Time moves in one direction only

I intensely dislike "vaguebooking," and I very, very rarely do it, but occasionally it's what's required. If I were to do it now, for instance, what I might say is this—I have another two and a half years to go before I'm declared "cured" of my cancer; until then, my life revolves around biannual scans and tests, and daily monitoring of my body, including a reflexive, sinking dread at the appearance of any unexplained pain, swelling, or fever. It's tiresome, believe me. I lost two creative years of my writing life while I was undergoing six operations and months of chemotherapy, but I was still able to get a book out this past summer. I'm low-key fighting to stay alive and to leave a few more books behind in case I fail. I don't have time for Internet drama, or ugly, spiteful chatterbox personal gossip on social media. Literally all I have time for is my husband of almost forty years, the final months of my Labrador Beckett's life, my family of the heart, my godchildren, my mentees, my wonderful real friends, my work, and my gratitude for all of it. You know, real-life shit. Also, I am sixty-two years old, and time moves in one direction only. Attempts by silly, self-important members of self-appointed cliques to drag me into their low-rent, sub-par social media backstabbing campaigns, or lies, or gutter-trash character assassinations, will be met with a polite, but firm, "no thank you," and a sincerely meant query regarding why my engager doesn't seem to have a life of his/her/their own—a life worth curating in an intelligent, creative, positive, loving way. C'est tout.

It's such a perfect day

 

It's been pretty much my most favourite kind of Toronto November Saturday afternoon, cold enough for my purple scarf.

Brunch with Dexter to go over his new student film concept, and get his impressions of his first Halloween in the city (he loved it, particularly the Church Street festivities, which he attended with his girlfriend and some friends from his film program at TMU.)

After lunch, I headed uptown to check out the explosion of Christmas decor that has bloomed since Halloween. I joke about it, but it's really quite beautiful. I came across a young writer sitting at a table in a busy bookstore signing his novel. We chatted, and I bought one—we've all been behind that table with a stack of our books with people milling around without stopping. I'm looking forward to digging in

The weather was classic fall—bright, cold, with intense colour. It was an easy day to love my fellow man; all of them I passed on the way home. The achingly attractive young couples and their model-looking children; the elderly couples, still obviously in love; the roving packs of teens, who seem to move their arms like propellers as they storm along the sidewalk; the blissed out middle-aged man trailing the scent of a marijuana behind him like a sail; all the small dogs walking their owners around downtown like publicists.

I stopped in at Glad Day Books on Church Street to have one of their delicious lavender lattes and check my email before the last stretch of the walk home.

As I sipped my latte and scrolled, a pair of studious looking queer teens explored the shelves upon which I wish there were more books. I loved their ease in that milieu, an ease that was literally inconceivable in, say, 1978, when I was their age.

"Nobody is 'born that way!'" hiss the religious fanatics and the political LGBTQ-phobes, two groups that intersect too often for my comfort. The answer to them is: "Sure they are. The trick is keeping them alive long enough to be strong enough to deal with you folks the way you deserve to be dealt with." (And, to the rest of us, write books for them.)

You need to be open to the magic of radiant, hard-blue, sourball-coloured autumn days like this, the same way you need to be open to love. If not, the perfection is so easy to miss.

Ron Oliver profile by Maddy Mahoney in Toronto Life

 This superb profile of my friend Ron Oliver in the November issue of Toronto Life is now online. Enjoy! 

https://torontolife.com/deep-dives/quality-trash-director-ron-oliver-hallmarks-king-of-schmaltz/

My American grandmother

 

