Hello!
Hi! Would you like some things? I have some things!
I was reading a book about nomads the other week - it was good but not so good I’d recommend it here - and I stumbled upon the tale of “Caid MacLean”, a Scottish soldier who ended up becoming a close adviser to the Moroccan sultan back in the 19th century. You can read a bit about him here, and enjoy the terrific pictures and drawings of him as well. The whole thing is quite enchanting.
Another good thing I read was this essay on the “debate me bro” grift and why all debate is not created equal, and actually you don’t just need to take everyone who says they just want to Talk About Ideas seriously. I thought it was very eloquent and clear-minded.
I don’t really know how to describe this utter and complete timesink - sorry, I meant online game. It’s very weird and addictive. Would You Like To Prove You’re Not A Robot? Then why not click on this link!
A column
I went to watch There Will Be Blood (2007) at the cinema last week and I didn’t like it at all. I thought it was far, far too long, and that the acting was quite hammy, and all in all I didn’t see the point of it. I read reviews afterwards to see if I’d maybe missed something but all they talked about was “capitalism” and “religion in America” and that made me feel both better and worse.
As it turned out, I’d got the movie. There were no hidden meanings I’d failed to pick up on. Even I was able to tell it was a parable about greed and the dark underbelly of success; about the things we want and the things we need, and those things not always overlapping. No, that hadn’t been the problem. I’d got the film alright. I just hated it.
It was a shame because apparently everyone else loved it. It’s allegedly one of the best movies of the 21st century. Hell, some people apparently believe it’s one of the best movies of all time. In my own personal opinion, it’s not even as good as Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn). I loved that one.
I went to watch Barry Lyndon (1975) at the cinema last week and I didn’t like it at all. It was so long. There Will Be Blood lasted for two hours and forty minutes but Barry Lyndon just kept going and going, all the way to three hours and ten. It was an unbearable experience, in a way. I got so bored it felt like hypnosis.
Nothing really happens in that film, which I’m told is one of Kubrick’s masterpieces. The main actor isn’t all that good at acting and I sort of get why he was cast - as I understand it, the whole point is that the character he plays isn’t meant to be awfully interesting, or have a thrilling interior life - but that didn’t help me, did it? I think I yawned 800 times while watching it. I checked the time every half hour, and there were lots of half hours in there.
Again, I didn’t really understand what you were meant to get from it. I was, in all fairness, quite taken by what felt like a realistic portrayal of the upper classes in the 18th century. There’s a stifling boredom you read about in books set in the era, but maybe you really do need to be watching people walking around parks slowly, playing cards slowly, and getting purposelessly drunk all day to truly get what it felt like.
That bit, I did enjoy. I was quite obsessed with the court of Versailles as a child, and the film managed to add some texture to a world that had existed in my head for a long time. Everything else, though? I just didn’t get it. Sure, I thought it looked nice. Do you know what else can look nice? That’s right - movies that last for an hour and a half. Movies with things that happen in them. Movies that last for an hour and a half and have things that happen in them.
Anyway, my point is: I didn’t actually think I would enjoy either movie when I decided to go watch them. Granted I could have spaced them out, but sadly I don’t control cinema listings. I wish I did - believe me! - but we’re not there yet. Here were two flicks I felt I should see one day, and they were showing within two days of each other. You can’t always get what you want.
In any case, I’ll now go back to watching my lower-middlebrow movies for the time being. I’ve eaten my vegetables; I can gorge on things I actually like. It’s going to be fun: I’m looking forward to it. I know there’s more broccoli on the horizon, though. You can’t just eat your greens this one time then call it a day. Believe me, I tried that when I was younger. I found out the hard way that it didn’t work.
Annoyingly, I know it’s all worth it. The whole point is to keep trying, even if you don’t really enjoy it. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently; “trying”, as a concept. I think it’s in danger of becoming quite a revolutionary act, if you don’t mind the grandiloquence. There’s one thing people seem less and less likely to want to do, and it’s to try. Handily, it’s also the one thing Silicon Valley would rather we didn’t do either.
The internet used to be fiddly and weird and you sometimes had to look under the hood to figure out what was going on with your computer, but everything is smooth now. Soon, with AI, everything will be even smoother. We, as a species, will have finally beaten “effort” as a concept.
In some ways it’s already happening; I saw this post the other day from someone who works in an escape room, and they were despairing at the number of people using ChatGPT to try and solve the mysteries for them. I’ve thought about it a lot since then; arguably too much. I have a lot to say about it but worry all of it is obvious. You’re probably thinking the exact same things right now.
Still, it may be worth stating some of it, namely: effort is good! You should have to make an effort more often in your life. It’s good for the soul. Does believing this make me a Protestant? God, I hope it doesn’t. That would do awful things to my brand.
