Sorry about the silence. I have been busy. If you haven’t heard the news, my Hollywood career recently didn’t skyrocket. I have been not cast in Black Widow 2, and not rehearsing for this film now occupies the majority of my time. I can’t wait for you to not see me acting alongside Scarlett Johansson. The film’s script does not contain a sex scene between us, and Ms Johansson did not whisper that perhaps we could violate SAG-AFTA rules and perform it unsimulated, and I have not decided whether to not be lead by my head or my heart on this issue. Let’s talk about My Terrible Life by Sunny McCreary.

McCreary is a pen name of Michael Kelly, an online humorist who went viral in nineteen-ninety-$DATE with Roy Orbison in Clingfilm. These surreal vignettes describe German citizen Ulrich Haarbürste, who is a fan of rockabilly legend Roy Orbison, wrapping his idol in clingfilm.

It always starts the same way. I am in the garden airing my terrapin Jetta when he walks past my gate, that mysterious man in black.

‘Hello Roy,’ I say. ‘What are you doing in Dusseldorf?’

‘Attending to certain matters,’ he replies.

‘Ah,’ I say.

He apprises Jetta’s lines with a keen eye. ‘That is a well-groomed terrapin,’ he says.

‘Her name is Jetta.’ I say. ‘Perhaps you would like to come inside?’

‘Very well.’ He says.

Roy Orbison walks inside my house and sits down on my couch. We talk urbanely of various issues of the day. Presently I say, ‘Perhaps you would like to see my cling-film?’

‘By all means.’ I cannot see his eyes through his trademark dark glasses and I have no idea if he is merely being polite or if he genuinely has an interest in cling-film.

I bring it from the kitchen, all the rolls of it. ‘I have a surprising amount of clingfilm,’ I say with a nervous laugh. Roy merely nods.

‘I estimate I must have nearly a kilometre in the kitchen alone.’

‘As much as that?’ He says in surprise. ‘So.’

‘Mind you, people do not realize how much is on each roll. I bet that with a single roll alone I could wrap you up entirely.’

Roy Orbison in Clingfilm stories stick to your brain like leeches. Even if you don’t laugh, you also don’t forget. Taking a stab at why, it’s because they’re so specific.

Every detail is memorable. Ulrich Haarbürste (lit: “Hairbrush”) is a funny name. Germany (aside from 1933-1945 and some select periods before and after) is a funny country. Haarbürste’s writing is strange, possessing the grammatically correct yet “wrong” register of an educated man who has learned English as a second language. A terrapin is an unusual pet, and “Jetta” an incongruous name for one (cars are known for being fast, turtles are known for being slow.)

And although Roy Orbison is portrayed as a willing (if occasionally reluctant) partner in Ulrich Haarbürste’s games, the idea of a fan wrapping a celebrity in clingfilm is peculiar and evokes the behavior of the Bjork stalker (a psychosexual desire to possess and control and objectify). And at least Bjork is an attractive woman, while Roy Orbison—who achieved fame in the 60s, was stomped flat by the British Invasion, and then staged a latter-day comeback—was a weedy, gangly, jug-eared man (it was laughable whenever a photographer posed Orbison next to a sexy car: he looked like a Make-A-Wish kid whose dying request was to be James Dean.) Making him the target of Haarbürste’s obsession is yet another individualistic fingerprint in a crime scene full of them. Specificity = good. Genericity = bad.

Am I explaining the obvious? Probably, but it eludes most writers, who hate specificity like it murdered their puppy. It’s believed now that writing must be “relatable”: your story should be set in Anytown USA, starring a character exactly like the reader. No deviation is allowed: if you describe your hero as enjoying marmalade on his toast (so the thinking goes), you’ve alienated the book-reading section of the market that prefers jam on theirs. And since you cannot predict the tastes of nine billion people, the only solution is to write characters with no traits at all.

Think of Harry Potter. He has no personality. JK Rowling actually writes good characters most of the time: Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger are incandescent on the page, and even controversial later additions like Stepin Fetchit the House Elf, Shlomo Shekelstein the Goblin Banker, and the Trans Bathroom Molester are vividly memorable. Harry, however, is boring. He is not an interesting person, he is a person that interesting things happen to. I read the The Deathly Hallows‘s final chapter with a sense of embarrassment. “Wait, you think I care about Harry’s life after he defeats Voldemort?”

