Earlier in the summer I saw the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park and that was a good night out but nobody in their right mind would claim that the Stones are better now than they were in 1969 or 1973. Yet the best time to see the Bad Seeds, who formed in 1983, is right now. Though Cave is about to turn 65, the refinement of his craft has required no ebbing of conviction. When he inhabits a murderer on Death Row in “The Mercy Seat”, or a mad prophet retelling the birth of Elvis Presley in “Tupelo”, he still goes all in. The quasi-industrial brutality of “From Her to Eternity” is as persuasive as the naked pleading of “I Need You”. When I went back to the studio versions over the following days, I found them somehow lacking by comparison. Between songs, Cave radiated warmth and good humour. Most frontmen pick a moment to commune with the crowd from the edge of the stage but I suspect Cave could have happily spent the whole show down there, arms outstretched.

Until I read Cave’s new book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, I found it hard to put my finger on why the Bad Seeds have become so much more potent and popular in recent years. Their only Top 20 entry is “Where the Wild Roses Grow”, a 1995 duet with Kylie Minogue. Two of their most popular songs on Spotify, “Red Right Hand” and “O Children”, owe their position to appearances in Peaky Blinders and Harry Potter. Many of their live highlights weren’t even singles, let alone hits. Since the creative nadir of Nocturama in 2003, the Bad Seeds have enjoyed a series of rebirths: the explosive maximalism of Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, the slower, subtler Push the Sky Away and the lambent prayers of Ghosteen.

That last transformation was enforced. Seven years ago, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died after falling from a cliff near Brighton. Cave’s grief was etched into Ghosteen and its predecessor Skeleton Tree, the making of which was chronicled in Andrew Dominik’s gently shattering 2016 documentary One More Time with Feeling. This incomprehensible tragedy suddenly became the signal fact of Cave’s life. “The loss of my son defines me,” he says in the book.

After a period of necessary privacy, Cave chose to make his grieving public. In 2018 he started answering questions from fans on his website under the name “The Red Hand Files” and on the road with his “Nick Cave in Conversation” events: an experiment in radical transparency and fostering a community of the bereaved. The first entry in The Red Hand Files was about how he resumed songwriting after tragedy. “Creative people in general have an acute propensity for wonder,” he wrote. “Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. Everything loses its sheen and appears beyond our reach. We were surviving, but we were surviving in exile on the perimeter of our lives, way beyond anything that mattered.” His lifelines were “work and community” — a means of connecting with the suffering of others in order to feel less alone.

As you can tell, Cave is one hell of a writer. As the author of countless spectacular lyrics, two novels, an epic poem and an unproduced screenplay (a berserk take on a Gladiator sequel), he could surely write a classic memoir but Faith, Hope and Carnage is something else: a series of conversations with his friend Seán O’Hagan, an Observer journalist. Kudos to O’Hagan for having the idea and Cave for running it because it’s an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind book. An alternative title might be God, Grief and Art.

Cave may claim to hate interviews but he is a miraculously fluent talker, incapable of a dull line. Many of the sentences have an aphoristic punch. Creating art is “the act of retelling the story of our lives so that it makes sense”. Hope is “optimism with a broken heart”. Twitter is “just a factory that churns out arseholes”. On lyrics: “A dishonest line tends to deteriorate somehow after repeated singing; a truthful line collects meaning.” On death: “If you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it.”

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Cave’s songs have always been saturated with religious imagery and language — first the Old Testament, later the New — but it was never clear how much of a believer he was. Now, he says, he is emphatically religious in the sense of feeling a “deep inclusion in the human predicament”. That sounds just like Leonard Cohen, another great songwriter whose wisdom derived from an idiosyncratic relationship with the divine and an underrated sense of humour. To call this a self-help book would horrify everyone involved but I suspect many readers will find it useful, especially those who have known catastrophic grief.

Cave describes the loss of his son as nothing less than an annihilation of the self. He has been broken to pieces and remade — born again, you might say. His songwriting, too, has required reassembly. He considers Skeleton Tree, mostly written before Arthur’s death but recorded afterwards, as an “unholy” record which he struggles to revisit. But making Ghosteen, via long improvisatory sessions with Ellis, was a “holy” experience in which his son’s spirit felt literally present. “Arthur was snatched away, he just disappeared, and this felt like some way of making contact again and saying goodbye,” Cave says. Over the course of these conversations, which began with lockdown in March 2020, there are other losses: his mother Dawn, his ex-lover Anita Lane, his friend Hal Willner and, most recently, his oldest son Jethro. Covid-19 gives the book an eerie backbeat.

O’Hagan is a sensitive interviewer — really more of a conversationalist. Cave says that he finds relating his own history “unbearable, mostly”. What’s more, it feels to him like someone else’s life — that of a man who had not yet lost his son. So why look back?

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Still, O’Hagan occasionally manages to lure Cave into the past. His idyllic, outdoorsy childhood in Wangaratta, Australia, gave way to a delinquent adolescence, which was blown apart by the death of his father, a teacher of literature, in a car accident when Cave was 19. He was already taking heroin, an addiction that he relates, perhaps surprisingly, to a conservative need for routine rather than the thirst for chaos that animated his music for many years. After the hellfire post-punk of the Birthday Party came the Bad Seeds. Cave remarks that Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld, band mainstays from the beginning until the 2000s, were domineering personalities like himself. “The potential for disharmony is enormous! It’s like having Hitler, Stalin and fucking Mao Zedong trying to make a record together.” Warren Ellis, who joined in 1997, is more like a brother: an equal partner in the studio and a remarkable friend. On the topic of friendship, Cave’s affection for Coldplay’s Chris Martin is delightfully unexpected. “Obviously, there’s a fair amount of daylight between the kinds of music we play, but who fucking cares? I have always been drawn to his generosity of spirit, his engagement with the world.”