My American grandmother, Alvina Becker Hardt, born in Alsace-Lorraine, Germany in 1902, at the very dawn of the 20th century, has been on my mind all day, almost as though her ghost has decided to pay me a visit. I half expect a drift of her perfume in empty rooms. I named the town on Alvina, Ontario in Wild Fell after her. Some of my most cherished early childhood memories are of her, her soft arms and hands, her thick German accent, the scent of her (very German) cooking, her occasionally florid emotionality, and mostly her utter delight in, and kindness towards me as a small gender-variant child. All my life I have not been able to shake the sense that my grandmother would not only have been OK with my queerness, but also that she saw it clearly before most people did, and wrapped it in a soft pink cloud of understanding, even protectiveness. I am gently and lovingly envious of my cousin Kimberley, who was able to spend more time with Grandma Hardt, and was the beneficiary of many of the things she had to teach, and her stories. Alvina died on May 23rd, 1976, while were living in Geneva. My mother must have gone back for the funeral, but I have no actual memory of her making that voyage back across the Atlantic. Childhood memories are odd things; but I will remember Alvina's tender touch until the day I die. This photograph of her was taken in our back yard in Ottawa, probably in the summer of 1972, with our Norwegian Elkhound, Prince. I cherish it for so many reasons.

Nova Scotia Thanksgiving, 2024

Tricked out in my white canvas Tilly hat like Jessica Fletcher off to solve a mystery on my annual pre-dinner Thanksgiving perambulation out past the salt marsh and the marina. The colours are a little late this year, after a warmer autumn than usual, but the cold salt breeze coming in off the water is absolutely autumnal and bracing. The sky is dazzling blue, almost painfully so.

I watched an eagle circle lazily above the trees bordering some brackish water, and on the way there, I watched two blue jays gamboling among the red leaves on infant maple leaves in the scrub forest and random splashes of red sumach.

This annual walk of mine is almost a religious pilgrimage—I took it in countryside out by the lake back in the days when we spent family Thanksgiving in Ontario. I always take it alone. It's me, communing with the beauty and silence of that natural world. It feels almost more meaningful here in Nova Scotia because the ocean makes it sacred somehow., as it has ever since I was a very small child on the Mediterranean coast, in Beirut.

I'm still high from last night at the dance at the Shore Club in Hubbards (an experience probably worth its own essay at some point, and one which engendered more joy than even I fully expected) and watching my beautiful goddaughter, Kate, as an adult among adults for perhaps the first real time; she's clearly inherited her mother's ability to own a dance floor—Kath, on a dance floor, is a vision. Of course I miss my godson Michael, who is not with us this year, but I carry the kids with me everywhere I go, in my heart. They're never far from me.

Quite apart from the utterly perfect Maritime authenticity of the spectacle in which I was fully participating, the delight of this mixed-age, mixed-skill crowd of celebrants dancing to the band was like oxygen I hadn't known I needed. Nova Scotia is good for the soul.

So much to give thanks for this year—good health, good marriage, good family, good friends, and an utterly beautiful day in the most beautiful part of a beautiful country. Even the absence of far-away loved ones is a joy of sorts, because one is reminded of how lucky one is to have them to miss.

May you all be similarly blessed.

 

Happy publication day to Nick Pullen's THE BLACK HUNGER!

I hunted down my dear friend Nicholas Pullen's stellar debut The Black Hunger on this, the evening of his publication day. I've been involved with this brilliant book since its earliest manuscript days, and there was a certain profoundly moving associative pride in seeing it on the bookshelves at Indigo tonight. It's a glorious book, and I urge any aficionado of intelligent, articulate gothic horror to seek it out and take that dark journey with him. Bravo, Nick!
 

Kingston Writers Festival 2024, wrapped

 

With award-winning veteran broadcaster and author Carol Off, before we took the stage on Saturday night. [Photo: Bernard Clark Photography]

Signing after our panel, with political scientist Rob Goodman, author of Not Here: Why American Democracy Is Eroding and How Canada Can Protect Itself at the Kingston Writer's Festival on the evening of September 28th. [Photo: Bernard Clark Photography]

Watching the countryside scroll past the train window as I reflect on this wonderful, whirlwind weekend. After years of not by any necessity traveling to the city of Kingston, Ontario, this has been my third trip, all related to my work. The first was in February when I spoke to jack.org at Queen's University. The second trip was my first encounter with the Kingston Writer's Festival when they invited me out upon the publication of PRIDE in June. The third trip, this one felt a bit like coming home.

