So I stumbled upon the film Strange Darling (2023), which has become something of a cult classic. First: I’m not a fan of serial-killer movies. The best of them thrill you with gruesome fantasies such as the “brilliant” serial killer a la Hannibal Lecter, while the worst of them indulge in Rated R torture porn, like the Saw franchise. When I read the description for Strange Darling I was initially put off, thinking, “Oh, just another serial-killer slashfest.” It has a 96% Rotten Tomatoes rating, however. That’s good enough to make me wonder. Spoiler alert: It’s hard to describe/analyze this one without giving away some details.
First thing you as audience notice is its nonlinear structure. It’s divided into six chapters (a la Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or The Hateful Eight). But it begins with Chapter Three, in an action-packed chase scene. From that moment on you begin making judgements about the characters and situations, based on what you’re seeing or being shown. Most of these are wrong, one way or the other. It’s a twist on gender roles: In the initial scenes there are only two characters: a flirtatious young woman (Willa Fitzgerald, terrific) who seems to be playing a dangerous game of Take a Walk on the Wild Side, and a stern-looking suspicious dude (Kyle Gallner, nicely understated) who has a gun in an ankle holster. They’re in his pickup, outside a motel, flirting. One thing leads to another and they end up in the motel room—frisky, handcuffs, the works. Foreplay, as it were. She produces some drugs—ostensibly cocaine—from her purse and announces it’s her birthday. (I didn’t believe that.) From that moment on the action gets ever more complicated. It becomes obvious Things are not what they seem.
As the nonlinear chapters unfold you come to understand that context is everything. It’s not a matter of seeing is believing. It’s a matter of what you see can’t be understood without the linearity of what came before. When there’s no context for the actions we insert our own reasons and logistical frameworks—which, in this story, are likely wrong. I liked how it subverted expectations. You think you know what’s going on and then realize you don’t. The acting and direction are first rate. (See the glowing blurbs on the poster image.) Ed Begly Jr. and Barbara Hershey play wonderful old hippies who don’t deserve their fate. The end is harrowing and poignant. I’ll leave it at that.
So for years I’ve come across mentions of Sinclair Lewis’s infamous novel It Can’t Happen Here, published in 1935, which depicts the Fascist takeover of the U.S. government by a duly elected conman, Buzz Windrip. Many have noted the similarities between Windrip’s rise to power and Trump’s. Both rode waves of populist support. Both parlayed a resentment of “elites” into a successful installation of corrupt, abusive government. I finally got around to reading it and agree that it’s a classic, warts and all. Some of the similarities are eerie and some of the differences are, well, somewhat hopeful.
Lewis notes how, like Trump, his fictional strong-man POTUS stocks his cabinet with lackeys and goons to do his bidding. But his use of the man manipulating Windrip is the eerie part: The sinister politico Lee Sarason is the idea-man behind Windrip’s agenda, and comparable to Hitler’s German cronies such as Hermann Goring. He seems a lot like Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff known for promoting White Nationalist policies. In the novel, Sarason eventually deposes the elected Windrip and installs himself in as new president (after exiling the legitimate Vice President). That’s one trick Miller probably can’t emulate. And as far as the differences go, perhaps the biggest noticeable difference is the popularity of Windrip’s newly elected regime, initially. In time his fascistic policies lead to Civil War, but at first he’s much more liked than Trump, at least at this stage of Trump’s corrupt regime.
I mentioned “warts and all”: For one thing, the names are silly (Berzelius Windrip, Hector Macgoblin, many others): They establish a comic tone that undercuts the seriousness of his subject. Much of the action is summarized, not dramatized. It helps Lewis cover a lot of ground in a short period of page-time. (The ebook is only some 180 pages long.) But at times it creates a static feel, of events being summarized rather than brought to life with good description, dramatic action, and characterization. The main character, Doremus (“Dormouse”) Jessup, is the local editor of a small-town newspaper in Vermont. He’s no Bernie Sanders, although the book does have lengthy discussions about Socialism and Communism. He’s an Everyman of sorts—a bit nebbishy, quiet, soft-spoken, and careful. He’s horrified by Windrip’s rise to power and its abuses, but feels powerless to stop it. Perhaps the most dramatic turning point in the novel is the killing of Jessup’s son-in-law, a doctor, which underscores the danger for Windrip’s family and friends. Doremus is ultimately thrown in a concentration camp for publishing anti-Fascist writings (against the “Corpo” regime of Windrip’s “Corporate” party), beaten and abused, from which he escapes and joins the Resistance movement.
I should note Sinclair Lewis was the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1930. The timing of the novel’s creation makes it a fascinating historical document. Lewis wrote it five years later, in the summer of 1935, before the election of 1936, during the crucial years of Adolph Hitler’s rise to power. (It’s even before Kristallnacht, in 1938.) Fans of WWII-era history should read It Can’t Happen Here and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) as companion pieces. Both explain, in part, the allure of Fascist policies, and how the Great Depression created an atmosphere ripe for strongman politics. Contemporary history often credits FDR’s New Deal policies for helping to ease the Great Depression, but Lewis’s ground-level narrative portrays a populace fed-up with Roosevelt’s policies and frustrated at the lack of economic growth. One of Windrip’s campaign promises is a gift of $5,000 to every American, on which of course he never delivers.
