2024-12-20 02:00:00
What We Do In The Shadows will most likely be one of my top 10 television series of all time. It was never “appointment viewing.” I’m sure there’s a lot that I’ve forgotten, and I probably couldn’t give details of entire seasons, much less individual episodes. But overall, it was relentlessly1 clever, surprising, hilarious, goofy, and as much as I hate to use FX marketing language: fearless.
One of the things that I most respect about the series is that the comedy and the tone were all over the place, but it always felt true to itself. It could be almost unforgivably corny, shockingly daring, and astonishingly clever all within the same episode, and sometimes within the same scene. One episode would feel like a traditional sitcom bottle episode, and the next would have an over-the-top bit of gruesome violence as a punchline, and the next would be a visual effects showcase that seemed far beyond the budget of a 30-minute comedy series.
As an example of how varied its comedy was: the gags that seemed to take hold with viewers the most, like “creepy paper,” Jackie Daytona, or the cursed witch’s hat, were rarely my favorite, but were usually alongside the funniest moments of any television series I’ve seen. I don’t know what the production of the series was actually like, but it sure seems like they would ignore the concept of a “show bible” or a consistent tone or style, instead choosing that anything was fair game as long as it’s funny.
Leading up to the finale, there was an episode inspired by The Warriors where the action was instigated by a character having his head burst like a tick and then ripped off at the neck; and then an unbearably awkward office party at a supremely shitty venture capital2 firm, which somehow made me even more uncomfortable. The series will have some of the corniest jokes you can see coming from a mile away, followed up by someone vomiting a torrent of blood or having their entrails spill out onto the floor. And it rarely feels too over the top; always exactly the right amount of excess.
That anything-goes mentality seems to have gone into the finale as well, where they decided to just try every possible ending they could think of. I only just found out that there are even a couple more I hadn’t known about — if you weren’t quite satisfied with the Newhart finale, you can go to the extra features to have Nadja hypnotize you two more times, with two more heavily-referential endings.
The series could have ended with the penultimate episode. It didn’t give closure to everyone’s story, but it was a very sweet and fitting ending to Nandor and Guillermo’s. Gizmo finally realized he was never going to fit into the human world, and Nandor finally started to treat him as an equal partner, and he proposed a new life where they fight injustice.
But it’s probably more fitting that the end of the series is the end of the documentary. It was full of meta-commentary on the series as a whole, in particular calling out the criticism that the series could’ve ended after season five had wrapped up the story of Guillermo wanting to become a vampire. I did appreciate that they explicitly acknowledged that the vampires were just going to keep on living their weird, stupid, after-lives, doing basically the same things over and over again for centuries. But it often felt more like it was giving closure to the writers more than the audience, giving them a chance to say goodbye to the series after six years.
And I’d never blame them for that! But I do think that my favorite aspect of the finale was the documentary crew just stopping the characters mid-interview, saying that they had enough footage. It was so callous and disrespectful that it felt perfectly in tone with this series.
The other thing that’s perfectly in tone with this series is taking it to the line of what’s tolerable, and even past that line, but then knowing exactly when to pull back. They can be so mean, or so gross, or so nihilistic, or so selfish and inconsiderate, or so violent, or so stupid, that the characters seem irredeemable and the writing feels like an overhard attempt to be edgy. But then they’ll have a surprising moment of kindness or cleverness that makes any sentimentality feel earned.
They did exactly that with the end of the series, choosing to have it both ways. They got the tear-jerker where Guillermo says goodbye forever and turns out all the lights one last time… and then they got the adventure-nonsense ending, riding a high-speed coffin elevator down to Nandor’s hidden underground lair. The key wasn’t just the effects — which, again, seem like way overkill for a 30-minute comedy series — but the fact that Nandor and Guillermo got to sit in the coffin together, as adventure pals instead of master and servant.
Now that it’s over, I do have a favorite moment from the entire series. Not the funniest, but the one that sums up exactly what I think is wonderful about the tone of What We Do In The Shadows. It’s in season five, when the vampires’ neighbor Sean is staging a pride parade as he’s running for office. Guillermo has just recently come out, and he’s given a special place in the parade: sitting by himself in a lawn chair on a flatbed truck, holding a sparkler and a piece of poster board reading “GAY GUY.”