I was so privileged to share a stage with Ken McGoogan, Rob Goodman, and Carol Off, and to participate in such a vibrant, occasionally passionate discussion on the future of democracy in North America, and to find similar and sympathetic perspective among intellectuals whose work I respect.

I was also very grateful to the audience, who clearly took in what we had to say, and had insights of their own.

He will likely never read this, but thanks in particular to the Indigenous Canadian gentleman on Zoom who asked about the place of Indigenous representation in the mythology of Canada.

He gave us a great deal to think about, chiefly how essential that representation is, and how if any of us believe the stories we tell ourselves about Canada, there is no way forward for us as a people without that reconciliations. Our "classic" vision of Canada needs to be able to survive that reconciliation, and it will, because it's an essential component of everything we believe about Canada at its best.

And the folks running the Kingston Writer's Festival itself have never failed to make me feel anything but entirely welcome, and their grace under pressure is one of the wonders of the world, especially the literary world.

And on a personal note, it meant to world to me to have my beloved Mary Davis Little, the matriarch of my Kingston family, following along on Zoom, and to have my godson Michael—who's been very kind about his godfather writing about him all these years, and photographing him his entire life, likely ad nauseam—in the audience, not far from my Thursday Wife™ Jenny, who made the trip up from Toronto

2024 has been an exceptional year, and a striking contrast to the years it followed. I think I'm going to keep doing exactly what I'm doing, because it all seems to be working somehow.

Clouds

 

These exquisite Ontario early-autumn clouds through the windshield of Stephen's car, on the drive home from Orillia this afternoon struck me as particularly poignant after Jordan and Clémence's lovely wedding yesterday.

This morning, I got up for breakfast at the hotel, not because I was hungry but because I needed a great deal of coffee to move "this morning" out of the realm of "last night" and into the present, as I made rather merry over the course of Saturday night.

My last view of their wedding was the intoxicating one, a dance floor filled with people I've loved for years, as well as some glorious new folks who crossed my life last night, most of whom I will likely never see again, but some of whom I'll never forget.

Not a bad look backwards on the way to my room at the Marriott and my lovely bed, all told.

The breakfast room was packed with people from one of the other two weddings who'd billeted their guests there this weekend. None of them were from "our" wedding, but the sheer joy they were experiencing in each other's company was very affecting. I felt part of it because of "our" wedding's joy (so much joy, in fact, that a number of "our" guests seemed to be sleeping it off upstairs) which, I know, mirrored theirs. I enjoyed my passive participation in their pleasure immensely.

Tomorrow I'll celebrate another trip around the sun. One of the great gifts of having so many of those trips under my belt by now has been the soul-igniting joy of watching the cycles of life open up in front of me like a sped-up stop-motion film of the life cycles of flowers.

In the photograph of me with Ben and Stephen yesterday, I was struck by a certain avuncular stolidity that seems to have set in. It's appropriate, and it feels good. It suits me, even it I can remember how jarring it might have been as recently as five years ago.

Likewise the bride and groom, and their/our younger friends—some of whom I vividly remember when they seemed as dewy and post-born as baby seals—have grown, and solidified into secure, confident, and rooted, strong, intelligent, loving adults.

We are, all of us, exactly where we should be in the panoply of events and experiences that being alive stitches together into the quilt that is life. There's so much beauty, and it's so very easy to miss if you're not watching for it.

Weddings can be a mixed bag, as I discussed with the other queer couple at yesterday's, but at their absolute best, we agreed, they can be a pageant that celebrates the very best of what makes us human—the cycles of life itself, and the joy of one naturally evolving into the next.

