent existence on stage sliced through the audience, allowed for the spectral potential of the production to be achieved in its completion. Each actor of this sinister quartet played with the audience’s perception of haunting, bring performances that kept the pace of the haunting at a constant revelry. 

The whimsy and magic of the immersive experience embraces the auditorium, handling every aspect with such clear sensitivity. The Cratchits are, despite my fond revisiting of this tale annually, cause for contention; Tiny Tim and his family cawing in mockney Victorian poverty pomp behind him makes one cringe under the amount of Victorian ‘virtuous’ poor narrative and disability fetish typically on display. However, a refreshing, modern consideration for the family were incorporated against the Victoriana. The pity porn was replaced with a quintet of talented actors who handled their roles with care, creating tender scenes; their warmth on stage was something to behold, and the dynamic between Charlotte Walton’s Bob and Scrooge was masterfully handled without the usual retreat into caricaturist workplace abuse. Instead, the ignorant optimism reserved for them was wholly invested into the pompously cheerful Fred (Nemo Royle). Adorned in a perfectly festive turquoise blazer, we were captivated around the dinner table, whilst he stood on a chair, like a true festive host, to address us, his guests, into parlour games; whilst at points the character began to sentimentalise and err on the side of tangent, the gusto of deliverance was to be relished, and an invitation back to his table would be received wholly.

The playfulness of the novella is fully anticipated when, on sofa or on theatre seat, one sits down to watch A Christmas Carol, yet the unbridled, unrelenting imaginative magic is full realised when we’re invited into stand within the tradition of this tale. If only more people could be invited to spend an evening around a Dickensian Christmas tale, then perhaps this tale would not need to be told year upon year, as the cast, crew, and production team clearly understood in their adaptation the unfortunate poignancy of the charitable message, which, as Scrooge does in the final moments of the play, grips you. The combination of theatrical enchantment and spectral illusion ensures that Christmas magic is released upon all who enter into this glimpse of Victorian London. The fun, nuanced, and gripping production affirms why A Christmas Carol is a powerhouse of a Christmas tradition. 

By Esme Bell

This is an easy pun to make, but it was with genuine sadness that I left Durham’s Gala cinema last week, after watching Ridley Scott’s latest sequel, Gladiator II.

It is perhaps unfair to say that it completely lacked entertainment value. It was a fun spectacle, at least, peopled with a dynamic and watchable cast – and, as my (Irish) friend Rachel mistily remarked, we can’t forget Paul Mescal’s ‘lovely Gaelic thighs’.

But Gaelic thighs alone cannot – and should not – make a film; and even a whole legion of Irish heartthrobs, no matter how well-muscled, could not atone for Gladiator II’s sins.

I have to preface the rest of this article by asserting how much I love the original, 2000 Gladiator; and so what follows could be seen as irritatingly nit-picking, or a failure to appreciate the new film for its own sake. I (obviously) disagree: Gladiator II as a commercial concept rests entirely on the deserved victory of the first one, and it actively appropriates the plot, music and even physical clips from its originator. This worked well in a film like Top Gun: Maverick, for instance – which proved that a loving sequel to an adored original can absolutely pay homage to its roots, but be completely successful in its own right. Gladiator II, however, fails on both counts.

Perhaps the gravest flaw – which catalyses most of the rest of the issues – is in the screenplay. It is, quite simply, lacking – in warmth, subtlety, heroism, and frankly, any sense of memorability. 

I, too, would probably lose a battle against an invading Roman army if I had to listen to Mescal’s attempt at an opening rallying speech. It falls so fatally flat, and seems so painfully self-aware of its inferiority, when compared to the glorious ease of Russell Crowe’s speech at the opening of the first film. This inevitable comparison continues: we have nothing to rival ‘Are you not entertained?’ or the chilling intensity of ‘Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife’ speech. And, again, this didn’t have to become such a glaring problem, but when Mescal’s Lucius is literally and metaphorically Maximus 2.0 – how can we ignore all the ways in which he fails to live up to him?

This brings me to my next point, which I make reluctantly, but truthfully: Mescal was a fundamentally underwhelming leading man. His occasional lapse in accent is forgivable, as Crowe also frequently slips into an Australian drawl; given the Roman Empire’s sprawling nature, it perhaps makes sense that someone’s accent might “travel” too. And, I also concede that most of Mescal’s flaws are the product, again, of the script and the plot, which allowed his character very little nuance or softness. But, the fact remains that, across the film, he acts and speaks on one, growly, broody, bear-like level, with very little variation.

One of the most powerful moments of Gladiator is not a battle, but simply a conversation early on, when Maximus describes his home to Marcus Aurelius: his house, his olives, his vines, the earth ‘black as my wife’s hair’, the wild ponies who tease his son. Crowe’s curt, cropped-haired violence is layered effortlessly with a tender, but never mawkish, vision of Maximus the farmer, who longs only for hearth and home. And this is crucial: we have to believe in his home, in his love – in the holistic man beyond The General – to then share in his grief, accept his need for revenge, and understand the man he becomes. 

We are granted no such insight into Lucius as he grunts, rolls, shouts, fights, and rolls again across the screen (Mescal does spend a lot of time on the ground with his tunic riding dangerously high – little wonder his thighs became so significant). And this critical distance from the audience’s empathy and understanding is not just frustrating, but becomes actively confusing. He asserts his passionate hatred for Lucilla (his mother) and Rome in one moment, and shortly afterwards declares his intention to die for the ‘dream that was Rome’ – with seemingly little emotional or logical backing to explain the swift change.

The cast in general though was the film’s strongest asset. Both Connie Nielsen and her character had aged well, and I felt she had more gravitas and purpose in the sequel. Pedro Pascal as the sympathetic general/ go-between was also engaging with his few lines – but his character was so unsatisfyingly written that his warmth and furrowed brow were cruelly wasted. 

The twin emperors, played by Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, were less slimily menacing than Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus – but entertaining nonetheless, and they had Denzel Washington to bulk up the explicit “villainy” a bit more. As Macrinus, he was the stand-out performance for me: he walked a compelling line between power-hungry mad man and charismatic mentor. If, at times, it felt like a reprisal of his role in Training Day, this was in no way a bad thing – and an accidental detail I loved was the way that he would constantly twitch and fidget with his robes. In real Ancient Times, it must have been a logistical nightmare murdering/scheming etc. with such long sleeves.

But even an undoubtedly star-studded, TikTok-approved cast cannot perform in a vacuum: and a plot and screenplay which moves confusingly and unsatisfactorily through story and character will struggle to serve anyone.

I do think too much has been made about how “unrealistic” the shark-infested Coliseum was. The entire plots of both films require a significant suspension of disbelief; a CGI Great White can’t be the final thing that disrupts it. But, although a slight fancifulness of story is in keeping with the original spirit of Gladiator, the rest of the “scaffolding” of the film – the effects, the soundtrack, even the inexplicable image of Tim McInnerny’s senator reading a newspaper –  are just further disappointments.

