It recounts the career of serial murderer Graham Young – or, rather, it embellishes it. It makes it downright funny. Some of the movie’s characters and events are admitted to be fictitious. Other happenings – even some of the murders – are, officially, mere speculation.
For an account that purports to be more factual, if not less sensational, see “The Teacup Poisoner” (Fred Dinenage: Murder Casebook, season 1, episode 2).
The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is more like an inverted morality play.
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The movie is not, as Roger Ebert would have it, “a wickedly satirical view of ambition in a gifted, if misguided, youth.”
Satire and ambition: let’s consider these notions in turn.
The purpose of satire is to correct behavior. It assumes that redemption is possible. This movie appears to take the contrary view. It isn’t satire; it’s the bleakest kind of irony. (I could tell you what kind if I knew Northrop Frye’s literary taxonomy better.)
Ambition isn’t this protagonist’s driving motive; it’s his smokescreen. Graham (Hugh O’Conor) has genuine scientific interests, but his self-portrayal as a scientist is largely a pose. He tries to convince his prison psychologist that, deep down, he’s a sensitive soul who permitted his thirst for knowledge to lead him too far, as if he’d only added heavy metals to people’s food and drink out of scientific curiosity.
Graham tries to convince himself of this, too. But he knows too well that he’s a vindictive little cuss.
Alas, the psychologist decides that Graham is no longer homicidal and arranges Graham’s release from the prison hospital where he has been confined since his teens.
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The movie has three acts:
One: Early misdeeds
Two: Confinement
Three: Release
In each act, the object of satire – or, more accurately, of ferocious contempt – isn’t Graham himself so much as his social environment. Yes, Graham does terrible things, but he does them to silly, grotesque people. They are always the butt of the joke.
Take Graham’s best school friend, who brags about his forthcoming date with the girl that has captured Graham’s attention (a serial flirt). This friend has the habit of asking Graham to swap sandwiches with him. (An outlandishly reckless habit, if you adopt Graham’s point of view.)
Soon this friend is laid up in bed. Graham escorts the girl to a music hall, where she beams worshipfully at the crooner.
But then Graham’s supper-talk is too gruesome for the girl, and she flees. For all her insinuation, she’s disappointingly ordinary, after all.
Next, consider Graham’s family members, who appear to have been dreamed up by Roald Dahl. They park in front of the television while Graham experiments upstairs with his chemistry equipment. These philistines have the gall to complain that Graham’s chemicals have fouled up the tea-set. Even though it’s his sister’s fault! (She has been mixing together face-creams in the teacups.)
Graham puts something nasty in his sister’s eyedrops.
Then Graham’s stepmother – Ruth Sheen, at her most acrid – finds some dirty magazines in the house. Graham’s father guiltily lowers his eyes, but it’s Graham who’s blamed. His stepmother scrubs him down in the bath and destroys his precious chemistry set.
Not long afterward, she’s bent over with stomach pain. Her hair falls out. Never lovely, she becomes hideous and weak.
Graham volunteers to spoon-feed her. Too feeble to protest, she peers out in terror at her family.
It doesn’t end well for the stepmother.
Graham’s subsequent confinement in the prison hospital is not unlike Paul Pennyfeather’s, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. We’re treated to the same bureaucratic dispute of that novel – rehabilitationism vs. disciplinarianism. The argument is rehearsed by hospital officials in front of the the inmates themselves, who, in a really clever scene, are locked up in a row of steam-baths so that only their heads are visible. We’re reminded of Dante and Virgil having it out over self-excusing sinners. (Silver-tongued these souls may be, but they are buried in mud.)
The harshest treatment is reserved for Graham’s victims of Act Three – his senior colleagues in the firm that employs him after he is released. They are ordinary factory workers. Some are cruel; some are kind; all are tawdry.
In one late scene, Graham sits on a grassy bank next to a reservoir, a bottle of poison in his hand. The implication is that he wishes to take revenge on all of society.
What damage might emptying the bottle do? Graham can’t know. It’s one thing to painstakingly monitor subjects one at a time, measuring the dosage slipped into each victim’s tea and finding out and recording each bodily symptom. It’s something else altogether to pour poison into the general water supply. The effects can’t be inferred from the prior experiments. Nor would Graham be able to observe them.
Graham isn’t a sincere experimenter. He just wants to hurt. And the movie comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that his victims – indeed, that all members of society – deserve their suffering.