When he was younger, Cave thinks, he had too much disdain for the world. Now it inspires awe. He cherishes humility, mercy and mystery; he loathes dogma, cynicism and the morally obvious. He is therefore stronger than most on the subject of cancel culture, to which his objection is more personal than political. He recoils from the punitive impulse; the failure of empathy and forgiveness. I would argue that forgiveness needs to be sought and earned but I think he’s right to say that the online ritual of denunciation can be merely “a kind of sadism dressed up as virtue”. I hope this section doesn’t get clickbaited as “Cave slams cancel culture!” because it’s more about the particular view of human nature that he has arrived at: “I rarely see badness in people; rather, I see layers of suffering.”

The context is obvious. Towards the end of the book, Cave finally talks about the night of Arthur’s death, and how he and his “astonishing and oceanic” wife Susie negotiated the immediate aftermath. Hard to read, it must have been infinitely harder to speak, but emotional availability is essential to everything he does now. The most common question submitted to The Red Hand Files, apparently, is “Does it ever get better?” To which Cave can now reply: “The answer is yes. We become different. We become better.” Instead of being diminished by loss, he has been enlarged. “I became a person after my son died” is a startling line.

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It is impossible to overstate how unusual it is to find this depth of self-analysis and wisdom from a rock musician. Faith, Hope and Carnage makes most rock memoirs look like skips full of rusty anecdotes and grudges. Among other things, the book finally helped me understand why Cave and the Bad Seeds keep getting better. Cave’s growing hunger for “communal awe” makes the shows feel genuinely necessary. And he believes himself to be a more generous and expansive person than he was before, so he has more to give.

“We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around,” he tells O’Hagan. “Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is.” He knows now.

***

This article was first published on 21 September 2022.

Liam Gallagher recently headlined Knebworth twice, with more than half his set devoted to Oasis songs. There are new books about the period, too: Faster Than a Cannonball: 1995 and All That, an oral history by former GQ editor Dylan Jones, and Verse, Chorus, Monster, a memoir from Blur’s Graham Coxon. It’s slightly insulting to lump these artists together as Britpop when it was just a three or four-year slice of their careers, but it was the slice that made everything else possible.

Why can’t we let Britpop go? It certainly helps that the generation currently running the media grew up with it, and that, unlike the extraordinarily unfortunate grunge scene, all the key players are still with us. Aside from Elastica’s Justine Frischmann (whose influence is audible in this year’s sardonic indie sensations Wet Leg), they are all still making music. The best songs endure. Beyond the music, it is a great yarn, with a tight-knit cast of characters and a full menu of drama: sex, drugs, money, hubris, vengeance and bitter rivalry.

Britpop is usually remembered as the musical component of a time when British culture was exploding with energy and optimism: in art, fashion, cinema, football, comedy, television, magazines, literature and politics. But the scene itself was full of rancour, gleefully stoked by the music weeklies. Oasis famously set themselves against Blur but so did Pulp and Suede. “It felt like whenever a new English guitar-based band arrived on the scene, the press would pit Blur against them, even when it wasn’t really appropriate,” Coxon glumly recalls in his book. And thanks to the warring Gallaghers, Oasis also hated Oasis. Music became a contact sport.

Britpop is still worth fighting about. When Blur tickets went on sale, one friend tweeted a savage (and simplistic) assessment by Suede’s Brett Anderson: a band “who waved flags and dropped their aitches and painted a social tourist’s cartoon of British life: patronising, jingoistic and crass”. This opinion wasn’t expressed in the NME in the heat of 1994; it appeared in Anderson’s 2019 memoir Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn. Old feuds die hard. People still argue about who was the best band. They argue about whether Britpop was guilty of legitimising flag-waving and misogyny. They even argue about Oasis’s grand folly, Be Here Now, which many fans like rather more than Noel Gallagher does. Most of all, they argue about whether it deserves to loom so large, then and now. Was it really so special?

Britpop was an idea and an attitude rather than a genre, and it was born out of confrontation. The milestone April 1993 issue of Select magazine (“Yanks go home! Suede, St Etienne, Denim, Pulp, the Auteurs and the Battle for Britain”) was a tongue-in-cheek riposte to sullen post-Nirvana rock and American cultural imperialism in general, against which it championed homegrown “glamour, wit and irony”. The Young British Artists had a similar sense of outsider ambition, greeting the post-Thatcher, post-Cold War Nineties with a determination to come roaring out of the sidelines and rewrite mainstream culture.

“Like it or not, we were Thatcher’s children,” Steve McQueen says in Faster Than a Cannonball. “When you realise there’s no safety net… people just tried to get on with it.” For the most part, these were not children of privilege (Blur’s Damon Albarn, the son of a university lecturer from Essex, somehow became the “posh” one) and they were reaching out to take what they had been denied. In Daniel Rachel’s oral history Don’t Look Back in Anger, radio DJ Steve Lamacq recalls his thoughts when playing Pulp’s 1995 hit Common People: “This is our victory; we’ve come from nothing and we’ve won.”

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Right from the start, though, there were sceptics. “One of Suede’s many achievements,” responded Keith Cameron in NME that same month, “has been to inspire some of the most outrageous examples of self-aggrandising tommyrot the British music press has ever seen fit to print… This is a small country, bedevilled with delusions of grandeur — not least of which that we invented pop music.” Suede and Pulp both hated the Union flag on the Select cover. Everybody hated the word Britpop, which didn’t actually appear in Select but soon became ubiquitous. “Nobody liked it,” Frischmann once said. “We knew it was trouble.”

