Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown: 1993, #100 - 91

 

Welcome all - this is the first entry in my attempt to review every song on every Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown (apart from the first three all-time countdowns) and, in the process, figure out when exactly it started to fall off a cliff. The rough format I'm going with is a general response to each song, attempting to draw together some collective insights along the way, followed by a general overview of what I've discovered along this journey so far. There is enough nostalgia for this period of music, even among Gen Zs today, that I don't completely feel like I'm blinded by nostalgia - things in the world of music, much as in the world of everything else, have gotten distinctly worse in the past thirty years. This series of blog posts is intended as an exploration of that decline. And also an exploration of why I've come to feel like there is a decline in a first place. Maybe I just have a chip on my shoulder, who knows. Let's dive into it.

 

The Triple J Hottest 100

 

In the wake of this year's ongoing, cyclical discussion about Australia Day, I've been revisiting the JJJ music countdown that has traditionally accompanied it (and which, for a lot of millennials, has been the only part of the day that's worth any amount of celebration). It has become a cliche to make fun of people who think the the Hottest 100 (and Triple J generally) went downhill at some indeterminate point at the past. For what it's worth, I'm one of those people with that belief, and I also happen to think said criticism has its roots in one of the worst Australian millennial cultural pathologies: that having strong opinions about any form of popular culture - music in particular - is pointless. It's just music, everyone has their own tastes, art is subjective, I'm very mature, etc. There are other commentators who think that more good alternative music is being produced now than ever, and who feel strongly about that. I don't particularly agree, but at least they're not elevating superficiality to the level of a virtue. If you're not passionate about music and you don't have hours of spare time each day to spend contemplating specifically what you want out of it, to construct your own philosophy of what music should be and what you want to hear, that's fine, but please do not stand in the way of the fanaticism of those of us who do. Being agreeable isn't moral, it's just a coping mechanism. Do you disagree with me about this? Good. Send me an email, it looks like we have some common ground.

Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street (2023)

 I'd heard this guy's name in the news from time to time during the financial crisis, and as a point of reference by political commentators I follow since, but I'd never looked into exactly who he was and the substance of what he did wrong. Joe Berlinger, who has taken a sea change from creating high-profile serial killer documentaries for Netflix, has put together a slow-burning, ultimately enthralling overview of Madoff as a person and the crimes he committed. In addition to a lot of entertaining, colourful commentary provided by a range of interested parties (including biographers, FBI agents, former employees and a mathematician who can hold a grudge), Berlinger also does a solid job of making Madoff's crime's comprehensible to the layman. There is something intrinsically satisfying about this: genuine educational content that strips away layers of artificially-imposed complexity and reveals the simple truth about a broad abuse of power. 

The con itself was actually just a very simple Ponzi scheme - Madoff always ran a legitimate business, but from early on would take on unofficial consultations for private investment portfolios. At one point, he simply stopped investing the money, and kept it for himself. At its peak, this led to Madoff managing billions of dollars belonging to clients from a broad range of backgrounds. When occasionally pressed for proof of financial transactions and investments, he would get people who worked for him to forge evidence. Most of the time, however, he leveraged his own prestige to attract clients and the associated exclusivity of his portfolio to ward off scrutiny. In one particularly damning example of this kind of manipulation, Madoff essentially took one of the few country clubs in Palm Beach, Florida that was open to Jews in the 1960s and '70s. (One interviewee entertainingly notes that success in Wall Street is measured by one's ability to spend half the year playing golf in Florida. He didn't mention Trump and he didn't need to.) In turn, he cultivated a sense of trust amongst its members in a place and time where they couldn't trust many others, and exploited that to get clients and enhance his own exclusivity. If you asked questions you were out. He used his personal magnetism to avoid serious scrutiny at various other points, at one point boldly making himself available, sans any team of lawyers, to a group of young forensic accountants appointed to audit his company by a regulatory agency, as the sole point of contact. This apparently had the effect of scaring them off from finding any serious indiscretions, though his prominence in said regulatory agencies and his ability to rub shoulders with their directors probably played a role as well.

