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killushawn · 7 years

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Killlua, Eren, and L... Fuck one, marry one, kill one...... GO.

Do you ever do something, and think to yourself, ‘Wow. Out of everything I’d imagined in my head, this is the worst possible scenario I could have possibly ended up with’? No? Just me?

Well…that whole ‘worst case scenario’ thing happened to me.

My name is Shawn. I’m currently in my early twenties, just living life and trying to get by, and work towards a better future. What we’re all doing, you know? Anyway, moving on.

It’s a typical Friday night. Nothing crazy. I’m out with friends at a local bar. Everyone’s drinking, and we’re having a great time. Nothing out of the ordinary happening.

…Until suddenly it is. The last thing I remember is a flash, a bang…and then black. All black.

I wake up a while later. Whether it’s been a few hours or a few days, I have no idea. I feel super groggy. You know when you fall asleep in the afternoon, and when you fall asleep it feels great, but once you wake back up, it’s a really shitty feeling? Yeah. It’s like that.

Anyway, I wake up, and once I’m able to get my bearings, I realize I’m strapped into a chair. Not a comfy one, either. One of those metal chairs you see in interrogation rooms. And hey, that makes sense, because guess where I am? An interrogation room. Ten points for you.

The room is very plain. Grey walls, a small table and two chairs, a light coming down from the ceiling, and a window (that I can only assume was a one-way mirror), next to a large, gray door.

I try really hard to think back to something I might have done. Something, anything that might land me in police custody. I’ve done some stupid stuff in my life…but nothing that warranted this.

I feel myself getting tired again. The room is the perfect temperature for sleeping. The silence was both terrifying and peaceful. And I find myself too tired to care. I’m in custody, after all.

Just as I start dozing off, the door to my left crashes open. A short, round man in a brown striped suit walks in. I can tell instantly that he meant business. The head of the mafia kind of dude, you know? The type that you’d expect to actually kill his daughter’s prom date. And wouldn’t you know it? His two henchmen waltz in after him. Even they fit the picture of ‘mafia boss’s henchmen’ to the T. Grey suits, glasses, identical looking faces, and looks that feigned an indifference that could kill.

The only difference in the two is the briefcase the one on the right is holding. It’s grey, and it’s handcuffed to his arm. I’m sure it’s filled with happiness and joy. Nothing horrible, right? Right?

So the main dude walks in. And he doesn’t just sit in the chair. He turns the fucker around, and sits in it so he’s facing me, sitting the opposite way the chair is supposed to go. I can tell it’s an intimidation tactic…and it definitely works. I’m terrified.

We sit in silence for a little bit. I feel the sweat dripping, pouring down my face.

More silence.

I get a nervous twitch in my leg that I can’t seem to quell.

More silence.

I feel my breathing getting heavier. I am too used to this feeling to not know the signs of a panic attack. Something needs to happen soon or I’m in huge trouble.

And then the man speaks.

“Mr. Hodson.” The voice is deep. It’s so deep. It’s not of this world deep.

“Y-yeah?” I manage to choke out. My voice sounds weak, pathetic in comparison.

“We’ve been watching you for some time. You caught our eye a while back, and now that we feel confident in who you are, all you’ve accomplished, and all you plan to do, we’ve chosen to act.”

“Watching me for some time? What I plan to do? Who the fuck-“

“And” the man continues, as if reading my thoughts, “Who we are is of little to no concern of yours. You might say we’re just interested in…having a little fun.”

“Having a little fun”…Thoughts are spinning around in my head. What did he mean by fun? Was this not the police? Who had this kind of power?

“O-Okay…” I say, my voice catching again. “What…what kind of fun are you referring to?”

If I wasn’t so tired, maybe I’d have more fight in me. More of my usual sarcastic sass.

“Be quiet. If I choose to tell you, I will do so when I deem fit.” His face is expressionless. A void.

A pause, and then, “I mean, if you’re referring to…that kind of fun… I’m probably too expensive for you.”

There it is.

He looks at me, and without so much as batting an eyebrow, pulls a gun out of his pocket.

And suddenly, I don’t feel so sassy anymore. Silence did always seem like more fun for me.

