The Haunting of Hill House ep. 5 - Memento Mori

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

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The Bent Neck Lady

We've seen Luke's side of the story: him and Nelly against the world. Nobody listens, nobody understands, nobody can see what they see. But at least they have each other.

Episode 5 treads similar ground to Episode 4: a spirit-sensitive twin bereft of their support system struggles to keep their head afloat in the onslaught of pain that is life. This could have felt redundant, but Flanagan and co. are wise to orient this episode around a key difference... these twins are not equally yoked. They may have been once, but the house and their history have come between them. Luke's coping mechanism leaves no room for his sister, as we see in a heartbreaking scene of Luke pathetically bullying Nelly into buying him heroin on the way to rehab. This is a betrayal of the highest order. It is also a harder and better scene than Luke's struggles with substance abuse in his own episode. Maybe it hurts more seeing addiction through the eyes of a loved one.

Best of the 2010s: Top Ten

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Art is Revolutionary. It can entertain, explain, obtain, and remain, but the most lasting experiences come with some pain. Stories are breakages. Why break if not to build something better from the wreckage?

Electric arcs follow characters who strive. Often they strive against the flow, as when a preacher does his small part to fight climate catastrophe, or when a boy comes of age in a world that wants to erase him, or when a worker refuses to perpetuate the oppressive cycles they are born into. Art has a Revolutionary quality; this may be its most crucial quality of all.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 4 - Compulsion

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

The Twin Thing

At the end of the last piece I mentioned the motif of a tertiary character telling a ghost story every episode. Oral storytelling is the preferred medium of ghost stories, after all. Specters can be inherited, and words are their DNA.

This time the story comes from a military veteran. He recalls gouging his own eyes out on an acid trip because of a charred Iranian girl whose corpse he encountered while overseas. She was all he could see. The eyelessness of the corpse he couldn't forget demanded the eyelessness of the body he cannot escape. Luke is the audience for this story, and the setting is an AA meeting. Why this particular tale from this particular person? The symbolism doubles up when child Luke explains the way he protects his family with little green army men. You have to count them out, a lot, and you have to keep doing it, and you have to believe it will work. Adult Luke is like a disabled veteran, cast off by society, whose PTSD and abandonment issues result in debilitating drug use.

Much like the teller of the ghost story, Luke's problem is that he sees too much. His follow-up problem is that nobody believes him about what he sees. When he was young he was dismissed as an innocent kid. Now that he's older he's dismissed as a cynical junkie. He just can't win.

DON'T LOOK UP: Dope Impact

Director: Adam McKay
Writers: Adam McKay, David Sirota
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande
Runtime: 138 mins.
2021

Dr. Strangelove, Sorry to Bother You, Melancholia: the much better apocalyptic satires that I was reminded of during this film. Do the Right Thing, Catch-22, First Reformed. I found solace in dwelling on the sharpness of these stories, their visual splendor, their human insights, and their gall. Don't Look Up has none of that. This is a Netflix film, which means it is algorithmically gestated to remind us of other, better movies. A thin veneer of style stretched over a boomer facebook screed about how kids are too much in their phones to Get Out the Vote. This is not satire, it is a lecture.

For this is a movie about the Bang at the end of the world, a massive meteor that nobody seems to want to take seriously. Our guides on this journey of misanthropy are PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). Their quest takes us from the observatory, to the White House, to yammering daytime talk shows, to oblivion. As they try to spread the word that the Earth has six months to live, the airwaves crowd them out with news of celebrity gossip and political scandal.

This is the kind of movie that thinks the height of comedy is revealing that the president of the United States (Meryl Streep) has sexted her vagina to somebody. This is the kind of movie that still thinks jokes about diet culture are cutting edge. This is the kind of movie that interrupts televised celebrity drama with a placeholder character who intones that their phone just automatically bought that celebrity's new single, and oh would you look at that, it did it again.