Not entirely sure but I think at least one of these is a Xenomorph (whom are pretty naughty creatures) 👀#NaughtyThingsInChurches pic.twitter.com/zMxtMNBuuT

— But It Was Aliens podcast (@ButItWasAliens) July 22, 2020

Is James Bond a secret gay Catholic?

Answer: Probably not, but here goes...

Back in 2012 there were the usual snorts and guffaws by the bigot English press about L'Osservatore Romano's glowing review(s) of Skyfall. (And, to be fair, for a supposedly Catholic journal to be apparently promoting such a morally questionable character as James Bond is de facto scandalous.) But then that was only to be expected, given quite how utterly bigoted thick intellectually idle English journalists always are when reporting anything to do with the Catholic Church. In reality, of course, the Catholic Church has no opinion on James Bond, or Harry Potter, or who should win this year's Yankee lying competition US Presidential Election. And you'd have to be barmy to imagine that a billion Catholics around the world even could have just one opinion about any of these things. But don't try explaining that to your average hack on The Hate Daily Mail. Life's too short, and he or she wouldn't be interested anyway.

(And besides, L'Osservatore Romano is little more than the neo-Marxist in-house wank-rag of the Vatican's spiritually etiolated secularist Establishment. It is not and never has been an organ of the Magisterium. But don't try telling them that either.)

The strangest thing about L'Osservatore Romano's apparently new-found Bond mania though is that they seem to have missed that Bond is himself a Catholic. Or at any rate he comes from an old recusant Catholic family. The Bond family in real life were Catholic recusants, and Ian Fleming almost certainly imagined Bond as being one of them. Fleming would have known of the family (as the blogger Tribunus argues in an unusually sober post - by his standards - here) and he even gave his fictional Bond their real-life coat of arms (as seen in On Her Majesty's Secret Service) and motto ('Orbis non sufficit The world is not enough').

As for all the gay stuff in Skyfall, it's worth bearing in mind that Daniel Craig's stock has until now been at least as high amongst gays (thanks to the trunks bit in Casino Royale and his playing Derek Jacobi's sadistic lover, complete with a todger shot, in Love is the Devil) as it has been (or should have been) amongst Catholics (see his remarkably straight-bat approach to Catholicism in Moll Flanders and Sword of Honour). So the smutty and silly (but still funny) bit with Javier Bardem teasing him (and vice versa) in Skyfall was certainly aimed at an already extant section of the audience (who have, presumably, ignore that Bardem's character is just as much of a homophobic stereotype as Mr Wint and Mr Kidd were in Diamonds are Forever, but never mind).

In much the same way, we learn at the end of the film (without giving too much away) that the Bond ancestral home has (or had) a priest hole in it. OK, this particular crumbling pile is (or was) in Scotland, the filmmakers thus keeping a firm grip on Bond's (fictional) Scots roots rather than on the Bonds' (real-life) roots in Dorset. But there can't have been many non-Catholic, non-Jacobite Scots whose Reformation-era castles harboured massing priests, even in the Bond universe.

So on the one hand Skyfall was infested with silly solecisms. My favourite has to be 'This was your father's hunting rifle', when it wasn't a rifle it was a shotgun and anyway in the UK we use guns for shooting (or possibly stalking, but certainly not hunting, which is done with hounds).* And also there's no real plot (which, after all the delightfully convoluted plots in Bond films of yesteryear, was rather disappointing). And the script was fairly lacking in either polish or sparkle. And the baddy was almost totally one-dimensional. At the same time, however, there were all sorts of little things (the return of Q, complete with a fairly tokenistic gadget, and the return of the Walther PPK) and big things (the return of the Aston Martin, the return of Moneypenny, the return of the old office, etc.) that did end up making Bond's anniversary outing (and I use the word 'outing' advisedly) both enjoyable and satisfying.

*And whilst we're nitpicking, despite being a staunch monarchist Bond for some reason declined to bow to the Queen when he escorted her to the Olympics (even though even HM's own children do that), which rather suggests that Craig doesn't have quite the grip on his character that you'd have thought such a great "ac-tor" would have.

Another Country

I saw this film on an old DVD that had been given away free with some Sunday 'paper. I just managed to save it from the recycling bag.