This early definition of Britpop was a spiky, arty affair. “I was thinking of Philip Larkin not Phil Daniels,” Stuart Maconie, who wrote the lead essay in Select, told me a few years ago. “It was bedsits and being on the dole: a sort of pasty-faced underdog strangeness.” But that eccentricity did not survive the million-selling success of Parklife and Definitely Maybe in 1994, two albums which collapsed the wall between indie-rock and mainstream pop. The new generation in charge of Radio 1, Top of the Pops and tabloid showbiz columns was as keen as the weeklies to cheerlead the new breed, and that rolled into a bigger narrative (embarrassing in hindsight) about the branding exercise known as Cool Britannia.

In rejecting the political earnestness and low commercial horizons of alternative culture in the Eighties, Britpop overcorrected. The music industry and media, more than the bands themselves, became obsessed with size and success, to the detriment of many careers. When outsiders become insiders, values change and the initial blast of subversion fades into assimilation. The same story played out simultaneously across British culture. Chris Evans, Loaded and the Spice Girls have become looped into the Britpop story while the Manic Street Preachers, Tricky and Radiohead have not.

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As a synecdoche for Britain in the Nineties, Britpop’s reputation rises and falls with that of the decade in general. When, in 2003, John Harris published The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock, a tale gradually swamped by cocaine, heroin, depression and disappointment, he struck an elegiac note: “Britpop is as uncool as could be imagined.” Britpop’s key bands broke up or lost momentum in tandem with the decline of New Labour and the YBAs, and they were all bundled together into a metaphor for squandered promise, arrogance, excess, conformity and apolitical escapism: what were we thinking? Britpop was also blamed for hogging the narrative and occluding other developments in British music, such as trip hop and drum’n’bass, which were more futuristic, more anxious, and less white. Come 2016, when the roots of Right-wing populism were traced back to Nineties Third-Way complacency, some people even blamed Britpop for Brexit — an absurd idea but a briefly popular one.

I sometimes feel like Britpop has to be either the best or worst thing that ever happened. The generation that grew up with simplistic received wisdom about the Sixties and punk rock has lived long enough to see its own youth culture reduced to a cartoon. That’s karma, I suppose. But Britpop had an unfortunate talent for self-caricature, producing images that did it no favours: Noel Gallagher at Number 10; Jarvis Cocker waggling his bum at Michael Jackson; the gruesome video for Blur’s “Country House”, directed by Damien Hirst in the style of Loaded. Such tabloid moments enabled Brett Anderson to dismiss Britpop as a “cheap, beery, graceless cartoon bereft of passion or rage which cravenly hid feeling behind a brittle mask of irony”.

Needless to say, the music was more complicated than that. “Common People”, for example, is neither jaunty social comedy nor a straightforward anthem of working-class pride but a mounting howl of rage and panic from someone who feels himself to be stranded between classes. Parklife’s studies of British life are satirical or elegiac rather than affirming, and the ghastly sitcom oom-pah of “Country House” has that ghostly cry for help in the middle eight. And even Oasis’s give-me-everything confidence was laced with apprehensions of loss: “Slide Away”, “Fade Away”, “Half a World Away”. Perhaps the only example of undiluted youthful vim is “Alright” by Supergrass. But narrative beats close listening every time. “I was singing out my slightly dystopian vision of the future, of the country, and everyone was going, ‘This is brilliant! It’s great!’,” Damon Albarn says in Don’t Look Back in Anger. “It became a nightmare. I suffered profound anxiety for years after as a result.”

These musicians were also more curious than they were given credit for. “Ultimately, Britpop was a reaction against new ideas; it was against rave, hip hop and R&B, wrapped in a Beatles/Stones comfort blanket,” alleges Bob Stanley in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. But Noel Gallagher, a former Hacienda clubber, made records with the Chemical Brothers and Goldie, remixes abounded, and it’s hard to find a British musician less parochial than Albarn, from Gorillaz to Africa Express.

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I always feel drawn to these wrinkles in the Britpop story but Faster Than a Cannonball leans into the myth with gusto. Whether the choice of interviewees dictates the story or vice versa, it is a robustly anti-revisionist amen to the mid-Nineties. We get rosy memories from those, such as Noel Gallagher and Blur’s Alex James, who had a spectacularly good time but not people like Graham Coxon, who found much of it unbearable. The “Country House” video, he writes in his memoir, “seemed to confirm what I was afraid of — that Nineties culture had become tacky and cheap. For me, the decade wasn’t as golden and beautiful as my idea of the Sixties were like — which, of course, would have been very different to the reality.”

Ah, the Sixties. At first, Britpop seemed to owe far more to the seedy glamour of the Seventies (“it was a bit off, a bit eccentric, a bit wrong”, explained Jarvis Cocker) but Dylan Jones argues that “the Nineties chimed with the Sixties in being a decade that was almost uniquely British”. Blur vs Oasis harked back to the Beatles vs the Stones and Euro ’96 to England ’66. Swinging London characters such as Michael Caine, Ray Davies and John Barry become icons all over again. “London Swings! Again!” shouted Vanity Fair. Driven too hard, the comparison ended up making all the excitement about British culture feel second-hand: an echo of the real thing. “With Austin Powers the decade was already lampooning itself as a kind of shit Sixties,” the usually upbeat Alex James complains in Jones’s book.

Faster Than a Cannonball is too bullishly celebratory for my taste but perhaps it is well-timed. While the 30-year-olds I know are likely to regard Britpop and the Nineties with disdain, the teenagers are enthralled by the last great music scene before the internet was everything. It speaks to the lost centrality of pop music in British life, when it could pull together art, sport, fashion, cinema and even politics. Britain still has great rock bands, fascinating pop stars and thriving scenes but not that same unignorable convergence of all three. We certainly don’t have that sense, overblown and self-congratulatory though it may have been, of national rejuvenation and positive movement. Britannia doesn’t feel very cool right now, does it?  The music industry feels more sombre, too. Now that we are acutely aware of the psychological and financial strains on musicians, perhaps the misleading notion that it was all non-stop fun in the mid-Nineties is more attractive than the messy reality.