“My…team…and I have finally finished our little project. And you are who we’ve chosen to take part in our…experimentation.” At this, Mr. Smith with the handcuffed briefcase sets said object down in front of me, types in a code, and cracks the lid. I find myself a little disappointed, there isn’t even a hint of smoke when it opens.

He pulls out some wires with suction cups on the end, and places them on different parts of my arm. See what I mean? Happiness and joy. What else could they be?

He then takes out a helmet, which is quickly slipped on my head. What do you expect me to do? I can’t struggle, yell or fight back. I’m practically eye-fucking the barrel of a sleek, sexy black pistol. One that probably won’t return my calls after two or three dates.

Anyway, Red Shirt #2 then presses a button inside the briefcase. Nothing noticeable happens to me physically, but I hear a strange sound in my ears. Like that high-pitched sound that only some people can hear. But now it’s everywhere.

“Now.” Mafia leader begins, “What I’m about to ask is very important. Fail to do so, and we…will find another test subject.” He waves his gun at me intimidatingly.

I’m practically shitting my pants at this point. It’s obvious to me by now that these are no police officers.

He continues. “Mr. Hodson. Like I said, we’ve been monitoring you a long time. We know what you like, what you hate, who you look up to, and who looks up to you. We know everything there is to know publicly about you. But this needs to come directly from you. Listen carefully.”

It’s almost as though when he speaks, I forget where I am. His voice is too deep…too…mesmerizing.

“I need you to think of your three favorite anime characters in existence.”

…What?

…Like…what the actual fuck?

“What the actual fuck?” I ask. I must have misheard him.

“You heard me.”

I guess I heard him.

“Why do you-“ He clicks back the hammer, cocking the gun. The question dies in my throat.

“Just answer the question. In your head. I won’t be saying another word from this point out. She’ll take over.”

“In my head? She? What the fuck is wrong with this guy. Anime? Anime?! I mean…I don’t want to die so…Here goes? If this is all I have to do… I guess…Killua from Hutner x Hunter…L Lawliet from Death note…and Eren Jaeger from Attack on Titan.”

The briefcase makes a whirring sound, and suddenly a female voice speaks.

“Cognitive recognition software is complete. Analyzing. Killua Zoldyck, Hunter Hunter. L Lawliet, Death Note. Eren Jaeger, Attack on Titan. Analysis complete. Please select a scenario from each of the following options with the characters you have selected: Fuck, Marry, and Kill. Please think your responses, voice recognition will not be necessary.”

“Fuck, Marry and- Are you fucking kidding me?”

The gun taps on the table, ever so slowly, and the man looks into my eyes, not saying a word.

‘What the actual fuck?!” I must be dreaming. There’s no other way to describe what is happening right now.

I can see the man growing more and more impatient, so I force myself to focus.

“Well…if I had to choose…”

The woman speaks up again. “Analyzing. L Lawliet: Kill. Eren Jaeger: Fuck. Killua Zoldyck: Marry. Analysis complete.”

Suddenly, my world turns black. Thousands of images start spilling into my head, and nausea threatens to take over. My whole world is turned upside down, and just when I think I’m going to pass out from the whirring of images, I find myself on a rooftop, late at night, in the pouring rain.

I try to move. I cannot.

It’s as though I’m watching a movie from behind a characters eyes. I am moving, but I am not dictating the movement.

I’m wearing a hood that does a poor job of protection from the rain. In my hands, I’m holding a long, sleek black sniper.

I raise it, slowly, and stare down the barrel. And there he is.

“L?!”

Suddenly, it becomes all too clear what’s about to happen. “No, no no no no! NO!” I scream in my head, but it does nothing. A harsh sound rips through the night. A gunshot.

L collapses. All around, people are screaming, running, and all the while, a pool of blood starts spreading around the corpse of the man I’d looked up to for so long.

Inside, I am broken. I am numb, shocked, and don’t know what to do.

Then, the images start flooding back into me, but this time, I understand them. News headlines reading ‘Kira is unstoppable!’, and ‘World’s greatest detective nowhere to be found!’, and other such articles zip around my head in a frenzied state. The pain inside is too much. Too much. Too much! TOO M-

Suddenly, I’m in a hotel. The emotions have been completely drained from me. It’s as though the last few fucked up minutes of my life have been torn away, leaving me as a slightly more broken clean slate.

