Issue #339: I do not need special equipment. I'm a natural writer.
Issue #339: I do not need special equipment. I'm a natural writer.
I have some rules to help me find good restaurants. One, that has been proven correct yet again this weekend, is Mexican food quality increases proportionally to the restaurant’s distance to a strip mall. If it is in a strip mall, well, now we’re talking.
I went to El Tequila in Gilford, New Hampshire. It was really good.
Another rule might put you in risky territory. But it seems to be true that roast beef sandwiches are better served by a restaurant with aggressive conservative political signage.
We also had some good Olympics this weekend. I enjoyed the men’s singles table tennis final, though it got lopsided toward the end. There is some history to the Fan Zhendong and Truls Moregardh matchup, which I imagine will continue to grow as the two find themselves pitted against one another repeatedly.
I didn’t watch much shooting, but the competitors seized the imagination of the internet. Yusuf Dikeç, Türkiye’s competitor, was my favorite.
This week: Trap (2024) and some of the best anime you’ll watch this year.
Dandadan is just in time for Halloween
The next big anime craze in the United States is poised to be Dandadan (2024). There are a lot of signs pointing to the marketing muscle Sony and GKids are throwing behind this thing. The first three episodes of the show will be screened in movie theaters starting September 14th in the United States, ahead of the TV premiere date. Another savvy marketing move, this time by Shueisha and Japan News Network (where it will air in Japan), the show will start running weekly in October.
That’s fitting for the subject matter. The manga began serialization in 2021 in Shonen Jump+, dealing with a unlikely duo each with a different supernatural conviction. Momo Ayase believes in ghosts and other forms of terrestrial magic, but also that we’re alone in the universe. Ken Takakura, who shares a name (and only a name) with Ayase’s favorite actor, dismisses the possibility of ghosts but is convinced of the existence of aliens. As it happens, the duo meets both, and opposes the power of the terrestrial supernatural to the space originating paranormal.
The two of them appear to be an odd couple, but the series is organized largely around romantic tension between them. The romantic plot is fine by manga standards, with Ayase cast in the position of “tsundere,” sometimes arbitrarily hostile toward the object of her affection. Potential honest romantic connection between the two is repeatedly interrupted by a number of other suitors, but none of them are of interest to Ayase or Takakura, despite sometimes appearing otherwise from the vantage point of each other.
More interesting, for me, is the staging of the broader conflict between the two of them and the supernatural forces they encounter. Author Yukinobu Tatsu has a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese urban legends, yokai, and international alien mysteries. He delivers his own wild version of familiar stories as antagonists for Ayase and Takakura to overcome.
I recommend Dandadan, but I imagine for anime fans it will be must see TV in October. So it might not hurt to wait around for the anime. The manga’s art is clean and dynamic. I would call it best in class. But I’m sure the show and the action will look spectacular in motion. I’ll definitely be buying tickets for the theatrical screening of the first episodes.
Sandwiches in the American Novel and Japanese Comic
I have been trying, and failing, to write about the greatest literary sandwiches. I may have brought this up here before. But wherever I had my running list, I’ve lost it. The ur-example is in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999). He writes poetically about sandwiches from a a bodega, Zeod’s, that the main character Lionel basically inhales. At this point, I’ve probably written more about the sandwiches in Motherless Brooklyn than anything else. Either that or the line where Lionel talks about characters getting killed off screen in detective movies. But those sandwiches have seized my imagination like nothing else.
Even if I haven’t yet been able to pin down the literary tradition of writing sandwiches, (clearly, Brian Jacques also needs to be mentioned here, though this parenthetical will be the extent of it) I’ve been attentive to the matter of food in other mediums. There are plenty of anime and manga that deal with food. Yakitate!! Japan (2004) was huge when I was a young anime forum denizen. Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma (2012) has been popular much more recently. And there are plenty of sleeper hits, like Antique Bakery (2008). But there are two exceptionally unique anime out there that deal with food, with an important commonality: Toriko (2011) and Delicious in Dungeon (2024).
More than being generically about “food,” or “cooking,” Toriko and Delicious in Dungeon deal with the matter of hunting. In both works, the foodstuffs are fantastical creatures and plants springing from the imagination of the respective manga artists, Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro and Ryoko Kui.