So is it any wonder that the myth of Britpop continues to exert such fascination? Even if the hard-earned optimism of the early Nineties soon gave way to boorish triumphalism, the memory of that enviable optimism still appears to burn bright. Faster Than a Cannonball suggests that you had to be there but I wonder if it is, in fact, easier to see that time as simply “golden and beautiful” if you weren’t.

Nothing illustrates an author’s reputation as clearly as misattributed work. The Sunscreen confusion proved that one of his era’s most scathing satirists had been recast as the cuddly hipster grandpa of American letters. This certainly chimed with one strand of Vonnegut’s work, which is summed up by a famous line from his 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine (“God damn it babies, you’ve got to be kind”) but that was by no means the whole picture.

Like Dolly Parton, Alan Bennett, George Michael and Anthony Bourdain, Vonnegut has become simplified into an avatar of kindness, his wrinkles ironed flat by the heat of sainthood. This happened long before his death in 2007 and he was a willing conspirator. George Saunders recently spoke about his own reputation as literature’s Mr Nice Guy and gave himself some advice: “one: don’t believe it; two, interrupt it.” The first is easier than the second. One of Vonnegut’s most famous lines is from 1961’s Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Vonnegut often pretended to be nicer than he was, which was good for both his ego and his income.

If you Google Vonnegut, one of the most-asked questions that comes up is: “Was Vonnegut a nice person?” Tough one. He could certainly be warm, wise and generous, but he could also be a greedy and disloyal business partner, a selfish, unfaithful husband and a crotchety, intimidating father. He suffered from depression and suicidal ideation; his work often flirts with nihilism. Robert B. Weide’s recent documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (the title quotes Vonnegut’s masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five) is candid about the writer’s failings as a family man but Weide, who considered Vonnegut a close friend and mentor, still sands off a lot of rough edges.

In his more objective biography And So It Goes, Charles J. Shields quotes the private notes that Vonnegut’s ex-wife Jane made after reading his 1981 quasi-memoir, Palm Sunday: “Kurt doesn’t mind being hurtful, really, although he talks a good game to make you think the opposite. He’s fooled most of his public now, for a long time. You see, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He’s really very innocent.”

When Vonnegut died, one newscaster tagged him as “an oracle for the baby boomer generation”, but that was not his generation. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis on 11 November 1922, a few months before Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. His childhood was happy and prosperous for seven years before falling off a cliff with the Great Depression. Kurt Vonnegut Sr, formerly a successful architect, couldn’t get a single commission during the Thirties. Edith Vonnegut, a society belle from a brewing dynasty, lost her inheritance in a Ponzi scheme and the shock of her reduced circumstances exacerbated serious mental health issues. Her family insisted that her death from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1944 was accidental but Kurt knew better. His father was shattered. “After I’m gone,” Vonnegut told Playboy three decades later, “I don’t want my children to have to say about me what I have to say about my father: ‘He made wonderful jokes, but he was such an unhappy man.’”

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By 1944, Vonnegut was in the US Army. He had agreed to study science at Cornell to please his father and his older brother Bernard, a brilliant atmospheric scientist, but put more effort into student journalism than his grades and figured it was better to enlist than wait to be drafted. Sent to Europe, he was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and incarcerated in an abattoir in Dresden, a beautiful, militarily insignificant city that did not expect to be bombed. On the night of 13 February 1945, however, Allied bombers almost razed it to the ground, killing around 25,000 civilians. When Vonnegut and his fellow POWs emerged from their underground meat locker the next day, they were tasked with removing the corpses of people who had been suffocated in their homes by the firestorm. “The end of the world is not an idea to Vonnegut,” John Updike wrote. “It is a reality he experienced.”

Vonnegut published his first short stories while working in public relations at General Electric, an experience that informed his relatively conventional debut novel, 1952’s Player Piano, a futuristic satire on automation. Vonnegut said that his first six novels were “all about the abuses of technology”. They are also about morality, mortality, free will, war, death, God, the nature of time and the meaning of life. As one character asks in Player Piano: “What are people for?” Vonnegut’s experience in journalism made his prose irresistibly swift, punchy and funny. As his former student John Irving says in Unstuck in Time: “It’s not easy to be easy to read.”

All Vonnegut lacked was readers, and therefore money to support his unexpectedly large family. In 1958, his beloved sister Alice died of cancer, just two days after her husband Jim was killed in a train crash. Kurt and Jane agreed to adopt the couple’s four boys but Jane did the parenting (they had two children of their own) while Kurt typed, chainsmoked and grouched about the noise. “Please let me off the father hook,” he would complain, reserving his physical warmth for his dog. When Vonnegut began teaching fiction at the University of Iowa in the autumn of 1965, all but one of his books was out of print. His latest, God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, introduced his alter ego Kilgore Trout, a desperately unsuccessful science-fiction writer and crank who was, Vonnegut later admitted, “the lonesome and unappreciated writer I thought I might become”.

Vonnegut finally got what he wanted with the 1969 publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, the novel about Dresden that he had been trying to write since 1945. It remains a radically entertaining read. Like the Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze movie Adaptation, it has the startling originality that comes from acknowledging that a story is untellable by conventional means — a sui generis medley of memoir, history, philosophy, science fiction and outrageous black comedy.

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“I got three dollars for each person killed,” Vonnegut said sardonically of his advance, but he made a lot more than that. Coinciding with the peak of the movement against the war in Vietnam, Slaughterhouse-Five made the 47-year-old a hero to readers less than half his age, who saw in his work their own anxieties reflected and made funny. Previously apolitical, if not conservative, he became “A Campus Orwell”, according to Newsweek, growing a moustache and bushy hair to suit his new persona as a public satirist. The press said that he was to the late Sixties what J.D. Salinger had been to the Fifties: an icon of dissent.