I must say, I hadn't expected much, but it was still bitterly disappointing. It's beautifully set and, up to a point, quite attractively cast. Colin Firth, it turns out, was marvellous even when he was cute. Rupert Everett, similarly, turns out always to have been awful. But there's Guy of Gisburne from Robin of Sherwood as well, smouldering away in the background looking blond and posh and, well, just smouldering. And there's even a young Cary Elwes - not even bothering to act, but just being posh and cute and lovely and sweet and smiling oh-so-nicely and... Aaah!

And I suppose the rest of the film could so easily have been like that - a sort of Sound of Music with cricket. And one can feel that it's what the filmmakers really wanted to do. But the convention by the 1980s was that beautiful blond young men were always evil, beautiful old schools were evil, the military and the British Empire were always evil - and buggery was a beautiful, liberating thing.

Oh, fuck it! It's moral drivel from beginning to end. It's a film about communists in England at a time when England already knew about the horrors of Lenin and Trotsky. What makes it worse is that it was made at a time just when the whole gruesome Soviet experiment was already starting to fall apart. (Having said that, the BBC made The Curse of Fenric virtually as the Berlin Wall was tumbling. For failing to gauge the mood of the times, no one has ever beaten the British media-Establishment - and that, in some ways, is a comforting thought.)

The film's moral inadequacy has an inevitable knock-on effect on its characters. The "good", left-wing characters are almost all drawn hideously badly. Everett is supposed to be a sympathetic gay character but he's not: he's the most annoying, snivelling excuse for a gay stereotype ever seen. And Firth is a splendidly enjoyable prick, but he never grows or develops. Just to expand on that unfortunate metaphor, his character remains limp throughout: he starts out as a prick and carries on as a prick all the way until the end - when he's still a prick; and there's never any clue as to why he's a prick. He's just a prick. And a Marxist prick at that!

The goodies are of course gays in denial and sadists and militarists and (worst of all!) praying Christians. Again, the inadequacy of the writing is such that we don't even find out whether they're supposed to be hypocrites or fanatics. All we're supposed to take away (or rather, because this is a film that was really only ever playing to the gallery, it's a prejudice that we're supposed to take to it) is that Christianity and the military are yucky and nasty. And that's all there is to it.

The most interesting characters in the film are Fowler - who is played by far and away the most handsome young hunk on display - and his favourite fag. The fag himself is a standard-issue, handsome little prepubescent love-muffin. But he is the only character towards whom anyone in the film shows any genuine affection or tenderness, and Fowler is the one character who shows it. (It's just one line: 'All right, Tomkins! You've done a decent job on my boots.' or some such.) But then a film that really explored the human condition, and tackled the emotional relationships - hero worship vs. emerging paternal fondness - between young men and younger boys, in school or out, would have been unthinkable in pro-Marxist 1980s Britain.

It would be even more unthinkable now.

Jimmy Sime, 'Toffs and Toughs' (1937)

There's nothing new about fake news, or indeed political disinformation in the mainstream media.

Leaving aside that nowadays the boys on the right would be just as likely to be beaten up for being "posh" (not to mention English and white) as the boys on the left would have been back then, the photograph is hopelessly posed and the title itself is both misleading and probably no older than 2004.

In fact the boys on the right are not "toughs" but pupils at a local Church of England school. They'd taken the day off school for a trip to the dentist and then decided to earn some easy money by helping out at the Eton-Harrow cricket match that was taking place at Lord's that afternoon. Sime has clearly, er, solicited their aid for his photograph (presumably for a small fee). And given that nice young Anglican boys would generally have been discouraged from walking around with their hands in their pockets, he's presumably also instructed them to adopt the poses their holding - apparently to make them look as if they're quietly masturbating. The two Harrovian boys though just happened to be standing at the gate at the time waiting to be collected by one of their parents, and by all accounts they were persuaded to pose for the camera with neither their parents' consent nor any financial emolument.

The picture is of course well known in England, and a good example of indigenous English leftist propaganda - that is to say the lies we like to tell ourselves. It was first published in the 10th July 1937 edition of the News Chronicle, a leftist newspaper that later merged with The Daily Mail (which of course by modern standards isn't even considered leftist). The screechy agitprop caption read 'Every picture tells a story'.