Far too much energy was expended on the computer-generated baboons that Lucius faces in the arena, and their Planet of the Apes-level screams rivalled Mescal’s own acting at points. The cheesy black-and-white rendering of (presumably) the River Styx and Charon claiming Lucius’ loved ones felt similarly jarring and wrong. The music was a particular let-down, also. Zimmer’s original score is so stirring and literally iconic – and the only vaguely memorable musical moments from Gladiator II were the few times that the original theme was re-worked. Zimmer does steal from Holst’s ‘Mars’ in the first film, so I suppose there is a Gladiatorial tradition of reusing and adapting, but it didn’t happen enough to feel like a deliberate choice, and just came across as artificial, lazy – like homework that had been done the night before.

And, in essence, I think this is the ultimate problem with the film. Like James Cameron with Avatar: The Way of the Water, Ridley Scott seems to have been subsumed by his own success, and has forsaken the integrity of his original. Like an emperor trying to win cheap approval, he has treated his loyal watcher as just part of the mob, to be fobbed off with bread, circuses, CGI sharks – and a sad dilution of an initial masterpiece. 

Even the excellent ticket price at the Gala (a joyously democratic £5) doesn’t make up for what, in this sequel, we have irretrievably, unforgivably lost: strength and honour.

By Emily Hough

Paddington 2 and Paddington in Peru: like asking da Vinci to recreate the Mona Lisa with different paints. 

This past Saturday, I sat down to join my, slightly hungover, housemates in our scheduled navigation on what Netflix has to offer. After a couple of rejected suggestions of horror films, dramas and cheap-looking Christmas films, we paused over Paddington 2. 

“You know, I read somewhere that it’s the highest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes,” my housemate shared. My other housemates responded in sheer excitement: “It is, quite literally, the best film I’ve ever seen.” This challenge alone had us sold. We pressed play and began watching, what I can confidently say, was one hour and forty-four minutes of complete and utter joy. 

Now, I understand that this may sound dramatic, and for the purpose of making this article readable it is to some extent, but the internet is all in agreement of the filmmaking phenomenon that is Paddington 2. 

In Peter Bradshaw’s The Guardian review, he called the film ‘a tremendously sweet-natured, charming, unassuming and above all funny film with a story that just rattles  along, powered by a nonstop succession of Grade-A gags.’ In fact, the ‘Grade-A gags’ Bradshaw refers to here is what possibly makes screenwriters Paul King, Simon Farnaby and Jon Croker’s creation so brilliant. It was the simple sequence of window cleaning that had us five students in fits of laughter. It’s hard to imagine how a bucket of water and a pulley could create comedic genius, yet it is the simplicity but effectiveness of the slapstick humour in Paddington 2, that gives it such a feel-good feeling.

 The Charlie Chaplin-esque humour alongside Hugh Grant’s convincing performance as a washed-up celebrity, had us ending the film with the disbelief but certainty that this was truly the best film any of us had ever watched. But what about these Paddington films makes them so addictive? How do they leave you with such a warm glow and a sunny perspective on life? 

One of my housemates seemed to offer the answer, stating “I think whoever wrote these films must just be the happiest person alive.” I think her comment pretty much answers these questions for me. So, in the hopes of continuing this winning streak, within 20 minutes of the end credits rolling, we had booked to see Paddington in Peru (the newly released third Paddington film) that next evening in Durham’s finest Gala  Theatre (£5.50 by the way, absolute steal).

With Paddington 2 achieving a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the film’s successor,  Paddington in Peru, was a hot topic of conversation in the industry in the build-up to its release this month. Critics were waiting in anticipation to watch the newest instalment of  Paddington’s adventures and see whether the trilogy could continue to get even better with every release. As it turns out, so were my four housemates and I as we waltzed into the Gala Theatre’s Cinema at 7.50 pm (a whole TEN minutes early for the adverts, we were that keen) with a bag stuffed full of an array of Tesco’s sweet treats.  

The third and final, for now, Paddington film follows the bear and the Brown family’s adventure to  Peru in search of his missing Aunt Lucy. The film opens strongly with a hilarious scene of  Paddington taking his passport photo, involving his polite responses to the automated speaker message, which sees him taking instructions a bit too literally and ending up in a pile of newspapers in Paddington station. We can see again how the writers are so talented in adding vibrance and humour so easily to mundane experiences we can all relate to. It seems the essence of Paddington’s character is to add light and cheer to parts of life we never thought would need it, like taking a passport photo or doing laundry, although in his case for his fellow prisoners.  

As we follow the Brown crew to Peru, we are introduced to Olivia Coleman’s  delightfully creepy character of Reverend Mother, the woman in charge of the  retirement home for bears that Aunt Lucy has mysteriously disappeared from. Her  opening musical number perfectly exhibits the ridiculous nature of her character, with  her humorously villainous smile giving away her not so inconspicuous identity. 

Ben Whishaw, of course, returns as the voice of Paddington, once again proving he is the one and only man to breathe life into this comical, good-hearted protagonist of the franchise. 

Paddington in Peru does face its challenges though, with a new ‘Mrs Brown’ as Emily Mortimer who takes over from Sally Hawkins in the role. There is also a new  director as Dougal Wilson takes charge, succeeding Paul King who directed Paddington 2. The directorial changes are notable, with reviews that do not shy away from the fact that the humour of Paddington in Peru does not quite match that of  its widely celebrated predecessor. 

Peter Bradshaw returns some seven years later to review Paddington in Peru for The Guardian, in which he comments that ‘just as jolly as the previous two films, but not really as  funny, Paddington in Peru is a sweet-natured and primary-colour family adventure  which takes Paddington Bear back to his South American homeland.’ Bradshaw, amongst other critics, says what the audience is thinking: no, it is not funnier or even as  funny as its previous film. However, that is not to say that it was not a perfectly  enjoyable experience, costing not much more than a pint in The Swan, and I would recommend watching the film to children and adults alike.

There is lots to be learnt from Hugh Bonerville’s loveable portrayal of Mr Brown. In this third instalment we see him adopt the mindset of his new American boss, Mission  Impossible’s new ‘it-girl’ Haley Atwell, and ‘embrace the risk’. Bonerville is a master of  bringing quintessential English humour to any character he touches, and in Paddington in Peru he is no different. His ‘under the breath’ comments brought a chuckle from all in the  cinema, and his fear of spiders is an aspect of his character I can greatly relate to,  although his triumph over it, is not.  

The film wraps up Paddington’s character arc in a neat and tidy bow. Whilst taking the  story out of London causes it to lose some of the humorous interactions with British  culture, it seems necessary to take Paddington beyond the space we typically see him  in and discover where our titular character comes from. 

The end of the film explores that all too important question of where do we belong? As  Paddington grapples with the duality of who he is, the cinema air is tense with  anticipation, broken with a sigh of relief as we see him once again choose London as his  home. The writers make one thing clear: You can take the bear out of London, but you can’t take London out of the bear.

Walking out of the Gala Theatre into the crisp November night, we wondered as a house at what point did we stop watching these ‘kids’ films in the cinema and concluded there comes a time when we  should all revert to these nostalgic stories.  I would urge you to take an evening and to come and fill your boots with the happiness that these types of films offer. After all, these lessons on family, adventure, and discovering things about ourselves may be  aimed at children, but I think we can all be reminded of them from time to time.

