Roses, Respect, Marriage, and… being awake.

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When I posted this review of Prey on Sunday, I made a mistake. I initially described Naru, the heroine of the movie, as Cherokee. She is, in fact, Comanche. These are very different peoples, from different parts of what is now North America.

I’ve never visited America, much less met either Comanche or Cherokee people (although thanks to the Web, in particular Twitter, I may now have the opportunity to speak with them). I suppose what happened was that given I smashed the article out in an hour, my tired, heat-addled brain latched on to the common initial letter ‘C’ and transposed the two. A genuine mistake. However… it gets worse.

When I looked back over the initially published draft, I saw I’d also managed to say that Naru was “native American.” Note the capitalisation there and think about this for a second. It was Westerners that called America by that name. Invaders. Generally, it is accepted that the Americas are named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

To describe indigenous people in this way is therefore both factually wrong, and disrespectful and I’m very sorry for it. The article has been corrected. Not many would have seen the initial mistake. So, why draw attention to it?

I didn’t mention any of the controversies around Prey or The Sandman when I reviewed them. It’s there, of course. I’m just bloody bored of it. There’s no shortage of eejits. Plenty of people are happy to jump on bandwagons and moan about the fact that the hero of the latest Predator movie is a woman rather than a 250-pound muscleman. Whatever gets you off, boys.

I do want to say this: the notion that women can’t fight is beyond ludicrous. I have seen it first hand in numerous martial arts. And if you’re going to tell me that martial arts aren’t really fighting, then how about Krav Maga? I watched a 23-year-old woman soundly defeat three big guys during a high-level grading. That’s at the same time by the way… in Krav, we always assume you’re outnumbered. I know of a pregnant woman who ripped off a dining table leg and used it to beat her abusive husband unconscious.

Of course, men are bigger and often physically stronger, but that’s no substitute for training, experience, and – most important of all – will. Bravery and intent are blind to gender.

I can’t comment on the changes made to The Sandman from the source yet as I am still waiting excitedly for the comic to arrive. I believe they gender-swapped Constantine and changed a few characters’ sexualities. I couldn’t care less. It seems to me that in a story about dreams everything should be fluid and uncertain anyway. The character of Desire worked brilliantly for me. It made perfect sense that they were essentially sexless, non-binary, fluid. Desire is arguably even more subjective and personal than Dreams. It is all things and takes all forms. A writer with the skill of Gaiman will have put much thought into this and he is, after all, English. The English are experts at repressing desire and I’ll never forget the Jeremy Paxman book about them where he spoke with an ex-public schoolboy who had needed reconstructive surgery on his backside due to his predilection for spanking.

One of the things about this story, it seems to me, is that it is meant to be provocative. The fifth episode, set almost entirely in a diner and coming closest to outright horror has, I know from reading interviews with Gaiman and the cast, been toned down from the comic on which it’s based. I don’t know about you, but my nightmares have scared me far more than any movie or TV series ever could. The Sandman makes a good attempt at realising such nightmares and to do so, it provokes. If making the characters more reflective of life in 2022 provokes people, then it serves the story. It is not just about some corporate diversity tick box exercise.

Anyway, as I said four paragraphs ago, I’m increasingly bored of this. I don’t care. I just want to lose myself in a good story. So why talk about it at all? And why draw attention to my own mistake?

Because while I may not care much for the debate, I do care about the intent. It is, simply, about respect. It’s all too easy to rush something out without taking the time to check, or even with the fullest of time, to overlook something.

I’m not a trained journalist and neither are most of us, but we all now can publish things instantly to a wide audience. Respect for those we write about is critical, as is respect for our audience. I made a mistake. It was disrespectful not to have checked and that bothers me. Hopefully, I’ll learn from this mistake and while I’ll inevitably make many more, I’m grateful to those who corrected me this time for allowing me to put it right.

Now some of you will be quite rightly thinking that I described a large number of people as ‘eejits’ above. Disrespectful? Yep. But you give it to get it, right?

I’ve had really interesting conversations on Twitter with people whose views I feel are completely wrong, but I see no difficulty for the most part, in separating the argument or belief from the person. I’m more than happy to have an intelligent conversation about it. I respect “informed dissent.”

But I have zero respect for the argument that Prey is somehow a lesser movie for having a female, indigenous hero, just as I have zero respect for people who have started to use the derogatory term “M-She-U” to complain about the number of female leads in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Respect the writers, respect the creators, respect the actors, and respect the story. Respect the decisions that went into making that story and judge it on its merit. If you don’t, then this is not the website you are looking for.

With the greatest respect, kindly toodle the f**k off.