It’s a good gag on the surface, because the characters are paying lip service to inclusivity without genuinely getting it. The result was Guillermo going through all the stress and self-doubt of coming out, only to be tokenized and put on display.
(As a side note: I liked how the show treated homosexuality as being distinct from Nandor and Lazlo’s hypersexuality; the series has mentioned the two of them having sex with each other and other men and male vampires plenty of times, but it never describes it in terms of romantic attraction, or as a part of their identity).
What makes the pride parade my favorite moment, though, is what happens as the camera lingers on Guillermo. He initially seems humiliated and miserable, but as the parade goes on, you can see a smile start to take over his face. By the end of the episode, he’s waving the sparkler and bouncing along to the music. Finally happy with himself and proud of the label. In an episode that’s been all about callously and clumsily making a show of pride just to win inclusivity points, it makes a very sweet and even subtle point about how much it means to the participants to be able to be out and open and not afraid of looking ridiculous.
That kind of satire, mockery, or nihilism followed up with a bit of sentimentality or kindness is what elevates What We Do In The Shadows from an extremely funny series to a memorable and even important one. It asserts that you can be smart without being elitist, sentimental without being maudlin, goofy without being pointless, shocking without being shallow, and have a tone that’s all over the place, just as long as you’re funny enough.
2024-12-07 10:04:39
Today I responded to a gag on Bluesky which said that it was insane to make the new Indiana Jones game first person, since a huge part of the appeal of Indiana Jones was looking at Harrison Ford shirtless with a whip.
“Ah yes ha ha I can relate to this as part of my shared experience as a gay man,” I thought as I nodded and smiled along in… wait hang on! Have I been wrong about the Indiana Jones franchise my entire life?!
Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my top 5 favorite movies, easily, and is usually what I’ll say if you ask me point blank what my all-time favorite is. I’ve seen it an awful lot. I had the poster for Raiders on the wall of my bedroom, the one with Indy in the center, cracking his bullwhip, his shirt half open. I also had the teaser poster for Temple of Doom on my wall for a while, the one with Indy standing in an archway with half his shirt missing.
I never thought much about how much of the imagery of Indiana Jones is bare-chested. Actually, that’s a complete lie; I thought about it a lot. What I mean to say is that I never thought much about the implications of it.
After all, these are some of the most heterosexual movies ever made, right? Not like Roadhouse or Commando by trying so hard to prove that they’re heterosexual; the Indiana Jones movies always felt super-straight to me because they didn’t have anything to prove. These are action movies all about recreating a long-lost archetype of a Man’s Man from the early 20th century. Women want him; men want to be him — and if the connection weren’t obvious enough, they made it explicit by casting Sean Connery1 as his dad. And even though the second movie started with a fabulous musical number, it felt less like a musical number than like a man going out of his way to look at his hot new girlfriend in a tight dress.
I’m so used to things being “queer-coded” — whether it’s secret messages hidden in a work by sly artists speaking to a subsection of their audience, or oblivious artists making art that queer people will spend the next several decades furiously re-contextualizing and reinterpreting. I always just assume by default that I’m watching or reading any work “the wrong way,” appreciating things that the filmmakers never intended.
But now that I think about it, I’m no longer sure it was unintentional. The thing that’s become abundantly clear is that the Indiana Jones movies are super horny, and they’re super horny exclusively for Indiana Jones. And although I’m sure they exist, I can’t personally recall ever hearing a woman name anything in the franchise as their favorite movie. But tons of men do. So we have a group of heterosexual directors, writers, and actors all working to make a film franchise for men that’s about how impossibly sexy the male lead character is.
That’s not to say that women don’t enjoy it, of course. I still remember seeing Raiders for the first time as a middle school birthday party. Our chaperone, a young woman in her 20s, was silent throughout, until the scene in which Indy gets off a submarine, punches out a Nazi, and takes his hat. At which point she said, out loud, “He’s so fine!”
