Agency, Violence, and the Worst Scene in Every Music Biopic
THE LIST: Spy shows, Dylan, Fugazi, Robotham, and Lynch’s bookshelf
The List is a fortnightly round-up of the music, movies, books, and oddities I’m into right now. There’s no structure or hierarchy.
🎸 A COMPLETE UNKNOWN
One of my long-held beliefs is that in any film, if there’s a scene of a band playing onstage, that is—without exception—the worst scene in the movie. This comes from years of playing shows, and years of going to them. No one experiences a gig from a crane’s POV (or a drone), and none of us get unfettered access to every dramatic angle from the front of stage either. And yet, this is how cinema insists on showing rock concerts.
This is why I slept on A Complete Unknown (2024). I just couldn’t. I’m not a huge Dylan guy, so why put myself through it? I figured it’d be a pile of shit. But it’s not. It’s great. Timothée Chalamet’s re-recorded vocals give his performances a strange kind of authenticity, and James Mangold keeps the live scenes tightly cropped—mercifully. As a study of how Dylan was turned on by progressivism, and later turned off, Mangold makes the most of the on-stage scenes with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). In those moments, I occasionally caught glimpses of music’s affect: the awe that transcends the grind of getting up there, and the weird love that can only be unlocked by the people up there with you.
(PS: some of the best concert footage ever filmed is in Jem Cohen’s documentary on Fugazi, Instrument—compiled from 11 years of shooting the band with one camera from side of stage. Turns out you just need lots of time to get it right.)
🎯 AGENCY
Agency is one of those shows that might’ve been lauded during the ‘Golden Age of Television’ but is now just another tile in a sea of tiles. I have no idea how we arrived at this point of abundance, where a tightly written spy drama with A-list stars (Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, and an imperial Richard Gere) can slip by without fanfare—but here we are.
Maybe it got a bigger push abroad? Maybe the 68% Rotten Tomatoes score deflated enthusiasm? No idea. But I loved it. And my pitch is simple: it’s James Bond, set in a realistic present, except it’s Fleming’s original Bond (sociopath, addicted, broken), not the movies’ tuxedoed charm.
🌀 LYNCH’S BOOKS
There was some online discourse about David Lynch’s book collection (being auctioned off here) and all I want to say is, he owned a copy of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. That novel is infamous in noir circles for being arguably the cruelest, most deranged entry in Thompson’s top-tier catalogue.
Its protagonist, Sheriff Lou Ford, is—of course—very Lynchian. Lynch’s villains are often like Ford: explosively violent, stepping out of the everyday and into pure evil without warning. There’s nothing arch about these men. Falling victim to them feels like stepping on a snake.
📚 CURRENTLY READING
I’m really enjoying the final chapters of Michael Robotham’s The Secrets She Keeps. There’s not much I can say without spoiling it, but (1) it’s got hectic, airport-novel energy, and (2) there’s a ripping heist in the middle. I look forward to picking it up every night.
Also on my bedside table: The Ones We Love by Anna Snoekstra, and Charles Ardai’s short story collection Death Comes Too Late.
🧟 THE DEATH TWINS (Short Story)
Read it here.
Jim Harris watched the birds circle through the trees. They were sulphur-crested cockatoos, squawking and carrying on, oblivious to the rest of the world. Harris dropped his cigarette into the gravel and took another sip of tea. He was in the abandoned back lot behind the police station. It was usually quiet out here at dusk, but not today.
Harris took his gun out and trailed one of the birds.
“Bang,” he said.
But the little bastards kept flying.
— IAIN
THE END IS HERE 👇
