Eruditorum Press

Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.

Review: Tough Crowd, by Graham Linehan

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I suspect that by posting this I’m on my way to a really shit day. Please consider improving it by supporting my Patreon so I can continue to create and publish work like this in a world that would much rather platform people who want me dead than me.

Every time there’s another one of these prominent media-pushed anti-trans books one of us dutifully steps up and takes one for the team in offering a review. Grace Lavery stepped up for a triple header and did Bindel, Stock, and Joyce in the LA Review of Books. Gretchen Felker-Martin, having killed her off in Manhunt, offered an absolute savaging of one of Rowling’s Cormoran Strike things. And as a trans media critic specializing in British television, the release of Graham Linehan’s memoir means that my time has alas come. 

Let’s start with the headline: this is a very bad book. I cannot imagine anybody who generally likes my stuff will enjoy much of anything about it. I cannot imagine anybody getting anything of value out of it. Even for Linehan’s fellow virulent transphobes it would seem to offer only the hollowest of pleasures, although I can’t in good conscience pretend that’s not their thing. But broadly speaking I encourage you to not bother reading this book, and if you for some reason feel you must read it, do not under any circumstances pay money for it. I sure as hell stole mine.

To get more into the meat of it, “very bad” is a statistical average of what are in fact two books welded together by a bizarre interlude in which Linehan attempts to make a brilliant “checkmate trannies” sort of argument. The first of these is an ordinarily bad memoir of a sitcom writer, while the other is an almost indescribably bad account of a man’s complete psychological collapse. Linehan presents this bifurcated narrative up front in his subtitle, which promises to tell how he “made and lost” his career. Indeed, as he explains, he lost more than that, including his family and all of his friends.

Well. Clearly not all of them. His book features blurbs from Jonathan Ross and Richard Ayoade, among those from a few less notable old career contacts and fellow professional bigots. These suggest the book will be “funny,” “honest,” “complicated,” and above all “compelling.” The overall result is a book that, to put it in the sort of Catholic terms that start to pathologize him, feels like a confession, though of course, one devoid of any repentance. “Here is how I pushed everyone away” says the man whose friends are blurbing his book and who is giving numerous interviews to promote it. “Don’t you think I’m compelling?” 

The first part of this argument—the sitcom memoir—functions as a sort of “I used to be somebody” windup to the sob story. And he did—a level of prominence roughly akin to what Steven Moffat had pre-Doctor Who, which is to say that he was well known among UK sitcom fans who paid attention to the writer’s name.…

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Queen Shit: The Case for Joan Baez

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This post, and work like it is only possible because of the support of my Patrons. And speaking of Patreon, we’re currently $450 a month in pledges away from Doctor Who reviews being posted to the site instead of paywalled. If you’re interested in that, or in supporting my work in general, you can join the Patreon here.

Also, I’ve created a playlist surveying Baez’s career for anyone who’s interested. It’s up on both Spotify and Apple Music.

Upon some self-reflection, I’ve determined that my single most heterodox critical position is that the greatest recording artist of the 1970s is Joan Baez. This is not true because of a lack of heterodox opinions in other spheres—Wish is the best Cure album, the Peter Capaldi/Jenna Coleman era of Doctor Who is the pinnacle of the series, if you’re in an American wine store you’re better off with South America than France—but because on almost every level the critical deck is stacked against Joan Baez. To use a recent example, it’s striking that when Jan Wenner, desperately backpedaling after being called out for writing a book called The Masters consisting entirely of interviews with white guys, tried to think of any women or people of color he had any respect for, the names he came up with were people like Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Grace Slick, or Curtis Mayfield—other singer-songwriters in the mould of his supposed masters. Joan Baez never even gets a look in. To be clear, I’m no more surprised by this than I am that Wenner failed to interview anyone that isn’t a white guy. While certainly an able and at times brilliant songwriter, Baez was largely more famed as an interpreter of other people’s songs, and so doubly excluded from Wenner’s paradigm. (For her part, when asked about Wenner’s comments, Baez’s response was simply “he’s a schmuck.”)

And yet the poptimists who might have embraced Baez in the same way they do Rihanna, Aretha Franklin, Madonna or any number of other stars who made their careers interpreting other people’s songs or working with established songwriters to develop originals also tend to neglect her. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, folk music is a rockist genre; the poptimists don’t go for Peter, Paul, and Mary or Judy Collins either. For another, however, the nature of Joan Baez’s pop stardom is odd. Whether it’s the aesthetic reputation of folk music, Baez’s steadfast political activism, or just her resolute disinterest in performing coolness, she comes off as fussy and stodgy in a way that keeps her from ever having gotten claimed. Indeed, as we’ll see, the particular sort of pop star she was is one that is almost necessarily not going to rise to the top of the poptimist heap. The result is that Baez’s legacy largely sits in the hands of a bunch of rockist twats who view her as a 6/10 historically significant also-ran, as opposed to one that even gets her a look-in as a dark horse pick for something like “greatest recording artist of the 1970s.” …

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State of the Erudition

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Hello everyone! I know, I should probably have another thrilling installment of Last War in Albion up today—people are no doubt dying to learn more about fractals. But it’s been a while since I’ve just done a general update, and there’s a fair amount of stuff. So Last War in Albion will have to wait two weeks. (Wait, two weeks? What’s happening next week? Well… read on.)