Of these two books, The Rise and Fall is the better read, for my money, by far (and much longer). Shirer does a great job of bringing the atmosphere of Germany in the 1930s to life, and the sinister and effective ways Hitler seized power in the mid-decade. (For one thing, he was elected. Then rigged the system to prevent his party from losing future elections.) But Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here is a good companion, showing how Americans were worried about the rise of Fascism in the U.S. At times it also echoes George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), with more lighthearted jokes and folksy characters. Imagine 1984 narrated by Andy Griffith.
I was working as a sandblaster on the coast of Texas, at an industrial park right off the Intracoastal Canal. A wasteland of bulldozers and cranes. Stacks of rusty metal pipes. A few scraggly palm trees, no grass, house or town within miles. That’s where I found her. Odd to see any people in that zone: We were like twenty miles from the beach on Mustang Island but there weren’t any bikinis or daiquiris to be found. Just miles of flat sandy windswept Nowheresville. Everything smelled like beached fish cooked in diesel fuel. Seagulls wheeled and squealed in the sky. They perched in lines on the concrete seawall and the pier railings.
We worked on a rusty barge moored in the canal. Our job was to sandblast the rust off the metal then paint it with rust-coating. We walked a bouncy plank bridge to get on board every day. Stagnant water beside the barge littered with yellow rubber gloves like a school of severed-hand fish. Summertime, ninety-five degrees in the shade, wind blowing twenty to thirty mph every day, flags popping on the big cranes used to lift shit.
And then, through a curtain of gliding seagulls against the bright summer sky, we see this gal walking in the wasteland. Took one look to know whatever is going on, it’s not good.
We is me and my painter boss, Pete, a crusty old drill sergeant of a guy with a handlebar mustache and eyes perpetually squinting in the sun, deep wrinkles on his face. He looked like a shrunken Marlboro Man. I was near six feet and he was a good step down from that—maybe five eight, nine. Classic Short Man’s Complex. Not a bully but grouchy and hard-bitten.
I was a newbie on the sandblaster/painter crew, young and naïve, got the job after talking with one of the painters while getting gas at a convenience store, told him I was looking for a summer job. He said, “Come on, Cowboy,” and that was that. After a few weeks I had a reputation for being easy to get along with. Pete wasn’t.
The other painters considered Pete a dick but we got along just fine. He was stern and grouchy but never really snapped at me as long as I did my job without loafing. Learned that my first day. The barge so hot I was just kind of standing there in the glare and heat willies rising off the baking sand. I took off my shirt and could practically feel my skin burning and shriveling up. At one point I felt dizzy and was leaning against the generator, trying not to faint. Pete growled, “Well don’t just stand there with your finger up your butt.”
After a few weeks on the job I knew his quirks. He was never a pussycat but he could be alright. I called him Mr. Grumpus one time and he almost smiled. Grouchy he was, sure, but I was never afraid of him. Pete reminded me of an old movie I saw once, with the actor Robert Duvall, The Great Santini. About a former fighter pilot who was a tough father. Once when I was finished cleaning all the paint equipment I said, “Okay, Santini. Let’s roll.”
When I first got the job, I told my friends, “Yeah, I’m a Sandblaster, no big deal.” I said it like I was some kind of Superhero: The Sandblaster. He’ll strip the flesh off your bones. Most people didn’t even know what it was. I didn’t, before I got the job. Cleaning rust off metal crap, that’s what it is.
Another reason the other painters didn’t want to work with him: He wouldn’t take breaks and generally ran a tight ship. As his assistant mainly I mixed the paints and cleaned all the equipment when we were finished, ran the compressors, and tried to keep the hoses from coming loose and twisting around like a rattlesnake, smashing you in the head with their hard metal couplings.
But that day Pete saw me watching this tiny girl in blue jean cutoffs and a halter top slinking along the stacks of concrete pipe over by the crane. I was about to call out and ask if she needed any help, but she was still too far and wouldn’t hear me. So I kept watching and ignored Pete giving me the stink-eye. “Get back to work,” he finally said.
I said it was kinda strange, wasn’t it? A girl walking alone out here? Then as we watched a pickup truck with two Mexican guys came driving across the wasteland, heading in her direction. “None of our business,” said Pete. “You want to stay healthy, keep your head down and pay no mind to that bullshit.”
I didn’t say anything. Rinsed out the sprayer and decoupled the compressor, covered the cans so the paint wouldn’t get stiff and thick. Like I was paid to do. But the whole time I’m watching. Mexican guys headed across the sandy flats and cut the gal off before she could get far. She saw them coming and ran behind the stack of pipes. They got out and each went in the opposite direction around pipes, and after a little bit here they come, dragging the girl along. Pushed her into the pickup cab and took off. But instead of leaving out the main road in they circled around to another rusty barge a ways down the canal, far enough that you couldn’t tell shit. But a half hour later they were gone.