The aforementioned admixture of personalities, both those profiled and those interviewed, adds a layer of richness to the documentary's proceedings. One highlight that stands out in my mind is the FBI agent who first approached Madoff's office and fancied himself an amateur art critic - the Lichtenstein prints of a bull by his desk, ostensibly referring to a bull market, he confidently describes as symbolic for 'bullshit,' and a large sculpture of a screw by the window means 'screw you.' This same guy channels another Bernie at the series's finish and unequivocally denounces the lack of consequences for the banks and other Wall Street institutions that profited from Madoff's ponzi scheme as unfair, as do most of the other interviewees. A Madoff biographer guides the series along with an impressive amount of detail about the man, from a surprisingly sympathetic perspective, but without losing sight of the seriousness of his failings. Harry Markopolos, a religiously committed nerdy forensic accountant and mathematician, discovered Madoff's ponzi scheme early on and pressed the regulatory agencies to do something about it for more than a decade, and remains bitter about the lack of accountability after finally been proven right. The unfiltered honesty of Markopolos and others interviewed, and the unvarnished honesty of the documentary's conclusion about the ecosystem that facilitated Madoff's crimes, makes the series watching in and of itself.

Some elements do not work particularly well, but I'm willing to be lenient given the number of terrible documentaries I've seen recently that do the same thing but worse. All re-enactments for documentaries are terrible, but there now  seems to be an expectation that they have them, and the ones produced for Madoff aren't as bad as they could have been. The silent, slow-motion shots of Madoff waltzing through his main floor on the Lipstick Building in Manhattan, magnanimous and supercilious, cigar firmly suckled, make the much more interesting real world feel sterile and Hollywood. The chosen actors look more like actors than real people, and ultimately less interesting, though with some interesting quirks of their own that don't quite fit. Joseph Scotto's sparkling white hairpiece, for instance, is much like an abstract sculpture you might find in the lobby of an office building in Manhattan. As Madoff gets older, it grows, in turn, more buoyant and luminescent. It looks like a unicorn's tail. Scotto is an odd choice to play Madoff - playing the man as though he's the lead in a biopic and, a la Al Pacino, seems to have decided to use the opportunity as an excuse to play to his own eccentricities and beats as an actor in lieu of truth to life. His Alan Rickman-esque acerbic self-possession and smugness doesn't quite match up with the Madoff we see in documentary footage, who came across as more charismatic, more gregariousness, his long-term con maintained behind a convincing, more personable veneer. If this was a movie about Madoff and Scotto walked into the frame I would immediately know he's the bad guy. If I was investing twenty million dollars in some behind-the-counter portfolio and this guy greeted me at the door of his office I would turn and run. And in reality that obviously wasn't what happened. People seemed to genuinely like Madoff - many of the investors and employees interviewed made efforts to separate the man himself from the crimes he committed, unable or unwilling to fully reconcile the two. 

 On the balance, however, Madoff was surprisingly entertaining - and insightful. Berlinger could have done more, and there's clearly a much broader world of corruption, which facilitated Madoff's ascension and took care of him until 2008, that isn't deal with by the series, but what it sets its eyes to is interesting enough to be worth a look.

The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

This review contains some Spoilers towards the end.

