Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

America a Prophecy 3: The Only Thing that Stops a Bad Guy with an Emotion is a Good Guy with an Emotion

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Scrape away the deconstructive close-reading, scrape away the history of decline, scrape away the entire wilfully absurd edifice of an annual blog series devoted to it and what you are left with is an unusually bathos-heavy bit of glurge.

The word “glurge” was coined by Patricia Chapman on a mailing list attached to the website Snopes. “Glurge” referred to a specific category of urban legend—the heartwarming, inspirational, and completely uncited and often fact-free stories that were often sent via e-mail in the late 90s and early 00s by the sorts of elderly relatives who would soon be preyed upon by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart. The term originally came out of the site’s then focus on urban legends, describing a common style of story characterized by an unabashed and excessive sentimentality. A doctor operates for free on a young girl that once gave him a glass of milk. A dying child comes back from the brink when her brother sings “You Are My Sunshine.” A marine comforts a dying stranger in the hospital. Stuff like that. 

9/11 provided something of a heyday of glurge—a sticky, cloying spray of it so voluminous that it becomes possible to identify distinct subgenres of glurge. There’s state glurge, like a motley collection of Members of Congress singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps. There’s imperialist glurge, like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.” There’s first responder fetishism, stories of American resilience, impassioned insistence about the dignity of American Muslim. And then, of course, there’s the category that John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith comic fits into: public mourning.

Public mourning is a concept I’ve always had a complicated relationship with. There’s a stagedness to it—a sense of perfunctory ritual in the place of actual emotive content—that runs counter to how I experience grief. Equally, of course, there are people who value it highly. One need only look at the scenes taking place in the UK when the last post went up and the sheer number of people standing in an hours-long line to shuffle past a box to see that these rituals of mourning carry weight. This is an important thing to keep in mind when we look at a misfiring bit of public mourning like the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip.

On the other hand, it’s not an especially radical observation to note that public mourning really can go embarrassingly wrong. Perhaps the worst piece of public mourning glurge I ever saw for 9/11 came a few years before I wrote that essay, in the parking lot for my vet’s office in Florida, where a car routinely sat bearing a bumper sticker that read “am I the only one who still mourns 9/11?” Like the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip, this bumper sticker provokes a certain awed horror. The question it asks is singularly stupid—the only possible response is “of course you aren’t, you narcissistic twatwaffle.” But this reveals what should be perfectly obvious, which is that the question is rhetorical.…

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“The special hell” (Firefly’s paradox)

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“We can’t die, Bendis. You know why?” Captain “Mal” Reynolds asks one of his soldiers during a pivotal battle in the first scene of Firefly. “Because we are so very pretty.” A moments later, Mal’s side, the renegade “Independents,” is defeated by the Alliance, an autocratic interplanetary supergovernment. As the Alliance’ spaceships descend from the sky, Mal watches in horror at the collapse of everything he’s stood for. It’s a terrific prelude, without which the remainder of Firefly would be robbed of context and drama.

After the collapse of the Independent cause, a spiritually broken Mal captains Serenity, a space cruiser in which he and a crew of vagabonds and refugees do odd jobs and bicker at each other in Whedon’s signature deadpan. The premise is essentially “Stagecoach meets The Wild Bunch,” where characters from different social and cultural backgrounds attempt to scrape by on the economically depressed galactic outskirts. Through it all, Mal is an obstreperous yet sympathetic juggernaut, knocking over anyone who gets in his way, but always looking after the crew that constitutes his found family.

On rewatching Joss Whedon’s Firefly for the first time in years, two things strike me. One is that Firefly is Joss Whedon’s finest work by orders of magnitude. The other observation is that Firefly is Whedon’s most politically grotesque work. For all that Whedon’s abuse of crew and actors behind the scenes is now widely known, Firefly’s pernicious influence has broadly been overlooked. It’s guaranteed that this is partly because Firefly is the martyred younger child of Whedon’s pantheon, slaughtered in its manger by Fox not even a full network season into its run. But this beloved child packed a lot of reactionism into its 14 episodes and one feature film. All of which is to say, Firefly is one of the most interesting texts to come out of post-9/11 network television.

