Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 10/11/24

October Surprise edition

I hate that October has become such a mental health challenge for me. I used to spend hours planning and executing my Halloween costumes. I wish I had photos of them all, especially my Bruce Willis/Butch from the year Pulp Fiction came out. Instead, here’s a photo strip of me from around that time, circa 1994, taken at an Amy’s Ice Cream in Austin, Texas.

My god, I was pretty. Full of hope, of life, just happy to be in the world. This is me, in 2024, after the last twelve years of horribleness.

I think I speak for all of us here…

This shit has taken its toll on me, folks, and I know I’m not alone. My assortment of personal tragedies would be more than enough. I am emphatically not looking forward to my birthday this year. After Sonya’s death last year, on my birthday, it took me nine months to even start to feel normal again. I’ve been keeping a lid on it, for the most part, because no one wants to be that guy all the time.

Being able to write about the personal struggles: my own battle with obesity and depression, Cathy’s cancer diagnosis and passing, Sonya’s death last year, et.al. has been a much-needed pressure valve. I probably don’t tell you this enough, but I am eternally grateful for the space you give me to explore those thoughts.

All of that would be hard enough. But when you dump an election year into the mix, it becomes intolerable. Worse, the last three election cycles, starting in 2016, have aggravated and intensified and strained all of our personal relationships in one way or another. Just when you think it can't get any worse, someone says, "Hold my Tang, which isn’t really an Astronaut drink, because the moon landing was faked."

I can’t talk about it. Not here, not freely. I’m in a part of Texas that is so red, it’s considered crimson. How red is it? Back in 2008, the day after the election, the headline on the front page of the paper read “John McCain Gets 67% of the Vote in Wilbarger County.” No mention of Barak Obama, who just won the election. That’s how red.

Also, I’m in a part of Texas that considers grudge-holding to be an official rodeo event. There are people in this town who have not ever darkened the door of a business because their father had a fight with the shopkeeper’s father back in 1952, and by God, they are still waiting on an apology. I’ve never seen people more eager to hang onto anger (not even their own) in my life.

Finally, let’s add in the carpetbagger that’s trying to get re-elected. I’m not going to call him a Republican because he’s not one. He’s also not conservative. But he’s sure got a way of talking, don’t he? He’s great with the ol’ appeal to authority. The condescension and the pithy little nicknames. “Talking out of your ass” used to be a bad thing. But not this tube of toothpaste, nosiree. His constant eructation is a feature, not a bug. It’s evidently the greatest thing ever when he muses, out loud, into a hot microphone, about what might be possible when you inject yourself with bleach.

I’ve never liked him. He’s never been someone I took seriously. What self-respecting New Yorker would agree to be in a series of ads for Pizza Hut? That’s like Nolan Ryan doing an ad for White Castle. He’s always been, at best, a charming huckster. That is, until he started this campaign to discredit an American citizen. It’s been his go-to, his pivot, ever since.

That he has the ear of so many folks I love and respect has me baffled and confused. I have tried, so hard, to meet people halfway on this, but fear has a strong hold on people right now and they are grasping for anything that resembles a straw...like his stupid hair...okay, I’ll be nice. I’m particularly galled at having to always be the one to try and meet people in the middle. This whole “refusal to budge” stance on an issue is another big part of the problem.

See, I can’t say any of that out loud. Not here. People will boycott a business if they think you’re “one of them.” I think this is childish and impractical, especially in small towns, but there you go. Olympic-Level Grudge Holding that goes to eleven. What’s all the more galling about this is that most of the people in my community, even if they are voting a straight Republican ticket, aren’t bad people. They don’t hesitate to volunteer for community outreach. They do meaningful ministry, feeding people that need food. They give back to the city, they do for others without thinking, and they are genuinely nice people who have never had to think about what not voting a straight Republican ticket would look like. It’s a comforting process, to know that your decision is already kinda-sorta made for you. I feel like there’s still room for a discussion there.

The ones I am most worried about are the people who are refusing help because they think machines are controlling the weather. They are the ones that you can say anything to, and as long as it’s ostensibly about The Dems, The Libs, or Antifa, there’s nothing they won’t believe. Of course, there’s a child sex trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza parlor. Of COURSE the people for which gun control is a hot button topic went completely against their principles and orchestrated an assassination attempt. OF COURSE I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON, HERE. How do you have a rational conversation with that? How can you learn anything new when you know everything already?

