Tom Talks about Some Stuff He Watched
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Hey Sicko fans.
As you may know, we are taking a Sicko Break this week due to Joe (test subject #138412) having to take a series of joke pills that scientists made as a prank in order to give him side effects that make him yell like Tom and Jerry.
Rather than have nothing at all for this week, I wrote about some shit I’ve been watching recently. Read on if you choose.
Tom Watched The Last Duel
Content warning: sexual violence
So I watched The Last Duel and it’s great! I can hardly think of a film more needlessly dumped on by “the discourse.”
You may remember I wrote long ago in another newsletter about “The Duellists,” a 1977 film that was Ridley Scott’s debut feature, in which two French maniacs ruin their lives for no reason. When I first heard about The Last Duel I was like holy shit, Scott is returning to his “French freaks dueling” roots! I wonder if people are going to make that connection. Well, fuckin no! They didn't, so now I have to.
The Duellists was good but pretty silly and slight—the characters didn’t have a ton of depth and one of the two main guys actually does not want to duel at all which undercuts the message. The Last Duel so strongly reads as “the fixed version,” where Scott returns to the same themes but is so much better as a filmmaker and artist and is thus able to hit a home run where he previously hit a line drive single.
So I gotta talk about the backlash—which as far as I can determine, was precipitated as a punishment for Scott saying in an interview that The Last Duel flopped because millennials are always on their damn phones. This is self-evidently a dumb Boomer thing to say, but Scott is a rich old Boomer, so it’s hardly surprising. The truth is that The Last Duel flopped because it’s an intentionally unpleasant story about history guys that came out only in theaters during Covid. Like come on. How was that ever going to make even one dollar.
The backlash seemed to revolve around two things—One: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck look stupid as history guys. Matt Damon’s hair is stupid (it is). Two: This is the big one—that the movie is bad because it centers around a violent sexual assault that is shown on-screen twice. Many accusations of being “rape Rashomon” where a male director is luridly using sexual violence as a catalyst in a man’s story, needlessly depicting it onscreen when it could have been simply alluded to or omitted entirely.
For the first, yes. Matt Damon’s hair is very stupid. His character is kind of a blundering, thudding dumbass who is constantly getting steamed up and behaving in the stupidest way. The hair suits him. Ben Affleck’s blonde dye job looks terrible but he’s also giving one of the best performances of his career so I don’t mind too much.
The second? Well, I sure understand if someone does not want to watch this movie because of the sexual violence it shows. It is *intensely* painful to watch. If that sounds like a dealbreaker to you, you are inarguably correct to not watch this movie. But to say that it is gratuitous or lurid or somehow not worth making art about is not correct. It is the heart of the movie and could not be removed. It is the dark sun everything else revolves around. It’s not fun. It doesn’t feel good. It infects everything with a sick, scary energy. This is by design and it makes for a fascinating film.
A major theme of The Duellists was the exposure of chivalry, nobility, etc as fundamentally fake concepts. The duels depicted were not honorable, necessary, or fought by exceptional men. The masculine ideals that drove the characters into these violent clashes are comically stupid—so much so the film suffers as a drama as it becomes silly.
This same theme hits so much harder in the Last Duel. This shit isn’t silly. It paints a hideous, heaving portrait of the sickness and cruelty in the hearts of men, and the key difference that allows it to succeed in this way is that the story is no longer about the two guys dueling (when a story is about two French freaks who want to swordfight in the mud, it’s always gonna be a bit silly). It’s actually about Lady Marguerite, the person whose life is torn apart by the power structures that favor the violent idiots who surround her.
The movie is presented Rashomon-style, where we get three views of the events leading up to the titular duel (I’m going to just use the actors’ names rather than the characters’ French names).
Matt Damon’s view shows him as a pure-hearted knight who is fated to be wronged and cheated by evil men, whose best friend Adam Driver begins to sneer and disrespect him for no reason! When his beloved wife Marguerite informs him that Driver raped her while he was away, he does what any loving husband would do and demands a duel to the death so the villain will pay.