The next day lunch time I took my cheeseburger and root beer and walked the seawall along the canal, toward the barge. Pete saw what I was doing and didn’t say anything. He was my boss but not the boss of me. We’d had a few words about the ICE deportations. He thought the “wetbacks” were getting what they deserved. I didn’t. Keeping my opinions to myself was part of the job.
Seagulls scattered before me as I made my way down the concrete seawall covered with bird shit. A blue heron five feet tall perched on leg and watched until I got close enough then it flew off slow and big like a baby pterodactyl. I got close enough to see that people were living there. A square cabin and wheelhouse toward the bow and a porta-potty perched aft, near the stern. A clothesline strung between the cabin roof and the railing. Women’s clothes on the line. Like our barge, this one had a wobbly jerry-rigged bridge of two-by-twelve planks held together every few feet with braces. I was thinking maybe I should step on board, ask if they needed anything. Then I saw him.
Skinny teenage Mexican guy, maybe my age or a little older, sitting in the shade on one side of the cabin, under the awning of a blue tarp stretched above him with yellow cord. Holding a rifle by the barrel, stock on the barge floor. Watching me. His face in shadow so I couldn’t see his expression.
I acted like I didn’t see him, kept walking along the concrete seawall. Made a show of looking into the water, like I’d lost something and was searching for it. Felt that gun aimed at my neck when I turned around and headed back. At our barge Pete was waiting, finished with lunch. He just looked at me and shook his head. “No, you ain’t doing that. So just forget about it.”
Quitting time we went home, getting munchies on the way. Pete bought me a cold beer and I drank it. Truth is I don’t even like beer, but I know you don’t turn one down. On the way back to the office, where my car was parked, we passed several ICE trucks with people pulled over on the shoulder of the road. Trash blowing in the wind. Palm trees waving in the gusts, people arguing, pleading, people with their legs spread and hands on the hoods of white ICE pickups. We’re used to it by now.
The Texas coast is pretty much Mexico with better roads and less diesel exhaust. Shrimp boats in the Gulf sometimes pick up extra cash by smuggling drugs off-loaded from others. Corpus Christi used to be known as a popular stop for illegals getting jobs and apartments. Now the Border Patrol is chasing down people everywhere and they’re all hiding. As we’re getting our beer white ICE pickups with green stripes surround a local bus and hold it up, drag two guys off and arrest them. The ICE cops wear black masks and have their pistols in side holsters, like wannabe gunslingers. I called them assholes and Pete said they were just doing their jobs.
Pete wears a gray hardhat shaped like a cowboy hat. It’s kind of cool, actually. I wouldn’t wear one. I couldn’t pull it off. But with Pete’s grizzled face and that handlebar mustache, he rocks it. Doubles as a political statement.
“They might be just doing their jobs,” I say, “but they’re still assholes.”
I still live with my parents, summer before college starts. I can’t stand my stepfather and we hardly say anything. But my best friend lives right down the street and I don’t have to pay rent. Don’t buy the cow when the milks free. After work I mainly hang out with high school buddies and get high, watch the moon on the water. My best friend likes to water ski but I never really thought much about being dragged behind a boat. I’m a working-class rat and skiing always seemed a rich kid thing, like those assholes who go snow skiing in Colorado at Christmas break and come home with broken arms or legs.
My mom said I was too negative. That I should learn to ski, to mingle with “quality” peeps. She suggested I enlist in the army. “Mom?” I said. “That’s for losers.”
Nonsense, she said. “You need some discipline,” she added.
She was big on inspirational quotes. Liked to embroider little pillows with sayings and tuck them all over the house. One pillow on our sofa proclaimed, “To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone.” Success and sweetness on wooden plaques hung on nails around our house: “Live, Laugh, Love.” The wag in me wanted to rewrite it as “Die, Frown, Hate.” But I couldn’t do that. She pasted that shit on my bathroom walls and my bedroom door. Here’s one of my favorites, on my bedroom door: “Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.”
The next couple days I tried to tow the company line: Heed Pete’s advice: Ignore the trouble. Let sleeping dogs lie. Don’t stick your neck out. We were almost done with the barge job. I was itching to get out of there. Warm wind stinking of dead jellyfish. I’d stare out the window on the drive to the site. Flat horizon, hard-baked sand, tidal marshes and ditches with alligators. At first there were power lines with sneakers tied at the shoestrings and thrown over the lines to dangle. Hundreds of them. It was a high school thing. Some people did it when they got out. Like I’m free. Others when they dropped out. Like fuck it. If you hooked your sneakers over the first throw you had good luck for life. After the sneaker lines, nothing but a few scraggly palm trees at the industrial park entrance. Oil spills on the dirt road. Brown pelicans in groups of three flying over the ditches, hovering in the wind.
