There’s nothing WEIRD about Biden.

The first big news story of the month was President Joe Biden’s pardoning of his son for any crimes he may have committed by selling his Dad’s name to ChiCom gang bosses and East Slavic corruptocrats.

For students of Chinese philosophy a much-discussed passage from midway through the Analects of Confucius came to mind. In Simon Leys’ translation:

The Governor of Shè declared to Confucius: “Among my people, there is a man of unbending integrity: when his father stole a sheep, he denounced him.” Confucius said: “Among my people, men of integrity do things differently: a father covers up for his son, a son covers up for his father — and there is integrity in what they do.” (Analects, 13:18.)

[Shè (葉, pronounced Shuh) was a district in the ancient state of Chŭ, in or near present-day southwest Henan Province.]

So Confucius, the great moralist, is saying we should put family before the law. That little passage has generated a lot of commentary.

For example: In his lectures on the Analects for Great Courses, Robert André LaFleur gives us that exchange from the middle of the Analects just two and a half minutes into Lecture 1 of his 24 lectures. Here are his opening remarks:

Clip: To get a sense of the teacher and his book let’s start almost literally in the middle of a text that has become known as the Analects — another translation could be the Discourses — of a man named Confucius.

Readers of the Analects are already past the halfway point when they come to a little anecdote that, in my estimation, sums up the teaching of the entire book.

The Governor of a little state named Shè is talking with Confucius …]

Much further on in his course, in Lecture 18, Prof. LaFleur returns to the passage.

[Clip: There’s always been a complex relationship in Chinese life between care for those one knows and to whom one is related in one form or another, and devotion to broader swathes of the public. Understanding that relationship is key to untangling the threads that bind large and small parts of Chinese society.

Think back to the opposing views of the Governor of Shè and Confucius in Chapter 13 of the Analects over how a young man should respond when his father steals a sheep. Many of the worst blunders readers make when interpreting Confucius’ Analects occur because they are not attentive to the seemingly contradictory message that one must protect one’s kin above all and toil on behalf of the larger community.

Those ideals are in constant tension; but understanding how they resonate, merge, and persist is central to understanding Confucius and his teaching. Governing the larger society requires balancing attention to family and public spirit. It is the greatest challenge of all in Confucius’ teaching.]

Confucius wouldn’t have seen any contradiction. In his imagination he saw society as a building of several floors, each floor supported by pillars on the floor below. The lowest level of pillars were those of filial piety and similar family-based virtues. If they were neglected the entire structure would come crashing down.

Up on the higher floors, of course, subordinates should be loyal to their superiors, Ministers of State to their ruler, and so on; but filial piety was foundational.

That schema for human society, or something approximating it, prevailed almost everywhere and everywhen up to the late middle ages, when Northwest Europe took the turn to what social anthropologist Joseph Henrich calls the WEIRD model: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

The older, clannish, kin-centered schema still prevails in much of the world — certainly in what we call the Third World — and there are still pockets of it nested in among the general WEIRDness of the modern West, generating what it always generates: lies, lawlessness, and corruption.

In the Biden family, for instance. There ain’t nothing WEIRD about Joe.

One who understands.

Here’s a guy who understands what I said there.

People from different nations with different circumstances, histories, beliefs and traditions will — by definition — hold very different conceptions of good government, some irreconcilably opposed to our own. It has been said that a principal cause of Rome’s fall was that “many men who never knew republican life and did not care for it … became Roman citizens.” Why then do we Americans continue to import millions upon millions who have never known republican life and do not care for it? In doing so, we do not uphold our Founding creed; we hasten and enable its oblivion.

That was Michael Anton, posting at the Unz Review in March 2016. Later that year Anton published, this time in the Claremont Review of Books, “The Flight 93 Election,” a landmark essay often credited with helping Donald Trump win that year’s Presidential election.

Anton served for a year on Trump 45’s National Security Council, resigning when World Saver-in-Chief John Bolton took over the NSC. He has since made a living writing and lecturing.

December 8th Trump announced that Anton would be Director of Policy Planning in the Trump 47 State Department.