Driver’s view shows Matt Damon as the dumbest man alive, a meathead who sucks at everything except swordfighting and is a bore to be around. Driver gets in good with the local Count Ben Affleck who loves to be an asshole and fuck babes. All the babes think Driver is hot so he’s out having fun fucking all the time with his bros and is known to be a big time ladies’ man. He meets Damon’s wife and she’s giving him eyes—he’s done this dance a million times before. She obviously wants him because how could she prefer a clod like Damon to him? He falls for her after some brief conversations at a party, so he comes to her house when she’s alone and they play a sexy little roleplay game where she’s the shy noble lady too scared to confess her feelings and they fuck. In his view, this was a real expression of love.
Then we get “the true version,” where Jodie Comer (Lady Marguerite) is a woman who spends all her life getting passed around between dullards and dunces who never speak to her like a human being. Her husband Matt Damon isn’t bad, exactly, but he barely talks to her for more than a moment, and rarely about anything other than when she’s going to produce an heir. When Driver comes to her house, the events we see are nauseating—there is no chance this was a little sexy game. It was bad before, but now it is hideous, brutal, and shattering.
And it needs to be! Because we viscerally experience the truth, it makes the men’s behavior all the more vile. The men in the movie do what the film itself is accused of—they think of this as the catalyst in their own stories! I mean consider the structure of the movie: we literally see “their own stories,” and folks, they think it’s a catalyst! Damon thinks this is his chance to strike back at the forces that unjustly wrong him. Driver thinks this is his annoying ex-friend trying to slander him because he’s desperate for some of his good fortune. Like in The Duellists, they allow their selfishness and stupidity to force them into violence they have convinced themselves is just and civilized—not only civilized, but noble! In the Duellists, we see this and go “haha, how dumb! They’re silly to do this” and that’s that. There’s not a ton of tragedy inherent to the duels because no one suffers because of them, other than the one duelist who is deep down a great guy and who doesn’t actually want to duel.
In The Last Duel, no one is deep down a great guy and they both want to duel. The themes become so, so much more powerful because we are centered not on the men but on Comer. She is the wronged party, not only by the sexual violence but by the duel and all it entails. The men doing the dueling don’t seem to notice or care that they are making her life hell. We see firsthand the life torn to shreds by their actions, how much pain she carries, how everyone she turns to for support meets her with indifference at best and hatred at worst. The consequences are written on her face in every scene—Comer really fucking nails this role. All the cast is excellent but she is on fire in this.
The titular duel kicks ass. As a piece of action filmmaking it’s supreme. You really feel the weight of the violence, it’s thrilling. But it’s also gross, muddy, and stupid. No one learns anything. By the end, even Comer wishes she had just stayed quiet about the whole thing rather than having to endure this. To the last, Driver denies, denies, denies (as his awful bro Ben Affleck advised) that he did anything even slightly wrong. In the end it’s just two guys wriggling in the dirt covered in blood killing each other while the person who actually suffered, for whom this actually put a crack in her soul, for whom no one would or could ever care to listen to, can do nothing but watch helplessly. It’s a hell of an image. It’s not fun, obviously, but as a piece of art it’s really something and very much worth watching if you feel that you’re capable of withstanding the images it contains. This shit is, unfortunately, timeless, and art deserves to be made about it, risky and dangerous as that may be, and in my view The Last Duel is an unambiguously Great Film.
Sickos Pickos
TOM’S PICKO: Watching magic tricks on Youtube
Penn and Teller are libertarian cranks but damn if their schtick doesn’t work 1000% on me. Anyway they have a show called “Fool Us” where magicians do a trick for them and they try to figure out how they did it. Ostensibly fooling them is “winning” but it really doesn’t matter, that’s just the hook they made up to get a network to agree to put a magic show on TV. The best tricks rarely fool them anyway since great magic is usually just guys doing 100-year-old methods they have practiced for 40 years and obviously Penn and Teller are going to know those.
Anyway when I see magic tricks I fucking hoot like an ape. I am the ideal rube for magic tricks. When the guy is about to reveal a card or something I start buggin out and when he does it I go nuts.
The show lets the magicians post their appearances on their channels so YouTube is full of dozens of these things. Holy shit it’s so good. I achieve a dog’s brain when I watch these and forget about capitalism. You do have to skip the introductory magician bio videos because they are the most horrific things ever made (it’s like if the contestant interviews on Jeopardy were also skits), and then also skip the interviews at the end because Alyson Hannigan is the worst TV host of all time.
These ones make me go fuckin nuts
well you just convinced me to put a movie I had not heard anything about (even the cursed disk horse) on my to-watch list!