Online, we see too many attempts to recapture whatever Roy Orbison in Clingfilm had. Most fail, because they’re too general, too “relatable”, too Harry Potter. They take the form of “I’m a 20 year old boy with a hot sister and [something wacky happens]”. They cast too wide a net and lack the sting and punch of the particular. They do not contain terrapins called Jetta.

I was delighted to discover that Michael Kelly has a website (and book) full of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm stories. I was also delighted to discover that this is not his best work. Not by a long shot!

One of his many projects is My Godawful Life. Which I haven’t discussed at all.

Kept in a bird-coop by his parents, Sunny McCreary endured a childhood of neglect, abuse and being bullied by pigeons, only to find it was all downhill from there. In the course of the most painful life ever, he survived tragedy and maiming, a savage convent school education, being pimped out in pink-satin hot pants, a degrading addiction to helium, and having a baboon’s arse grafted onto his face. Then things got really bad.

This book is a parody of “misery lit” such as Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It. These books, with their combination of luridly-described child abuse and sanctimonious hustle-positivity (“as my stepfather shoved my entire face into a woodchipper, I reflected that each day is a blessing from God”), provide a satirical target a mile wide, but what monster would mock the memoirs of abused children? The same monster who would wrap Roy Orbison in clingfilm, that’s who.

The book is so goddamn funny it’s unreal. It just keeps going and going and going. You’d think the joke would get played out somewhere around page zero, but it never does. Each chapter has a new outrage, a new horror, a new source of ridiculousness. The part where Sunny halfheartedly attempts suicide by jumping in front of parked cars and out of ground-floor windows.

Mr Kelly seems to have soured on the book. Which is a shame. It’s great!

[Edit, 2013: I repent this now, in fact I would pretty much like to forget I wrote it. It has moments of inspiration but it also has moments of the most appalling playground crassness. I would still maintain the things I was parodying are worse, but it crosses lines, sometimes with purpose but sometimes gratuitously, and what was bracing in the original five-page bit becomes wearing stretched to 300. Also, I wanted it to be more than a rag-bag of sick jokes, so it’s a rag-bag of sick jokes that develops delusions of grandeur.

What are these delusions of grandeur?

Well, midway through, Sunny adopts an autistic child with “Tourettes” called Euphemia. (I don’t exactly remember the circumstances: I’m reviewing this from memory because I gave my only copy away to a girl who has now moved far away from me for reasons which may or may not be related.) I find “genius child” tropes tedious, and was expecting and hoping for her to die. She doesn’t, and gradually mutates into arguably the book’s most vivid character.

Euphemia provides another source of comedy, but also acts as a foil to Sunny: pushing and provoking him to leave his shell. They fight a lot, but in the end form a good pair. Their interplay adds a lot of muscle and fiber to the book (which, I’ll admit, is mostly one note banged on a piano over and over.) The final couple of chapters are actually written by Euphemia, and basically address the phenomenon of misery lit head on, without a satiric voice. There is great evil in the world. But there’s also a force adjacent to great evil: a force that compels people to watch and stare and rubberneck at car accidents and enjoy outrage and misery. Suffering as entertainment. Is there something wrong with people who buy and read misery lit? Michael Kelly seems to think there is, and I would agree. It inspires the same revulsion in me as people who have sex with their furniture: even if the act itself isn’t wrong, enjoying it indicates there’s something wrong with the actor. The book might embarrass Kelly now, but it has only become more and more relevant, as this stuff continues to encroach into the mainstream.

Kim Jong Il was Supreme Leader of North Korea. He was also a prolific writer. Wikipedia tells us that “Kim published some 890 works during a period of his career from June 1964 to June 1994”. That sounds like a lot, though I hear most of those books were actually vampire/werewolf erotica.

This particular book is adapted from a speech the man gave in 1991, in the midst of the crash of the Soviet Union. It’s 54 pages in length, so quite a long speech—I hope nobody had to go to the bathroom. I read it to learn about the Juche school of Marxist-Leninism, and was disappointed. Kim Jong Il is not one for boring the audience with theory. His descriptions of how the Juche system works all go like this:

The Juche idea is a man-centred outlook on the world. It has clarified the essential qualities of man as a social being with independence, creativity and consciousness. It has, on this basis, evolved the new philosophical principle that man is the master of everything and decides everything.