Sometimes I’d turn around and notice Pete watching me. He’d be bleached by the bright sun, mopping his neck with a red bandanna, cowboy hardhat practically gleaming. Every day there the sun seemed to keep getting hotter. I stood baking in the heat, wearing a floppy hat like vets wore in Iraq, zinc oxide on my nose, my shoulders sunburned when I got too hot and stood around without a shirt. The other barge was a couple hundred yards away at least. Mainly just a dark structure down the canal. Now and then I could see movement but too far to tell who or what was going on.
At the end of day I was cleaning all the pain buckets and resealing the cans and putting all the gear into the bed of Pete’s pickup truck when I noticed something move under the ratty blue tarp back there. I lifted a corner. A pair of bare feet retracted and then something squirmed and I came to be looking into the brown eyes of a teenage girl, staring back at me, her head covered in shadow, only her eyes visible in the murk. “Please,” she whispered. “Let me just stay here, okay?”
I gave her a long look back. Rock and a hard place. Standing there with my hands on the tailgate, heat radiating off the metal. The pickup bed messy with paint cans and trays, tarps and crap. She was tucked into the back right corner, using a spare tire to make the tarp like a little blue tent. I said nothing. If Pete glanced over and saw me talking to someone he’d put a stop to it quick. Without trying to be obvious I wandered over to our water cooler sitting in the shadow of the compressor and filled up my one-liter bottle, then nonchalantly dropped it beside her blue tarp, where a hand darted out and grabbed it.
Come quitting time a trio of military choppers fly low over the canal and we stop and watch. You can feel the whump-whump-whump as they chop the air. The sky has turned violet by then and the air is cooling off. I ask Pete if they’re Chinooks just to distract him. He slams the tailgate of his pickup and doesn’t say anything, suddenly stops and lifts the corner of the blue tarp. Sighs and shakes his head. “You know,” he stares at me hard, “there’ll be hell to pay.”
I shrug.
Driving the dirt road to the gate of the industrial zone, we don’t say a word. I keep an eye on the distant barge to see if there’s any action. Nothing stirs. Expecting a lecture or worse from Pete but he keeps his yap shut. I’m bone tired and sunburned and sleepy and when I rub my eyes they sting from all the crusted salt. As usual we stop at 7-Eleven, passing an ICE van on the highway. The store is on the edge of Aransas Pass, a ratty town that’s the gateway to Mustang Island and Port Aransas, just this side of the ferry landing. I get a Big Gulp of root beer and take my place in line behind two giggling blondes in bikinis, barefoot and still soggy from the beach. One of them asks if she cut in line and I tell her No, she was there first. She thanks me and points out a sign near the door to her friend, one that says, “No shoes, no shirt, no service.” They make oopsy faces and smile back at me.
When we return to Pete’s pickup, the blue tarp is bunched up and pushed into the corner. Pete pulls it out of the bed and fold it up roughly, weighs it down with spray paint rig. On the way out, he drinks his beer and I suck down my root beer until my belly’s full. The only thing he says is, “Looks like you got lucky.”
After the girl disappeared I had the sense Pete wanted to get this job done asap. We still had a week of blasting and painting left but he told me to show up at five a.m. the next morning to get an early start. We worked till sunset. I was so tired and sweaty by quitting time I was standing at the compressor and yawning, my vision blurry, my lower back burning. By then it was almost dark in the wasteland, the western sky red as fire. We’re shutting down everything and cleaning up the equipment when we see headlights heading our way, against that blood-red backdrop. My heart started beating hard but I tried not to act worried. We never got visitors.
Pete stopped what he was doing and stood there, straight as a ramrod, almost glowing in the headlights. He disconnected the blaster hose from the sand tank and plopped the end of it in the space between his pickup and the compressor trailer. He lifted his cowboy hardhat and smoothed his hair, put it back in place, came over to where I was cleaning the paint sprayer. “Listen,” he said. “If this is about that girl, you don’t know nothin’, you understand.”
I nodded.
“Nothing,” he added. “Not a thing. And let me do the talking.”
“Got it,” I said.
A sandblaster is a pretty simple contraption: First you need a diesel-powered portable compressor, on wheels, with a trailer hitch. You park that somewhere close to what you’ll be blasting. Some old rusty thing. My main job was running the compressor: Fueling it, connecting all the hoses, turning it on, being ready to turn it off at the drop of a hat. If the compressor is on and the hoses aren’t all connected, the air shooting through the hose turns it into a dangerous snake whipping back and forth, with a heavy metal coupling at its tip. The compressor makes a racket. We’d already shut it off but Pete walked away from me and flipped it back on as the pickup pulled up close and the headlights blinded us. The only thing keeping the hose in place now was no air in the lines: There was another lever you turned to open the air feed to the hose. Pete gave me a look, turning his attention from the pickup to me, then pointed at the hose end, raising his eyebrows.
A skinny Mexican got out of the pickup slow-like and moved toward us. Pete paid him no mind. He was carrying the paint cylinder to the back of his pickup, and loudly told me to bring the tarps off the barge. The Mexican looked at us both. “Donde va?” he asked.
Pete was passing the compressor and the kid was just the other side of it. Pete almost ran into him, growling, “Coming this way,” as he got close. The kid stepped aside. Pete dropped the paint cylinder on the tailgate of his pickup with a loud clang, then scooted it back into the bed.
