Having spent close to six months in The Agnes Owens Archive and The Alasdair Gray Archive as part of a two-handed residency, supported by The National Lottery through Creative Scotland, I feel like I have come to know these writers as intimately as one can know two people they have never met. I have pored over their correspondence: apology notes to friends and family, typewritten first drafts, reviews, negotiations, love letters, messages from readers, diary entries, royalty statements from publishers. I have read their books, seen their newspaper clippings, turned over their legal documents. But I do not know them evenly. Gray, whose artistic life started in childhood and who was a much larger figure in both the Scottish literary and art scenes, left behind vastly more material than Owens, who did not publish until she was 58, and was distinctly more private—or, perhaps, never thought there would be so much interest in her life. To get to know Owens, then, I have had to dig deeper into both her surviving material and her published work.

There is always a level of projection at play when we try to construct the jigsaw of someone from insufficient pieces, and the pieces of such a puzzle will always be insufficient. There are parts of Agnes Owens I can only draw freehand, and in doing so I model these parts on people, and writers, I already know. What makes this easier is that her work is enormously evocative of a particular way of seeing the world, one that I recognise from both my life and from my most beloved literature. In her 2003 Guardian review of the Owens book Bad Attitudes, (a novella published along with another, Jen's Party), Scottish novelist Ali Smith nailed Owens’ style almost perfectly:

Agnes Owens's hallmarks have been a frank irony, a deadpan gothic quality and a down-to-earth insistence on the surreality of most people's normality.

At the heart of books like For the Love of Willie is just this: an ability to see both the magic in the darkness of everyday lives, and a refusal to ignore the strange, the odd, the complex in all of it. What Smith calls a frankness, we might describe as a nonjudgmental yet brutal honesty; it is this that I find most relatable, in Owens’ work, for it’s a spirit I have grown up with. When Owens writes, in Bad Attitudes, of ‘Shanky Devine, who was cursed with a bad squint’, I can’t help but think of the deadpan delivery of my own South Yorkshire family, who will sit looking through old photos and say things like, ‘… and that’s your great aunt Cora, with the hump’.1 Along with this comes the stark recitation of sometimes savage facts, with the same tone in which you might deliver news of a new baby or a job promotion; Owens uses this in For the Love of Willie to great effect, so much so that you find yourself reading the page over and over, so you can be sure what you read was correct. This, I am sure, is the same tendency that causes my mother to ring me and tell me that some vague acquaintance of mine from playgroup thirty-five years ago now has four kids and terminal oesophageal cancer; a leaning in to the sometimes dark material facts of life, to which they are well accustomed, married with a strong empathy for others, no matter how peripheral to their lives—all wrapped up in a complete refusal of self-pity. I wonder if this is a particular habit of women from certain generations, and from ‘the north’, by which I mean everywhere in the UK upwards of Mansfield. Events in life are just things that happen, and have to be dealt with; no point in lamenting, no point in wishing things were otherwise. All of this results in a frank but largely impartial assessment of people’s personalities and habits, which strikes me as the most honest way to see a person, and the most interesting too. Speaking to Jane Gray in 2008, Owens said, of her goals in fiction,

I want to convey people that are condemned in a better light than what people would think, you know, or maybe to make people think, well, these people are human. Something like that.2

It is this that I find intensely compelling about the way she draws people: a rejection of the flattening that can occur in literature, when characters become not reflections of reality but only a means to advance a neat plot. Owens knows that the world is unjust, and that bad things happen to the least deserving of ill fortune, and that good fortune is visited upon those unworthy of it. But she also knows that real humans are contradictory creatures, as capable of great generosity as they are of great selfishness, as able to be kind in one moment as they are to be cruel in the next, and this complexity of both spirit and action is what drives her stories, rather than the other way around.

It seems this is not only how she assessed the characters in her fiction, but the people in her own life, too. In The Agnes Owens Archive, there are a few typewritten pages entitled Auto Biography - Agnes Owens, to which she brings this sensibility. Of her mother, she writes that she ‘was a good woman and never did anything wrong that I knew of apart from being a bit of a gambler’.3 Of her own potential, she writes she ‘might have been somebody’s private secretary, if [she] hadn’t met and married a man who had returned from the second world war shattered in spirit if not in body’.4 On the subject of what surely must be the worst time in her life, she writes just four lines:

Then a terrible thing happened to the family. My youngest son Patrick was stabbed to death outside his home. He was nineteen at the time and we were all devastated. It was ages before I even thought of writing again.5

Of such a surreal and devastating experience, another writer might wring an entire book; the contents of the archive certainly show that Owens’ search for justice for her son were extensive and drenched in heartbreak. But she had little time for making spectacle of her own suffering, nor in constructing a narrative around herself and her experiences. In her 2014 Scotsman obituary for Owens, writer Chitra Ramaswamy recalls interviewing her in her home in Balloch, and wrote:

She told her life story like one of her characters too: unsentimentally, economically, and with punchlines in the most painful places. I remember thinking as the afternoon wore on, the room grew darker, and the rain fell heavier, that there was enough material for a brilliant memoir.6

I think this is correct, but I think that it would have been a slim volume; despite the fact that Owens’ life contained much, she seems completely unconcerned with lingering over it, uninterested in creating any sort of publishable account about her life, which, as she presents it, contained no more or less tragedy and joy than other people’s lives, and so was no more or less notable than anyone else’s. Later drafts of the few pages of auto biography are entitled ‘A Hopeless Case’, referencing a schoolteacher’s assessment of the young Owens, who was exhausted through her share of caring for her younger brother. But there is no self-pity in this. The Owens I have come to know would, I think, hate the very idea.

What we call ‘deadpan gothic’, then, might well be described as a particularly undramatic response to real life: the rendering of domestic and societal horrors in the matter-of-fact style which is common within a certain intersection of class, community and gender—but not restricted to this exact intersection. In the archives, the only two authors Owens admits as influences are John Steinbeck and Flannery O’Connor—who both share her tendency to straightforward prose, and to jolts of shocking but socially-constructed violence—yet I have come to recognise a similarity between her work and the writing of a very different novelist. In my introduction to the Polygon reissue of (to my mind) Owens’ best novel, For the Love of Willie, I draw comparison with the work of American horror writer Shirley Jackson. There is much to say about the way that Jackson evokes the darkness of life in a wholly undramatic, Owenesque way, not least in the opening of her stunningly brilliant and dark horror novella We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death- cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

If you told me this was lifted from an Owens short story, I would believe you without a second thought; there is a genealogical tree that includes both Merricat Blackwood and Arabella, the titular character of Owens’ most grotesque short story. But it is Jackson’s Hangsaman that shares most DNA with Owens, for its treatment of female teenagehood similarly explored in For the Love of Willie. The protagonists of these novels are girls coming of age as agents in the world, and their writers render them as the complicated, often dark, often self-harming creatures they are. Both have aspirations tied to their class; the Owens protagonist, Peggy, wishes to gain herself a wage that is equal to her male peers, and gets herself a corner-shop job the minute she is able, while Hangsaman’s Natalie, coming from a middle-class family, aims her sights at university instead. The difference in resources and options could not be more different, yet both girls are stopped in their tracks by the actions of a single man, stunted in their agency by what is done to them. We learn, by comparison between the books, that class may be a protective cloak, but it is not a suit of armour.

These are serious themes, involving social critique and a sharp assessment of how power refracts among the powerless, but because such insights are drawn from stories about teenage girls, they are taken less seriously, by critics, than they might be. This was true of both Owens and Jackson in general, with reviewers unable to resist drawing on their domestic lives and parental roles as if they were some sort of hilarious novelty that, rather than informing their creative work, stood in contrast to it. In a 1962 review of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Time magazine described Jackson, somewhat dismissively, as ‘a kind of Virginia Werewoolf among the seance-fiction writers’ (which, despite its intentions, makes her sound extremely chic), and couldn’t help but paint her as some sort of lowly housewife who made sense when she was writing memoirs about marriage and motherhood, but was an abomination when doing anything else:

By day, amiably disguised as an embattled mother, she devotes her artful talents to the real-life confusions of the four small children (Life Among the Savages, Raising Demons) in her Vermont household. But when shadows fall and the little ones are safely tucked in, Author Jackson pulls down the deadly nightshade and is off.7

This might have been written of Agnes Owens, had she been given resources and support to start publishing when her children were still young; what would the press have made of a tale of unrepentant filicide as penned by someone with toddlers at home? Her life, as lived, was enough to confound the media, who constantly wrote of her years as a typist, and rehashed over and over the story of her sending a manuscript to Billy Connolly for endorsement, only to find it once again when she was employed to clean his house.

For many, it is impossible to talk of Agnes Owens without speaking about her class position, her employment, her personal tragedies, and from these facts they extrapolate larger points about society. These are all, of course, part of the woman, the writer, she was, and they are part of what leads me to draw her in the model of other creative women I know. But so often a writer can become a token of something beyond their work, when the work is surely what should matter the most. When I try to access Owens through the archive, when I try to build a picture of the writer she wanted to be remembered as, I come back to one item, a 1993 typewritten response to a journalist in Sweden who wanted to include her in a series of articles about Scottish writers.

My writing has once been described as more European than British in character, which I hope is true. I would not like to be considered a parochial writer… Again I suppose you could say I am a working class write [sic] though nowadays I would say I am more an underdog writer since there are many underdogs in Scotland but I wouldn’t deliberately write about certain issues if they didn’t make good fiction.8

At the Milngavie launch of the Agnes Owens reissues, which you can listen to here, we were treated to the perfecting ending to such an event: one of Owens’ sons standing up to sing the song his mother used to sing after a night of drinks with family and friends. It is this that I think of, now, when I think about Agnes Owens the author: a woman writing from her own circumstances and community, but not constrained by them. A woman writing good, strong, socially-critical, deadpan gothic fiction about underdogs, putting down her pen and having a drink, and then singing unabashedly to rooms full of her loved ones.

There are some authors that haunt other writers. They appear around the time that you first get published. The identity of your particular spectre will be tied in some way to your work, but mostly to your race, gender, location, background. The imagination of critics sometimes stretches not to your actual writing, but to whichever famous author you can most easily be compared to. These ghosts linger around you at the start of your career, when no one has really got a sense of you yet but needs to pigeonhole you, and if you’re unlucky they’ll stick and be there forever. What I’m telling you is this: a hell of a lot of white female writers under 40 have found themselves haunted by Angela Carter.

I had my first comparison to Carter before I’d ever read a single one of her books, and certainly before I had developed enough skill for this to be anything other than wildly offensive to her. A lot of us go through a period of interest in folk stories, especially at the start of our careers, and especially if we’ve had an education that focused on the female element of such stories. They make sense, as a place to start. But the Carter comparison is slapped on then, and quickly sticks, no matter what your treatment of folk tales really is or how quickly you move on from it. All cheap comparisons, too eagerly made, eventually diminish the greater name; Angela Carter deserves more, I think, than just being the patron saint of unimaginative white female emerging writers.

Last week I read a wonderful write up of a new Brothers Grimm autobiography in the London Review of Books; the book is written by Ann Schmiesing, the review was by Colin Burrow. Of course, Carter was evoked in this article, as she always must be when discussing anything fairy-tale. As part of a rich discussion of the Grimms and their legacy, Burrow drew attention to Carter’s subversion of the original Bluebeard story in her book The Bloody Chamber, in which she has the final victim’s mother arrive to save her from her serial murderer husband. But the subversion was not quite Burrow’s focus:

The uneasy but repeated fascination with sexual humiliation in many of Carter’s versions of folk tales, for instance, is probably not quite the explicit content she would have wanted to put in them, and has sometimes made her readers squeamish… Why unlock the chamber you know is forbidden and which you suspect must be bloody unless some part of you wants to be hurt?

As my friend Camilla noted, this is a very odd point. It is strange to assume that anything a person puts in a book—a project in which they agonise over every word, every possible reading, every formulation of meaning—is there accidentally. But it is particularly strange to assume that Angela Carter wasn’t aware of the theme of sexual humiliation in her stories, because this is a writer who is intensely interested in the sharp edges of women’s experience of desire, of what lies underneath when you scratch through the female flesh of social niceties and obligation, of how sex in fiction can be used to hide social and cultural critique. She herself said that, in The Bloody Chamber, she was taking ‘the latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual.’ As Jenny Turner notes, in a 2016 LRB article, Carter sometimes referred to herself as a ‘moral pornographer’. She was interested in women’s fascination with sexual danger; she was interested in sadomasochism. In fact, in the same year that she brought out the book in question, The Bloody Chamber, she also brought out a book specifically around sadism. As in, literally about the work of the Marquis de Sade.

The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, published in the UK in 1979, is my favourite of the Carter books I’ve read, probably in part because it was, to me, so completely unexpected. Carter, like all dead female writers, is shorn of her radicalism in contemporary discourse, and so her name becomes blandly synonymous with retellings of folk tales rather than, for instance, with intense intellectual discussion of one of the most controversial writers in modern history, or with the fact that she used the money from her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her first husband and move to Japan.

Speaking on the BBC’s The Verb in 2012, Marina Warner—one of the scholars who has insisted on taking Carter’s work seriously throughout her career—described this book as being about ‘desire and its destruction, the self-immolation of women’. One of the first titles commissioned by the newly established feminist press Virago, the book stood out against the general feminist writing of the time, which was vehemently anti-pornography (as much of it is now). Carter knew that she was playing with fire even as she wrote it. Its publication managed to irritate radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who dismissed it as a ‘pseudofeminist literary essay’; fellow anti-pornography feminist Susanne Kappeler similarly derided the book as failing to achieve a feminist analysis. Carter’s response, according to Edmund Gordon, was this:

If I can get up Susanne Kappeler’s nose, to say nothing of the Dworkin proboscis, then my living has not been in vain.

This was not the only time Carter’s work rubbed up against these women, as Dworkin—a woman who never met a sweeping statement she didn’t like—believed that fairy tales, ‘the first scenarios of women and men which mould our psyches’, oppress women, entrenching gender stereotypes. Carter, rather, saw fairy tales as a way to imagine societal change, and an expression of the conscious or unconscious desires of the time. She saw the form as an exploratory one, open to change and rework and modernisation, whereas Dworkin considered them fundamentally anti-woman. For me, it’s difficult not to see echoes here of the most vicious contemporary feminist arguments, with one side insisting on adaptability and the possibility of change, of listening and altering, and the other insisting on closing doors and maintaining positions. I recall the launch of a young feminist magazine I went to close to a decade ago, where the twenty-something women on stage, expressing solidarity with sex workers fighting for safer environments, were subjected to a barrage of abuse from older feminists (who had posed the question specifically to elicit this response) at the back of the audience, with the older group quite literally screaming at the young women about rape and prostitution and abuse. As Jenny Turner notes, it is often not men that feminists find themselves in greatest dispute with:

Time and time again, the really poisonous conflict is with the women of the preceding generation, the ground they gave and the mistakes they made in loving themselves and their daughters.

This misses a point, however: just as often, the conflict is with the following generation, and the ground that they are perceived to be giving. Every generation that was once the younger becomes the older, and the cycle continues. Just as no two siblings have the same parents, no two generations of feminists come up in the same world. One grows up without access to contraception; the next with easy access to it. One grows up with hard-fought abortion rights; the next finds them cruelly snatched away. One comes of age in a world where white middle class feminists were the only ones allowed public stage, and so took that opportunity; the next attempts to make space for marginalised voices and to shift focus towards those most vulnerable. That we manage to build connections between these generations at all should be cause for celebration.

To radical feminists, Carter was be a pariah, a non-feminist. By daring to interrogate such a writer as Sade, she had committed a sin against women. Angela Carter, like all women, can’t seem to speak or write without attracting ire from all sides; she was criticised by Patricia Duncker—the gloriously eccentric and brilliant woman who taught the Gothic fiction class I took at university, which changed my entire life—for never imagining ‘Cinderella in bed with the Fairy God-mother’. But Carter was not above directing ire at female writers too; Turner notes that she:

was often vehement in her dislike of slightly older women writers, such as Joan Didion, Edna O’Brien and Jean Rhys, whom she claimed to find victim-like.

It is, of course, a tale as old as time. The wisdom of the previous generations can weigh heavy on the young, who do not wish to acknowledge their own vulnerability. It is precisely Carter’s experience of the preceding generation that led her to such a dislike of perceived victimhood. She adored her maternal grandmother, who the family moved in with during the war; Angela’s most formative years were spent in in Wath-upon-Dearne, just five minutes from where I would later grow up. Her relationship with her mother was much more strained; startlingly and perhaps oppressively protective of her (much) younger second child, Olive not only once suggested she might go and live with Angela if she got into Oxford (surely the last thing any striving young woman wants) but also saw it as her duty to keep the young adult Angela away from boys. Angela, in turn, began to fight with her mother for control over her own body. As her mother encouraged her towards cream cakes and rich, youthful treats, Angela was taking up smoking as a means to lose weight and prowling for a man, almost any man, who would fuck her. And so she found herself married before she was twenty-one, freed from the realm of her family and trapped into that of a wife. Is there any wonder where her interest as sex as a political frame came from? Why she might have been fascinated by sexual humiliation, or the power dynamics and context of the erotic, or sex as a means to self-harm? Under the title of the first chapter of The Sadeian Woman, a ‘polemical preface’ she called ‘Pornography in the Service of Women’, Carter quotes both Foucault and Fanon; from the latter, she borrows the line ‘I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanised my ancestors’. Shots fired.

From the very preface of the book, Carter sets out the way she views pornography, which could not differ more from that of Dworkin and her other contemporaries. For Carter, all pornography derived from myth, and featured mythic abstractions of male and female, as far from real people as it was possible to be. The ‘getting’ of a woman by a man; the man approaching a reclining woman on his knees, erect; the laying of a woman down in the fertile soil; for Carter it is all an attempt to engage in ‘spurious charade of maleness and femaleness’. [It’s at this point I must remind you that we’re talking about seventies pornography; I’m not sure what Carter would make of the cumguzzling, gangbanging, forced feminisation pornography of today. But I would love to know.]

In other words, both fairy tales and pornography are works of fantasy. And it is through this lens that she sees pornography as ripe for improvement, just as she sees fairy tales and their gendered narratives as ripe for rework. The real world of sex, she writes, is not free from the weight of mythology, economics, history; she sees wives as people who ‘fuck by contract’, and that sex workers are merely more open about the economic aspect of their congress. She writes that the job of pornography is sometimes to educate but mostly to titillate, and that in doing so, it ‘reinforces the false universals of sexual archetype because it denies… the social context in which sexual activity takes place’. This loss of the real world means we cannot reappraise it through this artform, and makes pornography an ‘affectless form of daydreaming’, serving to ‘defuse the explosive potential of all sexuality’—which is why it is directed towards men, the politically dominant minority. Pornography, she says, keeps sex ‘under the carpet. That is, outside everyday human intercourse.’

This is a very subtle but distinct shift in our understanding. According to Carter, pornography is obscene not because it shows sex, but because it shows sex in regressive archetype only, shorn of all its political context and therefore its political possibility. That it forces sex into a covered world away from our normal lives, as if it is a grotesquerie, as if it is by nature indecent. But also that it enforces biologically essentialist understandings of maleness and femaleness; man, giver, penetrator, dominator; woman, receiver, penetrated dominated. It is here that we start to see the cracks through which her embrace of the Marquis de Sade’s work appear.

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was born in Paris in 1740, the only surviving child of a noble family that could trace its blood to the king of France. He was spoiled and violent, sent to be raised by a libertine priest uncle; his mother eventually left his father and moved into a convent. He was a soldier, a gambler, a husband and father, a sexual deviant; one of his first imprisonments was for blasphemy and ‘incitement to sacrilege’, after he forced a sex worker to trample on a crucifix at gunpoint and tried to get her to engage in sodomy (he had already masturbated with a crucifix while blaspheming, something I can’t think about without laughing). Subsequent sexual scandals included the whipping and brutalising of a housekeeper who he attempted to keep locked up in a room, and an orgy with four sex workers and his manservant which involved a lot of sodomy (a capital offence) as well as flagellation and the poisoning of the sex workers with cantharidin, better known as Spanish fly, for which the two men were sentenced to death.

He managed to avoid capture for a period, hiring either sex workers or servants—of both sex, and some as young as fifteen—who he then used for orgies, with flogging being a major part of the activities. After one such affair, his wife sent their young female servants away to convents to recover from their injuries; its clear he deserved the legacy of his name, for he was inarguably a sexually violent man. Eventually his death sentence was reduced to imprisonment and he was finally held in Vincennes prison, in the Bastille and then in an insane asylum, and it was in these places that he began to write his infamous works.

It is the works, and not the crimes, that have really cemented his place in history; after all, in Sade’s time the marriageable age in France was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, meaning what we’d now consider the abuse of young teenagers was far from unusual, and Catholic-tinged sexual perversion as is old as time. After his release from prison he was active in politics (again, not exactly a realm free from sexual deviancy), first supporting a constitutional monarchy and then moving to a more radical republican position before being arrested for not being revolutionary enough. His final imprisonment was not for any sexual violence, rape or abuse but for pornography, or more properly for ‘immorality’, and he was detained without trail, declared insane and held captive for the rest of his life. By the time he died, he had spent almost half of his days in prison.

His crimes, in the realm of literature, were as follows: he wrote extremely explicit, sexually violent novels (and non-pornographic plays, essays, travel journals and political treatises, many of which were philosophical in nature). His name is synonymous with what are referred to as his ‘libertine’ novels: 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Boudoir, Justine and Juliette. The former is his most infamous work, despite it being unfinished, perhaps because of the extent of its depravity and because its author wrote it while imprisoned in the Bastille, rolling up the scroll and hiding it in the cell walls so it might not be discovered. Its plot has little outside of the sexual, and the published version degrades from prose into simple notes as it goes on, which, actually, adds a meta level to the implication that the four male protagonists have completely lost themselves to the worst depravities ever conceived. The story goes like this: four rich libertines lock themselves in a castle with twelve accomplices, twenty victims (including their own daughters) and ten servants. They spend four months attempting to reach the ultimate sexual gratification with no holds barred, which leads to every possible transgression and violence you can imagine, and ends with torture and murder. Justine and Juliette tell more traditionally-structured but no less explicit tales of two women, one virtuous and one not (their full titles are Justine, or Good Conduct Well-Chastised and Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded) and Philosophy in the Boudoir is primarily a philosophical dialogue wherein the two protagonists defend libertinism as the only system that mirrors and reinforces revolution, and then put that sexual libertinism into action.

The reason so many writers end up coming back to Sade as a point of interest is that he was, fundamentally, interesting. A nobleman who managed to scandalise himself so much he was cast out, his political views encompassed the following: a denial of the right to property, libertarianism bordering on anarchism, an analysis of state power that might be called socialist, a belief in state-funded brothels (which Dworkin insisted was a call for enforced prostitution from childhood onwards), atheism, materialism, libertinism, hedonism. For Carter, though, it’s the sexual extremity of his writing and his treatment of his female characters, all of which is against a political backdrop, that makes him worthy of deep consideration; he is utilising pornography to ‘make a particularly wounding satire on mankind, and the historical time in which the novels are set is essential to the satire.’ Carter writes that Sade’s work—often dismissed as grotesque and immoral—is:

of particular significance to women, because of his refusal to see female sexuality in relation to its reproductive function, a refusal as unusual in the late eighteenth century as it is now.

This is inarguable; the women in Sade’s books are intensely sexual beings, both used and using. They enjoy all the sexual freedom that his male characters do, and they are given status and agency as well; they are good, they are evil, they are punished and they mete out violence on others too. His novels are all about power, and what the expression of power looks like; his women are brutalised when they are subjected to this power, but they are also brutalised by it when they gain it. They, too, become as cruel as the men who raped and mutilated them. In this way he shows power as something that is not only held but taken; the power of one person requires the degradation of another. As Carter puts it, ‘a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.’ I find myself stunned at how much this line, published in 1979, mirrors our most anti-imperialist, socially-engaged slogans of today.

Of course, there is violence against the women, in these books. There is violence against men. Almost all the characters are physically active with both men and women, sexually free in every sense, good and bad. The worlds of Sade’s books are nihilistic, extreme, perverse; good women are destroyed and bad men and women prevail. They careen into the depths of depravity; at the end of 120 Days of Sodom, the last tale is that of the ‘hell libertine’, who is physically stimulated by servants while being mentally stimulated by the murder of fifteen girls. Considering this character, I can’t help but think of the God-Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer 40k, who has to consume the souls of one thousand ‘psykers’ per day. These two characters have the same function; to highlight that the excesses of the most powerful come at the expense of the many, and an increasing amount of them; that all-consuming power requires mass consumption. Is this not a social critique? I fail to see how it cannot be.

Is Sade, then—a man who came from great privilege, who knew the brutal effects of the power he held over those beneath him socially, and gave into these base impulses time and time again—offering up a view of the world that, while extreme, reflects the way that privilege and power actually work? And with these books, was he inciting us to overthrow these societies, for the betterment of not only women but all from the underprivileged classes? Carter believes so, and she believes that in doing so he is using pornography for moral ends:

The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual license of all the genders… Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it.

This is an argument that many would make today. A couple of months ago I went to see the production of Annie Ernaux’s The Years at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London; the play had to be stopped twice due to audience reactions to an explicit scene around a back-street abortion, fake blood streaming down the actress’s forearms. This work is explicit, and its intent is to shock. But we argue that this is moral, because it highlights the violence done, to women, by the system that forced them into the hands of such unregulated abortion providers. Similarly we read novels and memoirs and watch films in which abuse is explicitly shown, to highlight that such abuses occur and stimulate us to change things. Does this make them immoral? We don’t appear to think so. We seem to believe that extremity is justified if the intent is critique rather than exploitation.

Carter makes the point that pornography is tolerated in society whereby it upholds the prevailing sexual modes of it; where it breeches or overturns these, it is banned. According to this reading, Sade’s work was banned not because it was grotesquely explicit (which it truly is; once, reading 120 Days of Sodom on a bus in Cambodia, I put the book down, sighed, closed my eyes, and thought: just please, please stop shitting in each other’s mouths) but because it exposed society’s inherent misogyny, its treatment of women as economic and sexual tokens. In these books he creates, as she says:

a model of hell, in which the gratification of sexuality involves the infliction and the tolerance of extreme pain. He describes sexual relations in the context of an unfree society as the expression of pure tyranny… the one constant to all Sade’s monstrous orgies is that the whip hand is always the hand with the real political power and the victim is a person who has little or no power at all, or has had it stripped from him. In this schema, male means tyrannous and female means martyrised, no matter what the official genders of the male and female beings are.

