The Garret

Instead of "a group of moderate Democrats [who] agreed to proceed without a guaranteed extension of health care subsidies . . . as Democrats have demanded for almost six weeks," I wish the papers would just print "strikebreakers."

I was thrilled to be informed last night of the new mapping of Roman roads, almost doubling the previously known mileage of the mid-second century CE. Naturally it has produced an interactive dataset, Itiner-e. I am waiting for the sea-roads to come online, but in the meantime I could walk from Durovernum to Segontium in about five days, more or less up the A5. Colpeper would flip. The smaller, less paved, less historically continuous routes are even neater, flooded under modern dams or trodden between the constellations of villas. "The roads are anywhere that the Romans walked."

Because it would otherwise have closed before I could see it, for the first time in five years and ten months I made it out to the MFA to see Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea, a meditation on marginalization, migration, and the sea as site of simultaneous beauty and atrocity pairing John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark (1778) and J. M. W. Turner's Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840) with Ayana V. Jackson's Some People Have Spiritual Eyes I & II (2020) and John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea (2015). This last is a three-screen video installation subtitled Oblique tales on the aquatic sublime, which turns out to mean a breath-stealing churn of jewel-like navigations from black smokers through kelp forests to polar sheets against which is always playing the human use of the sea as unrenewable dump-site, the extraction of furs and oils and the disposal of bodies including a reenactment of the Zong massacre as if captured in the same grainily archival footage as the foundering vessels of Vietnamese boat people or the winter hunting of bears at Spitsbergen, the floe-slither of seals, the shoal-flick of egrets, the unzipping of a whale aboard a modern factory ship and the head-on gaze of enslaved faces whose humanity has outlasted the scientific racism that commissioned their immortalization by daguerreotype. Periodically one or more of the panels fills with theatrically historical tableaux, seaward figures stranded among a litter of clocks and chairs, bicycles and bones, a pram, a golliwog doll. The aristocratically scarlet-coated, tricorned Black man who surmounts the foreshore like a traveler by Caspar David Friedrich is Olaudah Equiano, enigmatically presiding like the memory of the Middle Passage. The soundtrack similarly interweaves journalism and opera, Nietzsche and Woolf, Melville and Heathcote Williams. It runs 48 minutes and is a hypnotically visceral, gorgeously difficult watch. It doesn't hijack the static art so much as it seems to gather it up, like a great wave. That it is ten years old has outworn none of its urgency on colonialism, immigration, the environment; it hit me much harder than I had imagined and I do not regret it. The waves I grew up with always knock you down.

To my bitter disappointment, I could not get an adequate photo walking home after sunset with only my phone for a camera, but the combination of a local porch-hung pride flag with the action of the wind on its accompanying anatomical model left over from Halloween now produces what I feel would be a respectably Chuck Tingle title: Mooned by the Gay Skeleton.

Fear in the Night (1972) may be minor Hammer in the scheme of the studio and minor horror in its cast's CVs, but it is the rare slow-burn twist-based thriller that doesn't melt itself down for scrap in the third act and until then it does more than atmospherically mark time. It even manages some surprises, little inclusions of the unexpected. Befitting a genre predicated on warped psychologies, its foreseeable moves are all a little off the beam.

Part Gothic and part giallo, the screenplay by writer-director-producer Jimmy Sangster doesn't just forebode from the start with an eerily deserted glide through the autumn-blown grounds of a school concluding in the macabre enigma of a corpse by the football pitch, it scarcely bothers with establishing a premise when it can slap down its tropes like a misfortune of Tarot. Six months out from the breakdown whose psychiatric sessions intercut the present action like intrusive thoughts, newlywed Peggy Heller (Judy Geeson) hasn't even made it as far as the stockbroker Tudor of the public school where her husband Robert (Ralph Bates) contends with the lower fourth when her quiet evening of packing out her live-in situation is shattered by the terrifying break-in of a black-clad figure of whose assault no trace remains when she comes to, not even the prosthetic arm she wrenched off in her struggle. "No, it's not spoiled. It's just . . ." Not what she hoped for, this whirlwind honeymoon in a picturesquely mod-conned cottage when she wakes in the middle of the night to watch for movements in the ivy-wreathed shadows of the school she will explore by day, her champagne-soured choke-out memories tinting her encounters with the gentle-voiced headmaster Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing) and his brusquer wife Molly (Joan Collins) whose violently avant-garde sculptures are the discordant note in all the mellow panelled oak and clerestory reflections of school cups. The sounds of a Latin lesson echoing from a classroom with no one in it nudges the question of her sanity, or perhaps only the supernatural. Worse yet, a second visitation by her nighttime strangler provides no vindication when once again she can offer no proof of the attack beyond her distress that does not equal the signs of forced entry or even bruising. Tear-shocked under the weight of her husband's concern, Peggy clings to her terror like dreadful wreckage, disturbed if she does, endangered if she doesn't: "My imagination . . . He kept saying it must have been my imagination. Well, it couldn't have been my imagination. Could it?"

