299. The Leap

Decking a man off the back of a moving motorbike is no mean feat. You have to run full-tilt, first of all, as close to motorbike speed as the human body allows, just to get in the door as it were. You need to properly angle your body and the leap it makes so that you’re aimed in the right direction rather than just jumping blindly. You have to lead the bike so that you’re not jumping at air where the bike once was. You have to not lead the bike too much so that you’re not gonna land on the dirt a few feet in front as the bike runs you over. You have to count on your quarry being so preoccupied by his own glee over the wanton destruction he’s wrought that he doesn’t notice the man in sweatpants barreling towards him. It helps to be shirtless and glistening with sweat, too. (I mean, I assume. Aerodynamics and all that.) You need your arms and legs at full extension, buying you time in midflight to readjust and aim appropriately, to say nothing of the asethetics. And you have to be animated with a blinding thirst for vengeance against a man who dressed up in head-to-toe denim in order to blow up the house of the weird old man who rents you an extravagant loft apartment for a hundred bucks a month, a nominal fee intended to keep the local Presbyterians at bay. You put it all together and you have Dalton, running at breakneck speed, then soaring through the air in order to crash into a man on a moving motor vehicle and then, after the crash, to kick his ass and tear his throat out. Poetry in motion. No, wait: Philosophy in motion.

298. The Laugh

Like a 1950s nun kicking the little girl under her desk.

Like a billionaire ejaculating on a $40,000 watch.

Like tyrant hearing a sycophant’s joke during the purge.

Like a budding killer dousing a cat with kerosene.

Like a border patrol agent who’s learned just enough Spanish to be cruel with it.

Like a wildfire taking a sudden turn toward inhabited areas.

Like the commander of the trebuchet that launches severed heads over the battlements.

Like an incumbent senator the night of his eighth reelection.

Like a man in wraparound sunglasses swerving his SUV toward a rabbit.

Like student loan officials at an all-expenses-paid luau.

Like a shitposter reading about the latest mass shooting.

Like a child’s nightmare of a cartoon villain as he slowly makes his way down the hall to the bedroom door.

Like a piano with only black keys, played by unseen hands.

Like a flash flood, like a rabid dog, like cut brakes, like hate speech, like black ice, like a sudden sharp pain in the left arm, like knives, like cuts, like blood.

297. On top of things

Dalton’s compassion is cloaked at this stage in the film by his rage, but it’s still there, animating his actions. To a fault, perhaps. After he pulls Emmett from his burning house, which then explodes a second time, Emmet tells him “I’d be fine if you’d get off of me.” And what does Dalton do immediately? Rest his head on the old man’s chest. He does this not out of spite or a desire to increase the man’s suffering, of course—he’s just overcome with relief that his friend is well enough to crack wise. Dalton even smiles for a second, despite it all.

When you write about Road House you have to take all of it on board or it doesn’t work. You have to treat every weird filigree of the film like a deliberate choice. You have to treat the characters as the gestalt of their actions. This is why Dalton engenders such love: About two minutes before he rips a man’s throat out in anger, he presses his forehead against the chest of his landlord, just to be closer to a man he’s glad is alive. He makes time to be nice, and bless him for that.

“The Affair” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Nine

Do I think “The Affair” set out to tell a #MeToo story from the start, before the #MeToo movement existed? No. But the pieces have been there all along. If it took until now for the show to look back and put those pieces together, that doesn’t make the resulting picture any less real.

Noah can be a good father, as Helen insists he has been. He can do his best to be a good man, as he has insisted time and time again — going so far as confessing to a crime he didn’t commit in order to protect Helen. He can even be the victim of opportunists like Sasha, who care only about the accusations insofar as they can be exploited for personal gain.

But Noah has been a bull in the china shop of women’s lives for a long time. All “The Affair” is doing now is surveying the damage.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

“Mr. Robot” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Three: “403 Forbidden”

Risk is the essence of romance. A wise woman told me that once; I live with her now, so I’m inclined to believe she knew what she was talking about. Exposed and vulnerable, we reach out to another person and hope they’ll reach back. We put ourselves at their mercy in hopes of connection. In some cases, we put ourselves at the mercy of a world that will punish us for that connection should it be discovered. There is some pain we suffer gladly because it’s the vessel in which pleasure comes.