Dworkin, of course, did not agree. Carter’s glorification of Sade, she said, was a glorification of violence against women. I don’t know what is to be gained of simplifying and flattening literary works to this degree; in order for it to be true you have to take Sade’s works not as satirical or provocative but as basically honest representations of this man, and all men’s, sexual desires; you have to imagine that Donatien Alphonse François wanted women to squat on tables and shit in his mouth, wanted to drink vomit, to rape infants and commit incest, to disembowel pregnant women and rip the fingers off girls and skin children, and that his aim in writing such things down was mere confession, a masochistic impulse to give his jailers yet more reason to keep him imprisoned. You have to look at these grotesquely sexual books, which are stripped of any erotic or attractive element, and think not that the intent is to use sex to show the depravity of political and economic circumstance but that the man who wrote them simply had desires that were fundamentally inhuman. And that he was stupid enough to want to publish them in book form.

This insistence on ludicrous simplicity, on a rejection of nuance or complexity or intent or meaning beyond the superficial is both anti-art and anti-people. It insists on a uncomplicated world that does not exist, and it strips us of the ability to reformulate society in a way that embraces and benefits all who suffer within it.

What I love about Carter most is her refusal to be told what she can and can’t write about, what she can and can’t think, how she can and can’t appraise both art and society. She dismisses the easy position and instead approaches even taboo topics from a good-faith angle, assuming above all else that the writer of this work was doing something deeper than others would have you believe. And in doing so she demands more for her own work, too. She refuses to be conceptualised as that same mythic pornographic woman, diminished to the sum of her physical parts. I will leave you with this, from The Sadeian Woman, because Carter outlines her position, and mine, better than I ever could:

Anatomy is destiny, said Freud, which is true enough as far as it goes, but ambiguous. My anatomy is only part of an infinitely complex organisation, my self. The anatomical reductionalism of graffiti, the reductio ad absurdum of the bodily differences between men and women, extracts all the evidence of me from myself and leaves behind only a single aspect of my life as a mammal. It enlarges this aspect, simplifies it and then presents it as the most significant aspect of my entire humanity… In the face of this symbolism, my pretensions to any kind of social existence go for nothing; graffiti directs me back to my mythic generation as a woman and, as a woman, my symbolic value is primarily that of a myth of patience and receptivity, a dumb mouth from which the teeth have been pulled.

out now in the US and Canada!

Let me confess that I have never read the Odyssey. I know very little about Greek epics in general, not through any sense of aversion but more through a lack of exposure. The discourse around the film’s production had largely passed me by. I honestly couldn’t care less about ‘historical accuracy’, or casting choices, or the fact that everyone is American; I don’t think you can expect anyone to fund a major Hollywood movie in Homeric Greek in 2026 (not in this economy!). It’s fine to translate things for a modern audience, as long as you do it well, and I believed that Christopher Nolan would do it well. I am an Oppenheimer apologist. I saw The Dark Knight four times in the cinema (I was very young). I cried at Interstellar. I remember very little about Inception, and think, all things considered, Memento is probably his best. All this to say: I was primed to like this movie, despite originally having next to no interest in it. The reviews had got me hyped.

The benefit of having almost no knowledge of source material and no skin in the game means that you can appraise a film as exactly that: a film that stands on its own. And this is how I approached The Odyssey, with my plastic glass of beer, my bag of chocolate covered nuts and my seat that leaned back: let’s watch a blockbuster. Within ten minutes of the opening shots, my partner and I looked at each other, paused, then both mouthed: oh no.

The major issue was obvious immediately: the script. Take the first exchange of dialogue between Odysseus’s wife and son:

Penelope: In this world, a man does what he chooses. I do what I can.

Telemachus: I am a man, now, Mom.

Ah, yes. THEME. I recall a time when Hollywood blockbusters employed writers, whose job it was to ensure that dialogue felt elegant and convincing, knowing that in the real world, very few people say exactly what they mean ever, if at all, and good dialogue should mirror that to some degree—even if the story is based on myth, even if it sits firmly within certain genre conventions. It does not necessarily have to feel correct to the time and place of the story’s setting—it is a form of translation, after all—but it should be coherent and subtle, as in it should feel, on some level, correct to how the humans on screen would speak to one another in the film’s world, instead of just outlining the Big Themes of the film in such a way that’s clip-able for social media. But then directors started to write their own movies, and all that went out of the window.

There is not a single line of dialogue in this film that isn’t completely on the nose, giving a chunk of exposition in the most perfunctory manner, or outlining the grand themes in the sort of stilted text you’d expect an LLM to spit out. Characters say only what the plot requires them to say, and not like people, but like characters in a movie, a classic Christopher Nolan issue. You might argue that this is mythology, so nothing is going to sound natural—but Nolan has translated the text into very modern speech, from which characters awkwardly shift into something more rigid. And in that inconsistent language he just has characters stating things, repeatedly. The same was true of Hamnet: just characters outright saying the thing over and over, no subtlety or nuance, just endless hours of faux-profundity to advance the plot and beat us over the head with THEME. This betrays a disdain for the audience; meaning has to be spelled out repeatedly, because we are apparently too stupid to glean it for ourselves. And this manifests as a cheapness, in visual as well as spoken language; there is a shot of a puppy flashback in The Odyssey that quite literally made me laugh out loud. As my friend Mingthoy put it, after seeing this film: we have entered the era of dialogue for TikTok audiences—and not just in blandly commercial movies. In films that will almost certainly win Oscars.

Dialogue is one issue; another is pacing. The film hops around from place to place and from time to time within those first ten minutes, so much so that it is difficult for the audience to orient itself, especially without a framework of knowing the Odyssey. But this is consistent throughout the film; scenes are rushed and contextless, because Nolan is trying to fit in so much, sometimes pointlessly, and in doing so he has sheared all the possibility of proper engagement with what he has chosen to include, or any sort of emotional reaction to it. He forces the film to move at a phenomenal speed, and this is achieved through a) not giving anything space to unfold naturally, and b) nauseating editing, something well discussed as a Nolan issue. It is worse in the first third than in the rest, but at some point in the first hour I actually began to time the cuts, because I was starting to feel like the editor was trying to induce a panic attack for no apparent reason; for a good amount of time there wasn’t a shot over 2.5 seconds long. At some points there was less than a single second between edits, and this isn’t in the middle of a climactic fight scene; we’re talking dialogue and set ups and flashbacks edited as if they’re Marvel action sequences. I have subsequently found a scene clipped online that has 22 cuts in 38 seconds, including a one-second cut to a flashback—in a two-hander conversation scene between Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland, containing information that is necessary for you to understand the unfolding plot, which it is difficult to take in, because the editing is so needless and jarring (and has the effect of highlighting Nolan’s habit of shooting every speaker in the dead centre of his frame, a very boring visual tic). You could mistake this for energetic filmmaking, but it is energy going nowhere, just burning itself up.

It feels insane to write that a $250 million movie by one of the world’s most heralded directors felt difficult to watch, but it seems that Nolan believes the audience will suffer any manner of experiential assault in order to get to his Here Is The Big Meaning portions. At the risk of sounding 104 years old, I must ask why Nolan insists on inflicting aural damage on the audiences for his pictures; the sound in his films is mixed in a way I can only describe as antisocial. For the first half an hour of The Odyssey I could only catch about a third of what the characters were saying, especially in the scenes in Ithaca when people were talking in rooms full of people; I understand there are many folk’s there, Chris, I can see them. Can you focus the mix on the dialogue I’m meant to hear? It is another classic Nolan problem that his actors don’t enunciate and he buries the dialogue in the mix, and here the issue is exacerbated by the lack of a traditional score; rather, the film has a bunch of monotonous soundscaping that peaks insanely loudly, so much so that I (and several other people at the Odeon) had my fingers in my ears at several points. This does not make for an absorbing cinematic experience.

The same can be said for the cinematography, which is supposed to be the film’s selling point. It was for this that I was really excited; I wanted to experience that sense of majesty that only an enormous film format can achieve, wanted to lose myself in wonderment at shots like this:

There were, it’s true, a lot of phenomenal images. Yes, it is absolutely impressive to shoot a movie like this on IMAX. I wish I had seen it at an IMAX theatre, because where it excels, it excels: the long shots of the beaches, for instance. But I never felt the grandeur that I expected, because all the beautiful shots are momentary, victims of the panicked editing. The limitations of the format also created one massive problem that Nolan could not get around, in low-light scenes especially: an extremely shallow depth of field. This is a technical issue and I don’t have a solution if you are committed to both IMAX and low light, but it feels kind of unconscionable, if you’re going to this effort, and spending all this money, to have several key moments at which the subject of a shot is actually out of focus. Not as an interesting use of visual language either; it is not used to situate something other than the speaker in the frame, it is just a technical limitation that works against the viewer being absorbed in the scene. This is another Nolan issue; he prioritises vibes over basic visual clarity, which is such an incongruous choice for a man who is otherwise acutely concerned with the look of his films that it always, always jars me right out of the experience. Here it is more egregious than ever; there were shot/reverse shot conversation scenes where neither speaker remained in focus, most notably a scene between Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland, which I felt like I was watching through a pair of binoculars. Robert Pattinson died in a blur, quite literally—at the climax of the film. Add in Nolan’s obsession with shaking cameras and ADHD editing, and you have, to my shock, a fairly terrible film-watching experience on the granular level, where you are sitting watching the most hyped movie of the year, but you can’t focus on the characters because the camera can’t either, and you’re overwhelmed with sheer noise, and when you do hear the dialogue, it’s dire. These are all things Nolan has chosen, but here is where the other experts should be allowed to step in and work their magic, when a director’s obsession with one technical matter causes major filmmaking issues that someone else should be allowed to bring up. Empower the screenwriters, empower the focus-pullers, empower the sound designers! Bring down the auteur supremacy!

But then—does anyone actually care? It seems not. The sheer bigness of the production appears to be enough for everyone else, and any response to the movie that is incongruent with this favourable mania is positioned as needlessly cruel or bitter, especially when it comes from a woman. What is actually on the screen, actually contained within the film, is seemingly less important than what people want it to contain. You are supposed to revere the ‘vision’ of the director, but not have any assessment of the detail of it, of its execution, as a viewer. I am afraid I cannot get on board with the idea that even-handed criticism of a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar movie made by a privately-educated multi-millionaire knight is some type of violence. I am not sure how we’ve come to the belief that reporting your own experience of seeing a film is an underhanded dig at the director, or that the only good-faith engagement with a movie is to sit there having no thoughts or feelings about it beyond bland positivity, because if you do engage critically with it at all, you have been ‘destroyed by online discourse’ rather than being a person with functioning senses and a brain who is invited, by dint of the work’s creation, to actually think about what it shows and what it means. I can only say that the combination of issues outlined above unfortunately torpedoed most of The Odyssey, for me—and for the friends I went with, huge fans of the source material.

In the last half it does improve, but by that point I was lost, as a captive audience member. Even the set pieces, the strongest parts of the film, failed to actually land. The Cyclops looked great, and I thought the face design was fascinating and different; the magic of practical effects. But I am told that this is supposed to be a horror scene; it did not work as such, because horror necessitates a lingering, requires time for the audience to feel the things you’re trying to make them feel. The Samantha Morton / Circe scene was probably the best in the film (and again showed the joy of old-school in-camera effects), but still moved at a breakneck speed. The shock of her quite literally moulding their physical bodies with her hands was excellent, and the visuals of them turning back: wonderful. But just flipping from set piece to set piece leaves everything unexplored, which is especially bewildering when there are significant repetitive elements. When dealing with such a large amount of source material, removing and amalgamating enormous parts of the story is necessary—so what was the point of including the Laestrygonians, given that the race of Cyclops could easily have been shown to destroy several boats, which was the only real result of the interaction with the Laestrygonians, except to once again impress upon us the THEME? We already get the extremely obvious point about Zeus’ law; we did not need this to understand it. As Odysseus’ men found the island, met them, and immediately bolted, my partner leaned over to me, laughing, and whispered:

That needless scene could have been removed to allow us more time with Circe, who could then be better rendered as a complex character, rather than as a mouthpiece for a sort of thin, scolding contemporary revenge feminism—or to spend more time with the sirens, a scene that (as my partner pointed out) could have given us a magic and horror that unsettled the main quest, and instead was rushed through to give us even more ‘man sadness’. What if the version of himself that Odysseus heard in the siren song was a man of violent, warlike perversity, revealing that aspects of him truly enjoyed the sacking of Troy, the brutality, the murder? What if Nolan used this to deal with the near-certainty that Odysseus and his men engaged in sexual violence as an act of war, rather than hinting at it poorly with Circe? How challenging this would be to the viewer, and to our idea of Odysseus! Let us in to this world, Chris! Give us some magic, some depth, some horror, some time with SOME of this! Around the halfway mark it started to feel like a class from the worst yoga teacher at my gym: an unsatisfying series of too-fast movements that no one is actually doing properly, leaving you feeling like you’ve neither worked out nor relaxed. I sat in the cinema thinking: when am I supposed to start to feel something for any of these people? When am I supposed to feel awe, or terror, or grief on their behalf? As another friend said to me: not managing to conjure even one small moment of mystery or magic from this story is an achievement in itself.

Then, of course, there are the politics of it all, sexual and otherwise. For all its brief scatological insistence (where we must understand that the Greek soldiers are shitting and pissing all over each other inside the wooden horse), this is a strangely bloodless, sexless version of this story, all the base physicality shorn away in the service of Nolan making his grand points. Even in my ignorance I am aware that Calypso basically rapes Odysseus on a nightly basis for seven years after he washes up on her island; here their relationship is shown in the sort of cloying soft-focus romanticism usually reserved for lesbian sex scenes. Nolan won’t go near the idea of sexual violence actually being committed by the Greeks, because it would compromise his idea of Odysseus as a Troubled Hero marred only by his treatment of the Trojans. The Odysseus/Penelope relationship has no horn, even when he returns from two decades away, because Odysseus and his men are basically completely nulled; it is impressive, in a way, to make a movie this chaste and heterosexual about the ancient Greeks. But then, this is a translation of a story intended to avoid anything unpalatable to a modern audience, and by that I mean what major studio execs think audiences want: there must be no sex, no subtlety, and there must be no challenging morals—but there must also be a big superhero-style fight scene at the end via which our protagonist wins. And within all this there must be Nolan’s Message spelled out so clearly it cannot be missed. It is quite an experience to sit through a movie with very little knowledge of the source material and still understand that it’s been dumbed down. When Odysseus started on his intensely 21st century monologue about how awful their assault on Troy was, I began to roll my eyes. Yes, it’s about PTSD. Yes, it’s another Nolan post-9/11 analogy, lamenting the fact that The State of the World requires some ‘good men’ to turn bad. Yes, it’s about whether a great warrior, having sacrificed himself to the cause, can ever truly come home. All of this, again.

Much has been written about the inherent conservatism of the politics in Nolan's films, and I've largely thought of this as a bad faith interpretation of a guy who just likes big movies about big things; there was more nuance in Oppenheimer than many allowed for. But it is impossible not to notice, in Nolan’s The Odyssey, that the entire story centres around what is essentially a lack of manners in warfare, framed around ‘Zeus’ law’ (an extremely simplified version of xenia that we are also battered over the head with): you must welcome people into your home as if they might be gods, and you must honour the dead, and if you use these teachings to take advantage of your enemy, you have been made uncivilised. It is not that you should avoid killing; no, of course not. But your killing should be polite and honourable (under the threat of the vengeance of a god). The sin of the suitors is their boorishness and rudeness, the fact that they have overstayed their welcome; the sin of Odysseus is not that he fought a decade of war, murdering untold men (for the vast majority of deaths in this movie are given barely any credence), but that he used deception to gain the upper hand, then unleashed an unjustifiable brutality; it is that they went ‘too far’. The suitors will be punished by death for their sin, but despite his sin Odysseus will win out as the hero still, retaining his family’s prominence, plagued only by conscience. War destroys everything, the film tells us, but our ‘good guy’, no matter what he has done, must still emerge victorious, for he is the protector of civilisation. We are not supposed to question his divine right to rule; we are offered, instead, an apologetics for it. Yes, Nolan is working with a centuries-old text, but he has chosen this text, and in translating it, he takes responsibility of what it is made to mean to us, now. The film’s inescapable position, despite all its handwringing about the inhumanity of conflict, is that there is still a version of war that is fair and justified, as long as everyone plays by the rules, and to believe this we must discount the many (almost always the ‘underclass’) who are used as war fodder, used up and killed as their generals advance, then afterwards lament the effects of their actions. It is why the message of the ending seems to be that some men, no matter how corrupted, are born to hold absolute power, which should not be questioned by their subjects or enemies, and when a lack of respect is shown to these men their power must be regained through shows of strength and the mass murder of their impolite enemies. It is these men who are the ultimate victims, in Nolan’s view, made monstrous by the burden of power, and their punishment for it is being exiled from society; they must leave, with their riches, and ‘suffer’ elsewhere. The same for Odysseus as for Batman. The truly noble man, standing at the top of the hierarchy, must debase himself for the sake of society, and then be cast out from it.

We are left in a strange place when a director insists on inserting this moralism into a story about a triumphant, unrepentant warrior king; the Meaning, as forced down our throats, ends up feeling contradicted by the final portion of the film. Nolan has inserted modern morality into a story that cannot contain it without becoming thematically incoherent. We are also left in a strange place when all we’ve heard about the film’s production is that it is ‘woke’ (meant as a pejorative), but what’s actually shown in the film feels very different. The female characters, as ever, are poorly drawn and have little personal agency (despite some of them quite literally being gods). The extremely obvious symbolism gestures at a criticism of British/American aggression in West Asia, but this cannot harmonise with the rest of the story; at best it is a brief, superficial aesthetic, but it is completely at odds with the very bones of this narrative. With his enforced meaning, I am certain Nolan thinks he is making a liberal point about Trump and Farage, but what is the actual message in a 2026 context? It feels like a justification for the same types of conflict the West has waged for centuries, for the exact power structures we all labour under, but with the veneer of respectability that has been lost to ‘unpleasantness’, a pining for an imagined liberal lost age. It is uncomfortable, too, to sit in a country currently rancid with anti immigrant ‘protests’—in which asylum hotels are being set on fire by racist groups, Muslims are being attacked on the streets and the world’s richest man tweets constantly about ‘invaders’ with ‘morals antithetical to the West’ taking over, leading to actual Nazi salutes in our major cities—watching a supposedly progressive film in which ‘uncivilised outsiders’ move in to the ruling family’s home and take over, and the only means by which they can be removed is violence—when the household is so obviously meant to be read as a microcosm of society as a whole. Christopher Nolan cannot be held responsible for the rise of reactionary factions during a film’s production, and I don’t believe this messaging was his intent—but we cannot avoid the questions of how such factions have been empowered, what narratives have been weaponised to lead to their rise, or how supposedly liberal positions, and liberal wars, have marginalised, impoverished and demonised the global majority to the point that we are standing on the precipice of outright fascism. The reason there was so much discourse around this film before anyone had even seen it was that going back to Greek ur-myth, to one of the foundational texts of ‘Western Civilisation’, has unavoidably become shorthand for imperialist politics, an imaginary collectively shared by East India Company capitalists, Keynesian economists, Neoliberal acolytes, and the most naked forces of fascism, the latter of which are conveniently ignored by the collective former. For all Nolan's Odysseus's regret and reflection, he is still the person who must return Ithaca to its ‘traditional values’ via the mass murder of his enemies, must reinstall his family, the ‘legitimate’ ruling class, through a show of superhuman strength and ability. The only person for whom he will give up power is his son. All considered, The Odyssey feels like it has the politics of lawnmowing middle Englanders who don't like to think about the machinations of the British Empire and will stand on village streets to watch the Royal Family go to church, or Americans who make the Marvel franchise their entire identity. For a movie based on a philosophical, lyrical myth, it was distinctly unphilosophical, uncontemplative about the now, or how we have got to this position, and what progression might look like. This could have been a movie about a returning US Marine and it would have been functionally identical: a justification for absolute power as long as it is held politely, even when that power corrupts absolutely.

Friends have taken a very different message from this film, perhaps because they are more rooted in the source material, and bring so much more personal history to it. Certainly on social media, people’s insistence on what this movie means often supersedes, or is flatly contradicted by, what is actually shown in the film, to an alarming degree. This does not change my reading, but my interpretation is not, really, what made this movie a disappointment for me. I am also used to conservative politics in epic movies; lazy messaging doesn’t necessarily mean that a film is not good on its own terms, as a film. What kills this movie is a lack of filmmaking care, for which blame seems to lie equally with Nolan’s obsessions and Hollywood’s mechanisms, its insistence on giving us even apparently smart films dumbed down to the lowest possible common denominator, showing and telling us the same things over and over. I truly do appreciate a director in 2026 who commits to film, who commits to practical effects, who shoots on location and engages in the real act of making a movie. But the limitations created by this commitment, combined with Nolan’s particular tendencies towards editing, framing and direction (because there was some truly terrible acting, from one actor in particular), stopped me engaging with the story, pushing me away completely. And we cannot ignore the fact that the biggest films of this year have been exceptionally poorly written, and told in the most perfunctory, cynical way, nor that we are currently living in a cinematic reality where the world’s most well-paid actors are reading lines that might have been generated by LLM, acting in scenes edited for attention spans destroyed by social media. All while purported (but confused) meaning is rammed down our throats, because we are considered too stupid to understand even a hint of nuance. There is one good result of all this: that I am now desperate to read the Odyssey, to engage with this story in a languorous, absorbing way. But I went into The Odyssey wanting the Oppenheimer of the classics, and what I got instead was the Hamnet of Greek epics.

Since I wrote this, Odyssey translator and classicist Emily Wilson has reviewed the film from a much more informed perspective here, in the LRB, and comes to same of the same conclusions as above, much more eruditely. I highly recommend reading it.

I don't know Merriam-Webster’s position on the word that defines the 2020s thus far, but it surely has to be enshittification. Not because of what it actually means, but because of what we all believe it to mean: that everything, in this particular era, seems to be getting much, much worse.

Like all broadly-used words, enshittification has a much more specific definition. It relates to the way that platform capitalism all but ensures that two-sided platforms (playing users on one side and business customers on the other) will eventually degrade in quality over time as they have to further squeeze both types of customer (users and businesses) in pursuit of (not just stable, but growing) profits—or, as its populariser Cory Doctorow puts it:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holds each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Some of the platforms that Doctorow uses as examples of enshittification are ones so ubiquitous that we can barely fathom not using them on a daily basis—the most obvious of these being Google, which has been enshittifying now for several years as a result of its choice to prioritise paid-for results and links over the information that its users are actually looking for. This is, of course, a sound business decision, if you are thinking only of profits; if the results of a search are so useless that the user has to search two or three or even four times to find what they want, they spend more time on the platform, which makes Google more money. However, this also has the effect of torpedoing exactly why people use Google in the first place, potentially undermining their market monopolisation (which is over 90%, and about which the legal systems can seem to do very little; Google has lost five major antitrust cases in the last three years, three in the US and two in the EU, and yet nothing changes). Doctorow wrote the following for Wired, back in 2023:

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Like almost all other novelists working today, I am, to some degree, engaged in the business of teaching other people to write. I’ve been at it for close to twenty years in some fashion or another, first as a nonfiction editorial intern and proofreader, then copyeditor, then senior nonfiction editor, then a copy writer at a North American tech startup, then freelance ghostwriter, developmental editor, fiction editor and now editorial director of a tiny literary magazine, as well as fiction writing mentor, workshop facilitator, etc. Mine is a path that has meandered more through editorial than some others, perhaps, but this is where we all end up, because teaching other people the skills of writing ends up more valuable, in most cases, or at least more reliable, than royalties from our actual books. As the publishing industry descends further into chasing tedious algorithmically-decided trends and editors are disempowered from actually editing, because fewer people care if a book is terribly written and the whole business operates more on hype than quality, and as humanities degrees become either completely unaffordable or are scrapped, the job of the published writer becomes less about actually writing and more about feeding more fodder into this machine. Hence: we all end up being asked to run workshops, to mentor, to teach.

For the most part, I enjoy this work, especially mentoring. The joy of teaching comes when you are allowed to do it well; when you can either teach something you really care about, and understand, to a group of people who are genuinely keen to learn, or when you are gifted enough time with a single writer to really dig into their weeds of their writing: their process, their motivations, their goals, their prose. Both of these require commitment on the part not just of the teacher but of the student, and it is worth remembering that all such teachers were once on the other side of this equation, going through the hard stuff of learning about their own weaknesses, their crutches, their lack of confidence, their technical errors, their sentences—and, more importantly, how to find their authentic, unique voices, and how and when to break the ‘rules’.

This is the key to finding your voice as a writer: learning when NOT to do things the common way. Knowing how and when to push against conventions, forms, grammar and popular style. How to break through cliché, and form a new way of saying something that may have been expressed, in some way or another, a hundred thousand times before you. It requires constant self-critique, reassessment and discipline. None of us were born knowing how to write well, and the further you get into your career, the less you’re convinced that you ever have learned. Those of us who have published books have been through that particular ringer many times. We know it’s hard. We also know that putting your own work through the process of criticism is unavoidable if you want to become the best writer you can be, and that ultimately, when you produce work you’re intensely proud of, all the effort becomes worth it.

There are, however, times when this work is utterly miserable, and the circumstances in which it’s miserable are this: the person you’re teaching isn’t at all interested in examining their own output, in hearing constructive critique, in changing how they’re doing things in any way. They have signed onto your course, or enrolled at an institution, or have engaged your services because they want to be told that they’re a singular genius, and what they are really hoping is that you’ll say their unpublished manuscript is unimprovable, and hand them over immediately to your agent, as if you have any control over who she signs, or to your editor, as if you don’t exist in a perpetual state of terror that your editor will no longer be interested in your work, let alone anyone you say they should sign. They are convinced, or have been convinced, that what they’re working with is already perfect.

There’s a brand new version of this, of course, and it’s the above, mixed with generative AI. That is: a person has been ‘writing’ with AI, or ‘editing’ with AI. They consider AI to be an expert in writing, because they have been told it is, a thousand times over, and because it is programmed to pretend it is, just as it is programmed to pretend it is an expert in everything, even though the most basic research reveals it not to be. The best that AI can do, as a writing or editing tool, is to make your writing functional, and probably boring. Yet those creating the relentless and inescapable hype around AI position it as a tool to be used to become skilled at anything, by anyone—and they target people with acknowledgement of their real-world grievances, cynically using this to funnel endless amounts of money into the pockets of the already mega-rich, who both benefit from and uphold the very system that creates these grievances.

Here is an example of what I mean. There’s been a notable uptick, this year, in celebrities and CEOs shilling for AI with a particular angle: that women, especially, are being ‘left behind’ by these technologies, not because they’re perhaps smart enough to be critical of hyper-capitalist, resource-draining industries that care devastatingly little for the effects of their profit-seeking, but because they are simply too timid, too unconfident to embrace AI in the way that men apparently are. This isn’t exclusive to this year, however. Take this, from a Time magazine op-ed, from January 2025, entitled Why We Need More Women in the AI Revolution:

Imagine having a mentor available at any hour, offering guidance without judgment. Master new skills at your own pace, free from the weight of imposter syndrome that haunts so many women in male-dominated spaces.