The Mexican stared at me. “Where’s the girl?” he asked me.
Before I could answer Pete moved between me and the guy. “What can I do ya for, amigo?” he asked. “We’re about to leave and this is a private job site, so you ain’t stayin’ either.”
The Mexican made a face, walked to his truck and opened the door. He told us to turn off the compressor, that he couldn’t hear anything. We kept packing but in a second he was back, holding the semi-automatic. “I asked you, Mr. Gringo, to kill that fucking noise.”
Pete nodded. He shouted, “Sorry gotta let it run to clear out the lines.”
The Mexican stared at the two of us. The whole time that compressor noise blasted over all three of us. He squinted. “Where’s the girl?” he shouted.
“What?” shouted Pete. “I didn’t catch that.”
The Mex said, “The girl.”
Pete shook his head. “It’s been a long day, amigo. You go ahead and look for your girl. Ain’t none of our business.” He came up beside me and clapped me on the shoulder, like we were best buddies. Something he’d never done before. “Us two are going for a beer.” Then he kind of pushed me toward his pickup. “Adios, muchacho.”
The Mexican pointed his gun at Pete. “Turn off that fucking noise, Gringo.”
Pete stopped and nodded, keeping his hand on me. “One sec,” he shouted. He turned to me and gave me a death stare. “Get ready to run,” he hissed. Then he reached toward the air release lever. The one you never flip if the compressor is running and the hoses not connected. He made sure I saw.
Then flipped it.
It always takes a couple seconds for the air to fill the hose. It’s a thick rubber hose about two, three inches in diameter, and starts to bulge and bend as the air fills it, then shoot sideways. We rush behind the compressor as the metal coupling bashes the Mex’s pickup grill with a hard smack. Like a giant rattlesnake it snapped and coiled and whipped, smashing into things until it hit something with a thud and the Mex let off a round of bullets. We’re huddling behind the compressor, where the hose can’t reach. The shooting stops. The compressor keeps roaring and the coupling smashing into things.
Pete edges forward and peeks around the compressor. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he says. He inches around till he can reach over and kill the compressor engine. Suddenly, silence. The sound of seagulls squawking. The Mex on the ground, head bloodied, crawling toward his gun. I’m on my feet by then and not sure what to do. Pete watches him for a minute, pulling on a pair of workgloves, and when it seems the Mex is getting close, Pete steps over and picks up the gun. He stares down at the kid and shakes his head. “Some people don’t know when to take a hint.”
He points the gun at the Mex and lets rip a burst of bullets. The blast echoes flat against the barge. Pete tosses the gun on the dead guy. “You keep that, amigo. Seeing as how it’s done you so much good now hasn’t it.”
I was shaking and had to pee something fierce.
In the movies when they shoot people it’s full of suspense and drama. You know it’s going to happen before it does. Usually. Not the way it was: Pete just pointed the gun and popped him. And people in movies always get shot between the eyes or in the middle of the forehead. Pete got him in the neck. He scrabbled in the sand as his throat gurgled and spurted. For a second it looked like he was trying to rise up. Then he head fell back and he went limp.
I saw it all and thought: Now what.
Pete told me to hang loose. He had some calls to make. I was trembling and dizzy, my legs wobbly. My mouth dry and goosebumps on my skin. Almost dark by then and the wind whipping off the canal cooled me to the bone. Pete dragged the tarp out of the pickup bed and covered up the dead Mexican with it. Same one that the girl had hid beneath.
I sat on the tailgate and watched the industrial park road we used to access the barge site. No action at first, then headlights bouncing along the dips, heading our way. Pete appeared at my side and told me to let him do the talking.
The county sheriff pulled up to us slow and careful like, got out and settled his official cowboy hat in place. We all shook hands and he asked my name, wrote it down. He obviously knew Pete. They walked over by the compressor and stood there talking for a while. I couldn’t hear what Pete was saying but I could guess. He was gesturing this way and that, and at one point lifted the compressor hose and acted like it was swinging around. The sheriff put on gloves and picked up the semi-automatic weapon, carried it to his car. Brushed his hands off after he put it in the back seat.
He shook hands with Pete, came over and patted me on the back. “I think we can have all this cleared up by Monday,” he said. Then he drove off.
That night, when I got home I found Mom had embroidered a new fancy-looking round pillow and placed it at the top of my bed. In big black-and-red letters, it read, “Act as if what you do makes a difference.”
We had a couple days left on the barge job. Other than being a little rainy, everything was mostly the same. The barge down the canal was dead calm. The clothesline gone. Never heard anything about the girl. Soon after I quit to go off to college. On my last day, Pete shook my hand and said, “Stay out of trouble.” That was it. Later I heard they practically gave him a fucking medal of valor. I’m cool with it. The path of the righteous man and all that crap. Plus, you know, the wicked.