Trump noted that Anton served the last eight years “explaining what an America First foreign policy truly means.” [“Trump names several picks for State Department roles,” The Hill, December 8th 2024.]

Given the disagreements in Trump 45, it is highly unlikely that John Bolton will be appointed to any position in Trump 47. With any luck Michael Anton will be “explaining what an America First foreign policy truly means” to Trump and his people clear through to January 2029. Fingers crossed …

Tourists of the Caribbean.

At a party earlier this year Mrs Derbyshire got chatting to a friend of a friend (male, single, sixtyish) who winters in Belize. He gave a glowing account of the place, capturing my lady’s attention. She got it into her head that it would be fun to take a brief winter vacation in Belize.

I knew nothing at all about the place. Come on: How much do you know?

Wikipedia told me that Belize was British Honduras until attaining independence in 1981. Thus encouraged, I tried to look up the colony in my grandfather’s faithful 1922 Atlas-Guide to the British Commonwealth of Nations & Foreign Countries. They gave it a very short description: the shortest of any territory, I think.

Boomer sex fizz

According to Philip Larkin:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three …

We know what he meant. Human beings were making the beast with two backs long before 1963, as Larkin — born in 1922, vigorously heterosexual, never married — surely knew, but the place of sex in our lives — in our society, in our imaginations — underwent some kind of radical shift in the early 1960s.

In relation to political power, for example. The pre-1960s U.S. Presidency may not have been an unbroken continuum of marital fidelity, but it was surprisingly close to one. The first thirty-four Presidents of the United States were, sexually speaking, a sober lot: the earlier ones quite strikingly so by comparison with their contemporaries in charge of the big old despotic empires.

(You can include female despots in that latter group. Was it Catherine of Russia or the Dowager Empress Cixi of China — pronunciation here — whose favorite retainer was said to be able, while standing upright, to spin a wagon wheel on his erect member? I forget.)

Then along came JFK.

Shirley MacLaine says Marilyn Monroe went to bed with both John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert on the same night.

The Oscar-winner, 90, makes the scandalous claim in her new coffee book, The Wall of Life: Pictures and Stories from this Marvellous Lifetime, which features a photograph from May 19, 1962 — the night Monroe breathlessly sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to JFK.

MacLaine was present at the event and says she attended an afterparty where she saw President Kennedy leave a bedroom with Monroe inside. [New York Post, November 2nd.]

Today, sixty years on, the scenery has of course all changed. There is no 2024 equivalent of Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot. We are not as reserved as our great-grandparents, but the fizz of Boomer sexuality has calmed down to occasional bubbles.

(As an aside: I’ve always thought the late Martin Gardner was on to something when he remarked the coincidence that the only two letters of the alphabet shaped approximately like the female bosom are “M” and “B,” while the best-known sex symbols of the middle twentieth century had initials “MM” and “BB.” Although Gardner did not mention it, we Brits had a sex symbol of our own in those years: Diana Dors. DD? Hmm …)

In idle moments I sometimes channel-surf through to reruns of the sitcom Two and a Half Men, which aired through the aughts. (From 2003 to 2011 in the Charlie Sheen version, which I much prefer.) The show relies heavily on sexual humor. That makes it a Boomer relic, as I am reminded any time one of my Millennial kids happens to cross the room as I am watching and laughing. My Millenial stops, watches a minute or two stone-faced, then exits with eyes rolling.

Have social scientists come up with general theories about how these shifting currents of sexual attention affect the fate of societies? Of course they have; but I wasn’t acquainted with any of them until late November. Then, scrolling through X, I came across a post by M.A. Franklin, proprietor of the Foundation Father website, which gives advice on fatherhood. Franklin had posted a good long thread on the anthropologist J.D. Unwin, whose dates are 1895-1936.

I had never heard of Unwin. Now I have his 1934 book Sex and Culture on my reading list.

America’s Newspaper of Record Legs

In all the shifting currents of sex-in-society, some things stay fixed.

Opening my New York Post this morning, what should I see occupying most of page three but a leggy young blonde of no very significant news value — brandishing a cigar! Nothing new about that: here are illustrations from the Post for four consecutive days prior.