Yet Vonnegut was ambivalent about his new celebrity. “I was just writing books to entertain,” he protested in 1972. “I never dreamed of becoming a Pied Piper of the young.” Asked by Playboy if he was a radical, he replied: “No, because everything I believe I was taught in junior civics during the Great Depression.” It’s striking that, with the exception of 1985’s Galapagos, all of Vonnegut’s essential novels — Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, My Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five — were written while he was unsuccessful. He had been poor and obscure for so long that he was discombobulated by the tardy onslaught of wealth and fame. Slaughterhouse-Five, he said, “was the end of some sort of career”.

It was also the end of his marriage to Jane, who had been his most ardent cheerleader during the lean years and never got to enjoy the fat ones. Vonnegut eventually produced 1973’s Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday, a metafictional patchwork festooned with whimsical illustrations and more interested in aphorisms than plot. He summed up its strengths and flaws in an interview: “My books are essentially mosaics, thousands and thousands of tiny little chips all glued together, and each chip is… this thing I learned to make as a child, which is a little joke.”

Breakfast of Champions lodged in the bestseller list for a year but, like most of his later novels, was poorly reviewed, with accusations of glib wisecracks, sophomoric philosophy and recycled ideas. Hostile critics assumed that because his books appealed to students, he must be pandering to them. Reviewing 1976’s Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!, Newsweek called him “an ideal writer for the semi-literate young”. Vonnegut also became a popular target for censors — some of his books were literally burned — which dismayed him. When a Michigan judge condemned Slaughterhouse-Five as “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian”, Vonnegut drily responded: “But Billy Pilgrim was a Christian. The judge apparently read the wrong book.”

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During the Eighties, Vonnegut’s talent and confidence were on the slide (“The only way I can regain credit for my early work is to die,” he told Martin Amis) but he was still in demand as a celebrity. He advertised coffee, played himself in the comedy Back to School and accepted a mindboggling $150,000 from Time for six one-page articles. His speeches became more celebrated than his novels, and his interviews were sensationally entertaining.

They could also be very bleak. “God will kill us by the millions quite soon, I think — by starvation, with flu, through war, in any number of ways,” he said in 1976. And what about this, from 1980? “I think that at least half the people alive, and maybe nine-tenths of them, really do not like this ordeal at all… You know, you talk about the dark side of life: that’s really it. Most people don’t want to be alive.” There is nothing cuddly about that. Salman Rushdie observes that “So it goes”, the famous phrase from Slaughterhouse-Five, is often misinterpreted as a stoic shrug — life goes on — when it’s really about the inevitability of death: “Beneath the apparent resignation is a sadness for which there are no words.” In 1984, Vonnegut attempted suicide with an overdose of pills, just like his mother. So it almost went.

Clearly, Kurt Vonnegut was not the man he pretended to be. His adopted son Jim Adams told Charles J Shields, “There was a definite disconnect between the kind of guy you would imagine Kurt must be from the tone of his books, the kind of guy who would say ‘God damn it, you got to be kind’, and the reality of his behaviour on a daily basis. He was a complicated, difficult man.” There are two ways of interpreting this. One is as cold hypocrisy. Another is to see him as a troubled, serially traumatised man who wanted to be a force for good and often fell short, in which case his talk of living decently in an indecent world was not a scam but a genuine aspiration. “All my books are my effort… to make myself like life better than I do,” he once said.

The truth is that paradox and disappointment are what make Vonnegut’s work such a compelling dance between cynicism and idealism. Who needs perfection? “The crude term that every writer would like to do is mind-fucking,” he said in 1987. “It’s to get into somebody else’s head.” Kurt Vonnegut didn’t need to be a saint or a guru because he succeeded, as well as any writer of his generation, in getting into people’s heads.

My daughter, who wasn’t born when it came out, can recite every line, including the time-capsule references to Dick Cheney’s heart condition and a disrespectful Moby video. As Eminem gobbled up the detritus of American culture like Pac-Man, many of his jokes were doomed to age badly, but you don’t need to clock the allusions to get a kick out of his mischievous vitality 20 years later.

Eminem was so central to pop culture in 2002 that he could legitimately launch an album with a song about the importance of his return. Nobody inspired more arguments. Rappers had inflamed politicians and the press before, but none had done so with albums that sold 25 million copies a piece.

The furore over Eminem’s first album was large enough to be the central theme of his second, and the fuss around that one fuelled the third. A bridge-builder of sorts, he managed to unite Christian conservatives with feminists and LGBTQ groups. The Sun accused him of promoting “torture, incest, murder, rape and armed robbery”. (Not just rapping about these subjects, by the way — promoting them.) The editor-in-chief of Billboard condemned him for making “money off the world’s misery”. Culture warrior Lynne Cheney told a Senate hearing: “It is truly astonishing to me that a man whose work is so filled with hate would be so honoured by his peers.” Sadly, the line often attributed to George W Bush (“the most dangerous threat to American children since polio”) was a fabrication, but it was sufficiently credible to appear as the epigraph in Anthony Bozza’s bestselling 2003 biography Whatever You Say I Am. At least Eminem’s notoriety predated social media. If Twitter had existed back then, it might have fried his brain beyond repair.

How can rap’s former enfant terrible be turning 50? It wasn’t guaranteed. In 2001, Joan Smith wrote in the Guardian: “Validating his rage, which is what his fans are doing, is hardly going to help someone whose biography suggests he is already some way down the path to self-destruction.” But here is — alive, well and, as of this year, America’s best-selling singles artist of all time.