I’d even say that the spark of the movies directly correlates to how sexy Harrison Ford can be. Crystal Skull has a lot of issues, but I think the bulk of it comes down to the feeling of being a kid watching your parents at a dinner party with a bunch of other grown-ups. And Dial of Destiny kind of drives the point home with its extended opening sequence saying “remember when Harrison Ford used to be impossibly hot?” I read an interview that said he insisted that he appear in his underwear after the extended flashback, to drive home the idea of how much Indy (and he) had aged. And I respect that a lot, especially for a movie that is primarily about regret and vainly wanting to turn back the clock. But it’s an entirely different vibe from the earlier movies.
None of this is at all unprecedented, either. I can still remember seeing an interview with Robert Conrad as a retrospective of The Wild Wild West, in which he made a joke about how the producers of the show were always putting him into impossibly tight pants.
My conclusion from all this is that I should be less hung up about target audiences and whether or not I fit. There is a long tradition in commercial entertainment in making money off of attractive people looking sexy and doing exciting things while looking sexy. It was happening long before anybody started over-analyzing it, and before anybody realized how much money you could make by having stuff explicitly marketed towards queer people with disposable income.
The entertainment industry has never cared whether I was watching stuff “the right way.” They only cared that I was watching it.
I kind of prefer to think that I wasn’t alone in some weird silo watching Indiana Jones cracking his whip at Nazis2 and swooning that he was cracking that whip for me. Or even finding community from other gay kids whose formative movie-watching years were in the early 80s, like how I discovered so many other guys who vividly remember the scenes in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when Eddie Valiant had his shirt off. That’s all fine and good, but it’s somehow even more comforting to think that all of us were part of an even larger community, transcending gender and orientation, all sharing the universal human experience of being super horny for Indiana Jones.
2024-11-27 10:13:04
I ain’t no student of ancient culture, but there’s one thing that I do know: The B-52’s didn’t do a ton of research when writing the song “Mesopotamia.”
But that’s kind of what the song is all about, and kind of why I love the band. They made songs about whatever weird shit they felt like: counterfeiting, driving in the south at night, odd beach encounters, how there are a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia.
Because we’re living in the future, Apple Music automatically showed me the lyrics as I was listening, and I realized I’ve had it wrong for 30 years. When Kate sings, “I know a neat excavation!” I had always heard it as “I know I need excavation,” which I’d always thought was some kind of weird horny double entendre. The real version is much more charming and in the spirit of the B-52s, of course.1
Another lyric I always misheard was from “River Euphrates” by the Pixies. I thought they were just saying “ri-ri-ri-ri” over and over again for River Euphrates, much like Shaggy would say “gh-gh-gh-gh” for Ghosts. Apparently the real lyric is “Ride a tire down the River Euphrates.” Which is also much more charming than I’d thought. It generates a calming image of the Black Francis and Kim Deal tubing through the cradle of civilization while Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson call from the shore to come check out some neat pyramids.
2024-11-21 14:58:46
Book
Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie
Synopsis
A collection of short stories about Hercule Poirot’s various cases, all narrated by his friend Captain Hastings.
Pros
Cons
Verdict
Light and mostly fun, especially good for establishing Poirot as a long-running character, with more presence than the full novel-length mysteries.
Side Note
My modest goal was to read 12 books this year, and I’m clearly not going to make it. It’s not been a great year, and maybe reading challenges are dumb?
2024-11-15 02:00:00
Agatha All Along ended a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve spent the time since then trying to figure out what exactly I thought of it.
My initial reaction was that I was a little disappointed. Midway through the season, it seemed like they suddenly decided they weren’t content to do another televised MCU installment, and they wanted to be putting out stuff for Emmy reels and best-of compilations. But I initially felt as if they’d managed to make all the plot threads fit together, but without the end result meaning much of anything.
The last two episodes were genuinely surprising. For WandaVision, the big “reveals” had been mostly figured out by fans of the comics early on in the season, so that series was a case of watching stuff we already knew was going to happen, but in a way that was so satisfying and fun that nobody really cared. I’d assumed that Agatha All Along was going to do the same, presenting some not-particularly challenging mysteries and let us all have fun pretending to be surprised. “Oh, she’s still under Wanda’s spell!” “Oh, that’s Wanda’s son Billy Kaplan/Wiccan!” “Oh, she’s the Marvel embodiment of Death!” “Her sudden outbursts are foreshadowing things that will happen later in the series!” I was perfectly satisfied with this level of engagement, only to get a double rug-pull in the last two episodes.