So, first of all, I’ve got a proof of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8 on its way to me. I still have some ebook formatting to do, and I’m obviously going to get Kickstarter orders fulfilled before I put it on general sale, but I figured I should announce the fact that this is happening imminently.

Second of all, and excitingly for UK folks, Penn and I will be tabling at Thought Bubble next month in Harrogate. We’ll mostly be pushing Britain a Prophecy because it’s a comics convention, but I’ll have any Eruditorum Press stuff at the table as well. We would love to see you.

Third, I wanted to talk a bit about the Patreon. It took a pretty sizable hit earlier this year when I had to nuke and restart it—it went from paying our rent every month with some to spare to falling well short of our rent. That’s been rough. And so I figured now would be a good time to announce two things. First is that… well, you remember that time I accidentally wrote a book? This time I accidentally wrote a novella-sized essay on Joan Baez. Seriously, there’s a 26,500 word essay called “Queen Shit: A Defense of Joan Baez” up on the Patreon. It’ll be here next week, because I realized while I was writing it that there’s a big Joan Baez documentary out and given that I’m not going to embargo it for long.

Which brings us to number two. Because honestly, I don’t like embargoing stuff. Especially not with the collapse of Twitter and the lack of social media. I’d much rather be putting stuff out here for public consumption. Which brings us to Doctor Who.

There’s one school of thought that says that the obvious solution to my low Patreon is to just put my reviews of the 60th Anniversary specials and of Series 14 on the Patreon and make people go there. But like I said, I don’t like embargoing stuff. Especially not things like reviews. I mean, come on—don’t you want a proper Eruditorum Press comment section for The Star Beast? Don’t you want podcasts? I do.

So I’m going to do this the perverse way. Right now my plan is to paywall all my Doctor Who reviews. But if enough people back the Patreon between now and November 23rd, I’ll switch gears and do them publicly. In fact, if enough people do it I’ll do podcasts too, and make those public. That’s right—the more people who back the Patreon the less exclusive it gets. It’s like capitalist fundraising as understood by weirdo anarchists who hate capitalism!…

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Crinkly and Complex (Book Three, Part 72: Numerocracy, Fractals)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The first issue of Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers was a lush and splendid object that positioned itself as a formal heir to Watchmen even as it rejected superheroes in favor of shopping malls and math.

Eventually, the snowflake’s edge becomes so crinkly and complex that its length, theoretically, is infinite. Its area, however, never exceeds the initial circle. Likewise, each new book provides fresh details, finer crenelations of the subject’s edge. Its area, however, can’t extend past the initial circle: Autumn, 1888. Whitechapel. – Alan Moore, From Hell

As with Watchmen, Moore uses a detached, omniscient perspective. Indeed, he takes it even further than he did in Watchmen, where he could use Rorschach as a pseudo-narrator. Big Numbers has no equivalent character. The closest it comes to narration is a montage at the end of the first issue in which one of the character’s poems is contrasted with a series of single panels reviewing the various characters that the book has introduced. For the most part, however, Big Numbers is told with an impassive objectivity. It takes flights into individual subjectivities, as with the dream sequence in the opening sequence or a later sequence in which Mr. World, a psychiatric patient released into the “care of the community,” fantasizes about the violent murder of a fellow bus passenger, but even these subjectivities are treated with a level of objectivity, the internal landscapes of the characters being treated as just another thing to look at.

Part of this sense of distance is simply the sheer number of characters involved. Moore’s outline for the series features thirty-one separate characters along with one group of characters, three characters from a story within a story, one ghost, and a set of people in a model railway set that will be treated as characters. In the forty pages of Big Numbers #1, twenty of these are introduced overtly, along with the ghost, and another is positioned in the background of a panel. Even though the action is centered almost entirely on Hampton, it gives the impression of a startlingly broad portrait of the town—one that, by the time the bulk of the remaining characters are introduced in the second issue, spans from the town’s rich and powerful to its underclass, with policemen, construction workers, students, sex workers, shopkeepers, and more all represented within the sweep of its worldview. And by exploring the connections among these people, as works of this sort of sprawling social realist genre inevitably do, Big Numbers displays the same sort of meticulous clockwork precision as its predecessor. The overwhelming sense of the first issue is one of inevitability; that a town in Thatcher’s Britain can only face the arrival of a massive shopping mall in one way. Moore even discussed as much, noting that “What I wanted to do was to show the fragility of human community, human relationships, and then to put this shadow of a large and inhuman shopping mall, a monolith of purely economic concerns, that would cast its shadow over that community.…

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The Agency of a Talking Anteater (Book Three, Part 71: Big Numbers #1)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: On the back of his monster success with Watchmen, Alan Moore declared that he would be self-publishing a comic about shopping mall and algebra.