The bathroom door opens…and there he is…I try to move, but again, I’m watching a movie, merely along for the ride and feeling every single emotion.

“Hey, are you ready?” Eren Jaeger says, and the words fall lovingly on my ears. They’re full of joy, passion, and above all, lust.

“No, but I don’t think I ever will be. Let’s do this.” I hear myself say, the words sounding more confident than I ever would be in a situation like this.

But hey, this one isn’t so bad. I find myself almost forgetting how crazy my day has been. And of course, the nauseating feeling starts back up, and suddenly I’m seeing flashes of it. It’s passionate, loving, caring, rough, and steamy. The disorienting feeling takes over, however, and again, just as I’m about to pass out, I find myself sitting in a room, alone. It’s a warm sunny day, and the room is completely silent.

I look down, and take a deep breath. I know what this is. My heart skips a beat.

I’m wearing a suit. I feel nothing but a deep, radiating joy. Today is finally the day. After everything, I finally get to marry him.

I stand up, and make my way out the door.

I can’t help but feel an extreme excitement at what’s about to happen. I’m walking towards a pair of double doors, and I know full well what’s on the other side. Music starts up, and all of the noise on the other side of the entrance stops.

This is it.

I push the doors open, and-

The nausea starts up again, this time worse than before. I can tell instantly that something is wrong. Suddenly, I’m back in the room with the three men, and I feel myself shaking, convulsing. The two henchmen are holding me down, while the main guy has his hands in the briefcase, fiddling with different knobs. He looks up, a look of panic in his face, and we lock eyes.

Suddenly, I’m holding a sniper, and killing Killua. My vision blurs, and L is on top of me, a look of deep passion and lust in his eyes. Eren is now standing next to me, holding out his hand, asking me to be his forever. The images continue, each one blurring into something more and more crazy, until…

Black. Nothing but black.

/Fin

#fuck marry kill #eren jaeger #killua zoldyck #L lawliet #hunter x hunter #death note #attack on titan #I WROTE THIS AT WORK #AT WORK #AND I AM WAY TOO LAZY TO EDIT AND FIX THIS UP #I DID NOT WANT THIS #I DIDNT WANT THIS TO BE THIS LONG #BUT THEN I KEPT WRITING #AND STILL WASN'T AT THE FUCK MARRY KILL PART #I FELL TOO DEEP

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ed-star · 4 years

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johnnymundano · 4 years

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Shut In (2016)

Directed by Farren Blackburn

Screenplay by Christina Hodson

Music by Nathaniel Méchaly

Country: France, Canada

Running time: 91 minutes

CAST

Naomi Watts as Mary Portman

Oliver Platt as Dr. Bennett Wilson

Charlie Heaton as Stephen Portman

David Cubitt as Doug Hart

Jacob Tremblay as Tom Patterson

Clémentine Poidatz as Lucy

Crystal Balint as Grace Mitchell

Alex Braunstein as Aaron Hart

Peter Outerbridge as Richard Portman

Shut In is the kind of glossy, well-acted mainstream thriller I sometimes feel polite society would rather I waste my eyes on, rather than ancient, less than salubrious Italian chillers no one normal cares about. Of course when I do watch a glossy, well-acted mainstream thriller like Shut In I often find they are crap, and thus feel a lot better about watching a paraplegic Donald Pleasance solving crimes with a straight razor wielding chimp. Or whatever the hell was going on in Phenomena (1985). Fun Fact: When I first typed the title of this post it came out of my fingers as Shit In. Subconscious much?

If it was my cheeky little subconscious at work it would be quite apt as that’s what they call “psychology” and Shut In concerns Mary (Naomi Watts), a female child psychologist. Mary works from her isolated home since she also has to care for her step-son Stephen (Charlie Heaton), who is in a vegetative state following a car accident in which his father died. That’s a hard row to hoe, so Mary is herself receiving counselling from Dr. Wilson (Oliver Platt). Things may be starting to look up for poor Mary, as she is contemplatively flicking through care home brochures for Stephen while cautiously reciprocating amorous advances from burly Doug (David Cubitt). When Tom (Jacob Tremblay), a patient Mary has become attached to, goes missing Sarah begins hearing strange noises and dreaming strange dreams. As the days pass Mary starts to fear she is losing her mind, and as a snow storm closes the stage is set for a confrontation as predictable as it is silly.

