TLDS October Culture Klatsch
Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers.
David Swanson: Happy Almost Halloween! Are you doing anything spooky to celebrate the season?
Talia Lavin: Thinking about the election! It's terrifying! But also last night I watched “Van Helsing”, a Universal Horror schlock-fest I enjoyed way too much.
DS: Is that the Hugh Jackman one?
TL: Yes! Glorious young Hugh with shoulder length hair. And Hot Dracula. And ‘90s ultra-babe Kate Beckinsale with the worst Slavic accent you've ever heard.
DS: I still have a lot of affection for Coppola’s version. Do you have a favorite? Either a performance as Dracula, or a vampire movie in general? I watched the trailer for Robert Eggers’s “Nosferatu” this morning, which looks great.
TL: I'M SO EXCITED FOR THAT. I loved The “The VVitch” and “The Northman”. Eggers' attention to detail is amazing. I love all the Hammer Horror ones with Christopher Lee, who is Dracula in my mind.
DS: I watched “The Northman” like six times when I was sick on a cruise ship in Greenland—which is the only situation that warrtents watching a feverish Nordic epic that many times in 48 hours. Did you know the original “Nosferatu” with Max Schreck was just Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but they didn’t have the rights so they changed all the names? Your St. Crispin’s Day post the other day inspired me to go watch a ton of Henry Vs, speaking of iconic roles. I’m fascinated by stories that have countless iterations like that. “The Northman” is “Hamlet”! And so is “The Lion King”!
TL: “The Northman” is Stupid Hamlet. I loved it. Dracula itself is such a magnificently bizarre book. Have you read it?
DS: It was one of the first grownup books I ever tried to read. I got that and Frankenstein at a book fair when I was like 8 years old. I think I really just tried to read it though, rather than actually doing so. But I have gone back to it, and it’s narratively wild. It reminds me a bit of Moby Dick in that there’s so much more in there than you might expect going in.
TL: Like “The Wonders of Stenography”. “The Magic of Train Schedules”. “Blood Transfusions Are Basically Sex”. “Don't Be On The Ghost Ship From Hell”. I've been reading a lot of books about poison. As novel research, mainly, but they're also entertaining. Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook is a standout. Quackery is a little too snarky for its own good. The Angel Makers a little too melodramatic.
DS: You and Catherine de Medici would get along. I mostly know about poison in the context of renaissance intrigue. The Borgias were big into their arsenics. Do you have a favorite poison?
TL: Arsenic has a rich history, but I find the ones you can grow—aconite, digitalis, hellebore—witchier and spicier. The medical poisons like insulin and digoxin—terrifying! It gets wild in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when new poisons kept getting invented and then being widely commercially available with no oversight. Jane Toppan's story is insane. She killed thirty-one people or so in the fin de siecle! My antiheroine is an early twentieth century female poisoner, so I'm doing my research. Only semi-related: I was surprised to learn that a TON of cocaine was floating around during the Russian Civil War, and a lot of the most bombastic White warlords were on huge amounts of it.
DS: Well that goes back to your observation about nineteenth-century oversight. It was so easy to be a coke-head or junkie legally. For what it’s worth, Bombastic White Warlords sounds like a group of coke-heads, or a metal band.
TL: I'm reading A People's Tragedy, an account of the Revolution by Orlando Figes, but it's a thousand pages and taking me a bit.
DS: I read that in college. Long book.
TL: It is astonishing just how decrepit the tsarist autocratic state had become.
DS: That’s the same thing you realize reading about the French Revolution. Or the collapse of the Roman Empire, for that matter. On that note, I’m pretty psyched for “Gladiator II”. It looks like peak Roman Decadence.
TL: Isn't that just “Megalopolis”, the Coppola movie about "New Rome"? I haven't seen it, but I gotta. Aubrey Plaza IS Wow Platinum. This clip is etched into my mind forever.
DS: But is “Megalopolis” about the end of the Roman Republic, or the Roman Empire? And which one is America experiencing at the moment?
TL: I think it's about a secret third thing in Roman clothing. Either way I want to see it.
DS: “Megalopolis” or the end of America?
TL: “Megalopolis”! I don't wanna talk about the election right now. I've been thinking about it nonstop for… ever, it seems. Give me beautiful Hugh Jackman throwing a Hulkified Mr Hyde from the roof of Notre Dame anytime. Sometimes you wanna turn your brain off!!
DS: With vampires and poison!
TL: Exactly. I've not only written a book about Christo-fascism but I’m also promoting it, so basically every day I go on a podcast and talk fascism for an hour, and write op-eds, and so on. I need relief! The waters of Lethe! Kate Beckinsale in a corset with a sword!
DS: Okay, here’s a good Halloween-inspired prompt: who is the ultimate badass lady with a sword?
TL: The girl reading this 🥹.
DS: Well, obviously, but present company excluded. Chappell Roan has been doing the work recently, and I love the women in “Crouching Tiger” and “Kill Bill”.
TL: Eowyn is up there. Her line in the book is even better than the one in the movie.
DS: “I am no man?”
TL: “Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!”“No living man am I! Eowyn I am, Eomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my kin. Begone if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.” 🤘 Vibes. Let's carry that with us into the coming weeks.
DS: To quote Henry V’s other great speech: “Unto the breach!”
TL: “Once more!!”
DS: The other new movie set in Rome that I’m really excited about is “Conclave”. Vatican skulduggery is a passion of mine
TL: Have you seen “The Young Pope”?
DS: I have! Good show. The series “Borgia” is my favorite piece of Vatican-centered pop culture. (I need to specify “Borgia” and not “The Borgias”, which came out the same year is inferior in every way.) Recently I’ve been reading about the Vatican’s Banco Ambrosiano scandal, which is a lot more recent than the Borgias, but not as recent as “The Young Pope”.
TL: Tell me about it!
DS: Have you seen “Godfather, Part III”? Because all the Vatican stuff in that is based on real events.
TL: I have not, I stopped at “II”.
DS: I can’t really fault you there. But the basic gist is that the Vatican’s bankers were involved in extensive money laundering and fraud, the Mafia was involved, and a bunch of people ended up dead. Some rather spectacularly so. One of the main characters in the story was discovered hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London.
TL: Good lord! And when was this?
DS: That was early eighties. Did you know The Godfather was supposedly inspired by the Borgias?
TL: An inferior copy, presumably.
DS: It depends if you’re talking about Godfather the book, or Coppola’s version. I think the Corleones are presented more honorably in the movies than the Borgias are in most historical accounts. I mean, there’s a lot less poison and incest in “The Godfather”.
TL: Yeah but weren't the Borgias slandered by their enemies? What can we truly trust from the past?
DS: Are you suggesting Henry V didn’t really give those speeches?
TL: Probably not. That was a play.
DS: But “the play’s the thing,” as The Northman says.
TL: “Wherein to catch the conscience of the king!”
DS: I may need to rewatch “Hamlet” now. I just need to decide which version
TL: Branagh for comprehensiveness, Ethan Hawke for Ethan Hawke, Olivier for mood. Or any of the other ones! You can't go wrong. Men only want one thing and it's disgusting: to kill their uncle at the prompting of their father's ghost. My personal favorite performance of a Hamlet monologue, though, is from the end of “Withnail & I”:
DS: Out of context Shakespeare monologues are underrated:
TL: They're good words. Also, Sherlock Holmes, canonically, was on a fuck-ton of cocaine.
DS: The Bombastic White Warlord of Baker Street.
TL: Shall we end here? Til Tuesday, friends!