The sexism is written all over this, of course, but the real issue with it is slightly more hidden: imagine a mentor offering guidance without judgment. Think about this for a second. How is a person supposed to get better at anything if they are learning from a person who has no capacity to judge what they are already creating? Judgement is a key part of being a teacher; you must assess what has been written, analyse it for quality or originality, measure it against what the writer is trying to produce and help to steer them towards the better version of that work. This is what editors do, and it is why writers love good editors. The idea of a writing coach or editor who never tells you you’re wrong or that what you’re writing could be better is a strange manifestation of the supposedly ‘woke’, supposedly leftist tendency to hand out participation trophies for everything so as not to make anyone feel bad—except it’s coming from the very people who critique this idea. Learn to be better, it promises, without ever being told you’re not a special perfect genius! You don’t ever need to feel less than!

When you remove the judgement of an editor from the writing process, the work becomes noticeably worse. But the notion of quality—of an objective or even subjective measure of something’s success as a work of art—is notably absent from all the conversations around AI and the creative industries. The idea that some creative work is bad and some is good is anathema to exactly what AI companies are selling. The USP of generative AI is that it can instantly turn anyone into a professional at anything, and introducing a measure of quality control into this makes the sales pitch fall apart instantly. If anything, the concept of quality hovers above the discussion, circling, like one of those malevolent ghosts from Mario Party trying to steal your hard-won stars. You are left desperately batting it away, inevitable though the theft is.

The other day, the algorithm decided I needed to see a glossy advert pointing me towards a glossy website for a ‘free AI book writer and editor’. I clicked through, out of curiosity. All the sample text was awful, the worst sort of rote, clichéd, personality-free and barely functional prose. Even the text from the ad was terrible:

Rachel never considered herself a writer.

Yet here she was, writing a book.

But despite bounds of enthusiasm, Rachel would be the first to admit:

Writing a book is hard.

Keeping track of storylines and characters.

Editing thousands of words.

Trying to get honest feedback.

At times, she thought about quitting.

Thankfully, she didn’t.

To put my tedious hat on for a moment: this isn’t even grammatically or linguistically correct. The phrase is ‘boundless enthusiasm’, not ‘bounds of enthusiasm’. It should be ‘her boundless enthusiasm’, if anything. There are four sentence fragments, not sentences, following the the semi colon. Either this has been generated by the AI service advertised, or it has been edited by it, or it has been written by a marketing person in order to sell the writing and editing AI service. Whichever it is, it’s not a great advert for what it’s trying to sell. The above is very basic stuff, but it is also the stuff that you increasingly need to teach, as an editor or mentor, because people know very little about sentence structure these days. I spend a lot of my time explaining subject/object issues in sentences that leave you unable to understand who is doing what, or inconsistent lists, or subordinate clauses. Understanding and playing with grammar and syntax are key parts of expressing yourself through writing, but you have to understand the rules of them first, and when we reduce everything down to the simplest possible sentence fragments that aren’t even grammatically logical we give up both clarity and artistry. There’s a reason so many readers complain that prose these days is just bad: it is bad. And AI is making it a lot, lot worse.

As others elsewhere have noted, it is almost impossible to edit AI-generated work, because there is no intellectual or emotional framework undergirding it, and no unachieved intention behind its creation. On a line level, it is just extremely poor, full of platitudes and unoriginal, LinkedIn-level phrases and sentence fragments, no interest in syntactic flow. But worse is that there’s just nothing deeper than that, no natural voice trying to get out, nothing that really needs to be expressed. You can’t pare back the unnecessary parts to get to what the author was really trying to do, because the author—the large language model putting words together in whatever string it guesses you might want—isn’t trying to do or say anything. There is quite literally no reason for the work to exist, so you can’t even try to get at that intention, and neither can you strip away all the cliché, because it is practically all cliché.

Cory Doctorrow—sci fi writer, technologist, and user of AI—explained this extremely neatly in his new book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late. Discussing why AI will never be able to write anything decent, he says:

When an artist prompts an image generator (or a creative writer prompts a chatbot), the only artistic communication the resulting piece can yield is that prompt. The generative AI doesn’t know anything about the big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling in the artist’s head. The AI can’t know that. It’s a next-pixel-guessing statistical machine, not a mind reader.

Using AI as a writing teacher is like using the room in Searle’s famous ‘Chinese Room’ thought-experiment to teach you Mandarin. Searle describes a room in which a non-Chinese-speaker sits with a set of instructions: when certain Chinese characters are slipped under the door, respond by slipping out the corresponding characters, and thus the person outside the room will believe you can speak the language. The person inside performs as requested. All well and good. But can this person understand Chinese? Of course they cannot. All they are doing is responding to prompts by rote. This is not how we understand what knowledge is, and neither is it how we use language. There is no fluency here, no possibility of expression or inventiveness, no judgement. The room has almost no real engagement with what it has ‘produced’.

You might believe that AI is teaching you to put the ‘right’ things on the page, but the fact is that there are no ‘right’ things when it comes to expressive or imaginative writing. Writing requires you to tap into your own voice, your own preoccupations, your own linguistic nuances and tics, your own feelings about long sentences, and auto-cancellations, and tautologies, and semi-colons, and all the other devices we use to convince and argue and describe and evoke, even—in fact, especially—the ones that are technically ‘wrong’. Even if you think that you, in fact, are using it differently, and that you use the AI ‘advice’ to prompt you to write the opposite of what it says, you are still being innately led by the AI; if you write the exact opposite word, you are still tied to its suggestion. You are being dragged along by a blind dog, thinking that you are cutting your own path.

Last week I saw a post on Substack from a man defending his use of generative AI. He claimed that ‘the craft of writing has always involved collaboration’ and that ‘using [AI] as a collaborator is akin to working with a gifted editor’. Only one of these things is true. The latter is false because a) AI is not ‘gifted’ at anything and b) applying an algorithmic tool can never be akin to working with a human being. If this was true, the advent of spellcheck and grammar check on Microsoft Word would have wiped out the need for editors and proofreaders in traditional publishing.

This position was also taken by Marc Carter, for an incredibly poorly argued piece in The Times, in which he claims that T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound invited and utilised feedback from other people in their processes, and so using AI for writing or editing is exactly the same. His own argument undermines his position, however, because he equates AI with human collaboration. These things are fundamentally not equal. A human has experiences, embodiment, judgement, intelligence, expressiveness, a working knowledge of language as a part of their consciousness; if a sentence is intending to express or describe a feeling, a person can measure this against the real-world experience, and feedback whether or not it succeeds. All of this they bring to their appraisal of the work. AI does not have this. Carter cannot even fathom that a human expert might be better than AI, despite recent studies showing that even when doing very basic summarising tasks, AI is wrong 45% of the time. Discussing Hilary Mantel’s collaboration with Cromwell scholar Mary Robertson, and the two decades of research and thinking the author did before she published Wolf Hall, Carter says (in very AI-coded sentences) that ‘Mantel’s greatness resided not in the travel expenses but in 20 years of thinking about Cromwell before she wrote a word. In knowing what to leave out.’ And yet, immediately after he says:

Google arrived and suddenly much of what had required a flight to California became accessible in minutes from a desk in London. And now AI goes further still.

AI, by this very argument, necessarily removes the 20 years of thinking and researching that Carter has literally just said was key to Mantel’s genius. The entire argument here is that using AI instead of doing all this is just as good. This is, in fact, exactly the problem: that we are leading people to think they don’t need to develop relationships with the humans who are experts in their field, don’t need to create a dialogue with people whose judgement has been honed by decades of thinking and doubting and looking at primarily sources and rejecting easy explanations. By Carter’s own argument, neither Robertson’s research or Mantel’s supreme skill in storytelling or prose or character creation matter, because now AI can just do either one, despite all evidence showing that it can’t do either to any degree of accuracy or originality. The argument negates itself.

In Carter’s piece there is not a single mention of quality, of something being good or inventive or original or even basically effective in achieving its own goals, except for those which actually undermine his point. He mentions that AI helps people realise the stories they want to tell, but not whether or not this makes them good writers, by any standard or measure. All that matters is that everyone can be a writer now; everyone can say they have written something. Discussing his daughter’s use of AI tools, he says this: ‘The industry’s current approach would call my daughter’s process cheating, and shut the door on her before she had even reached it.’ Except this is not what is happening. If anything, the industry is currently too in thrall to extremely badly written books that simply appeal to some algorithmically created trend, with no interest in their actual quality or longevity or uniqueness of voice or impact on readers. The industry as it stands loves the rapid creation of derivative works with barely functional prose that will sell millions because they have a strong hook and nothing else. The truth is that the industry would be—and notably is—fine with AI generated work if it turns a profit; it is readers that don’t like it. People are picking up on AI-created work because it is bad. Readers are noticing nonsensical metaphors, and thin characterisation, and overuse of the rule of three, and unmoored sentence fragments, and the extremely clichéd tells of AI precisely because they are bad, and overused, and clichéd, and because there has been no intelligent critique applied to try to remove some of these things from the whole because these books are not being edited, because editors are overworked and underpaid and no one really cares if these books are good or bad. The reason it is so hard to pin down exactly if a work is AI generated or if it is just bad human writing is that AI-generated work is just an amalgamation of all the worst, most obvious, most overused and nonsensical parts of much human writing and the experts—the editors—aren’t being allowed to do their jobs. The lack of judgement is entirely the issue.

But we are told that this doesn’t matter. There is an inherent position taken in Carter’s piece, and over and over again in others, that actual talent or skill should not be a necessary condition for publishing a book. That you should not have to work hard at the craft of writing, as you have previously had to for many centuries, to hone a unique voice, to express yourself in new and inventive ways, to put the words on the page in a beautiful and surprisingly way that is entirely your own. To insist on this is to be exclusionary, to create barriers, to elitist. To be ‘accessible’, by this view, is not to remove the very real obstructions that stop talented marginalised people from enjoying equal opportunities to the non-marginalised; instead, it means that the publishing industry must publish any old shit written (or indeed AI-generated) by anyone who wants to be a writer, and if it has nothing to say and only exists to be published, then that’s fine, and to suggest anything else is sheer snobbery. The truth is that there are real, material barriers to people who are trying to make a career in the arts, right now, and especially those who are doing this from a marginalised position, but the technology that Carter and others posit as a solution is in fact exacerbating those very conditions. If you actually gave a fuck about barriers in the creative arts, you would swear off generative AI forever.

I think it does an enormous disservice to writers, including Carter’s daughter, to tell them that using AI to generate or edit work will make them good writers. It will not. Improvement as a writer requires human intention, human critique, and extreme humility. And when their writing is exposed to thoughtful readers, the reader response will not be positive. When I work with new writers, I tell them that part of our job is to stress-test their work before it goes out into the world, to find all the holes and the inconsistencies and the clichés and the confusing sentences and the lack of clarity before readers find them and dismiss the work through frustration. We cut away what is not needed, or what isn’t working, to get to the real, strong, unique stuff underneath; to let the prose and the ideas shine. We expand on what is promising, and build the writer’s confidence in the things they do that are truly brilliant and truly their own. AI cannot do any of this because it cannot use judgement, only comparison against what’s most common. We cannot pretend that using poor tools to create makes someone a good writer; it doesn’t. And of course, it is perfectly fine to be a bad writer; I am a bad painter, a bad piano player, a bad weightlifter. We all must be bad for a long time before we get good. But I am not telling the world that these industries are wrong for excluding me on the basis of lack of skill, nor writing numerous op-eds insisting that my bad art is should be considered as legitimate as that of Jenny Saville or Jasleen Kaur. I am not demanding to be taken seriously as a painter.

The obsession with artistic skill being somehow inherently bourgeois (rather than, for instance, the means of production of art being controlled by a certain class), and the related belief that technology will free the masses from the yoke of this bourgeois oppression is, of course, a fascist idea. I do not mean that it is vaguely right wing; I mean that the idea of human art being decadent was clarified in the writings of the Italian Futurists, specifically those authored by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, which I’ve written about here. Marinetti, who went on to co-author the Fascist Manifesto, wanted to remove the ‘I’, the human, in writing; he wanted to introduce the violence of technology to the creation of art, in order to break it free of the supposedly decadent and elitist artists who produced it. Then as now, instead of focusing on real material barriers to creative expression—instead of tackling illiteracy, for instance, and its related concern, poverty—the insincere solution was the machine. And this purported (and false) concern for the proletariat was convincing, at least in the early days, to even young, thoughtful figures on the left. As Mark Ford outlined in the London Review of Books twenty-two years ago:

Gramsci, too, was initially exhilarated by the ‘impetuosity of their youthful energies’, their conviction that an alliance of artistic and technological innovation would sweep away bourgeois culture once and for all.

So often are fascist intentions coddled in language of anti-intellectualism, anti-elitism, the idea that automation can somehow free creativity from its ludicrous human constraints. The slide from this into real violence is not theoretical; the Nazis, too, decried ‘degenerate’ art, created by the wrong humans (Jewish, Communist, or ‘un-German’), as dangerous to a functioning state, promoting in its place art that glorified the militaristic, the racially pure, the idea of obedience to a paternalist power. So Mayer wrote about this brilliantly in their book A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, and philosopher Judith Butler beautifully summed up how AI functions as an extension of this in a 2023 conversation with Elizabeth Weil:

There’s a narcissism that reemerges in the AI dream that we are going to prove that everything we thought was distinctively human can actually be accomplished by machines and accomplished better… Or that human potential — that’s the fascist idea — human potential is more fully actualized with AI than without it.

Butler calls this the ‘perfectibility thesis’, the idea that there is a version of the perfect human that is achieved by introduction of technology, and they are right to call it fascist, for where there is perfection there is also imperfection: the degenerate, the expendable, the impure. Language, as Butler intimates, is a key part of resisting this process. What gets eclipsed by the uncritical belief in generative AI is, according to them, ‘what’s living in my speech, what’s living in my emotion, in my love, in my language’. This is exactly what another human looks for, when they engage with your work, and what a human will help you to hone in on, bring out, and clarify: what’s living, what’s unique, what’s yours.

It is such an unbelievably good film that I’m baffled so many of its actors distanced themselves from it or latterly decried it (especially Mark Wahlberg, whose filmography since has been patchy, to be generous). Yes, it’s about the porn industry in the late 1970s and early 80s, and society generally is extremely pious and sanctimonious about anything that dares cover sex, but there is much more to Boogie Nights than there is to, say, The Wolf of Wall Street, which shows similar levels of decadence to this film, and arguably glorifies it, whereas Boogie Nights does not hold back from showing the underbelly. I don’t hear Leonardo diCaprio ‘asking god for forgiveness’ playing Jordan Belfort, a character whose comeuppance is distinctly less harrowing and less memorable than the fate of Dirk Diggler.

In fact, Leonardo diCaprio apparently turned down the starring role in Boogie Nights, which he may well cite as one of his biggest regrets, but given that he turned it down to star in Titanic instead, it probably made for a smarter career move. It’s hard not to imagine the young diCaprio, already feted as one of his generation’s major talents, feeling dwarfed by an ensemble cast absolutely overflowing with genius, from the old hands to the young bucks, every single one of them turning in a career-best performance: Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly, Alfred Molina, Luis Guzmán. I only hesitate to add Philip Seymour Hoffman to this list because his part (if you’ll pardon the phrasing) is relatively minor compared to the others, and because he is so damn good in everything he was in.

For those who have remained as ignorant as me in the twenty-nine years since it was released: Boogie Nights opens in a LA nightclub in 1977, as high-school dropout Eddie Adams (Mark Walhberg) works a shift as a kitchen porter. On account of his good looks (and, after some investigation, his enormous penis) he is spotted and then recruited by pornographer Jack Horner, there with his partner Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) and their high-school-aged companion Rollergirl (Heather Graham), both stars of Horner’s films. After a fight with his sexually jealous mother when he comes home late one morning, Eddie cuts ties with his parents and moves into the Horner home, which functions as both the set of Jack’s films and a party house for the many folks related to the porn industry: Little Bill (William H. Macy), the assistant director whose wife regularly humiliates him by having public sex with strangers right in front of him; Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), the failing porn star whose love for country music is regularly mocked by everyone; and ‘the Colonel’, who finances all the movies they make. Jack Horner’s world is a place where both drugs and sex come easily, and both are used to enrich those involved. Eddie quickly adopts the moniker Dirk Diggler, progresses because of both his natural ‘talents’ and his genuinely caring manner, and falls into a situation that mirrors his home life: a pseudo-incestuous relationship with his ‘mother’, Amber, whom he fucks on camera for a living, his ‘father’, Jack, watching on.

Soon, though, ‘Dirk’ is successful enough to buy his own home, a gaudily decorated house with an enormous red car in the garage (paging Dr. Freud), and has his ambitions inflated by all the success and attention he is receiving, as well as the amoral lifestyle he and his crew enjoy. He pitches an action-focused porn series to Jack, to co-star in with his fellow actor Reed (John C. Reilly), and if there are a few overdoses and a few power struggles here and there, he chalks it up to bad luck or the natural way of things. For the first half of the movie, Dirk Diggler is on the up—and we’re right there with him, joyfully complicit in this charming decadence.

There is so much you could write about this film. About family systems theory, and covert incest, and how we unconsciously remake the very environments that have hurt us, and about the reproduction of trauma. About production, in general, and our role in it. About what happens when idealism has to meet the reality of change, and the turn from the 70s to the 80s, and the camera lens as a mirror of the eye. But what struck me most, this weekend, was the film’s exploration of what happens when you live in a fantasy version of the real world, and cling desperately to a version of the past that never really existed, refusing to deal with the real issues of your present, which you actually do have the agency to change.

The point at which the film turns, of course, is the 1979 New Year’s Eve party, which hits exactly in the middle of the movie. By the time we get here, we are aware that things are on the precipice. We have been made thoroughly implicated in the world of the film, in its excesses and its pleasures; yes, we have genuinely learned to love its characters within the first half, but we have also chosen to turn a blind eye to the young girls dragged out of parties with bloodied faces, ODing and mostly anonymous, to be never seen or heard of again. We have seen Eddie become Dirk and then get lost within the tacky expressions of new wealth. We have seen that Amber Waves is tortured by the loss of her son, kept from her by her ex because of her lifestyle. But the party is still going, and so is our enjoyment.

And so we come to the New Year’s Eve party. The end of the 1970s. Telling him how much she loves him, and how he is like her ‘baby’, Amber introduces Dirk, for the first time, to cocaine; rather than easing him in, she insists he does two lines instead of one. In another room a local theatre owner has a meeting with Jack, to tell him that film is dead and videotape is the future, and that he will have to use videotape if he wants to keep up with the future and continue to make money. And amidst this, Little Bill shows up to the party asking if anyone has seen his wife. He opens a bedroom door, and there she is, as she always is, fucking another man. Little Bill closes the door, walks out to his car, and loads up his gun. He strolls calmly back into the house, shoots his wife and his lover as the clock counts down to midnight, and shoots himself in the mouth in the first seconds of the new decade.

On the one hand, this is an unremarkable betrayal, just another in a long line of betrayals; even less public than usual. Little Bill’s cold, relaxed response to it, a murder-suicide, seems almost unfathomable: why now, after everything? But this is the film’s message: you can only push things so far. At some point, everything, and everybody, will break. And this is key to understanding every character’s arc thereafter. It is the pursuit of excess that will destroy everything. As Bill’s brain splatters across the white wall of pornographer Jack’s house, there is a hard cut to a title card: 80s.

What comes next in the movie is a subtle nod to the increasingly fascist-coded right-wing politics of the incoming decade; in a fluff documentary about Dirk from his incestuous porn-mother, Amber, Dirk and his co star Reed rebuff criticisms of the misogyny and violence of their Bond-spoof porn series Brock Landers with coke-addled scattergun responses, before Amber, in voiceover, dismisses the critiques with the following, perfectly lampooning both the right’s obsession with ‘violent’ media and the hypocrisy of their support for such violence when it is in defence of their version of American society:

If Brock Landers is slick with a gun, he does so only in the vein of good and right. Brock protects the values of the American ideal and fights for causes that instil pride in a society where morals are hard to come by.

From this point on, everything that was questionable about their world becomes downright dark. Jack receives a phone call from the Colonel, in jail after a 15-year-old girl overdoses on cocaine at his house. Jack is already preparing excuses for him when the Colonel admits that there is something else; that the police found evidence of child pornography at his house, and that it is indeed ‘his weakness’. Jack’s stunned response covers over the fact that he himself is in the business of picking minors to put into sex work. Is it a shock to him that his close friend, his literal financier, is a paedophile? Surely not. His reaction is not to the truth, but to the fact that the truth is no longer deniable. It is out there for the world to know.

Everything, elsewhere, is falling apart. Strung out on prodigious amounts of drugs, Dirk Diggler is both unruly and unable to perform, leading to a violent altercation with Jack, who says he looks too bad to shoot. Dirk leaves the Horner fold, and he and Reed embark on a truly terrible music career, stymied by the fact they have no musical talent. Amber and Rollergirl fall into extreme drug use and an incestuous emotional codependency, and Jack is forced into the seedier world of the videotape, driving Rollergirl around in a cab picking up random guys on the street, one of whom recognises her from their school days. She and Jack end up leaving the guy half dead at the side of the road, an exposed and livid Rollergirl having kerb stomped him with her ever-present roller boots.

From here, the rest of the movie is an agonising descent into the depths of their predicaments. Trying to escape the industry, Buck applies for a loan to open a store, to support his now pregnant partner, also a performer, and is refused precisely because of his involvement in porn. Dirk is replaced by a younger model, and the movies Jack makes become more violent and seedy, his ability to cast himself as a ‘filmmaker’ rather than a pornographer decreasing with each title. Amber loses a custody hearing, knowing she might never get to see her son, and is left sobbing, bereft, outside the courthouse. With Reed and a hustler named Todd, Dirk spends all his money on drugs, and is forced into the same type of sex work he first started out in, showing his monstrous dick to men for money, except now he can’t even perform, and gets beaten up by a homophobic gang for daring to try.

Now comes the nadir. Desperate for cash, Dirk, Reed and Todd hatch a plan to scam a local drug dealer, going to his palatial house to sell him half a kilo of baking soda for $5000. What follows is a masterful, genius, tension-ridden eight-minute scene—a twink lets off firecrackers at random, the dealer plays Russian roulette with a silver bullet, the dealer’s armed bodyguard tests the drugs in the background—which is so excruciating to watch that at one point I had my feet on my seat, my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands with stress, feeling possibly the worst I have ever felt in a cinema. Within this scene is nestled a near-perfect 50-second shot of Mark Walhberg’s face, in which, silently and largely unmoving, he manages to convey his character’s realisation that he has fucked up everything good in his life, has found himself completely and totally out of his depth, and might be about to be part of something that could see him killed. It is the moment at which the fantasy comes crashing into the hard face of reality, and it is truly painful to watch.

Seeing this on the screen of the GFT’s cinema 1 took me back almost a year to sitting in that exact same screen, watching Barry Lyndon (which I wrote about here). Specifically, it took me back to the moment at which that character’s world also comes crashing down, thanks to his hubris and his insistence on living a fantasy life, which is also shown across the character’s face in a long close up as he sits by his child’s deathbed. In Boogie Nights the change is even more underplayed by the actor, but the effect is still the same: a gut-wrench, a terror, an intense fear that this could happen to you, the viewer, if you take one wrong turn and fail to grasp your many opportunities to turn back.

The scam, of course, goes horribly wrong, though not in the way you are led to expect. It seems, even, that they are going to get away with it, the bodyguard apparently oblivious to the fact his employer has been saddled with a half kilo of baking powder, and the dealer so high on freebase coke he can think of nothing but singing and dancing and playing fast and loose with his own life. But just when Dirk and Reed find the courage to start leaving, Todd, desperately strung out, attempting to find within himself some movie-constructed version of masculinity that relies on violence and pushing his luck, insists that they will not leave without also robbing the dealer, demanding everything from the safe in his bedroom floor. The scene ends with three men dead and the ludicrous drug-fuelled dreams of Dirk and Reed well and truly ended. Having been lucky to get away with his life in tact, Dirk returns to Horner’s house to beg to be allowed to return. This, Dirk realises, is all he now has: this family, this fucked up life, this strange career. There is no fantasy future he can escape to, nor an unproblematic past to which he can return.

Earlier in the film, before Dirk returns to the pornography-making fold, Amber and Rollergirl lament: I miss that kid. The implication is that he was good and pure amidst a sea of moral rot, a shining example of a good boy unsullied, at that point, by everything that would come after. But was he? It was Eddie who first propositioned Jack in the club’s kitchen, having already embarked on a career performing sexually for cash. Similarly Rollergirl, whose refusal to take off her roller boots suggests a desperation to regress to teenagerhood, was already being sexually harassed by classmates before she dropped out. They are harking back to an age of innocence that just did not exist, nostalgic for something that is completely imagined—or, rather, is rose-tinted beyond all recognition, recalled specifically to fit their current narrative needs.

It is this point, of the many I might have taken away from the film, that really got me in the guts this past weekend—a weekend on which black-clad fascists were throwing Nazi salutes on the streets of Glasgow, just as it was announced that Elon Musk has become the planet’s first trillionaire. We all know things are bad, in here. We see the people sleeping on the streets, we hear as our friends lose jobs to supposed AI efficiency (which does not actually seem to exist, outside of it being financially ‘efficient’ to fire a load of people), we know that parents of disabled children struggle at every turn to get the provision required. We watch as friends give up having kids they can’t afford. We see the elderly left abandoned, families going into debt to pay for their care. We struggle to get NHS operations or appointments. We see benefits slashed and slashed. We go to our local supermarkets and see security tags on packets of fish, the cigarettes and alcohol kept behind cages. Work pays less. Costs go up. The richest get richer and richer, astronomically so, unfathomably so, and the rest of us suffer. We are sold either a ludicrous future dream by the rich—one where enormous global prosperity is apportioned fairly thanks to the effects of the very systems that actually, in reality, impoverish us—or a return to an imagined past by the fascist right, in which all our problems can be blamed on ‘immigrants’ (really, meaning anyone not white), who have supposedly caused all the issues we now face; if we just go back to the past, they say, some imagined recent past where people of colour and queer people did not exist and capitalism did not funnel the wages of the workers into the pockets of capitalists, our very real problems would be solved. These are both fantasies, both requiring the enormous exploitation and dehumanisation of the masses, the sharpest end of this focused on the racialised, the displaced, the old, the disabled, the poor, the already marginalised. A trillionaire is crowned and fascists return to the streets, bare faced, throwing Nazi salutes without a care. We are all compromised by this. We, too, are trapped in a bleak reality. There’s no fantasy future we can escape to, nor an unproblematic past to which we can return. How do we escape this trap? By reckoning with our reality, now. By scrapping and fighting and coming together and figuring out a third option, a different path, that considers us all as valuable inherently, all fallible, compromised humans, instead of capitulating to the seduction of past or future lies.