If you want to enjoy the terribleness of Shut In for yourself you should stop reading there (or here, I guess) as I am going to SPOIL it by talking about how awful it is. Unfortunately it is impossible to get across quite how offensively dumb Shut In is without SPOILING it. Or at least, I’m not going to bother finding a way because, hey, life’s too short. And, let’s face it Shut In SPOILS itself by being awful. The set-up is good but, c’mon, who can’t see what’s coming? In the interests of fairness I tried to hide it in the synopsis, but if you watch the movie it’s as predictable as the fact this sentence will end with a full stop. The whole movie is a kind of exercise in flop sweated desperation as it frogmarches its plot into the ridiculous convolutions required to make this insipid bullshittery “work”. And for all its huffing and puffing Shut in still doesn’t work. It’s not even that you can see what’s coming, a Gay Pride float in a Gay Pride Parade has more subtlety, it’s that it all makes no sense whatsoever. In comparison Body Double (1984) looks like a documentary. Shut In doesn’t just require you to suspend your disbelief, it requires you to hang it by the neck until dead.

Shut In is set in a world of idiots, where someone can be diagnosed as being in a vegetative state following a car smash, with the only check being that they haven’t moved much since they were admitted. Apparently nobody has done any tests on Stephen during the 6 months since the crash other than looking at him and deciding he hasn’t moved. Cunningly though, Stephen only moves when nobody is around. He just, you know, “knows” when nobody is around, and so has never been caught once in 6 months. He must be the only teenager in existence who has never been surprised by his parent when doing something he shouldn’t be doing. During those 6 months Mary has been taking care of Stephen’s every need; feeding, bathing and whatevering him. At no point during the 6 months of Mary pushing baby food into his mouth or sponging his Gentleman Jim in the bath has he once broken cover. As Stephen Charlie Heaton (from TV’s ‘80s nostalgia bath and merchandise generator Stranger Things) is okay, but he plays an impossible character. “Evil man-child with preternatural levels of self-control” would task anyone to imbue it with believability. He tries, bless him but ends up as just a common or garden movie nutter.

Naomi Watts is fantastic, but Naomi Watts is always fantastic. Unfortunately for Naomi Watts being fantastic isn’t enough here. She’s like a solid core of believability around which a load of noisy, ridiculous bullshit revolves, constantly reminding you that Naomi Watts should be doing something better with her time. Maybe she took the role as some kind of audition tape, she does get to do a whole load of acting after all; doting mother, crazy lady, fierce protector and drug addled goofball. Because for Shut In’s plot to work (it doesn’t) Stephen has to slip her his pills which cause her to get way spacy. Okay, I’m not a medical professional so maybe they do medicate shut-ins with the kind of drugs Stephen uses to put a crimp in Mary’s reality. Sure, it’s possible that shut-ins are basically doped up and tripping balls all the time in there, but I doubt it. if any medical professionals would like to take the time out of their busy schedule to defend the use of medication in Shut In, you know where to find me. Oh, and poor old lovable Oliver Platt plays a psychiatrist who provides face-time therapy before the script forces him to emulate the Scatman Crothers role in Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). At times, in fact, you can almost hear Shut In grunt with the effort to emulate The Shining, but all it does is make you want to watch The Shining rather than Shut In.