Between the 89-year old grandmother cutting up the dance floor, and the three and a half-year old for whom the entire floor of the banquet hall must have looked liked the most exciting runway they'd ever seen, and all of us at various mileposts between them, everything just clicked. 

And it was all...perfect.

Coming to a writers festival near you

I opened a copy of the September/October issue of THE WALRUS this evening, and found this ad for our Kingston Writers Festival event on September 28th, "Election Year and the Fate of North American Democracy." Not a bad cap to an already entirely satisfying day.

Visitors from Jacksonville

Walking home tonight in the mercifully cooler night. It's been so humid that tonight, the t-shirt I wore to the gym was almost as damp as the one I took off after my workout.

Too, the AC at home has been busted for the past 5 days. As unpleasant has it's been for us, it was worse for old Beckett, who's been panting on the floor a lot more lately. But it got fixed tonight, thank God, and the house will be cooler when I get home.

I met a middle-aged tourist couple just north of the Marriott. The husband had the "dad" mien of a man who was used to knowing where he was, and how to get to where he wanted to go, brow furrowed, alternately glaring at his phone and looking around, trying to place himself. It's a visitor look I've seen a thousand times, especially in summer.

His wife was stunning. She had beautiful cornrows, green contact lenses, and a chunky diamanté pendant spelling out QUEEN in bold letters. In spite of decades of committed gayness, I confess my heart did the tiniest flip. There was a trail of Dior Addict perfume in the air when she moved,

I asked them politely I might help them find what they were looking for.

Unsurprisingly, the husband said they'd be fine, but the wife told me they'd seen a large Toronto sign on the way in from the airport, and were trying to find it. She thought it was nearby—was it? I told her it was a few blocks south, at Nathan Phillips Square. "Not too far to walk?" she asked. I assured her I'd just come from there.

"Welcome to Toronto," I said as they turned and prepared to walk the 3 or 4 blocks to the big Toronto sign.

The wife said, "We're from Jacksonville." She paused, then added "Florida," placing her hometown in case I wasn't sure which Jacksonville it might have been.

"You brought the weather with you!" I said brightly, with a general wave towards the drift of residual lower-hanging clouds.

"We're sorry," she said, smiling a smile so white and dazzling that my heart did that little flip again as she and her husband walked off, hand in hand, into the vast humid night twinkling with garlands of coloured neon lights.

 

Canada Day...out of town

 

Feeling a pressing need to spend this Canada Day outside of the city, the Hero MD™ and I drove deep into the countryside outside of Toronto, first north to Kleinburg, in then west towards Georgetown, specifically Norval, then back north again to Orangeville and Camilla.

I've been most positively marked in my life by the countryside, first as a child in Switzerland, then on the exquisite Western prairies during my high school years, then later with the Hero MD™ when we lived in Milton, before it became the sprawling, sclerotic suburb community it has since become. In the countryside, my blood pressure drops. The absence of my fellow man is a balm like no other, and there is something ineffably soothing about the miles of farmlands, forests, and blue skies.

The silence of the countryside isn't merely aural; you can feel it in your soul. And in the oddest way, it roots me in my family's Ontario history—a history that was never emphasized by my father, but which came to me in later life, and with which I connect, like WiFi, whenever I'm outside the demanding, even oppressive forcefield of Toronto, which has been my home for 42 years now. I love my "home" cities, here and abroad. They make sense to me, and I can navigate them with joy and ease. But the countryside is who I am when I'm most still, and most myself.

Today was a perfect example of that. The fireworks outside the house will probably blast on for hours yet—thank God Beckett is too ancient to be bothered by them. But I checked in with my country, and my roots, hours ago, and had a Canada Day that made sense to me, whoever (if anyone) else it might have made sense to, or not.