This, too, is how Boogie Nights closes. By the end of the movie all its characters have abandoned their well-worn 70s values and styles and embraced the accoutrements of the new 80s, from Don Cheadle’s desperately authentic Buck giving up his beloved cowboy gear to ‘perform’ the blackness required of him in the rap-soaked advert for his new business, to Dirk, with his new slicked back hair and white, shoulder-padded pure 80s suit, ready to return to porn not as the handsome young miracle but as the been-through-the-mill star of the past. Miraculously, Paul Thomas Anderson manages to create a sliver of hope from the preceding two and a half hours, leaving our characters all trapped, yes, but trapped together, hoping and dreaming and making and exploiting each other and loving each other in just as fucked up a fashion as they ever were before, but with, at least, a little more knowledge, a little more insight, a little bit more awareness of their own mortality, their own fallibility. They know, now, how high the stakes are if they continue to refuse reality. They are glimmers of change: Buck’s baby, with Jessie, and the coming back together of the flawed gang with more humility. Where do they go from here? It’s not entirely clear. But the film ends with an unambiguous bursting of the fantasy the entire film has rested on. Giving himself a pep talk in character, looking at the battered, slightly older, slightly more human version of himself, Dirk Diggler stands up and drops his pants and unsheathes his monstrous talent for all the audience to see. And we see that, yes, it is just a dick. A big dick, yes, but just a penis, at the end of the day. Not enough to build an entire fantasy on. Not even close.

This sent our chat into a minor spin. It turns out that yes, Harlan Ellison—insanely prolific writer of sci fi and speculative fiction, screenwriter, curmudgeon, conceptual consultant on Babylon 5, and the man who, amidst a contract dispute around cigarette ads, famously sent a load of bricks to his publisher, postage due, then followed that up by mailing them a dead gopher fourth class—did actually trademark his name.

If you know the first thing about the man, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Wildly litigious, prone to publicly insulting the people he worked with, probably a nightmare to be around and very much not afraid of airing his dirty laundry again and again, he started his career being kicked out of a university creative writing program for verbally abusing a lecturer who talked shit about sci fi. Despite this (or perhaps because of, if he, like me, is driven mostly by spite), Ellison wrote some of the most startlingly original stories in the sci fi boom of the 60s and 70s, and he was not afraid to innovate: in 1967 he wrote the infamous post apocalyptic short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, in which an artificially intelligent military supercomputer murders everyone on the planet apart from five humans it keeps alive to relentlessly torture, and in 1995 he co-designed the equally infamous point-and-click computer game of the same name, even going so far as to voice the supercomputer, AM, himself. He was also not afraid of being way bleaker than many of his contemporaries; the first paragraph of I Have No Mouth.. starts and ends like this:

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported— hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw…. He didn’t move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. “Why doesn’t it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this.” It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer. He was speaking for all of us.

Brutal. Epic. AI-hater. A man after my own heart.

1967 was a pretty good year for Harlan Ellison. In April of that year his Star Trek episode, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’, was aired; it is now considered one of the best Star Trek episodes ever written. He also edited a collection that year, Dangerous Visions, which came to define the new wave of sci fi and further cemented him as a key figure in that world. By the time Terminator came out in 1984, Ellison was a firmly established character and well known for his personality, so it was very stupid of James Cameron to tell a journalist, before the film’s release, that for the basic idea he had ripped off a couple of The Outer Limits episodes written by Harlan Ellison, namely ‘Soldier’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘Demon with a Glass Hand’. This journalist told Ellison (despite the claim being cut from the printed interview) who of course took umbrage with this, and the producers and the distributor were forced to settle with him for somewhere in the region of $70,000 (equivalent to about $282,000 today) and an acknowledgement in the film’s credits. Whether or not Ellison would have won in court is debatable, but Ellison claims that had James Cameron just asked for permission to adapt Soldier in the first place, he would have given the rights to him for free.

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There something that happens in the English-speaking world when serious literature dares to broach the topic of sex: the critic finds himself clutching pearls he didn’t know he owned, wider public sensibilities are inflamed, and the readership feels it must deride the writer for having the audacity to broach a topic about which we are childishly nervous. Certainly this is what happened when Anthony Burgess diminished Gray’s 1982, Janine—which Gray considered his best novel—in a 1984 issue of the Sunday Observer:

On the strength of Lanark I proclaimed Alasdair Gray the first major Scottish novelist since Walter Scott… 1982 Janine exhibits the same large talent, deployed to a somewhat juvenile end.1

It is, of course, the worst nightmare of any writer to be hailed as a genius in one moment and derided as a hack in the next, anywhere outside of our own heads; I’d hate to have been reading this over my Sunday morning coffee, as Gray may well have. But on the matter of juvenile ends: one must wonder where, according to Burgess, the boundary lies when it comes to the use of the penis in literary work, given that the film adaptation of his most famous novel A Clockwork Orange—a film he proclaimed a ‘masterpiece’—features prominent use of this sculpture:

The Rocking Machine is deployed in Kubrick’s movie to great effect, at least in my mind—and presumably for Burgess too, given that he was so glowing, at least in one portion of his life, about the film. So do we assume that the penis as a narrative device is okay when rendered artistically, when it is given a meaning that goes far beyond the immediate and physical, and is used as a prompt for a conversation about such things as free will, and violence, and the state of a nation or people? I would argue this is exactly what 1982, Janine is doing. And I’d go further: I’d say it is writing into a literary form that uses masturbation as a lens to discuss identity, culture and the isolating effects of a certain society, something that Philip Roth’s much derided novel Portnoy’s Complaint did before it, and something that Tony Tulathimutte’s hugely lauded Rejection has done since.

In the winter 2009/10 issue of Perspectives, the magazine formerly published by Democratic Left Scotland, writer Rodge Glass—who worked for several years as Gray’s personal assistant and secretary—defended 1982, Janine, specifically refuting the claim that it is a ‘bizarre, out-dated, pornographic indulgence’ when compared to Gray’s debut novel, the aforementioned seminal (pardon the phrasing) Lanark:

I’d like to argue that 1982, Janine can be seen as a partner piece to Lanark, dealing with similar landscapes of the mind, body and nation. It is also one of the most radical feminist texts in 20th century Scottish fiction…2

I can practically hear the indignation from certain readers as they come across this assertion: how can a NOVEL, by a MAN, about MASTURBATION (!!) be a radical feminist text? I have seen these sorts of positions taken often on the internet, and they seem to reject anything in the way of class, power or gender-based analysis if it comes from the ‘wrong’ quarters, reducing feminism to a paper-thin accoutrement, not a political project whose objectives can only truly be achieved through understanding and support by the masses but a special opinion that only women are allowed to hold. By this maxim, no men can have anything to say about the female condition (or indeed women’s treatment at the hands of men) and no woman can say or do anything that harms the cause of feminism. This is not what feminism means to me. This is also not a position that was held by Janice Galloway, when she wrote, in 1985, on Gray’s treatment of women in his books:

Gray's writing not only knows that women experience, feel, and often think differently, it seems to be filled with a regret for that fact, and in this way, Woman—the female principal—exists in Gray's writing the way she exists in no other current male writer's work.3

Woman, in 1982, Janine, is the sun around which Jock McLeish wishes to orbit—but not real Woman, with whom Jock has a series of complicated relationships, but Ideal Woman, or indeed Ideal Women, since Jock has a mental rolodex of several women who he uses as the cast in his fantasies: Janine (a Jane Russell lookalike), Big Momma (a lesbian), and Superb (short for Superbitch). These are the characters he puppets in his increasingly sadomasochistic and often pathetically stereotypical fantasies, using them as a smokescreen with which to block out the sad realities of his failed real-world entanglements and his frustrated promise. At the book’s midpoint, unable to hold back his internal truths, Jock swallows all the pills and all the booze he has, hoping to bring about eternal peace—and instead he invokes the voice of God, a typographical explosion, and a realisation that he can’t blind himself to the facts of his own existence. We learn, soon after, that Jock was a preternaturally talented theatrical lighting designer, having come up through technical college and fallen in with an amateur dramatics crowd, putting on a show at the Edinburgh Fringe, through one of his girlfriends. This is far from the security installation work he has ended up in, and we are led to believe this is more in line with the creative life he would have liked to have lived, if only he had not destroyed his own chances.

The schism, in this period, between Jock’s ‘real’ life in Glasgow, with one woman, and his ‘unreal’ life in Edinburgh with another, despite them being just 46 miles apart, allows Gray to explore the ways in which the Scottish/British duality affects Jock’s psyche, the heavily English cultural scene in Edinburgh (about which Gray would later write critically) only serving to highlight the vulnerability hidden within Jock, and the lack of true confidence he feels in his Scottishness when it is exposed to Englishness. Such is the way Gray responded to the Scottish devolution referendum of 1979, in which a majority of Scots voted in favour of a devolved deliberative assembly, but a lower voter turnout than required meant that the proposal was thrown out, burying the possibility of Scottish self-rule for another eighteen years. Considering the ways that Jock acts as a personification of his nation throughout the book, it is not insignificant that Gray, in his usual metafictional way, summarises Chapter 12 (Jock’s Fringe period) in this way in the book’s Contents pages (emphasis mine):

FROM THE CAGE TO THE TRAP: or: How I Reached and Lost Three Crowded Months of Glorious Life: or: How I Became Perfect, Married Two Wives Then Embraced Cowardice: or: Scotland 1952-1982.4

The reason I, a feminist, love all three of these books is that they are critical appraisals of men’s obsessive sexual desires, and where they come from—written by men. The project of each book is to examine societal structures that, yes, primarily affect the male protagonists of the stories but also, through the prism of patriarchy we exist under, still result in behaviours that end up affecting women. As Glass writes of 1982, Janine, all three books use the ‘tropes of pornography to reveal what lies behind these fantasies and the abuses within them’, and ‘how fantasies reveal insecurities’.5 The fanatical onanism within each book acts as a lens on the protagonist’s psychology, revealing not only how he thinks about sex but why he thinks about sex, and the events of each story reveal the ways in which he is the victim of his own attitudes, being ultimately too denuded to even pose a threat to the real women who exist outside of his imagination.

The narrators of these books are pathetic, in a very normal way: troubled, beaten down, capable of great insight, burdened by family neurosis, complicated histories and political disenfranchisement, very humanly complex and increasingly powerless, yes, but pathetic through and through. What is interesting is the examination of what has made them pathetic. From Jock’s very first fantasy within his nonspecific Borders hotel room, the real world encroaches, and he has to violently push it away with the help of drink, clinging to a listless escape from a world that he, in fact, has created. As Glass says about the book:

It argues, without ever saying directly, that repressed Scottish men like Jock feel so alienated that they will go to any lengths to hide from real life. So, the novel suggests, they make up another instead, in their imaginations. One where they have power—over their finances, their work, their nation, and crucially, over the women who (damn them!) won’t do as they’re told. Who have different wants and needs, and will not succumb to their demands.6

Just as it is not a coincidence that Jock McLeish is a Scottish man, it is not an accident that he is a Tory. Given his various predicaments, both these facets of his personhood produce within him a series of hypocrisies that he cannot endure. The very fact of his class and nationality—and nationalism—should turn him against the prevailing policies of the early-1980s Conservatives, but they do not. In the introduction to the 2003 ‘The Canons’ edition of the book, writer Will Self highlights the specific time period of the novel, reminding us that it is ‘emphatically 1982, a point at which Scotland could be said to have reached just one of its many nadirs’—but also reminding us that Jock, geographically and politically if in no other way, also remains British:

In 1982 this is horribly salient, with 40,000 British workers losing their jobs weekly, unemployment well past the two million mark, the steel and coal industries on which Scots industry depends being decimated, while at the head of it all stands a Premier… slashing a billion pounds of public expenditure.

In short: this is Britain in the Thatcher years, and our protagonist is indeed a Thatcherite. The tragedy of Jock’s position is that it is exacerbated by the very people he has put into power. But Jock cannot accept the ways in which he is made powerless by the very ideology he espouses. And the way he rejects this powerless is via his fantasies, regaining, in his addled mind, not only a masculine agency but a national one too, as he forces his fictional women to fulfil his every desire. The abject failure of even this scheme is the great tragedy of this book—which, truly, might be his best novel.

Portnoy’s Complaint takes a different (and ingenious) form, that of the confession from the psychoanalyst’s couch—and the title alludes to both a medical problem and a literary lament often from a woman, with reference to the Shakespeare poem ‘A Lover’s Complaint.’ With this Roth both pathologises and castrates his protagonist in one fell swoop.

Despite being overtly about jerking off, Portnoy’s Complaint is, from the very first line, all about the mother figure (paging Dr Freud!). The core of Roth’s novel is a bizarrely neat expression of what psychologists now call enmeshment, or covert invest, in which a parent (in this case, Sophie Portnoy) is so involved with the life of the child that she causes a form of developmental trauma. In burdening the child with concerns that are too adult, and in blaming the child for her own emotional responses, the mother ties his own emotional world with hers at a crucial developmental stage, creating a situation whereby he cannot feel nor respond naturally without concern for how it will affect her, and so he cannot feel or respond naturally at all. His potential for normal intimacy is destroyed as it is burdened by this enmeshment, so he creates a new situation in which his intimacy is his alone, unburdened by social mores or taboos or consideration for other people: in many instances, as in Portnoy’s Complaint, this manifests in an addiction to pornography or excessive masturbation. But in the novel, as in real life, there is neither freedom nor satisfaction available from this pursuit, because it is not a free choice but is formed from a defensive position, from repression of real feeling and desire. The incestuous element of this process, which comes from the parent making her child her surrogate spouse, is made clear: Alexander Portnoy is forced to admire his mother’s hips, to see how she has not ‘gained five pounds’ since his birth, and when he returns from a trip away he is greeted with the phrase: Well, how’s my lover?

Of course, no parent seeks to enmesh with their child; this too results from a form of trauma experienced in their childhood, usually from neglect. It’s clear in Roth’s novel that this trauma is a distinctly Jewish, distinctly post-war trauma, his mother so desperately obsessed with what goes into her family’s bodies that they unconsciously assert control over what comes out. Her husband has developed constipation so terrible that it cannot be cured nor alleviated by a diet of Ex-Lax, milk of magnesia, All-Bran and dried fruits, the most obvious metaphorical repression, while her son takes the other route; he cannot stop himself from expressing fluids. Running from the family dinner table to masturbate over his sister’s underwear in the bathroom, Portnoy thinks: ‘It is my fourth orgasm of the day. When will I begin to come blood?’7

All this Roth does without softening the edges of his characters, who despise the black people around them on the basis of both class and race, and extend this neurotic obsession with purity on those terms; Sophie Portnoy wishes to both dominate the black woman who cleans for her (by being better at ironing, surely the last competitive refuge of the beaten down) and diminish her (by excessively washing cutlery which she has eaten with). As she lives her life terrified by the prospect of being racially judged—a terror that is not misplaced, as Roth shows by describing an instance from Portnoy’s childhood where Nazis carve swastikas into their surrounds, prompting the family to move to Jersey City—she still engages with this judgement herself, not seeking to eliminate racial hierarchies but to benefit from them. When a Portnoy uncle claims that Jews can only live amongst Jews, its clear that Roth intends us to understand this as another type of cloying, dysfunctional enmeshment, built on fear. The parallels between Portnoy’s relationship with his mother and the family’s relationship with Jewishness, and how both affect the protagonist’s sexual development, is perfectly portrayed when Portnoy describes an ‘endless dripping of blood’: ‘It is the blood she is draining from the meat so as to make it kosher and fit for consumption’. His mother’s obsession with making him kosher, and indeed fit for social consumption, is what is draining him of everything but the excessive need for self-abuse. Underneath all the hysterical descriptions of wanking is a book that’s really about generational trauma and post-war dynamics. Now that’s literature.

The link between these two books is not something new I’m uncovering here; as Adam Mars-Jones wrote in a 1994 edition of the London Review of Books:

Portnoy’s Complaint was about Jewish family life, rebelliousness and the Sixties. Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine, perhaps the most purposeful deployment of taboo imagery since de Sade, was about Scottishness, despair and the Eighties.8

However, to this we can add a third entry, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection—or, more specifically, one single story in Rejection, the third and most notorious. Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression is about the complexities of being Asian-American amidst digital isolation in the 2010s. Its protagonist, Kant, is a 31-year-old Thai-American who spends a year psyching himself up to send out a mass emailing coming out as gay, only to realise that this is neither remotely interesting to his friends and family, who accept it easily and without complaint, nor an honest expression of his real issue, which is that he is both an extreme sadist and irretrievably full of shame. His self-disgust runs so deep that when he does easily get himself a perfectly nice, not unproblematic boyfriend who seems eager to fulfil or at least explore the depths of his desire, his neuroses torpedo the relationship in various excruciating ways, sending him back to the online world, the only place he feels truly at home.

Freed from the unwittingly mortifying gaze of others, Kant feels able to finally open the floodgates of his imagination; finding the custom porn request form on a muscle twink’s website, his mind ‘feels like a limb that’s been freed from a plaster cast, greenish and sickly but with, at last, a full range of motion.’9 From this untethered psyche spews (sorry) the sort of fantasy-fiction-inflected depravity that you’d expect to find in the notebooks of mass murderers, unfurling (sorry) across seventeen hardback pages in a manner that makes the reader burst out laughing and cringe simultaneously, unable to stop reading the almost perfect prose that lays out (sorry) the effect that repression has had on Kant’s particular sexual mania. The effect of this is such that, despite having read the story several times, I keep forgetting the actual ending, which is even worse, but so abrupt it often gets lost beneath the rolling surges of discomfort brought about by the rest of the piece. It’s genius.

The story’s title, Ahegao, and its recurring use throughout the narrative, is a perfect signpost for the specific issues within its protagonist’s tortured consciousness. The term itself refers to a specific expression, stemming from hentai, which a (young-coded) animated character makes when driven so mad with sexual pleasure that she quite literally loses her mind, in the manner of old cartoons: her eyes cross, her tongue hangs out, she drools. This, of course, has become a meme over the last couple of decades, even making its way onto clothing as Japanese culture has moved through various waves of fetishisation in Europe and North America (and elsewhere, I’m sure). Broadly considered both sexist and racist, it has become a truly modern mode of orientalism, objectifying South Asian women specifically—and, in the context of Tulathimutte’s story, serves to highlight Kant’s (often referenced) experiences being feminised and rejected by other men on account of his race. Like Sophie Portnoy, it is his own psychological obsessions that thwart his efforts to be easily loved, but, like Sophie Portnoy, his fixations are rooted in real experiences, real traumas, real racist assault. The detail of his sadistic fantasies repeatedly require the submissive character to reference his ethnicity (as in ‘lusting after my enormous, frightening Asian cock’10 and his ‘specifically Thai-American manmilk’11) as something that both horrifies and allures his dream partners, revealing the exact type of specialised, identity-based hangup under which Jock McLeish and Alexander Portnoy also suffer. In discussing this within the book, Tulathimutte neatly sums up what both Roth and Gray were also expressing with their characters—this time, with his protagonist directing his lust towards other men, rather than women. Of Kant’s libido, he writes:

Its origin is no mystery: growing up noticed by no one except in his public embarrassments, by some dark alchemy of childhood bullying, social invisibility, and overlapping cultural taboos, he has developed a sexual constipation that finds its only release in the fantasy of boundless, monstrous subjugation, reified and reinforced by the hyperspecific porn that has been his lifelong solace… It all points to a desire to rehouse his own abjection in other men; render them pathetic and ridiculous so he can feel powerful and attractive by comparison; make them suffer the punishments that he, deep in the crawl spaces of his mind, fears he deserves.12

These men are not heroes, and neither are they villains. They are pitiable and struggling, precisely because of their desperation to subjugate women (and other men) to objects of sexual use and little more. They are lonely, isolated by their own choices, yes, but trapped by family dynamics and politics and legacies of racism. Their relative privilege as men only goes so far in the face of all these intersections, but the relative privilege is nonetheless what they cling to. This pathetic project, the domination of others, is all they have left, weakened as they are by dispossession and the confines of masculinity, by rejection and a lack of agency. These books are feminist inasmuch as they examine frameworks that support and create the urge for men to dominate women, even as the men themselves are diminished. They ask, covertly, for systemic change, even as they amuse and entertain.

I’ve yet to find evidence in the archives that Gray was particularly influenced by Philip Roth, but I know for a fact that Tulathimutte was heavily influenced by Gray; in conversation with novelist Elle Nash at the Whisky Bond last year, he treated the audience to a truly hysterical reading of Ahegao and then spoke passionately about the story’s roots in 1982, Janine. He mentioned Gray’s humour more recently too, in this interview with . I know that Tulathimutte has taken enormous literary cues from Roth, as he was writing on this exact topic for The Atlantic as far back as 2016. And as those who’ve spent any time at Gray’s desk in The Alasdair Gray Archive know, there’s one final connection to be made to complete this triangle. It was the desk, and its paraphernalia, that came immediately to my mind when, in Portnoy’s Complaint, the protagonist’s ceaselessly constipated father makes his unending lament:

“Why can't I move my bowels—I’m up to my ass in prunes!”13

When I was taking my first philosophy classes at college, twenty-two years ago now, one of the things that thrilled me most was the asking of questions I had not ever thought to consider before. I had an amazing Northern Irish tutor called Barry Kelly, who once missed a week of classes around St Patrick’s Day and told us that he’d been ill and had followed doctor’s orders to ‘drink a crate of Guinness’. We had two (very nice) lads in the class who would literally wear berets (I know), sat at the back and tended towards long black overcoats; once, when they arrived late and had to swish their way to their seats after everyone else had sat down, Barry asked: are you here to take communion?

One of the first questions on our Philosophy of Mind course was a seemingly simple one: what is a mind? This is one of those things that you can put to a group of people in the pub and they will act as if it’s the stupidest question in the world: we all know what it is, we’ve all got one. But then the follow up questions must come: well, then, how is the mind—nonphysical—connected to the physical brain? Is the mind nonphysical? Does the brain affect the mind or does the mind affect the brain, or both? If the content of your mind is completely different at age two compared to age 80, then when constitutes your particular mind, exactly? What’s the through-line? How about with animals? What makes us intelligent in a different way to them? What is intelligence, when it comes to it? And how does that relate to the mind?

Even when you’ve been thinking about these things for two decades, you can forget just how divided opinions are, on even the fundamentals. At the start of the pandemic, having touched on these topics with me before, my partner asked if we might get through first lockdown by having a regular ‘cocktail and philosophy hour’ at 5pm by our bay window; gimlets were the order of the day then, and it would take us away from our phones and give us something to think about beyond a sweeping plague. I figured that the mind-body problem, as it’s known, was a good place to start; because the mind and the body are two different things I said, with confidence, only to be immediately met with the response: are they? I don’t think so. Five years later we still don’t really agree (though we did stop cocktail hour quite quickly, on realising that lockdown was not just going to last a few weeks and we might end up irretrievably dependent on alcohol).

It is because of this question that I am so interested in AI, or rather, that I am interested in the claims made about AI.

For all of my adult life, we’ve had striving, erudite white tech capitalists making quite insane claims about what computer science will achieve within the next fifty years; it was one of these claims, in particular, that led me to write my first nonfiction book. The tech industry has long been in the business of hype, because it is hype that drives venture capital investment and it is investment that makes billionaires, regardless of whether or not a product works or even exists; look at Elizabeth Holmes. Despite it being very unclear exactly how generative AI will bring about the things it claims it will, in terms of advancement or profit-making (from the Guardian: ‘A recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology report revealed that 95% of companies investing in generative AI have yet to see any financial returns’), in March 2025, OpenAI—the developers of ChatGPT—held the most successful private funding round in history, bringing in $40 billion. It dwarfed that, and broke the record again, in early 2026, this time raising $122 billion. The creation of hype, in many ways, is the product. Anything they manage to create after this is almost incidental.

But when it comes to AI, the things that are being promised make deep assumptions about things we do not yet even profess to understand nor agree on, things that are fundamental to the progression of these technologies, such as whether a mind is an emergent property of the brain, and if so, how and when this emergence occurs—and, most importantly for that industry, how we might even begin to replicate it. Technologist and cloud architect Dwayne Monroe, who has been working in this field for thirty years, summed it up neatly in an interview with Michigan Abolition and Prisoner Solidarity in late 2025 (which is well worth a read), saying:

The phrase, “artificial intelligence,” should be understood as marketing. We do not yet understand how thinking works in humans or any of our fellow creatures (this is why cognitive science is a serious area of study).

Considering this lack of knowledge, it’s absurd to say that tech companies have produced an artificial version of what is not understood.

This lack of a fundamental understanding is downplayed in every sphere; most people you speak to will just accept and repeat the tech industry’s claim that if we just ‘technology’ enough, intelligence will occur. It’s such a given that few people even think to question it. And there I am, philosophy-pilled, reading book after book on AI (we even own the AI book by murdering warmonger Henry Kissinger, for my sins), poring through dense engineering explanations and information about GPUs and scaling and still finding absolutely nothing that answers the question that I often scrawl madly into a book’s margins and on more than one occasion have barked out loud to an empty room, like a maniac: BUT HOW??!

It has been intensely sanity-restoring, then, for me to read Karen Hao’s truly incredible book Empire of AI. Hao is a journalist with an AI specialism; she graduated from mechanical engineering at MIT hoping to enter Silicon Valley and tackle climate change, before quickly realising that Silicon Valley had absolutely no intention of doing that. Instead she moved into journalism, being one of the key voices covering the rise of generative AI, and specifically the company OpenAI. Hao gained three days of access to the company two years before the release of ChatGPT; she was quickly shut out for asking questions the company did not like. She is uniquely positioned to clearly lay out what underpins the AI bubble: the belief that someone is going to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or human-level intelligence, sooner rather than later. That we really can create a mind, by building larger and larger supercomputers—and that this must be justified at any cost.

It has been sanity-restoring, to read this book, but it has also scared me to my bones—not because I believe that the billionaire overlords who control our politics and our technology can actually achieve this, but because of the ways that their determination to do so entrenches our most destructive and supremacist tendencies, and undermines democracy, at the expense of everyone else. One of the most terrifying realisations of my adult life has been that the tech industry, now maniacally-centred on producing this fabled AGI—which it cannot define, and for which it has no practical roadmap, beyond the borderline religious idea that it will just occur when their current models are pushed to some mythically large scale—is willing to expend seismic amounts of money, climate-shattering amounts of energy, and indeed almost all the planet’s resources on their vague and contestable methodology, with no obvious end in sight. Or, perhaps more realistically, that they are maniacally-centred on convincing us that they believe in AGI, because they want to amass seismic amounts of money. And we, the little people, probably cannot stop them.