I hadn’t suspected at all that the Witches’ Road was Billy’s creation. I did expect that we’d meet a Great and Powerful Oz type character at the end, who had some connection to Rio, but hadn’t even considered the possibility that the entire premise of WandaVision was playing out again on a smaller scale. And it seemed kind of obvious that Agatha was lying about the road, and her experience with it in particular. But I’d thought it was going to be a simple case of undeserved bravado, claiming she’d been on it when she hadn’t. Or we’d see the rumor play out, where her previous trip on the road had presented a choice between the power she wanted (the Darkhold?) and her son. It never once occurred to me that the final episode would take agency back from Billy Kaplan and make the title of the series make sense! It was a really clever layering of surprises: he subconsciously created the road just like Wanda first created the Hex, but in the end, the instigator of the whole thing really was Agatha all along.
So my disappointment was that all of that cleverness seemed to be in service of something kind of shallow. No matter how well done, it ultimately felt like another MCU installment, instead of something with the ambition and reflection that WandaVision had. And the problem, as I saw it, was that the main character of the series had an unsatisfying story. And it would’ve been so easy to fix.
I saw an interview with Jac Schaeffer online in which she said they went back and forth on whether to make Agatha All Along a redemption story for Agatha. My first reaction to the conclusion of the series was that they’d never made up their mind. There were signs throughout the series that her selfish/callous nature was just a front, a defense against people who were afraid of her power, and a scary story that was easier to live up to than the truth of something painful in her past.
I had been expecting that once we saw the story play out, we’d see that she’d been feared and misunderstood, made a horrible mistake that somehow resulted in the loss of her son, and that set her on a path of being a villain intent on seeking power, since it was easier than being honest with herself. But then in the last episode, we saw that Agatha had been killing witches her whole life, ever since her first coven. She was a villain all along! It’s not just that there was no redemption; there was no arc at all!
After mulling it over for a while, I think it’s trying to tell a story that’s a little bit more subtle than my first interpretation. As I’m interpreting it now: it was Agatha’s betrayal by her mother, and the rest of her coven, that set her on the path of being a villain. She’d inadvertently killed them all, but it was traumatic enough that she no longer trusted any witches, and she instead chose to kill them and take their power. This ended up with her developing a rapport with Death, with the arrangement of Agatha “providing her with bodies” that they mention in the third episode.
Once her son was born, Agatha just began using him in her ongoing scheme of ingratiating herself into a new coven and then murdering them all for their power. This went on for years, and the lore of the Witches’ Road grew. Finally, his conscience made him decide he didn’t want to be part of it anymore. After that (the show makes it seem as if it happened that same night), Death finally took him. Grief and a desire for revenge make Agatha resolve to keep using the lore of the Witches’ Road, not just for survival, but to become more and more powerful.
It feels a lot more nuanced and mature than the version I’d expected from a show this broad and straightforward. The terrible revelation of the horrible thing that she did to her son, the thing that was so bad she can’t bear to face him even in death: she disappointed him. Even as a child, he was able to tell that what she was doing was wrong and unnecessary. She’d lost the only family she had, and instead of building a new one with her son, she was wiping out any opportunity for either of them to find a family beyond their “coven two.”
It also helps smooth out some of the pieces that didn’t seem to fit, to me. The “black heart” was definitively Billy, but Lilia’s sigil prevented her from using his name. He was essential to the coven, not just for the obvious reason that he created the road, but because he’s Agatha’s new family. Helping him find his brother is the closest thing Agatha is going to get to redemption.
The other witches’ stories fit thematically, more or less, since they’re all aspects of family, sisterhood, betrayal, and finding their purpose. The one that’s still out of place is Sharon Davis/”Mrs. Hart,” who I kept expecting to see resurrected but am still disappointed. I’m assuming that her character exists more as a misdirection than to serve a thematic purpose. Maybe it’s a reminder to people like me that Agatha is still a villain at series start, and not simply misunderstood?
