This is a real Christmas treat and Del Toro’s new “Nightmare Alley” makes it kind of a covert grand slam: crossfading a “quality” product about capitalist degradation with its lower-quality original *and* an anti-quality example of capitalist degradation être-en-sois: reality TV that turns human “canvases” into actual beings-in-themselves. Say what you will about previous reality shows, not even their most damaged participants got their faces permanently disfigured for a fleeting spit-take beat in someone else’s storyline. (Can you imagine folks who did this and didn’t even make the final cut? What do producers toss them? A bottle of Cisco? A fish?) I assume that life gravely softened these folks up for this modern-day geek duty, which would indeed be too mawkish if played any way besides “reality.” Btw: I want to recommend Ray Davies in BBC teleplay updating They Shoot Horses, appearing as the title character in “The Long Distance Piano Player”: consigned to the Beckett-worthy prop of a piano stool, in a dreary pub, to perform a supposedly career-saving spectacle of a four-day piano-playing marathon. (It’s worth finding for Davies’ performance and its vibe, which is The Hustler meets Lumet’s interminable The Iceman Cometh.) God bless us everyone.
Love your observations, Chris. Cintra, again, I’m so glad you talk about income disparity and the disappearing middle class. I’m still haunted by a New Yorker article I read about the working class dying early “deaths of desperation.” I feel like people aren’t talking about this enough. I want to read “Billionaires in the Wilderness” but dread vomiting from disgust. Jimmy and I now stop what we’re doing to sit and listen to your recordings as if we are in the ‘40s, gathered round a radio. Particularly love your impassioned delivery and your voice going high at 4:40, and the part the brave, self-sacrificing Marine almost causing you to feel patriotic. I hope never to hear the geek howling in the original Nightmare Alley. I couldn’t take it. The description of this movie reminds me of the darkness of another movie from the same era, I think, The Sweet Smell of Success.
This is a real Christmas treat and Del Toro’s new “Nightmare Alley” makes it kind of a covert grand slam: crossfading a “quality” product about capitalist degradation with its lower-quality original *and* an anti-quality example of capitalist degradation être-en-sois: reality TV that turns human “canvases” into actual beings-in-themselves. Say what you will about previous reality shows, not even their most damaged participants got their faces permanently disfigured for a fleeting spit-take beat in someone else’s storyline. (Can you imagine folks who did this and didn’t even make the final cut? What do producers toss them? A bottle of Cisco? A fish?) I assume that life gravely softened these folks up for this modern-day geek duty, which would indeed be too mawkish if played any way besides “reality.” Btw: I want to recommend Ray Davies in BBC teleplay updating They Shoot Horses, appearing as the title character in “The Long Distance Piano Player”: consigned to the Beckett-worthy prop of a piano stool, in a dreary pub, to perform a supposedly career-saving spectacle of a four-day piano-playing marathon. (It’s worth finding for Davies’ performance and its vibe, which is The Hustler meets Lumet’s interminable The Iceman Cometh.) God bless us everyone.
Love your observations, Chris. Cintra, again, I’m so glad you talk about income disparity and the disappearing middle class. I’m still haunted by a New Yorker article I read about the working class dying early “deaths of desperation.” I feel like people aren’t talking about this enough. I want to read “Billionaires in the Wilderness” but dread vomiting from disgust. Jimmy and I now stop what we’re doing to sit and listen to your recordings as if we are in the ‘40s, gathered round a radio. Particularly love your impassioned delivery and your voice going high at 4:40, and the part the brave, self-sacrificing Marine almost causing you to feel patriotic. I hope never to hear the geek howling in the original Nightmare Alley. I couldn’t take it. The description of this movie reminds me of the darkness of another movie from the same era, I think, The Sweet Smell of Success.