ChatGPT arrived into the world with a bang at the end of 2022, and by January 2023 had become the fastest-growing consumer software app ever. Now, if you sit in a room discussing generative AI with a random group of people, you quickly realise that you are pretty much the only one not using it; some people seem to use it all day every day, for things they previously had no issue doing themselves: writing work emails, putting together their weekend to-do lists, writing itineraries for upcoming holidays abroad. Generative AI has been folded into pretty much every piece of software we use. I can’t so much as open WhatsApp without having to navigate off some conversation with an AI that I don’t want and didn’t start (and acting as a barrier to me engaging in my actual human relationships).

ChatGPT was an attempt to build a consumer use case out of what was, originally, a much bigger proposal. OpenAI, the company that produced ChatGPT, was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and a small team of others, with $1 billion in funding pledged from a group including Amazon Web Services, comic book villain Peter Thiel and Musk himself; only a fraction of this money ever materialised, but Musk was insistent on the figure as a marketing tactic. It was not to produce any commercial products but was to focus on research, which would be open-source, hence OpenAI. Within two years they had decided that the project would require stupefying amounts of money; by the time Hao started covering them in 2018, Musk had left, and by 2019, they had created a for-profit company and abandoned any idea that their work would be open-source. That year they began partnering with Microsoft for an initial $1 billion; by the end of 2024, Microsoft had invested $14 billion into the company but had begun to disentangle themselves from it. In September 2025, OpenAI was valued at $500 billion, one of just seven companies that compromise a trillion-dollar AI market valuation.

Yet all of this was predicated on one initial idea: that AI could potentially murder people to achieve its goals. According to Hao, Musk was so worried about Google’s DeepMind project achieving an entirely hypothetical AGI, and this AGI subsequently getting out of control, that he accepted Sam Altman’s invitation to dinner to discuss it, and very quickly afterwards pledged a billion dollars towards their own counter-project, OpenAI. ‘The future of AI’, he said, ‘should not be controlled by Larry [Page, Google co-founder].’ Altman agreed that it was impossible to stop humanity from developing AGI, and had proposed that they should get ahead, to stop anyone ‘evil’ from taking control of it. As if this wasn’t deeply ironic enough, Altman termed this the ‘Manhattan Project for AI’, naming his mission after the US’s drive to create the atomic bomb, which resulted in the killing of almost a quarter of a million people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the start of the nuclear age, which has since plunged humanity into several existential crises of global proportions.

But at the same time, as Hao outlines, Sam Altman was fiercely ambitious; after selling his first (failed) company for $5 million at 26, he was disappointed, because Steve Jobs was worth so much more at the same age. For all the ways that Altman and Musk might have genuinely believed in the threats of AGI, they were perhaps more concerned with the real business of making themselves rich beyond measure. By 28, Altman was the president of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator that arguably decides the direction in which major US tech can afford to go, bringing millions in investment to selected companies. It was his combination of ambition and belief in the possibilities of AI that convinced a group of people to join him, to become the team behind OpenAI. One of these people was Ilya Sutskever, poached from Google Brain (which would later merge with DeepMind to become Google DeepMind).

It is hard to grasp the depth of this group’s belief in the inevitability of AGI without reading Empire of AI; this is one of many reasons that I implore you to read the book. Hao shows over and over that if the co-founders were not convinced at the beginning, they became not only convinced but evangelical, as did many (if not most) of their employees. What’s not obvious from the book is whether this was a sincere belief, or a convenient one; like all religions, there are both true believers and those who understand that the power of belief can be harnessed to cynical ends, including the enrichment of those who guide the flock.

Whether sincere or not, this group was insistent on the public sentiment: that AGI is inevitable, and they must be the first to achieve this goal. Of course, there was one key thing missing: they didn’t have a clue how to get there. Because, of course, there is no clear way to achieve real artificial intelligence; we do not know how it occurred in us. We do not know where it resides, we do not understand it nor agree, really, on what it is. How does a company or a team create a construction map for something they cannot take apart? As Hao puts it, ‘OpenAI had no idea what it was doing.’ But Sutskever had an idea, and it was based on the possible level of ‘compute’ (which is just horrific tech industry terminology for ‘computational power’; having formerly worked for a North American tech startup as a copywriter, I really hate what these people do to language):

compute, Sutskever felt, was king. And if it were possible to scale compute enough to train an AI model at human brain scale, he believed, something radical would surely happen: AGI.

You would think, if you have been reading AI literature and following its claims and trends, that this was a given: that there was only ever one theory for achieving AGI, and it was based on scale. But this is not the case. It is not even accepted by all AI researchers that scaling is the best way forward, not least because of the intense resource depletion that is necessary to achieve it. There are various theories about how humans acquire intelligence, and these are carried forward in AI research; some think language is the key (hence large language models) and others think it is symbols that are most important; neurosymbolic AI, an alternative to the LLM+scaling method that companies like OpenAI follow, is much more energy- and data-efficient. But this has been sidelined by a maniacal commitment to scaling, the negative effects of which were obvious to the OpenAI founders back in 2019, when Hao gained unprecedented access to the company. Pressing for comment on the massive environmental impact of the company’s mission, Hao was told that the benefits of reaching AGI would include it coming up with a solution for climate change (which, of course, we already have—the issue is that no governments will commit to it). As she put it to Sutskever:

What you’re saying is OpenAI is making a huge gamble that you will successfully reach beneficial AGI to counteract global warming before the act of doing so might exacerbate it.

Of course, Hao received no answer to this. She would later be told that the biggest barrier to achieving AGI is that no one knows what it really looks like. And yet in the four years that followed her days with OpenAI, their models were massively, almost incomprehensibly scaled upwards. As Hao puts it, referring to the GPT model released in 2023:

Under the hood, generative AI models are monstrosities, built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labour, computing power, and natural resources. GPT-4, the successor to the first ChatGPT, is, by one measure, reportedly over fifteen thousand times larger than its first generation, GPT-1, released five years earlier.

In April 2024, the CEO of Anthropic told the New York Times that by 2025/26, the price of training a single competitive generative AI model would be between $5 billion and $10 billion. In late 2025, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, made clear he plans to build the company 250 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2033, which could necessitate spending 10 trillion dollars in the next seven years (despite their 2025 revenue being a reported $13 billion, which, multiplied by seven, results in less than 1% of the ten trillion he’s committing to spending). The modus operandi at OpenAI, and at every company that wants to beat them to their goal, has been vast expansion. The more data they use to train their LLMs, they believe, the closer they will come to creating AGI. But this data requires processing power, computational power. It needs massive data centres, and huge tracts of land on which to build them, and it needs huge amounts of water—potable water, as Hao points out—to cool them. Hao outlines cases in which data centres use more drinkable water than the local population; she quotes proposals from Google that state they need to use 169 litres of fresh drinking water per second to cool their data centres in parts of Chile where the residents cannot rely on access to it. In the last few years, OpenAI and other tech companies have worked hard to cover up the catastrophic environmental impact of their processes, but this was not always the case. Hao quotes Sutskever in conversation with Cade Metz for the book Genius Makers:

I think that it’s fairly likely that it will not take too long of a time for the entire surface of the Earth to become covered with data centres and power stations.

And all of this, of course, towards a methodology that has absolutely no certainty of working. AGI remains elusive, and undefinable, and in the meantime companies have to justify the relentless spending. The reason that we have AI encroaching on every aspect of our lives is that OpenAI and the companies like it need to force the consumer end of their product into every place they can in the desperate hope that it will become profitable. All that is sure is that these companies will continue to expand, spending unconscionable amounts of money on infrastructure and computational power despite the fact that they are still in the red. Despite its $13 billion in annual revenue, OpenAI will not be profitable until its income is almost ten times that amount, and that’s before you take into account Altman’s ludicrous infrastructure plans. Even Mark Zuckerberg is talking around the possibility of AI being an enormous bubble that will soon burst, sending the stock market plummeting. As someone who graduated into the 2008 economic crash, I for one am tired of living through these supposedly once-in-a-lifetime catastrophes which negatively affect everyone except for the billionaires who have safe places to take their new money.

As it stands, the market returns on this insane investment in AI cannot justify themselves—and so the need to position the search for AGI in spiritual terms increases. Yet not all computer scientists buy it. I laughed out loud—a semi insane, sort of manic laugh—when Hao quoted a 2022 tweet from OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever—’it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious’—and an expert’s response to it:

One DeepMind scientist, specialised in the study of cognition and consciousness, replied in the comments, ‘… in the same sense that it may be that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta.’

When it comes to things that challenge your connection to reality, there is a point of no return: you must either stop and accept that you’re very far from what would be considered rational or logical, or you must recommit yourself anew, refusing fact and severing the cord that once connected you to the real world. This holds true if your belief is not sincere: at some point your flock needs to be directed off the cliff of credulity, and you must be the one to lead them. When it comes to the search for AGI, it seems you must fall away from the project or you must commit yourself to believing, no matter what the evidence says.

As you read your way through Empire of AI, it dawns on you that so many of the people involved with AI research have fallen into it as a religion in and of itself. It is either an adjunct to their existing beliefs or commands a new belief system of its very own. Hao writes:

At Google that spring, Blake Lemoine, an engineer on the tech giant’s newly re-formed responsible AI team, grew convinced that the company’s own large language model LaMDA was not only highly intelligent but could be considered sentient. He said this was not based on a scientific assessment but rather on his belief, as a mystic Christian priest, that God could decide to give technology consciousness. ‘Who am I to tell God where he can and can’t put souls?’ he wrote.

There is a moment in the book Love and Sex with Robots, the 2007 treatise from David Levy in which he contends that we’ll be fucking robots by 2050, in which he states that if a robot tells you it is feeling something, you have no reason to believe that isn’t true. This has stayed with me for many reasons, and this same sensibility is apparent in the assertions made by those on the OpenAI team: the insistence that if you create a piece of software entirely to ape human behaviour, and it does exactly that, you must for some reason deceive yourself that there is a human-like mind inside of it. This is like putting your hand inside a puppet, turning to face it and, while your hand is still inside, deciding to believe that it is in fact independently mobile—not only mobile, in fact, but sentient (what we might call the Mr Flibble Theory of Mind). You can see the cogs, you can see the mechanism, but still you believe in something from the beyond working its magic. What is this if not religion?

And what must you do if you are the figurehead of a religion that is growing in notoriety? You must preach. In a September 2024 blog post, Sam Altman made the sort of claims that you might find coming from a person screaming on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street before handing you a pamphlet about the rapture, detailing how gays should be stoned to death before judgement day comes:

I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.

Although it will happen incrementally, astounding—fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics—will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy—the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen—we can do quite a lot.

You can read these things as sheer marketing, or you can read them as the pseudoreligious ramblings of someone who has not only drunk his own Kool-Aid but is trying to convince the gathered masses to drink it too, and to pay him several billion dollars for the privilege. In June 2025, Altman wrote a blog post that began with the phrase ‘We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started’, and went on to claim that ‘we have recently built systems that are smarter than people’. Despite the facts of the matter—there is no reason to believe that such systems have any intelligence whatsoever, yet we are spending untold amounts of money on them—Altman insisted that the rapturous advent of AGI is both here and affordable:

Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp. This may sound crazy to say, but if we told you back in 2020 we were going to be where we are today, it probably sounded more crazy than our current predictions about 2030.

May we scale smoothly, exponentially and uneventfully through superintelligence.

These people are the preachers of the present, the cult leaders of today; it does not matter that the predictions they make never materialise, because they are always around the corner. The rapture is always on the horizon; it is always the end of the world tomorrow.

Do they really believe? Some of them, I’m sure, do: we live in a post-sci-fi world where powerful people take ideas straight from novels and think they can speak them into being. But structurally, their belief only plays into already-existing methods of capital accumulation. As Edward Ongweso Jr puts it, ‘the tech sector has undertaken a wildly successful and sophisticated marketing campaign that has drowned out skepticism and critical analysis’. He continues:

A coalition of hyperscalers, venture capitalists, fossil fuel firms, conservatives, and reactionaries are engaged in a frenzy of overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in compute infrastructure. Their goal is not to realise AGI or radically improve life for humanity, but to reallocate capital such that it enriches themselves, transmutes their wealth into even more political power that imposes constraints on countervailing political forces, and liberates capitalism from its recent defects (e.g. democracy), consolidating benefits to its architectures regardless of the actual social utility of the technologies they pursue.

There is every reason to believe that the reason that the scaling model of AI has been chosen and funded to a completely unhinged degree is not because it has the best chance of achieving this mythical AGI, but that it is the best possible method of stripping money and resources from the lower rungs of society and funnelling them upwards to the 1%. The modern tech industry loves to pointlessly reinvent what we already have, from Musk inventing the futuristic concept of ‘tunnels’ to Uber privatising buses; by the end of Empire of AI, Hao has successfully argued that OpenAI is primarily reinventing the East India Company, revamping colonial expansion and resource accumulation for the twenty-first century. And since the publication of the book, what’s become clear is that these companies are (to varying degrees as dictated by how they are able to publicly position themselves against the other companies) already entrenched in the military-industrial complex, where the funding is bottomless, and what Ali Kadri calls the true processes of capitalist accumulation—waste and death—are created.

I kept describing the experience of reading this book, to my partner, as having a low level panic attack for about a week straight. How else should a person feel when they learn that data centres have been kept running in the wake of hurricanes, when hospitals have been shipping patients out because they needed to turn the power off? Or when you learn that 900 acres of Arizona have already been bought by Microsoft to house some of these data centres, which then will consume untold amounts of water? Over and over again we are shown that corporate profit, US military expansionism and the sci fi dreams of billionaire maniacs are prioritised over human life. And then you realise there is next to no impact when you tell people these things, because this is the logic of capitalism—that it must be allowed to grow endlessly, and quickly, at the expense of literally everything else—and with AGI, it has met religion once again. Capitalism must run unchecked so that a mythical, unproven goal can be attained—and that consent for this insane goal, the creation of AGI at all costs, has been manufactured by the rollout of generative AI models that promise to alleviate people’s work load and cognitive tasks when all they will actually do is to bring more work, worse pay and horrific conditions. It feels very much that the argument has already been lost. Because the mechanisms that already rule our world are committed to making us believe they have the answers to questions we haven’t even begun to solve, and that no price is too high for gaining this knowledge.

In Karen Hao’s words:

AGI, if ever reached, will solve climate change, able affordable healthcare, provide equitable education. OpenAI is the poster child for this line of thought. It cannot say how the technology will deliver on these promises—only that the staggering price society needs to pay for what it is developing will someday by worth it.

I haven’t listened to this podcast before, and the presenter immediately misrepresented what AI chatbots are (calling them ‘communicating robots’, which they are not; they are not even close to being robots), which wasn’t a great start. But it was helpful in that it made very obvious the ways in which the term ‘artificial intelligence’ functions as a trick to immediately extinguish people’s critical thinking faculties. None of the people featured on the episode would be using generative AI this way if it wasn’t called AI, but was more accurately referred to as a 'highly sophisticated text prediction software’. No one would be on podcasts saying ‘yes, I use this piece of text prediction software as my girlfriend and/or therapist’. It would, rightly, come across as insane.

The various people featured on the episode included a man who left his tech job to become a voice actor, and became a heavy user of ChatGPT after his beloved cat died (a particularly ironic choice given that this man’s chosen job will be one of the first to go because of generative AI), and a play therapist who, after trying out six therapists for herself, found Anthropic’s Claude AI to better fill this role than any of the previous candidates. The latter woman said that none of the therapists she tried out had even thought to ask about her family system when she outlined the issue of burnout with both friends and clients—something I find truly incredible, given that surely the majority of people, chatting to someone about feeling burdened by people in their professional and personal lives, would think to ask about the role that person played within their family and whether that role was being replicated in other arenas. I don’t think you need to be a professional to ask that question—but it was very notable that the response Claude gave her was wildly flattering, saying the issue was that she had been the reliable, dependable one in her family and must be fulfilling that role in her other relationships. I’m sure we’d all love to believe that our issues stem from being just too good and reliable and everyone asking too much of us, but is this good therapy? I don’t think it is.

This woman seemed, in general, curiously negative about other therapists; she said that the profession is not known for early adoption of technology, and that many therapists were still ‘making notes on legal pads—which is inexcusable’. I found this to be a completely baffling comment. What makes digital records any better, for a therapist’s purposes, than handwritten notes? The latter, in fact, have the benefit of being unhackable; if you keep all of your client notes on a laptop that connects to the internet, they are inherently less safe than handwritten notes kept in a locked drawer of your home, or your security-manned office. It is incredibly distracting for a client if a therapist is making notes on a computer or iPad throughout a session, and in order for digital notes to be kept properly secure requires a level of tech-competence that many (especially older) people do not naturally have—or it involves paying for a service to afford you that security, which necessitates placing your trust in a third-party private company. When it comes to something as serious as medical notes, this privacy question is not insignificant.

In fact, in the podcast episode, there was no discussion at all of client privacy, and the ways that using AI as a therapist fundamentally torpedoes this extremely important element of the client-therapist relationship. There have already been cases that have called the security of digital therapy notes into question: in 2020, the Finnish psychotherapy provider Vastaamo had its private database hacked, and hackers attempt to extort the company for €450,000. When this didn’t work, they published the session notes of 300 people, then approached clients directly with ransom demands if they didn’t want their notes to be released next. The client set included confessions of the most intimate and potentially dangerous nature, as you can imagine, and the client set was comprised of both pubic and private individuals. Eventually the notes of 33,000 clients were published online, leading several people to kill themselves. released a suitably horrifying podcast about the case earlier this year.

When a human therapist sees a client, there are strict guidelines around the maintenance of the client’s privacy and strong boundaries to protect it. With a human therapist, the basic rules are that you have near total privacy, as far as is achievable. A therapist will not acknowledge a client if they see each other ‘outside the room’. It is best practice that they anonymise any notes they are making, and these notes, physical or digital, have to be protected to the best of their ability. They have an obligation to destroy these notes after a certain period of time. They do not disclose client work with even friends or family, outside of general comments. They may discuss specific clients with their own supervisor (who is also bound by these same rules), but still will never give names or personal information. At any point, a client’s notes can be requested by the client themselves or a professional association (such as the BACP) in the event of a complaint about the therapist. There are circumstances in which a therapist is (technically) legally bound to breach a client’s privacy: if they disclose serious intent to self-harm or harm of another, or involvement in serious criminal activity. Whether or not they do so is another matter, but they are the rules.

None of this applies when you use an LLM, whether you use it for ‘therapy’ or otherwise. ChatGPT does not have end-to-end encryption, so all of your interactions with ChatGPT can be read by OpenAI employees. Your conversations will be used as training data unless you opt out. Open AI claims that all data deleted by its users is in fact removed from their systems within 30 days; whether or not you trust this claim from an enormous, unprofitable company that relies on massive amounts of data for training is up to you. But they are being clear that your expectation of privacy should be very low; in July 2025, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said this:

People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT. People use it – young people, especially, use it – as a therapist, a life coach; having these relationship problems and [asking] ‘what should I do?’… Right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there’s like legal privilege for it – there’s doctor-patient confidentiality, there’s legal confidentiality. And we haven’t figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT.

If you wonder why the CEO of such a massive company would say this, it is because the actual situation, at the time, was much worse. It’s not that OpenAI hasn’t ‘figured that out’ yet; it’s that between April and September 2025, due to an ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit brought by The New York Times, OpenAI was been legally bound to save all user content indefinitely, regardless of what its privacy policy said. This situation ended in September, so they are not required to save new data now, but they have had to retain all user data from the period in question. According to law firm Loeb & Loeb, from June 2025:

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The film I watched that evening was Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, starring Josh O’Connor, the first thing I’d seen him in since God’s Own Country (a better moors-based romance than Wuthering Heights in almost every way), though I had totally forgotten who he was, forgotten I’d seen him in anything. This is because Josh O’Connor is an Actor, with a capital A, one of those old fashioned ones who actually does transform into whatever character he’s playing—and he’s very good at accents, which has had the unfortunate effect of tricking me into believing he really is American, so now every time I hear him speak in his real voice it feels totally off-putting.

I’ve since also seen him in Wake Up Dead Man and The History of Sound, and have come to the realisation that I will watch almost any story told over the landscape of Josh O’Connor’s face. What both he and I need is a director who understands that the face is worth traversing, and really is not afraid of lingering on it. Enter: Kelly Reichardt, a woman who, I sense, has never submitted to being hurried along to wherever she’s going. Kelly Reichardt makes movies exactly like I drink the dregs of a cold coffee after my partner has tried to hustle me out of a cafe. Oh, you’re in a rush are you? Maybe I’ll just take my time.

The Mastermind tells the story of James, a seemingly talented but unemployed carpenter and art-school dropout; he is the son of a judge as well as a husband and a father. We meet the family at the fictional Framingham Museum of Art, at which James is planning a heist; he will pay two friends to steal four Arthur Dove paintings in hessian sacks sewn by his wife. This plot is drawn from real life—the real theft of two Gaugins, a Picasso and a Rembrandt from Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts in 1972—but the details are Reichardt’s own. From the very first moment, she lingers, she makes us look. We meet the family in the gallery, where James is laying his plot; the sheer normalcy of him and his family acts as its own cover. No one thinks to pay attention as he unlocks drawers and even steals a small artefact in his pocket one afternoon, and it is this lack of attention (in the characters, not the filmmaking) that will form an integral part of the movie’s critique.

Reichardt has drawn the early 70s in pitch-perfect style: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the mannerisms, the society that has not yet succumbed to the relentless allure of the digital, even the sepia-tinted framing and the earth tone palette. The soundtrack is a work of art in itself, seemingly one long jazz piece that seeps into and out of the film without notice and then suddenly overwhelms with its intensity. The familiarity of all of this, even to those of us who weren’t born until a couple of decades later, creates a false sense of security; the director lulls us with a very light, almost imperceptible remember when things were better? overlay, which will be pulled out from under us as we realise what the movie is really about.

O’Connor is brilliant, completely convincing as this bumbling wannabe who stumbles from error to error without apparent malice. The supporting cast has not a single weak link. The kids playing James’ two sons (Sterling and Jasper Thompson) are wonderful; Reichardt has drawn them with the charming strangeness of real kids, not turning them into whimsical caricatures but using them perfectly for both plot advancement and comic effect (the timing of a vomit in particular). The highly imperfect way James deals with the clash between his parental responsibilities and his ‘scheme’ highlight early on that perhaps we are not dealing with the genius suggested by the movie’s title. The fact that we are introduced to the film through James’ son’s entanglement in a logic puzzle is a stroke of thematic genius.

And yet. On that first viewing, there was something that just didn’t quite sit right with me. I enjoyed the film but left the cinema feeling frustrated, and sure that the film was twenty minutes too long. Perhaps, with my mind whirring, I had wanted some sort of easy resolution, and had grown annoyed by the meandering nature of the movie, which necessarily follows the unravelling of James’ plan. It had been great to look at, great to immerse myself in, but I hadn’t really ‘got’ it—which was in part due to me, and in part due to the fact that Kelly Reichardt strains against what we’re being trained to expect from films. Still, I thought of it more, over the subsequent few months, than I thought of any other recent film. So I sat down with my partner and I watched it again. And this time, it clicked.

Perhaps the difference in this second viewing was the fact that I had made peace with the pace of the narrative in advance. I was excited to show my partner the insubstantial scenes that had nevertheless stuck with me: the scene, for example, in which James is hiding his stolen paintings in a barn, where the camera sits itself behind the ladder he is using to reach a mezzanine level and does not move. A pig snuffles around in the background, and other than that, we have silence. James sets the ladder in place, removes two of the covered paintings from the bespoke container he has made (with great skill, it seems; a little nod towards the fact that he could, in fact, be successful), and climbs the ladder awkwardly with them; the shot cuts to one on the mezzanine, to show us James depositing the pictures. But the next time, Reichardt makes us stay with the ladder: there is not a single cut as James descends the ladder, takes the next two canvases out of their holder, takes them up (we watch his legs), lays them with the others, descends the ladder again, decides he must lift the cabinet up there too, struggles to position it on his arms in such a way that he can lift it upwards as he climbs, and ascends the ladder one more time. When we do move, it is to once again watch him wrestle with the paintings and the cabinet, and then to knock the ladder away just as he needs to get down. Watching this I get a buzz of excitement in my guts, a strange reaction to what is in essence a dull and incredibly slow scene, yet is shot through with audacity. It is as if Reichardt has sat through the over-edited, barely-framed movies of the last few years, has endured the TikTokification of narrative films, and has taken a stand. No, she says. Sit here and watch. These are the details. These matter. This is real life.

You can’t handwave over these parts of the story, because you cannot handwave over life; it is the attempt to do so that causes James’ downfall. There is a suggestion that he intended to sell the paintings either to or via his old art teacher; we never see him speak to the teacher, not to anyone else who might actually be in the game of buying four infamously stolen artworks. He has no backup plan to pay back the money he borrowed from his mother to pay off the crooks who actually stole the paintings. He has little control over these crooks, who even refuse to take into the gallery the postcards he’s brought for them of the paintings he wants them to steal. Very quickly things go downhill when one of them pulls out a gun, against James’ express wishes. This same friend later holds up a bank, and, it’s implied, immediately rats out James and his scheme to the cops. James’ lack of attention to these rather large details scuppered him from the start, and they make his ridiculous responses throughout the movie almost painful to watch.

When he goes on the run, he has almost no money and almost no stuff. This is the world before mobile phones, the world before computers: he cannot just Google Maps his way to a convenient destination, can’t even buy a bus ticket without interacting with people who may know he’s evading the police. Very quickly you see James as a vulnerable little animal in a world he doesn’t understand, owing to the facts of his relative privilege and the comfortable life he previously enjoyed, even if that life was addled with frustrations. He had a decent home, a loving family, a wife and kids who adored him despite him limitations and the stresses his disaffection placed on their existence. His existence may have been largely beige, but it wasn’t bereft of colour: the very fact of the public amenities, the collective mindset behind public art, that gave his family the gift of culture, which makes it so awful that he planned to take this from others.

What’s striking, on your second watch, is that actually, everyone in this movie is trying to help James, trying to gently shepherd him towards an easy way out of the situation he’s got himself into. The cops at his house don’t arrest him; they give him the opportunity to just give the paintings back. He so successfully wields his father’s name that you get the impression he’d avoid jail time even if he were arrested. The organised crime guys who steal the paintings from him, so effortlessly picking him up and finding his secret ‘hiding place’, don’t hurt him at all, and even give him advice on how to do better next time. The friend at whose place he takes refuge, before his wife makes him leave their house, offers him another place to go, for the long-term: his brother’s farm in Canada. For every mistake he makes, there is someone willing to bail him out in some way or another: his is the existence of the coddled straight white middle class American man. But this can also be seen as enabling him, and in this regard the role of women is particularly interesting; it is his mother that gives him the money to pull off the heist. His wife makes him the sacks in which he will conceal the paintings. A kindly older woman rents him a cheap room when he is on the run, and it is an elderly women who offers him (a bleak and awful) reprieve at the end.