When Janice told me she wanted to take the test to become a licensed voter registration volunteer, I was initially worried. We had a long talk about it and it took her a while to convince me that she wouldn’t be accosted by someone who thinks if she’s registering people to vote, it must be some Democrat Trickery to stuff the ballot boxes and steal another election. I even went with her on a couple of sits, only to be pleasantly bored by the whole thing. She signed a few people up, and looked up a few more to make sure their registration wasn’t expunged from the record (by our esteemed governor, a few months back). None of the documents in the gauntlet of forms that both she and the person registering had to sign had a box or a blank anywhere that required them to note their political affiliation. Just the standard array of personal information you might expect, like a driver’s license and a mailing address.

If you read the above and your first thought was, “That’s it!? See how easy it is to commit voter fraud?!” then I need you to take a deep breath and stop reading for a while. It’s one thing to have an intense conversation about what percentage of our taxes is allocated to military spending versus education spending. It’s quite another to insist that tax cuts are going to save us all from the horrors of Communism and by the way, the Democrats are performing sex-change operations in public schools now.

The last twelve years have done a number on all of us. Disproving conspiracy theories has become the default setting for political discourse. Remember when lying was a big deal? And yet, somehow, fact-checking an outrageous statement has become politicized. Why are there only two settings, believe everything that you are told, or believe none of it? When the creative class of the world lamented that grown-ups lacked a sense of wonder, trying to convince us that Jewish Space Lasers are real was not the whimsical indulgence of imagination we were talking about. If you’re going to pick a conspiracy theory to champion, at least pick something that won’t derail half of America. Did you know Paul McCartney died and they replaced him with a body double? Go take that one out for a spin and see how it feels.

I’m tired of all the fearmongering. Worse, I’m super tired of it actually working. Real people are getting hurt, getting killed, because of the crazy shit spilling out of Your Political Heroes’ mouths. Maybe you personally don’t really believe it, and have the smarts and the savvy to know when someone is speaking hyperbolically, but as we have seen, time and time again since the rise of the Tea Party, other people do take it seriously and at face value, and what’s more, they act on it.

I guess it’s nice to feel as if you’re being courted by these people. I remember how it felt when I watched Iron Man, and Captain America: The First Avenger and Ant-Man and I realized that they were making these movies specifically for my generation. It felt good to be ‘seen,’ you know? But twelve years later, we got Avengers: End Game and my era was done. Twelve years. A good run. Nothing to sneeze at. But a few of my ilk don’t want to admit that the MCU has moved on.

That must be what it feels like to follow some of these jackwagons on social media and see them giving voice to those thoughts you idly considered in the privacy of your own home before rejecting the idea, because Cousin Ralph was coming for Thanksgiving this year and he’s, you know, liberal and stuff, so it’s not worth bringing up. Only now it’s being brought up by this popular politician who is known for being a vile shit-stirrer, and then repeated every single media outlet for the subsequent 72-hour cycle. No that everyone is talking about it, surely it’s okay to bring up what they are talking about on social media, right? What harm could one little post do? Wait, hold on, Cousin Ralph just called me a Nazi and blocked me. He’s such a snowflake.

We’ve all been living like that for too long. I’ve got enough on my plate without having to tip-toe through a minefield of conversational tripwires and dodge the firehose of hot, buttered nonsense that the conspiracy theorists are shooting into the digital stream in real time. It was bad enough when we could all laugh at it. But now it’s become a daily disinformation campaign and it’s being fueled by the people we elected to represent us and improve our lives. How’s that working out for everyone?

People say we can’t get the genie back into that bottle. I don’t agree with that, but I also don’t know how we get back on the same page without some sweeping changes from several major sectors of modern-day life.

It doesn’t matter what I think. You’ve already made up your mind. Go vote early. In Texas, that starts October 21st. Get it out of the way. I’m sure planning to. It’s high time to take a step back and think about where we are and how we got there. It’s time to consider other possible reasons for our dilemma and how we can collectively address that. I know no one likes to admit they got something wrong, myself included. I’m not a genius, by any stretch of the imagination, unless we’re talking about being a Dungeon Master, and then I totally am. I don’t know everything. But I am convinced, by any conceivable metric you’d like to use, that there is no such fucking thing as Jewish Space Lasers and Government-Owned Weather Control Devices. On that hill, I am prepared to die. Come at me, Bro.

Or you can watch Ed Zitron talking about why the Internet is slowly dying and why we hate it:

If that’s not your jam, here’s a great video by Legal Eagle breaking down the 165-page Smith motions and moreover, why they are such a bombshell and the pretext under which they were filed:

Or maybe you’re one of those growing number of people who wants to see the electoral college changed or done away with. You need to go read this multi-state initiative and consider writing a letter.

