giornata, 1/16/25

vampires and lads

Giornata is my weekly media diary, coming out Thursdays, covering whatever I read, watched or listened to in the last week!

Nosferatu, dir. Robert Eggers

I basically enjoy Robert Eggers films, though horror is the genre with which I am the least familiar, so I have little to nothing to add in the cyclic discussion of prestige horror’s value or place in the genre. I had a good time with The Witch, loved The Lighthouse, found The Northman frustrating because 1. I couldn’t see anything, which I’ve been told might have had something to do with the projector at the theater where I saw it, 2. I think there is reason Hamlet starts in the middle of things. The revenge tale when there was no question of whether the revenge was justified or rational got a little boring.

Still an upside of all these is that they do not give me nightmares, something I am very prone to have. My sister and I both had a good time with Nosferatu, mostly over how on the surface funny it was, particularly after Willem Dafoe shows up. I adore Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola, but I have a similar reaction: the story just switches into another gear with Van Helsing arrives.

The main talk around the movie seems to have centered on the question of Count Orlok’s sexual predation and/or a reading of the character as a part of a romance. Sanjana made a great video about reading the film through a monster romance lens (embedded above). I think the literal takes on the character are a part of the same cultural impulse that make it so hard to talk about historical romances that are bodice rippers. I see authors and readers talk about growing up reading bodice rippers, with an asterisk, with a caveat, with a dismissal, of the thing that drew them to those works. I see romance readers bristle all the time against the assumption that what we read is a literal manifestation of our desires, as if we can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality. And yet, we borrow that language to couch our interest in any romance story that is remotely thorny or with any character that exhibits bad behavior, even when that bad behavior, be it violent, cruel or just unfeeling, is condemned by the narrative.

Orlok, unlike even bodice ripper protagonists, has an additional layer of fictionality on his character. He isn’t only fictional to me, viewer of Nosferatu (2024), he is a fantasy creature in the world of the film itself. And a world that has no widespread concept of a vampire yet! Obviously, that fantasy can wreak real havoc, but in what world do our base desires and violent suppression of them not have that power? As the physical manifestation of Ellen’s sexual curiosity that, in 19th century Germany,¹ only has the chance to exist as a corrupted, destructive force. Whether Eggers pulls off this rubber band tension is up for debate, but that conversation is more interesting to me than moralizing whether this film is horny/sexy, or horny/sexy in the right way.

My MVP in the film was Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who should play worms more often. He reminded me of Bradley Cooper, which I promise is a compliment. Though at parts I did think “oh he is losing the accent,” totally forgetting that he is absolutely English.

A Precious Jewel by Mary Balogh

My weekly Balogh novel. Chels recommended this to me ages ago and I just got around it and they weren’t kidding as how special it is. I don’t think anyone else could write this book. This is an early enough Balogh that was originally published as a Signet Romance. Signets are capital-R, Regency Romances, meaning they are not just set in the Regency, but they are descendants of Georgette Heyer. Conflations of terms abound here, given that the collapse of Regency Romances with “Regency-set” romances and authors, like Balogh, pushing the bounds of what could be included in a category Regency. Category titles, like those published by Signet, tended to be shorter, more structured and less explicit.

Something like Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught from 1985 uses the Regency setting with a tone and plotting from more sweeping romances, usually set outside of the Regency, or at least outside of ton ballrooms. But in 1993, Balogh writes a book that reads like a Signet style romance, with a heroine who is a sex worker and the most beta hero I’ve possibly ever read. In an introduction that she wrote on republication in 2009, Balogh writes about how she couldn’t stop thinking about Sir Gerald Stapleton, a side character from her book The Ideal Wife. In that book, he is distressed over his long time mistress being about to marry another man. But she says she couldn’t conceive of how a sex worker and a beta hero could work in a traditional Regency, but she wrote the book anyway. When she eventually sent the manuscript in, it was accepted straight to the copyediting process.

Sir Gerald, a baronet, meets Priscilla when she is working in a brothel in London. He has a highly specific request when it comes to his workers: no funny business. He doesn’t want them to feign passion or help him along at all—he basically wants them to lie there. Priscilla stands out as trusting his request is in earnest and he takes to her. When she is violently assaulted by another client, he offers to buy out her contract with her madam and sets her up as his mistress. Priscilla is a highborn lady who fell on hard times when a sexually lecherous cousin inherits after the sudden death of her father and brother. She feels like separating her identities is important to her survival, so she thinks it is paramount to keep her origin a secret from Gerald.

But Gerald is incredibly dense. He may be the least appealing romance hero I’ve ever read: he is not very good looking, he is not particularly charming and he has not head for business or land management. He’s never cruel to Priscilla, but he is incredibly invested in his role as a titled man versus her role as his mistress. And yet—I was charmed. That’s what I mean when I say only Balogh could write this book. I think she may be at her best when she introduces a character who you cannot imagine a romance for and she writes that romance anyway.

I’ve sold one of my favorite Baloghs, The Secret Mistress, as “if the Palmers from Sense and Sensibility were deeply in love. She makes her Austen inspiration explicit here. When Priscilla’s madam asks her her favorite character in Pride and Prejudice, she responds “Mr. Darcy without a doubt, if one is to speak of heroes. I think him quite the most splendid hero of any book I have read. But Mr. Collins is a marvelous creation—a totally obsequious man without in any way becoming a caricature.”