The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, “Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.” In their new mood (perhaps movies in their cumulative effect are partly responsible for it), people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims – that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it.
It’s an interesting question whether The Young Poisoner’s Handbook “wants to dig it.” Certainly, it presents the victims as “dupes and phonies and weaklings.” What it doesn’t do is glorify the victimizer. Graham is vicious, but, unlike A Clockwork Orange’s protagonist, he’s not a tough person; he wouldn’t instigate a physical fight. His choice of weapon betrays his cowardice. Nor does he dress or speak boldly. He’s essentially an overly formal, petulant little boy brandishing a chemistry set that has all the awesomeness of a model train.
Does this difference make the movie less or more misanthropic? At least in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, there’s one alluring character – even if he is a ruthless Nietzschean “overman.” The protagonist of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook has considerably less attraction.
There’s one way to avoid interpreting this movie as an expression of pure misanthropy, and that is to insist that since Graham is the narrator, everyone is seen through jaundiced eyes. The key is to look for details that Graham doesn’t emphasize in his narration. Graham, we observe, is a Nazi enthusiast. But very little is made of this. We just know it because of some pictures on his wall. An obsession with Hitler was a large part of the historical Graham Young’s life. But when Graham tells us his story, he leaves it out. It’s as if he’s back with his prison psychologist, eliciting sympathy, omitting details on purpose, making his victims seem worse than they are.
What the movie shows us, then, is a weakling who tears down other people, in his thoughts and with his deeds – but always at some remove – to compensate for his own smallness. This leaves us with one contemptible figure, not a wholly contemptible world. But, wicked though he may be, since he’s just one small person, he can’t deprive us of the magnanimity or the resources to pity even one such as himself, should we choose to do so.
I don’t often look at Instagram or TikTok, so these two shows were something of a revelation for me.
Text messaging has for some time been a staple exhibit of the true-crime genre. (See, e.g., Lover Stalker Killer.) But, to my knowledge, only in the last year or so have documentarians made much of compulsive video posting.
The first show’s protagonist is a villain. The other show’s protagonist is a victim/witness. The former is a teenager just out of school; the latter is a thirty-ish professional – a forensic pathologist (!).
It’s the teen who’s coldly calculating. The corpse dissector is warm-hearted, loyalty-torn, and ultimately heroic.
What they have in common is, they’re always posting video.
And, in the footage they post, using drugs.
(Each program goes to some length to explain that its protagonist’s drug use doesn’t affect the outcome.)
Both protagonists have unconditionally supportive parents, for better or for worse.
One show is as chilling as can be; the other is almost heartwarming. I recommend them both.
Samuel’s winter holiday has begun. He doesn’t sleep in; he gets out of bed, puts the hall light on, and chatters to himself until I go out to him. I do gain 30–60 minutes of sleep because I needn’t take him to the bus. I’d say this improves my well-being; on closer inspection, however, I may actually feel worse.
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Ecuadorians who died yesterday:
(a) Rodrigo Borja. The first politician I supported. I was seven when he became president.
(b) Mario Pineida. Decent fullback for Barcelona. Shot in broad daylight, outside a butcher’s shop. Partner murdered, too.
I’m sorry he was murdered, of course. It’s an awful thing, and I can’t imagine that the social repercussions will be good.
Before he was killed, I barely knew about Charlie Kirk. I knew his name and that he was associated with the political right. I didn’t know about his specific views or his way of conducting himself.
I believe I once watched some minutes of a video in which he debated college students. But I don’t remember what was said.
(I don’t spend much time listening to the pundits. For example, I may have been the last person in the United States to become aware of Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow. And no, I don’t know if those two pundits are meaningfully comparable; my point is just that I ignore famous talking heads from both sides.)
I didn’t know any details of Charlie Kirk’s personal life: that he was only thirty-one, that he was married and had young children, that he was close to Donald Trump, etc.
I still know little. I know even less about the young man who is thought to have killed Kirk.