So to even begin a review of Project Hail Mary I have to first confront my ambivalence about its star, Ryan Gosling. He tends to get gushed over but for dubious reasons: Much as the world loved the Barbie movie (2023), I found it a big gob of pink bubblegum. It was fine, if you like that sort of thing—vacuous brand-name-based comedy. (Remember the Summer of 2023? The whole “Barbenheimer” thing? Was that only three years ago?) Ryan Gosling certainly had his comic moments as Ken. He’s great in The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) too. Maybe he should play bank robber/stunt-motorcyclists more often. Which leads us to Project Hail Mary, composed of, oh, approximately 95% Ryan Gosling on screen.
An easy description would be something like “It’s E.T. meets 2001 meets Contact meets Arrival meets Wall-E”—with a healthy dose of Steven Spielbergian moments, most in outer space. There are twists and turns that I won’t reveal, but I’ll note Gosling’s costar appears to be made of rather flexible rocks, hence the moniker “Rocky,” as in “Rocky phone home.”
Although comic, it’s not exactly funny. It’s sweet. My one-word review would be “Cutesy.” Hard not to quibble with the premise, from this Trumpian hellhole into which our nation has fallen: An intergalactic menace is threatening our sun, and to save it a great team of international scientists cook up a mission to travel beyond our solar system to find the fix. (Of course in our “real world” all the scientists would either be fired or under investigation for being “woke,” so forget the whole save-the-world mission altogether. For this review I consulted a team of scientists who confirmed we have a 99% chance of becoming the overweight humanoids of Wall-E by, say, 2035.)
Yet in the far-fetched fictional world of Project Hail Mary, they need a hero. For that they tap Ryan Gosling, who plays Ryland Grace, a high school science teacher who has a PhD and somehow manages not to yell at his students to put away their frickin’ phones. He’s reluctant to join this mission to deep space. I don’t blame him. What follows is heart-warming. Rather unlikely but heart-warming. Isn’t that what we all need at the moment?
So a friend turned me on to this new Apple TV series Widow’s Bay. It’s something of a mashup satire of horror/disaster movies, with pointed references to such classics as Jaws, The Fog, and many others.
A “dramedy,” the most fun of the show involves the quirky citizens of the quaint New England island Widow’s Bay. The main character is local mayor Tom Loftis, played by Matthew Rhys, performing admirably a role reminiscent of Murray Hamilton’s classic money-obsessed mayor in Jaws. Only Tom is more nuanced and complicated: He’s not exactly likable but you end up pulling for him anyway. He often says or does the wrong thing. His assistant, Patricia, is the funniest character, who bickers with Tom and plays passive-aggressive head games.
At times the humor is tongue-in-cheek. For instance, Tom is single, raising a rebellious teenage son (is there another kind?), and explains that his wife died “in childbirth”: The way he says it makes it seem suspicious. It’s either a throwaway explanation for his being a widower or maybe he’s lying and there’s a “secret” that will be revealed later. In another scene mayor Tom makes a scene at a local bar when he yells out, “There’s something in the fog!” That’s a tagline from the famous John Carpenter film of 1980, The Fog. And there is something in the fog, but the scene is played for comic laughs. Everyone stares at him and the fog quickly dissipates.
Episode 2 has a subplot in which Tom agrees to spend the night at the spooky local Inn that has a history of unnatural deaths: He does it to quiet the locals who are scaring away the potential tourists. Many clues make the connection between this spooky Inn and Stephen King’s notorious Overlook Hotel of The Shining (1980) fame. He has to stay in the Captain’s Suite, which has a particularly bloody history, shades of Room 237 from The Shining. He also meets a lovely young woman who seems rather aggressive with her come-hither looks, who invites herself over to his house, and whom he comes to believe is an incarnation of the Sea Hag—a ghost-woman who lures sailors to their deaths by sitting on their face.
It’s on Apple TV and debuts a new ep every Wednesday. Next week is the fourth episode of ten, so we’re not even halfway into the series. It’s a winner.
So I just read in the Dallas Morning News that only nine Texas summer camps are approved to open after last year’s Camp Mystic tragedy. Not having Texas summer camps is a tragedy in itself. The population of Texas is over 30 million so it’s an easy guess that only nine camps won’t be able to serve a great percentage of kids who want (and should) experience summer camp. So what are they going to miss? Childhood memories, for one thing.
I spent a couple weeks at a summer camp in the Hill Country near Mason, Texas many years ago—think I was in fifth grade. What I remember most: It was hot—baking hot, Sahara hot, summer-in-Texas hot. We panted like dogs, our tongues hanging out. At the end of every day we were sunburned and scruffy. Not at all like the many slasher movie summer camps such as Friday the 13th (1980) and its iconic Camp Crystal Lake. We didn’t have frisky camp counselors Kevin Bacon and Adrienne King (the original slasher-movie Final Girl) trying to sneak off to make out while we got away with murder. Nope, we were on a tighter leash than that.
Our counselors were all football-coach wannabes with fat necks, bulging biceps and bowling-pin calves who wanted to whip our little grade-school asses into shape. (And keep us so tired and worn-out we wouldn’t get into any trouble. It worked.) Although we played sports and had cookouts and ate hot dogs, it was less Bill Murray’s iconic Meatballs (1979) . . . .