Fear in the Night is far from a film noir, but it leans into much of the same chilly sense of nightmare, the superficially ordinary charged with indescribable dread. To say that the headmaster discoursed on the therapeutic value of knots before addressing himself to the kerchief tangled in the heroine's hair does not convey the disorientating infusion of eroticism and detached courtliness in his manner, the tender vagueness in speaking of his students which may unsettle the audience more than the reveal of his black-gloved artificial hand. "Do you know that is the most difficult part? To make them want to learn?" To call her near-fatal miss by the headmaster's wife out shooting a rude welcome to the rust-brushed parkland underrates the brazenly personal and unaccountable hostility of the interaction, as territorially intimidating as the housewarming gift of the gorily potted rabbit that could just as easily have been Peggy's shining blonde head. "Well, why didn't you say so, my dear? I nearly made a widower out of you, Robert." Despite repeated invitations to dinner, it is impossible to picture them at the same table, a cracked Crocker-Harris, a brutal Diana. Even the never-named school seems to squint in and out of focus, a neglected exterior of moss-sponged brick and discolored plaster, interiorly spotless down to the neatly laid china and the matron-cornered beds, dust-sheeted in the dead days between terms and worth a quarter of a million according to Robert, who jokes wistfully about his own work-shyness compared with his employer's dedication: "I wish I had just half Carmichael's money . . . You do that every time I go off to work and I shan't go off to work." A unicorn of a husband for a frightened woman in cinema, he's supportive despite his acknowledged skepticism of an intruder right out of a horror comic, decisively reaching to ring the police when she reiterates the reality of her attack, but the suspicious viewer could make something of his very attentiveness, especially when it comes with its own lacunae—he refers to the retired maths master who had the cottage before them, but what exactly does he himself teach? The possibility of another strike from a half-mechanical strangler hangs in Chekhov's plain sight like the loaded shotgun in the Land Rover, but the real tension hums through the bare-branched days because even normal human conversations have a habit of skewing off true as if the world itself is slipping like a badly pasted advertisement. Peggy herself makes an unusual choice of woman in peril: she fits the outward profile with her small, fair looks and huge celadon eyes, but she does not give off an automatic sense of fragility or helplessness—she worked successfully as a carer—which means that to watch her terrorized does not register as the natural condition of a horror heroine, it feels violatingly wrong. Under other circumstances, we would not at all be surprised to see her defend herself with the gun she expressed real distaste for, unloading both barrels at point-blank range as if she'd held her own in a slasher movie before. That her efforts against her own panic are rewarded with nothing more than the advance of an apparent dead man behind his glasses splintered blind as some specter out of M. R. James feels like cheating; the question is on whose part.

( It's the end of term. )

Sangster had done much to form the iconic image of Hammer in the '50's with his Technicolor-shocker rewrites of Frankenstein and Dracula and Fear in the Night as his last effort for the studio was a much more subdued affair, although not blandly so. Veteran Hammer DP Arthur Grant gives the school a curiously, simultaneously vacant and vigilant look, so inhabited by absence that it would feel just as natural if it flashed over to ghosts. Shooting in the last rags of fall in Aldenham Country Park and what was just about to become Bhaktivedanta Manor provided a breath-fogged, brackenish palette against which anything bright—like blood—stands sharply out. One early shot of a service station in the mist of a greyed-out day should be merely establishing and feels instead like dissociation on the northbound M1. It fits with the elliptical editing of Peter Weatherley, which cuts actions as closely into one another as lost time until it can catch up at last to that rook-cawed, corpse-cold open in the pure singing of a punch line. Aside from the fact that it was taken years ago by an American B-noir, the title is almost misleadingly irrelevant, but the commitment of the cast and the odd, bleak artistry of the picture more than compensate for the fact that I would have called it End of Term. I watched it on Tubi, but it can be found just as freely on YouTube and the Internet Archive; it had gotten onto my radar years ago for Peter Cushing and I was prompted more recently toward it by the presence of Judy Geeson and Ralph Bates. It is small and weird and both qualities count for a lot with me. This end brought to you by my surprising backers at Patreon.