Why am I writing, then? I guess to make the (obvious) point that most of us have nothing worthwhile and non-obvious to say. Lamenting is good, because a life has been taken and human life is sacred. But how many of us can responsibly attempt more than that? I’ve noticed a disturbing number of people on social media – friends of mine – issuing or sharing calls to arms. Calls to, like, hunker down with one’s family and one’s guns; or to join in fighting a civil war that, allegedly, already has begun. Which all seems dangerously overblown, especially since the average person can’t be trusted to have understood (a) Charlie Kirk, (b) his killer, or (c) his many and varied admirers and critics. Because I recognize that I understand so little about (a)–(c). And because I see other friends – Ecuadorians who know less than I know about U.S. politics – posting about Charlie Kirk. (Their condolences are unobjectionable; their hagiographic pictures and language are not.) Which makes me think, maybe people are opining because it’s a bandwagon to climb onto. (Which, arguably, I’m also climbing onto, hoisting myself up a little more surreptitiously than most.)
Tagging Green Fish (1997) as a “gangster” flick is like calling Badlands a “spree killer” flick: it ignores the poetry. Beautiful little scenes are interspersed with violent ones. The little scenes carry the movie.
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Ilsan, which lies within commuting distance of Seoul, was once farmland. Now, high-rises stand next to the fields. Mak-dong’s family still lives in a hut. The patriarch has died. Mak-dong’s oldest brother is mentally disabled; another brother, a policeman, is a drunkard; another barely gets by, delivering eggs; their mother cleans houses; their sister does sex work.
Mak-dong has just completed his military service. Riding the train home, he confronts ruffians who are molesting a stylish young woman. The ruffians beat him. He loses his belongings; the woman retrieves them and tries to contact him. He tracks her to Seoul, where he lands himself in another fight, this time with the gangsters whose boss the young woman, Mi-ae, is mistress to. The boss, “Older Brother,” brings Mak-dong into the gang.
Mak-dong’s talent is for taking beatings. His first assignment is to bait a councilman into beating him up after karaoke. The councilman thus acquires a debt to “Older Brother.” Such is the labor to which Mak-dong is put.
I’ll support the family, Mak-dong tells his brothers. He works for their sake – and for Mi-ae’s.
And, paradoxically, he is motivated by genuine loyalty to his exploiter, “Older Brother.” Not just by need or fear.
You might believe such loyalty to arise from a misguided, idiosyncratic compulsion. But “Older Brother” is just as loyal to the older head of a rival gang. Although these men are adversaries, they uphold the same seniority code.
Mak-dong’s fellow junior gangsters are ineffectual louts. The parallel with Mak-dong’s biological family is unmissable: the gangsters also are called “brothers.” Mak-dong outperforms his fellows, as “Older Brother” recognizes. Yet he remains at the bottom of the pecking order. The gang is hardly a meritocracy. Only the boss’s intercession saves Mak-dong from suffering more abuse than he does.
And Mi-ae? Behave how she will – whether she obeys or throws tantrums – she’ll always be the “kept” woman. That’s her fixed place.
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As a genre specimen, Green Fish exhibits the common tropes: police corruption; assassinations; the “kept” woman’s daliance with a subordinate member of the gang.
But these are just pegs from which to suspend the individual scenes. And these, often, are glorious.
(1) Mak-dong’s early encounter with the ruffians has a surprising, satisfying logic of reversal and counter-reversal.
(2) Mi-ae lets go of a scarf. It flutters from her train window and lands on Mak-dong’s adoring face.
(3) Restaurant patrons discuss whether to order the dog soup or the chicken soup. They agree on the chicken and then join the cooks in chasing the condemned bird around the yard.
(4) The egg vendor is pulled over, bribes the police, is cheated, and chases the police in turn.
(A persistent theme is contempt for official authority. All of the police are corrupt or weak. Mak-dong’s policeman brother prefers to describe himself as a public servant; thrown out of a restaurant, he makes no appeal to his badge. Mak-dong, as a soldier, receives no respect from civilians. Is this because every man must take his turn in the armed forces? Or must every man take a turn because soldiering is disdained?)
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I was hooked from the opening credits, which are set against lovely old photographs of Mak-dong and his family in the countryside.
An early scene (below): Mak-dong the ex-soldier comes home. See how indifferently he walks past another fight. (Fights seem very common.) You can get a sense of the movie’s soapish/noirish music. The mood is of a defeat.
Which, for many rural citizens, was what Korea’s new industrial prosperity was.
Ithaca is no. 6. I used to hear rumors but never thought the town was that bad. I also used to see people getting arrested across the street from where I lived, but that was outside a bar and therefore to be expected. Besides, it was on the same corner where I once saw the Vienna Boys’ Choir climb into a bus. The Choir’s beatific presence contributed to the overall mildness of the place.