Joss Whedon’s work had largely fallen out of favor with consensus even before his public outing as an abusive and manipulative boss. Since then, it seems to have taken a step down in the popular consciousness. And for all that a lot of this seems to be performative (why people feel guilty about liking a TV show 20 years before they find out about the creator’s abusive behavior is beyond me), it’s also not hard to see why. Whedon’s work is permeated by 90s male feminism, the tropes of early Aughts network television, and the knowledge of the banter-ridden genre dramas that would come after it. These things aren’t Whedon’s fault as such, but they aggressively ride against the legacy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Firefly has aged slightly better than Whedon’s other shows by merit of having a stronger premise than them. Buffy, for all its genuine innovations at the time, has a premise that doesn’t boil down to much more than “what if a teenage girl kicked ass?”, Angel is simply about someone’s boring ex-boyfriend being sad, and Dollhouse never seems to realize that its premise is just “rape victims for sale.”…

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Oppenheimer

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This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

If you fire a neutron into a uranium nucleus, you may get a nuclear chain reaction. If you fire good source material at Christopher Nolan, he might not make a good movie, but sometimes he will.

Oppenheimer is one of those occasions in which Nolan’s entanglement with source material produces a properly thrilling movie (don’t worry, I’ll stop the quantum mechanics jokes here). This is Nolan’s best movie since at least The Prestige, or maybe ever. Nolan’s ostentatious epics can misfire, usually if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. With Oppenheimer, he’s put himself in a place that matches his ambitions.

Oppenheimer spends every minute of its runtime striving to be one of the great Hollywood epics of cinematic history. It is meticulously complex and massive, darting across space and time with a precision that Memento only hinted at. Nolan’s assertion in interviews that Oppenheimer’s story is the most dramatic ever told is hard to argue with: if you want to tell an epic story, make a movie about the Manhattan Project. Comparisons to Lawrence of Arabia, consciously invited by the text, are conspicuously earned. This is a movie whose supporting cast includes Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Edward Teller. If Oppenheimer wasn’t a triumph, it could only be a disaster. There’s no room for this movie to be passable or even just “pretty good” — Oppenheimer wants to be mentioned in the same breath as The Godfather and The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Miraculously, this works. The storytelling on display is as good as the story earns. Nolan’s studious fixation on American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s excellent biography of Oppenheimer, has paid off. Knowing the story of Oppenheimer’s life inside-out, Nolan fits it neatly into his old favorite mode of a nonlinear puzzle box. The result is as neatly told as The Prestige, with a stomach-churning quality that The Dark Knight only managed in spots.

J. Robert Oppenheimer is of course much more interesting than the nom de guerre “Father of the Atomic Bomb” would indicate. He was a profoundly insecure man, brilliant and rash in equal measure, alarmingly detached and loyal to a fault. Oppenheimer simultaneously celebrated left-wing causes, including Spanish anti-fascists and European Jewish refugees, and built the imperialist atomic bomb that Truman used to murder a quarter-million Japanese people. He served his country and was defeated by antisemitic Red Scare tactics. His contributions to the nuclear storm of the 20th Century were followed by seeming contrition (humble or self-serving, we may never know). One may argue whether any of this matters more than the civilian lives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and if you know my politics, I’m sure you know my answer). But the evil he contributed to doesn’t make his story any less fascinating. If you’re going to make a movie about an infamous servant of American imperialism, Oppie is the guy to make it about.…

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Barbie

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This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

On the way home from a family screening of Barbenheimer, my parents and I made our cases for which of the two brilliant movies we’d just watched was the better one. Everyone present had hugely enjoyed both Barbie and Oppenheimer, but we were split down the middle about which movie we’d preferred. My mother strongly made her argument by pointing out that you could fairly identify some movies that are sort of similar to Oppenheimer, but nobody can name a movie similar to Barbie.