And here was George Orwell, writing a long lifetime ago:

There is an immense amount of pornography of a mild sort, countless illustrated papers cashing in on women’s legs, but there is no popular literature specializing in the “vulgar,” farcical aspect of sex. [“The Art of Donald McGill” in Horizon, September 1941.]

How I love my New York Post! — the still center in a changing world.

(Legs apart … Sorry! I meant to say, legs aside: I don’t know how things go at the Post in 2024, but in the old Fleet Street tabloids forty years ago, the corner of the newsroom that housed the subeditor responsible for those features was known as the Ts and Bs desk, for “tits and bums.”)

A man of honor

Speaking of Presidential sexuality: Following Donald Trump’s election this month I thought I should flesh out (yeah, yeah) my understanding of the other person to win two non-consecutive terms as President, so I took Henry Graff’s short biography of Grover Cleveland out of my local library.

Before reading Graff my knowledge of Cleveland was rudimentary. I knew the story about the child that he sired before he was married; I knew the ditty it inspired when, a dozen years later, Cleveland was elected President:

Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?
Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!

I knew that, and I knew that Cleveland had behaved honorably towards the child, financing his education. (The boy became a physician.)

The October Country

October in the northern hemisphere is, let’s face it, a melancholy month.

Walking the dog through the quiet streets of our bosky suburb one chilly morning, a mild wind came up, filling the air with downwards-drifting dead leaves in slow showers. The pop-music standard Autumn Leaves of course surfaced in my head and got stuck there for the rest of the day.

It has been recorded about 1400 times by mainstream and modern jazz musicians alone and is the eighth most recorded tune by jazzmen, just before All the Things You Are. (Philippe Baudoin, “History and Analysis of Autumn Leaves.”)

So I guess there’s a good market for melancholy, at any rate in jazz.

Back home at my computer I summoned Keats’ poem to cheer me up. Out on the street I’d only been able to recall the first couplet, but I knew the thing was autumn-positive. Sure enough, the poet reminded me of one thing I like about this month, martyr as I am to small biting insects: October kills off the summertime bugs.

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft …

Well, boo hoo hoo. Mourn away, damn you, then die!

Sorry. I guess October really does get to me.

It doesn’t help that it’s also a macabre month. If, when walking, I took my eyes off the down-drifting dead leaves, they met ghouls, skeletons, monsters, evil-grinning jack-o’-lanterns, fearsome giant black spiders on purple webs, and other memento moris (or whatever the correct plural is) on suburban lawns. One of my neighbors actually has a hearse on his lawn, drawn by a skeleton horse, along with — good grief! — a skeleton baby in a stroller pushed by a skeleton Mom.

If you were born and raised in the U.S.A. it’s probably hard to imagine how peculiar all this seems to those of us who weren’t, the more so to those of us from superstitious cultures. My wife, when she first settled here from China, was horrified by Halloween decor. The Chinese don’t take death lightly, not even just for one day a year.

Halloween wasn’t observed in the English East Midlands of my childhood, but I got some of the transatlantic flavor of it around age twelve when I read Ray Bradbury’s short-story collection The October Country. To this day, if there are people gathered around a traffic accident, I expect to see the red-haired, red-cheeked woman from “The Crowd“; and the expression “Grim Reaper” carries an extra load of meaning for Bradbury fans.

So yeah, a melancholy month. Right in the middle of it, though, there comes a clear bright day when gloom is temporarily banished; when life is celebrated and death not thought of. Happy birthday, sweetheart!

Baroque sports

Until this month all I knew about Augustus the Strong was what I had gathered from Prof. Steinberg’s Great Courses lecture on him.

Then came my October delivery of the London Literary Review. One of the books reviewed is a new biography of that Baroque monarch: Augustus The Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco.

The reviewer has this to tell us about Augustus’ sporting enthusiasms.

While paying due attention to all this magnificence, Blanning also gives unsparing descriptions of the hunting of animals, which was one of Augustus’s favourite pursuits. At the “wedding of the century,” four hundred deer were driven into the River Elbe so that the wedding guests could shoot them; the bride apparently joined in with particular enthusiasm. Then there was pig-sticking and a Parforcejagd, in which a stag was chased across open country until it collapsed from exhaustion. Another “sport” Augustus favoured was fox-tossing. To entertain the visiting king of Prussia, two hundred foxes were tossed in blankets in the palace courtyard until they died. There was also the Treibjagd, in which deer, bears and boars were driven over a cliff and fell to their deaths, watched delightedly by courtiers and peasants. Most of these activities involved no skill whatsoever.