Gainesville is no. 1 in crime. Not too surprising. Now and then, I see Gainesville in crime documentaries. Gainesville even had its own “Ripper.”
I’m inordinately loyal to, even fond of, Bloomington (no. 10). I’ve never been there. Sometimes, I walk along its streets on Google. I hang out in Assembly Hall or outside Scott Russell Sanders’s house; I avoid notorious “Cutter” districts.
At this point, you’re probably asking what counts as a college town. Is Memphis a college town? Is St. Louis? They have universities and lots of crime. Albuquerque? Atlanta? Baltimore? Boston? Chicago? Los Angeles? New York? Philadelphia? Washington, D.C.?
Seattle? (Think: Bundy.) Salt Lake City? (Ditto.) Tallahassee? (Ditto.)
Is South Bend a college town? Maybe not, since Notre Dame is its own city. But see the murder-writings of Ralph McInerny (where there’s smoke, there’s fire). Or this sad movie.
a total of 26 U.S. college towns were selected based on the following criteria: The institution [the university] is a central feature of the city, meaning it materially influences local demographics and infrastructure.
Top- and bottom-ten lists don’t mean much in a field of just twenty-six.
Most people looked at him with terror and with fear
But to Moscow chicks, he was such a lovely dear
He could preach the Bible like a preacher
Full of ecstacy and fire
But he also was the kind of teacher
Women would desire
Ra, ra, Rasputin
Lover of the Russian Queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra, ra, Rasputin
Russia’s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on
He ruled the Russian land (and never mind the Tsar)
But the kasachok he danced really wunderbar
In all affairs of state, he was the man to please
But he was real great when he had a girl to squeeze
For the Queen, he was no wheeler-dealer
Though she’d heard the things he’d done
She believed he was a holy healer
Who would heal her son
But when his drinking and lusting and his hunger for power became known to more and more people, the demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder
“This man’s just got to go!” declared his enemies
But the ladies begged, “Don’t you try to do it, please!”
No doubt, this Rasputin had lots of hidden charms
Though he was a brute, they just fell into his arms
A few years ago, I put on I, Tonya (2017) and then quickly turned it off. I couldn’t stomach its “mocumentary” format. A respectful reassessment of Tonya Harding was then in vogue. I’d been impressed by ESPN’s documentary about the figure skater.
I’m not sure if I, Tonya tries to portray Harding’s life any more accurately than, say, Amadeus portrays the life of Mozart. What I am sure of – now – is that stylistically and thematically, I, Tonya is a re-hash of To Die For (1995).
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To Die For isn’t about Tonya Harding, but elements of that movie nod to the Harding-Kerrigan scandal as it was interpreted in the 1990s – i.e., as a specimen of:
(a) ruthless feminine ambition (to take the lurid perspective);
(b) journalistic sensationalism (to take the sober, critical perspective).
(See, e.g., the second verse of Weird Al’s song “Headline News,” which expresses both perspectives.)
To Die For’s source is a 1992 novel by Joyce Maynard. The novel draws from the real-life murder of Gregg Smart by his wife, Pamela.
However, To Die For and the Harding-Kerrigan case do share certain themes. These include:
(a) personal ambition;
(b) the sleaze of media producers, subjects, and consumers;
and
(c) violence performed over long distance.
Imagery is shared, too: especially, ice and ice-skating.
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“First impressions in one word?” says rough-edged figure skater Janice Maretto (Illeana Douglas) when asked to describe her sister-in-law, Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman). “Four letters. Begins with ‘C’: Cold. C-O-L-D.”
Janice looks directly at the camera. One gathers that she’s being interviewed for a documentary about Suzanne and that Suzanne has acquired a certain notoriety.
Other characters, including Suzanne, are “interviewed” during the movie, but it isn’t always clear whether it’s for the same “project” or even whether it’s during this life or the afterlife. It isn’t clear whether Suzanne herself is alive or dead.
Her husband, Larry (Matt Dillon) – Janice’s brother – is definitely dead. The movie recounts Suzanne’s role in his demise. It blends “interviews,” other TV footage, and straightforward narrative. The blend disorients, but that’s on purpose.
The general outline is simple enough: ambitious young wife tires of husband, regards him as career obstacle, plots his murder, is found out.
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There’s more to it. The murder isn’t just Suzanne’s means to a career.
No, what’s distinctive about Suzanne – her tragic flaw, if someone so hollow can have one – is her craving for attention. She wants a career in broadcasting because it’s a way to be seen.