The Juche idea has raised man’s dignity and value to the highest level.

In our socialist society, which is the application of the man-centred Juche idea, the interests of every
individual are respected.

Because it is the embodiment of the Juche idea, our socialism is a man-centred socialism under which man is the master of everything and everything serves him.

Fluffy stuff. I am reminded of the time Neil deGrasse Tyson proposed a nation called “Rationalia”, with just one line in its constitution. “All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” It’s really easy to run a country: just make laws based on evidence. While I’m relieved that there’s such a simple road to paradise, in practice there seem to be devils lurking in the details. Likewise, a founding principle of “man is the master of everything” sounds good, but what does it mean? Is man also the master of other men? I suppose North Korea is a eighty-year experiment in answering that question with “yes”.

Hitler’s Mein Kampf isn’t my favorite book—it’s dull, and has some problematic bits (he repeatedly calls Joseph Stalin an “autistic [r-slur]”, and the chapter spent discussing his favorite anime shows is beyond the pale), but it’s big and hefty. There’s the implication of thought behind it. Even if it’s mad thought, it’s a believable and credible basis for a movement. You could use the hardback edition of Mein Kampf to club an enemy to death.

Kim Jong Il’s writing falls to the other extreme. Although light and readable, it displays no evidence of thought whatsoever. It’s just rah-rah feelgood nice stuff, emptily asserting that the Juche philosophy means certain things, regardless of how improbable or self-contradictory they might be.

Socialism is a new social system which differs fundamentally from all the exploitative societies that have existed in human history. As such, it has to blaze a trail despite fierce struggles against the class
enemies. Therefore, it may meet with transient setbacks in its progress. However, mankind’s advance along the road of socialism is a law of historical development, and no force can ever check it.

To be honest, it doesn’t “read” like something a Marxist-Leninist would write: it has the prose style of a tech CEO who hires PR firms to scrub his Wikipedia page of sexual harassment allegations. You could not beat an enemy to death with Our Socialism Centered On the Masses Shall Not Perish. Whack someone with this book and they would gain life-force somehow. Wrinkles would mysteriously disappear from around their eyes. The spring would return to their step. Only by staring at the page through a microscope can you discern any influence from, say, Hegel (note that the rise of socialism isn’t a fact contingent on particular circumstances, it’s a law. But somehow we still have to fight for it…).

The book swings like a weathervane from the banal to the palpably absurd.

The Juche idea’s approach towards people of different classes and strata is that they should be judged by
their ideas and actions

The pampered heir apparent of North Korea, gifted hundreds of totally undeserved jobs, positions, and titles by his father—could actually write (and say) this without provoking gales of laughter. Such was his power. I think I would prefer to live in a society that’s openly tyrannical and reft by classism, rather than a variant of the same that hides tyranny under classlessness. I can’t find the tweet that went something like “At least medieval peasants weren’t subjected to the humiliating fiction that their king wanted to have a beer with them.”

It appears that Juche’s main point of disagreement with mainline Marxist-Leninism is its emphasis on North Korean independence and national identity. It’s an isolationist cover of a familiar tune. The very first line of the book is “WORKING PEOPLE OF THE WHOLE WORLD, UNITE!”, but Juche socialism was not based on any sort of global class unity. So far as Kim Jong Il was concerned, the working people of the world could go pound sand, jump in the sea, and throw a flying fuck at a rolling donut. Juche was about improving the standing of North Korea. One family in North Korea in particular.

This speech was made in 1991, when North Korea was clearly rotten to the core. Half a decade later, wracked by famine and stripped of Soviet aid, it had become possibly the worst place in the world. Kim Jong-Il would later refer to these years of starvation as “arduous march”; a hiking trip to some glorious destination that some citizens (perhaps three million) were regrettably not fit enough to survive. He still found ways to enrich himself. A slogan I remember from this book is “When the Party is determined, we can do anything!” He should have said “I can do anything”.