“It fascinates because Sim is an absolutely brilliant maker of pages, a sublime cartoonist with total control of the form… and because, during the progression of the work, you can clearly see his mind crumbling under the pressure of his immense undertaking and twenty-five years of increasing solitude in which he can only express himself to the world through the agency of a talking anteater.” – Warren Ellis, “Grey Fog”

This declaration came in the context of Moore talking about his experiences self-publishing AARGH via his Mad Love imprint. This had been a decision made at the behest of Canadian writer/artist Dave Sim, who had found considerable success self-publishing his satirical Cerebus via his own press, Aardvark-Vanaheim. As Moore put it, “For years, this frosthardened son of the North has been standing there in his snowshoes, haranguing those of us within the bullpens and sheepdips of mainstream comics from an uncompromised position that’s been increasingly difficult to refute. ‘Hey! Why work for them guys? You must be some kinda stupid hosers, eh?’” It must be stressed, however, that Sim was in many ways a latter day William Blake—a singular and visionary talent who could not possibly have had the career he wanted on any terms other than his own. Blake, when this comparison was put to him in a 2020 seance, scoffed that “at least my gender politics weren’t that bad,” and it is notable that Moore would eventually terminate his relationship with Sim after Sim appended an introduction to an interview they did together explaining that “it would be really nice if, as a 50th birthday present, I could just type ‘IN THE NAME OF ALMIGHTY GOD COME OUT OF ALAN, THOU VILE AND ACCURSED.’ And have it work. Just like that when Alan read it. But, alas, I don’t think demonic possession—at least of the sort that Alan seems to have involved himself with—works that way” before digressing into a bit of Biblical exegesis to the effect of “women are hella icky.” Which is to say that, as effective an evangelist for self-publishing as he was, ultimately what worked for Dave Sim was not inherently likely to work for anyone else.

Equally, in a world in which Dave Sim was prominently advocating for self-publishing (and had not yet publicly accused Moore of being demonically possessed), Moore was never going to not try it. A central concern of his triptych of magna opera was the basic fact that these were his great works. They would not be owned by a vast American media company that could endlessly license them off in a cynical bid to bilk as much money as possible from rabid fans of malls and algebra. This was, for Moore, the point every bit as much as his creative interests. From Hell and Lost Girls both found their initial homes in Steve Bissette’s Taboo anthology, published via his own Spiderbaby Grafix, but for The Mandelbrot Set, or, as it eventually ended up being named, Big Numbers, Moore decided to put it out via Mad Love, investing the bulk of his profits from Watchmen (save for some with which he bought his parents a greenhouse) into the endeavor, with his wife Phyllis and partner Deborah Delano handling the business end of it.…

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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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Striplights and Software (Book Three, Part 70: Shopping Malls)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Moore found his worldview rapidly evolving in the wake of Watchmen.

“It’s a new world, Arcane. It’s full of shopping malls and striplights and software. The dark corners are being pushed back a little more every day.” – Alan Moore, Saga of the Swamp Thing

These evolutions were already in progress, however, as Moore contemplated what he wanted his next major project to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he remained ambitious. Watchmen would have been a perfectly fine career capstone for most people. Indeed, Watchmen was already substantially more ambitious than what most people would attempt, which was at once its virtue and its tragedy. But Moore was surely rankled by the fact that his magnum opus sat in the control of a company he disdained and was steadily sliding towards outright despising. On top of that, he was only thirty-five. There was plenty of time for Moore to write another work of the scale of Watchmen.

In fact, he would decide to write three projects of that sort of scale and ambition, each picking up on different aspects of Watchmen. One of these was From Hell, which saw Moore expand his idea of using a murder and detective story to understand a larger world away from a narrative device for a comic book universe and into an interrogation of the 20th century itself via the Jack the Ripper murders. Another was Lost Girls, which saw Moore give his recurring interest in sexuality as a theme its fullest realization.

It was the third project, however, that was the biggest, most ambitious, and most fascinating thing Moore would work on during the period—a work of audacious formalist complexity that would delve into the storytelling tools he had developed for Watchmen and build an entire philosophical worldview out of them. Moore’s first description of it came in an interview published in February 1988, where he proclaimed that “ I want to do a graphic novel about shopping malls.” Clarifying this willfully puzzling remark, he explained that the comic would be “about a number of things. What happens is that an American shopping mall of Californian scale, one of those monstrous, minature cities you seem to have over there in LA, is erected in this small town in the middle of England.”

This captures one of the essential things about the shopping mall, which is that it was a distinctly American phenomenon even as it was exported to the world, emerging out of the specific concerns of post-World War II America. It is helpful, since Moore sets up the contrast himself, to contrast this with the UK. Both countries experienced a post-War economic boom. In the UK, this involved the creation of the welfare state, and, on a housing level, things like the new towns scheme and the “renovation” of the terraces into tower blocks. These were mixed blessings at best, as Moore trenchantly observed at numerous points during his career, and indeed their failings would be an implicit part of his malls project.…

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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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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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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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