Issue #348: The Best Gambling Movie and The Best Manga on Your Phone
This was a historically great week for experiencing great art. Surprisingly, I read an entire novel today: Keigo Higashino’s Malice (1996).
First appearing in English in 2014, I heard a lot of buzz about this book but never got around to reading it. Once I started, though, I couldn’t put it down. My writing on Soji Shimada got me flown out to Japan for a conference once, but it had been a while since I read a crime novel from Japan. Malice measures up to my favorites like Out (1997), Cult X (2014), Six Four (2012), Lady Joker (2021), and of course The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981). I haven’t read the genre that deeply, however. By volume, I mean. Just like in the States, Japanese crime and mystery authors are prolific. I am beginning to wonder how often Japanese crime authors use metafictional frames. Analysis of that postmodern gesture in Shimada’s Tokyo Zodiac Murders was a big part of my writing about it, but I was surprised to see a similar narrative frame in Malice. I’ve got my quotations lined up for a Malice conference paper or journal article. Something like “‘[T]he perfect crime… the perfect motive’: The Structure of Narrative in Keigo Higashino’s Malice.” Don’t be surprised if you see that title in a later newsletter, actually.
I also had the amazing opportunity to watch the first of the Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) compilation movies in theaters. It was a much, much better experience than I expected. I don’t remember loving the first compilation movie, but I came out of it gobsmacked. There were so many moments that looked so awesome on the big screen. The first mono-eye filling the screen, explosions in Garma’s last stand, lightning portending the fight between Amuro and Ramba Ral… I have some screenshots below, but they don’t do justice to the theatrical experience.



Finally, I made meme for the Johnnie To and Melville heads out there:
I’m glad to count myself as someone who has gotten to enjoy, thoroughly, the work of both directors.
Rolling High in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur
Bob Montagné (Rogert Duchesne) is the kind of character that you could make hundreds of movies about. The fact that there is only this one installment in a series that could have been the French Zatoichi is illustrative of just how much this movie does. It contains everything. Cigarettes hang out of men’s mouths like they’re glued to the bottom lip. Expectations are subverted. A narrator, Jean-Pierre Melville himself, sets the stage for a litany of silky voiced French narrators who would follow.
Cinematic coolness sometimes finds its criterion in Jef Costello (Alain Delon) from Melville’s Le samouraï (1967). After Bob le flambeur (1956), there is no question that the true honoree, the standard against which all must be judged, is Bob. In French, the ‘o’ is shorter. “Bob” comes out of the mouth like a bullet, with an “oh” rather than an “ah”. Sounds better than “Bob Dylan” or “Bob Dole,” maybe as good as “Bob Barker” or “Bob Ross.” But none are close to the Bob to end all Bobs, the flambeur.
There’s a question of translation of the film’s title. Bob le flambeur becomes Bob the Gambler in English, but flambeur more accurately translates to “high roller,” as the subtitles treat it when spoken in the film. When calling him a “gambler,” the script uses the word joueur, which can also mean “player,” but implies gambling.
If Bob le flambeur doesn’t translate, it suggests an even greater mistranslation from the film to its audience. This is the earliest of Melville’s films I’ve yet seen, likely to be the earliest I’ll see for a while — I have Two Men in Manhattan (1959), Le doulos (1962), Magnet of Doom (1963), and Army of Shadows (1969) on the docket. But having seen Le deuxième souffle (1966), Le samouraï, Le cercle rouge (1970), and Un flic (1972), Bob is the most Melville Melville has ever been. True, it is missing a signal from his final four crime films: the introductory quotation which I wrote about in Le deuxième and Un flic and is present in Le samouraï and Le cercle.
Bob is even more astonishing than those films precisely because it refuses to follow any generic patterns. In those latter four films, Melville produces nothing so mystifying.
Going into the films blind, I wouldn’t have been surprised to have Bob le flambeur work as a character study more akin to Bay of Angels (1963), Pale Flower (1964), or California Split (1974). But, formally, it comes to resemble Any Number Can Win (1963) or Croupier (1998) more closely with its absurdly planned and plotted heist.
Despite the structural resemblance, Bob is more similar to the former set of movies than the latter, if it is indeed similar to anything at all. It takes a half hour before a heist is even alluded to, with the first concrete mention coming almost ten minutes later.



Though it’s not “opening credits after an hour” (forty minutes, I know) subversive, like Drive My Car (2021), it’s a lot of runway for a “heist” movie. And an exceptionally rich runway, at that, something runtimes won’t capture.
Instead of framing his film with a quotation, Melville opens Bob with a waking.
Like Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), this makes available the idea of the dream. Melville is inviting this kind of reading. He shows an interest in unusual non-sequitur material in the film, later showing the events of the heist from the perspective of Bob’s anticipatory imagination. Instead of a phobic anxiety, he has the optimism of a gambler. Bob imagines his heist will go off without a hitch.
The evocation of the dream defines the neighborhood of Paris where the film primarily takes place, Montmartre. It’s always spectral, cosmic, steeped in fantasy. Melville’s narration calls it “both heaven and hell” as a streetcar slowly moves downward, a descent to the aforementioned space of the afterlife.
Repeatedly, Bob seems to represent the city as more impressionistic than surreal, but nonetheless dreamlike. The facade of a Chinese restaurant is double-reflected in a cop car, a killer melts into the shadows cast by the bright lights of Montmartre, and that same cop car must plumb those depths to attempt to pull someone from them.