By Lydia Firth

At the beginning of this month, I had the absolute pleasure of attending one of Laura Marling’s four nights of residency in Hackney Church. In case you’re not familiar with Marling, she has been a steady presence in the indie folk and singer-songwriter world since the 2000s, releasing her first album ‘Alas, I Cannot Swim’ at the age of just 18 and winning the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist in 2011. Her classic sound has led her to be compared to the likes of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. Having been a fan for a few years, I was excited by the prospect of seeing her in such an intimate and atmospheric venue. 

Marling opened with a fifteen-minute number of four interwoven songs from her 2013 magnum opus ‘Once I Was an Eagle’. She joked we’d passed the endurance test, but really it was no challenge: her intonation is addictively Bob Dylan-esque and she sings lines like ‘I will not be a victim of romance’ as if they’re an incantation, with an admirable acerbity. The crowd were engrossed: to her, singing and playing is entirely instinctive. The first half of the concert was dedicated to her reasonably extensive back catalogue and for the second half she was joined by strings and a choir to perform the entirety of her new album, ‘Patterns in Repeat’, as well as a couple of cult-classics. 

Alongside her quintessential odes to women persecuted or misunderstood, the principal focus of her new album is motherhood. Alluding to Cyril Connolly’s assertion that parenthood and creativity are incompatible, she stated on the album release day that she hoped ‘if nothing else this album serves to represent the possibility that the pram in the hallway is not, as it turns out, the enemy of art’. She is undoubtedly successful at proving Connolly wrong. Almost paradoxically, reflecting her precise use of words, she sings in the title track ‘I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me’. Despite this complete candour, the album never borders on saccharine, she retains a dark edge: her artistic integrity and storytelling capacity runs too deep.

From the new album, ‘Caroline’ has quickly become a classic. Reminiscent of Leonard Cohen, it’s haunting and utterly timeless. The ingenious idea of forgotten lyrics (‘A song I only just remember / That goes oh, something something, Caroline’) reflects Marling’s wit, which was delightfully highlighted for me during the gig when a fan shouted out ‘we love you, Laura!’ and she replied, knowingly, ‘good, good’. Her quiet confidence is palpable: even when she sang the wrong lyrics in one song and suffered some technical guitar malfunctions, she resumed the song unfazed, clicking back into an almost ethereal state of absorption which was incredible to watch.

Recorded in her home, the new album features faint baby gurgles and chirping birds, which complement the soaring string sections to tether the album to a strong sense of reality, different from earlier albums of which the narratives are more fantastical and abstract. ‘No one’s gonna love you like I can’ is another standout: a gut-wrenchingly beautiful two-minute song which she performed on the piano. It is perhaps the closest to sickly-sweet she gets, but she retains her usual playful blend of sentimentality and sharpness (‘You were saying something strange just to make me misbehave’). Hearing this song live, it’s apparent that the album is more hopeful, expansive, and forwards-looking than her previous works; the song takes flight with the help of the strings as she sings ‘And if life is just a dream / I’m gonna make it mean something worth a damn’. 

With no opening act nor encore, something Marling fans have come not to expect, she closed the show with the song ‘For You’, from her 2020 album ‘A Song for Our Daughter’. Released three years before having her daughter, she now refers to the album interchangeably as ‘Premonition’. The tone aligns with that of the new album as she sings ‘I thank a God I’ve never met / Never loved, never wanted (For you)’. A fusion of her innate scepticism and her joy at becoming a mother, with a lilting rhythm, it rounded up the concert charmingly. She waved quickly at the audience, unslung her guitar, and headed off-stage, embodying her understated and underrated genius.

By Em Robertson Taylor

As someone who has the St. George’s cross blu-tacked to my wall, I am often asked why I display such a controversial visual. Whilst patriotism is a divisive topic in itself, ‘Englishness’ seems to be most commonly defined by extremism. During the destructive riots over the past year, the English flag was often seen towering above the heads of angry racists, and for much of modern cultural history, has become a stamp on the letters of bigotry and exclusion. 

I must admit, I find it a shame that we have seemingly surrendered the concept of Englishness to the extreme margins. I suppose we witnessed the wave of  “Cool Britannia” in the 2000s that led up to 2012 Olympics, which for many of my peers seems to symbolise the peak of their limited patriotism for this country, but even so, that was a pride in Britishness, which seems to be somewhat easier, and less awkward to associate with. And whilst Wales and Scotland have been able to foster a more inclusive cultural nationalism, it is the United Kingdom’s biggest player that has been unable to do so.

In 2009, Jez Butterworth premiered Jerusalem, a play that sought to resituate cultural Englishness into a literary context, and also comment on how rural Englanders respond to their changing cultural landscape. The play focuses on the eviction of Johnny Rooster Byron, an English traveller whose caravan is at risk of demolishment by the local Kennet and Avon council. Upon first impressions, Byron is the personification of aged and chauvinistic stereotypes, his discourse is filled to the brim with derogatory and colloquial euphemism. He drinks, he spits, he is the epitome of the ‘social underclass’ that so many people associate English pride with. Crucially, he’s an outdated anomaly, a glitch, a rural caricature that simply cannot keep up with the mechanisms of modernity. And yet, it is with this archetype that Butterworth believes a realisation of English cultural nationalism can be reimagined. Johnny’s surname, Byron, immediately ties him to the English romantic great.  Johnny also bears stark similarity to the original author of Jerusalem, William Blake. At one point, Byron reminisces about his legendary performances before his fall into social isolation and obscurity, supposedly prancing across three double decker busses at the local Flintock fair – these illustrious tales of greatness much resembling the infamous hallucinations of Blake. Furthermore, his fall from grace has colonial tinges. As Johnny Byron grapples with his isolation, England must surely construct an identity independent from its imperial past. 

By the play’s culmination,  Johnny’s syntax has transformed into lyrical and decorated soliloquies, his flourishing final monologue a clear ode to English mythology and folklore. And whilst choosing to stand by his caravan, Johnny Byron self-actualizes and reconnects with a rural form of cultural Englishness that has become so lost and mistranslated, and argues that there is rich form of English identity that can indeed prosper in the modern world. Englishness is not an unstudied concept in the literary scape. In E.M Forster’s Howards End, for example, a similar mythical and artistic enlightenment is discovered by the protagonists. Forster, however, seems to commit the English middle classes to this task of reimagining England’s green and pleasant pastures. Butterworth imagines a revolution from the bottom-up and suggests that class-consciousness is integral to forming a cultural richness for a nation that seems so fragmented. Perhaps this debate is trivial, perhaps we can never reconcile a version of Englishness that is fuelled by folklore and romanticism, as opposed to exclusion and suspicion. Perhaps, patriotism is just a dusty book on the top shelf that this generation has no interest in reading.  But I do feel it is our responsibility to re-imagine a more accessible and deeper Englishness – after all, the alternative is throwing it to the beer-bellied wolves.

By Jacob Watson

Five years does seem like a long time to take to get around to reading the highly anticipated follow up to Call Me By Your Name, one of the most iconic books/films of recent times. But then again I’m just your average common reader so I can’t be hated for taking this long. And the book was published twelve years after Call Me By Your Name anyway. So Find Me basically had to wait twelve years to get published, and then another five years to finally get picked up and read by yours truly. 