The wrinkle is that she’s unable to supress that craving in order to obtain greater exposure in the long run. She has to be noticed at every step. It’s a compulsion.
When she gets a job forecasting the weather for the local cable channel, she inundates her boss (Wayne Knight) with suggestions about how to run the station.
Boss: “Well, Suzanne, I sure pity the person who says ‘no’ to you.”
Suzanne: “No one ever does.”
She recruits three youths to feature in her self-publicizing documentary about the lives of high schoolers. She does more than interview and film them. She becomes their after-school companion. Soon she’s hanging out with them in shopping malls, giving them weight-loss and career advice, trying on clothes in front of them. Training them to depend on her, adore her, gawk at her, hang on her every word.
Her posse consists of three losers: Lydia (Alison Folland), Russell (Casey Affleck), and Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix). They’re the best thing about the movie. Director Gus Van Sant is on his surest footing here, sympathizing with troubled youth. Phoenix’s performance, especially, is a slam-dunk. It’s as if a dismal cartoon teenager from Beavis and Butt-Head acquired flesh and blood, became a Real Boy. Suzanne soon has Jimmy wrapped around her finger. She plays him against the other two.
Then she coaxes them to murder her husband.
Why? Why not kill him herself? Why involve these sad, incompetent children? Not because Suzanne is a criminal mastermind, but because it’s compulsive for her to play to an audience. Why bother to become a murderer if no one is there to see it?
Lydia, in an interview, explains:
Suzanne used to say that you’re not really anybody in America unless you’re on TV … ’cause what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if there’s nobody watching? So when people are watching, it makes you a better person. So if everybody was on TV all the time, everybody would be better people.
Then, touchingly, Lydia adds:
But, if everybody was on TV all the time, there wouldn’t be anybody left to watch, and that’s where I get confused.
It’s like someone near the bottom of a pyramid scheme dimly realizing it’s a pyramid scheme.
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But hey, Lydia is on TV, isn’t she? She has made it, hasn’t she? And doesn’t almost everyone in this story appear on TV?
There are a couple of very weird scenes – whether they take place in this world or in the next one, I’m not sure – in which Suzanne’s and Larry’s families answer questions together, for a talk show, in front of a studio audience. Despite the tragedy that has brought them there – that ought to pit them against each other – the families are convivial. They even seem mildly pleased to be interviewed. Could it be that although these ordinary citizens lack Suzanne’s obsessiveness, they share her basic philosophy: that what really matters is to be seen? That, unspeakably, the destruction of Larry and Suzanne is a blessing for them? That scraps of recognition are worth people dying for? If this is so, then the movie indicts not only the outrageous, cartoonish Suzanne, but ordinary people as well, in fact an entire society.
Is my anglophilia/crime lit appetite out of control?
Today I learned of Lon Fuller’s “speluncean explorers” (1949), which I am a little ashamed not to have come across before. I had read about R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) and Philippa Foot’s “fat man stuck in the cave mouth” (1967), a sort of Lon-Fuller-Meets-Winnie-the-Pooh scenario (see p. 7; Foot says the case is “well known to philosophers,” although I confess I don’t know who previously discussed it).
Similar cases involve the shipwrecked guys who fight over a plank; and, in Candide, James the Anabaptist, whose plight, perhaps not interesting to the theorist, is (I hope) especially poignant to the person on the street.
Deadnorth (Tubi), set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula;
Lover, Stalker, Killer (Netflix), set in Omaha and its environs.
I watched one right after the other, knowing little about either. There was considerable thematic overlap. The true crime genre is, if nothing else, extremely useful as a catalog of behavioral red flags.
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Samuel went to the lake with grandparents, grandaunts, granduncles, and second cousins (an inexact tally). He came home this afternoon, sunburnt.
With just Daniel in tow, Karin & I went out for gyros. As we were finishing our meal, a nerdy, headset-clad man one table over, who’d been talking into his phone all lunch long, asked me to look after his food while he ran out to his truck. I nodded. His truck was a semi. I watched through the restaurant window while he fumbled around in the cab. Then he brought out a cigarette and smoked it outside the restaurant.
Finally, he returned to the bits of onion and tomato on his plate.
“I pay for all these streaming services, and which do I end up watching? The free one: Tubi.”
Hear, hear. I could go on about Tubi … and Canela, Freevee, Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex, and Pluto (not to mention subscribable services like ViX that provide a surprising amount of free content). But, for now, let me just discuss Tubi.