Toriko aspires to the model of long-running shounen manga like One Piece (1997) and Naruto (1999) with the comedic flourish of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo (2001) and Gintama (2003). There’s a focus on combat, with the titular protagonist, Toriko, using spectacular martial arts moves to take down gigantic creatures for cooking. Aside from the financial motives, Toriko works to satisfy his own palette and create a full-course meal. It’s great and funny in both its comic and animated incarnations, well worth the acclaim it has received.
Delicious in Dungeon, more recently, deals with hunting creatures in a high fantasy dungeon that usually aren’t used for food preparation. Each episode is a vignette focused on the preparation of one or two dishes. There is an overarching plot, but Delicious in Dungeon moves at a much slower pace than Toriko, and comes across as more of a sit-com than an action anime. There is, in fact, little combat to speak of in Delicious in Dungeon.
It is fascinating to me to see these two different works with such a bizarrely specific premise — the cooking of fantasy creatures — approached in vastly different ways. But both are incredibly entertaining works.
Entrapment of the Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Trap
I am an M. Night Shyamalan fan, so I was eager to see Trap (2024) this weekend. Given Shyamalan’s penchant for twists, there have been plenty of theories regarding the film’s ostensible plot. It appears to be about a serial killer, Cooper, played by Josh Hartnett, trying to escape a Taylor Swift-esque concert set up to capture him. Whether or not that premise holds to be true I’ll leave to your viewing experience. But I hold Shyamalan in very high regard, maybe too high given my actual opinion of most of his movies. Still, I can’t help but admire a filmmaker who sticks to his guns. His approach to filmmaking is more than creating some hare-brained twist like, for instance, it is Cooper’s daughter or the pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) who is actually the culprit for the killings. Generally, his twists are pretty clever, as is the case here. If you are looking to go into the movie totally unspoiled, I would recommend scrolling past this one as I’ll discuss a lot of plot details below — but I’ll leave the paradigmatic twist unspoiled.
What Shyamalan is above all else, more than a filmmaker of the twist, is a filmmaker of sentiment. Shyamalan clearly has been strongly influenced by Hitchcock, and Trap had the potential of being his most Hitchcockian film yet. But sentiment is what separates the two. Hitchcock is never sentimental and always rejects the status quo. There is never a gesture toward ideas of healing psychologically damaged characters, fulfilled desire, redemption, or subjective unity in the work of Hitchcock. Shyamalan embraces each of these, however, in his film’s conclusions, and Trap is no exception. Cooper, as a parent, is plagued by faults. But the potential always exists for him to be redeemed through the simultaneous actions of forgiveness for past transgressions against him and fulfillment of paternal responsibility.
Cooper is indeed the serial killer the trailer promises him to be. He makes a defamiliarizing sort of protagonist — a bit of a nod to Hitchcock heroes and antiheroes — working to escape a trap that is never fully convincing but still a source of tension. Indeed, like the incredulous audience member questioning the verisimilitude of the film’s setup, Cooper tests boundaries. He explores different exits, engineers injuries, and explores various possibilities of escaping the concert arena without engaging law enforcement. There are a number of interesting, meta-critical gestures in Trap. Early in the film, Cooper leaves behind a half eaten pretzel in a beverage cup at his foot. This, in the logic of the police procedural, would be the smoking gun that would eventually reveal Cooper’s culpability for the crimes. Even in his escape, the fact that he is captured on film, seen on surveillance footage, and has a recorded, assigned seat would allow the police to find him. But his deposited refuse doesn’t come up in the film again.
More than sloppy filmmaking or incoherent plotting, this is just one of the many red herrings Shyamalan leaves for viewers intent on figuring him out. The FBI profiler, Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills), resembles Cooper’s mother. She is a threatening motherly figure, but has no actual relation to him. Later in the film, Lady Raven pays special attention to jewelry Cooper’s daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) is wearing. Again, the focus here is meant to communicate to the audience that Raven recognizes the specific jewelry and has some personal connection to one of Cooper’s victims. But, in fact, she has no idea and doesn’t recognize the jewelry as anything other than strange for an adolescent. Instead of the specificity of the killer’s trophy being recognized, it’s merely the general idea that a killer would take jewelry from a victim and give it to his family that Raven is aware of.