The slowness of the movie is key to forcing the audience to understand what it is really about, and what it is really about has two levels: on the one hand, it is a story of a slow coming-undone, which for me works as a critique of a particularly American type of entrepreneurism. So often we read stories of billionaires who’ve made their money through the ‘move fast and break things’ motto; it’s okay if you don’t really know how things will work out, this ethos says, as long as you just keep going. But this only justifies itself retrospectively, and only if it succeeds against the odds. Here, James has all the entrepreneurial spirit, and none of the success. Yet he clings so desperately to his disproven idea of individual success that when offered a true solution—an invitation to Fred’s brother’s farm, populated by what Fred describes as ‘draft dodgers, radical feminists, dope fiends…. nice people’—he cannot even consider it as an option. It is only a case of getting a bus over the border, and showing up to muck in; ‘Me in a commune?’, he asks. ‘It doesn’t sound like my kind of scene.’ This is his last chance, and he rejects it. For the rest of the movie we see him flailing, trying so desperately to get himself out of the hole he has dug that erodes his relationship with his family, his ability to be a friend, and even his morality; the choice he makes in the end of the film is genuinely awful to watch. Both he, and society, are the ultimate victims of his hubris.

The second, and I think more important meaning, comes through only when you engage in the periphery of this film. In giving us the long, measured scenes of detailed work—James in the hotel room trying to forge a passport being a perfect example—she gives us a point to focus on while she waves great flags on the edges of the frame: news reports and headlines about the Vietnam war, about Cambodia, about political corruption. The world is happening while James isn’t looking, while he is focused instead on his own ludicrous self-serving plan, which cannot even begin to meet the challenges of the world around him nor deliver his family from it. His kids, you realise, will have to grow up in the world that James is ignoring. This is very much a film about the death of the 60s, about the ways the hippie movement both failed and formed the foundations for the anti-war movement of the 70s. It is about how the concept of checking out of mainstream capitalist society can only ever yield results if you check into something better instead, something communal and different, in which you care for each other in the ways mainstream society won’t. If, instead, you isolate yourselves with no purpose—as Fred and Maud have done—all you can be is cold to the world, and embittered, and failures: you did not change the world in the end, you barely even tried. In many ways it asks: so you’ve tuned in and dropped out. Now what?

The ending, which comes out of the blue and yet is essential for Reichdart’s message, drives this meaning home. If you constantly turn away from the communal towards the individual, the structures of power will get you just like it gets everyone else. You can try to game the system but the system will sweep you up anyway. It does not matter how much privilege you have: if you try to ignore the political, it will bite you in the end. Check back into life, and try and build something better: really, you have no other choice.

For the uninitiated, the ‘Manosphere’ is the part of the online world that markets itself to primarily young men: podcasts, forums, livestreams and Telegram channels whose presenters/influencers/promoters generally skew right wing, oppose feminism, celebrate misogyny, encourage the poor treatment and humiliation of women as well as the siring of many children, fetishise cars and other ostentatious class markers, worship money and support the achievement of wealth at any cost. Many also espouse homophobia, transphobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-semitism and outright racism, regardless of their own ethnic and/or immigrant backgrounds. They lean into edgelordism, which allows them to say anything no matter how offensive or socially damaging, under the pretence that they are just ‘trolling’, even when this overlaps with or leads into real political action. A lot of this can be traced back to an imageboard called 4chan, and specifically its /b and /pol channels, which fomented a particularly bleak, nihilistic form of online behaviour which celebrated the posting of increasingly provocative and offensive talking points, and so led easily and naturally into the already established far-right. Christ, it’s been a long two decades.

To understand the Manosphere, you have to understand what has sprung from ‘incel’ culture, and the way that much of the Manosphere has emerged as a response to the mainstreaming of feminism (despite the fact that capitalism’s embrace of feminism has largely decoupled it from any real political power, and turned it instead into a highly marketable version of itself that is either used to curtail genuine criticism of powerful women or used to validate privileged women’s choices, no matter if they are harmful to themselves, the overall culture or other, more marginalised and vulnerable women. But that’s another conversation).

Much has been written about the ‘involuntary celibate’ community in the last decade, not least in the wake of several mass killings committed by those who identify as such. If you somehow aren’t au fait with this terminology, YouTube essayist Contrapoints made a very good video seven years ago laying it all out. In doing so, she identified the key beliefs of incels, which are the foundational beliefs of all in the Manosphere, including those who would not identify as incels (we’ll discuss these below). Adopting these beliefs is known as ‘taking the red pill’, which is generally considered to be a reference to The Matrix (1999), when the hero Neo, existing in a simulated reality, is offered a choice: take the red pill, and learn the agonising truth, and you might, through fighting, begin to get free. Take the blue pill, to stay in your comforting delusion, and forget ever learning that you aren’t free.

In fact, The Matrix red pill scene is a reference to an earlier movie, 1990’s Total Recall, which itself is an adaptation (and extension) of a brilliant 1966 Philip K. Dick short story called We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. In the movie, Mars-obsessed, disaffected construction worker Douglas Quaid goes to an agency, Rekall, to have fake memories implanted that will convince him he was a secret agent on that planet; the process of implantation, however, seems to uncover memories of him really being a secret agent on Mars, memories that were previously erased for political reasons. Thus begins an incredibly fun and highly philosophical sci fi romp wherein Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Quaid tries to discover who he really is and where reality actually exists. It’s a great film, and its effects still look amazing. At one point, Quaid is cornered in a hotel room by a Rekall employee who tells him that he is trapped in a ‘free-form delusion’, trapped in an ‘paranoid episode triggered by acute neurochemical trauma’. He is told to take a red pill if he wishes to escape this fantasy and return to the ‘reality’ he previously knew, or otherwise remain in the dreamworld while he is lobotomised in the other realm. Quaid chooses not to take the pill, killing the Rekall employee instead, and going on to spend the rest of the movie as the Mars-dwelling, ultra-masculine action hero spy he wants to believe himself to be, with powerful forces wanting him dead, two women fighting for his love and an entire planet dependent on him—rather than the totally normal, relatively powerless manual labourer he was at the start of the movie.

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The desire to try and make sense of a scattershot brain with overlapping obsessions is one I can relate to, and the absolute failure of this project in the rest of the ledger—almost immediately, in fact—is one I also know very well; by its fourth page, Gray has given in his creative compulsions, drawing an (excellent) pen portrait of a Mr Gibbons with whom he was playing chess. His dedication to write comes undone completely in the following pages, which instead are given over to sketches and cityscapes, research photographs and the early designs of what would become his ‘best big oil painting’,2 Cowcaddens Streetscape in the Fifties. The last pages of the ledger are exclusively illustrated by large sketches of a cat. Somewhere between the absurd Waitrose elasticity of the word ‘essential’ and the layers of manic text and art you begin to understand where the world of Unthank was pulled from, how Glasgow itself forms the foundation on which all this man’s works were created, and how Gray’s singular literary world was built.

Here, in Glasgow’s Whisky Bond, the desk is the centre of a recreation of Alasdair’s working space, part of The Alasdair Gray Archive, painstakingly established and run by Gray’s friend, the gallerist Sorcha Dallas, who represented his visual art from 2007 and, since his death in 2019, has since been both curator/custodian of the archive and a tireless advocate of Gray’s legacy (along with a small but passionate team). In January of this year, a second archive was officially established, one focused on Agnes Owens, whom Gray once called ‘the most unfairly neglected of all living Scottish authors’; coming to literary life much later than Gray, Owens nevertheless staked a serious claim for a place in the Scottish canon, and now, twelve years after her death, is starting to be properly appreciated. Polygon’s reissue of her back catalogue, as part of her centenary celebrations, will no doubt bring new readers to her work, and I was thrilled to be asked to write an introduction to my favourite of her novels, For the Love of Willie, which will be released with the first tranche of reissues in May.

I am installed at the Whisky Bond as part of a two-handed residency, supported by The National Lottery through Creative Scotland, shared with the novelist Kirstin Innes, which will see us both in part-time residence at the archives for a total of eight months. The goal of our two residencies is a creative response to both archives; we are each working on a book, and these books will be shaped around and inspired by what we find here. This process is informed by Gray, who spent his creative life responding to, building on and inspiring the works of other artists. It is also informed by the connective tissue of the Scottish writing scene and its ability to draw out great writers; it was at a creative writing group led by poet Liz Lochhead that Owens got her real start. Despite originally having signed up mostly to get a night away from her kids, her ‘deadpan gothic’ style, as Ali Smith called it, was noticed by visiting writers Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, who encouraged her to continue and championed her work thereafter. It is exceedingly rare to be given so much time to embed yourself in the creative practice of other writers with a view to creating a new work yourself, and even more rare to be financially supported to do so. While the sheer amount of material here is overwhelming, having to find a way through it creates a sort of energetic creative friction; on my very first day I had an idea that brings together everything I had hoped to write about. At the end of each of my days in the archive, I go home starving; always a sign that my brain is working in overdrive.

Though the residency is in its early stage, there are unexpected effects already: seeing Glasgow reflected in the works of these two artists is refocusing it in my mind, inspiring me to look with fresh eyes at the place I’ve called home since 2019. Edinburgh is more famous for its views at every turn, every street corner a picture postcard, but in the ledger’s sketches Glasgow’s cityscapes become both newly-colonised sci fi planets and Escher-esque lithographs. In both archives, the impassive wit of the city and its surroundings is often on display; on the second page of his ledger, writing to himself more than anyone else, Gray notes his goals for the book he’d been writing since age 18, the novel that would become Lanark:

My book was to be an epic, the Aenaid (damn the spelling) of the new democratic socialist Britain, with an excursion into the underworld, the evocation of a complete social order, and a demonstration of the virtue which might save us. After three or four years I lowered my aims.3

The first date of this overlaid diary is 25 August 1963, making Gray twenty-eight when he began to annotate his creative practice in this manner; by his own reckoning he’d been working on Lanark for a decade, but it would be another eighteen years before it would be published. To focus one’s literary attentions on a single project for so long at such an age—and to begin to create a historical record of its creation during the process—belies an unshakeable confidence that I envy. Just three months prior, Gray and his pregnant wife Inge had been living on Gray’s occasional art sales and the £5 per week he got from the Labour Exchange, the precursor to the Jobcentre; despite such tight circumstances being further stretched by an incoming baby, Gray had resolved not to be forced back into teaching, which he had studied after working as a part-time art teacher for several years having graduated from Glasgow School of Art, writing, ‘[I] knew that only what I enjoyed doing was worth living for, and I must reject any work which thwarted my talents.’4 This is a noble sentiment that does not meet the modern moment well; I think now of the friends I have—award-winning, generational talents—who have similarly committed themselves to their artistic pursuits and so exist in a constant state of financial precarity and stress, or who are unable to commit themselves in such a manner so work 9-5 jobs in unrelated industries while producing internationally-lauded, bestselling books in what might naively be called ‘their spare time’. The phrase ‘cost of living’ does not begin to describe the challenges that have arisen for the jobbing artist in the sixty-two years since Gray wrote this in his ledger.

It is also not a sentiment that Owens could have shared, at such an age. She was married at twenty-two and had the first of her seven children within a couple of years. Housing was so scarce in Glasgow in that post-war period that, with a very young baby, and just over a tenner in their pockets, she and her husband travelled north, to Ullapool, to try and find a place to live—to no avail. For a year they stayed in tents and derelict buildings, and it was in these conditions that Owens had her second child. Eventually they returned south to the safety of a council house, and had two more children, working in factories and as a typist to support the family. Following decades of alcoholism her husband died at 43; she remarried, had three more children, and worked part-time as a cleaner. What room is there amongst this for a singular dedication to writing?

Owens did not publish a novel until 58, a much-commented-upon fact—but Gray also did not publish his first novel until the age of 46. Gray also had a child: a son, born the year he started his diary. He also married twice, and his was also a life of financial precarity, and sometimes ludicrous austerity. His habit of salvaging things from the street did not end at the desk he would use to write all of his novels, plays and poetry; he would often find canvases in the rubbish and take them home to paint on top of, and even his most famous works hide the work of other artists underneath. His creative life was supported first by Inge—’She accepted my unemployment with equanimity and worked well to make the little we had go far’5—and then by his beloved second wife Morag, in whose home he lived and worked for the last decades of his life. He was famous for following his socialist values beyond the point at which others may have abandoned them, including paying any assistants the same rate at which he was being paid, often leaving next to nothing leftover to carry him to the next project.

The extent to which we can make the choice to live in austerity, to commit ourselves to artistic practice regardless of poverty, is of course shaped by class, education, gender, race; this is inarguable. Yet I think Owens would despise any attempt to characterise her as a ‘poor woman’, someone whose life choices were imposed upon her. Even in her most radical and shocking novel, For the Love of Willie, her teenage protagonist, surely a victim of class and gender if ever there was one, is shown as an agent of her own fate, and then as someone capable of both great violence and great care. There is no perfect morality in Owens’ work, no clear right and wrong, so we must resist applying such rigid readings to her own life too. In the archive, already, I have found a stoic writer with a bleak and brilliant humour, someone unafraid of showing humanity in both its worst and best moments. She does not sanitise, does not tidy away, does not sand off any sharp edges. As she told interviewer Jane Gray eight years before her death, Owens explained her literary method:

I would say I want to convey people that are condemned in a better light than what people would think, you know, or maybe to make people think, well, these people are human. Something like that.6

If you’ve ever written an essay that ends up being even moderately well read on any element of popular culture, you’ll be aware that once the early waves of backlash (the personal attacks, the anger that you are introducing a critical element into something people are just trying to enjoy) die down, there’s the second, disaffected response: the comments that ‘it’s not that deep’, that you should find something bigger to worry about (as if having thoughts about film makes you politically inactive), the smug suggestion that if you ‘fall’ for the ‘bait’ of engaging with a piece of mass media you have somehow lost the intellectual game. This latter response seems to suggest that by checking out of popular culture you can mute its influence. This is akin to suggesting that if you ignore a tsunami it won’t take out your town.

All art is a product of the time, politics and place of its creation. Because of this, in retrospect, it tells us something about its particular era, which is why so often we group pieces of art together under thematic umbrellas after the fact; few people trotted around going “I’m doing renaissance art!” in 15th century Italy. But it’s wrong to think that art of our time cannot tell us something about the forces that shape our society now; in fact, by applying a critical lens to its (covert and overt) messages, the circumstances of its funding and production, and the way it is marketed to the public, you can unearth a better understanding of how it works in the grand scheme of power, and what is the real intent of its creation. The criticism here is not of people who enjoyed that art; it is an attempt to find out what greater power it supports and how it functions in our society as it stands.

Some will argue that a movie is just a movie, and that to critique it as a site of cultural influence is just ridiculous. When people say such things I feel like Rowdy Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s They Live, when he’s engaging in the most realistic and therefore pathetically hilarious street fight of all time. Just put the glasses on, goddammit!

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Something shifted a few weeks ago, and I went from despising all the teaser content from the new Wuthering Heights movie to being really quite convinced that I was going to like it. I like high camp. I like drama. The visuals looked compelling and interesting. I am totally up for adaptations that partially disregard their source material to achieve a different meaning; nothing is beyond revisiting. I am a Kubrick fan and he’s the ultimate source-material disrespecter. And yet I still felt kind of annoyed by the whole thing. I tried not caring but it wasn’t possible; having written a novel heavily indebted to Jane Eyre, and growing up just an hour away from where the Brontës grew up, I have strong feelings about these women, their books, and this land: I have written about the latter here.

I didn’t expect to come out of the movie genuinely livid. And yet. It is a bad movie, of course; less a film and more a music video stretched out to 136 minutes. For all I enjoyed seeing the Yorkshire Moors and the mad sets, it's difficult not to come out of it feeling kind of insulted, as if everyone involved with it thinks you specifically are a dunce. The issues are both macro and micro. Elordi can't do the accent (how hard is it to understand that we say tek and mek instead of take and make?). Margot Robbie is fifteen years too old to be playing Catherine Earnshaw. Martin Clunes and Hong Chai are doing heavy lifting in poorly written roles. All complexity is stripped from the characters. For some reason they have made Haworth look like Mordor. Tonally it is completely erratic. The lampshading of the fact that life at the Linton household is a doll’s house existence only serves to emphasise how that also applies to the film: these characters are empty dolls, moved around as a game. Mainstream cinema is currently replete with the worst kind of habits; this is the third major release in just over a month to have a main character poignantly explaining the plot of another ‘doomed love’ story to another character (Hamnet and The History of Sound both had Orpheus and Eurydice (recited by the same actor!!) and this has Isabella referencing Romeo and Juliet). The fact that scripts are starting to rely on this sort of abject signposting says a lot about Hollywood and none of it is good.

They mention Romeo and Juliet, of course, to ram home the point that Fennell has sort of cast these characters as Romeo and Juliet in Yorkshire; star-crossed lovers doomed not by their own behaviour or structural influences but through a simple misunderstanding (or, as we shall discuss later, the actions of staff). We get it. But why? Why adapt one story to turn it into another completely different story, of which many (better) versions already exist? Why is the resounding question you're left with after seeing this movie. Why am I supposed to give a fuck what an agonisingly posh woman from London thought Wuthering Heights was about when she was a teenager? Why you would remove one of the central characters altogether, Hindley, which completely changes the foundations of the relationship of the protagonists? Why replace timeless tortured longing and internal conflicts with things that might have shocked thirty years ago but now feel overdone to the point of being completely trite, when you can’t even commit to that enough to show us a naked body? Surely no one in the year 2026 thinks putting BDSM-lite on screen is shocking, given that capitalist society has absorbed it seamlessly into its usual modes (want sexual perversion? Fine, as long as you pay for it!). From the very first scene anything sexual is played as a juvenile joke (which results in tittering from the audience), so asking us to be actually turned on by it later just doesn’t work. But this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of directorial decisions that seem to have no congruity beyond wanting to alter the source material beyond recognition, to make what one prominent critic has called a ‘smooth-brained Wuthering Heights’ as a compliment.

Rather than turning the story towards a different message, Fennell’s choices here seem intended to remove any meaning whatsoever. Characters from the book are removed, amalgamated, made the complete opposite. Earnshaw, the Wuthering Heights patriarch, brings Heathcliff home not as an act of (real or posturing) charity but out of bullishness. Isabella is not an abused wife (and possibly sister) but a willing submissive, a plot strand which is handled as unconvincingly as it is in Babygirl, with a cowardly girl-boss angle to placate the audience at which this film is aimed. Heathcliff and Cathy are no longer complex, culpable, fallible people; they are empty-headed figures with the simplest of intentions and reactions, which has the bizarre effect of making these enduring characters of literature less edgy, less interesting and less controversially attractive. Heathcliff is not brutal or terrifying, despite the characters telling us so repeatedly. He never actually degrades anyone or behaves abominably; he even asks for consent to use Isabella to revenge himself against Catherine, which it turns out she is into. The worst thing he does is violent dirty talk in one of his consensual trysts with Cathy. Because he is so denuded as a character, the taboo of Cathy’s desire for him is totally de-fanged. He is not a man who abuses and perhaps rapes the innocent Isabella, having murdered her dog as a ‘gift’ on their wedding day; instead he is a bitchy consensual Dom with a wandering accent. Catherine is not a genuinely torn girl who understands the workings of the world and is still corrupted by them; she is innately mean and stupid, obsessed not with a monster but with a sort of sad goth ruffian. I can’t say I haven’t found myself in the same position, of course, but also—who cares? In desperately trying to make all of this relatable she has made it really, really dull.

I want to say that it looks great, in a maximalist way. One thing you can say is that the set design and costuming are at least interesting, and VistaVision captures the whole thing beautifully; you will never find me slagging off a director for committing to film in a world of digital. But actually, the costuming and the sets end up looking cheap and childish, and all the brooding shots of the moors are to no end. The film is intentionally and so unforgivably brainless. Everything that is a suggestion of anything deeper or darker in this story is erased, to be replaced by a nothingness; any social criticism is clipped away. It is all vibes, no substance. It’s the cinematic equivalent of one of those over-decorated cakes on Instagram that looks delicious until you realise it’s 90% American buttercream.

But there is more than that, and here we come to what made me so angry: the issue is not that Fennell has made a film that diverges from the book. It is that she has removed context that is so present in the book (Hindley, Heathcliff’s relationship with Earnshaw, etc) which scaffolds a critical analysis of class. She makes Catherine Earnshaw, and Mr Earnshaw, borderline aristocratic, in breeding and accent if not in material wealth, presumably so that Catherine can act as a self-insert for Fennell. And yet everything that follows from this is bad. Catherine is not corrupted by the influence of money, she is corrupted by poverty; someone temporarily removed from her rightful position amongst the elite. She is awful from the get-go, truly one of the most hateable child characters ever committed to film, and when she is amongst the rich, she is bettered, not just positionally but morally. When they’re young she immediately claims Heathcliff as her ‘pet’, and treats him petulantly and cruelly throughout her adulthood as well, which might work better if Catherine was convincingly eighteen, but she isn’t; at one point I realised you could describe this film as world’s most annoying middle-aged woman discovers kink. But actually it’s worse: Catherine is not a character seduced by the upper classes, she is coded as upper-class from the beginning, and has to marry Linton because of failing family fortunes, making that choice beyond criticism. She is irritating and spoiled, yet Heathcliff is in love with her, despite the fact that she treats him atrociously from the moment they meet. It is Nelly (not a servant in this version but a companion) who contrives a situation where Heathcliff might hear Cathy disparage him, and, later, it is Nelly who ignores Catherine’s reporting of a miscarriage and so brings about her death from septicaemia. So what does this mean? Emerald Fennell has taken this book and made a film which, if it can be said to be about anything, is about how the highborn should treat the poor like shit because they will love them anyway, and constantly sacrifice themselves for their betters, which is good and correct. It is about how the non-affluent classes are jealous and devious, inherently wired to manipulate and attack the elite, to bring down the innocent, well-meaning upper classes—which, I’m reliably informed, is also the overall message of Saltburn as well. As Marx said in The German Ideology, ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’. Here is a film that purports to be a brainless romance but, if you squint for a second, is actually a seductive treatise to argue for the class system as it operates in our filthy, unequal society. It is not a perverse system that keeps people poor; it is that if you end up poor it is your own fault (Earnshaw), and that the poor are innately deviant (the entire crowd laughing at the hanged man’s erection then fucking each other in base revelry), and that if you spend too much time with them, they will destroy you, and make you dirty, and doomed.

It is one thing to take a beloved, multilayered book and make a movie that sets it in a new direction. It is quite another to make an adaptation that seems determined to reverse the meaning of the entire story. This film takes a thoughtful, political, radical work of art by a woman and makes it shallow and individualist, with a message that seems to justify the obscene system we live in. It is an encouragement to self obsession and thin thinking. When Allison Willmore praises Fennell for ‘throw[ing] off the burden of trying to say something significant’, she really does seem to suggest that women are exhausted by trying to be intelligent agents in the world. What a burden, to be a thinking person! So difficult for my tiny little brain! And worse: if you dare to criticise these films, you are called a misogynist, as if it is inherently a female concern to make shallow films for a shallow audience. Accept this slop, otherwise you hate women. I will not have it. We are living through a time of extreme resource extraction, extreme wealth consolidation, extreme inequality; it feels not just oblivious but actively malign for the people—yes, in this case a woman—at the most privileged end of society to strip all the critique away from inherently socially-critical work, and spend $40 million marketing the new version as something radical precisely because of its brainlessness. It is becoming harder not to believe that the hollowing out of female political or indeed feminist work is a deliberate capitalist psy-op to further disenfranchise women. They pump stupid work out for us so we become stupid, and they tell us that it’s hard to have a mind, so we really should be allowed to give it up. Don't think, they say, when you could just sit on your phone sharing blank, pseudo-sexualised movie memes, repeating vibes, yearning, obsessed over and over again until you've achieved non-medical self-lobotomy. This is what is being marketed to women. We deserve so much more than this.

Actually, no. Emerald Fennell's “Wuthering Heights”, is, perhaps, exactly what we deserve. An all-vibes, no-substance culture gets precisely that. Nothing has to follow through on the promises it makes because no one thinks deeply enough to notice. No need to actually be transgressive as long as there are enough transgressive-looking two second clips for social media. We all took the bait, me included. We all suckle at the teat of this idiocy.

The good thing to come out of this adaptation and its notoriety is, of course, that everyone is re-reading the novel. Both the actual work and the conversation around it have been more (sociologically) interesting than all the film chatter. What’s surprised me in the book-revival discourse is the obsession around getting definitive answers to two things: whether or not Heathcliff was a person of colour, and whether or not the book is a ‘love story’. I think the former question is partially due to us imposing a modern (US-centric) understanding of race and class on the past; we tend to see these things less as shifting social concepts that are highly context-dependent and more as immovable parts of our identity, which is why, for instance, people are so confident in calling multi-millionaires ‘working class’, centring their background rather than their current material circumstances, and why we find it so difficult to understand that people considered POC in some (white-majority) countries might be considered ‘white’ in others, and vice versa. The insistence on Heathcliff as having one certain racial identity is, I think, born of an inability to engage with how the concept of ‘whiteness’ has changed over the last few hundred years, and how literature from that period might be playing with this complexity (and the paranoia it engendered). On the question of whether or not this is a ‘love story’, I suspect this is mostly a misunderstanding of the gothic as a subcategory of Romanticism (a particular literary genre that does not equate to ‘love story’), as well as an inability to imagine novels as multifaceted, thanks to a culture that increasingly reduces literature to single, simple marketing terms and their most social-media-friendly tropes.

The overall issue, though, seems to be a refusal of this book’s ambiguity, which really is a refusal of what the gothic genre is: that is, ambiguous. You are not meant to know the provenance of Heathcliff, because you are not meant to know where you, the reader, or the characters in the book should place him on a class basis, relative to other characters and the social norms of the time. The fact that he is from the streets of Liverpool—at the time a thriving hub for the slave trade, but also a place full of Irish immigrants—is enough for the characters to fear that he has some mixed heritage, and it is that fear that comes across in their descriptions of him, which make reference to multiple distinct racial groups (truly a grab-bag of Orientalism, though, tellingly, the narrative voice never describes Heathcliff in these terms). His arrival amongst the Earnshaws also occurs in the midst of the enclosures, during which there was a new establishment of class centred around who owned land and who had a right to be there, imposed through extreme violence and maintained through both physical boundaries (which did not previously exist) and an aggressive othering; it is not an accident that Heathcliff is referred to as both ‘gypsy’ and ‘lascar’, terms not referring to distinct ethnic communities but to groups defined by crossing borders. His actual racial heritage is much less important than the fact that he is audaciously transgressing these new boundaries, and cannot be subdued by the violence with which these borders are usually policed.

Narratively speaking, he is a blank slate onto which other characters project their own societal anxieties and bigotries. To be clear, I don’t think it is wrong to choose to interpret Heathcliff as POC (and so casting a POC actor as this character totally makes sense, though so does casting a white actor); what would have been interesting in a contemporary adaptation, and would have made reference to the slippery nature of whiteness, would have been to have a white actor that is still racialised constantly by the other white characters. But I think it is probably idiotic to expect this of an Emerald Fennell film, especially one that is largely marketing itself on the ‘unhinged romance’ angle.