Construction on our street no longer even rates a jackhammer, it seems: the ponderously concrete-cracking blows reverberating directly across the road are the product of effectively punching the sidewalk with a backhoe. I have those mornings, too, but I don't make my neighbors listen to them. Facebook permanently deactivated my account in the night, deleting fourteen years' worth of memories, photos, conversations, connections, my profile picture on a mountainside in Vancouver. It is still nice to read political news that does not feel like the rear view of an event horizon. My plan for the rest of the day is heavily tilted toward returning from this afternoon's doctor's appointment and trying to sleep.

Having access this evening to a tableful of newspapers, I saw the front-page article in the Globe about the climatically imminent flooding of the Seaport and it was pretty much exactly like reading that water is wet. I still have difficulty regarding that neighborhood as a real part of Boston, not merely because of its glass-shelled gentrification but because it is even more obviously on loan from the sea than the rest of this flat gravel-fill town. As soon as there was sea-rise in the future, Boston was going to be under it, long before the governments and corporations of this world blew through the 1.5C deadline. I love the harborwalk and I have seen the harbor walking over it. Urban renewal was faster cash in the moment than streets that would not flood the next minute. I do not believe in the stupidest timeline because I was exposed too early to the folktale in which it could always be worse, but it is nonsensical and nightmarish to me that this is the one we are all trapped in. It is because the universe is an unjust place that so many in power are not found in the morning blue-lipped, salt-lunged, sea-strangled on land.

On the other hand, tonight I watched Hestia trot over to spatch's new computer on which was still stuck the silver-paper bow of its early holiday present and pluck it in passing, after which she hunted it up and down the front hall with much batting and biting and singing the high, clear song to her prey which is usually reserved for socks. Decades after bouncing off all the George Eliot I tried after Silas Marner (1861), I seem to be embedded in Middlemarch (1872). It washed out my plans for the day which I then did little with, but I slept a generally assessed normal number of hours.

I have joked for years about my paper gaydar, an improvement on my previous gaydar of a rock, but a viewer should not need even the gaydar of scissors to appreciate the rarity and joy of the happy ending granted its candidly queer couple by the semi-precious shoestring gem of Girl Stroke Boy (1971). It has as little time for coding as for pleas for tolerance when it can have a snow fight instead. Especially in these ever more gender-essentialist days, its cheerful one in the eye for cisheteronormativity feels more than historically affirming.

Queering its social message conventions from jump, the film wastes no time setting the outrageous scene: the straight, white, snowbound middle-class home which a jam in the central heating has rendered a sort of Buñuelian steambath of locked windows, stuck doors, and taps that burn to the touch in which George and Lettice Mason (Michael Hordern and Joan Greenwood) are literally sweating the arrival of their adult son with his girlfriend, a momentous day for a household that has not so covertly worried about his sexuality for years. "Mallinson, you know, woodwork and biology, said that Laurie was the only boy in the class who never giggled during sex instruction." He's never had a girl that his parents know about, much less brought one home to meet them. Anyone expecting a white wedding reset to straight time, however, should clutch their pearls now because while the Masons have braced their suburban sensibilities for the daughter of a West Indian High Commissioner, at the sight of the resplendently femme Jo Delaney (Peter Straker) with her soft midi-Afro and fashionably leopard-lined eyes and several inches on their son even without the go-go heels, their social script drops all its pages on the floor. The appalling scribble shoved by Lettice at her mortified husband says it all: Is it a man? To the credit of the lovers, neither of them has walked into this ordeal unprepared. Fresh out of hospital for some unspecified crack-up which may have boiled down to contact with his family, Laurie (Clive Francis) is fair and fragile and sardonic and devoted to Jo, emphasizing her pronouns with dry unexpected firmness where he remarks ruefully of himself, "Mother really wanted a romantic hero for a son. I must have been a terrible disappointment." Jo kisses him lightly but meaningfully on the cheek; her own introductory act after an altercation with the radiator is a grave, sly fumigation of the parlor with her cologne, sounding out the local density of whiteness with icebreakers of mud huts and Tarzan. They may have an ally in George, the beleaguered secondary modern school head whose air of vague acquiescence to the absurd suggests an openness to new ideas so long as his instinct to please everyone doesn't strand him on the side of the status quo. "Your father's all right. I like him. Well, the bits of him that she's left." The problem is Lettice, the tiny, implacable romance writer who plumes herself on her progressive bona fides while blithely describing the heroine of her latest novel as an "octaroon" and professes confidence in her son with the lethal encouragement, "Darling boy, I hope you'll always do exactly what you think is right, after first having talked it over with me." Her conversation is a textbook in transmisogynoir, starting at microaggressions about spices and hair and spiraling into the ludicrous yet all too real determination to prove the masculinity of her son's girlfriend as if it would be news to him, the virginal innocent deceived. Her eye on the position of the toilet seat would challenge a cat at a mousehole. Her baited hooks on the natures of the sexes are as uncalled-for as they are off-base. At least when she bullies her inarticulately uncomfortable husband into dialing the Delaneys (Rudolph Walker and Elisabeth Welch) at their official address in Belgrave Square, the inappropriateness of her enquiry provokes the clapback it deserves: confused, scandalized, and inevitably, "Is that girl Laurie a boy?"

