What will it take? A flood over Europe, a fist in the face, or what?

[sovay]

I don't know what I am supposed to feel about the new national low of three mass shootings in seven days. I don't mean that facetiously or disingenuously; I know two people who didn't get shot in different cities by sheer chance of timing and it doesn't feel very different than knowing friends who work at synagogues or kids who go to school, but it also feels as though it should: the circle is tightening. It is not normal; it's already normal, it keeps happening. It serves a purpose. And it's not exactly a shock to me that the rest of the planet seems to be imploding to keep time, but I find the news out of Kashmir terrifying. I spent almost all of today working, not even looking at the news. Have some unrelated links.

1. gwynnega linked me to a clip of John Hurt as the Fool in a 1983 Granada King Lear. He's marvelous: dark, quick, nervous, shape-changing. I see the production also contains people like Diana Rigg, David Threlfall, and Laurence Olivier, but I want to watch the rest of it just for Hurt. I am still not reconciled to his loss.

2. It fits with awkward neatness into the conversation I was just having with asakiyume about the tilt toward Confederate narratives in movies of the American Civil War, but I am dearly hoping this movie is good, because there is still not exactly a surfeit of f/f (or nb/f) historical romances on film: Union (2019). Also I might as well re-read selkie's The Covert Captain (2018) because "Sweet Polly Oliver" is not getting out of my head any time soon.

3. I am trying to keep the message of this sampler in mind; it's true.

P.S. Courtesy of spatch: elephant's toothpaste. I was not expecting it to achieve liftoff.

Comments

[swan_tower]

I might have viewed the trailer for Union more charitably if I hadn't watched it immediately after the trailer for Harriet, which as near as I can tell is the first biopic of Tubman and very nearly the first screen adaptation of her story. It didn't help that the Union trailer was just abysmal as an example of the genre; I more or less stopped paying attention to it because although I loves me some "disguise yourself as a man" plots and a f/f or nb/f romance, historical or otherwise, is the kind of thing I would normally want, I was bored stiff by the actual footage onscreen and also turned off by the Confederate angle. I have a hard time feeling like what we need right now is a story about how Union soldiers murdered a child and a Confederate woman joined up in a war that didn't seem to involve black people at all. (Though admittedly there may have been some in the trailer and I just missed them because I had tuned out.)

[sovay]

Harriet, which as near as I can tell is the first biopic of Tubman and very nearly the first screen adaptation of her story.

I've heard about that! I'm really looking forward. Tubman is one of the earliest historical figures I can remember seeing dramatized, in a production by the Underground Railway Theater when I was in elementary school that I still have vivid memories of.

I have a hard time feeling like what we need right now is a story about how Union soldiers murdered a child and a Confederate woman joined up in a war that didn't seem to involve black people at all.

That's much of what I mean about hoping it's good: historically-narratively as well as representationally. The alternative would be illuminating in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of acceptable American narratives, but I would be much more sad.

(I did not watch the trailer; I really don't like trailers. I try to avoid them unless they are actively recomended to me—cf. recently The Lighthouse. Captain America remains an outlier and should not be counted.)

[lauradi7dw]

I stopped trying to watch the trailer when one of the soldiers said "sir, we have a situation." (or something quite similar). I am not an experienced n-gram searcher, but it seems to agree with me that such a sentence was not current in Civil War times.
I am also looking forward to Harriet.