What’s worse is how nasty the (barely sub-) subtext of Shut In is; it seems, intentionally or not, to be that as soon as they reach adolescence you should maybe give some serious thought to killing your kids before they kill you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie as fearful of children growing up. And I’ve seen Christine (1983) more than once. And, yeah, Stephen is Mary’s step-son not her birth son, but that’s obviously just pathetic cowardice on the scriptwriter’s part. It all gets a bit Oedipal in there towards the end, which would be supremely creepy if he was her natural son, and Shut In just isn’t that low class, thanks. It would have been better if Shut In had grasped the nettle and gone low, because supremely creepy is at least interesting. And the movie ends up being supremely creepy accidentally anyway, with its emphasis on kids being monsters once they won’t let you chuch their chubby cheeks anymore. The “feel good” ending is truly horrible. Mary ends up adopting the tiny, cute moppet Tom after killing her own son, Stephen. A smarter movie would have gone in hard on this nastiness and left you uncertain about whether she’ll be violently trading in Tom too once his balls drop. Basically, Shut In needed to be a lot nastier and far smarter, it needed someone like Brian de Palma to work. But there is no one else like Brian De Palma, and so Shut In doesn’t have Brian De Palma, and so it doesn’t work.

Seriously, Shut In is so bad it’s baffling. It looks like the kind of movie mums and dads like, it’s got a great cast, it’s civilly filmed and there’s an onus on suspense rather than gore. I’m not averse to that myself on occasion, but then I am a dad. But, Christ, the plot to this thing is so ridiculous it should star George Hilton and Edwige Fenech and come in a banana yellow blu-ray case, with a commentary track by Troy Howarth consisting of him just laughing for 91 minutes.

#Shut In #Movies #Thriller #Horror #Farren Blackburn #Christina Hodson #Naomi Watts #Oliver Platt #Charlie Heaton #The 2010s #2016 #France #Canada

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 5 years

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THE ESSAYIST IS MANY THINGS: egotistic is definitely one of them. This cuts both ways, however. Essays can be focused on the writerly self, but they can also offer an escape. As Montaigne said well over 400 years ago, one gets rather wrapped up in oneself. “I have no more made my book than my book has made me — a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life.” Yet the essayist also retreats. Emerson saw his reflections as solitude, where “all mean egotism vanishes” and he becomes “a transparent eyeball,” a “nothing.” The essay is much more than that too, of course. A riff or a sally, a fight or a laugh. A journey, a ramble, a wandering about. Beyond such meanderings — the digressions on which the essay thrives — the nature of the form is itself formless. It might be “short or long,” as Woolf wrote in 1922, “serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza,” or — recalling Samuel Butler — “about turtles and Cheapside.” But so often, as she wrote on Montaigne, the essay turns back to oneself, “the greatest monster and miracle in the world.”

Fast-forward almost a century and we have Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant by Joel Golby, which takes up (and takes down) his own monstrous ego with delicious panache. You probably know of his work. He’s a crusading hero for twenty- and thirtysomething UK renters who frequently lambastes the hellish property market in his regular “London Rental Opportunity of the Week” column for Vice. From an exposé of a toilet jammed inside a shower at the foot of the bed, to a Beckettian litany going over and over the nature of a bedsit with multiple sinks but no adequate space for a mattress, Golby wages a single-handed war against that peculiar subspecies of human: the landlord. He’s massively popular, not least with those of us destined to forever move from one overpriced grief hole to the next. Golby does absurdist humor on other themes, too. A piece asking questions about why Pete Doherty was seen “aggressively eating” a massive breakfast outside a greasy spoon in Margate; 101 ways to ruin a party; “deep dives” into property TV shows; the likelihood of certain celebrities eating worms if they go on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! One recent column on “The New Rules of Being a Millennial” is both caustic and community-building. If Lena Dunham (as a “voice of her generation” — that now somewhat hackneyed joke in Girls) was a member of the precariat and grew up in Chesterfield, she might turn phrases like this:

The problem with the “us” thing is that we (Us) do not have a collective term for ourselves which isn’t wildly inaccurate or painfully cringey. “Hipster” suggests a level of effort that I think we’re all big enough to admit we don’t subscribe to. Does “millennials” work? Sort of, but not. It’s too broad. Plus, “millennial” is more-or-less a slur these days, isn’t it. Nobody self-identifies as one. It’s just something your dad calls people with university debt. It’s nothing. The people I’m talking about are the ones who know what De School is and don’t really know what a “James Arthur” is.