Still, that pales in comparison to the twenty years the characters – Elio and Oliver! – had to wait to finally reconnect. And the reader of Find Me might feel themself to be sharing in their waiting: as has been decried by almost every reader of this book, you have to push through over two hundred pages of seemingly unrelated material before the terrible twosome themselves finally get together properly in the last fifteen or so pages of the book. 

Waiting – being made to wait, making things wait – is clearly a big thing in the book. And it reminds me of the opening of Call Me By Your Name in fact: Elio’s recollection of Oliver’s constant and apparently meaningless use of the word “later”. One difference, though, may be that in the earlier book, we are made to wait and watch the romance develop, and the plot quicken and get weightier, and that’s really part of its appeal. Whereas with Find Me, your average reader is just waiting for the book to give what it needs to give, in order to justify its existence. 

And that’s the issue, isn’t it: this was always a book cursed to inherit all sorts of waiting, from the characters, the readers, the writer himself, and around the narrative skeleton of characters less pretentious and robotic as these ones, it may be the stuff great novels are made of. But Aciman seems to have misjudged the capacity of his characters to satisfyingly dramatise this waiting. So, apparently in order to add substance to his novel, he makes the cardinal sin of producing a novel that relies on the author’s (characters’s) intelligence and cultural knowledge to work. 

Thus in this instance, what you end up with, annoyingly, is a highly stylised and conceptually intriguing novel whose characters come across as utterly transparent, lazily drawn puppets, the sole purpose of whom is to voice (sometimes implicitly but gratingly often explicitly) all the theory and cultural reference and intellect with which Aciman feels compelled to salt his text. They certainly don’t think, talk or act the way people do, but they think, talk and act the way Aciman needs them to in order to fill the black hole in his text left by all the implicit waiting. And it doesn’t even pay off: when the characters finally stop their wholly unconvincing, preposterously robotic and referential and incessant dialogue, it’s seemingly only ever to pose little rhetorical questions inquiring into the nature of their own minds. Obviously, not all character-narrators owe the reader complete narrational and mental transparency, and a bit of unreliability and unclarity is nice. But one can only really groan when it becomes clear that the questions, for instance, are only there to hint at and suggest an awareness of the psychological depths and recesses that Aciman apparently can’t be bothered to plumb. Consider these random quotes where Sami Perlman is talking about getting to know the woman from the train: “Had I once again spoken out of turn and crossed a line?”; “When was the last time I’d spoken to someone like this?”; “Had I yet again snubbed her without meaning to?”; “Was she teasing me?” Girl, I don’t know! And it doesn’t look as though André Aciman does, either. For this whole first episode of the novel, nothing seems real, and not in the good way. Knowing each other for one day, Sami Perlman and Miranda, the woman from the train, decide that theirs is the greatest love story ever told, discuss having a baby and consider getting matching tattoos. I literally was not convinced for a single moment. Questions like these worm their way into Elio’s part of the novel as well. And again it just seems like lazy writing. 

There’s actually another little stylish trait that grated on me while I was reading Find Me. All four sections of the novel are strewn with these unbelievably cringe-inducing and irritating italicised phrases. I think this is a longstanding trait of Aciman’s actually – it was in Call Me By Your Name, too. But here, it’s just unfathomable. Or, at least, at first it was. Though there wasn’t ever much evidence throughout the novel as far as genuine narration is concerned, I was able to gradually come into an awareness of the nature of these italicised phrases, and I think it has something to do with tense. Though the whole novel is told through the minds of the narrators in the past tense, the italicised bits of narrative appear to be thoughts directly lifted from the characters’s actual minds at the time they are describing. Have some examples: “Why am I not even hesitating?”; “This is what I’ve always wanted. This and you.”; “I shook my head. Like you needed to ask.”; or even the woefully mechanical: “Just kiss me, will you, if only to help me get over being so visibly flustered.”

Now then. This struck me as extremely unnecessary. Doesn’t all past-tense narrative, its goal being to recollect and present the sensation of events as they had happened, work through burning the fossil fuel of present-tense sensations that have buried themselves in the brain? That is, given that all past-tense narrative operates via the previousness of a present-tense sensation pressing itself through time zones into a new present, and that that is the implied machinery of all past-tense narrative, especially one invested anyway in time, why should the writer even bother to distinguish between the two? Again, it seems to me to be a sort of gimmick, insisted upon by the novelist in order to fraudulently suggest a crisp and clinical awareness on his part of the stream of perceptions, travelling and morphing across time zones in and through his characters’s minds. But for the reader who has unhappily admitted that the characters in the novel are literally insubstantial, you have to regretfully accept that the questions are just there to create the illusion of insight.

This leads me on to another of the novel’s problems. If these annoying little italicised bits only serve to arbitrarily and for no reason severe the time zones of the narrative on the level of form, it may only be because the novel brings with it so much sort of theoretical baggage that Aciman seems to insist on including in the novel, apparently just as a way of justifying or advocating for the underperformance of the narrative itself. Aciman, a Proust scholar, can be forgiven for trying to make his novel pretty Proustian. But only up to a certain point. The characters have annoying conversations about time, and fate, and strike me as how Proust may have written his novels if he had written them to a deadline and on the toilet. William Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust, Bach, all worm their way not only into the novel, but into completely unrelated conversations. And often when they do so they do so clumsily. Consider the unforgivably clunky Shakespeare reference, when Miranda’s father describes her as having “a tempest” inside her. If reading Dostoyevsky on a train is improbably enough, talking to the stranger on the train about why you’re reading Dostoyevsky is more improbable still.

If the explicit engagement with cultural reference and intellect is grating enough as it is, the implicit cultural and theoretical inheritance is no better. There are two cultural patrons of this novel: Proust and Freud. The Proust bits are either terrible or nice. When Aciman successfully brings Proust into the novel, it’s because he’s written a passage of thought so attractive in its grammar, in the placement of its different lexical weights and even punctuation, that one feels highly impressed. I’ll transcribe a nice bit, from Elio’s section, here: 

“What never ceased to amaze me and cast a halo around our evening was that ever since we’d met, we’d been thinking along the same lines, and when we feared we weren’t or felt we were wrong-footing each other, it was simply because we had learned not to trust that anyone could possibly think and behave the way we did, which was why I was so indifferent with him and mistrusted every impulse in myself and couldn’t have been happier when I saw how easily we’d shed some of our screens.” 

See? Nice! This works well largely because it’s a pleasant contrast to the novel’s utter lack of character insight; the passage offers a detailed and sharp unravelling of Elio’s motives and thoughts in a way that feels natural and self-fortifying. But parts like this are few and far between, and indeed I had to work quite hard to find my nice example.

There are also some plot points that are quite heavy-handedly Freudian, and these come across as sort of amateurish. I mean, the sexual psychology of Call Me By Your Name itself was liable to read in all sorts of Freudian ways, but in Find Me it gets a bit crazy: 

“I loved […] being coddled this way, loved when he started rubbing a lotion on me that felt wonderful each time he poured more of it on his palm and touched me everywhere. I felt like a toddler being washed and dried by his parent, which also took me back to my very earliest childhood when my father would shower with me in his arms.” 

I mean, come on. That sounds like if you pushed a microphone into a stranger’s face on the street and asked them to say something that sounds like something one of Freud’s patients would say. This man is a professor! Throwing Freudian-sounding little bits of lore is not enough to actually construct a narrator; but it appears to be all Aciman has at his disposal – alongside rhetorical questions and Shakespeare references, that is.