***

Marriage is a new drama on the BBC written by Stefan Golaszewski, who also brought us Him and Her and Mum. I didn’t watch the latter, but do remember enjoying Him and Her quite a lot… it was quirky and different. Hard to categorise, but with excellent acting.

That was one of the reasons I was very much looking forward to Marriage when it debuted on Sunday night. The other two being Sean Bean and Nicola Walker, both of whom I think are great. I‘ve certainly said before on this blog how much I love Sharpe. It was the TV adaptation of that where Sean Bean became well known, before he became a meme. At the time I thought his acting was adequate, but since then he has proved time and time again to be a versatile and deeply talented performer, notably in his work with Jimmy McGovern.

Walker, I know mainly from Spooks, the early 2000s spy drama which delighted in brutally killing its lead stars before Game of Thrones was ever aired. She did sterling voice work in a Cthulhu Mythos audio play/podcast a couple of years ago and has received plaudits for TV dramas such as Unforgotten which I haven’t seen. She’s a very naturalistic actor.

As for the subject matter… well, I think anyone who calls themselves a marriage expert is heading for a fall, but I’ve managed to make it the best part of 20 years despite quitting pretty much everything else I ever started, so I was looking forward to their take.

So, we sat down with quite high expectations.

Jesus bloody wept.

I mean… I can see what they’re going for, I think. For sure the silences in a marriage (as in many relationships) are often the loudest shouts. We saw the different facets of the characters in their different environments and different relationships. There is much to be explored over the three(?) remaining episodes.

But I don’t have the endurance for it. I found it occupied a purgatorial zone between crushing boredom and deep discomfort. There was little to lighten the load or even warm you to the characters and while TV scheduling is now largely irrelevant, I’m struggling to see why this was chosen as Sunday night entertainment, especially in 2022 when we all need a bloody break.

I’ve just paused in writing this to read a newspaper website’s review, and while they were very positive (four out of five stars), the comments beneath overwhelmingly seem to reflect my view.

By all means, give it a try, but unless everyone starts raving about it in the next few weeks I certainly won’t be going back.

***

Much more my cup of tea and also from the BBC (iPlayer exclusive) is Red Rose, which was released yesterday.

I’d read some hype beforehand comparing it to Ring, the J-Horror masterpiece that regular readers will know I adore. That should tell you from the outset that we’re dealing with a horror story that uses technology as the source of fear. It’s a tough area to play in. Host was superb, but in my view, it was an anomaly. Paranormal Activity did a great job of making the camera footage itself the frightening part of the movie and the thing it has in common with Host is the constraint of budget, Host was full of misdirects in the sense of ‘traditional’ horror scares, things we’ve seen so many times now it’s impossible to be scared of them, but that softened the viewer up for the more original stuff to creep in and inject some genuine chills. But as good as those films were, neither of them got to this writer the way Ring did and I can’t think of anything else that has come close.

It’s not from a lack of trying, either. There have been numerous ‘tech horror’ movies that try to make modern technology more frightening. Off the top of my head: Pulse, Unfriended, Countdown, The Lawnmower Man (God help us), Feardotcom, Cell… I’m bound to be missing many, some of which I am sure were pretty good (let me know in the comments), but considering the number of them, the success rate is woeful.

So far, I’ve watched three of the eight episodes of Red Rose, and while comparing it to Ring seems premature, it’s good. Really good.

It centres on a group of friends in Bolton who have just finished their exams and are in that exciting but disorienting summer between school and college. It’s quite a big cast of mostly unknowns, but the opening episodes quickly zoom in on Rochelle and her best friend Wren, played respectively by Isis Hainsworth and Amelia Clarkson, both excellent. The eponymous ‘Red Rose’ is a phone app which causes a lot of grief and pain to these characters while the story fleshes out other members of a uniformly high-quality cast.

There is horror to be found here. Although the show hasn’t delivered any chills on the scale of Ring just yet, it has some effective scenes in terms of potentially supernatural scares. But ‘Hell is Other People.’ The obvious subtext here is cyberbullying and mental ill health, both of which can quickly cut you off from support networks with devastating effects. The show does a great job of exploring this, albeit a little too transparently. I remember being a teenager was tough enough without everyone carrying around a weapon of mass embarrassment in their pocket. It does help you empathise with that generation.

The show feels like an extended episode of Doctor Who in many ways, which is high praise and it’s not just because one of the stars is Samuel Anderson, who played Clara’s tragic love interest, Danny Pink. Also, while researching it, I was thrilled to learn that one of the writers involved is Gemma Hurley, best known for… Host!

As I say, only three episodes in, so it could yet end in disappointment, but so far, I’m hooked.

***

That’s all for now, folks.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for letting me write.