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant is a gathering of 21 new essays and three updated pieces, and arrives at a time when emerging writers are voicing their histories and outlooks in hilarious and poignant ways that befit modern anxieties. The Chicago-based blogger-turned-writer Samantha Irby’s debut collection, Meaty, and her second, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, both offer takes on bad sex, Crohn’s disease, life as a woman in her mid-30s, loss, and more, and recent collections from Hanif Abdurraqib, Chelsea Hodson, Scaachi Koul, and others reflect an exciting boom in the genre in the last few years alone. The essay has made a comeback, but it was always powerful. Again, Woolf said it best. “You can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other,” she wrote in “The Decay of Essay-Writing” in 1905: “its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities.”

There’s definitely something about essays, in their long-held comic tradition — “the joke” of literature, as G. K. Chesterton framed them — that resonates strongly today. After all, they are easily digestible, and in turn digest ideas. They are often simply “brain soufflés,” as David Lazar puts it in After Montaigne: a “walk-in closet of self or selves” ever more popular in our era of selfies and accumulations of followers on social media. Indeed, contemporary essays are often thoughts that gestate online, developed from blogs or one-off pieces: the sort of text with “14-minute read” under a byline for the crushing commute to work. They can also be surprisingly long and detailed, putting pay to the redundant idea that millennials cannot focus on anything beyond a shakshuka brunch, or — as the Daily Mail might interminably trot out — avocado toast. Caity Weaver’s epic quest to eat limitless mozzarella sticks as part of a TGI Friday’s promotion requires a good chunk of your time. John Saward’s classic reflections on Mike Tyson are as astute and amusing as Hazlitt. But with Golby we’re treated to two things at once: the pleasure of his wit and style as he ranges his themes, and a sustained, near-Swiftian satire on the very real and material challenges driven by the United Kingdom’s housing crisis. It’s not as simple as just laughing at £1,894 for a fold-out bed in Marylebone, or hedonism gone wrong; in Brilliant, we find a writer gunning for a fight.

In “PCM” (“Per Calendar Month”), Golby lays out the vagaries of dealing with the feudal overlords that might kick you out or take your deposit at the drop of a hat:

The landlords were very keen to stress when I was viewing the house that they were Reasonable People, which I have learned to now take from landlords as an immediate red flag that actually means “I am insanely deranged,” but I didn’t know this then; I was but a young bear cub, tiny and clear-eyed and full of trust, and plus desperate.

Golby intersperses his stories of the worst offenders with brutal, bloody fantasies of decimating each and every one: “The sound a landlord makes when you nail their toes down into the wood floor beneath them is, ‘This isn’t the definition of normal wear and tear.’” This is followed by an adroit move to his notion of “capsule coziness”: the kind of Scandinavian homely warmth called hygge that people were raving about a few years ago that in actuality equates to a herbal tea, a candle, and a “heather-colored blanket” you have to pack and move with every time the tenancy is up. Yet for all his inherently socialist leanings — this piece includes a well-researched outline of the real estate sector going back to 1986 — Golby is the first to admit that he is a slave to late capitalism’s charms. “Monopoly is the best game because the Actual Devil lives inside it,” he writes in another piece, before confessing to his rapacious greed and inhuman dealings on the board. “When I play Monopoly,” he writes,

I am David Cameron rimming Maggie off, I am Edwina Currie fucking John Major harder than he can fuck her back, I am a roaring-drunk Boris Johnson, I am Tory to the core-y, I am shaking hands with property developers in shady backroom multimillion-pound deals, I am blocking social housing to build luxury apartments in an effort to squeeze an extra £200K into my own private account, I am wearing a panama hat in the Cayman Islands and laughingly lighting a cigar with a £50 note.

In the United Kingdom there is a generational moniker: “Thatcher’s children.” If you were born in the ’80s, so the tag implies, you’ve been raised on rampant conservatism — the assumedly money-grabbing offspring spawned by her regime. But in truth we’re more conflicted. Society has raised us to believe getting on the property ladder is of paramount importance, but the reality of life-long renting and being pushed out of the city draws a big line between those who gained and those who lost under and after Thatcher. That Golby spins comedy gold from such a sorry state of affairs is testimony to how much we need a voice like his. Given his toothsome fight against oppressive property-owning profiteers, it is tempting to ascribe a cohesive political drive to Brilliant’s author. I asked him over email if he was interested in the horrors of capitalism, given how much of a theme it is in his work. “Mm, yes and no,” he responds. “My politics are, like baby-level deep. I was on a podcast the other week and everyone kept saying ‘neoliberal’ in a natural, casual air that made me sweat. I know the right and the left and vaguely where I fall on that spectrum … but beyond that I don’t feel qualified to talk. I don’t have the vocabulary.”