Aciman’s marginally more subtle involving of the Freudians, though still pretty obtrusive, may be in Find Me’s unusual fascination with dying, soon-to-be dead and dead fathers. Almost every character – I dare say every – has a father who is one of these three. It’s like a weird remix of kill your gays – kill off the fathers, and their sons will start being gay, acting gay, or come out as gay, or reconnect with the gay lover of that one Italian summer twenty years ago. I don’t know what the reader is meant to make of this. And I don’t know what Aciman was perhaps wanting to demonstrate: maybe he was just hoping to repeat an event throughout time frames and throughout his novel and hope that eventually it sediments into something bearing the semblance of relevance in the reader’s mind. 

But I think the worst crime this novel commits – and the one there is absolutely no excuse for – is the disgusting omnipresence of clichés so ridiculously overused that you can’t even yawn or roll your eyes at them because you’ve already yawned and rolled your eyes at those clichés throughout your life anyway. My hand almost cramped underlining them. Here are some:

I stared at him. “You know I’d like to.” And this wasn’t the single malt or the wine speaking.

My heart was racing, yet suddenly I felt awkward even if none of this was unfamiliar to me. 

[By] now his body knew mine better than it knew itself. 

I have nothing to add to this. It speaks for itself. 

You know, there’s a bit in this novel where Elio’s much older lover, Michel, describes their morning sex, having taken place after their night time sex, as their “hasty little […] sequel”, and if this weren’t such a lazily and amateurishly Freudian book I’d feel a morsel of guilt about reading those words as a bit of a Freudian slip on Aciman’s own part, too. But I don’t, since if any book opens itself up to criticisms of the nature of its actual writing, it’s this one. It’s a shame. A lot of the things everyone hated about this book I saw no reason to hate. For instance, I didn’t really care that there wasn’t much Elio-Oliver content, and would have been perfectly happy reading about the sexual adventures of Elio and his father (not together, I hope! But for a book this Freudian it’s not out of the question! (I joke.)); but this hasty little sequel to Call Me By Your Name is lazy in too many ways for me to like it any more that on a neutral level.

By Jacob Watson

Alan Hollinghurst’s third novel, The Spell, is unique in his bibliography, qualitatively and, if you like, quantitatively, in some compelling but confusing ways. His novels have tended to be huge six-hundred-or-so page tomes, large-scale state of the nation works which announce themselves formally and sometimes explicitly to be the inheritors of the Jane Austen and Henry James type of social novel. The Spell, on the other hand, barely makes it over the two-hundred page mark, and lacks the expansive social vision and criticism that his other novels are able to offer. 

The novel is described on the blurb as a “comedy of sexual manners”, and the placement of those terms is more revealing than it might seem. At points in the novel I wondered if it perhaps could do with being inverted: “a sexual comedy of manners”; I occasionally felt as though the novel represented something that maybe could have been a sexless comedy of manners, but which had had sex smothered onto it, resulting in a sort of neutral, traditional comedy of manners rendered sexual by Hollinghurst’s desire to just do so. But I think the description is in general more accurate, as the “sexual manners” the novel deals with are, themselves, indeed comedic, and a source of comedy. So, in a way it’s the inverse of my first thought: it’s not a comedic novel rendered sexual, but rather a sexual novel that can’t help coming across as comedic. 

The Spell is a more or less plotless affair, a pseudo-modernist carousel of narratives which focalise, revolvingly, on the perspectives of each of a set of four gay men, whose sex lives are intertwined beyond belief, twisted into a Gordian knot of desire that binds itself up even across implicit family lines. The sexual extremities on display here, and the neutrality with which they’re described, seem to amount to (to borrow the novel’s term slightly) a transvaluation of all sexual values, and in this regard the novel brings to mind the works of Jean Genet, in particular his Our Lady of the Flowers, to me at least. 

And it’s interesting that it does so, seeing as it resembles a piece of Genet-inclining modernist prose fiction. But it does so only in a limited way. I suppose the novel resembles Genet in a world where, instead of spending years in prison for homosexuality, Genet had gone to boarding school and then got two degrees from Oxford. This is a pretty colloquial phrasing of what I do in fact take to be the novel’s problem. In The Spell, Hollinghurst appears to have tried his hand at writing an airy, elusive, plotless circuit of intermingling sexual psychologies; but this kind of narrative can only succeed if the writer is genuinely willing to relinquish an insistence upon facts and details, actual and mental, to allow the novel, which he wants to be evocative, to actually evoke. Let me explain.

*

The kind of novel that Hollinghurst intended to write with The Spell only really works by being slightly elusive and unclear. But Hollinghurst can’t seem to shake off his formal affinity with the Victorian and Edwardian novelists: I mean, he did write his MA thesis on the novels of Forster, Firbank and Hartley. Perhaps this novel would have succeeded more if Hollinghurst were able to stop describing his characters’ every thought with a level of self-evaluation and insight that, if they actually had at the time of the events the novel describes, they may not have acted this way and produced the plot the descriptions are describing.

I mean, just look at the state of this sentence: “Alex felt the beautiful unwise emotions of something starting up, and grinned to himself between bites, as if his sandwich was unaccountably delicious; though what he was savouring was the longed-for surprise of being wanted.” This is the kind of sentence the modernists with whom The Spell is implying an affinity would never write; can you imagine Jean Genet, Woolf, Mansfield, writing something like that? Sentences like this, which are constant in the novel, imply a razor-sharp awareness and ability to monitor all the thoughts and feelings that stream through a character’s mind – an awareness that people just don’t have in real life, and which, looking at the actual plot of the novel, the characters certainly don’t have, either. Moreover, this kind of penetrative, retroactive psychological insight is not conducive to the success of the kind of novel that The Spell is striving to be. Those kinds of novels work by exploiting the evocative, richly sensual, the whiff of the unconscious occasionally finding its way to the surface, for instance. I guess what I mean is: a novel can’t be this plotless and unbelievable whilst also maintaining an Edwardian, Bennett-esque focus on the details, the events, of real life and the mind. 

Here’s a comparison by examples. Consider this extract from Our Lady of the Flowers:

“Now, as there was no bathtub in Darling’s home, he used to be dipped into a wash basin. Today, or some other day, though it seems to me today, while he was sleeping, he dreamed that he was entering a wash basin. He isn’t, of course, able to analyze himself, nor would he dream of trying to, but he is sensitive to the tricks of fate, and to the tricks of the theatre of fear. When Divine answers, “I’m doing the wash basin,” he thinks she is saying it to mean “I’m playing at being the wash basin,” as if she were “doing” a role. (She might have said: “I’m doing a locomotive.”) He suddenly gets an erection from the feeling that he has penetrated Divine in a dream. In his dream he penetrates the Divine of the dream of Divine, and he possesses her, as it were, in a spiritual debauch, And the following phrases come into his mind: “To the heart, to the hilt, right to the balls, right in the throat.””