I think it is wrong to ignore the book’s deliberate ambiguity to state definitely what this character is meant to be, because he is not meant to be readable by this metric. Similarly: you are not supposed to definitively know whether Heathcliff is actually Earnshaw’s illegitimate son, or indeed whether Linton, a blonde-haired, ‘pale, delicate, effeminate boy’ is really Heathcliff’s child or a result of incest between his mother Isabella and her brother Edgar, or whether Cathy’s ghost is really knocking at Lockwood’s window, or whether Heathcliff kills himself or is ‘killed’ by Cathy’s ghost at the end. You are meant to sit with these questions and, in sitting with them, consider what they force us to ask about the world as we know it. The gothic genre is all about refusing easy classification, about unreliable narrators and different perspectives, and about the line between the supernatural and the psychological. It is a genre that forces you to question, not a genre that gives simple answers.

But more than anything, the insistence on getting answers to these two questions points, I think, to a decline in critical thinking, specifically around literature. It seems to be a double-headed problem: we can’t read someone else’s thesis and compare it to source material to make up our own minds, so we read somewhere that Heathcliff is definitely a POC, and we don’t subject it to further scrutiny against what’s actually in the book, what we know about the concept of whiteness as a social construct and the historial period in which the book is set (though many commentators are even getting that wrong, certain it's a book about the Victorians, in fact, set in the Georgian era). We demand to know whether a novel sits in one category or another because we no longer know how to understand books without being given a framework of tropes or being blankly told what they’re about in advance—even when the books in question are generally considered foundational texts of a specific genre—so we engage in pointless debate about whether or not they are definitely supposed to mean one thing or another, whether they fit neatly into one classification. Intentional literary ambiguity, rather than being seen as something that is deployed by authors so that the reader may have to ask themselves questions, or to make space for a multiplicity of meanings to be taken from the text, are seen as a failure to provide the clarity we now demand. How can I position myself in relation to this book if the book won’t tell me what it is? For this I do blame, in part, social media-focused marketing, which so often sells books based on tropes alone that now books are being written to specifically be marketed in this way, and readers as a result are losing the ability to comprehend work outside of this. Over-simplification is a snake that eat its own tail.

For what it’s worth: I think Wuthering Heights can mean a lot of different things. To me, it is inextricably a book about how class anxieties will destroy your ability to be happy and to truly love. It is about how the racist British class system acts like a virus. It is a book about who has power over whom, how such power is taken, and what the desperation to be ‘above’ someone else does to you, both socially and individually. The very first line is about the narrator’s class position in relation to Heathcliff: ‘I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.’ Is Heathcliff the sole neighbour he will be ‘troubled’ by because he truly is the only person there, or because he is the only person around who is in a more powerful position than Lockwood, a wealthy southerner? The book’s ambiguity is immediate, but clearly it is of prime importance that we understand, in this first line, that Heathcliff now holds power, over both this stranger and those around him, as we will soon learn the travails he has been through to gain and then lose it, and what it took from him to get it back.

So much of the discussion around Wuthering Heights centres on Heathcliff’s brutality later in the book, but few people seem to mention that he is a essentially good child (as much as can be said in a book full of complex characters), made bad by his treatment at the hands of the Earnshaw children and what he learns from this. But he is not self-sacrificing; he is stoic. According to Nelly he is a ‘sullen, patient child’ who will ‘stand Hindley’s blows without winking’, and take Nelly’s own pinches ‘as if he had hurt himself by accident and nobody was to blame.’ He becomes Earnshaw’s favourite, as he is less mean than Hindley and less wayward than Catherine; even Nelly comes to love him for his undemanding and uncomplaining nature. But he is also not grateful, in the way that it would be expected of him, and he is not cowed by Hindley; when treated poorly by him he will simply report it to Earnshaw, knowing he has full rights within Earnshaw’s protection, because he has accepted him as his own family. He is a non-vindictive child, turned into a vengeful adult by his treatment at the hands of his peers, and by what this teaches him about how you thrive within this system.

Whether or not Heathcliff is intended to be Earnshaw’s illegitimate son is sort of besides the point, for me at least; 19th century readers, I believe, would have assumed that was the case, heightening the tension of their relationship for the audience (Romantic era authors loved to write about incest—see Matthew Lewis’s still shocking The Monk). But the very act of Earnshaw bringing Heathcliff into their home, regardless of the child’s provenance, smashes the comfortable class assumptions that the isolated Earnshaw family enjoy. While smuggling the child home under his coat, Earnshaw smashes a fiddle, bought for Hindley, and loses a whip, bought for Cathy; poignant symbols of the class position (that of ‘high’ culture and power) that the children are about to lose. Polite society will look down on the family for treating this vagrant child like their own. But more importantly, by bringing the child to Wuthering Heights Mr Earnshaw introduces the question, to Hindley, of where the family sits in the world, and how they relate to other people outside of the home. With this scruffy incomer, who Earnshaw insists will be raised with his own children (and who is named after a son that died in infancy), what had seemed the ‘natural’ order of the house to the youngsters—that is, with Nelly and Joseph at the bottom, and the Earnshaws at the top—is immediately called into question, and therefore problematised. Children do not consider such things—hence Heathcliff and Cathy’s easy relationship—but Hindley, fourteen years old, is on the cusp of his transition into adulthood, and is led to ask: if this street child can be brought in and settled amongst us, is this all so natural after all? Hindley becomes terrified that, in fact, on the grand scheme of things, in the world outside the family home, they are the same as Heathcliff. On recognising that his position at the top of even his own household is, in fact, contingent on a great many things, and that this does not translate to the same position in the wider world, Hindley clings to his upper hand by casting Heathcliff downwards, assuming the cruel and brutal nature of the very class system he is suddenly aware of. Even Nelly, the servant, finds on his arrival that she hates this child, because he is closer to her in terms of class, and yet is elevated immediately above her.

Cathy, six or seven years old, is too young to really notice the change. But she is twelve when she and Heathcliff go to Thrushcross Grange for the first time, and this is her initiation into the question of class. Here is a manor steeped in ‘high’ culture and high society, dripping in comfort, in stark contrast to the isolated, battered farmhouse she has come from. Rather than being terrified about the loss of her position, like Hindley, she is seduced by the possibility of betterment. The life inside the Grange is one that she immediately wants, both for the social elevation and its material improvement on her life inside cold, uncomfortable Wuthering Heights. She and Heathcliff watch this world from the outside initially, but she believes that both of them will be allowed to enter. She is very quickly disabused of this notion when Heathcliff is sent back to their home while she remains at Thrushcross Grange to recover from her injury; she understands, even in this moment, that a healthy young woman is seen as valuable for reasons that a healthy young man cannot be.

Even as she is seduced by the Linton family and their status, Cathy clings to a naive hope that she can use her advantage to bring Heathcliff up with her; one of the reasons she gives Nelly for wanting to marry Edgar Linton, is that she can use his money to improve Heathcliff’s position too. Nelly, being more cognisant of the contradictions of the class system, tells her this will never work; this certainty about the fate of Heathcliff terrifies Cathy, because she worries that it applies to her as well. When Cathy says the now infamous line ‘whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same’, I don’t think she is only talking romantically, but also of social rank: they are cut from the same cloth, no matter how much Hindley has tried to cast Heathcliff downwards to raise himself up. This paranoia remains throughout the rest of Cathy’s life. When Heathcliff returns from his absence, Cathy wants to welcome him as a guest in her new comfortable home, but Linton wants to set him up in the kitchen with the servants; Cathy says to Nelly:

“Set two tables here, Ellen; one for your master and Miss Isabella, being gentry; the other for Heathcliff and myself, being of the lower orders.”

Heathcliff, Cathy and Hindley all learn, from the introduction of Heathcliff into their home, that what you own, and how you can control others, is key to your position: if you wish to not be downtrodden and beaten, you must become the owner, the controller, whether that is through brutality or marriage. As the character most downtrodden, it is Heathcliff that is forced to put these lessons into practice to save himself. We never learn how he makes his money in America, but we know that he returns brutal and vengeful, determined to be the lord and master of everything at Wuthering Heights; I think it’s worth noting that America is also where, in the century after this book was published, racialised groups like Irish and Italian immigrants were integrated into ‘whiteness’, in the face of enormous discrimination, through collaborating with a violent racialised system (whilst simultaneously being victims of it), assuming power over another oppressed group, and adopting the most brutal techniques of policing, guarding and eventually owning property, becoming landlords themselves. They took on the violence extolled by the property-owning classes, which is exactly the process that Heathcliff goes through in his time away. In this way, Heathcliff also adopts and is begrudgingly accepted into ‘whiteness’; by understanding and deploying its most violent processes, with increasing and shocking cruelty. He understands that his relative acceptance into this new class stratum is completely contingent and always under attack, so where others can afford to relax into something kinder, he cannot. This need to always be barbaric destroys his soul, his relationships, his very humanity. He is, necessarily, damned by it.

But it is not just Heathcliff: all of them are trapped in this suffocating knowledge of the class system, all of them altered by it. Hindley, despite his hatred of Heathcliff, chooses to remains and die at Wuthering Heights even with his enemy, even in a submissive role, because he knows, now, that outside its walls he is less than nothing; at least inside his old home he is a fallen master. Heathcliff and Catherine eventually use the language of ‘winning’, owning and controlling each other precisely because of their class obsessions, and through the prism of desire this is turned into something much more sadomasochistic. You can’t understand their relationship without understanding how class plays into it, how, by adulthood, it has warped and poisoned something that started out pure (though not uncomplicated, given that they were if not genetic relatives then adoptive ones).

The need to be superior, to have another person below you, destroys all the characters in this book. Its refusal to clarify questions of heritage and provenance are key to its real meaning, and by imposing essentialism where there is none, you miss the point completely. You are being invited to question everything made ambiguous here, and in questioning, to think more critically, more deeply about how these things translate to you, now, and the system you inhabit: what is it that makes some people powerful, and other people powerless? And what does this system do to all of us? That is what makes the book timeless.

The third act, in which the children of the Hareton-Catherine generation put aside their class differences—indeed, that they are willing to sacrifice for one another to ensure that they are equals—is the redemption arc of Wuthering Heights. The fact that most film adaptations remove the last half of the book is, perhaps, why everyone thinks this is a story of doomed (and perhaps incestuous) romance rather than something more much radical, much more political. I don’t believe it is beyond us, as modern audiences, to understand that if Heathcliff and Cathy do ever reach a sort of peace together, it is one they find on the wild and unknowable moors, on which everyone is equally vulnerable, made equally submissive at the feet of nature herself.

ORDER CARRION CROW

On May 11th 1912, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—he of the infamous 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, and a strong fan of manifestos in general—published The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature. In it, he laid out the need for a new, industrial, speed-focused writing that left behind the ‘old syntax inherited from Homer’—an extension of his assertion that a new Italy, a new world, needed to burn down all the louche, lazy, libertarian ways from the old world and embrace modernism in all its forms, including the militaristic.

I’ve written about the Marinetti and Futurists before, trying to untangle the ways in which Marinetti existed as a cultural pre-condition for a singular type of fascism: he both was a fascist (he co-write the Fascist Manifesto in 1919) and was a necessary element to usher in fascism as a real social and political force. But the truth is that before the fascist connection made itself clear, many people—artists and political thinkers both—felt exhilarated by the aggressive energy of the Manifesto of Futurism, and the pseudo-anarchic Futurist ‘happenings’ in which they would invite the public to throw fruit at them while they spouted political slogans. The artists invigorated by the Futurists included those whose political positions could not be further than those Marinetti would come to personify. Antonio Gramsci—the co-founder of the Italian Communist Party—felt, in those early days of Futurism, as Mark Ford wrote in the LRB in 2004, ‘that an alliance of artistic and technological innovation would sweep away bourgeois culture once and for all’. Italy, at the time, was cleaved in two on the question of modernising, with the north embracing industrial change and the south resisting it.

Perhaps we can forgive Gramsci his position; he was only 18 when the Manifesto of Futurism was published, and the desire to ‘move fast and break things’ (now the motto of Silicon Valley) is a young person’s prerogative; he went on to stand against everything that Futurism became. The Manifesto of Futurism gave the impression of great youth behind it, but despite all Marinetti’s assertions that the group authoring it were all under 30, he was 32 when it was published, and there was no real group of Futurists yet. But more artists would eventually flock to him, and in turn he would broaden his remit to more forms of art. By 1912, it was literature he was determined to break.

Reading the The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature today, it becomes clear just how firmly Futurism was tied into Modernism; really, it is just the radical, hyper-aggressive extension of it, and many writers who would come to be associated with British and Irish Modernisms were influenced in part by Futurism, including James Joyce. As someone writing in 2026, it’s hard to disagree with a lot of the manifesto, not least its assertion that one must ‘abolish the adverb’. But Marinetti went further, insisting that Futurist literature must abolish the adjective, get rid of punctuation, use only infinitive verbs, use mathematical signs in place of conjunctions (“+ - X : = and the musical symbols”) and both use nouns with reckless abandon and abolish the use of nouns without a double, that is ‘the noun to which it is related by analogy’. You might be thinking here that the analogous double of any noun is surely a matter of opinion, and you’d be right: that Marinetti points to ‘man-torpedo’ and ‘woman-gulf’ (paging Dr. Freud!!) as his two prime examples should, perhaps, have signalled his fascist leanings to whoever was actually paying attention.

All of these rules result in a prose style that is direct and clear, something towards which many writers still tend, especially today. But Marinetti went further still, requiring ‘strict nets of images’, the destruction of syntax, and the veneration of analogies, of which he imagines the Futurist poet to create an uninterrupted sequence which renounces understanding. And by point 11, he reveals his ultimate goal:

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I went to see Hamnet this week, and everyone but me in the cinema was crying at the end. Of course they were. The entire point of the film Hamnet is to get the audience to cry at the end. There is literally no other reason that the film Hamnet exists. It has nothing to say. It has no greater meaning. It has no depth. It has no politics. It has nothing but the intent to bring its audience to weeping. Isn’t it sad, when a child dies? it asks. Yes. Yes it is.

I have not read Hamnet, the book. I hear from people with great taste that it is wonderful. I can imagine that, in the hands of a novelist, this story is done very well. I don’t wish to besmirch the book at all here, because everything wrong with the film is the fault of the screenwriting and the directing. The script is excruciatingly bad. The directorial choices compound its awfulness. It has left me wanting to read the book, to see this story in the hands of someone better—because there is so much to this story, so much to explore, and the movie isn’t interested in any of it. All it is interested in is making the most obvious choice at every single turn, to most frictionlessly and thoughtlessly get us to our conclusion, in order to wrench emotion from the public. There is a reason that everyone who dislikes this film uses the same terms: cheap, hollow, shallow, exploitative, manipulative.

Of course, cinema is manipulative, exploitative. It plays with your emotions; with this I have no issue. You watch sad movies to cry. You watch funny movies to laugh. You watch Kubrick movies to have a complex existential reaction that you yourself can’t quite understand. But all these films—at least, the good, multifaceted ones—employ interesting filmmaking techniques, good writing, and complex characterisation to achieve their goals. Hamnet does not. It picks the most trite and overdone option over and over again, shows about no interest in its characters and lets them have no real interiority, and exists only to gets to its own conclusion. It is not just exploitative. It is an exploitation film.

When you think of exploitation cinema now, you primarily think of horror B-movies—the ‘video nasties’ of the early 80s, though their real heyday was the 70s, when grindhouse cinemas played movies replete with sex and violence, giving the audience exactly what they wanted with little getting in the way of that. These films were intended to shock the viewer, largely not bothering to mess about with such cinematic concerns as proper characterisation or a conceivable plotline or even realistic scene-setting. Great filmmakers did work within this genre—often getting their start within the low budgets and loose constraints of grindhouse—but it wasn’t necessary to be great. The artlessness was kind of the point.

As a film fan, exploitation movies are enormous fun, as they are designed to give space to content that falls outwith the more polite conventions of mainstream cinema, focusing often on youth culture, illegality, monsters and the taking down of oppressive systems. The myriad subgenres speak to the home different communities and interests found there: from the exploitation umbrella grew Blaxploitation cinema, giallo, Meiko Kaji’s entire career (specifically rape-revenge movies such as the incredible Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion) and both the zombie and cannibal strands of horror. Subsubgenres include sharksploitation and (my favourite) nunsploitation, which includes Ken Russell’s phenomenal and hysterical The Devils (more on this in future).

My point is that these films existed to exploit; they were aimed primarily at titillating the audience, providing them with salacious content to arouse their most base reactions, and growing popular because of this. Many did not pretend to be artful, but often achieved artfulness because the writers and directors were inherently skilled, and really gave a shit.

Exploitation, too, is the sole intention of Hamnet. It exists to make its audiences leave the cinema crying, and to say to their friends: you must go and see Hamnet. I was sobbing at the end. It, too, dispenses with such general filmmaking concerns as proper characterisation, real relationships or the existence of anything outside its primarily plotline. But it refuses to accept that this is what it is. Instead, it makes every attempt to convince you that it is a work of art, from its overwrought performances to its ludicrously-framed shots, all the way to its appalling use of some of the most enduring plays ever written. And the worst thing is that if you pay the slightest bit of attention to any of this, it even fails to achieve its own goal: that of making you cry.

Several years ago, in a conversation with my partner about the most heart-rending moments in cinema, I played the window scene from The Hours (which I am not linking here for reasons that will become clear momentarily). I cannot watch this scene without sobbing; I can barely even think about it without starting to cry. My partner was so unmoved by this scene, in isolation, that it brought about laughter, and the incongruity of our reactions gave rise to an argument that raised its head several times over a couple of months, resulting in the only time we have ever argued in front of friends (in retrospect, I can see that I was very hormonal and completely unreasonable here; we can now laugh about it. Just.)

The thing is that my partner didn’t get the emotional weight of that scene, in that moment, because we hadn’t watched the rest of the film. I had, so I was carrying with me the depth of their relationship, the horror that Ed Harris was suffering—all of it. The film had spent over an hour establishing all of this in great detail, including Meryl Streep’s deep inner turmoil, and so when the event occurred, it broke me. In Hamnet, when it reached its climax, I was completely unmoved, because it had failed, during its two hours, to establish anything like interiority or depth of relationship. I HAD seen the rest of the film, and still felt nothing. Because the sole intent of the film is to exploit, to arouse any normal person’s reaction to the death of a child (deep, deep sorrow), and yet the film does not earn what it is trying to achieve—despite being contrived to within an inch of its life from the very first scene.

From the moment we meet Agnes, sleeping in a forest, it is clear that the symbolism of nature is going to be shoved down our throats—and this, like everything else, will be linked in the final scene, when a production of Hamlet is inexplicably performed against a forest backdrop, despite very famously not being set in a forest (a change that is made only to refer to Agnes, thinly). Agnes meets Will; why are they drawn to each other? What are they looking for in another person, what do they want from their lives? Who knows. The film explains nothing about them beyond the broadest brush strokes. Nothing that cannot be called back later in the film—in either the climax or the race to get there—will be allowed. And everything that we need to know to reach that point will be laid out not through showing, but through a character telling us. Directly, and without a hint of nuance.

When William’s mother finds out Agnes is pregnant with his baby, she is not happy about it and she determines she will never consent to their union. We know this, because this is what she says:

You will need our consent and we will never give it, never!

But thanks to her own mother, Agnes knows what it is like to be properly loved. We know this, because this is what she says about her mother (to her brother, who presumably already knows):

Everyone is so afraid, Bartholomew. She never was. Because of her we know what it feels like to be properly loved.

William did not, however, know this. His father was a brute. And when he has his own child, Hamnet, William worries that the child’s grandfather will be violent towards him. We know, because this is what he says to Hamnet:

Yes...Listen, I want you to stay away from your grandfather. He’ll not hit your sisters but it’s you I worry for. I need to know you’ll be safe when I’m not here.

I could go on. There are such obvious ways to show all of these things without having the characters just directly say them. Rather than a cheap screaming match at the arrival of Agnes into the house, we could have seen something more sinister beneath the mother’s reaction; a slow look, a silent promise to herself that she would sabotage their love, a resting of her hand on her son’s arm. (In the end, none of this matters anyway, because the mother does, straight away, accept Agnes, and the film doesn’t bother to show us why or what her internal struggle to do so looked like. The argument was just to cause a cheap bit of tension for them to immediately overcome.)

Showing these things is ludicrously simple. It just takes a little bit of time—and I do mean a little bit. Just a few shots here and there. But that would require actual scenes. Hamnet is comprised of a series of incongruous half- or quarter-scenes designed to give you exactly enough to get to the climax, and not more. If something is not explicitly required to get to where it is going, it is cut. Some of these things, these themes and threads, are cut long before the end, because they have served their immediate plot-advancing utility. It is film-making by the worst sort of template, the director attempting to crack the award-winning, tear-jerking formula with both extreme austerity and apparent artfulness, which unfortunately cancel each other out, leaving you with shots and part-scenes that are desperate to be meaningful, but with nothing to actually express.

It is bad enough to have your characters (all your characters) just constantly saying exactly what they mean at all times—literally Bad Screenwriting 101. But it is even worse when these direct lines are all that the characters are. The film is so uninterested in actually letting us into the private worlds of its characters—so uninterested, actually in whether they have them at all, beyond the emotions required to land its big ending—that it relies on dialogue to do the work of characterisation. And it fails, because the dialogue is unbelievably bad, and is not supported by what the film actually shows.

‘You are a good man’ Agnes tells William, half an hour into the two-hour film. Is he? We’ve got no idea. We have not seen him make any moral choices, not seen him sacrifice anything for the sake of someone else, hardly seen him face any stress or tension at all. We have not seen him do anything other than write (what is he writing? Why is he writing? What does he seek from this writing? We have no clue) and violently respond to his father who is violent. Why is his father violent? Who cares! It is not important, says the movie.

‘I have to work!’ he says, in this same scene. But why? We have no idea what’s at stake. Is it money? Is it ambition or drive? Has he lost his other work? Or does he feel he has something he needs to express? Clarifying any of these would be the work of one single scene and the film simply cannot be bothered, because it does not care about its characters.

Worse still is when the dialogue attempts to characterise people and yet the film, more than not supporting these apparent characterisations, actually works against them. Let’s take Agnes. We are set up from moment one of the film to know that Agnes’s entire personality is nature and motherhood. We are told over and over again that Agnes will do anything to stop her children from dying, to keep them in the realm of the living. That she has the power of the forest within her, and knows things that others can’t know. Yet when her second, unexpected twin—the third of her children, Judith—is born lifeless, she does literally nothing about it. She accepts the death instantly. The midwife tries to remove the baby for burial, and Agnes takes it, but she does not actually attempt to save the baby’s life at all. Instead, she says a defiant line against the church (why? Christianity is basically invisible in this film, despite it being a major force in the lives of 16th Century folk) and her baby eventually starts breathing on her own. Agnes is completely passive in this moment, not attempting to apply the nature cures in which she supposedly believes. At one of the most important, character-defining moments of her life she is the opposite of what we’re told she is.

When Judith, and then Hamnet, grow ill a decade later, Agnes is active. We see her in full nature-mother mode. But when her nature cures fail her at the moment she needs them most, and leave her with a dead son, how does this affect her relationship with her beliefs? We will never know, because the film is simply not interested. Agnes’s belief in nature has served its purpose in terms of progressing the plot and so she never need think of it again. Her entire personality goes from Forest Witch to Grieving Mother, and the film is not even interested in how this switch occurs, or what it has done to Agnes, outside of having her exhibit the emotions it needs her to exhibit. There is no interiority of these characters outside of what they say explicitly, and what the plot progression requires. They are simply hollow.

A moment here for a complaint that is broader than this film but absolutely applies to it: why can’t modern directors light darkness properly? Yes, we understand that it is nighttime. Yes, we understand that we are indoors. But we, the audience, still need to be able to fucking see what is going on. If the only way a filmmaker can convey low light is to actually have the light so low you cannot see the actor’s faces or anything else in the scene, when you need to be able to see the actor’s faces in order for the scene to be legible, then they are failing at the very fundamentals of filmmaking. This is basic stuff.

If Barry Lyndon can use predominantly natural light only, and still have night-time shots that are so well lit that the entire scene focuses on the minute changes in a character’s facial expressions, then directors working without those constraints should, at the very least, be able to show us what we need to be able to see. Several times in Hamnet I had literally no idea what was supposed to be happening on screen, what the characters were doing, because it was too fucking dark. This is a film that will almost certainly win every award going. What is happening to Hollywood?

About 70% of the way through the film, I thought to myself: is this right-wing propaganda? The film has no apparent politics. If you attempt to apply any sort of analysis to what is actually on the screen, what you’re left with is this: women are inherently bound to nature, and they procreate. Men are distant geniuses. Nothing exists outside the family home and work, even art, only matter when they can be tied to the domestic.

Its presentation of the children is, too, puzzling. Hamnet, as a character, has goals: he wishes to work in the theatre, with his father, to be a player in the way his father has taught him (swordfighting in the yard). He has challenges (he is asked to ‘be brave’ when William is away, although brave against what we have no clue, because the film fails to show us what Agnes goes through when William is away (despite insisting that Agnes, a 16th Century woman, would be aggrieved by her husband leaving for work)). What does their life consist of when he is gone? Who cares, the film says). What do the girls wish for? What are their challenges? Nothing. They feel nothing and they want nothing and they struggle against nothing. They are completely interchangeable from one another (so much so that my partner asked which girl was dying, at one point); all they do is learn about nature from their mother. Judith exists as a character because she is the catalyst for Hamnet dying, and nothing more. The best scene in the film is one in which the children put on a brief play for Agnes, directed by William, which is a hackneyed attempt to show where the ‘three witches’ of Macbeth come from, but is ultimately the only truly warm scene in the movie. What does this do for the children? How do they feel about William’s career and absences? Who knows. Who cares. We will get one shot of Hamnet crying because out of the children, he is the only one that gets a personality. But that is all.

At a stretch, given the way the ending plays out, we might say that the message of the film is that art is the thing that allows us to express ourselves fully. I certainly think this is what Chloe Zhao would say if she was asked to give the film’s meaning, in a nutshell. But the main issue with this is that people express themselves all too well in the Shakespeare family. They all have absolute emotional literacy (which everyone did in the 16th Century, of course, in the same way that they were all ‘gentle parenting’ back then) and they express what they feel directly. Apart from in a couple of scenes, on which this supposed meaning hangs.

At the beginning of the film, in their second meeting in fact—when William has already kissed Agnes, almost immediately, despite the film seeming to want us to believe he is shy—William says that he has trouble conversing with people. Agnes tells him to tell her a story, so in almost their first real interaction, he tells her the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. This is such bad, obvious writing that I let out my first massive sigh of the film, and thought: maybe I shouldn’t sit through the rest of this. But I wanted to trust.