Instead, what I think I am is a gamer. Hollow Knight: Silksong came out a few weeks ago and I’ve already dedicated around thirty or forty hours to it. I can’t get enough. If you’ve not played the original game or its new sequel, there is, in this context, only one thing you really need to know: they’re tough. No, really, they’re just quite unpleasantly unforgiving.
There are bosses and it will take you five, ten, fifteen times to beat them, because you have to memorise every single one of their attacks, and learn how to dodge them with a millisecond to go. Crucially, the last savepoint before said boss will, more often than not, be quite a long way away, meaning that you will have to beat a number of enemies and progress across harsh terrain before you even get back to the actual fight.
Oh, and do you know what the worst thing is? Sometimes you’ll beat this great big boss, after what felt like a million tries, and the game will reward you with…nothing. I beat a great big boss just the other day and all I got was access to a new area that was so hard I kept dying. I nearly threw my Switch at the wall. Instead I just kept playing. It was great.
In truth, I couldn’t really explain to you why I’m enjoying Silksong so much. I’m quite bad at it. Everything just takes so many attempts. Or maybe that’s the whole point? That’s what I’ve been asking myself. What if I love gaming because, most of the time, there just aren’t any shortcuts?
There’s this saying in gaming which you’ll encounter when you get stuck somewhere and you google your problem, hoping that someone will have found some magic solution allowing you to bypass your own shortcomings. You’ll end up on Reddit, or some forum, and stumble upon someone who once faced the same issue as you. What did other players have to say? Easy: “git gud”. These two short words - are they even words? - will just make your heart sink. What’s the best way to do this really tough thing? Easy! You just have to become better at it. Any other questions you’d like to ask the class?
What’s important there, however, is that we all do just keep trying, at least most of the time. We maybe spend a little while trying to find a sneaky shortcut but, failing that, we just go, again and again, until we get it. It’s what I’ve been trying to do with Great Movies, I guess. I wouldn’t say either of my parents were big cinema buffs, and a love for poncy movies never came to me naturally. I assume that, if I keep trying, I’ll get there eventually.
Clearly there’s something a lot of people get from films which is still beyond me a lot of the time. I can imagine it being there because I get it from literature, and sometimes I find it hard - ironically - to put it into words. You can read a novel and feel like your whole world was slightly shifted off its axis and it’s a wonderful and deep and magical feeling. It makes your life feel that much wider, and denser.
Can films start doing that for me? Maybe, maybe not. I’m inclined to keep giving it a shot in any case, because I worry that “trying” is on its way to becoming a lost art. You could blame the internet, the pandemic, AI or all three, or maybe a secret fourth thing, but the point remains the same. We’ve all got quite lazy, here in the 2020’s. We’ve got siloed and comfortable and too incurious for our own good.
I can’t pretend I can fix it all for everyone, but I can definitely try to make my own life bigger and more interesting. I can keep taking little steps out of my comfort zone and seeing if I like it there. In a way, it’s what I did with art a few years ago, back when I was in Venice and I was so bored that I had no choice but to try and get all that contemporary stuff I thought was bullshit.
It actually worked! I still think a lot of that contemporary stuff is bullshit but, since then, some of it has moved me to the point of tears. All it took was…god, all it took was trying. I went to galleries and I stood in front of piece after piece and I forced myself to try and see if I could squeeze anything out of them; if they could make me feel anything. I decided to treat it as a conversation, and I made myself listen to what that thing in front of me was trying to say.
It was, in the end, hugely gratifying. Quite often now, I’ll go to galleries when I’m feeling sad or forlorn for whatever reason, and most of the time I’ll find one show, or even one painting that’ll lift my spirits, or take me out of my own head. Isn’t that mad? I just don’t know that I would have believed you a decade ago, if you’d told me that, and yet here I am. I tried, and it changed me for the better.
I’m currently having a real hard time convincing myself that Masterpieces Of The Big Screen will ever manage to hold such a place in my heart, but who knows, right? That’s the whole point. You just have to keep going and hope for the best. I’ll update you when I feel I have a clearer answer, I guess. Oh, and I should add: I reckon this one just won’t take, actually. I’m almost certain I’ll never become a film buff. My experiment is going to be a failure.
Do I care? No! I don’t. I also know for certain that I won’t be able to finish Silksong because I didn’t manage to finish Hollow Knight at the time - I had to give up near the end because it was just too tough for me - and the sequel is even harder. I’ve spent the past few weeks fighting like hell to progress through a game while knowing I’ll never get the satisfaction of completing it. It’s almost like - come on, you can sing it with me! - the trying is the whole point.