This is one extract which actually bears some likeness, content-wise, with The Spell, but obviously is different in ways; ways that make it succeed. There is, I admit, a suggestion of genuine self-awareness (“he thinks she is saying it to mean […]”), but it of course ultimately falls, in favour of an obscuring, evocative stream of little psychic convulsions which imply rather than state the psycho-sexual state of affairs. Of course, to be fair, Our Lady of the Flowers is a first-person account, and the minds of the characters it describes obviously can’t reasonably be entirely traced by the limited narrational capacity of Jean; whereas the free-indirect-discourse of The Spell nominally allows for the narrator to know everything about its character’s motivations. But firstly, novels of this sort blur the lines between these distinct modes of narration anyway, and moreover, Hollinghurst actually remains probably just as present in the narration as Jean does in the Genet. And the very fact of that difference is part of The Spell’s unsuccessful attempts to adopt a precise formal mode – one that allows for the plotless narrative circle it wants to be. Here is Hollinghurst in The Spell describing a comparable psychological moment:

“One simple possibility for today was to give Terry a ring, but he [Justin] rejected it with a clear sense of tactics. He mustn’t give Robin any new occasion for his old grievances, and Terry’s discretion was still untested. He took a mug of tea through to the sitting-room and then remembered that there were some photographs of Danny in the little commode. He kept forgetting that he fancied him now as well.”

In both of these extracts, Genet and Hollinghurst are basically attempting to describe men absent-mindedly considering sex. But in the Genet, although the narration is of course much more imprecise, we nonetheless get a much more emphatic understanding of Darling’s character-essence. Whereas in the Hollinghurst, every single quivering of psychological motive is aired by the narrator. And let’s face it. There’s nothing more unsexy than having attention drawn to all your actual thoughts. Simply stated, everything may work in some novels, but not in a novel which strives to be airy and impressionistic, and especially not in one which allies itself with the queerly modernist aesthetic. Not to be basic, but I can’t help recalling these words from Woolf’s “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”:

“I let my Mrs. Brown slip through my fingers. I have told you nothing whatsoever about her. But that is partly the great Edwardians’ fault. I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character ? And they said, ” Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe -” But I cried, ” Stop ! Stop !” […]”

Woolf is, unsurprisingly, right; and Hollinghurst, striving to emulate the style of the queer modernists, ought to remember that there was a reason “modernism” felt a need to supplant the Arnold Bennetts of the world in the first place. The extreme nature of the psychological self-awareness in The Spell is completely dissonant with the seemingly unmotivated randomness of the events which form the threadbare plot of the novel. The narration implicitly claims and enjoys a staggering insight into the thoughts and motivations of the characters; and yet if all this was, in fact, actually available to the foursome of characters in the novel, they would, I’m sure, have acted differently. Couple Robin and Justin both independently sleeping with the much younger rent boy lover of Robin’s own son, for instance, was a quasi-incestuous moment that makes one question what the use of these layers and layers of psychological detail exactly is. 

Still, to be fair to Hollinghurst, this seems to be the novel that he had to write, quite early in his career, in order to get out of his system everything that would have otherwise stood in the way of the brilliance of his later novels such as The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child. And as well, it’s worth putting the novel in its proper context. One of Hollinghurst’s intentions, I think, has always been to properly render gay psychology to make it seem normal to a general reading public. The Spell was released in 1998, and I guess at this time a novel which attends to and presents the psychology of the gays was likely worth having around.  So this novel isn’t really as major an outlier amongst Hollinghurst’s bibliography as I had assumed. It’s more like a typical Hollinghurst novel which couldn’t help but fall under the spell of the modernists; and as for the characters, the spell of an attractive external influence can be difficult to resist.

Image credit: Interview Magazine 

Settling differences with Susan Hill’s horror

By Edward Bayliss

There’s a wonderful quotation I chanced upon recently in George Eliot’s Silas Marner – itself a novel so well informed by superstition and the supernatural. It goes: ‘Before such calm external beauty the presence of a vague fear is more distinctly felt – like a raven flapping its slow wing across the sunny air.’ It seems to me that this is the force that fills the sails of good horror. Like the small itch of a splinter between your toes, or in film terms, the almost imperceptible cant of a camera lens, there should exist an unease, barely there but present enough to unsettle you gradually. This is the agitated and wrinkled sheet on which the real time body horrors lie.  

Susan Hill’s 1983 gothic horror novel, The Woman in Black, has borne two cinematic adaptations. Doubtless, most have heard of James Watkins’ 2012 version (starring Daniel Radcliffe), but I suspect Herbert Wise’s 1989 feature leans lonely against the shaded edge of our film shelves – even so, I must remember that I speak for a certain generation. In broad strokes, the films take markedly different approaches in their realisation of Hill’s novel on the screen. Wise’s Woman in Black is much more faithful to its source text, save his strange alteration of Arthur Kipps’ surname to ‘Kidd’, and the fashion of his family’s death; he leaves the meat of the original plot unspoiled. Watkins instead kills Kipps’ wife before the film has even begun, and donates much more of the film’s minutes to the circumstances of the children’s deaths in Crythin Gifford which are treated in more mysterious terms in Hill’s novel. Though I am very fond of the novel, I won’t pedestal it as some god-breathed scripture that must be followed to a T. 

What interests me more are the directors’ treatment of that heap of a house – Eel Marsh House. We must consider not only the fact of the setting, but also the framing of the setting. The Drablow estate, set isolated across a marshy causeway suffocated by ‘sea threats’, is a great invention of horror. In Watkins’ 2012 adaptation, we see it first from high angle shots – it’s a black and brown tangle of trees and rocky outcrops, a kind of unspectacular Mont-Saint-Michel. It’s obscure and dark, very dark. The geography of the ‘island’ I’ve noticed doesn’t actually add up when we arrive at the house on ground level. Whether this is an intentional move from Watkins, I’m not sure. The estate grounds bear all the hallmarks of high gothic horror, with gnarled gravestones, trees antlered with dead branches appearing as grey phantoms, and carpets of smothering moss and ivy covering every unbreathing surface. A bluish grey filter sits on the lens throughout. The gothic catalogue is well read, maybe too well read. 

Herbert Wise approaches the site with much more austerity, open space, and bigger skies. Eel Marsh House’s surroundings are unwooded, bare, and unsettlingly unfilled, except for the romantic ruin of a chapel arch which appears also on the cover of the first edition of Hill’s novel. This is the most notable difference in terms of the Eel Marsh grounds. To return to our initial assessment of ‘good horror’ prompted by the Eliot quotation, it’s the 1989 version that best exemplifies this undercurrent of edge. Let it be said, the scenery of the Drablow estate in Watkins’ film is uncomfortable, but it’s comfortably uncomfortable – for me it’s too explicit in its presentation, too direct. Its effects are overground, like a wind slapping against your cheek, whereas with Wise’s Woman in Black we feel more the unsteady shift of soil beneath our feet. 

Now to the house itself. In the Radcliffe film, much like it’s outside, the inside of the house is in a state of complete disrepair (seemingly abandoned for decades), with Satis house-esque shivering cobwebs and burnt-down candlesticks. An infinitely long corridor on the first floor is unsurprisingly exploited in several POV push shots. The camera, I should say, behaves unsubtly in Watkins’ Eel Marsh House. It too often frames Radcliffe in the corner of the frame, demanding us to look elsewhere in the shot, and ‘shockingly’ discover the blurred shape of Jennet Humfrye, the woman in black, against a far away wall. The camera also appropriates the perspective of Humfrye too regularly so that the effect is rendered less and less potent in each instance. Here, the camera gymnastics often distract from the subject, creating a self-awareness, reminding us we are watching pixels on a screen in our sitting room.