The real "story" of the photograph - of the tragic fates of the two "toff" boys and of the long, happy, normal lives of the "toughs" - is now freely available on line thanks to dear old Wikipedia.

While everyone is focused on Joe Biden's comment about black voters, @JesseKellyDC SLAMS him for saying this in the same interview:

"From the pandemic, you can remake the world as it should be."

Jesse asks, "Does that not creep you out?" pic.twitter.com/mXtibbY6xA

— The First (@TheFirstonTV) May 23, 2020

Netflix vs. Amazon: Two Comic-Book Takes on the Post-9/11 World

Adorable shorts are cool. (Change my mind.)

It turns out 2019 was quite the year for dramas based on comic books. On the big screen we saw Disney's MCU series finally come to a gorgeous, decades-long climax with Avengers' Happy Ending Avengers: Endgame. On the small screen meanwhile Netflix and Amazon found themselves going head-to-head (although head-to-knee might be more appropriate given the disparity between the two) with two surprisingly watchable adaptions of comics from the late 2000s...

The Umbrella Academy

Tweenage superheroes in goofy prep-school uniforms (including kinky eye-masks, Argyle sweaters, knee-length socks and adorable little shorts) ought to be a genuinely fun idea. X-Men go full Hogwarts? Why not? Mix in time-travelling men in black assassins from Doctor Who (or at least from the 1990s "wilderness years" novels and comics versions of the franchise) and you should almost by definition have a kick-ass (if not quite Kick-Ass) comic book and a very serviceably fun but fucked-up TV show.

So! Did it work?

Well I've never read the comic, so I can't possibly say whether the Netflix people did a good job of adapting the source material. As a show though it's... OK. As I said, the main gimmick is sound, being mostly tried and tested, and the back-up time travel gimmick has of course been tried and tested to destruction (even if I use the phrase advisedly).

Just as Stan Lee taught us that superheroes can have their human sides, and Watchmen taught us that if Batman were real he'd have more in common with Nathan Bedford Forrest (or at least Bernhard Goetz) than he would with Sherlock Holmes, now we're invited to imagine that not all super schools are quite so "enlightened" as Charles Xavier's. In fact there's nothing like being brought up with your fellow (alien) septuplets in a big house in New York, with an emotionally distant authoritarian Englishman (also an alien though!) for an adoptive father and an android Stepford housewife for a mother and, er, an augmented chimpanzee for a butler to leave you... an angry, embittered, emotionally needy, "dysfunctional", and generally just typically obnoxious millennial. Only with superpowers!

If the X-Men were written to appeal to teenagers not too cool for school but definitely too cool to fight in Vietnam, the Umbrella Academy were evidently supposed to be channeling the angst of a generation that couldn't quite cope with 9/11, Bush and Iraq. Now they've been repackaged in time for the Great Awokening, I'd suggest that updating them by the better part of two decades wasn't such a great idea.

For one thing, they don't really fit into the post-2008 era, let alone the world post-2016. It's hard to sympathise with the marital problems of a super-powered Hollywood celebrity (for example) if you're a 40-year-old man who can't afford to move out of his mother's spare room, and when teenagers are being sacked from university and having their lives ruined for expressing the "wrong" opinions on WhatsApp it's a bit much to suggest they should be angry at their 'rents for having been too strict. (Then again, the total failure of the entire media establishment to come to terms with either the Great Recession or the post-Obama revolutions of Brexit and Trump is an ongoing cultural problem. So perhaps one shouldn't judge Netflix too harshly for failing adequately to adapt a 2000s comic-book to a late 2010s zeitgeist.)

Thomas Hoepker's "most controversial photo" of 9/11

Rather more important is that The Umbrella Academy has a very distinct post-9/11 vibe to it. When Mohamed Atta and his chums brought down the World Trade Centre, they also challenged many of the Baby-Boomers' and Generation X's previously devoutly held beliefs (even if in the end they didn't quite manage to bury them). Thomas Hoeopker's infamous photograph in fact illustrated not so much the indifference of young Americans' to their fellow citizens' suffering but their complete inability to comprehend what was going on. "I don't get it, dude. Why would anyone want to attack us? We're cool, aren't we?" Because whereas previously multiculturalism had been seen only as a Good Thing and America's role on the world stage had only ever (or at least since 'Nam) been seen as "a force for good", suddenly young Americans were invited to re-imagine both America's relationship with the world beyond their borders and their own relationship(s) with the American government itself.