A similar modesty emerges with the very title of the book, even in its absurd egotism. “The title was initially there to make me laugh,” Golby explains, “then over time it became supremely annoying. It’s hard to pronounce without counting the Brilliants on your fingers: naming the book in this way has become the ultimate self-own.” One also finds this “ultimate self-own” in Golby’s approach to the book’s other major theme: masculinity. He riffs on the ineffable quality of “Machismo” (Golby’s brand is “soft knits and high necks” and a complex skin-care regime that includes the joys of an eye mask), offers an exhaustive, obsessive overview of all the Rocky films ranked in order of greatness, and marvels at Lenny Kravitz’s ability to pull off a leather jacket. (Golby decidedly cannot.) This deconstruction of masculinity accounts for some of the book’s funniest moments:

I realized a way of upgrading myself from a 5-out-of-10 to a solid 6 is to get a special trimmer to do the edging on my beard. And suddenly I went from a bar-of-soap-in-the-shower man to a guy with flannels, with precise and expensive tweezers. A guy who says this: “£55 for a moisturizer? Hell fucking yes!”

I asked Golby why masculinity can be so funny. “Well, because it’s absurd,” he replies, “but also it’s been one of the overriding influences on culture for the past million years, and we’re only just — just! — cracking out from that shadow … A lot of the things every man who has ever lived or ever died, a lot of what he has ever done, has been due to some deep roiling well of masculinity.”

I wonder if Golby is quite apart from the hegemonic masculinities (as initially theorized by R. W. Connell) that he decries. Brilliant arrives on the shoulders of gender theory: generations of feminist work with which emergent men’s studies became conversant in the 1980s, in works by Peter Schwenger, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lynne Segal, and many others. A major subject of such studies was the “New Man” figure that appeared in popular culture in that decade — an emotionally more intelligent, respectful of women, post-yuppie incarnation — which in turn led to the “New Lad” of the 1990s. Integral to the British “lad culture” associated with the Britpop musical genre, the “New Lad” has been characterized by Rosalind Gill as an ironic, “beer and shagging,” Nuts- or Loaded-reading, cheeky manchild. We found him in David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s comedy and the “Three Lions” football anthem, for instance, in the TV series Men Behaving Badly and in the fiction of Nick Hornby and Martin Amis. “Ladlit,” as Elaine Showalter named it, is a direct forerunner of Brilliant, which — over 20 years after the classic “lad” film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and in the light shined on shameful male behavior by the #MeToo movement — inherits and plays with its own genre heritage.

On the one hand, Golby retrenches old notions of manhood. “The Full Spectrum of Masculinity as Represented by Rocky in the Rocky Movies” tangent is a somewhat limited list that veers between brute force and fragility, relying on tired myths as the joke. There’s a familiarity in this move, a well-worn trope. After all, as Steve Connor wrote in 2001 (in “The Shame of Being a Man”), talk about being a man usually has “tucked into it a snicker at its bumptious presumption”: “[W]e find it hard to take masculinity as seriously as we suppose.” That Golby turns his comedy on this theme so frequently suggests a reiteration not wholly free of its antecedents. On the other hand, however, he’s doing something utterly new with the late 2010s permutation of “lads.”

Golby’s Instagram is often one long stream of captioned images sending up exhausted “haway the lads” lager-swilling clichés with a belligerent repetition of “love and appreciation to the lads” — men and women — until it goes from funny to irritating to funny again. He’s also aware of the ways in which, as Connor puts it, “to write is to be unmanned, meritoriously to unman oneself.” Golby embraces such “unmanning.” He explores his own sensitivity and offers a catalog of “All the Fights I’ve Lost.” He’s part of a new generation that knows (yet still laughs) at how, as Connor again writes, “[m]en are spent up: masculinity is a category of ruin, a crashed category. It’s a bust.” Golby is also aware of its persistent homosocial nature: the values and relations exchanged between men, as Sedgwick’s ground-breaking work revealed. “I have to have a very small-voice conversation with myself every time I put a selfie on Instagram,” he tells me. “‘Is this … lame? Will the other boys … mock me?’ It’s an insane and stupid thing to be under a thrall to.”