This was a fair point. Barbie has moments that recall His Girl Friday, The Wizard of Oz, and Singin’ in the Rain. It certainly draws from the big budget Technicolor Hollywood musical and the screwball comedy, and in its own way revives both of those genres. But Barbie is hard to even classify by a basic genre like “fantasy” or “comedy.”

And this clearly has to do with who’s writing the movie. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are simply incapable of writing the same movie twice. Gerwig’s three solo directorial features to date are a high school movie set in the Aughties, a Civil War-era adaptation of Louisa May Alcott, and Barbie. My mother pointed out that Gerwig has made three completely different movies much the same way Christopher Nolan has made the same movie 12 times.

A lot of what makes Barbie so striking is its meticulously curated unreality. Barbieland is a classic Hollywood movie set that would make The Wizard of Oz blush, with its striking pink that caused an international shortage and a vibrant palette that makes Arriflex look like vintage Technicolor. Nobody is Barbieland is a real person — props are their reality. This is a Barbie movie that treats Barbie with weird literalism.

There are early indicators that Barbie is offbeat. The PG-13 rating is striking for a Barbie movie. So is the opening homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, where narrator Helen Mirren introduces the mythology of Barbie, with Margot Robbie standing in for Kubrick’s monolith. The whole aesthetic is in the uncanny valley in a way blockbusters, with their current half-hearted commitment to pseudo-reality, just aren’t anymore. All of these things are quirks rather than bizarre moments of transformation. It’s when Barbie starts saying lines like “do you guys ever think about dying?” that Barbie goes off the rails in a delightful way.

During my second viewing of Barbie, my partner Janet, who is a philosophy major and has read her share of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, said Barbie’s irrepressible thoughts of death marked the moment she realized that Barbie was in fact a weird movie. When we left the theater, Janet pointed out that Gerwig had actually kind of nailed existentialism. And again, given that this movie is about Barbie dolls, this is extraordinarily weird.…

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“It’s called capitalism” (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny)

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It’s a tragedy that when given a choice between The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi as models for blockbuster storytelling, Hollywood chose The Force Awakens. That choice became horribly clear when The Rise of Skywalker took The Force Awakens’ deference to nostalgia, quick and easy monomyth stories, and low-key conservatism to a whole new level of self-sabotage. To an extent, this was inevitable. A retro franchise like Star Wars was always going to revert to an aesthetic conservatism. But given how The Last Jedi found creative and fun ways to tell stories without that space, Hollywood’s rejection of new and exciting directions for the same old shit is pretty disheartening.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a post-Force Awakens movie. All of its pleasures are drawn from earlier Indiana Jones movies: life-threatening stunts, arcana wrapped in riddles, and a bellicose Harrison Ford growling at the supporting cast. Like The Force Awakens, The Dial of Destiny competently delivers many of the thrills of its predecessors, assembling something that looks like an Indiana Jones movie, and gives its largely middle-aged, divorced audience a perfectly enjoyable two-and-a-half hours between alimony payments.

And the nice things to say about The Dial of Destiny mostly run out there. This movie is first and foremost completely safe. Not that I was expecting an Indiana Jones movie to be a thesis statement: this was always going to be a comforting, mindless blockbuster. But The Dial of Destiny doesn’t care to be anything more than an Indiana Jones movie. Given that we already have four of these by one of the greatest directors in Hollywood history, the existence of a fifth movie helmed by a lesser filmmaker is questionable.

We’ve danced around director James Mangold so far. Obviously anybody was going to pale in comparison to Spielberg. Mangold makes the wise choice not to simply imitate Spielberg’s style. It’s hard to pin down any particular shot in The Dial of Destiny that feels like Mangold trying to do Raiders. The resulting problem is that the movie lacks a distinctive visual style. In lieu of trying to do Spielberg, it doesn’t end up doing much of anything. Even The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for all its flaws and essential pointlessness, is visually striking when the aliens are offscreen. For the first time, Indiana Jones looks like any other Hollywood movie, with all of the associated bad color grading and inadequate lighting (the opening sequence, set almost entirely at night, is particularly egregious on this count).