As a comedy of manners whose joke is not after all on the outré intersections but the straight and exceeding narrow, Girl Stroke Boy is an amazing transmission from 1971. As an experience of cinema, it's a more awkward proposition. Director Bob Kellett was an accomplished farceur and it's a clever reversal to play the cishet older generation for burlesque while allowing the queer young lovers to be the mimetically textured pair, but since most of the scenes are four-handers, the tonal results are uneven and the shedload of transphobia can wear on the viewer even when it is visibly, risibly in the wrong. It would slice the 86-minute runtime in half, but no member of the audience who ever once had to grit their teeth through misgendering, passive-aggression, or just plain familial rudeness would fault Jo and Laurie for lighting out for London in the middle of the night. What saves the film is that it is always on the side of the lovers, especially the self-possessed Jo who meets this nightmare-in-law with the grace and fierceness of someone long past needing to explain herself, if she ever did. "Well, there's at least six couples in my block of flats that don't agree." She is never treated as a trap or a riddle, her femininely tilted presentation as drag or a gag or an effort at heterosexual camouflage. Beyond her portrayal by a cis male actor, the character can be textually confirmed as AMAB and so what? Both she and her boyfriend arrived as flamboyantly as if they had heisted half of Carnaby Street on their way out to Shenley Hill and it just happens that she's minimally accessorized with polished nails and her mod handbag and a silver labrys pendant when she says bluntly across the breakfast table, "Sex isn't what you wear. It's not being face up or face down in bed. Nowadays it's simply a matter of personality . . . Look, who gives a hell whether it's a girl or a boy? We're all a bit of both, aren't we, Mrs Mason? I bet you don't get many absolute heteros in your school." Full Judith Butler ahead, gender as performance does not require conformation to its most stereotypical signifiers. Jo's level-headedness does not invalidate her femininity any more than her light-chested voice, any more than Laurie should be considered less of a man just because his sharp-tongued inclination to put in his oar casts him fairly as the bitchier of the two. Certainly the higher-strung, he channels the audience's own incredulity in the face of a delusion that might nowadays call itself gender-critical feminism: "Mother dear, doesn't it ever occur to you that I might know everything that she is and isn't by now? I know that she's never going to beat you at Scrabble. I know that she's never going to be Home Counties Badminton Champion or President of your Needlewomen's Guild or good at church flower decoration—" The most extensive meditations on sexuality and gender are not loaded onto the queer characters, however, but free-associated by the heat-rumpled George as he botches his way toward acceptance through a waveringly touching mix of conviction and cluelessness, early on throwing down the unprecedented gauntlet of "Laurie says she's a woman, she says she's a woman. With such evidence, I am prepared to take her femininity on trust," and even after his wife has browbeaten him to accept her conclusion of the assembled facts, holding his ground as if somewhat surprised to find himself standing on it:

"Whatever my son's taste in sex, I'm not ashamed of him. If Jo is a man, I don't think I'm disgusted. If they have a taste for one another and it adds to their life, then as far as I'm concerned they can be as loving as they like. We're none of us so normal, so self-dependent that we can turn down all the good sex that comes our way—or the chance of having someone to love us. Don't you agree? I don't give a damn if she's a man. If she is, she's a jolly good chap."