Fox-tossing as a spectator sport? Fox-tossing? That almost left me feeling positive about women’s soccer.

The two kinds of knowledge

No sooner had we made our bow to Mr. Cambridge, in his library, than Johnson ran eagerly to one side of the room, intent on poring over the backs of the books. Sir Joshua observed, (aside,) “He runs to the books, as I do to the pictures: but I have the advantage. I can see much more of the pictures than he can of the books.” Mr. Cambridge, upon this, politely said, “Dr. Johnson, I am going, with your pardon, to accuse myself, for I have the same custom which I perceive you have. But it seems odd that one should have such a desire to look at the backs of books.” Johnson, ever ready for contest, instantly started from his reverie, wheeled about, and answered, “Sir, the reason is very plain. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and the backs of books in libraries.” Sir Joshua observed to me the extraordinary promptitude with which Johnson flew upon an argument. “Yes, (said I,) he has no formal preparation, no flourishing with his sword; he is through your body in an instant.” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson; April 18th, 1775)

Johnson had plenty of data in his bewigged head, but he was plainly also a fan of metadata — data about data. Not only did he know a lot of stuff; he knew where to go to find out what he didn’t know.

Indeed, “knowledge is of two kinds”: there is data, and there is metadata. If I send you an email, the contents of the email — the information I want to impart to you, or the question I want to ask you — is the data. The date and time stamped on the email, the names and e-addresses of sender(s) and recipient(s), the subject line, the number of words or bytes in the body of the email — that is metadata. Indexes, concordances and directories, “catalogues, and the backs of books in libraries,” … all metadata, of a kind Dr. Johnson would have been familiar with. For as long as humanity has been producing anything that resembles books we have been working the metadata.

Scriptural isolationism

Because I don’t know the Bible very well I often get caught out by scriptural references. So it was the other day when I was browsing my September 2024 issue of The New Criterion.

That magazine always includes some original poetry. The poet in this issue was George Bradley, whose most recent collection, Late Montale, consists of his own translations of verses by the 20th-century Italian poet Eugenio Montale.

George Bradley’s contribution to this month’s New Criterion was a single well-wrought poem, five stanzas of ten lines each, unrhymed and with just enough scansion to pull the reader along. Title: “A dog by the ears.” It opens:

A man who meddles in a quarrel not his own
is like one who takes a passing dog by the ears
says the Scripture, …

Does it? I didn’t get the allusion. Fortunately my Scofield Reference Bible was close at hand and has a good concordance. Dog … dog … yep:

Prov.26:11; 2 Pet.2:22, as a d returneth
26:17, like one that taketh a d by ears

I looked it up:

Proverbs 26:17. He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears.

According to a different American poet, Proverbs was written by King Solomon, who was famously — in fact proverbially — wise. Perhaps we isolationists should point out that particular bit of his wisdom at those of our pundits and policy-makers who want us to plunge up to our nukes in a war between the world’s two most corrupt white nations.

Fiction of the month

Book or movie? Most often the book comes first. We’ve read and enjoyed a novel; someone’s made a movie of it; we watch the movie to see how faithful the movie-maker was to the novel’s plotline and how closely the movie characters correspond to the mental images we generated when reading the novel.

The result is often disappointing. A good book may not make a good movie. Perhaps the movie-maker didn’t get the point of the book; perhaps he was in too much of a hurry, not feeling well, or under-funded; perhaps he’s an ideologue who wants to send us a Message when the novelist only wanted to tell us a story. Or it may be that he’s attempted the impossible. Novel and movie are different art forms. Perhaps some good books just can’t be made into good movies.

This month I watched a movie, then read the book. Both were excellent. I’d be hard-pressed to say which was better: the movie, as a movie, or the book, as a book. The title in both cases was Me Before You. The movie (2016, 1h 50m) was directed by Thea Sharrock; the book (2012, 384 pages) was written by Jojo Moyes. Both ladies are Gen-X Brits.