. . . and more Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). More like Boot Camp than Summer Camp. We slept in bunkbeds in a long barracks building and you had to hide your stuff or your other little happy campers would steal it. But they had chocolate milk in the mess hall, which made it a little like Heaven.
Part Lord of the Flies as well: I remember one kid bawling that he missed his Mommy and wanted to go home. He was kind of a small kid and maybe people made fun of him but I don’t remember that at all: We felt sorry for him. The counselors said he had a bad case of Homesickness. Gone the next day, mustered out. Me, I’d be ashamed to be sent home for crying and didn’t want to get sent anywhere (unless perhaps a nice house with air conditioning) so I didn’t sniffle or mope. This was not a rich-kid’s camp. It was run by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, and as I was a good Irish-Catholic kid I think I got sent there for free or a small fee. Some of the other kids were black and Latino inner-city kids from San Antonio, which gave more of a mixed, urban feel to the camper population.
It was survival of the fittest. Toward the end of Week One we did an eight-mile hike, in the middle of the day, when the air temperature in the shade was probably like 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Kids were dropping like soldiers in the Bataan Death March. But at the end of the hike we reached a swimming hole on the Llano River, one of the Hill Country’s limestone-bed rivers with cool, clear water. There were no floods that summer. The only safety measures I recall were roped buoy-barriers around the swimming spot to keep us from drifting downstream to the rapids. We didn’t have any kids drown, thank god. We ate s’mores and fashioned crude designs on belts in Arts & Crafts class. We made hand-prints in foil-pans filled with wet plaster. I was a small kid and somehow survived the kickball games . . . barely.
After two weeks I was ready to go home and back to hanging out at the suburban swimming pool we spent all our summer days at, eating Giant Sweet-Tarts and playing Marco Polo. Being out in the sun and heat and river water for two weeks was a good experience, toughened me up a little. I learned that if you were sunburned badly enough your skin peeled off in sheets. That was the first summer I went “camping,” which involved sleeping around a campfire in my friend’s backyard. Kids need time in the outdoors. We should expect the owners to run places like Camp Mystic safely, but I hope they don’t go extinct.
So since 1990 I’ve been a bit of a distance runner, have run 16 full marathons and 5 half-marathons, including today’s. The real treat this year: My daughter, Liliana, ran the Half-Marathon with me. She didn’t think she was going to make it and did great! It was chilly at the start but by mid-morning it was all blue sky and sun. Pittsburgh—The City of Bridges—is actually quite charming and scenic. Yesterday we visited the Andy Warhol Museum, though I rather doubt Andy ever ran their marathon.
So a friend of mine turned me on to the recent film (seen via streaming, from last year) Dragonfly (2025) that I knew nothing about. It stars the terrific character actress Andrea Riseborough as Colleen, a downtrodden British gal with no family or friends, no job, and a seriously jaundiced view of life. But she has one precious thing to make her life worth living: her big dog, Saber.
Saber is a costar of the film, in the animal world at least, although the human costar is Brenda Blethyn, who plays Elsie, a widowed woman living next door to Colleen in a council-house neighborhood in the north of England, an area that seems to signify the term “Broken Britain.” Jobs and money are scarce. Elsie’s middle-aged son is being threatened with being “redundant,” as in he’s on the verge of getting fired or laid off. (He seems frightened, uptight, not particularly warm and compassionate.) Elsie and Colleen are neighbors and hit it off, as Colleen befriends Elsie and helps to care for her. Meanwhile the only other thing in Colleen’s life is Saber, with whom she sleeps. (As I allow my beagle-mutt to sleep in my bed this made me connect with Colleen and sympathize with her, naturally.)
For about the first half of the film it’s a quiet, careful depiction of these two women’s lives. There’s a bit of mystery: As the viewer you’re suspicious of Colleen through some of her actions, and suspect she might be trying to take advantage of Elsie somehow, to either rob her or for some other reason. But she’s also caring and kind, so that suspicion seems mainly to arise from the mystery of intentions: Why is she being so nice to Elsie? What’s up with that? Which is itself a jaundiced view of the world: Why shouldn’t she be nice to Elise? When Elsie asks that very question, Colleen replies, “We’re neighbors. Neighbors should look out for each other.”
The final half of the film is heartbreaking and stunning. I won’t give it away. But as devastating as it is, it’s a fresh view of the world, not a rehash of superheroes, aliens, ghosts, monsters, and other silliness. The lives of Colleen and Elsie are heartbreaking but they seem real. At times it does seem like Grim & Grimmer, but it’s touching. That’s a good thing.
So as an aficionado of Old West histories I’ve stumbled onto a real gem: Paul Andrew Hutton’s The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History (2016). I should first mention that in the last month I’ve picked up and discarded several nonfiction histories of the West, two of them concerning the history of New Mexico. Why? They simply weren’t worth the reading time. A good history vivifies the past and helps you understand its importance events and cultural/historical ramifications, and it takes a certain kind of skilled writer to pull that off. While I was disappointed in these failed books I won’t name names: I’d rather celebrate good writing than nitpick bad. And as chance would have it, I happened to read a description of Hutton’s The Apache Wars and bought it, quickly became hooked. I’ve been binge-reading ever since.