PRIDE in the Globe and Mail

 

This past weekend, the Globe and Mail ran a full page 800-word excerpt of my essay from Pride as an op-ed in the Opinion section, which is national. (For the benefit of our American friends and family, the Globe is Canada's equivalent to the New York Times.) I first saw my byline in print at age 15, in 'Teen magazine, on a newsstand at the Winnipeg bus depot in November 1977. I can remember that moment like it was yesterday, and even after all these decades, and the advent of online media, there is still nothing like seeing it in a physical newspaper or magazine. Years ago, my dad and I had a very earnest and serious talk about whether or not gay marriage would ever be legal—he emphatically believed it would not, certainly not in either of our lifetimes. As an ex-journalist himself, I wish he had lived to see this morning's Globe, and his son's words in it about the necessity of Pride. I know he would've loved it, even if the drag queens might've freaked him out a bit.

Sadly, it's that time of year again

 

Link to article here. 

Excerpt from PRIDE in today's TORONTO STAR, June 1st, 2024

 

Link to article here

CBC Metro Morning interview for PRIDE with Angel John Guerra, Friday May 31st, 2024

 

Interview link here. 

Happy (official) pub day, PRIDE

Happy (official) Publication Day to PRIDE! Our beautiful little jewel of a book (thanks, Douglas & McIntyre, you did us so proud!) is now available nationwide from all the usual suspects, including Amazon, in advance of its forthcoming availability in the U.S. this fall. Western Canadian friends, please consider purchasing your copy from McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg, a bookstore very close to my heart, and with whom I have a fond history (and who can ship books to eager U.S. friends who truly can’t wait till October.) My co-author Angel Guerra and I dearly hope that between my words and his pictures, our book might have something relevant to add to the ongoing dialogue about the state of the 2SLGBTQ+ community today; mostly, why our lives and histories—especially the lives and as yet unwritten histories of the precious queer youth coming up behind us—are worth all the vigilance and love we can muster, as well as all the joy and celebration Pride itself warrants.
 

Prudence Emery (1936-2024)

 

"Though the sex to which I belong is considered weak, you will nevertheless find me a rock that bends to no wind."

—Elizabeth I

[Prudence Emery photographed by Richard Paris, August 12th, 2016]

PRIDE in the wild

 

Defying the official publication date, which is April 27th, a few copies of PRIDE have snuck into key bookstores across this city. So lovely to visit "the kids" today in the 2SLGBTQ+ section of Indigo, both Bay/Bloor and the Eaton Centre. They'll be available for order on Amazon on the 27th within Canada (U.S. readers can pre-order for  the October U.S. release) and will trickle into bookstores across Canada during the next few weeks 

Author Copy Friday

 

Some thoughts on Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon's NEFARIOUS (2023)

 

Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon's R-rated Nefarious (2023), which I watched last night, is an interesting paradox—a beautifully acted and written, absolutely top-notch demonic possession horror film with wide genre appeal, written with a primarily Christian audience in mind.

You can easily imagine youth pastors all over America solemnly arranging viewings in church basements for their older teenage congregants, warning them grimly that while what they're about to see may frighten them, it's all scripturally sound and a dire warning about the state of worldliness, but it's still "just a movie," and reminding them that it was made by Christians, "so you're safe."

What makes it a paradox to me is that while Evangelical and Catholic audiences will doubtless have their "aha!" moments with predictable, near-epileptic regularity, any sophisticated horror viewer will be able to settle back into the exquisite writing, and particularly into the occasionally terrifying performance by Sean Patrick Flanery (whom I had not seen since he broke my heart as the eponymous star of 1995's Powder) as the possessed death row inmate Edward Wayne Brady.

The film is set at a prison in Oklahoma on the afternoon before Brady's execution for multiple murders. A psychiatrist, Dr. James Martin (Jordan Bell) has been brought in ascertain whether Brady, who claims to be a demon, is actually insane, in which case he would spared execution. All of which is a pretty standard death row horror movie setup.