I’d never heard of either novel or movie until early this month. Browsing social media, I saw some friends discussing a different book: Two Arms and a Head by “Clayton Atreus,” pen-name of Clayton Schwartz. (A curious choice of pen-name.) This is not fiction, it’s a memoir — and it may not be an actual print-on-paper book: I can’t find a listing on Amazon.

You can read Two Arms and a Head here. I don’t recommend you do so; I couldn’t get very far with it. It quickly gets gross. What you mainly need to know is in a review at Astral Codex, posted last month. From which:

In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition.

He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road.

The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down.

On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide.

In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note.

Writing under the pseudonym Clayton Atreus, he lays out in excruciating detail how awful it is to be paralyzed, and how his new life is but a shadow of what it once was. He concludes that his life is no longer worth living, and proceeds to end it.

Along the way, he addresses the obstacles that society has put in his way of dying on his own terms — the biggest of which is the fact that physician-assisted suicide for his condition is illegal at the time.

That review, incidentally, includes — a short scroll down — a good diagram of the human spinal column, with all the vertebrae labeled. Sure enough, T5 is just above nipple level.

(And I can’t let the phrase “physician-assisted suicide” pass without recalling my mother’s response to it, although I’m sure I must have mentioned it before. Mum was a full-time professional State Registered Nurse in England from the 1930s to the 1970s. When the legality of physician-assisted suicide came up in conversation once, she rolled her eyes, laughed, and said: “For Heaven’s sake! Doctors have been doing that for ever!” Even to members of the Royal Family, we now know.)

Well, one of my friends, in their social-media chat about Two Arms and a Head, mentioned the movie version of Me Before You. I looked it up; it was the kind of thing my wife would like; so we streamed it from Amazon one Saturday evening after dinner.

Mrs Derbyshire did like it. By the end she was crying. Quote: “I haven’t [sob] cried at a movie [sob] for ages …”

Yes, it’s a woman’s movie. I enjoyed it, though — not usual for me where women’s movies are concerned. All the actors were excellent, the narrative pacing just right.

The male lead is Will, played by Sam Claflin: a formerly active and successful young man now afflicted, like Clayton Schwarz, with a paralyzing spinal injury. Will’s injury is worse than Clayton’s, though. He’s a C5-6 quadriplegic, with very little function below the neck. (The medical profession nowadays prefers “tetraplegic” as being etymologically more correct, but the book uses “quadri-.”) The female lead, a young woman named Louisa, played by Emilia Clarke, is hired to keep Will company.

Mozart in the Jungle

I have thought, ever since reading his 1959 classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, that Erving Goffman’s distinction between the “front” and the “back” is a good starting-point for a lot of sociological commentary.

Here I was, for example, diarizing about a trip to Mexico that we enjoyed six years ago:

There is something here analogous to famous distinction between the “front” and the “back” of our social performances. In a restaurant, for example, the “front” is murmuring, deferential waiters offering carefully-arranged dishes in an atmosphere of hushed, orderly, genteel cleanliness; the “back” is frayed tempers, shouting matches, panicked chefs, and broken crockery in an overheated kitchen with clogged grease traps.

A nation, like any other social unit, has a “front” and a “back.” We didn’t get more than a glimpse of Mexico’s violent, corrupt “back.” The tourist “front,” though, is pretty darn nice.

The performing arts of course offer many instances of the front-back contrast. I tried to catch some of it as it presents in the world of opera in my novel Fire from the Sun, using gossip I’d picked up from opera magazines, memoirs, and conversations with actual opera singers.

Another (ahem) literary gem in this small genre is the late Blair Tindall’s 2005 memoir Mozart in the Jungle, which I read just this month.

Tindall, an American lady from North Carolina, died last year at age 63 from hardening of the arteries with, according to the county Medical Examiner’s office, alcohol poisoning as a contributing factor. She had made her living as an oboist, playing that difficult instrument mainly at concert performances.