Beyond that, The Dial of Destiny (what a weak title) is a smattering of aborted plot threads with some miniscule triumphs in the mix. An incoherent Three Days of the Condor-style subplot involving Jones getting framed for murder is dropped early on. Shaunette Renée Wilson, while injecting some energy into the movie’s first act, doesn’t get to follow up on the human drama of a Black woman working for the American Intelligence Community in the age of Hoover and Fred Hampton.…

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An American’s Guide to Czech Culture: The Joke

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I wrote this a couple weeks ago, when Milan Kundera was still alive. I’m posting it unedited as tribute. Soon I’ll post another tribute to Kundera.

Few names loom as large in Czech literature as Milan Kundera (pronounced MEE-lahn KOON-dair-ah). At the age of 94, Kundera is undoubtedly the foremost living Czech novelist, although given his ban from Czechoslovakia and his long-term residence in France, he prefers to be known as a French author. From his output, including The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he provides a consistent yet alienating body of work. His novels, internally separated into seven parts, often navigate between viewpoint chapters of characters in a proto-Song of Ice and Fire way, toe the line between fiction and memoir. At points in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera acknowledges that his characters are fictional. Those two novels tackle the horrors of Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia, and how characters try to numb themselves to those horrors through destructive sexuality and chauvinism. Kundera is not a comforting writer, but he’s a profoundly instructive one.

Kundera ends The Joke, the story of a Czech man who has his life destroyed by the Soviet regime in Czechoslovakia over an off-handed joke to his girlfriend, with the date of the book’s completion: “Completed December 5, 1965.” In those days, Czech art was booming with the Prague Spring, a rejuvenation of their culture. Less than three years later, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. The Joke, like its subject, was banned.

The Joke is a counterintuitively funny book, in that it’s amusing but not in the way its title would have you believe. A reader would see a book titled Žert (Czech for “joke”) on a shelf, pick it up, and encounter a grim story about Soviet labor camps, virulent misogyny, and the decline of Slavic folk culture under Stalinism. The protagonist, a student named Ludvík, makes a joke to his girlfriend about the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which leads to him being branded a Trotskyist, being forced out of the Party and his university, and spending years in a Soviet labor camp. It’s a profoundly upsetting book, if not quite as bleak and hopeless as it sounds. The Joke is funny, like I said — the premise is absurd and depressing in equal measures, and the denouement includes one of the funniest failed suicide attempts I’ve seen in fiction. But it’s very much the story of a man broken by the U.S.S.R., written by a young man in the dying days of the Prague Spring, before the U.S.S.R. totally decimated Czechoslovakia.

One suspects Kundera is wrestling with his own past here. In his days as a student, Kundera was a militant Stalinist who joined the party in the days after the coup, when Soviet-backed forces took over the Czechoslovak government. He may have turned over a dissident to the regime — we’ll never know. And his early poetry reflects a Stalinist worldview. By the time Kundera wrote The Joke, he clearly had a far more grounded view on the Czechoslovak Communist Party.…

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Tombs and Seances and Murders (Book Three, Part 69: Brought to Light)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Moore made savvy use of his artist in Brought to Light, offering a wordy and dense history of the CIA for Sienkiewicz to offer his abstract and often terrifying illustrations to.

