EPISODE 420: WE'LL CARRY ON

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Hi. Welcome back. How’s your world going?

Any Australians in the house today?

For those unaware, Australia woke up yesterday to the news that its Liberal/National Coalition government, which has been one train wreck after another for six years – really a whole Christmas list of xenophobia, misogyny, corruption, political ineptitude and global warming denial – and which has spent the entire last term in the polls behind the opposition, which came to the election with one of the most comprehensive, bold and progressive policy platforms of any opposition in decades --

(you know where this is going)

--has just been re-elected for the second time.

Yeah. When I went online yesterday to check out the results, the Guardian actually leapt out of the screen and punched me in the face, then stood over me kicking me and laughing. It was like A Clockwork Orange with other slang.

Or like 2016, and who knows, maybe 2020.

I know, I know, think positive. Click your heels together and make a wish, say Candyman three times while staring into a mirror or wait for the Rapture, I don’t know. I just hope when they find my clothes my underwear is clean.

(I wonder if, for those who have them, Rapture fantasies are sort of like visiting Hollywood or reincarnation fantasies. Only the good stuff happens to you. And Elizabeth Taylor is there. And she is amazing.)

(Actually I bet the Rapture is exactly the opposite. The only interesting Rapture stories are the ones where you get left behind. And Elizabeth Taylor is there. And she is amazing.)

Well whatever happens and/or just happened, we all have to remember we’re not alone. At least after we are able to pull ourselves out of bed, throw out the industrial size Ben & Jerry’s cartons and put on our outside clothes again. ++ I coped with the new season of Australian Horror Story by finishing the third season of The Good Fight, CBS All Access’ Chicago legal-political drama. Man it’s been good this year. The only show I know where they are actively talking about our social insanity. This season included someone who may or may not have been Melania Trump trying to figure out how to get out of her prenup, a group of liberal women who decide to try and take down Trump using the same kind of tactics his people do, and an episode about voter fraud that made a disturbingly compelling case for trying to hack voter machines.

It has also included “I’m Just a Bill” type Schoolhouse Rock songs each episode about things like NDAs, Russian troll farms and impeachment. They are every shade of yes.

The one great thing about streaming services is that you can subscribe for a month and then walk away. If you need someone to hold you close right now, let CBS help you.

[Buy Season One on DVD here. Or check out CBS All Access here. I see the first week is free and then it’s $5.99 a month. Definitely worth it.]

++

In other current historical traumas, Game of Thrones is ending tonight. And last week’s episode… man.

I’m not going to detail anything that happened, so don’t worry if you haven’t caught up/are in witness protection and don’t watch Thrones because the mob knows your viewing habits and also what city you’re in and also what time you watch TV (I don’t want to cast aspersions lightly, but I think your witness protection may be garbage)/WHY IS THIS NEWSLETTER ALWAYS ABOUT GAME OF THRONES?

I actually wrote this pretty hopeful piece for America at the start of the season arguing one of the characters is sort of like a Christ figure. Last week’s episode was basically a point by point repudiation of everything I had said. Which was kind of hilarious, in a “What would it be like to be in a wrestling ring and have someone climb up on top of the ropes and then throw him/her/themselves down on you repeatedly?” kind of way.

I just wish I could say the choices made in the episode were not only devastating but true to the characters involved. The one with the Night King was certainly Thrones at its best. (Aside: Wouldn’t it be great if every GOT episode was done like Friends titles? “The One where Sansa Wants to be a Princess”; “The One with the Wedding”; “The One with the Other Wedding”; “The One with the Toilet”.)

This last week is definitely not the worst, but I think it's safe to call it "The One Where the Writers Came to Our House, Broke Our Toys and Said it Was Their Own Fault."

++

One of the many difficult things about Game of Thrones this season is that every episode is sort of a Series Defining moment, and yet until tonight we will not have gotten the full story. Which means we’re always reacting without all the information. Maybe we haven’t seen the last of Ghost. Maybe Brienne has realized she wasn’t that into Jaime anyway. (What? He’s not THAT interesting.)

Maybe Bran is not a Human McGuffin who has been wasting all my early love for him. Maybe that coffee cup actually meant something.

I guess we’re about to see….

In the meantime I’ve been reading this Thrones prequel book Fire and Blood, about how the Targaryen family first came to Westeros with their dragons, and what they did over the centuries. And the thing that has probably most surprised me is realizing the Targaryens are bad, y’all. They are really really bad.

I don’t mean there aren’t good Targaryens, there are. But as a concept, a small group of people who hold power because they have living nuclear weapons and they are not afraid to use them, like all the time is just bad bad bad.

(I know this will not be a popular opinion, but I kind of hope someone kills Drogon tonight.

Of course, I also hope we discover new dragon eggs, baby dragons are hella ‘dorable. And maybe not every dragon is a monster. But some are, and Drogon is.)

Also, I’m now realizing Dany’s that whole reason for insisting she gets to be queen, because her family was, is just plain dumb. That was a long time ago, girl. And a hideous unsafe world.