If anything, Priscilla is the Mr. Darcy character in this book: proud to the point of reticence, terrified of revealing her origin lest it be used against her. And she falls in love with her Mr. Collins, a self-important fool. But for all the grand gestures in romance, what Gerald pulls off in the end is as impressive as any of them, since by that point, you know how he has to work to make it happen.

Reader reviews of this book reminded me of the Nosferatu discourse and the disconnect I feel when the angle for considering romance is if “the reader,” both the specific reader reading the book and the imagined, Platonic ideal of the reader, finds the hero appealing or attractive. Besides this being based on the idea a presumed female reader would always identify with the heroine, it always seems to say that those are the only romances worth telling. I don’t think all readers, or even most readers, actually read this way. I just don’t care if Gerald is a hero that I would want to date (I wouldn’t), but the book is a fun read because I’m interested in the combination of his personality with Priscilla’s and the journey of how Balogh will pull off getting those to a happily ever after.

Canto 26, The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri

I read this as I was working on my next Ulysses update, which concerns the episode known as Hades and also Joyce’s relationship to Dante. More to come this weekend!

Better Man, dir. Michael Gracey

Robbie Williams feels a bit like historical romance novels in 2021 to me, as in “I can’t believe I never thought to think that obviously I would love this.” His music, which I have been listening to non-stop since Tuesday when I saw Better Man is like George Michael for idiots. I love George Michael and I’m a pop music idiot. I can’t stop listening to “Rock DJ” when I am at work.

The fact that we still get paint-by-numbers music biopics after Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) so successfully lampooned the cliches of the genre is often noted as an embarrassment, usually whenever a new musician biopic comes out. And yet, they continue to be produced and released, sometimes with laudation because the colors have been filled in mostly competently. I get most frustrated at the collaboration aspect of these biopics, especially as it manifests in sanitizing and sanctifying participants who are around to be executive producers (I remember the exact moment during the movie when I realized Brian May and Roger Taylor were the two Queen members who participated in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).)

Better Man actually did something with that collaboration, with Robbie Williams providing the voiceover for the film’s frame narrative, and he mostly comes off as a wanker. There’s no sinister force that leads him astray and even the main narrative antagonist, his father, is given quite a bit of grace and understanding. Obviously the thing that is most different about the film is the choice to have Williams depicted as a CGI monkey. This, combined with Americans lack of knowledge about the pop star who never made the Atlantic crossover fully happen, has combined to memeify the trailer, another brick in the mutual “what exactly is going on over there” cultural exchange between the United States and England.

I don’t know what to tell you: the monkey worked for me. Having the character be CGI the whole movie made surreal moments have a visual grammar that didn’t take me out of the film. It’s certainly the best use of “digital fur technology” I’ve seen in a musical. As a One Direction fan in the months after losing Liam Payne, I was also primed to be moved by the story of a boy band member alienating those around him, achieving success on his own and still almost losing it all, only to come back beloved and as cheeky as ever. Payne, like Williams, was 16 when he joined a boy band. Payne’s audition song when he first auditioned for the X-Factor was Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” and Williams uses Sinatra as a model and idol in the film and in real life, covering “My Way” as one of the last songs in the film. Williams easily could have been the Take That member that not only didn’t make it out, didn’t make it at all.

Williams drew comparisons between his own struggles and Payne’s in his tribute post after Payne’s death, writing on Instagram: “I met the boys on The X Factor and ‘mentored’ them. I use the word mentored in inverted brackets cos I hardly did anything to be honest. I just hung out with them. They were all cheeky and lovely. I enjoyed the light hearted piss takery and
Thought about all the times I was that cheeky pisstaker with the Popstars that had gone before me when I was in Take That. Our paths have crossed ever since that day and I’m fond of them all. Liam’s trials and tribulations were very similar to mine, so it made sense to reach out and offer what I could. So I did.”

robbiewilliams

A post shared by @robbiewilliams

The movie didn’t totally escape from the classic musician biopic cliches, designed to make me weep, but I did weep, as much for Liam as I did for Robbie. Plus Alison Steadman was there, as Robbie William’s beloved grandmother, doing incredible, empathetic Alison Steadman things.

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony

Revisited on Fran’s suggestion!

A tight five on Tchaikovsky's Fourth

Oscar Levant Plays Debussy

The other artist that Better Man made me think of was Oscar Levant, particularly my favorite scene in An American in Paris, where his character, Adam, fantasizes about performing Gershwin’s Concerto in F, as the pianist, but then also as the conductor, horns, strings, woodwinds, percussion and audience. I got a record player for Christmas (the belt currently giving me issues, so I can’t actually use it yet), but I picked up quite a few old recordings from the Philadelphia Orchestra I am looking forward to hearing to go along with the new turntable.

In the meantime, I’ve been listening to full albums from the 1960s of classical music recordings and this was this week’s. My favorite pieces were the Two Arabesques. Something about just piano pieces intimidates me, listening wise. I got very overwhelmed trying to listen to a bunch of Chopin when I read a biography of him—full orchestra pieces feel easier to hold on to (and distinguish from each other). But I did love The Debussy Film by Ken Russell, which explores the violence of form in his work and his life that, like a lot of artists associated with impressionism, in any medium, gets flattened with almost a century and a half of distance. Debussy sounds like easy because it is pretty, but I find that is not the case!

Plus how good is this album cover?

1. It is funny to me that Eggers was fine with having the setting card say “Germany” for a film set in the 1830s, since Germany as a country identity doesn’t exist until 1871.