I’m scrolling through my queue. I’ve added classic cartoons and movies; trashy old TV movies; British TV; Australian TV (Crime Investigation Australia and Crimes That Shook Australia); and a low-budget documentary series, Village of the Damned, about crime in Dryden, NY, some 20 min. east of Ithaca – not a topic of universal interest, but an alluring one for this ex-resident of Tompkins County.
Indeed, to scroll through Tubi’s main page is a revelation. This isn’t Netflix’s conveyor belt of formulaic, in-house content. No, Tubi is still a chocolate box, in the Forrest Gump sense.
This 1995 HBO production is much, much better than the average made-for-cable movie of that period. I’ve seen it ten or fifteen times. It’s rewatchable because of the acting. I cherish each facial expression, every vocal intonation and contortion – even though the (Western) actors speak with Russian accents of varying thickness.
It’s based on the case of a notorious serial killer. It takes some historical liberties, one of which I’ll mention at the end of this review. How discrediting this is, I’m not sure. I can’t check all the facts, but I ought at least to read the book upon which the movie is based. Citizen X is superficially (and, therefore, deceptively) realistic; it’s hardly Amadeus, which a viewer can enjoy in good conscience as a kind of fable, realizing that much has been embellished.
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Rostov Oblast, early 1980s. A body is discovered in a field.
Search the woods, Burakov, the forensic specialist (Stephen Rea), tells one of his police underlings. That’s where this person was killed.
It’s almost five o’clock, the underling complains.
I don’t care what time it is. Search the woods.
That night, as Burakov is concluding his post-mortem, seven more bodies are wheeled into the lab.
Have a nice evening, says the underling.
And that is the basic pattern of the movie: Burakov works hard to catch the killer while others drag their feet.
It’s clear that we have a serial killer on our hands, Burakov reports to a committee of local Communist Party leaders. The most prolific in Soviet history.
The response is not encouraging. Serial killing is a decadent Western phenomenon.
No wonder nothing ever gets done, Burakov confides to his immediate superior: the smirking, urbane, politically astute Colonel Fetisov (Donald Sutherland). Fetisov is on the side of the angels. But he is not a conventionally nice man. He has just been mocking Burakov’s death-odor in front of the committee – Next time, a little less diligence, a little more hygiene – scoring cheap points against his detective in public. But he means to aid him, behind the scenes, in the long run.
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The killer (Jeffrey DeMunn) is an anxious little man. He recruits his victims in train stations. Most are young. He lures them into the forest and stabs them to achieve sexual gratification.
The camera lingers on him after his killings.
No glib psychopath he. We see him on the prowl, awkward with potential victims, avoiding police, receiving tongue-lashings from his boss and his wife. Always wretched. Always bracing himself for the hammer-blow. He exudes as much dread in daily life as he does in his execution scene. It’s a haunting performance.
(The movie says little about his background, which is as harrowing as anything else in the story.)
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But the heart of the movie is the interplay between Burakov and Fetisov. Burakov is passionate and direct; Fetisov, ironical and cunning. Fetisov, especially, utters some delicious lines.
Burakov: He finds his victims on the trains!
Fetisov: I have never ridden the trains, but they do sometimes impede my limousine.
(Dick, my PhD adviser, used to talk like this; he, too, was on the side of the angels.)
Each man, in his own way, works for the good.
Toward the end of the movie, Burakov and Fetisov recruit a psychiatrist – Max Von Sydow, in a small but winsome role – who, congratulating them on an investigative success, delivers this line: May I say that together, you make a wonderful person.
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Now, the inaccuracies. The investigation spans twelve years. The characters don’t age. Burakov has young children; they stay young. This might be an oversight, or it might be a deliberate artistic choice. Not aging, Burakov’s children subtly bring to mind the children who’ve been killed, who’ll never grow up, who haunt Burakov’s dreams.
The more serious inaccuracy – the fabrication – is Burakov’s recurring conflict with the committee of Communist Party leaders, and especially with an ogrish, blockheaded bully played by Joss Ackland (in another entertaining performance) who seethes from the end of the table whenever Burakov reports on the investigation.
I’ve read that there was no such conflict in real life. (Again, I’d have to check the book to make sure.) Bureaucratic idiocies did exist in the Soviet Union, but they may not have been so influential in this case.