Of course, in a comparatively short period of time the fantasies of the past all bounced back in the shape of conspiracy theories about Bush, oil, evangelical Christianity and (of course) racism. But for a short while the kids who'd grown up watching John Hughes movies and listening to the sonic sewage of MTV felt vulnerable both physically and intellectually. Having finished the first season of The Umbrella Academy therefore, I was interested to discover that it was the brainchild of Gerard Way, who was of course (with My Chemical Romance and in particular 'The Black Parade') one of the very, very few creative talents to have tried in any way to come to terms with 9/11 artistically. And whereas 'The Black Parade' was an unusual and (at least in some ways) original reflection on how young people should think about death, the first Umbrella Academy story gives the dysfunctional early 2000s generation their own comic-book avatars, who are supposed to overcome their own dysfunctionality and bickering in order to stop the End of the World.*

Admittedly, it's hard to make dysfunctional people dramatically engaging, let alone sympathetic. There aren't many people in The Umbrella Academy that we can really be expected to root for. But then one presumes that's the point. Deep down, each one of them is a beautiful damaged human being, and in the end they all love each other, and we learn to love them as they reconnect and rediscover what they have in common. Or... something like that.

The only really good thing about the Netflix adaption is of course Aidan Gallagher. Robert Sheehan finishes comfortably but still distantly in second place, playing a gay character who hardly develops at all. (He goes to 'Nam - having travelled back through time to get there - and comes back not significantly affected by the experience beyond having had a boyfriend who then died. Which makes one wonder if that's really all the significance that war can have to a X-gen/millennial audience.) And unfortunately it also has one really, genuinely bad thing going on, and that of course is the abysmal Ellen Page. And it is unfortunate because she's really, really, really bad. She's clearly supposed to be an "interesting" baddy. But alas, she really, really isn't.

And on the subject of interesting baddies, that brings us neatly to...

The Boys

Should one feel disappointed that a TV streaming series called The Boys hardly has any actual boys in it?†

Only joking! The Boys is glorious, and so gloriously fucked-up it should be on one of Russell Brand's 12-point rehab programs.

Simon Pegg gives it a big daddy kiss of approval. In the original comic book he was actually the inspiration for the main character, and he even wrote a foreword to one of the trade paperbacks by way of a wink and a thank-you. Here he literally plays the daddy of the main character, albeit with a slightly ropy Noo Yawk accent. Karl Urban sports an if anything even ropier London accent, though he goes on more or less to save the series on a character level just by projecting sheer scary bear charisma. Less successful is the actual main character, played tolerably but almost entirely without charisma or insight by Jack Quaid, as is his similarly one-dimensional super-powered girlfriend played by Erin Moriarty. (I just had to google their names, so trust me they're forgettable.)

In fact the series titular heroes - a slightly screwy squad of CIA gunslingers who are dedicated to "bringing down" (politically, legally and literally) the world's superheroes (who in general terms are asshole versions of DC's Justice League) - are surprisingly dull. There's a token black man (of course), who believes in Jesus and lies to his wife. There's a comedy token Frenchman (for some reason), who tortures people to death and then fusses about his baguettes and so on. And then there's Karl Urban's character Butcher, who's out for revenge, and we definitely feel his pain, but then he flies into a homicidal rage and murders Haley Joel Osment (whose guest appearance as a psychic washed-up former child prodigy is quite fabulously dark) in a public lavatory.

And that's sort of it for the goodies. Yes, obviously the series was trying to go down the now well trodden GoT route of not really having goodies and baddies. But there's a sense in which that wasn't quite what was wanted. It's clearly supposed to be "challenging", but if one really wanted to challenge modern norms one could easily have flagged up (for example) why a man and a woman who aren't married to each other should think it's OK to fornicate. Quaid's nerd and Moriarty's feisty blonde are supposed to be the goodies, but they're only goodies in that they both have utterly cliched story-arcs. Her "rebel without a clue" arc is even lamp-shaded by the Wonder Woman character. His arc looks as if he might be a new Breaking Bad-type character in the making, but as of the end of the first seasons he's nowhere near there yet. (In the last episode he shouts "Sorry!" whilst murdering private security guards. Is that supposed to be darkly funny? I'm not even sure that it was.)