Titled “403 Forbidden” — like every episode title so far, it’s both an internet error message and a signpost for the story — this installment of “Mr. Robot” has both the series’s protagonist and antagonist putting themselves at risk in romance’s name. In one case, it leads to disaster. In another … well, the season isn’t over yet.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times.

New column alert!

I’ve started a new column about film called My Favorite Movies, which will cover exactly that. The inaugural installment: Eyes Wide Shut. It’s available for my Patreon subscribers at the $5/month tier. I hope you dig it!

With that in mind I’ve experimented with making my pro wrestling column, Sweeping Up the Eyeballs, free this week. I hope you dig that too!

RIP BoiledLeather.com 2011-2019

Due to a lost credit card, a crowded inbox, a lackadaisical hosting service, and a piece-of-shit squatter, I no longer own boiledleather.com, the address of much of my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones writing since 2011. Fortunately all the content is actually hosted at boiledleather.tumblr.com, so it’s not a total loss. I sincerely apologize for the linkrot that’s now setting in, though. I’m mortified I let this happen and gutted I can’t afford to buy the domain back from the people who snaked it out from under me.

296. SWAYZE SAVES SANTA

It’s a layup, I realize, to take your old-man-with-a-big-white-beard character and put him in red long johns for pajamas. Because it makes him look even more like Santa Claus, see? But in a way I fear that this deep in the weeds with Road House we’ve lost sight of some of its simple pleasures: butts, boobs, dudes getting punched in the face, people getting thrown through tables, explosions, a monster truck, a town full of nothing but codgers and yokels. Can we not add “Emmett dresses up like Santa Claus when he goes to sleep” to the list? Can we not savor the site of Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay rescuing St. Nick from a fiery inferno? Can we not enjoy the fact that after being bodily removed from a building in the process of exploding like the Hindenburg, Emmett’s only concession to Dalton’s query about his health is to quip “I’d be fine if you’d get off of me”? You can’t keep this right jolly old elf down, try as you might. The same is true of Road House. There’s always something marvelously dumb just around the corner, if you’re willing to look.

295. Fire and water

Jimmy Reno has exactly four minutes to live when he sets off the initial explosion in Emmett’s home. Four minutes to the second. What an emotional journey that must be for him. The tension and thrill of being a sneak in the night. The firebug awe of the detonation. The bonus, unlooked for, of the secondary explosion, even bigger than the first. Stopping his getaway motorbike to laugh uproariously at Dalton, Doc, and Emmett, reveling in their powerlessness compared to his fiery prowess. The sudden shock of being knocked off his bike by a flying man. The determination to kill this man. The back and forth of their battle. The pain of incurring blows and the satisfaction of inflicting them. The sadistic delight of reminiscing about his time as a prison rapist. The moment when it all changes and he realizes he’s in trouble, deep trouble. The desperate decision to pull a gun and settle things for good and all. The rushed in-the-moment thinking that occurs when you feel you’re at immediate risk of death. The pain in his throat. Oblivion. From lighting up the night with his malice to floating face-down dead in a river, in the time it takes the Beatles to do the “na na na nanana na” part of “Hey Jude.” Take a sad song and make it wetter.

294. Whose house? Emmett’s house

Emmett’s house explodes twice: first from the explosive set by Brad Wesley’s lieutenant and bastard son (WE WILL NOT BE ACCEPTING QUESTIONS AT THIS TIME) Jimmy, and second, presumably, when the house’s oil tank or moonshine distillery or meth lab or something catches fire and goes boom. It’s a comically large explosion even by the standards set by Red Webster’s Auto Parts, which of course was a larger building and filled with natural accelerants. In the image above you can see Dalton, Doc, and Emmett fleeing as the explosion reaches its height; that should give you so me sense of the preposterous scale of the thing.

Sometimes when I play Minecraft with my children I’ll build an entire structure out of TNT blocks, just so it’ll blow up bigger when I light it on fire. It’s easy to wonder if Emmett did the same with his sad little house, waiting for the day when his sins, whatever they are, came due for repayment.