Ultimately I’m really impressed that a series with so many different boxes to check off — MCU installment, sequel to WandaVision, Halloween season-scheduled horror comedy, woman-led series, story about fictional witches and the real-world significance of their characters — managed to be surprising and thematically resonant. One of the reasons I liked WandaVision so much was that it was completely and unabashedly a comic book story, but it still felt it had a reason to exist beyond its role in the MCU. I’m impressed that Agatha All Along went from feeling like a series of interesting escape rooms, to become another series that had ideas about found families and parenthood that went beyond just setting up the Young Avengers.
2024-11-11 13:06:50
It has been an absolutely beautiful day in my section of Los Angeles today. I went up to the roof for a while and enjoyed the sun and a very nice breeze, while appreciating the view around my house. Seeing mountains and palm trees all around is still such a novelty for me, and I hope I never get tired of it. There are two tall palm trees (which are perfectly framed by my office window) that have become a symbol of serenity for me.
I should’ve known after my experience with smoking, but giving up anything cold turkey just doesn’t work for me. So instead of being able to change my focus and priorities all at once, I should probably expect sporadic bursts of I Have A Take On Politics That I Must Share With The Internet.
I can’t know for sure, obviously, but I have a strong suspicion that many of the people I spent years aligning myself with online, who’d talk about equality and rejecting classism and capitalism, etc, are people who never talk to their Uber drivers.
That’s not purely a condemnation, by the way. I have a lot of scorn for hypocrites and snobs, but I also need to acknowledge that I’m out of touch with people. In the case of ride-sharing, even if I weren’t an introvert, I don’t think anybody doing their job should be obligated to make conversation if they don’t want to. And it’s inherently a deeply unfair situation, more than a taxi, because the company that doesn’t give them benefits still holds them accountable to driver ratings. You’re unlikely to get a candid conversation that will build bridges. But when I’ve been in a ride with a particularly gregarious driver, or an extroverted passenger, it’s been a reminder that I very rarely talk to people whose jobs and economic situations are different from my own.
Speaking of smoking: over the past few days, my brain keeps asking “What would it even matter?” if I had a cigarette. But I haven’t had one yet. And in the days since I last tried one and hated it, I haven’t been that interested in getting one. I’ve noticed I think of myself as a non-smoker now, too: whenever I do get the urge to have a cigarette, I think of it as a novelty, instead of going back to my default state of always having a pack on me. Plus the memory of my last one is still really gross. I have a ton of sympathy for people battling addictions.
While I was up on the roof today, I was reminded that I hardly ever go up there, and in fact have spent entire days without going outside. Worse, instead of being outside in the sun with a great view, I’m most often indoors on my phone looking at things that make me angry or sad, which I have no control over and no influence to do anything about. It drove home the fact that I’m not actually just being lazy and using social media or the news to procrastinate, as I’ve always assumed, but I’m actively choosing to look at it instead of doing something healthy.
I was reminded today that one of the best TV series of all time, The Good Place, ran from 2016 to 2020. It seems fitting for a series that was all about ethical behavior in a world that made ethics seem like an impossible luxury. The thing that I love most about the series was that it was so full of grace: never saccharine sentimentality, never compromising on its core values, but still understanding that there’s so much complexity in what makes a person good or bad.
Another thing I thought about while I was on my roof was how grateful I am to have that place to go to. It’s a luxury that I’ve been embarrassed to even talk about, since it often feels like I don’t deserve it. And if you spend too much time online, like I have, you’ll be constantly subjected to crucial ideas of societal injustice and inequity being used as a bludgeon, making a convincing case that you don’t deserve anything.
Today I reminded myself that although I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate, benefiting from the hard work of my parents, the incredible kindness of friends, and just plain good luck, that it’s not just luck and privilege. I’ve worked hard, made thoughtful choices, and set priorities. But the most important thing is the simplest: I’ve tried to be humble, kind, generous, and fair, always. And even when I haven’t succeeded, I’ve tried to be the kind of person that people want to work with. It’s always seemed like the bare minimum, but lately as I’ve been filled with despair at seeing arrogance, selfishness, and unkindness succeed, I’ve realized just how valuable humility and kindness can be.