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Nobody argues about Eminem anymore, which is good for the person but less so for his music. In 2000’s paranoid, semi-sarcastic “The Way I Am”, he declared “I am whatever you say I am,” but now that nobody’s making grand claims about him for good or ill, he seems unsure what he is. After his 2005 singles collection, Curtain Call, he dropped out of sight for four years to wrestle with writer’s block, his grief over his murdered friend Proof and his addiction to prescription drugs. Since returning to music with Relapse in 2009, he has never quite managed to find a convincing second act. The recent Curtain Call II lays bare an ongoing identity crisis as he bounces between throwback provocations, sentimental soft-rock hooks, goofy jokes, lyrical showboating and collaborations with Ed Sheeran and Pink. Some tracks sound great but none has the life-or-death necessity of his early years. “I’m not the person I was at 28,” he told Vulture in 2017. “The passion is still there but the rage mostly isn’t.”

Eminem’s most enjoyable late album is 2013’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2, a shameless nostalgia trip on which his tongue-twisting virtuosity is not just the medium but the message. When I saw him headline Wembley Stadium around that time, I felt like I was watching an athlete as much an artist. “Rap God” entered the Guinness Book of Records for featuring the most words (1560) in a hit single and included Eminem’s explanation for his initial success: “Simply rage and youthful exuberance/ Everybody loves to root for a nuisance.”

In the same song, he boasts that he’s been having hits “ever since Bill Clinton was still in office”. I’ve read three new histories of the Nineties this year and none of them addresses Eminem in any depth. This is possibly because he debuted at the very end of the decade; but in many ways Marshall Mathers III was a creature of it. Raised in poverty and chaos on the east side of Detroit, he was a teenager during hip hop’s golden age, when microphone technique was paramount. He slogged his way through the independent hip hop scene before finding both his mentor, Dr Dre, and his voice. The whiteness that had been an obstacle (blame Vanilla Ice) became an asset. It enabled him to read as a rock star as well as a rapper, and licensed him to write explicitly about mental health issues. He was closer to Kurt Cobain than Tupac Shakur in that respect, his problems more internal than external. He didn’t deny it. “If I was black I would’ve sold half,” he rapped in “White America”.

The rap battles recreated in his 2002 quasi-autobiopic, 8 Mile, taught Eminem the importance of getting a reaction with every line, and nothing did the job like a bad-taste joke — the more offensive the better. Hence his shock-comic alter ego (or id) Slim Shady. “I’m only giving you things you joke about with your friends inside your living room,” he explained on “The Real Slim Shady”. “The only difference is I got the balls to say it in front of y’all.” A frequent comparison when he came out with The Slim Shady LP in 1999 was South Park. “Hi kids, do you like violence?” he leered on his debut single, “My Name Is…”, fully anticipating his role as corrupter of the nation’s youth. Shortly afterwards, the question of lyrics and violence, having steadily escalated through moral panics about heavy metal and hip hop, went nuclear with the Columbine High School massacre, as Eminem’s labelmate Marilyn Manson was accused of inspiring the killers.

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Using a technique pioneered by Public Enemy a decade earlier, Eminem performed lyrical judo, turning the backlash to his own advantage. It’s hard to file a case of cultural appropriation against someone who raps, “I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley/ To do black music so selfishly/ And use it to get myself wealthy.” Tough to accuse him of being a bad influence when he has a song called “Role Model”: “Follow me and do exactly what the song says: Smoke weed, take pills, drop outta school, kill people and drink.”

Most important, he had “Stan”, an extraordinary feat of in-character storytelling sweetened by a sample of a pre-fame Dido. Here was a song of such undeniable artistry that even the sceptics had to sit up and listen. Giles Foden, the Guardian’s deputy literary editor, compared “Stan” with the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning; Elton John performed it with Eminem at the Grammys. Years later, it gave us a new word for obsessive fandom. “It’s kind of like a message to the fans to let them know that everything I say is not meant to be taken literally,” Eminem explained at the time, with Columbine on his mind.

Two years later, Eminem’s sensitive performance in 8 Mile, with its motivational anthem “Lose Yourself”, made him almost respectable. Anthony Bozza sums up the rapidly changing media narrative: “(1999) Is he a novelty?; (2000) Does he matter; (2001) Should he be stopped?; (2002) How great is he?” He attracted fans as unlikely as Barbra Streisand and Daniel Day-Lewis, who used Eminem records to hype himself up on the set of Gangs of New York. Sean O’Hagan wrote in the Observer: “It is not overstating the case to say that Eminem is as reflective of his time as Bob Dylan was of his; and, in his own way, just as trenchant a social commentator.” Seamus Heaney praised his “subversive attitude” and “verbal energy”.

No artist can ride the zeitgeist for long, nor should any sane person want to, so there’s no shame in Eminem’s career dropping from a boil to a simmer. Time may not have improved him art but it has clarified it. First, his talent is beyond dispute. Even in the heart of the storm he was committed to hard work and craft. He has not inspired many (any?) great white rappers but his technique and emotional rawness are audible in the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator.

Second, it is obvious that controversy was not his motor after all. Unlike the many celebrities who fall from grace when their secrets are revealed, Eminem’s scandal was frontloaded and, despite some legal troubles, mostly stemmed from his lyrics rather than his behaviour. He’s not quite Snoop Dogg, who went from a first-degree murder charge to hosting a cooking show with Martha Stewart, but compared to Marilyn Manson, who faces multiple allegations of sexual abuse, or the endlessly self-detonating Kanye West, he looks remarkably stable and content. When it comes down to it, he simply loves to rap.

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Finally, we know what he believes. You might reasonably see in his early work a harbinger of the white male rage that now fuels the alt-right, including the trollish humour that leaves it strategically unclear whether provocation is an end in itself or a vehicle for genuine malice. In the original song, Stan writes fan letters with what sounds like a pencil and records his final message on a cassette. Now he might easily be shitposting on 8chan and fuming about his latest Twitter suspension. Similarly, “White America”’s vision of a ”fucking army marching in back of me” sounds more sinister than it once did: “So many lives I touched, so much anger aimed/ In no particular direction, just sprays and sprays.” We have a clearer idea now of where that anger can spray.