Lady Raven is a heroic figure in the film, not unexpected given that she is played by Shyamalan’s own pop star daughter. She does a fine job in the role, too. But, perhaps because of this familial relationship, Trap is a film that is exceedingly naive about fans and fandom culture. In a late turn of events, Raven uses her fans to locate an imprisoned victim of Cooper’s. She does so quickly, instead of getting a deluge of useless advice, skepticism, or scrutiny. Not to accuse a work of fiction of being unrealistic, but I can only recall the “Boston Bombing debacle,” where well meaning reddit posters repeatedly misidentified the perpetrators of the Boston Bombing.
The idea that a pop star’s fanbase could quickly solve a crime is naive and ideological. The online sleuths of Gen Z become a subject-supposed-to-know that inspires comfort. The mysteries of the world are solvable using instagram and tiktok, if one is so inclined, as in the SNL “Detectives” skit from earlier this year. But the youth have no such power, and no mass of frenzied fans online will do anything but repeat the misidentification and routine harassment of reddit posters trying to solve the Boston Bombing.
Shyamalan doesn’t seem intent on critiquing fan culture, a huge missed opportunity for Trap. But even he can’t avoid some of the ugly facets of the mania for Lady Raven. At one point, Cooper talks to a staff member (Shyamalan’s obligatory cameo) where he suggests Lady Raven could start a cult. There’s a clear analogy being made between the enthusiastic concert goers and those with a morbid fascination with Cooper’s actions. Cooper meets a t-shirt vendor, Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), who confesses to being “obsessed” with The Butcher, Cooper’s media-given epithet.
In my favorite scene in the film, Lady Raven recounts a story to the concert audience about forgiving her father through visualization, and “releasing” him from the pain he caused her. She asks that the audience do the same, visualize someone that has wronged them, forgive them, and try to move on from the internal antagonism. Cooper looks on with awe as everyone around him puts up their cellphone lights, including his daughter who is dealing with bullying at school. Scenes like this are one of the best ways to use a pathologically murderous character for social commentary. More than any other moment in the film, Cooper is like an alien experiencing some bizarre ritual of human culture for the first time. And, for once, he has the right read of things. There has been no forgiveness in the 60-seconds-or-less since Raven’s injunction to her audience. These are empty, meaningless gestures, as the film emphasizes by highlighting the continued antagonism between Riley and her bullies. And all of this is to say nothing of how ill-advised it is to take seriously psychological advice from a teenage pop star.
Trap is a riveting film, but it stops short of making the commentary on fan culture I would prefer. My preference for what the film might argue aside, it seems to have some unresolved and unintended ambivalence regarding what, exactly, it is trying to get across about pop stardom. But not every film needs to hit every note exactly right. The movie is nonetheless exciting. And Josh Hartnett’s performance is impossible to look away from. Shyamalan need not engineer a complex corral to get people to watch his latest. It is, in fact, among his best.
Weekly Reading List
https://shininglife.bigcartel.com/product/slp-059-shining-life-fanzine-compilation — I contributed to this zine compilation as a print spin-off from the newsletter. I’m also featured a couple times in other contributions. See if you can find them, like where’s waldo. There’s also a fair bit of what’s included here I haven’t gotten a chance to read yet. I am really excited for one pagers from:
Friend and mentor Chris Dooley
Never Was Turned Has Been (previous editions available in the Paradox Newsletter webstore)
Ati Mental (custodian of the only music awards worth a damn)
Society Suckers
Freddy Alva
Gratitude Fanzine
I Question Not Me
I’ve discussed GISM pretty extensively in this newsletter. I should probably go back and line up the decently long history of writing I’ve done about them. But this is not about me. This is about the new GISM documentary flick with unreleased footage. You can buy it from Fuudobrain using your favorite Japanese proxy. Or hit up generalspeech@gmail.com. Tom will be distributing the film in the U.S. and may have spots left on his reservation list.
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/journal/41282/volumes-issues/journal-updates — In what appears to be some cross-promotion with the Olympics, the special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society I contributed to earlier this year is now entirely free. In addition to my essay, you can also read excellent contributions from scholars including Ryan Engley and Klaudia Wittmann.
I’ve enjoyed Mike Ross and Xian’s new fighting game youtube channel. This video is a nice crossover for the newsletter, since they try their hand at film criticism.
Until next time.