But again, you have to give Kim Jong Il his due. This is not a book, it’s a speech, printed and sold as a book for some reason. What can you expect? And it’s not like the audience had to be convinced. They were already “pre-sold”: maybe at bayonet point, that the Juche system kicked ass. Even though there may not have been a Juche system at all, just a blank unwritten idea that allowed the Kim dynasty—Sung Il, Jong Il, and now Jong Un—to impose their real ideas on their people.

You can either read this book or avoid it. There’s not much to it, either. It’s just 54 pages, and that’s with the lines of text ludicrously double-spaced, like a padded college essay. Those empty spaces should be funny, but they’re not. I gaze into them and unpleasant images flood out. Each seems to have starved and rotting bodies inside it.

A movie based on a British comic book series (that I haven’t read), starring Lori Petty (who I’m not familiar with), made in the year 1995 (which I was barely sentient for). In other words, I’m bringing what’s probably the right amount of baggage to Tank Girl: none. I’m not some comics fan whose childhood is ruined. This movie might as well have been made by aliens.

I had fun. Tank Girl is a weird and special movie. It’s either really good, or a profoundly fascinating failure that rises above pitiful conceits like “good” or “bad” like Gautama Siddhartha attaining enlightenment. The colors have a raucous Bava-esque pop. The script dangerously mixes Loony Toons gags with riot grrl punk energy. The visuals blow holes in your retinas. The set designers either spiked their morning cocaine with Viagra or their morning Viagra with cocaine. The actors are freaks (sometimes literally), and the lead plays her role like it’s a choice between this movie and porn, which it may have been.

It’s not perfect. The second half is far worse than the first, and a studio clearly fucked the whole project in the ass (if you’re going to imply a human-kangaroo sexual relationship, you don’t get brownie points for keeping it PG-rated), but that only adds to its delirious, warped quality. It’s like wandering through a cinematic junkyard; trash-strewn and ugly, littered with broken things that are barely recognizable as treasure.

It’s supposedly set in Australia. I say “supposedly” because the very first thing we hear is a chick saying “IT’S TWENNY FIRRY-FREE AND THE WORLD IS SCROO’D NOW!” in a foghorn of a Bronx accent. A comet has hit the earth, and it has not rained in eleven years. I hate it when that happens.

The narrator proves to be Tank Girl. We see her riding a cow through the desert (the first of many nods to Mad Max 3), though we never discover where she pastures it. She later upgrades to a tank that has spoilers, stickers, and even a BBQ grill. Her motives are to find (steal) a birthday present for her boyfriend, who lives with her at a kind of hippie commune, stealing water and avoiding the totalitarian Water & Power company (whose acronym, with a little imagination, is WAP). They live in riotous squalor. Everyone fucks and looks like they smell bad.

Everyone is Beautiful and No-One is Horny remains an insightful piece of writing on what’s wrong with modern superhero films. They are packed with ludicrously attractive people, but don’t allow them to do anything gross, ugly, or vulnerable. Ironically, this includes have sex: the purpose of attractiveness. What’s left is cold, inert marble: beauty for the sake of beauty (Captain America doesn’t look hot to attract a girl, but to attract an audience—it’s a classic Keynes Beauty Contest). Modern Hollywood is so irreversibly neutered that young people get angry and uncomfortable when there’s a nipple on screen. Did Oppenheimer really NEED a sex scene?? Was it really NECESSARY??? Everyone wants beauty, nobody wants bad smells and ruptured condoms. Tank Girl flips the script: everyone is horny and no-one is beautiful. It has an ugly, gross animal to desire to shock you with biology. Midway through the movie, Tank Girl is captured by W&P goons for stealing water, and straitjacketed with her arms behind her back. She throws out a line about how it’s hard for her to jerk off. There’s a lot of that kind of writing. It’s just an attempt at realness.

Tank Girl was made in an era that can be identified with a laser’s precision: the mid 90s. Post No Doubt, but pre Spice Girls (in a legendary piece of SG lore, Geri and Victoria met in the lineup at a Tank Girl casting call).