There’s a theme here, if you hadn’t gathered. In Wise’s adaptation, the interior of Eel Marsh house is intact and lived in (Alice Drablow had only died a week prior to Kidds’ visit). There is even electricity, as in the novel, and few dark corners for phantoms to lurk. The electrical aspect of the house is used brilliantly. In an outhouse, a panting generator eerily sounds out through the house’s tight corridors. One of the most striking moments of the film occurs when the faulty generator is revived, and all the lights of the house are restored. In this exterior shot, the house again becomes uncannily alive. Wise’s film doesn’t rely on dark corners for the dark deeds of his woman in black. The lens, as though afraid, often shrinks back from the Jennet Humfrye rather than possess her. 

Herbert Wise’s Woman in Black is the better of the two. For want of more coherent expression, it’s better to have uneasy easiness than easy uneasiness on the screen.     

Image credits: IMDB & BFI

The diabolical exploitation of the Menéndez brothers.

Lyle Menéndez (left) and Erik Menéndez (right) during their highly publicised trial. / Associated Press

‘Violence is never an answer, never a solution, and is always tragic. As such, I hope it is never forgotten that violence against a child creates a hundred horrendous and silent crime scenes darkly shadowed behind glitter and glamour and rarely exposed until tragedy penetrates everyone involved.’ — Erik Menéndez in response to Monsters

If you are not familiar with the Menéndez brothers, I simultaneously feel very sorry for and very envious of you. The 1989 murder case of wealthy entertainment tycoon Jose Menéndez and his wife Kitty, fatally shot in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion, may predate bite-sized TikTok rundowns, long-winded docuseries and ‘white woman true crime podcasts’. But by no means could the trial of the brothers responsible be described as anything other than a media circus—one that dominated the televisions and tabloids of the early nineties and turned suffering into spectacle, their tragedy into tableau. Nearly thirty-five years have passed, though the echoes of that anguish refuse to fade.

The public’s fetish for this case — and discourse surrounding the brothers’ defence that they were sexually abused by their father — are once again brought into controversial conversation with Ryan Murphy’s newest instalment of Monsters. This is not the place for learning about the idiosyncrasies of the Menéndez brothers’ crime; this is a place solely dedicated to the scrutinisation of the heinous and invented story Ryan Murphy so bumptiously tells. It is a place for examining the wounds he has reopened and unpacking why this spurious and irresponsible distortion of the truth matters. In August of 1989, Lyle and Erik Menéndez, twenty-one and eighteen respectively, shot and killed their father and mother. It is crucial before watching and digesting the fiction of this programme you understand why. In 2005, Erik Menéndez would tell People magazine: ‘It’s as if there was kerosene all over the floor that a match could light at any time. And my soul was burnt to death. The way I reacted was so destructive to all. It was the most awful devastation.’

Cooper Koch (left) as Erik Menéndez and Nicholas Alexander Chavez (right) as Lyle Menéndez. / Netflix

I’ll come clean and admit to being borderline ecstatic when I heard there was a new series about the Menéndez brothers coming out. It’s a case that sits very close to my heart, and affects me to a degree no fictional tragedy could ever hope to inspire. But I was less so after seeing it was produced by Netflix, even less upon learning it would be spearheaded by Ryan Murphy and the next instalment in his ‘true crime’ franchise. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story. Shuddersome. I understand the title is meant to be ambiguous, a possible subversion of itself depending on what side of the fence you happen to sit on. The implication is still there; it’s still not right to even suggest these two men could stand on the same level as Jeffrey Dahmer. 

And this is where the cruel exploitation of Lyle and Erik Menéndez begins. Murphy takes off running from here and never seems to stop. There are a great many issues I take with this series, but I do believe its mindful and mannerly to mention the brilliant acting by breakout stars Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, poignant score by Thomas Newman paired with a captivating soundtrack that has reintroduced an entire generation to Milli Vanilli, and outstanding cinematics achieved by a talented team. It is a well-crafted and engrossing show; I will not shy away from admitting to that. Any fond remarks I may have about this series now come to an abrupt halt. 

Erik Menéndez takes the stand in 1993. / CourtTV

I boast no behavioural psychology qualification save the common high school course. Nor do I intend to imply that having an interest in true crime—no matter how intense—grants me any authority to make sound claims about the truth of this trauma. Still, I find it impossible not to mention the presence and manner of the Menéndez brothers in court; how their disposition and the details of their demeanour during their testimonies add nuance and colour to the words that come stuttering, hesitant and embarrassed, from behind their teeth. Though the pain and trauma these two men suffered throughout their childhoods is, I do believe it’s fair to say, nearly their entire defence case, there is an astonishing and noticeable lack of self-pity in their statements. The physical and sexual torture they were subjected to is presented to the jury by the defendants with the same straightforward candour a twelve-year-old boy may explain his process of long-division to a tutor. Step-by-step. ‘That’s just the way it goes, see?’ When there are tears, put them under a microscope. You will find no ‘poor me’s, no crocodile victimhood, only their wretched, childlike frustration at not being able to spit out the words they need to say. ‘My dad…my dad…my dad…’ is how Erik Menéndez begins when questioned by his defence attorney Leslie Abramson: ‘What do you believe was the originating cause of you and your brother … shooting your parents?’ It takes him minutes of frustrated brow-furrowing, aborted sentences, hard stares at his lap while he tries to get his tears and his breathing under control. There are shaky sighs and sharp exhalations blown into the microphone—too close, the pops filling the courtroom. He pulls his mouth, desperate to school his expression. This lasts for fifty-five excruciating seconds. ‘It was you telling Lyle what?’ Abramson prompts. He looks physically ill as he finally forces out the full sentence: ‘That my dad had been molesting me.’ The mic captures a sharp inhale as the defendant’s face twists in embarrassed agony. There is no vaunting present. This is not something spoken lightly, with an air of ‘Look, see?’ Erik Menéndez chokes these words out, his voice saturated with defeat and shame. To be eighteen, feeling smaller than nothing as you tell this to your big brother. To be twenty-three, even smaller as you admit this to a courtroom full of strangers, a camera crew, the whole world. Can you imagine?

Lyle Menéndez at trial. / Getty Images

This older brother Erik Menéndez confides in is hardly present in Murphy’s rendering. There are crucial facets of Lyle Menéndez’s personality he miserably fails to show. Take, for instance, his considerable emotional connection to soft toys. Lyle considered them family: ‘They made me feel safer,’ he would go on to testify, ‘Especially early on, but really all the way through my teenage years, sometimes they got me through the day.’ He took them to high school. When Erik would orphan his stuffed animals, having grown out of them, Lyle would take them in. He would impose different traits, roles, temperaments onto them, crafting highly complex hierarchies and social orders. Dr. Jon Conte, a psychologist specialising in child abuse and who worked with Lyle Menéndez during his time in jail, would remark of this behaviour: ‘In a way that I’ve never heard from another victim, he … was doing play therapy. When we see traumatised kids, we often ask them to act out with [toys] their bad experiences. The difference between Lyle’s [playing] and play therapy is that there was no therapist there to help guide the process.’ It is difficult to reconcile this Lyle Menéndez with Murphy’s brash, Janus-faced caricature, prone to violent threats and bratty outbursts.