The Boiled Leather Audio Hour #95: Chapter Analysis: Theon I, The Winds of Winter

Stefan and I are starting a series of Boiled Leather Audio Hour episodes going in-depth on each of the available sample chapters from The Winds of Winter, starting with a look at Theon I!

“Watchmen” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice”

It’s wild!

No, seriously, it really is wild. It reminds me, in a good way, of some of the most far-out episodes of Lindelof’s Leftovers run—the ones where Justin Theroux near-death-hallucinates that he’s an international assassin, say, or the one where Christopher Eccleston talks to God on a weird cult’s orgy boat before God gets mauled to death by a lion. Where Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen eased you into its world’s weirdness—which to be fair was orders of magnitude less weird than either the Marvel or DC shared universes of which it served as a critique—Lindelof and director Nicole Kassell dump you into the deep end and expect you to do the butterfly, with the aggressive and eerie music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross blaring in the background.

I reviewed the series premiere of Watchmen for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show all season. It’s good!

293. Shirtlessly Smoking

Shirtlessly smoking
His surgeon, she’s standing nearby
Awaiting a word
Gasping at glimpses
Of bottomless buttocks
He runs, wishing he could fly
Only to leap when the house blows sky-high

Wordlessly watching
He waits by the window
For Wesley
That’s the JC Penney guy
Anxious for Emmett and arson explosions
He worries
Did Wade wish him goodbye? Or call him mijo?

They are one cooler
They are two alone
They are three together
They are for the road house

Bound from the barn loft
And bounce by the hay bales to rescue
Your beardy landlord first
Dalton is diving
He’s down to defend from the danger
Maybe rip out throats
And choke them with their blood

They are one cooler
They are two alone
They are three together
They are for the road house

292. Body language

This is Dalton when he has nothing to do but fume. His muscles are taut, arms crossed fussily across his abdomen. His head juts forward, neck straining, jaw tight as he vents his frustration and rage. There’s nothing else for him to do right now—just vent, impotently, at his girlfriend. His body is like one huge knot.

This is Dalton in action. His landlord Emmett’s house has just exploded and he’s leaping to the rescue from his second-story window. But he moves not like someone who needs to brace himself for a fall, but gracefully, soaring rather than falling. His arms are wide, his legs angled just so, his hair flowing in the breeze. Faced with a physical problem, he moves toward a solution like a dancer hitting his marks. This is Dalton as he is meant to be. His body responds to the call of duty just as much as his mind.

291. Take him

“I’ve always wanted to try you. I think I can take you.” That’s what the Knife Nerd said to Dalton in the very first scene of the film, when Dalton breaks up a fight at the club he worked at back in New York. The sexualization of combat was already clear in the man’s choice of words, a language of dominance and submission that glistens and gleams each time it’s used. It happens again and again. “Your ass is mine, boy,” Jimmy tells Dalton when Wesley calls off their fight in the Double Deuce, just for example. And a few seconds from where we now stand it will accelerate to explicitly sexual speeds.

Dalton inadvertently sets the dominoes in motion. “I know exactly who Brad Wesley is,” he snaps at Dr. Elizabeth Clay after she warns him he has no idea what Brad Wesley is capable of. “I’ve seen his kind many times. He keeps taking, and taking, until somebody takes him.” Dalton believes he’s man to do this—to take Brad Wesley, and thus best him. There’s a weird lacuna in the phrasing that invites questions: takes him…where, exactly? takes him down? takes him on? takes him in? You almost can’t help but sub in the sexual connotation of the phrase, since we’re offered so little by way of an alternative. This shirtless mass of muscle and sinew and fine feathered hair wants to take his enemy. You connect the dots.

‘Watchmen’: Here’s What to Know From the Comics

The show is set roughly 30 years later; during much of that time, Robert Redford has been president. Vigilantism remains banned except under official government auspices thanks to the Keene Act, a 1977 law named after Senator Joe Keene, whose charismatic son is now challenging Redford for the presidency. And Dr. Manhattan, who despite his near-omniscience was unable to stop Ozymandias’s plot, has fled the planet for Mars, where he has lived alone for decades.

