WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE FINALES OF THE CURSE AND FARGO SEASON 5

It’s this collapse of meaning that frightens me the most about The Curse. The idea of falling into the sky is a common enough fear for anyone who’s laid back and looked up at the blue yonder and suddenly found themselves gripping the grass a little tighter. Once it starts happening to Asher, he and Whitney and their employees come up with a series of rational explanations and practical solutions, none of which mean anything in the face of a power capable of flinging a human being clean off the face of the earth and into the frozen space beyond. Everything Asher believed was true ceased to be true, in the most rapid and complete way imaginable. 

Fargo slams the breaks on all that. There’s a version of this season that ends with a happy suburban family systematically executed by a supernatural entity whose only moral code is that debts must be paid, a version in which everything that spousal abuse survivor Dorothy Lyon was able to put together for herself and the new husband and child she loves is dumped into that metaphysical garbage can by a psychopath. In the case of this television program, anyway, that’s not the version we got.

I wrote about the January 2024 finales of Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie’s The Curse and Noah Hawley’s Fargo Season 5 as two contrasting visions of the future for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World. It’s a subscriber-only piece, so subscribe!

Which brings us back to Mr. Black Magic himself. The Teddy Bass of Sexy Beast the television show is played by a TV vampire of considerable experience: Stephen Moyer, True Blood’s Bill Compton. Watching Moyer slink his way through this show, leaving a trail of dropped drawers and broken bodies in his wake, you can’t help but feel that this is the kind of monster Moyer had hoped to play all those years ago. Finally, he’s got something he can really sink his teeth into.

Younger, hungrier, and more dynamic than the older version played by McShane — who by that point is firmly on top of the pyramid — the TV Teddy is vampire-coded to a major degree. He’s quiet, pale, raven-haired, black-clad with red accents, largely nocturnal, possessed either by brooding malice or sinister good cheer and nothing in between. He kills men without compunction, rapes men without shame. He tends not to step into a home unless he’s been invited. And once he is, all are powerless before him.

In the most recent episode at the time of this writing, Teddy wheedles his way into the manse of his quarry, the corrupt aristocrat politician Sir Stephen Eaton (the marvelously named Julian Rhind-Tutt), by seducing his wife’s best friend from her university days. “He walked right up to me, this close,” she recalls giddily, “and he said ‘Everyone in this room, man and woman, wants to fuck me, but I only want you.’” Teddy fingerbangs the friend under the table at dinner, using the same hands he used to nearly shatter the bones of a loudmouth at the party, to the delight of all onlookers. By the end of the evening even Sir Stephen is tenderly brushing his hand against Teddy, even though he knows, for a fact, that Teddy has been spending the past few weeks using Gal and Don to rob him blind. He is irresistible. 

But he is also angry, righteously angry. In the monologue that opens this piece, from the episode that airs this week, Teddy explains to Gal, in a voice more Cockney than Queen’s E, that he loathes the upper class for its thievery and entitlement. It’s not until the season finale that you see his real supervillain origin story in this regard, and I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s ferociously, almost frantically anti-oligarchy, making their menace to the body politic concrete in their menace to the human body itself. Sir Stephen’s enrichment of himself at the expense of the public fuels Teddy’s quest to take him down every bit as much as Teddy’s own lust for power. This man is excited to plan a heist for Guy Fawkes’ Night because he vocally admires Guy Fawkes. 

I wrote about Stephen Moyer’s portrayal of Teddy Bass in Sexy Beast for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World.

The Siegel house, intended to evoke comfort, safety, and the capital-G Good life due to its fancy pants and ultimately pointless “passive house” environmental certification, is where you feel that malevolence the strongest. The place the Siegels themselves designed to make them feel their safest and best is where they are most keenly and cruelly observed by the camera, and where they are, in the end, most harshly punished by whatever force exists to do so in their world. The family home is central to the middle-class dream; it is just as central to the nightmare of surveillance cinema.

I wrote about the “surveillance cinema” of Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, and Alan Resnick’s This House Has People in It for the Welcome to Hell World newsletter. Scroll down to read it!

The main characters of Godzilla Minus One are a kamikaze pilot living with the shame of refusing to kill himself to kill others, a survivor of the Tokyo firebombing who found herself caring for the baby of a woman she watched die, a sailor who wishes he’d been old enough to fight and a crew full of navy veterans who tell him he should be “proud,” in their words, to never have fought at all. I cried when the traumatized pilot twice had mental breaks in which he was convinced Godzilla had actually killed him years earlier. I cried when the orphaned little girl asked for her dead mother. The day I was found sobbing in front of the open produce drawer I had cried in the shower earlier over a different song from the score, “Resolution,” which sounds like all of humanity inhaling and exhaling as one. (I hear Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver “Main Theme” in the song just for starters.)

Yamazki’s film is the best and worst of humanity refracted through a radioactive green lens. It’s uranium glass. It makes you feel the colossal weight of the crimes committed by both sides in World War II, embodies them in the form of Godzilla, and unleashes it on people who do not deserve to suffer and die. What more could you possibly ask from a horror movie?

My piece on Godzilla Minus One for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World is now available to read for free, without a subscription!

Sometime last week my wife returned home from an appointment to find me sitting on the floor in front of our open refrigerator, surrounded by the groceries I hadn’t finished putting away, sobbing into my hands. I was crying, hard, because I was listening to the song “Last” from Naoki Sato’s score for Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, released the weekend prior. I was crying because the song is a sonic last stand, the musical expression of a distant final hope for the survival of some beautiful doomed thing. In Yamazaki’s film the beautiful doomed thing is the population of World War II era Japan — fed into a meat grinder by a government so indifferent to their lives it had an entire program dedicated to killing its own pilots on purpose, subjected to the fires of creation itself by their swaggering conquerors, horrifically traumatized by what they saw on the front and what they survived in the rubble of their homes. An enormous monster that kills everything it sees is on its way to add more misery, destroy more families, rain more pointless death upon an exhausted people. And some of those people will give up their lives — instantly, reflexively, without thinking — to save the lives of others.

I’m pleased to be making my full-fledged debut at Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World with an essay on Godzilla Minus One, one of the best films of the year, and on Godzilla in general. The piece is for subscribers only, but great news: Luke has been generous enough to donate 7-day free trial coupons for anyone who wants to read it.

2. Losing My Religion

Impeccable, untouchable, not a note out of place. Despite its acoustic nature it sounds as insistent and relentless to me as something off of …And Justice for All. Once you learn what the song’s about — I had no freaking clue back when it was a hit — it feels like Stipe pounding on your door, begging for help, using Buck as a battering ram.

I wrote about my five favorite R.E.M. songs for the great Luke O’Neil’s newsletter Welcome to Hell World along with tons of other cool writers and such. My relationship with R.E.M. doesn’t go that deep but the stuff I know and like I REALLY know and like, so I hope that’s an interesting perspective.

NB: I would name the core unit at the heart of both Parliament-Funkadelic and the JBs (and their many side projects) as the greatest American band, followed by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and then probably R.E.M. But that’s really neither here nor there.