Midway through my morbid month of monsters
Not featured: Sasquatch, Godzilla, King Kong, Loch Ness, goblins, ghouls, nor zombies (with or without a conscience)
Kia ora koutou
I hope everyone is keeping the garlic and stakes on hand. We’re right in the depths of the scariest month of the year.
During my last week of viewing, I have been treated to:
- Day 15 - Draculas
- Day 16 - Mermaids
- Day 17 - Grim reapers
- Day 18 - Dark magicians
- Day 19 - Blaculas
- Day 20 - A different kind of Dracula
- Day 21 - Aristocratic sickos (but not the Dracula kind)
Outside my scheduled viewing, through sheer coincidence I ended up watching two excellent 2024 films about a very different kind of monster: President Donald J Trump.
Since 2016, American culture has been lousy with attempts to interrogate the meaning behind the election of a disgusting racist game show host to the highest office of the land. Most of this ‘soul-searching’ comes across as completely solipsistic and misguided from an outside perspective. For a recent example of a filmmaker looking at Donald Trump and drawing insane conclusions, look no further than Megalopolis. Of course, anyone who has so much as a rudimentary understanding of history will understand that Trump is a quintessentially American figure, not some sort of aberration from a noble experiment gone awry.
The Phantom of Mar-o-Lago is YouTuber extraordinaire Vic Berger’s compilation of material from the last four years of Trump. As the title suggests, it uses the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (and formative Trump text) as a lens for viewing the former President. Like the Phantom, he is a grotesque monster stalking the grounds of a grand old building but Berger pushes it from tragedy all the way into farce.
Then there is Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, a film I was fully prepared to hate but was pleasantly surprised by. Abbasi brings a valuable non-American (Iranian-Danish) perspective to Trump’s 1970s and 1980s rise that, more than anything else, plays like a Frankenstein story. As Roy Cohn, Jeremy Strong is a sort of mad scientist who creates the monster (Sebastian Stan) before losing control of him. Crucially, Trump doesn’t come out of nowhere but is cobbled together from existing pieces of American conservatism and weird New York culture. There is no Hamiltonian reverence for pre-Trump America here, it is just as gross and tacky and offputting as it needs to be.
See you next week.
Ngā mihi nui
Johnny