There’s a lot of other good things in Fire and Blood, if you have a thousand hours – it is SO LONG, and yet I CANNOT STOP READING IT.

Buy it here. (One warning that George R. R. Martin fans will love: It turns out this is just volume one. Expect volume two to arrive approximately never.)

(Other lessons learned: If you live long enough everything goes bad; royal families having a dozen kids are just asking for the whole world to be in ruins after they die; not every Stark is a good guy; and nobody wins when dragons fight.)

++

I’m in Budapest.

I know, kinda buried the lede there. I’m doing research on a crazy script idea I have, and being here I am both realizing the depths of the crazy that this project is and also kind of having my mind blown open.

I’ve never been to Central or Eastern Europe, and never thought about going before, either. Yet I keep running into assumptions I somehow have about the place. Specifically, that it’s heavily authoritarian and/or haunted by communism and the Nazis. There’s perhaps some truth to both – this is a nation that has been invaded and ruled by others something like 31 times in its over thousand-year history. I was at a dinner party with some Jesuits from around the world where the question was put, “What is the most important value for your country?” The Hungarian said immediately, and with great strength, “Freedom”.

(For the U.S. I said “Netflix”.)

But even if occasionally I might be on target with some of my assumptions, in general I’m finding that I am constantly in the way of actually understanding this place on its own terms. I feel like I’m trying to grab a ghost. Or like I showed up at a dinner party and something has happened but no one will say anything about it when I’m around.

++

One story from my week here: Last night I went to the opera to hear Manon Lescaut. I knew nothing about the piece other than it was by Puccini, which to my mind meant it was going to be a gorgeously sung tragedy about a doomed love.

Beforehand I been to one of Budapest’s famous thermal baths, which is basically like a suburban wave pool combined with a ton of tiny indoor pools at different temperatures. At one point this little old man said to me the way to do this is go back and forth between very hot and very cold four times. “Then you will be strong!” he said, raising hands clenched in fists. “Then you have a cold beer and have sex all night.”

Suffice to say, when the bath was over I couldn’t stop thinking about beer.

So I go to the opera, and just as it starts the effect of all that time in the baths hits me, and within about ten minutes I am OUT. Like, I know there was a guy who never falls in love, and then he saw this lady and they fell in love. But then the next thing I know she’s living with some other guy, and maybe she’s kind of a live-in prostitute? But she still loves that first guy, and also there’s a guy who keeps appearing in the fireplace, and I think it might be the devil?

I know, Oprah. It was weird.

But then at the end of the second act, everything kind of locked into place: she’s caught with the man she loves by the man who more or less owns her, and she’s going to be sent into exile or something as a result. And this group of men show up in drab uniforms that felt like a combination of the U.S. Confederate Army and 1960s Eastern Europe. And you could feel everybody all around suddenly leaning in.

And then the third act is this powerful story of the man trying to break the woman out of jail before she’s going to be shipped off to the U.S. And he and his Seal Team Six blow it, and so then he has to sit there and watch as she and a whole bunch of other women are paraded before this gathered community of scolding elites, sympathetic nuns and brutal soldiers, who violently throw the women into a corner to wait.

And of course in the middle of all this action is our man and woman, holding each other, refusing to let one another go. And slowly the attention of the entire group focuses on them, and where you might imagine there would be scorn or severity there’s this incredible feeling of sympathy. The man ends up begging the head soldier to let him become a sailor so he can stay with her. And as he waits you can hear a pin drop.

And of course he says yes, and as the act ends all I could think is what an incredible statement this is about Hungary’s recent past – the danger people found themselves in (a Jesuit told me that over 60 Jesuits were jailed in Hungary, with sentences that totaled more than 1000 years), and the profound sense of empathy they had for each other. I don’t know if I’m reading this right at all, but for me the act was like this powerful moment of wish fulfillment. And I want to say it’s very Hungarian, in the sense that the happy ending is not “They get away”, but “They get to be cast out together.”

++

(There was actually still one more act, and it was like this alternate timeline where the two of them are wandering around ruins and she is dying of thirst, and of course he goes off to get help and she has this bad feeling and death shows up and looks just like a character out of my song of the week, “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance.

And so then she does her big finish, then dies in his arms.

Seriously, I swear I did not doze off, it was this random. I had this fantasy of Puccini’s producers telling him, “Gio baby, you know we always love your vision, but maybe this one time it doesn’t need to end with the woman dying.”)

(Also, I desperately now want to see or write an opera about multiple timelines.)

++ LINKS ++

A drop of water turns into a snowflake.

Pete Davidson has a show he likes more than Game of Thrones.

Smokey Robinson gets harassed by the Letter U.

Just a few more hours to the end of Thrones. One thing I am really going to miss:

Sometimes the only appropriate response to reality is some serious Sansa Stark side-eye. So side-eye away. From a “world that sends us reeling/from decimated dreams,” as My Chemical Romance, we say:

Do or die
You'll never make me
Because the world
Will never take my heart
You can try
You'll never break me
We wanna know,
We want to play this part.
We’ll carry on.
We’ll carry on.
We’ll carry on.
We’ll carry on.