I love you all. Even the weird ones. It’s hard enough to get through modern life at it stands. Let’s not make it any harder than it has to be. I just want to feel sad about real things. Maybe in 2025 we can get back to addressing actual problems that we can do something about. Big hint: it won’t be found in the basement of any pizza parlor on the Eastern Seaboard. It’ll be found inside your so-called Smart Phone.

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: everyone here in the DMR has agreed to keep the focus on horror movies for the month of October. If you have any requests for new or recent horror/suspense movies or TV shows that you’d like to see us deconstruct, please note this in the comments below. Thank you for your cooperation.

Hold Your Breath (Hulu)

Sarah Paulson stars as the beleaguered mother, trapped in the wilds of Oklahoma Dust Bowl in the 1930s, trying to stave off either madness or a supernatural entity that travels on the wind.

I think it’s great that an actor as well-regarded as Sarah Paulson would have a soft spot for horror and suspense projects, because she’s in a lot of them, and at this point, I’ll watch whatever she’s in as a result. That’s how I discovered Hold Your Breath, and my response was, “Oh, thank GOD Sarah Paulson has a horror movie out in October; otherwise, I don’t know what I’d do with myself." I watched the trailer and my first thought was, “It looks like they are borrowing some emotional connective tissue from The Wind, either the Scarborough novel or either movie (1928 and 2018, respectively). Needless to say, I was all in.

This movie starts with a jump cut, and I honestly thought the film had skipped forward ten minutes. Not so. It’s an abrupt opening scene, followed by about twenty-odd minutes of detective work wherein we are left to piece together the background, the set-up, and the plot, which does come online early in the process. In that twenty minutes when it would have been great to, Oh, I don’t know, establish an emotional connection with everyone important, I was instead trying to decide how real everything in this horror movie actually was.

I don’t mind when people take shortcuts to backstories in dialogue and flashback scenes, but those typically happen when the audience is on firmer ground and knows what world they are in and more or less what’s the point. Hold Your Breath can’t wait to get to the good stuff, and unfortunately, when the really creepy stuff starts happening and the haunt gets going, I did not care in the slightest. I kept expecting a twist or a fake-out, because a lot of the story seems to rest on the idea of someone being an unreliable narrator.

The whole movie doesn’t play very fair, which—to me, anways—cheapens the cares and the creepy moments. It’s a shame, too, because everyone in Hold Your Breath is acting their assess off. Everyone is really good in this film that has no emotional resonance other than, “Well, she’s a mom, so, you know, she cares about her kids and stuff.” I would love to see them take another crack at it. It needs five more minutes of connective tissue and a new, less clever, cut of the film.

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Hellboy: The Crooked Man (video on-demand)

Hellboy and Agent Song are stranded in Appalachia following a train wreck and there they encounter various locals, including the enigmatic Tom Ferrell as they deal with the menace of The Crooked Man.

This is the fourth (!) live action movie starring the world’s foremost paranormal investigator as created by Mike Mignola for Dark Horse Comics back in the early 1990s. He’s been one of my favorite characters and comic series ever since. As a movie property goes, Mignola has been lucky to attract writers and directors who seemed to really care about the comic and tried their best to get it right in the conversion from the page to the screen.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man was co-written by Mignola and author Christopher Golden, with whom Mignola has worked with many times before, and it’s also an adaptation of Mignola’s own comic series of the same name. As such, director Brian Taylor made the decision to shoot and edit this movie in the most Mignola-y way possible. There are several quick, poppy, jump-cuts between one scene and another, which may be contextually relevant or not, which is a thing Mignola does in his stories often. Taylor figured out how to put a Mignola inset shot into the movie. The whole film watches the way a Mignola Hellboy story reads.

The folk horror genre is on an upswing these last few years, and setting the story in Appalachia in the late 1950s puts some people in mind of Manly Wade Wellman, an author who wrote extensively in that sub-genre of horror. His character, Silver John, is a backwoods troubleshooter who walks from place to place with a silver-stringed guitar, helping people out with their ghost and demon problems. Hellboy: The Crooked Man is all of that and a bag of chips, thanks to the Tom Ferrell character who is no Silver John but clearly intended to be a affectionate nod. Jack Kesy may not have the overall size of Perlman’s or David Harbour’s Big Red, but he nails the silhouette of the character as Mignola draws him, with this massive barrel chest and these naturally slumped shoulders, which gives Hellboy a perpetually world-weary look.

I loved the movie. It’s got a lot of genuinely creepy moments in it and it fully embraces its comic book origins without simplifying or dumbing down the material. Right now it’s only available digitally, but I found it to be a delightful addition to the Halloween season. If you’re a fan of the comics, seek out Hellboy: The Crooked Man and revel in the obvious care and affection everyone in the production has for the B.P.R.D.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”