 

 The Pale Blue Eye is a beautifully-shot, thoughtfully-paced treatment of Louis Bayard's 2003 novel of the same name about Edgar Allan Poe's (fictional) involvement with a murder investigation as a cadet at the United States Military Academy in 1830. Shot against the backdrop of a rural New York winter, it progressively lays out of multiple threads of intrigue, all of which are treated seriously and with respect to the viewer's intelligence, and only falters in its attempt at resolving them in the film's final third. Retired detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is asked by the Academy's brass to investigate the recent desecration of a body of a cadet who had apparently committed suicide, and Landor soon meets Poe, played by Harry Melling as a morbid, naive youth with a sort of beatific expression on his face, and with an accent that, as an Australian, I don't feel qualified enough to comment on the authenticity of. Landor, whose motivations and past are presented ambiguously, takes something approaching a fatherly interest in Poe and recruits him to infiltrate a specific group of cadets whom he suspects as being involved in the dead cadet's mutilation, and possible murder. At the same time, the Captain (Simon McBurney) and Superintendent (Timothy Spall) of the Academy have a political interest in the case's quiet resolution - apparently several Senators would like to see it shut down - and put pressure on Landor to that effect. Another layer of complexity and ambiguity is presented by the Academy's coroner, Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), whose initial collegiality with Landor is soon undermined by seeming mistakes made in his own inquest, and whose colorfully dysfunctional family raise Landor's suspicions. His daughter (Lucy Boynton) is in fragile health and becomes the object of desire of the morbid Poe, while Marquis's wife is mercurially eccentric and his son is part of the cadre which Poe is tasked with infiltrating.

Director Scott Cooper and cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi shot this film in a captivatingly tranquil and subdued palette. The Pale Blue Eye is filled with scenes of snow-adorned forests, wooden cabins nestled by the Hudson River producing smoke and flickering lights, cadets in dress uniform wandering stiffly about stone barracks, as well as a particularly evocative candlelit tavern. Many conversations take place inside some dark, brown wooden building or other over a table lit only by candles, and the effect is startling, giving an atmosphere close to something like fantasy. These conversations often delve into the more fantastical, spiritual elements of the plot, while the film is brought back into sharp relief when Landor squabbles with the Captain and Superintendent in the coolly-lit, cavernous, not-quite-sterile government buildings of the Academy. Many of the actors, including Bale, accentuate these aspects of the film's aesthetic through underacting, some of the cadets almost whimpering their lines. Others, such Melling or Spall, deliver more expressive, mannered performances, with mixed results.

 Melling's eccentric interpretation of Bayard's interpretation of Poe is fun to begin with, and plays off Bale's underacting nicely, but - like the film as a whole - he struggles to use this framing of his character to get at the man that lies underneath. Poe has many entertaining intellectual conversations with Landor and others about poetry and death, and alongside his naivety and foppishness this provides an intriguing portrait of a sort of clueless literary outsider, incongruously compelled to train as a soldier. (In many respects, not in the least being his accent, the person Melling's Poe reminds me most of is the American political commentator Nathan J. Robinson). But, though he may explain to Lea Marquis that he believes death to be "poetry's most exulted theme," no rationale for this belief pierces his veneer of naivety, and that he is naive and wholesome at his core is demonstrated in the final third of the film (more on this later). His seeming compulsion to disclose upon meeting new people that he is regularly visited and guided by the ghost of his mother provokes some interesting reactions (in a brilliant scene, Lea stifles a laugh that could be either nervous, mocking or both upon hearing this, but seems to become fascinated with him soon after), and the ambiguity behind this in the context of the film adds a layer of depth to scenes where he or Landor wander through thick mist in the night, or the dark empty halls of the barracks. However, for all the (highly welcome) conversations about ideas, conflicting opinions on the role of poetry and national identity, Poe, through his actions, becomes shallower in line with the plot as it develops, and the motivations for his actions do not imply much more than the surface characterisation established earlier - of a weird-looking, put-upon intellectual twenty-something youth, out of his element, naive and possibly delusional, but with few hidden depths. By the end of the film it almost feels like an affected kookiness.

