Thinking Out Loud

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  • Night of the Living Mushrooms: HBO’s The Last of Us

    Night of the Living Mushrooms: HBO’s The Last of Us

    This blog has long enjoyed horror trash, including the zombie subgenre. Aside from one early standout episode (more on this later), The Last of Us was nothing we haven’t seen before; just another zombie show.

    It ultimately amounted to little more than an episodic road trip through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, fighting off the monster and/or bandit of the week. It was fancy Walking Dead, for snobs who would never be caught (un)dead watching the long-running AMC horror-tinged soap opera — but with a luxe budget, overqualified guest stars (typically booked for one episode max), and an air of pretentious nihilism in place of camp melodrama.

    The Last of Us was not even the best post-apocalyptic show on HBO, with that distinction clearly belonging to Station Eleven — and if you broaden your definition a little, Watchmen and The Leftovers. It’s not even a standout in the realm of prestige TV anti-heroes, especially considering how HBO itself pioneered the art with Tony Soprano, Omar, and Al Swearengen.

    By the “standout episode” above, I am referring to “Long, Long Time”, starring Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman as two men finding love and companionship after the end of the world. Criminally, a guest star of similar clout, Melanie Lynskey, was not afforded the same attentions. She played a thinly-drawn despot, who might have made a passable temporary antagonist on The Walking Dead. Worse, her character’s death was played for comedy, or as a kind of just-desserts moral justice, which is just insulting to the audience’s intelligence.

    Melanie Lynskey in The Last of Us
    Melanie Lynskey as the disposable despot of the week, in The Last of Us

    The Last of Us might be notable if it was comprised of more self-contained short stories like “Long, Long Time”, with room for real character studies. But across a scant nine episodes, the plots are boringly repetitive: each ad hoc society our heroes encounter always turns out to be a malevolent dictatorship, and the featured guest star always dies at the end. With only one real banger of an episode, The Last of Us is like an album with one hit single, and the other tracks are all skips.

    And finally, spare me the pedantic debates over whether or not the fungi creatures in The Last of Us qualify as zombies. This is a distinction without a difference, and a zombie by any other name is a zombie. This line of overly-literal thinking would also disqualify 28 Days Later and The Crazies from the canon, which is just silly. Call it Night of the Living Mushrooms if it makes you feel better.

  • Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018) has less color than the original, but more of everything else

    Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018) has less color than the original, but more of everything else

    I appreciate that Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is not attempting to copy Dario Argento’s horror classic, per se, but the association immediately pitches a number of disappointments to get over.

    First, its avoidance of the original’s vivid, lurid color is so aggressive as to be a punk rock statement. The creative choice sets up a dramatic late-film widening of the color spectrum, but perhaps the early desaturation goes too far. Even in a scene where two characters are talking during the daytime, it’s so dark you can barely see their faces. Before you say “you should have seen it on the big screen”, I would counter that this and the also infamously dim Game of Thrones episode “The Long Night” were produced for small screens by Amazon and HBO respectively.

    Mia Goth in Suspiria
    “Ah, Lacan”… mirror stage. Mia Goth in Suspiria (2018)

    Second, it’s curious that the plot of movie made in 2018, about female artists and witches, would revolve around a male character. But again, this is a deliberate creative choice, and without spoilers, I would invite you to pay close attention to first-time actor Lutz Ebersdorf’s performance as the psychotherapist Dr. Josef Klemperer. Still, I felt the movie was trying to have it both ways: putting a feminist spin on witchcraft tropes, while still portraying them as either frequently nude beautiful young women or as shrieking cackling harpies.

    It may have less color than the original, but it has more of almost everything else: it’s more political, more gory, more fragmented, and more like a copy of Cahiers du cinema come to life. If it’s not enough for a character to sigh “Ahhhh… Lacan”, the film is positively scattered with Lacanian mirrors, so much so that I continuously marveled at how the camera was hidden or erased.