You wonder why the children of America are obsessed with death? You wonder why rock groups that look like corpses and zombie comic-book heroes are so goddamn popular here? It’s just the same way your Victorians loved their tombs and seances and murders. The American Empire is dead and does not know it. Like your empire before it, it’s only aware of the truth in its sleep.” – Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

The eagle presents himself as a salesman, and launches into a pitch, though for what exactly is not clear. The content, however, is a history of the CIA, narrated to the reader over twenty-one of the comic’s thirty pages. This is a complicated frame for a story that could have been presented more straightforwardly, but it gives Moore several advantages. The eagle functions as an unreliable narrator—a point that’s made emphatically clear at the outset, when he talks about the CIA’s relationship with Congress in terms of how “My wife, she holds the purse strings, see? I gotta account for every cent. As for laying down the law… hell, she practically drafted a Bill ‘o Rights!… Bitch watches my every move. Still, there’s ways an’ means. What she don’t know ain’t gonna hurt her.” (This stylized dialogue provides the unquestionable highlight of the Gary Lloyd audio adaptation, with Alan Moore voicing the eagle in a style that could be described as “the voice he’d developed for ‘Old Gangsters Never Die’ on several lines of cocaine” but is frankly far better simply sought out and experienced for one’s self.)

This gave Moore three separate ways of revealing information. On the most basic level, he could simply have the eagle convey some historical fact—for instance, that “over in Cuba this friendly dictator named Fulgencio Batista ad been running things along with Santos Trafficante, the Mafia’s man in havana, Cuba’s capital. Batista ignored the drugs, gambling, and prostitution for a cut of the profits… Suddenly, in 1959, this socialist, Fidel Castro, an’ his buddy Ché Guevara overthrew Batista in a so-called popular revolution. Under Castro, Trafficante and the mob hadda leave Cuba.” But he could also lean into the eagle’s status as an unreliable narrator, such as the following sentence, “Say watcha like, the Mafia represent free enterprise, which we, as a company, are sworn to protect.” On top of this, he still has Sienkiewicz’s illustrations, so he can then devote two panels to the eagle lighting a cigar (“Havana cigars—best smoke inna world”) and taking a long drag on it, implicitly commenting on the way in which the CIA and its officers enriched themselves on Cuba.

The unreliable narrator also allows Moore to inject some humor into what is not exactly inherently entertaining subject matter. So, for instance, talking about the use of a Pepsi bottling plant in Laos as a front for a heroin-running operation, Moore has the eagle dryly remark that “later we decided that things went better with Coke.”…

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Pop Could Never Save Us – 06R

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Guess who’s back. It’s your favourite podcast about the UK Top 40 Charts. Pop Could Never Save Us. This week, we’re officially in the 90s; a time where both hosts were actually alive. This is such a barn-stormer of a conversation, it simply could not be limited to a single episode. Enjoy the unique auditary experience this podcast offers. Here’s part one:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5HuFtPEP8tuAGvIdVC4ktw?utm_source=generator

…

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The Cremator (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

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CW: the Holocaust

Long before he became a director, Juraj Herz turned ten years old in a concentration camp. The Slovak Jew and his immediate family were among the not-even-3,500 survivors of Ravensbrück. Roughly 60 of Herz’s extended family members never left Hitler’s camps alive.

Herz had just turned four when Germany annexed Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia’s borders, essentially absorbing Czechoslovak industries and military strongholds. When the Nazis marched through the rest of Czechoslovakia, they faced little armed resistance. Certainly the Nazis experienced little pushback from the British at the time, whose Prime Minister gifted Czechoslovakia with a cordial grin.

Nazi infiltration of Czechoslovakia began long before the Wehrmacht marched into Prague. Goebbels had propagandists at work in Prague. Pockets of Nazis surfaced on the streets and in politics. The unstable landlocked Central European country had few means to stem the rise of fascism.

If his movies are any indication, Juraj Herz never forgot the passivity of his countrymen in the face of the coming genocide. His masterpiece The Cremator, an extremely bleak period horror film, follows its titular character as he descends from a Tibetan Buddhism-obsessed husband and father of Jewish people into a serial killer who succumbs to Nazi ideology and kills his family in their name. It’s one of the most fucked things ever filmed, in a way only a Holocaust survivor could truly capture.