The fabrication adds drama to the story, and it makes Burakov’s heroism more poignant; it also establishes why Fetisov must operate as he does. Arguably, the fabrication is artistically necessary. The story isn’t much of a procedural. The haphazardness of the policing (not Burakov’s, but the force’s) deprives this crime story of the usual pleasure that comes from watching an investigation logically unfold. Instead, the movie is driven by its personalities; and these are compelling because of what they must overcome.
I won’t decide whether the inaccuracy is fatal to the movie. I simply don’t know enough. But it remains true that the movie is absorbing to watch, with characters who are movingly played.
The Venezuelans are at their all-time best. They’re on pace to qualify for their first World Cup.
Ecuador outplayed them in Maturín, in the far northeast, about as far as you can go without straying into CONCACAF land. What an uninspiring game this was. Neither team covered itself with the tiniest shred of glory.
Whenever the Ecuadorians would recover a ball in their opponents’ half, they’d send it to their back line to “recycle” possession. It seems to be what this coach wants them to do.
We’ve scored four goals in five games. We’ve scored in just two of those games.
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For the first time ever, Argentina and Brazil lost qualification games on the same day – Argentina at home, against the superb Uruguayans, and Brazil in Colombia. Luis Díaz, whose father, recently released from kidnapping, was in the stands, scored two late goals to sink the Brazilians.
The Brazilians are on a two-game losing streak – their first ever in World Cup qualification. It might become a three-game losing streak. They’ll play Argentina next. I expect the Argentinians to be in a kicking mood. They hadn’t lost since the first game of the World Cup. Before that, they hadn’t lost in dozens of matches.
I believe this is the first Ecuadorian president or presidential contender to have been murdered during my lifetime. President Jaime Roldós died in a plane crash several months before I was born; as far as I know, he was Ecuador’s last president – or near-president – to die mid-career (so to speak). It happened forty-two years ago; I’ve now had a longer life than Roldós.
Other presidents have been kidnapped, exiled, forced to barricade themselves indoors, etc., but they’ve survived. It hasn’t been too, too unsafe to seek the presidency in Ecuador. A lot of ordinary citizens have had it much worse.
But several politicians have been murdered this year (and more ordinary citizens than usual have been murdered). Ecuador is in a bad way.
For 1½–2 years, my phone wouldn’t ring. A short time ago, however, it “fixed” itself – probably by downloading an automatic update – and the spammers began making up for lost time. A spammer roused Daniel from his nap, and, when I picked up, inquired after my “senior benefits.” Within an hour, another spammer had tried, twice, to convince me that an impostor had used my Amazon.com account to buy a MacBook Pro.
The police, paramedics, firefighters, war veterans, university chancellors, air traffic controllers, dentists, etc. resumed their panhandling-by-phone. I still am waiting to hear from the U.S. Space Force – or whichever underfunded military branch it is whose job involves shooting down Chinese weather balloons.
(I mean, either the phone repaired itself or Samuel fixed it by punching who knows what buttons. The other day, he called 911.)
Samuel, I regret to say, has identified himself with a certain fictional character: Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes. “Greetings, my name is Calvin,” he proclaims. “GREETINGS, MY NAME IS CALVIN. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”
They do look alike.
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Aunt Linda – my parents’ oldest sibling – is visiting from Missouri. Samuel and Daniel are turning on the charm for her. My parents are at our house, too.
They reminisce about the Ecuador of the 1950s and 1960s. My dad talks about the night his family’s house in Esmeraldas burned down because a kerosene lamp was lighted with what turned out to be gasoline. After the fire, my dad’s family had to stay over with some missionaries who lived on the plot of land where, eventually, the Hotel Cayapas was built. I don’t envy my dad’s family their ordeal, but I am slightly intrigued. I grew up a block from the Hotel Cayapas; it was one of the fixtures of my childhood; it seemed the height of luxury and class (the grass in its yard was cut silently, with a reel mower, by a starched-shirted worker). I ate in the restaurant once or twice and dreamed of spending a night in the hotel. My dad slept there – or on the same land – during his family’s time of greatest need.
It’s strange to think of the hotel not existing. But, of course, travel to Esmeraldas was hardly easy in those days; vacationers certainly didn’t flock there.
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In theory, it wouldn’t be very hard for me to sleep in the Hotel Cayapas now. I look it up on Kayak: a night’s stay costs a little over $50. The hardest part would be traveling to Ecuador. The second-hardest part would be to avoid being kidnapped or killed. In recent years, Esmeraldas has become a hub for foreign drug cartels and their domestic recruits and conscripts.