Quotes about the book compare it to S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon and I second that, although I think I favor The Apache Wars over Empire. Both are quite good, both gripping page-turners, and both about Native American tribes of the Southwest: Empire concerns the Comanches while Wars obviously concerns the Apaches. Although their territories in the Southwest overlapped the two tribes were not in league, and were actually mortal enemies. They fought tooth-and-nail for dominance in the southern Great Plains. The Comanches essentially won and forced the (Lipan) Apaches into far West Texas, although the heart of Apacheria was actually western New Mexico and Arizona. (There were several bands of Apaches and the Lipan’s territory overlapped with the Comanche.)
The Apache Wars has an excellent structure to frame its detailed account of the conflict from 1861 to 1886, using the kidnapping of the white boy Mickey Free as its touchpoint. As with the Comanche wars, trouble between settlers and Natives began much earlier than that, as soon as the westward expansion heated up in the late 1830s and into the 1840s. For many readers the most famous and visionary depiction of this era unfolds in Cormac McCarthy’s classic novel of western frontier brutality, Blood Meridian (1985). There are passages in Wars that seem lifted straight out of Meridian, although it actually must have been the other way around: It seems McCarthy researched both Apache and Comanche history, and came across scenes that he used later in his description of the Glanton gang.
In particular is this incident detailing the actions of the mercenary Irishman James Kirker:
“In July 1846, Kirker achieved true infamy when he conspired with the leading citizens of Galeana, Chihuahua, to lure a mixed band of Chokonen and Nednhi Chiricahuas into town with promises of a peace treaty and rations. Negotiations were held between the Mexicans and the Apaches while Kirker and his men hid themselves. A pledge of eternal peace was secured and to cement the bargain a liberal disbursement of whiskey was provided. On the morning of July 7, while the Apache men lay in a drunken stupor after a nightlong fandango, Kirker and his land pirates slaughtered 130 Chiricahuas.
“Spybuck supervised the scalping, for his Shawnees had perfected a rapid technique. A neat circle was cut at the crown of the victim’s head. The scalper then grabbed hold of the Apache’s long hair and pushed off with his feet against the victim’s shoulders. A loud pop followed as the scalp came off. The scalps were taken to Spybuck, who treated them with some salt for preservation and attached them to long scalp poles. Each scalp was a debit against the treasury of the state of Chihuahua.
“Kirker marched his men into Chihuahua City in a grand procession headed by the governor and several priests, with musicians escorting them into the town in triumph. They carried the Apache scalps before them on long poles. In the fiesta that followed, the priests ornamented the front of their church with the scalps. “Opposite the principal entrance, over the portals which form one side of the square, were dangling the grim scalps of one hundred and seventy Apaches,” noted an English visitor, “who had been inhumanely butchered by the Indian hunters in pay of the state.”—Hutton, The Apache Wars, p20-21.
For those unaware of the stature of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, know that it was ranked by a group of editors/writers as the second best novel of the past 50 years (I believe Toni Morrison’s Beloved was #1). In it McCarthy does a masterful job of turning history and legend into an artistic epic that is both beautiful and awful. Hutton’s The Apache Wars, a nonfiction work, provides great context and understanding to this era, and reinforces the visions of McCarthy.
So Season 2 of the Netflix series Beef has dropped and is quite good. Think of it as The White Lotus meets Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). It’s about a quartet of grifters using whatever nefarious arrows in their quiver to get ahead, the main one being an iphone snippet of a middle-aged couple’s old-fashioned “domestic dispute” (in the husband’s “man cave,” no less) caught on video by a much-younger couple.
Although everything is not what it seems is undoubtedly a movie cliché, it works to great effect in this season’s storyline. The most captivating character is Ashley Miller, played by Cailee Spaeny, who possesses the sweetest smile and the darkest heart. At first she genuinely seems to care about her boyfriend and the abused wife she videos, but one surprise after another makes you rethink exactly how much Ashley cares about any people other than herself. (Spaeny reminds me of the great Sixties/Seventies actress Sandy Dennis, in a good way.)
Second most captivating character must be the always terrific actor Oscar Isaac, who plays Josh Martin, the manager of a high-end California resort. He’s ambitious, mercurial, and at times seriously deranged. Carey Mulligan plays his wife, Lindsay, who puts up with his shenanigans . . . until she doesn’t. As usual, I’ll refrain from giving it all away. Like Season One of Beef there’s a Korean-American plotline that’s important, but not the sole focus, as opposed to the first season. One thing I admire from series creator Lee Sung Jin: Things happen very quickly. It’s not as frantic as the Oscar-darling Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) but dramatic events unfold, spurt, bounceback, and recoil with a fast, deft touch. It features eight episodes, all of which have major plot twists and developments. I was hooked and binge-watched it.