It’s a hedonistic city, of which Bob’s urge to gamble and Anne’s (Isabelle Corey) disaffection are the emblems. Anne is unimpressed even with the sense pleasures of Montmartre, even as they come as close to thrilling her as anything could.



One imagines she should be the one gambling instead of Bob, his distorted double totally unable to find even momentary satisfaction. She is held off from the fate of Pale Flower’s Saeko (Mariko Kaga) because she doesn’t taste the pleasures of gambling that Bob so enjoys.




And, of course, the study of gambling cinema demonstrates that the pleasure of the win is always subordinate to the exquisite expenditure of the loss. Anne’s shortcoming relative to Bob is her inability to evacuate the paradigm of accumulation — though Bob himself is ultimately rewarded in an ideological way (by money) because of what he chooses to risk.


It is not as if Anne is risk-averse, though. She is incessantly imperiled, relative to Bob, because of her gendered subject position. She never has the agency to risk what Bob puts on the line.



The ending unfolds as a precursor to Uncut Gems (2019), the latter movie’s opposite. Bob le flambeur endorses the ideology of masculine authority over property (money, freedom, life) as opposed to disintegrating it. It’s Anne who is consigned to a symbolic death, rather than Bob, reversing the fates of Howard (Adam Sandler) and Julia (Julia Fox).
Frankly, my reaction to this film puts me in the position of wanting to say everything about a work that is impossibly dense and could sustain almost endless close reading. Letterboxd user culturesky writes in their review of Bob, “有些電影真的該逐格分析,” which I read as “some movies really should be analyzed frame by frame.” I could not agree more, totally arrested by every singular moment of this film. The moment to moment performances are stunning. Just looking at the facial expressions in any of these screenshots could be mesmerizing.
Melville does so much with so little, generating drama and tension from situations with no stakes whatsoever. Take, for instance, Roger’s (André Garet) safe cracking dry run. Melville oscillates between two angles as Roger works on the safe. He commands the attention of the characters as much as the audience. And while the question of his success or failure is not interconnected with an imminent threat to the characters’ freedom or wellbeing, it’s Melville’s moving cuts and angling of the shots that produces the intensity.


There is also a rich symbolic reading of the scene. The phallic logic of penetration, of course, should be obvious. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” and sometimes it isn’t. And nothing in Bob le flambeur is just.
One of Melville’s most persistent themes is the question of the criminal’s relation to law. In Bob, Le deuxième, Le samouraï, Le cercle, and Un flic, he sets up an identical dynamic: an opposition between two groups of criminals, with the police pursuing one of the two groups in conflict. Always, the police pursue the more “honorable” of the two groups, including the films’ principal characters, with the aid of the more villainous set of crooks. To varying degrees, especially in Le deuxième and Un flic, the police themselves are morally compromised in some profound way.
The honorable thieves on which so many of Melville’s films focus can thread optimism through otherwise dreary subject matter. Bob is surely his most optimistic film among the five, with Bob himself serving as the vivacious counterweight to Jef Costello’s embodiment of the drive. But the two exist in the same symbolic universe where one’s actions are beholden to an authority greater than oneself. Not the authority of the written law, but principles that sometimes subvert that law. The movement from Bob to Jef is the movement from cinematic wish fulfillment to dream dashing Aristotelian tragedy.
Bob’s magnetic personality even works on the police. I’ve never seen a film where the cops are so wracked with guilt and uncertainty about catching the crook.



The idea here is not subtle: Bob is a stand up guy. Commissioner Ledru (Guy Decomble) is more guilty because of having to enforce the law than Bob is because of breaking it. Ledru seems to experience acutely the refrain of Le cercle: “all men are evil.” In Bob, though, the meaning is the opposite of how Mattei (André Bourvil) interprets the idea in Le cercle. Ledru isn’t turned away from evil because of the regulation of the law, but has to break the greater principles to which Bob adheres to enforce the law. The universality of these principles, the ones that govern Bob’s behavior more than Ledru’s, are also evinced in the cosmopolitan texture of Montmartre — with the sinister underside of period-appropriate fetishistic racism.


Bob is always wrestling with the loss of something. Not the material losses he experiences through gambling, but something more elusive and inarticulable, like that of a dream’s content. This feeling comes through in the essence of the film’s structure, which always subverts expectations. Down to the last minute, I was never sure how it would end. The heist is one of the most interesting facets of the film in terms of suspense. It is extensively blocked and planned but never comes to fruition.