"Post-modern? Moi?"

What saves the series rather than the Boys themselves is the baddies, who are of course the not-so-super superheroes. And boy, what wonderful baddies they are! If the X-Men comics humanised heroes and Watchmen and its followers meditated on the dehumanizing effects of having great power and great responsibility, The Boys takes the latter concept one stage further and asks what sort of people superheroes would be in the "real" world of rolling news channels, Hollywood blockbusters and media-savvy politicians.

Obviously the whole world at some point is going to have to come to terms with why we're currently spending the same sort of money at the cinema to see Iron Man thump Thanos as we used to spend on Gone with the Wind (or at any rate on a pseudo-sci-fi Gesamtkunstwerk like Star Wars - or even an American homemade neo-Marxist mythological masterpiece like Titanic). Personally I think there are perfectly legitimate economic reasons why we do. (Patriotic epics are all very well, but by definition they have limited international appeal. And yes, that includes Bondage.) And it's possible that even kiddie wizards and neo-mediaevalism may simply have had their day (especially now that China is opening up to Hollywood). But there's also a clear sense in which the 21st century world has both forgotten the past (the historical epic is currently beyond resuscitation) and lost faith in the future (because sci-fi as a genre isn't much better off), and so it contents itself with a fantastical version of the world of the present day. The question is, does it dare from such a vantage point to say anything about (let alone to) that present-day world. And does it have anything to say?

Like The Umbrella Academy, The Boys does indeed "deal" with 9/11, but having been written by a Brit rather than an actual resident of New York it does so far less obliquely, far more cynically and (arguably) more observantly.†† In fact it has an actual 9/11 calque in the shape of a 'plane hijacking that the heroes then make a hundred times worse when they intervene. And the character who fails to save the day but who then goes on to save virtually the entire show is of course Anthony Starr's Homelander. In the current golden age of television, when writers write to character rather than plot and then write their characters to the actors playing them (even when it means they end up with character-arcs that make no sense in the context of the plot - witness Jaime Lannister and Daenerys for a couple of good examples!) it was perhaps inevitable that having cast somebody really good as their main baddie they would end up whether intentionally or not making him the most "interesting" character of all. Because Anthony Starr, to employ a phrase, absolutely kills it.

Homelander on screen is cleverer, more charming, more three-dimensional, more devious and more ruthless, and altogether more interesting than he was in the comics. Is this just a problem with writing to a genuinely good actor? (And the Great Awokening has certainly sorted the men from, er, the boys in that regard. With fewer white heterosexual roles out there, even a thorough-going scary villain like Homelander, much like Smith in MitHC, will end up becoming a deeply compelling antihero.) He's cynical enough to bring a baby into a room with a bomb just because he wants to know if it will survive the blast - because he wants to know whether it's his or not. And the scene when he finally gets the measure of evil domineering single-mother lipstick-feminist nympho Hillary-clone Madelyn Stillwell and lasers her brain out of her head must have raised a cheer from every God-fearing toxic masculinist throughout the English-speaking world.†††

Umbrella Academy went to town on the idea of superheroes being emotionally immature adults, but The Boys goes all the way to the big city on it. And in doing so it doesn't just dip into a somewhat hackneyed critique of what a liberal American might consider to be a cold-showers boarding school-style of education. Perhaps inadvertently The Boys holds up what a leftist Ulsterman might consider a mirror to America itself. Yes, it turns out that Homelander was brought up in a laboratory. But then "real-life" modern America is itself just as much an artificial being. After all, what other sort of country could ever be satisfied with such an utterly banal version of protestant "Christianity", in which religion is reduced to pop music, scriptural slogans and foreign aid campaigns? (Give me dogmas and incense any day!) In what other sort of country is it considered sexually mainstream for teenage boys to lust over women's mammary glands. (Over here, even straight men prefer their hindquarters.) If America were a superhero it would be Superman, and if Superman were real he'd a smug but neurotic evangelical obsessed with tits.