The Cremator’s closest American analogue is The Shining. It has a similar sense of quotidian dread to Kubrick’s movie, finding the evils inherent in domestic life. Fascism in both movies stem from the banal evils of the domestic. Jack Torrance and Karel Kopfrkingl both lead ostensibly normal lives — they’re middle-class family men who don’t behave in a way that’s abnormal enough to be noticeable outside their homes. The way they operate behind closed doors is another matter — they’re preening abusive narcissists who can’t have a simple conversation without at least subtly terrorizing their wives and children. Karel is perhaps worse than Jack — he’s closer to Grady, the Overlook Hotel’s original caretaker, who succeeds in killing his family.

And Karel’s everyday life leads directly to his fascism. Karel has the same repetitive justifications for his behavior as every abusive fascist. In his case, he pervasively touts Tibetan Buddhism in claiming his goal is to bring an end to suffering, that cremating people is a way of liberating them. In his mind, this makes sense, even as it’s an obvious lie. When the Nazis come along, they fit perfectly into Karel’s narcissistic worldview. His crematorium is his life — to Karel, the Holocaust is a vastly more efficient way of doing what he already does.

And like all fascists, Karel is selective about who the criteria of his Nazi beliefs apply to. In polite Czech society, he humbly claims to merely have a drop of German blood (a common feature of Czechs, many of whom were ethnically German). When that German blood is useful for him in the face of the Nazi invasion, which is slowly inching forward over the course of the movie, he highlights it more and more.…

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The Films of Jiří Trnka (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

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In a sane and just world, Jiří Trnka would be a bigger household name than Walt Disney. Instead, Disney has taken over the world and Trnka is best known for his influence on Rebecca Sugar and other animators. Such is the toll of monopolistic capitalism on media culture.

There’s no such thing as a national filmmaker, or one whose work sums up the culture of their home country. But Jiří Trnka, a Czech stop-motion animator, comes close to being the defining artist of Czech cinema. His body of work, ranging from children’s picture books to class feature and short films, chronicles a vital period in Czechoslovakian history. There are few major Czech texts Trnka didn’t adapt or toy with in some way. He saw Prague in the clutches of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. And he chronicled that history in depth — not as a documentarian, but as an animator.

Trnka originated in Plzeň, a Bohemian city about 50 miles west of Prague. You’ll know Plzeň by its German name of Pilsner, if you’re fond of lager (this first-and-fourth generation American has disappointed her Italian and Czech-descended relatives with her allergy to alcohol, so I can’t indulge in Plzeň’s major export). Trnka’s initial work — and in many ways his only work — was puppetry, a longstanding Czech tradition in which Trnka was coached by his mentor Josef Skupa. Trnka is first and foremost a storyteller for children, one adapting the Brothers Grimm and Czech fairy tales.

Czech fairy tales are dour in a way influenced by the grim state of life in ancient and medieval Bohemia. Nature itself is hostile — water is an alien force in landlocked Česko. Children befall terrible fates. Mothers lose their families. And some incestuous perverts with bad chins control half the continent. It’s delightful. And Trnka is deeply invested in the tradition of Czech folk tales. Kids like a good scary story. Trnka has nothing but nationally conscious scary stories.

Part of this is Trnka’s medium. Stop-motion animation is inherently creepy. The marriage of tangible objects with artificial, coerced movement never quite moves out of the uncanny. When I was a kid, I made my father turn off Jason and the Argonauts because the sight of Talos, a giant statue who turns into a creaking stop-motion statue of horror, was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen. Talos was slower than your grandmother on the wrong dosage, and he was going to absolutely decimate your ass. Even chintzy shmaltz like the Rankin-Bass specials always seemed a bit off, although I watched Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town every year to see Mickey Rooney’s Anarchist Twink Santa overthrowing a fascist regime. Trnka uses stop-motion as an imitation of life that fully embraces the medium’s eeriness. It’s not that all his work is dark or creepy, but Trnka rejects hardline realism in a way that keeps him in the realm of the Eerie.

Let’s take Trnka’s debut feature film, 1950’s Špalíček, or The Czech Year.…

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