Nevertheless, I don’t think you can blame Eminem for that, any more than you can pin Brexit on Britpop. Crucially, his rage never included racial animus, and he has never swung to the Right. Having recorded a song attacking George W Bush in 2004, he released an anti-Trump freestyle in 2017 and donated “Lose Yourself” to a campaign ad for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “Anyone who’s followed my music knows I’m against bullies — that’s why I hate that fucking bully Trump,” he told Vulture. Eminem outgrew his anger, along with his homophobia and misogyny, rather than nurturing it, and he didn’t get lost in his own black comedy. The listener might not always have known whether he was joking or not but he did, and the joke was usually on him.

In “Without Me”, Eminem presents himself as an obnoxious necessity; a fly in the ointment of early 2000s celebrity culture. “Now this looks like a job for me/ So everybody, just follow me/ ‘Cause we need a little controversy/ ‘Cause it feels so empty without me.” Twenty years on, he’s smart enough to realise that we have more than enough controversy and that that fire doesn’t need stoking. Maybe he became a role model after all.

The writer-director Michael Winterbottom begs to differ. Sky Atlantic announced his six-part drama about the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020, towards the end of the period it covers. Winterbottom’s original title was This Sceptred Isle but Sky, fearing that the allusion was too niche, requested a more broadly legible phrase from John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II: This England. It began filming in February 2021, when the first picture of Kenneth Branagh, buried in prosthetics as Boris Johnson, was released. At the last minute it was delayed for a week due to the death of the Queen but it’s still a good six months away from Orwell’s three-year red line.

“Here’s a chance to engage with something which has that certain uniqueness — but engage with it now, as soon as possible after it happened, as opposed to trying to recreate a war story from 70 years ago,” Winterbottom said in a defensive interview with the New Statesman. He co-wrote the series with Kieron Quirke but had to delegate directing duties to Julian Jarrold for health reasons. He added: “It’s very neutral. Almost a diary. A record of something we all lived through.” Perhaps he was trying to pre-empt early-bird hatchet jobs like the one in the Mail on Sunday, which called it “yet another sneerfest by the TV-land Lefties” and accusingly introduced Winterbottom as “a staunch supporter of the Labour Party and close friend of actor Steve Coogan”. Oh no, not a friend of Steve Coogan! Nadine Dorries, still Johnson’s most loyal attack dog though no longer responsible for the culture brief, slammed “a self-regarding, metropolitan, theatrical class whose favourite sport is trying to take pot-shots at the Johnsons”. The Mail claimed credit for the addition of a disclaimer, “This is a fiction based on real events,” but Sky told me that this is “standard practice”.

Looking at Winterbottom’s freewheeling filmography, it’s easy to spring to conclusions about which lane he would choose for this story. Perhaps it would be what you might call Coogan Mode: antic, postmodern portraits of charismatic narcissists from Factory Records founder Tony Wilson in 2002’s brilliant 24 Hour Party People to a fashion mogul rather like Philip Green in 2019’s misfiring Greed. Or maybe the sober, polemical style of documentaries such as The Shock Doctrine and Eleven Days in May. But This England, which tracks the six months from the 2019 election to Dominic Cummings’ rose garden press conference and the end of the first wave, is neither of those. Barring an incomprehensibly ill-advised recurring dream sequence, it is cautious in a way that Winterbottom rarely is, fully conscious of its responsibilities to history. In aspiring to neutrality, however, it winds up proving that neutrality is impossible.

We have to start with Branagh, who read every word and watched every second of Johnsonia he could lay his hands on, and pays Johnson the compliment of taking him seriously. I’m no fan of prosthetics but he captures the burly, bearish demeanour, the blustery charm, the cosplay gravitas, the constant air of improvising his way out of a tight spot. He compulsively rifles through a mental wardrobe of ready-made quips, comfy quotations from Shakespeare and the Classics, and self-flattering allusions to Churchill. Criticised for boasting about shaking people’s hands in the early days of the pandemic, he protests that not to do so “would be like Churchill hiding in the bunker”. But whereas one national crisis transformed Churchill from an erratic, divisive politician into a great leader, this one exposed Johnson’s fundamental shallowness and reluctance to make big decisions. His failure is framed as having less to do with specific choices than with the question of character. He was a people-pleasing booster thrust into a once-in-a-century cataclysm that he couldn’t bluff his way through.

Yet Branagh’s Johnson is unexpectedly sympathetic, unless you’re Nadine Dorries. He has some witty lines. “Not dead,” he says when he’s in bed with Covid. “Or if I am, nobody’s briefed me.” His hospitalisation, easily forgotten now, is genuinely traumatic. His relationship with Ophelia Lovibond’s Carrie Symonds is warm and playful. While each episode is frontloaded with evidence of his arrogance, infidelities and glib provocations, he does at least emerge as a palpable human being.

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The other tentpole character is Dominic Cummings, played by Simon Paisley Day as a far more gaunt and sinister character than Benedict Cumberbatch’s flamboyant disruptor in Channel 4’s Brexit: The Uncivil War. (Confusingly, Paisley Day was Douglas Carswell in that earlier drama.) Cummings, in this telling, wanted to exploit the systemic failures of Covid policy to strengthen his case for a root-and-branch reform of Whitehall in his own image, pitting his fantasy team of hypercompetent mavericks against a caricature of the sclerotic establishment. “He wants everyone to be crap except him,” complains Matt Hancock. Of course, that would-be revolution stalled after Cummings’ road trip to Durham and died with his firing six months later but it was always less a coherent plan than the projection of a gigantic ego.