Her memoir is unsparing about the concert performer’s life — those performers, that is, who are not world-famous superstars. Opportunities are limited, the pay is terrible, and working mainly evening hours severely limits your dating opportunities. Let the late Ms. Tindall tell us:

Indeed, a full-time symphonic job evolves into monotony for many players. Orchestra musicians saw away like factory workers, repeating the same pieces year after year. Once a player is employed by a desirable orchestra, career advancement is severely limited. Perfectionism and injuries wear musicians down. Nighttime and holiday work disconnect them from mainstream life. Players complain they forfeit autonomy to an omnipotent conductor who works a third of their schedule, is paid as much as twenty musicians, and gets credit for the music they make.

As well as giving us a graphic account of the low-life side of her trade — the book’s subtitle is “Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music” — Ms Tindall also describes the ebb and flow, mostly ebb, of concert music through the later twentieth century as it responded to cultural change, especially as that change affected the funding of orchestras and the willingness of people to give up an evening and a sizeable ticket price to attend performances. Her memoir predates the COVID pandemic, but those years surely delivered another blow.

There has been technological change, too: radio to TV, vinyl to CD via cassette tape, and so on. That aspect of the story left me thinking how vulnerable concert music surely is to AI.

If you visit social media much you have seen the astonishing visual creations. Audio must be equally susceptible. How hard can it be to create, ex nihilo, a sound file precisely mimicking an oboe being played? Merge a few such files together, you’ve got a complete orchestral performance. What need for human players?

Blair Tindall quotes a Harvard researcher who found that orchestral musicians scored near the bottom in job satisfaction: “Only operating room nurses and semiconductor fabrication teams scored lower.” Perhaps hi-tech will soon relieve them of their drudgery.

Vocal discontent

As bad as things are for concert-music instrumentalists, they seem to be even worse for singers. Ms Tindall:

Up in the wooden choir loft, chorus members had already started gathering. Singers like these live even more unstable freelance lives than instrumentalists, often taking jobs at the largest synagogues and churches to sing during their services. They get rock-bottom rates for these gigs, without the union-mandated benefits attached to my check. Together with office temping during the week, they strive to make enough to pay for vocal coaching costing between $70 and $100 or more per hour. Except for the highest echelon of opera stars, even the most successful vocalists barely scraped by.

That touches on one of my present discontents, although it’s a very minor one.

Our church has a “worship team” to lead the hymn singing. The team consist of two female singers, an occasional pianist (female), and one or two guitarists, both male.

The lady singers do a great job. It seems to me, though, that there should be a male voice in there too. No, not mine: I can’t any longer sing worth a damn. In our congregation, though — seventy or eighty souls on a good Sunday — there must surely be a young guy with a voice.

I bring it up at church meetings. I have no problem with the worship team, I explain; but as an opera fan, I want to hear a male voice in there with them — a baritone or tenor. (Baritone for preference; tenors too often want to steal the show.)

Our pastor nods at my suggestion, other members roll their eyes or snigger, and we move on to the next item of business.

Our culture seems to have drifted into an era when, outside the concert hall, it is considered peculiar for a man to sing. Even in church, most male congregants don’t join in with the hymns, and the handful who do look embarrassed about it.

This is a real loss. There’s pleasure in singing, especially in company with others. I cherish memories of a coach-full of high-school classmates singing lustily to and from an away rugby fixture, of sing-alongs in the pub as closing time approached, and, yes, of a congregation joining in the lovely old Anglican hymns.

Get off the lawn!

Yes, I’m going to lurch off into geezerish grumbling about the decay of our culture.

One evening in late August when we both had time on our hands, the Mrs and I decided to watch a movie on Netflix.

Neither of us is a movie buff. I know nothing at all about movies. The Mrs is only a little better; but sometimes she hears from friends that such-and-such is a good movie, and remembers.

So it was this evening. The movie name she had heard and remembered was Equalizer, a thriller. I powered up Netflix on the TV and did a search. Two movies came up named Equalizer. One was from 2014, the other — a remake, I supposed — was from 2023. We agreed that the newer one was likely a better bet and settled down to watch it.

Fifteen minutes in, we were baffled. The movie made no sense. Who is this guy? Why did he do that? And what, exactly, did he do? …