Emerging talent Nicholas Alexander Chavez as Lyle Menéndez. / Netflix

Chavez’s disarming and ill-tempered Lyle swears at ticket agents, frightens children on Halloween, punctuates his immature shouting with wild gestures, banging on tables and slamming doors. Murphy even goes so far as to imply this awful imitation of Lyle is capable of deceiving the ‘audience’ of the jury, of putting on a performance of pain and misery so as to elicit profound, falsely-rooted sympathy. It is vile. Today, Erik Menéndez continues to fight on behalf of his brother, still defends him. In direct response to Murphy’s loud, violent, near bipolar portrayal of Lyle, he had this to say:

‘I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show. I can only believe they were done so on purpose. It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent.’

A rare and raw moment of brotherhood Murphy delivers. / Netflix

We now arrive at the principal thing I take issue with. The great stain on what I genuinely consider to be an otherwise technical cinematic achievement. Ryan Murphy’s representation of Lyle and Erik Menéndez’s bond is nothing short of repugnant. There are moments where he almost captures it—tender and tearful apology met with easy forgiveness on the bow of a boat, the poignant contrast of Lyle paternally dressing his younger brother for the moment they hear their verdict, still finding ways to take care of him. All things in line with the real, corporal Lyle Menéndez, living and breathing outside of fiction at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility. The same Lyle Menéndez who wrote to his brother in 1990 a letter from behind bars, containing the phrase: 

‘Never think for a second that I favor someone over my brother.’ / Netflix

But it’s all mangled, distorted, perverted by a sickening, intentional incestuous undertone. Ryan Murphy injects this poison for sheer shock value. This itself existing within the fictive vacuum of the show is nauseating enough to bring up, but when you consider that these are characters born from real people, real brothers, real victims of incestuous abuse still living and suffering today? It is unforgivable, and it inspires true rage.

You see, Lyle Menéndez was out, one could say. He had ended the cycle of sexual abuse between him and his father years prior; he was attending Princeton, he was in a committed relationship, he was on his way to forging a successful, independent life for himself. But when his little brother finally came to him, suicidal and terribly, terribly lost, it all went out the window. And that’s just the way it had to be. Witness of the prosecution and Lyle Menéndez’s former friend Donovan Goodreau would say of Lyle: ‘He takes care of his brother … It’s his biggest concern.’ When questioned by his attorney why he didn’t simply leave his younger brother to handle the situation himself, Lyle responded: ‘I would never say that to him, and he would never expect me to say that.’ When asked for a reason, the answer he provides echoes a sentiment Erik would repeat: ‘Just because we were brothers.’ Erik slept in Lyle’s bedroom that night, eighteen-years-old and terrified. Lyle testified he remained wide awake. He’ll come with me to Princeton, was planned, or I’ll figure out how to transfer to UCLA. There was confidence—misplaced confidence—but to Lyle Menéndez there was only one outcome: Erik would be safe, Erik would feel safe. And this he would make sure of; it didn’t matter how. Before Lyle Menéndez was a student, a partner, a businessman, an athlete and especially a son—before any other label, any other marker of identity, Lyle Menéndez was an older brother.

Erik Menéndez at trial. / Associated Press

And Erik? Well, when asked during trial if he ever considered running away, hiding or fighting extradition in any other manner, Erik Menéndez denied this. When questioned why, the answer was plain: ‘Because I wanted to be back with my brother.’ When presented once more with the question of why that was, he looked baffled, no answer prepared. In what world would any other scenario play out? In what world would any other truth come to pass? In what world would Lyle ever go through this alone? To Erik Menéndez, this question was stupid, undeserving of an answer, undeserving of consideration. This line of questioning was not taken any further.

This is who Erik Menéndez is. As stated by himself, standing behind Lyle was his ‘fixed position’ in life. It’s a core tenant of his identity; a marker of who he is, who he was and who he will always be. If it can be said that above all Lyle Menéndez takes pride and pleasure in his role as a big brother, then Erik Menéndez takes equal honour and comfort in his role as a little brother. ‘Erik Menéndez had always had few friends and fewer confidants, so his brother became, during that stage of his life and thereafter, the one person on earth it felt safe to love’: Leslie Abramson does a marvellous job of communicating to the jury how ardent a bond this is. She delivers its weight, its breadth—the scope and scale of its many nuances and shades of grief. This is a fraternal bond born out of fear and nurtured in an environment of great pain. It is built on a foundation of devotion, loyalty and shared torment. These two men are the only people on earth who will ever be able to entirely grasp what the other languished through. I cannot stress the importance of that enough. At the risk of sounding maudlin, it is the purest form of love I have ever witnessed, even from this great distance.

It is this very reason Ryan Murphy’s abashed exploitation of the Menéndez brothers’ story sends me into potent fury. Murphy sees two attractive young men in close proximity and makes the extraordinarily shallow decision to fetishise it, to suffuse it with surface-level suggestions of underlying brotherly incest, in an attempt to appeal to…whom exactly I can’t even say. If it is not intended to captivate a certain audience, then it must simply exist for equally surface-level shock value. To take a bond such as this and filthily taint it in hopes of a few gasps and shaking heads? 

The Menéndez brothers at their preliminary hearing in 1990. / Associated Press

When asked by Barbara Walters on ABC how he would feel should the two be sent to separate prisons, Erik Menéndez responded: ‘There are some things that you cannot take, and there are some things you can endure … With everything taken away, that’s the last thing you can take.’ Following this interview, the two were placed in two separate vans. In Alejandro Hartmann’s documentary The Menéndez Brothers, released earlier this month, Erik reflects on his reaction: ‘I started screaming.’ The brothers spent twenty-two years separated before both were finally placed at Donovan, where they reside today. On being reunited with his brother, Lyle Menéndez would say ‘I felt like it was finally a chance to heal, and I was starting on that day.’

To me and to many, it seemed the situation and circumstance of the Menéndez brothers was utterly, hopelessly lost. The release of this series and the consequences of the case returning to the public mainstream in this fashion only promised devastation. To have the sensationalism and media spectacle that so heavily infringed upon the first trial resurrected? It spelled disaster. To have it centred solely around this new interpretation so far removed from the truth? I couldn’t begin to describe the resentment I felt towards Murphy, Netflix and everyone who sat adjacent to this project. Lyle and Erik Menéndez are still alive and striving for their release; the weight of this programme’s influence cannot be understated.

There is, however, hope to be found in Hartmann’s new documentary The Menéndez Brothers, also bizarrely distributed by Netflix, which worked in direct collaboration with the brothers through extensive audio interviews. It is two hours of accounts, testimony and context; it is very difficult and very necessary to watch. For it to have been released so soon after Murphy’s farce is vital, ineffably so. I have hope it will instil in this new generation of interested parties a sense of obligation to the truth. I have hope it will counteract any damage Murphy has done to the public’s perception of this case. And I have hope it will prove Erik Menéndez wrong in his sullen belief that he has ‘taken the painful truths several steps backward—back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women.’