Landor is in the standard mould of the troubled outsider with a murky past, much like a classic Clint Eastwood role, and like Eastwood Bale uses the part as an opportunity to play to his strengths as a known quantity. Landor is moody, quietly acerbic, strangely serene, at times temperamental and arrogant but also sympathetic, with a sense of conviction. Bale handles all of this well and is magnetic enough to elevate the material, and the writing itself - for all of the characters in the first half of the film - is kept just ambiguous enough to hint at broader, unspoken relations and forces between them in the background of the plot. In many conversations you're never completely sure what either character is thinking, or what each thinks of the other, the sense of intrigue deepening with each scene. This ambiguity also applies to the ideas that the film seems interested in exploring - a man hangs himself in a military institution, but is also mutilated, and a cover-up is indicated but never explicitly stated as a suspicion; ghosts may or may not exist, and cult activity concerned with communicating with the Devil may just be a fascination with death not unlike that afflicting Poe, or it may have some sinister material basis; there are a few interesting overt discussions about religion and faith itself, its relevance and effectiveness.

However, for reasons best known to Scott Cooper (who wrote the screenplay), this layering of plot and characterisation and ambiguity is abandoned in the final third of the film, and the complex, shrouded motivations behind each characters' actions established earlier are each spelled out and resolved as if according to a set timeline. Mayber Cooper just got bored, perhaps there was some pressure from the studio to provide a quick, comprehensible solution. The narrative thread with Marquis family culminate in a scene where someone knocks over a candle, two major characters perish in the resulting fire and Landor has to hold Poe back from rushing into the flames himself. Does this sound familiar? This lends credence to the idea that Cooper either got bored or struggled to find a way to write the scene (or that Bayard faced the same dilemma) and instead drew straight from the Hollywood screenwriter book of forms to solve this problem (perhaps a deadline). This comes up again when Landor's motivations are explicitly spelled out in the film's final act. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's presented as troubled and volatile because his daughter was raped by a group of cadets and commits suicide. There are a couple of problems with this: one, as other critics have pointed out, this is something of a sexist cliche - a male character's aggrievement based on sexual violence directed towards a woman he's responsible for; another being that it reductively implies that his character traits have to be based on a specific act he's experienced divorced from other elements of the film's context. In the final third of the film Landon does have a run-in with the Captain and Superintendent, and explains his moral and ethical objections to the Academy in the way that it takes away "a young man's will, [...] fences him with regulations and rules, deprives him of reason, [and] makes him less human." This, however, is quickly forgotten, and any lingering hostility is dissolved in later scenes at the conclusion of the investigation. 

To compare another moody fictional detective, Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan's hostility to his superiors draws from a much deeper well - evidence is given for it, including his own mistreatment by the police force, personal tragedy in the line of work, his exhaustion with the job, and a more general, less easily articulated problem with authority and with himself. This makes the character and the films (particularly the first Dirty Harry) more involving to watch, and he comes across as more real and more nuanced as a consequence. His problems are never fully accounted for or resolved, and he remains mired in them, we only learn more about them and him during the course of the film. Christian Bale's Augustus Landor, however, is wrapped up neatly along with the plot. I don't think any loose ends after left by the film's conclusion - if there were any they would probably stand out as plot holes. Landor is even symbolically absolved of his sins by Poe burning his confession with a candle. Poe's own complexity is severely diluted through his display of moral outrage at Landor's crimes. One would think a morbidly inclined young intellectual like him would at least weigh up the morality of murder against the culpability of the institution of the military, which had so abused him as well, in the rape of Landor's daughter. But there is no discussion or argument about this, and Landor embraces Poe's naivety rather than pushing back against it. The screenwriting conventions used to paper over this feel familiar as well.

This isn't meant to be a complete takedown of the film. The Pale Blue Eye is still (in parts) a very well-made, intelligent, thoughtful murder-mystery, beautifully shot and with what seems to be rich attention to historical detail. It's much more interesting than Glass Onion, and I hope more films like it will be made. But I also hope that if other directors decide to make a similarly complicated literary adaption that they commit to it, and they expand the parameters of the narrative world at the film's conclusion rather than narrowing it.