It’s definitely a movie of its time, stuffed with dreadlocks and neon and Kandi raver bracelets. The visual design is as pungent and earthy as the performances. It benefited from a brief period American interest in Australian culture, provoked by the likes Paul Hogan, Yahoo Serious, Steve Irwin, and Outback Steakhouse (not that the movie has anything to do with Australia—if it had come out in the age of New Labor and Cool Britannia, they probably would have played up its origins as a British comic strip instead). Lori Petty is heavily made up to look like Gwen Stefani. After she gets captured by the W&P, she gets a splat of paint (or blood) on her head. It looks kinda like Stefani’s bindi.

In the pre-Spice Girls clip above, Geri Halliwell introduces herself as “Geri, as in Tom and Jerry.” This is an outstanding segue from Ms Estelle Halliwell-Horner, because I am burning up inside to talk about Tom and Jerry.

Whatever emotions you feel for T&J, come on…can we admit it’s obviously a cartoon that was conceived in five minutes, tops? It’s the most generic and obvious idea there is. “One animal chases another animal!” And what animals, pray? “I dunno. A cat and a dog? Is that good?” Tank Girl has some of the same “character created in thirty seconds with a gun to the writer’s head” quality. She’s a girl. A girl with a tank. It’s a concept that writes itself. You can even imagine like five jokes that are actually in the movie (her tank makes men feel inadequate, etc). Tanks are impressive but not particularly conducive to stellar action scenes, and the movie struggles to integrate Tank Girl’s tank (an M5A1 Stuart) into the action believably. (Apparently, the Stuart’s reverse gear was broken, so if they needed to do another take, the tank had to drive around in a huge circle to get back to its starting mark.) So while I haven’t read the Tank Girl comic, I’m suspicious that the movie ruins too much. It may have been ruined to begin with.

I like that it has no reverence or respect. I watched some Zack Snyder thing once and had to stop, partly because of all the slow zooms on Superman’s somber face, dramatically lit, while stirring music swells in the background. Enough. Superman is a Depression-era funnybook character who wears his underwear on the outside and Schuster and Siegel were paid $130 to create him. Can we please have some fun with this character, for the first time in 50 years?

And that’s where Tank Girl wins me over: it’s just fun, particularly if you’re tired of sterile perfection. Movies like this do not get made now. It’s a relic from the before-days (pre Raimi Spider-Man), when there were no rules for making superhero movies, after all, they usually bombed and got 1 star out of 5. But that’s dangerous. When failure’s inevitable, you’re free. You can take risks. Things like Barb Wire and Spawn aren’t good, but I’d rather watch them than BLACK HOLE AT THE CENTER OF MY BRAIN THAT PROBABLY DENOTES THE LAST MARVEL MOVIE I SAW. But now that superhero movies are reliably the highest-grossing films of the year, they cannot take risks. They sag at the gunwales with investor cash, and they cannot be allowed to sink. They must be as safe as blue chip stocks.

Tank Girl has some really frustrating moments. Like its spirit animal Mad Max 3, it opens strong but then kind of falls over in the latter part. The kangaroo characters cleverly designed but just tiresome, sucking up precious airtime. The villain gets defeated something like three separate times, each time returning (cackling) from the grave. You roll your eyes. But even at its worst, it’s a thousand times more watchable than modern superhero fare.

Some people are campaigning for a Tank Girl remake. Be careful what you wish for. There is no chance that Tank Girl and “2024” could collide without the results being unmitigated shit. Tank Girl would be an aspirational girlboss who rolls her eyes when men say she can’t do stuff. The zoophilia and pedophilia jokes would be replaced with “So that happened.” All the rough edges would be gone. The animal lust and bonkers tone would be replaced with a neutered, PG-13 aspect, with every joke focus tested. The studio meddling that compromised the movie in 1995 would have ruined literally every single frame. The movie would pitifully crip-walk into theaters, watched by nobody, hated by all. At best, it would be a Moebius-esque joke. In six months, it would be gone. Instead, it was made in 1995 and made like this. Fucked up. Glorious. Kind of eternal.

(It stars one actor I recognize: Malcolm McDowell. I’d previously watched him in Caligula and A Clockwork Orange. It’s nice that he keeps his pants on in this one. I guess he finally reached the level of Hollywood fame where he no longer had to sordidly strip for money. To all you young actors and actresses, let that be an inspirational story. If Malcolm McDowell can escape the casting couch, so can you.)

What’s the