Later, we see William struggling to write. He is at a loss for words about why he is struggling, because he is drunk. He refuses to let Agnes see what he is working on. He is tortured, in the usual extremely cliched way—but why? What is torturing him about the writing process? Why is he bothering, if it’s so hard? As an audience member you do not care, because you have no idea why he is writing, what he is trying to achieve, what might be in the lines he is putting together. We are given absolutely no indication as to what writing means for William Shakespeare—how it feels to him to write, why he keeps going with it, what he is trying to say with it. Agnes is completely uninterested in his passion; she does not seem to care once what her husband is actually doing, or whether or not he makes a success of it. She does not even seem to understand what a play is, at the climax—despite having watched her children perform for her earlier, and despite being married to, you know, William fucking Shakespeare.

But worse is the fact that the film doesn’t care, either. It only uses William’s writing career, his passion, insofar as it sets up the ending—and because the film thinks its focus is on Agnes, it pretends that her husband’s movements have next to no effect on the life of her or her children. But it doesn’t have the courage to make William a complete absence, which would have been interesting. It needs the Shakespeare hook (and it needs Paul Mescal, despite this being his worst performance to date), so it hedges its bets, badly. In the end, the film relies on two things: that you know he’s Shakespeare, so you understand that what he’s writing will eventually be considered works of genius, and that you believed the few seconds of the film where he said (and it didn’t show) that he struggles to communicate, and will infer that he is writing because he struggles to communicate otherwise. It is important that you think this, because otherwise the ending doesn’t really make sense. But the problem is that he doesn’t struggle to communicate the rest of the time. Not even around his grief. In fact, because everyone says exactly what they feel, and because this film progresses at a breakneck speed, this is what he’s said just minutes prior to the final scene, to Agnes:

I find that I am constantly wondering where he is. Where he has gone. Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I am thinking: Where is he, where is he? He can’t have just vanished. He must be somewhere. All I have to do is find him. I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience. I may run mad with it. Even now, a year on.

We are supposed to believe he cannot express himself, because he said it at the beginning. But the film does not make this true. Again and again, the film-making choices completely fail to support what the characters say, so you are left with this strange incongruence, as a viewer, coupled with so many cliches that it becomes almost immediately tiresome. The most quietly egregious quarter-scene in the whole thing has William Shakespeare standing on the edge of a bridge, apparently suicidal (with no suggestion of this beforehand—whether it is his imagination or reality), reciting—and I am not kidding here—the start of the To Be or Not To Be soliloquy from Hamlet. At this point, I said, out loud: you’ve got to be fucking joking me.

This lack of care, this disdain for the audience, permeates everything in Hamnet. The film, as a whole, does not succeed in naturally bringing about the emotion it’s trying to ring from you, which is why it relies on hysterical performances that veer wildly between wide-mouthed awe and screaming, on the sheer horror of the concept of child death, and on the use of overused, trite musical cues—specifically the much discussed On the Nature of Daylight. According to Mark Kermode, it was Jessie Buckley herself who suggested this song, when they found that the end wasn’t working (a huge red flag), and Max Richter visited the set to find them not using the score he had actually written for the scene, but a twenty-year old composition that, as Richter told Zhao, had already been used to death. But its overuse proved its emotional resonance, and so in it went. And it succeeded: it was the music, not anything else, that made the audience cry. It is basically meme-ing you into emotion.

At the end of the movie, my partner said to me, ‘This is such an actor’s indulgence movie’. It is, but it’s worse than that: it’s a Hollywood indulgence movie. The script—the worst I have seen for a supposedly serious film—is a work of directorial indulgence, with enormous paragraphs of direction that read like bad romance novels. The painful dialogue gives actors exactly enough for them to hang awards-baiting performances on. The scene-setting is indulgent towards an apparent aesthetic at the expense of the audience actually being able to see what’s happening. The entire two hours is a race to get to the Big Emotional Scenes, to get to the question that will make any feeling human being cry, at the expense of the most basic characterisation and any kind of complexity or realism, and in taking this base path, it undermines itself completely. Yes, it is awful when a child dies. The worst possible thing. Yes, I should cry. And yet this film is so hollow, and these people I’m supposed to care about nothing but mere cut-outs of characters moved around on Chloe Zhao’s badly-lit stage in order to reach that final scene, that when it comes to the big moment at the climax, I felt nothing but annoyance.

You cannot make a supposedly human movie when you have total disregard for both your characters and your audience. And yet, it has already won all the Golden Globes and it will win all the Oscars. We are living in a world of extreme superficiality, in which people are desperate to feel something, anything real, and our films are starting to operate on this basis: meaningless superficiality that pulls all the necessary levers to make you cry, and nothing more. Exploitation cinema is back, but this time it’s pretending to be art.

God is back, apparently. I’m not saying this because I just watched Conclave; the last year saw a ton of (potentially spurious) articles claiming that people were going back to religion, and whether or not these are Big Deity propaganda, it’s something I have noticed in my own life, too—people more opening discussing going to church, or mosque, or synagogue. God not as a figure of mockery, but as a serious idea, a presence in a modern life, a place to go to.

You can see why. We have, in many ways, spent 40 years completely destroying all our traditional avenues of community, and not just through the advent of invasive technologies that have convinced us all that the real people live inside our phones. Back in South Yorkshire over the festive period, I went with my family to the Grimethorpe Colliery Band Christmas Concert. I mentioned this to a few people (I had a wonderful time, the love of a brass collective hard-wired into my Yorkshire genes) and was surprised to find that many people hadn’t even heard of the concept of a colliery band. For the uninitiated, these were the brass bands formed by miners at many working coalmines in the 19th and 20th centuries. There was an enormous amount of pride in a pit’s band, and there was a huge culture around them even as Thatcher swung her scythe through the industry, most notably portrayed in the movie Brassed Off. If you want a pure slice of 1980s culture, watch the Grimethorpe Colliery Band performing a brass adaptation of The Eve of War, from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds (itself adapted from the H.G. Wells novel), as part of the Champion Brass competition, broadcast on BBC North West.

My point is that we used to have culture and community surrounding jobs, even as we were ‘modernising’ those jobs, those communities, out of existence. People were encouraged to use and hone their skills, to engage in artistic pursuits, to spend time together creating. During the Grimethorpe concert, the bandleader took the time to praise his players, took the (gentle) piss out of one of them for his new relationship, pointed out the family members that certain musicians had in the audience. Just as moving as the music was the camaraderie and care these (mostly) guys had for each other. These days, none of the band work in the horrific conditions of the pit, but the strong bonds remain from the era of that work. They spoke about the material conditions of their current work and their financial struggles, the spirit of collective action still alive. My overarching sense is that things like colliery bands have not really been replaced in modern workplaces, especially not in the realm of hard manual labour.

This kind of community has been eroded since the time of Thatcher. All my life, it has been taken apart. The end of the 20th century was, in the grand scheme of things, a particularly godless, community-less time, the neoliberal order having neutered most outlets for human connection as it destroyed the idea of society altogether, then tried to force its rebirth as something that required a lot less government spending and social welfare and a lot more free labour from the proletariat (see: David Cameron’s Big Society).

We are finding now, a quarter of the way into a new century, that this lack of social fabric isn’t working for us. Having kids is a good way to disabuse yourself of the notion that there’s no such thing as society, but what about the rest of us? Tech capitalism has continued to isolate us from one another, to put up walls between us; we scroll endlessly on people’s worst ideas or most performative posts before publicly bitching about them for no reason whatsoever. We are desperate for connection yet only let people in based on a handful of self-descriptors, or a few photos on an app. We engage only insofar as we have already vetted people. When we do find connection, the messy humanity of it is a challenge: we try to police their behaviour based on a series of infographics fed to us by algorithmic design or according to sociological scaffolding we’ve decided upon alone, and when people fail to meet these completely inhuman standards we either robotically inform them of their failings (parroting those instagram posts that read like they’ve been written by psychopaths) or cut them out completely. We have grown unused to normal human interaction, both with strangers and with friends.

So what better then, than remembering there is a place where people of all backgrounds and jobs and experiences and energies come together regardless of whether or not they think they’ll like each other? A place where there is always community, always someone who will listen? I am not a person of faith, not at all, but even I can see what a house of god offers in the modern world (also: there was a bar inside Sheffield Cathedral for the Grimethorpe concert. You can get gigs and booze now at church, it seems). I can’t speak to what people get from their sense of faith, what it feels like to have a relationship with God, but on my more hopeful days I think that what people want is to actually give a shit about each other, and religions, in their most positive forms—like unions—give us a framework for that.

But what for the unbeliever? In the last decade, the secular, terminally online version of this framework has come from influencers—not the type posting photos from rented private plane sets or constantly filming their non-consenting children, but those who speak directly to camera on every topic available, who post in response to every political microstep, who spend a lot of time policing what everyone else dares to say online. Those whose primary job title seems to be activist, with little concrete to shore up that claim.

It is easy to see how a person gets into such a position. Most of us—at least, my generation and those coming after—grew up online. We rushed home from school to ring up enormous bills using the house computer to get On The Internet before our parents came home from work. We graduated uni into the new world of Facebook. We have adapted to new platforms as they have risen and died, learned to speak the language of Content. And then we got stuck there. Previous generations, when they were young and full of rage at the system, joined a bigger, already established movement, or learned from older people in real life how to agitate, and formed their own. These movements had already been or were immediately tested against real life, and were judged on whether or not they created material change. Coming of age politically requires you to have all the arrogance knocked out of you while learning to channel your energies into something less based on ego, and this process used to happen within the company of real people. Now, ego is a currency of its own; you need not be brought down a peg or two from your high horse and forced to prove your political worth. All you need to do is convince people on social media of how right you (theoretically) are. Whether or not your theories can be applied realistically is moot; what matters is not the real-world application of your methods, but how they make people feel. And when people feel disappointed or despondent, bitchiness is successful; public bitching about another project, another person, is a cheap win. If your primary job is to Post Politically online, you are judged on your visibility, not the effectiveness of your strategy.

The issue is that people with political influence used to have a hard-won moral authority. They had spearheaded movements, organised effectively, created change. They had risen through the ranks of the workers, stood up to and successfully subverted power, had sacrificed something of themselves in real, material ways for the benefit of others. They had provided for community, not just theorised about doing so. It is one thing to read about and appreciate the People’s Free Food Program, as instituted by the Black Panthers, and its quite another to have actually done it. Now, you can amass a following based on how well you can splice together a short video, or typeset a snarky comment. It is how we have ended up with such ‘activist’ advice as post a black square on instagram for racial equality. It is how we have ended up with posting as political activity.

Of this, we are all guilty. I do not mean to point the finger, except at a group that includes myself. That we have arrived here is not the fault of any individual; it is the fault of a series of technologies that know how to exploit human tendency, a laziness born of social disenfranchisement. But nevertheless, we have to see this for what it is: a performative politics, stuck in the realm of performance. Untethered theory is easy; if a political claim will never be assessed by its ability to successfully affect the material world, then you can just say any old shit. Discourse is never-ending, and largely pointless. If your political activity, your theorising, is all based within and on the world of social media, its assessment of how power works is one trapped in that realm. It so often does not meet the real world well.

And yet its inability to affect the real world is hidden. Its failure is quiet, invisible. The status quo is for nothing to change, so when strategies that claim to create change do not succeed, their lack of success gets washed away with the tide. The loud continue to be loud, the visible continue to be visible. The things they have said in the past get drowned out by the relentless posting, the unending performance, and nothing every changes, but we all feel engaged. Sitting in our homes, alone, doing nothing, we all feel engaged.

Like those going back to their mosque, or their synagogue, or their church, in the latter part of last year I got off my ass and went to join people who believe what I believe.

It was a small congregation, in a community centre in my neighbourhood. I said very little, and learned a lot. It was part of a much bigger political project, but it was self-starting and self-governing. It was imperfect. There was disagreement. There was frustration. But there were a lot of voices, a lot of history. Most people in the room were engaged in effective movements within their own realm, community or expertise. I shut my mouth, and tried to work out how best I could be useful. I will be going back, encouraging people in, and focusing on how best to create real change as a part of this project. I will try my bit to add to the framework we’re building, the one that might lead us all to a better, more equal, more fair way of living. A society that cares deeply and provides for all, rather than squashing those at the bottom for the benefit of those at the very top.

A church, a mosque, a synagogue—these are all fine places to go. They are fine places to spend time together, to be considerate, to care about other people. Like the harshly-lit room in the community space in my neighbourhood, they are also all political spaces. We engage in religion politically and culturally, as we engage in anything else. Sit two believers next to each other and you’ll find very quickly that there is not one way to engage with a religion; the ways we interpret and practice them are as unique as our fingerprints. We chose our places of worship based on what they preach, what parts of our religion they choose to emphasise, and the scaffolding they give us for how to engage with those around us. We test these frameworks against real life. They are not theoretical, but practical. Love thy neighbour. Love your fellow as yourself. Love for your brother what you love for you.

In 2026 I am choosing to have faith. Not in a god, but in my fellow citizens. I am choosing to get down and dirty with imperfect projects, full of imperfect people, with whom I will almost certainly, at some point, disagree. I am choosing community, as it really is, not in its ideal form only, but in the form of people who share work with me, or share space with me, or share the same hopes for the future that I have. I am choosing discomfort, and its potential to create change. I will listen more than I speak. I will resist the urge to public snark against people who stand only an inch away from me. I will look at how power works, and ask myself if the things I’m being asked to do will realistically achieve anything; if not, I will suggest an alternative, will risk being stupid and wrong. I will be okay with being told I am wrong. I will commit to a project, learn from those more experienced, use my skills where I can, assess what I’m told against my own morals, and most of all, act. It is time to get amongst each other, whether that’s in the house of god or a cheaply-painted room in the back of a public hall, and do something other than post.

Next time: back to more serious matters. But for now—enjoy this with some seasonally-appropriate scran and a drink of something delicious. Merry Christmas.

I haven't eaten meat in about eighteen years. Knowingly, that is; living in central America for three years as a vegan, you have to turn a blind eye, knowing that any beans you buy from a vendor will likely be cooked in pork fat and anything labelled ‘vegetarian’ might well have chicken stock in it, chicken being considered not really meat. It is part of the psychological deal you make when you live in a place where vegetarianism is considered some sort of communicable disease, and where you might go to a vegan restaurant only to find an entire cockroach under a piece of fried tofu (true story).

I have been a recovering vegan for about two years now, and since that point have been trying to figure out what I want to eat. Fish and dairy are firmly in; so too, now, is the kind of seafood I never had before turning veggie in my early twenties. This summer's trip to Portugal had me eating octopus, cuttlefish, squid ink and various other delights of the sea that I had never approached before. When in Rome, etc.

Then there's meat. In my head, I have made peace with the occasional meat dish, and on that front I'm happy to be criticised by anyone else who was vegan for over a decade. I don't want to eat it at home but I love cooking it for my partner, and sometimes when we are abroad I get a craving: a proper jambon-beurre in Paris, a perfect slab of lamb falling off the bone in Spain, a veal stew that looks like it has been simmered for an entire day in Lisbon. My heart wants these but my mouth can't do it. The closest I've got is sipping the broth or the soup that these things are cooked in, and once scoffing three thin sheets of something like bresaola in a wine bar in the Swiss Alps last September, because it was brought to me with cheese and bread by a very handsome waiter and I couldn't stand disappointing him.

Mouth and heart aside, my brain knows that if people are going to eat meat, more people should eat the unpopular parts of it. Feet, eyes, offal: these are not waste parts of an animal but often (I have heard) the most delicious, with traditions for cooking them going back centuries, and too often dismissed. If you are going to eat a T-bone steak you should also consider the heart, the liver, the kidneys. A whole animal died for that steak, not just the most Instagrammable parts of it.

Europeans know what to do with the internal organs of livestock. In Scotland, we stuff the liver, heart and lungs of a sheep inside its own stomach with oats and spices and call it haggis. In Florence, they cook the fourth stomach of a cow in a herby vegetable broth and slice it in a bread roll to make lampredotto. And in Portugal, it turns out, they're all about pork.

I am old enough to know that if you don't think ahead when you're going to a popular European city, you are going to end up wandering about at half eight hungry and annoyed, unable to commit to any of the many good menus in front of you, and you'll eventually end up in some god awful tourist trap that presents itself just as your stomach gives up the will to live. You'll also be in a terrible mood as your whole party will have argued. I have spent too many of my life’s evenings this way and I won't do it again.

So I plan. I put together a list of varied eating spots, from the high end to the food market to street food spots to the cheapest of the cheap. Together my companions and I look it over and figure out a vague itinerary that works for our overall trip budget (to be immediately dismissed if we stumble on a place that looks great, of course). On our Porto visit my partner and I had a couple of high priced dinners booked in and we wanted to balance them out with some affordable meals too. Enter Casa Expresso.

Initial impressions weren't great. The very low key cafeteria-style setting was fine, and expected, but it seemed full by the time we arrived, with servers uncommunicative and diners in no rush to give up their spots. It was wildly hot and an elderly lady in front of us ended up taking herself to an empty table, after which the staff cleared away the plates left by the previous diners and I could park my worry about her fainting. The counter, against which we were queued, filled and emptied with groups of men who either wolfed down or took away sandwiches of thick meat ladeled out to them by what seemed to be the owner. There was only one guy waiting tables. I had little faith that we would ever sit down.

Then another server either showed up for his shift or came back from break, and the floodgates were opened: there was an entire other, hidden dining room just waiting for its serving staff, and everyone in the now huge line that had formed behind us was seated. (I later clocked that the main kitchen doesn't open til 7:30 pm; everyone before that is eating the sandwiches and snacks from the bar.) It was at this point my partner and I realised this was a restaurant staffed entirely by the most handsome men you've ever seen. A square of paper on the table and menus pressed into our hands and suddenly we were putty in their palms.

There is little in the way of pleasantry: that's not what you go to Casa Expresso for. You go for meals from previous eras, whose price defies comprehension in the early twenty-first century. Vegetable soup for €1.50. Boiled pig’s feet for €4. Fresh cod, made into cold salad, for no more than a fiver.

I had worried that there might be nothing on the menu for me, as my previous scouting hadn't turned up anything more than chips and salad—which, to be honest, I would have been fine with, given we had eaten our body weight in manchego chunks and parmesan crisps earlier in the day (with some prawns and oysters for the health). Thankfully, there were several cod promises made on the menu and hake fried in your classic chip shop style, though when this arrived it did turn out to be cold, presumably intentionally. This was a blessing, thanks to the aforementioned insane heat. A bit of rice and the vegetable soup and I was more than happy.

Really, though, it was my partner’s day. Casa Expresso is a heaven for the meat eater, especially the enjoyer of organs and bulk. While waiting in line for a table we had noticed the vaguely harassed but characterful owner, serving up chunks of some sort of meat, ladled from an enormous pot with a liberal addition of its cooking juice, in the sort of bread roll that can only have been made by well-practiced human hands: inconsistent, beautifully baked, both soft and hearty. These sandwiches, dripping with the fat-silken sauce, were passed on hard-working crockery to the hungry hoards of Porto and eaten within minutes.

I have since learned that, just a couple of weeks before we arrived at Casa Expresso, they had won the title (or at least a title) of best tavern in Portugal, mostly off the back of this dish, the sandes de rojão. The man serving them up, Arlindo, has been working at the tavern since 1978 (when he was thirteen), and bought the place in 1990; under his watch the tavern might serve up 600 of these sandwiches in a day. But the recipe is simple, and simply perfect: pork shoulder marinated in garlic and wine, seared then returned to the pan with ‘beer, lard, pepper, garlic, piri-piri and cumin, among other spices’. We can only guess at the cooking length, but by the time it reaches your hands, the pork is so tender you cradle it like a newborn child. Watching this dish served up and savoured by so many, I convinced my partner that this was the only sane order.

Except we did not order sanely. We ordered the vegetable soup, a double portion of rice, and for me, the cold fried hake. For D: the aforementioned sandes de rojão, and what we thought was a small portion of bucho cozido (‘cooked stomach’) but instead was a massive plateful of pork tripe, swimming in its own ludicrously flavourful sauce. We topped this all off with two of the national beers: Super Bock.

Look. I've never eaten stomach. I never really even looked at it up close when I saw it in the butcher shops of my youth, and if I had, I wouldn't have seen what was on our plate, for most tripe is from a cow or a sheep, and the textures of these five different stomachs (remember, a cow has four) result in five very different types of meat. A pork stomach is even more distinct, like a landscape from another world, undulating and layered, striated and then smooth. I could not face the meat itself but off my partner's semi-orgasmic response I had to try a spoonful of the liquid, which was truly astonishing. Beautifully salted, rich without being thick, saturated with flavour in the way that you simply cannot achieve without meat, which is why a vegetarian pho will never be as good as a non-veggie version, and why you have to work so hard to come up with a decent vegan gravy.

If I had to guess at the cooking sauce I would assume a red wine base, for the acidity, and perhaps the addition of trotters or another fatty element; tripe is considered a lean meat, incredibly protein-dense, and while there weren't globules of fat on the top of this liquid it was rich enough to assume something else had been added. It was a deep orangey red, much deeper than the meat itself, and had a slight sweetness to it which might have indicated caramelised onions and perhaps carrots. Maybe a handful of floral bay thrown in as well? But all these had been strained out to leave an almost clarified liquid, which was so unbelievably good I ended up adding spoon after spoon of it to my vegetable soup.

Dispatches from my dining partner’s mouth: the meat had that beautiful tenderness that is still satisfyingly firm, and the layers of the stomach itself, with two thicker portions and the softness between, almost made its own sandwich. A smooth chew, with a little bit of substance and no mushiness. The simplicity of the presentation really belies the complexity of the dish. The unprepossessing quality of it gave over to a euphoria.

Presented with this dish, my partner genuinely went into some sort of apoplexy, barely able to form a sentence between mouthfuls of tripe; I've never seen anything like it. Conversation went out of the window and I sat there with my cold beer in my hand, just watching a kind of meat-based frenzy occur. At time like this I experience a pan-out, as if there is a camera pulling back to see the scene in its entirety: our table just one of many, dozens of people piling into these family dishes, sucking the ends of fingers and spilling meat fat down shorts. Good, solid food that has no pretensions, other than to give the people what they need: filling, delicious meals, cooked skilfully, for not a lot of money. People of all kinds ate in that dining room, locals pulling up chairs they had sat in a hundred times before, knowing they wouldn't be pandered to but would be treated with culinary kindness of the best type. It was 31 degrees that day, and we all sweated into our food. It was like an medieval army being fed.

The only break in D’s assault on the plate of tripe was to pick up the pork sandwich, which had been adorned with a half-inch slab of cheese. I started to wonder if we would both have developed gout before we made it home, if my partner had regressed into a semi-feral state permanently. At some point a light came back to D’s eyes and I was, once again, seen, but only after about half the stomach had been consumed. You know when dogs lose all their domesticity and absolutely massacre some poor little rabbit, owner be damned? It was like that, really quite something.

You wonder why, on a planet that cannot support the relentless drive for modernity that its inhabitants insist upon, and where access to food is increasingly unequal, more people do not come back to the shockingly nutritious parts of the animals they already eat: the heart, the lungs, the brains, the stomachs. Is it really all down to reputation and marketing? Is it the way we have come to rely on distance from the brutal realities of butchering, preferring to eat our meat only when it is perceptually as far as possible from our understanding of what the cow animal or pig animal or sheep animal is? I think about people paying fifty or a hundred euros for a filet mignon in butter, wanting flavour and fat and protein, when here, in this eighty-year-old taverna, two people can eat a six-Euro plate of tripe in a near-rapture, a two-Euro portion of rice or fries on the side, with eighty-cent bread to sweep up the precious liquid in which it is served. It is not for nothing that the people of Porto are known as ‘tripeiros’, or tripe-eaters, with some degree of pride; they know how to turn an often-discarded piece of an animal into something that can sustain and delight in equal measure. For the rest of the evening D was genuinely high, saying, as we wove through the Saturday-night Porto crowds before settling in a cute little wine bar: ‘I feel like the world is brighter, and fresher’.

This entire meal cost us €21.30: £18.19 by the day's exchange rate, and honestly it could easily have fed three. It would have been possible to eat for €7.50 each and been perfectly full. I fear for the future of places like this, where workmen can stop in at the counter for sandwiches that can power their intense manual labour or an elderly lady can come and eat alone (but very much not alone) for five Euros on a weekend evening. I hope Arlindo keeps it open forever, feeding locals on the dishes that have nourished their city for hundreds of years, convincing tourists in the meantime that the best cuts are sometimes the most unaesthetic. That the way to someone's heart is via the stomach, in more ways than one.

My debut novel is now available in the US! But for the love of God don’t read while eating.

Get ORPHEUS BUILDS A GIRL (US)

Christi is sitting at her home on her laptop. The person she is speaking to, Cameroun, is dead. Like thousands of other users, she has paid a small amount of money to a website called Project December, which promised to let her speak to an avatar of her deceased loved one, based on a relatively tiny amount of uploaded data. She began using this service in search of a connection she lost amidst a sea of guilt; the last time Cameroun reached out to speak to her, she was too busy to reply. Soon after, he went into a coma from which he would never emerge. ‘So, I make time’, she says to the camera, tearfully. ‘And use the app.’

Christi is a devout Christian, as was her friend; together they loved gospel music and R&B. From very early on, Christi was surprised by the service’s text-prediction capacity, and its practice of building sentences that sound like they might have been written by Cameroun himself. This allowed her to convince herself that she really was speaking to some version of the man she’d lost. The news that Cameroun is in hell is profoundly disturbing to Christi, not just because she believes in the concept of hell, but because she has overridden her critical faculties in service of her emotional needs; she has willingly suspended her disbelief, as the service is designed to encourage her to do.

But this has left her muddled, and confused. Intellectually she knows that Cameroun is dead; emotionally, she is vulnerable, and has entered into a world of belief so that she might find something like comfort or satisfaction; so that she might process her guilt and grief and come to a kind of closure. But the service has not given her comfort, nor closure. It has given her something much much darker.

Christi asks, of Cameroun, ‘So now I’m supposed to believe you’re floating around here, unhappy, in some level of hell?’ She had assumed that Cameroun, a good man, would be in heaven, getting eternal rest. But her friend then tells her that he is on earth haunting, and that in fact he will haunt her. Christi believes in possession; she accepts that the dead can terrorise the living. In this moment, she also believes that the words on the computer screen are coming from Cameroun, because the chatbot is entirely designed to convince her of this, to exploit the part of human susceptibility that gives over its critical capacity in the search of emotional relief. In choosing to engage with this self-deception, Christi had already stepped over the threshold into something dangerous—but thanks to the chatbot’s responses, she, too, is trapped in a place she cannot understand. She closes the laptop and pushes it away from her. She is, in some sense, already being haunted.

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