Historically and psychically, the TV series roots itself in the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Okla., in which a white mob swarmed the prosperous black part of town, resulting in as many as 300 deaths, with thousands more displaced. In the fictionalized present day, the series pits the Tulsa police force, whose members wear vigilante-style masks to protect their identity, against a militant white supremacist group called the Seventh Kavalry, which has adopted Rorschach’s lethal methods and black-and-white mask.

I wrote a quick and dirty guide to Watchmen—the comic, the show, and their shared world—for the New York Times.

290. Firestarter

Dr. Elizabeth Clay is not taking Dalton’s shit. That’s the throughline for nearly every word she says during this scene. On Brad Wesley: “You don’t know him.” On the inability of the people of Jasper to stand up to Brad Wesley: a sarcastic “But you can stop him.” On Dalton’s assertion that he never loses: “But what are you gonna win?” She continues: “Who’s this for, anyway? Are you doing it for them?” She answers her own question: “I don’t think so.” She pulls off this rhetorical trick again for the coup de grace: “You think you’re gonna save these people from Wesley?” At the top of her lungs, her voice shredding, her face a grimacing mask of fury: “WELL WHO’S GONNA SAVE THEM FROM YOU?”

BOOM.

At that precise moment, the building visible through the window behind her blows up. It’s the most fortuitously timed act of arson in the annals of Jasper, Missouri, I’d have to imagine. The bomb Jimmy the goon used to blow up the house of Emmett the old man is like an inflammable exclamation mark at the end of the Doc’s rant. It’s as if the ideas she’s bringing up are too dangerous even to give voice to. The world ruptures around them in gouts of flame. She’s a pyrokinetic Cassandra with one message to deliver: In the contest of Dalton vs. Brad Wesley, the only winner is the conqueror worm.

289. “I never lose”

“Brad Wesley picked me,” Dalton tells Dr. Elizabeth Clay, “and when he did, he fucked up. I’m only good at one thing, Doc: I never lose.” The thing to pay attention to here is that Dalton has rarely, if ever, sounded like more of a loser than he does right here and now. His tone of voice is clipped, nasal, truculent. His body language and facial expressions are those of a man who, contrary to what he’s saying, feels he has an enormous amount to prove, and is trying to bluster his way into confidence that he can do so. He’s also, it should be said, being a huge dickhead to the one that he loves and who loves him. She’s there simply to ask him not to put himself in a life-threatening contest of wills with her insane ex-husband, and he’s taken this as an opportunity to whip out his dick and measure it in front of her.

Something’s got to give.

“The Terror: Infamy” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Ten: “Into the Afterlife”

Now here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write today: The season finale of The Terror: Infamy moved me to tears.

Wait, what? We’re talking about the same The Terror: Infamy that squandered its predecessor season’s goodwill by shoddily cobbling together warmed-over J-horror with real-world historical atrocities? The one that employed a central supernatural metaphor that appeared to place the blame for Japanese Americans’ political predicament on Japanese Americans themselves rather than their racist captors? The one that was haphazardly plotted, jerking from location to location and time period to time period with seemingly no sense of narrative balance or emotional logic? The one where the main character chose the moment when he and his family are rounded up by the American government as potential traitors to tell his mom that he got some lady in a family way? That The Terror: Infamy?

Yes, that The Terror: Infamy.

Written by co-creator and showrunner Alexander Woo and directed by Frederick E.O. Toye, “Into the Afterlife,” the final episode of the AMC anthology series’ second season, is an extended grace note for a story that up until now had just been banging on the keys at random. Attentive to the historical import of the time period it chronicles, generous in spirit toward its characters both living and dead, and driven in large part by the season’s most effective and poetic imagery, it nearly makes up for all the dross that’s come before. It left me imagining a season that had lived up to this standard from the start, and wondering how much more impact a finale like this would have had if it had.

I reviewed the shockingly good finale of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

“Mr. Robot” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Two: “402 Payment Required”

Adding additional layers to an already complicated plot is tricky business, of course. But the mysteries are so intriguing, and Esmail’s command of his craft so sure, that the investment seems sound as a pound.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times. It’s good!