What followed was extraordinary: an extended dialogue between the two men—the death row inmate with the odd twitch and the rough, bulky mannerisms of a dockworker speaking in perfectly crafted sentences, exhibiting a vast knowledge of theology and Christian mythology, while never once breaking character and becoming pompous and artificial, and the avowed atheist psychiatrist, exhibiting a brittle intellectual and clinical disdain for Brady's "delusion," at one point taunting Brady's demon to enter him—a moment that doubtless brought both the Evangelicals and the horror fans in the audience together in a "you fucking idiot, don't do that!" moment.

Having known nothing about very publicly Catholic filmmakers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon's cinematic oeuvre before this film (you can look them up), I didn't make the connection until a throwaway line by the demon, explaining how he began to enter Brady's body when Brady was a child who'd received a Ouija board from his grandmother, tipped me off

Evangelicals and Catholics are obsessed with "gateways" to "demonic possession," and they've always been quite excited about Ouija boards and Dungeons and Dragons in particular. I paused the film and did a quick Internet check, which confirmed my suspicious. But I was enjoying the film so much that I went back to it, and was not disappointed that I did.

As I said, the writing was stunning, and a viewer knows that he or she is in beyond competent hands when a film that is basically a set-piece of two men talking can be that frightening (of course the cast expands later in the film, but by the time I does, the horror die has been well and truly been cast.)

If did force me to examine something I hadn't really thought of before: we have been absorbing Biblically-founded horror for centuries, much of it written by believers of one kind or another, from Dante, to Milton's "Paradise Lost," to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," to The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), and even The Devil's Advocate (1997.)

The films that came to mind while watching this were, in particular, The Seventh Sign (1988) and, oddly Exorcist III (1990), film with which it shares some thematic overlap.

A devoutly Catholic filmmaker can bring what William Peter Blatty brought to The Exorcist—an "insider" view of the darker side of Christian mythology, as offered by someone who literally believes in the possibility of what he's writing. If done by a gifted writer, you get something like Nefarious. If done badly, you get a Chick tract.

Part of the horror of this film came from the shape of the demon's sadism and hatred towards its human host —some grotesqueries that I won't share in this note, but even things like making sure it requested the electric chair for its host to die in, knowing it would be more painful for Brady than lethal injection. Or even the scene where it allows Brady request his final meal as himself, then cancels it when he repossesses him, and leaves Brady to wonder, when the time comes, why he isn't being fed in the hours before his execution.

The magnificence of Flanery's performance derives in no small part from the moments when the demon let its tormented, wretched human host show through—the murderer who doesn't remember his crimes, and who is aware of being dominated by a malefic force against which he is utterly powerless.

The film has been criticized for using the demon as a mouthpiece for the filmmaker's fundamentalist beliefs, but to that I said, so what? They do it seamlessly. It's a horror story about exactly those themes.

The things the demon says to the atheist psychiatrist are exactly the sort of things any demon worth its brimstone would say to an atheist psychiatrist, and the lines are delivered with a deadpan matter-of-factness that is genuinely chilling.

And to their credit, they resisted the temptation of making Dr. Martin into an Evangelical caricature of "an atheist."

Only a clunky, pedestrian info-dump second-to-last scene—an interview between Dr. Martin and Glenn Beck—threatened to sink the entire film, but miraculously did not—perhaps the truest evidence of the endless war between good and evil in the film.

There were two natural places in the third-to-last scene of the film where it could have ended on near-Wagnerian note, but populist American Christianity is to art what a hidden vine stretched across the forest path is to joggers: if there's a way to trip and fall flat on their faces, they'll find it.

But at the end of the night, even that couldn't ruin Nefarious, a film which I recommend highly, particularly for anyone with a basic grounding in religious thinking, mythology, or imagery. It adds to the film's punch, but is in no way a requirement.

I'm reminded of the difference between the way The Exorcist affected Catholic friends of mine vs. how it affected Protestants, Jews, or atheist friends. The Catholics took the film personally. And that's powerful.