This is the film’s most essential subversion and why it can never be repeated or duplicated. It’s a heist film with no heist at all that must distribute the climactic tension that would normally take place in such a set piece scene.
After one transcendent viewing, Bob le flambeur has ascended to the rank of one of my favorite films of all time. It has an audacity characteristic of a young filmmaker, benefitting retroactively from the many films that have revised its premises and engaged with its ideas. If it is outlandish to say the greatest heist film absents the very event that defines the sub genre, one only need watch Bob to see this movie’s astonishing density. It captures the spectacularity of filmmaking while absenting the spectacle.
The Best and Worst of Reading Manga on Your Phone
I read a lot of manga. My bookshelves are strained to the limit, so a lot of what I keep up with I do through the litany of official iPhone apps and websites offered by publishers and vendors. Here is a list of the ones I’ve used, and some manga worth reading on each.
Shonen Jump
$2.99 a month
I read a lot of stuff on here. It’s a pretty straightforward and affordable manga reading app for Shueisha’s flagship serialized titles. The main annoyance is that the “mature” titles are not available in the app and have to be accessed through their inferior web interface. You can get to it on your phone easily enough, though.
Recommended titles: Kagurabachi (2023) (though it is getting worse by the week), Shiba Inu Rooms (2024), Kaiju No. 8 (2020), Dandadan (2021), The Prince of Tennis (1999), Claymore (2001)
Viz
$1.99 a month
I don’t really understand the logic of Viz having a separate app from Shonen Jump. Viz is the parent publisher of Shonen Jump in the United States. So, intuitively, it seems like a ripoff to have to pay for two separate subscriptions from a single publisher. But, the subscriptions are cheap. Viz is $1.99 a month tacked on to the SJ $2.99. It still comes out to less than most other services. Adding to that, as I mentioned with Shonen Jump, these apps are simple. Compared to your average manga publisher app, there’s no tokens, tickets, or whatever that you can be upcharged for even with a subscription to read the newest chapters or chapters in excess of a daily limitation. You just read.
But, Viz shares SJ’s downside. Titles with a mature content rating can only be read in a web browser, which is a huge pain. Hopefully they fix this down the line.Recommended titles: Steel of the Celestial Shadows (2020), Fool Night (2020), Flame of Recca (1995), Junji Ito anthologies, Inio Asano serials and one-shots, The Drifting Classroom (1972)
Azuki
$4.99 a month
I got this app more or less exclusively to read Knights of Sidonia and Diamond no Ace so it gets full marks on facilitating that. But I’ve found at least one or two other stray manga series I’ve enjoyed. They are US based and not backed by any major Japanese publishers.
Recommended titles: Ace of the Diamond (2006), Knights of Sidonia (2009), Bloody Monday (2007)
Manga UP!
$4.99 a month
This app gets upset if you take screenshots from it, which is pretty obnoxious. It also has a complicated credits system, not uncommon with these apps, where you are upcharged if you read certain stuff not covered by a subscription. I got this to read The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World (2020) and thought it was pretty bad. Square Enix is the publisher behind the app. From what I can tell, most of what they’ve published is isekai crap.
Recommended titles: Nothing. Read something else.
MANGA Plus
$1.99 a month for currently serializing titles
$4.99 a month for serializing and completed titles
This is Shueisha’s third app and subscription service, alongside the Shonen Jump and Viz apps. It’s the worst designed. Like Manga UP! and K Manga (which I’ll get to) it’s visually heinous and threatens to make you exchange real money for pretend money to read manga chapters. Mercifully, you can avoid such a fate with their two subscription options. Red Cat Ramen can only be found on MANGA Plus, and it is amazing.
Recommended titles: Red Cat Ramen (2022).
K Manga
No monthly subscription, charges you using a points system
This is Kodansha’s official app. There is basically no circumstance I would recommend using it. It is not only barely functional, but does not offer a monthly subscription. It instead sells access to chapters using a points system that could only have been designed by a lunatic.
Recommended titles: N/A… Wind Breaker (2021) and Tokyo Revengers (2017) are good, as is a lot of other stuff on here, but it’s just not worth it. Find another way.
Mangadex
Free
Not an app and not legal. Mangadex.org is the highest quality manga reading website online, but it does not host titles that are officially distributed within the United States. In some cases, they link to a given publisher’s official manga reading solution. Usually, these suck, like the aforementioned K Manga and Comikey (another non-subscription virtual currency monstrosity). Mangadex does the good work of keeping a lot of fantastic, under-appreciated manga available by multiple translators in the highest resolution possible.
Recommended titles: Billy Bat (2008), Sukeban Deka (1975), Sanctuary (1990), Rikudou (2014), Dragon Head (1994), Switch (2018)
Weekly Reading List
https://www.lacanonline.com/2024/10/news-september-2024/ — Owen Hewitson comes through again with the update of Lacanian publications for the month. I just picked up Jean-Michel Rabaté’s new book, Lacan and Psychoanalytic Obsolescence (2024), which is sure to be a significant contribution to the field.
The exploration of the Name-of-the-Father across a broad set of milieus promised by Diego Enrique Londoño-Parades’ A Social Ontology of Psychosis (2024) also sounds enticing.
There are also a host of other events, in-person and online, coming up in October from various Lacanian schools and organizations. I particularly recommend Derek Hook’s upcoming talk for the Guild of Psychotherapists on the 26th of October, which will be livestreamed and available on demand after the event.
Until next time.