When I was growing up, I’d go to sleep listening to the loud music of the discotheques on the beach. Now, because of violent crime, that nighlife has pretty well ceased. In the 1980s and early 1990s, that was unthinkable: that sort of thing only happened in Colombia, and Esmeraldas always would be a party town.
I have been watching, on Hulu, the documentary series about Steven Stayner and his family. I remember viewing the 1989 dramatization, I Know My First Name is Steven; I was eight years old. Stayner was seven when he was kidnapped.
The dramatization was the bleakest TV show I had seen in my young life.
The new documentary retells the story and brings it up to date. Yes, much more has happened to the Stayner family. Terrible things. Imagine having to play a “horror lottery,” a “lottery” of devastation, as in the Shirley Jackson story, and losing it twice.
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Today was gloomy but not ugly. Daniel slept more than usual. I had forgotten that the weather has this effect on babies.
Today I watched the mystery series Manhunt (2019), featuring Doc Martin’s sour-faced Martin Clunes.
Look at him.
I decided that British TV insidiously promotes the belief – the ideology – that practically anyone could work as a Detective Inspector.
In the halcyon days, detectives in fiction were either private consultants (Sherlock Holmes; Hercule Poirot) or else amateur busybodies (Father Brown; Lord Peter Wimsey; Jane Marple). It was easy enough to accept their quirks. At least those sleuths weren’t representatives of the state. One could keep one’s imagination untainted by bureaucratic matters.
Now, the bureaucracy is almost the main feature. Viewers have come to understand that sleuthing is only feasibly done by the police. Consequently, almost all of today’s detectives are public servants.
In and of itself, this is realistic. The corollary it generates is anything but.
Now we have a parade of crime shows in which every actor who’s made an impression, irrespective of style, in a soap opera, period drama, or comedy gets a turn as a Detective Chief Inspector or Detective Sergeant. (If the actor really, really looks like a goblin, he or she can only rise as high as Medical Examiner.) Yes, some actors are specialists: Douglas Henshell has played a DI on at least five different crime dramas since 2009. But the prevailing attitude seems to be: “You were a valet or a lady’s maid on Downton Abbey. Go on now, take a turn as a DCI.” I can think of at least four Downton servants, and at least four soap stars from Last Tango in Halifax, who’ve switched to policing.
Brenda Blethyn, who, in the fullness of time, might have played Miss Marple, has long investigated murders on Tyneside. Could one such as her character, Vera Stanhope, become a DCI in real life? Yes. Could all these scene-stealers, cumulatively, be DCIs? That is, could Brenda Blethyn and Martin Clunes and Nicola Walker and Kevin Doyle (Mr. Moleseley of Downton Abbey) all struggle with their demons while ordering the lower ranks to comb through the CCTV footage? The system would fall apart.
One suspects that if John Gielgud were still alive, he’d be playing an embattled, semi-retired Superintendent.
Meanwhile, I await the investigations of DCI Richard Ayoade.
After a three-month hiatus, Karin & I have returned to our adult Sunday school class. Our attendance lapsed when Samuel was born, and, each week, we just kept on sleeping in through the Sunday school hour.
But now it’s good to be back. The current text is John Stott’s 1 & 2 Thessalonians: Living in the End Times. (The link is for a new edition that will be released this summer; Stott is the sole author of the edition we’re using.) It’s amazing how insightful the discussion is when we try to answer Stott’s study questions.
The class meets in a new room, around a stylish, curvy table. No, it isn’t quite like the table in the classic scene in 24 Hour Party People. The whole church is being frugally rearranged. Its basement rooms will soon be rented out to a fostering agency. The agency will pay less rent than it did for its downtown offices, and the church will recover a significant proportion of its maintenance costs. Everyone will win.
The church has another connection to fostering. It hosts a “foster closet,” in which donations of clothes, books, and other household items are collected for foster parents.
We attended our small group meeting tonight and heard some bad news: the church’s garage had been broken into. Nothing of value was stolen, but a lock was snapped off. Apparently, our church has been robbed for several years. It used to own a couple of vans which, from time to time, would be vandalized. Parts would be stolen, probably for resale in Chicago, and gas would be siphoned off. That’s the disadvantage of being located in such a picturesquely isolated part of town.