One final thing that The Umbrella Academy and The Boys have in common is that each breaks with its comic book source by giving its first season a cliffhanger ending, and one indeed that holds out a glimpse of a possible "nostalgic" resolution. The Umbrella Academy's is fairly simple. Even if is about to "get messy", we're still invited to imagine the characters are on the verge of going back through time and having a Quantum Leap-type second chance, with childhood innocence, order and beauty restored. The Boys on the other hand ends with a humdinger of a twist, when we find out that both Butcher's wife and Homelander's son are alive and well and living in a leafy suburb somewhere - though not how any of them will really react to their discovery.

So, have we seen the last of Ellen Page? Will the Umbrella Academy now be able to move on from that quirky, slightly convoluted time-travel story and continue having new wacky adventures for years to come? Will Butcher be able to come to terms with the probability that he was legitimately cuckolded by Homelander and certainly not widowed? Will Homelander give his long-lost son the chance to become the emotionally developed human being he could never be? (Because even being brought up by a single mom beats growing up as a super-powered lab rat.)

With second seasons in the pipeline for both shows, each has plenty to play for.

"No! I am Darth Vader."

*Interestingly there are several musical choices in The Umbrella Academy that tonally feel quite out of place. Generally speaking if I recognize a song in a show's soundtrack the chances are that it's too mainstream for the drama. So 'Run Boy Run' may have briefly fitted the mood for the opening of the second episode. But 'Don't Stop Me Now', though in many ways excellent, certainly didn't. The idea of having any Black Parade songs in there may sound in and of itself incestuous, but given that a Black Parade atmosphere pervades The Umbrella Academy the fact that it wouldn't have fit the tone of the drama rather makes one wonder what tone exactly the show-makers were aiming for.
†There is one, as it happens, and he's mouth-watering.
††Having been brought up on legends about Dunkirk, Brits are perhaps more familiar with the ability government spin-doctors have to turn a monumental establishment fuck-up into first a national tragedy, then a national parable, and finally into a foundational myth for whatever the Government wanted to do in the first place. (As a WWII nerd, one suspects Garth Ennis would appreciate the parallel.)
†††They did repeat Brightburn's goof though - i.e. when Superman's heat vision blasts straight through the back of your skull it's unlikely you'll have time to wince and say "ouch".

@jacksgap nearly #naked #EXPOSED pic.twitter.com/IRmsjW55f9

— Jackson Finnegan (@jackfinnexposed) March 23, 2013

Conspiracy Theories: From Jack the Ripper to COVID-19

Watching dear old Christopher Frayling’s 1988 Timewatch documentary about Jack the Ripper (made to commemorate the centenary of the murders and available on Auntie’s iPlayer), my mind inevitably wondered back to the Coronavirus. Because the Ripper’s identity was just as much of a mystery to the Establishment 130 years ago as the nature of the Covid-19 disease is today. And just as both the MSM and “mainstream” politicians nowadays are finding themselves swept up in theories that even if they aren’t “conspiracy theories” are at least outlandish, so the Metropolitan Police of 1888 often had little more to go on than the evidence-free speculations of the general public.

The breakdown in relations between the police and the press of course has its own echoes in the rising number of horror stories in today’s ’papers and social media about unfortunate plods trying and failing to implement the Government’s social distancing and self-isolation regulations. The search for answers about the virus’s origins and spread has (albeit quite rightly!) turned attention to the secret activities of foreigners (i.e. Red China). And sooner or later, there is no doubt, there will be serious questions asked (even if they’re not in practice asked by particularly “serious” people) about why some social and ethnic groups have been affected by the virus worse that others.

And of course over both phenomena has hung the perennial and ultimate horror of death.

The only real contrast between the London of the 1880s and the London of the 2020s is that nowadays there is almost universal and unconditional respect for doctors and for men of “science” generally. But as the economic consequences of the Government’s response start to become apparent, and as some inevitably start to raise questions about the wisdom of implicitly trusting the judgement of latter-day quacks and wizards (because there is, it turns out, more to good government - and indeed preserving lives - than just “protecting the NHS), that too may very well change.

I feel like laughing but this is tragic.

Very soon, people are going to wake up.

And then they'll realise that however much they wanted this ridiculous, non-curative "cure" it was far, far worse than the disease. https://t.co/eT2XwiT1iv

— Man in Black (@Man_in_Black_63) May 2, 2020