As I said: while it will doubtless give religious fundamentalists a tingle in their trousers in the same way Mel Gibson's gory Renaissance pietà The Passion of the Christ (2004) did, a more sophisticated horror viewer will see a masterclass in mortal relativism, supernatural suspense, and psychological sadism, and they may even occasionally jump, as I did more than once.

Some thoughts on Jonathan Glazer's THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023)

 

OK, so—The Zone of Interest. The coldness I felt after watching this film last night dissipated on my walk with Beckett this morning, and I'm ready to consider why it feels more like an unusually disturbing nightmare I woke up from this morning instead of brilliant, deliberate mini-masterpiece I watched on television before falling asleep.

First off, what it's not: it's not gory, it's not overtly violent, it's not "shocking" in the way we've traditionally come to think of Holocaust films. It's not Schindler's List (1993), and it did not set out to be. It's an eerily voyeuristic look at the family of Rudolf Höss, living on the other side of a human abattoir where 1.1 million people were murdered over the relatively short 5 years of the camp's existence.

Writing negatively about the film in The New Yorker last October, Richard Brody said the film "turns the horrors of the Holocaust into scenes from a marriage," and calls it, a bit grotesquely, "Holokitsch."

With all due respect to the eminent Mr. Brody, who doesn't need lessons in film reviewing from the likes of me, he may have missed the fact that director Jonathan Glazer's clear intention in shooting the film that way was to quite precisely contrast the utter banality of the day-to-day existence of high-ranking Nazis families with the monstrosities occurring on the other other side of the wall where, in the case of Zone, Daddy works.

It's a technique that was employed with much more overt drama in Mark Herman's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas(2008), and to a slightly different degree in Frank Pierson's Conspiracy  (2001) which depicted the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where a boardroom full of high-ranking Nazis calmly planned the logistics of the eradication of Europe's Jews, as dispassionately, even cordially, as a stockholder's meeting—with lunch and cigars included.

Last night I was trying to put my finger on where this film's genius heart lies, and it occurred to me how much it structurally resembles the first 3/4 of Jaws, where the great white shark is kept more of less off camera. The audience knows it's there, and the fact that it's not being shown simply ups the terror.

In Zone, the great white shark is Auschwitz itself, rarely glimpsed, and most often represented by the wall.

The difference is, in Jaws, even at its most carnivorous, we all knew the shark was killing to eat and survive. In Zone, we know that Auschwitz exists exclusively for the purpose of wholesale human slaughter, for the convenience of people like the family in the well-appointed villa on the other side of the wall, where the grandmother lovingly closes the children's bedroom windows at night so they're not woken by the agonized, terrified screams of the people just beyond the garden.

Zone, like Chernobyl (2019) draws heavily on the imagery and traditions of horror films, and at the end of the day, it's a bloodless, gore-less, melodrama-less horror film about disconnection from humanity.

As I mentioned, the audience already knows what's happening on the other side of the wall. It haunts the film like a malevolent ghost, accentuated by the ambient noise of gunshots, screams, ugly male shouting, dogs barking, and train whistles.

The genius of director Glazer is that the audience gets used to those sounds over the 1h 46m of the film, as we are most likely intended to. He forces us to squarely identify with the Höss family, who are likewise used to those terrible sounds which have become merely part of the fabric of their lives. My abrupt awareness of my complicity in that, as a viewer, was one of the more devastating moments of the film for me, along with the lurid red light of the crematorium flickering on bedroom walls, or the whistle of the death-trains in silhouette.

The other monster in the film, besides Auschwitz, is the character of Hedwig Höss, the commandant's wife, brilliantly essayed by Sandra Hüller, who portrays "the Queen of Auschwitz," thus named by her husband, as a frumpy, slatternly German housewife with a graceless, ungainly waddle, risen from a less than modest background to become the ogress wife of the ruler of a death factory.