The homosocial dimension of Golby’s thoughts on masculinity might explain the book’s main oddity. Brilliant has no women in Golby’s love life to speak of. No formative crushes, sex, dating stories — nothing except an encounter with a man in Barcelona selling state-of-the-art sex dolls. The cringeworthy, non-erotic nature of these scenes made me wince with the uncanny feeling Ernst Jentsch and later Freud associated with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s automaton doll Olympia in The Sandman. They are, as Golby puts it, “eerie”: “balloon-like breasts w/ bullet nipples, sagging unlocked jaw w/ a raw pink tongue, splayed neat rubberized vagina, a one-size-fits-all butthole put out with a drill.” Again, we’re less in the realm of sexuality and more in gendered constructs. Golby offers a feminist take on AI and consent, yet feels disquietingly shorn of “the pulsing core of straight masculinity” when surrounded by these uncanny valley robots. He has it both ways: exceeding the “busted” category of manhood, yet circling back to it for a laugh. Is this a new new laddism? The book provokes such a question.

There’s an adolescent immaturity to Golby’s writing, to be sure, but a joyful one, with a comedic suaveness that demands attention. He consistently delivers the jokes through distinctive stylistic moves. Words and phrases pile up in heaps until bam! — the thing tips over and you’re laughing, rereading. He even manages to pull off some comedy in the opening essay, the moving yet funny “Things You Only Know If Both Your Parents Are Dead” that appeared in an earlier form on Vice and more recently the Guardian, about being orphaned at 25. He repeats “My parents are dead” no fewer than 22 times, yet still finds humor in grief, in um-ming and ahh-ing over which kind of beer basket to plump for for a neighbor, or buying vol-au-vents at Tesco. (There was more about the ubiquitous supermarket Tesco, but it was subbed by the US editor for being a bit too British. Other Britishisms include: the cheap pub chain Wetherspoons; the cigarette papers Rizla; tights.) This is perhaps one of the most powerful things about the book: people have reached out to Golby after that essay’s first publication, “as if I am some sort of griefsaver,” but, as he says to friends, “no two griefs are the same. They are always different spikey, awkward shapes. There’s no clean, easy way to vomit grief up out of your system. It just works its way through you in whatever way it chooses to.”

In some ways, as with his romantic life, Golby keeps a lot back, but aspects of Brilliant, like his loss, are totally up front — a juxtaposition that gets us back to the question of ego. I wonder if he considers himself private. “I don’t know if I’m wildly private,” he tells me. “I tend to tweet every thought I have, Instagram my dinner with a forced hashtag and wrote an essay [“Ribs”] about attempting auto fellatio — so let’s not worry too much about that.” Golby still harbors a strong, endearing desire to go to America and “hole up in a motel room with every snack I’ve ever seen on TV and watch 24-hour news.” (He’s wanted to do this since he was about eight.) He admits that his book is all about him, as he has had to convey what it’s about to many an editor’s bemusement with “a blank stare and say something along the lines of: ‘things that I like. I am the theme.’” Ultimately, he confesses, “more than anything else it is, still, fundamentally, just an ego trip thing. I have an enormous ego. An insufferable one.”

In the end, it is Golby’s satire that carries most weight. I ask him one final question, which was always on my lips as I read his columns and choice bits of the book. Is it possible for a human being to become a landlord without turning into a monster? “No,” he replies, firmly. “It’s not possible to become a landlord without turning into a monster. It’s not even possible to conceive of the idea of becoming a landlord without some hollow part of you already being monstrous. No landlord can escape the curse of their own landlordism. Their soul is condemned before they even pull up outside the auction house.”

Cathryn Setz is an Associate Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

The post The Ultimate Self-Own: On Joel Golby’s “Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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