Coming from a father so generally, pricelessly flustered that he fumbled which sexual orientation he was supposed to be championing in the clinch, it's an extraordinary statement. It is not at all clear that he has a real handle on the concepts of sex and gender that he mangles so magnificently together in his last word and it doesn't matter. Jo was right to single him out for a sotto voce appeal for support. Quite a lot of parents in 2025 can't get as far.

( And no one is coming to dinner tonight! )

The title remains unfortunate. Girl/Boy obviously plays on the perceived ambiguity of Jo as well as her pairing with Laurie, but it's naughtier than it needs to be when spelled out; it misserves a film that is relaxingly, radically matter-of-fact about the presentation of its lovers. I cannot speak to the stage source material of David Percival's Girlfriend (1970), but the screenplay by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin steers remarkably clear of sad, hysterical, desexualized queer clichés while its intimacy is sexily, dreamily limned in montages of languorous heat and playful cold by DP Ian Wilson who would later shoot both Edward II (1991) for Derek Jarman and The Crying Game (1992) for Neil Jordan, the latter of which reassured me that I had not been reminded occasionally of Jaye Davidson's Dil by Straker's Jo only through the common ground of transfeminine Blackness. One especially lovely composition offsets her with orchids in the conservatory, a sensuous one intertwines their fingers over the curves of a tiger cowrie and interchanges their profiles like coins, a droller one cages the Masons behind the rungs of a ladder as they attempt to extol the virtues of heterosexuality to an openly hilarious Jo and a Laurie who looks distinctly as though checking himself back into hospital would be less of a strain on his disbelief. "Dad, is this what is called a man-to-man talk?" So soon after decriminalization, so soon after Stonewall, the film shows no self-consciousness or sensationalism over the kisses and embraces of a pair of actors, their stymied efforts at lovemaking. They touch one another with casual affection, sometimes with active desire, sometimes in defiant, assertive display. They are not a perfect couple. On the floor in front of the opened refrigerator on the theory that it should be the one place in the house cool enough to fuck, they briefly fight instead, the mood spiked by the cramp in his calf and her discomfort in the fish-fry heat even before his territorial nerves irritate her into an allusion to some past sexual failure and just a moment ago they were lying so comfortably together even in the horrible wicker of the guest bed, it's a relief to the viewer when they manage to laugh it out and get on with the getting off. "Not so loud! Look, I can't put a notice on the door—coitus don't-interrupt-us." It makes them more real, less like any idea of representation beyond the fact of their love for one another, their individual quirks, and the genuine stress of spending any kind of night in a house containing racist knick-knacks and a TERF. "It's like having it off in the British Museum!" Structurally, the interracial angle is submerged almost at once in the gender trouble, but it does persist in the reality of their relationship and it's pleasant to see just how much of an issue it isn't for Jo and Laurie, an entire other message picture dodged. That said, I had no idea a film had been released ten years before my birth in which a character defends their partner's pronouns to their parents, giving yet another lie to this tsunami of transphobia currently swamping the U.S. and the UK. The arc of the moral universe could tesser any time now.

I had no idea about this film, period, and in its small, contrary way, sometimes well-made and sometimes wobbly and often suggesting that someone forgot to fetch the budget out of the boot of the car—it was shot in two weeks in an actual house credited to "Faggot's End," which looks in real life like Faggotts Close—it may be important beyond its apparent premise of Guess If Pat's Coming to Dinner. I found it in the filmography of Clive Francis and then on MyFlixer, although if you prefer not to wrestle with the necessity of adblock it can be more usually streamed and against all odds exists on a rather handsome Indicator Blu-Ray. I wouldn't hold it against any viewer not to want to spend a weekend melting with the Masons, but my hard sell on romance had no defenses against Laurie and Jo with their in-jokes and frank sex talk and soft gestures of loving, their astringent and forthright complement that I imagine made them treasures of elder queerhood. "We care for each other. We show others we care. Isn't that how it's done?" And let them still be doing it, onscreen and off. This personality brought to you by my absolute backers at Patreon.

Happy Halloween! Having not slept for a variety of stupid reasons, I am appearing this year as the world's most tired Green Man.

As part of my birthday month, spatch just presented me with a little black cat bag containing the Criterion flash sale fruits of Orson Welles' The Immortal Story (1968), which I had loved at the start of this month.



I just want an extra week in the month to do nothing but sleep instead of talking to doctors and bureaucracies. I can't believe we are almost out of October. It should be an inexhaustible resource.