When Rudolf is about to be transferred, she insists he make sure that she and her children can stay at Auschwitz. "We've built a good life here," she tells him querulously. "We've finally got everything we've wanted since we were 17."

We see Hedwig trying on the fur coat of a Jewish woman from whom it was taken upon her induction. The coat is too small, and Hedwig scowls at it in the mirror, turning this way and that to find a flattering angle. She scuttles over to her dressing table and dabs her lips with the dead woman's lipstick, which she found in the coat pocket.

Hedwig presides over a houseful of female servants whom she verbally abuses at will, and with all the cruelty that can accrue to someone intimately familiar with powerlessness, but who always dreamed of having power over the powerless, making them feel as vulnerable as she once felt. "I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice," Hedwig casually informs a housemaid she suspects of insolence. Her visiting mother asks her about the servant girls. "Jews? In the house?" she demands, taken aback. Hedwig casually replies, "They're local girls. The Jews are on the other side of the wall."

While the film is indeed about the banality of evil—a phrase so overused today that it's become almost beside the point—what it's really about is dehumanization, and how easily and insidiously that occurs.

It's about how ordinary people, albeit with a likely natural inclination towards sociopathic disassociation borne of deep-seated prejudice, can abruptly become casual terrorizers of people they no longer consider human, and co-exist with murder as though it was a neighbour who rarely leaves the house.

It's about how the audience can be romanced by the beauty of the Polish countryside in summer, all the while knowing that they're only seeing it because they're watching a film about the most famous and devastating genocide of the 20th century.

Its power comes from Glazer's seduction of the viewer in forcing them to see the world from the Höss family's perspective, and to see for themselves how easily it could all happen again, particularly in 2024 where the locks on the cellar doors where the monsters live have been all but chipped away.

It may not be the "best" Holocaust movie, if such a bizarre ranking exists, but it's absolutely one of the most needed, especially right now, and it's one we haven't seen before.

When life is Kenough

 

This is the Ryan Gosling I met almost 30 years ago in Montréal, on the set of my friend Ron Oliver's "The Tale of Station 109.1" episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark: a humble, precocious, polite, dignified, lovely 14-year old boy, who was a delight to be around, and a joy to interview. Ron was effectively the first director to put Ryan in front of viewer's eyes as an actor, in Dark, and, later, Goosebmps, and would then go on to nurture him in the following years—hardly the first example of Ron nurturing and mentoring young talent, but perhaps the most objectively striking example of it, as history will record.

I hope Ron writes his own memoir someday, because an important part of a 38-year best-friendship is knowing when to let the other one tell his own stories, and when to keep quiet. But I celebrate Ron's life and career, and what he's accomplished, much of it in private, with a dignified modesty that seems out of date in 2024. I love him for that, as for so many other things. And I can draw a clear, memory-laden temporal line in my mind between their first meeting, at the casting session for Dark in 1995, and what the world saw onstage tonight at the Oscars in 2024.

Speaking for my own memories, what I'll say of Mr. Gosling, who owned the Oscars with his "I'm Just Ken" routine tonight, is this: one minute they're snoozing on your sofa at your house in Toronto, or you're faxing them their homework on location, or ferrying them to photoshoots—and the next minute they're the biggest star in Hollywood. It might make someone else feel old, but it makes me feel marvellously fortunate to have lived the life I've lived.

Ryan and I last saw each other in 2012 when both he and Ron were both shooting films in Toronto. The four of us went out for dinner (the Hero MD,™ who hadn't seen him since the 90s, went with us) and I was delighted, but again, not remotely surprised, to be reminded that he grew up to be the perfect adult incarnation of the kind, humble, precocious, polite, dignified, lovely kid I met on that rainy night in Montréal in 1995. Like many others, I can attest that he is everything he seems to be onscreen, except to the decent, unpretentious nth degree. What a euphoric experience to watch him own that stage tonight.

Sometimes life is more than wonderful—It's Kenough.