This England illuminates when it shows the tension between health strategy and political optics. We see Hancock’s obsession with hitting the testing target by the end of April driven primarily by concern for his own reputation. Shri Patel’s Rishi Sunak is a glib, headline-hungry lightweight and director of communications Lee Cain (played by Derek Barr) a petulant bully who stomps around yelling, “We need something to announce!” Focus groups appear to have been almost as important as SAGE. Government announcements, taken from real news footage, are met with a Greek chorus of unimpressed doctors, scientists and journalists. Winterbottom shows his hand in these scenes but who would now defend the handling of PPE procurement, or the decision to return elderly patients from hospitals to care homes without testing them? Compared with Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott’s damning book Failures of State, This England might even be accused of being too generous. Matt Hancock, for one, should be pretty chuffed on balance, and not just because he’s played by the earnestly handsome Andrew Buchan.

The directors recreate the sense of how bewilderingly fast everything happened, especially in March, when the facts and calculations changed from day to day. Beyond the Johnsons and Cummings, most scenes are kept short, like shards in a collage of British life under Covid. The irony can be heavy-handed but no less true for that. Cutting from Johnson’s promise that “2020 will be a year of prosperity, growth and hope” to a tray of bats in Wuhan market? Well, that was the case. Juxtaposing the match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid on 11 March with a dying man? A report by MPs concluded that 37 people died as a result of that match, and 41 because of the Cheltenham festival on the same day. Cummings in Durham grimly watching Hancock on television reiterate the order to stay at home? The dates align. I remember all of that and you probably do, too, although there are some things we didn’t know at the time, like the rapidity with which the vaccine was designed in February 2020.

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For most of us, the first phase of the pandemic was an unprecedented blend of anxiety and boredom. The lucky ones can look back on it as a strange hiatus, enlivened by Joe Wicks, Tiger King and sourdough loaves, so there is value in forcing viewers to focus on the unlucky. The director’s cut briskly from the corridors of power (and the corridors of Zoom) to ICU wards, care homes and houses across the country, where NHS staff faced an overwhelming tide and tens of thousands people died who might have lived if things had been done differently. The regular sound of coughs and the beeping of monitors provides the drama with a kind of sickly drumbeat. With this panorama of pain and grief, This England does similarly vital work to the Covid memorial wall, commemorating those who paid the price for bad short-term decisions and inadequate long-term planning at a time when the country is keen to move on. Whether the bereaved will feel that their anger has been represented on screen as well as their loss, I’m not so sure.

I think that This England has a strong answer to the question of whether it is too soon for a drama like this. It passes Orwell’s test of seeing the events of the moment in perspective. In fact, I was shocked by how much I had forgotten, or was unable to piece together sequentially. Exhaustively researched through documents and interviews, the series is a gift to posterity. The effort to tell it true and tell it whole is undeniable, yet I still got the impression of conscientious people working extremely hard to do what could not be done: withhold judgement.

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“I personally have no point of view of whether things were done correctly, or incorrectly,” Winterbottom says in the press pack, but I can’t see how that could possibly be true, not least because he and Quirke have Johnson tell Cummings in the final episode: “I think we failed… We fucked up, Dom.” There is no such thing as neutral history, unless it is an unfiltered mountain of data. As soon as you begin to tell a story you have to make choices about what to include and how to frame it. There need not be partisan bias but there must always be judgement. While a historian can assemble evidence for competing accounts of an event, a dramatist must pick one version to show you and say, yes, this is how it was. In an effort to pretend that such decisions have not been made, the writers mute their impact.

If you tune in hoping for the clear assignment of blame, then you will be disappointed, whatever your priors may be, but perhaps that task should be left to the official inquiry. This England does what a drama can do, which is to convey how it felt across the country to live through that unreal period when the world seemed at once to stop and to unravel. Muttering Shakespeare to himself in the dark, Johnson sees himself as a tragic hero, but the tragedy was ours.

Earlier in the summer I saw the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park and that was a good night out but nobody in their right mind would claim that the Stones are better now than they were in 1969 or 1973. Yet the best time to see the Bad Seeds, who formed in 1983, is right now. Though Cave is about to turn 65, the refinement of his craft has required no ebbing of conviction. When he inhabits a murderer on Death Row in “The Mercy Seat”, or a mad prophet retelling the birth of Elvis Presley in “Tupelo”, he still goes all in. The quasi-industrial brutality of “From Her to Eternity” is as persuasive as the naked pleading of “I Need You”. When I went back to the studio versions over the following days, I found them somehow lacking by comparison. Between songs, Cave radiated warmth and good humour. Most frontmen pick a moment to commune with the crowd from the edge of the stage but I suspect Cave could have happily spent the whole show down there, arms outstretched.

Until I read Cave’s new book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, I found it hard to put my finger on why the Bad Seeds have become so much more potent and popular in recent years. Their only Top 20 entry is “Where the Wild Roses Grow”, a 1995 duet with Kylie Minogue. Two of their most popular songs on Spotify, “Red Right Hand” and “O Children”, owe their position to appearances in Peaky Blinders and Harry Potter. Many of their live highlights weren’t even singles, let alone hits. Since the creative nadir of Nocturama in 2003, the Bad Seeds have enjoyed a series of rebirths: the explosive maximalism of Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, the slower, subtler Push the Sky Away and the lambent prayers of Ghosteen.

That last transformation was enforced. Seven years ago, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died after falling from a cliff near Brighton. Cave’s grief was etched into Ghosteen and its predecessor Skeleton Tree, the making of which was chronicled in Andrew Dominik’s gently shattering 2016 documentary One More Time with Feeling. This incomprehensible tragedy suddenly became the signal fact of Cave’s life. “The loss of my son defines me,” he says in the book.

After a period of necessary privacy, Cave chose to make his grieving public. In 2018 he started answering questions from fans on his website under the name “The Red Hand Files” and on the road with his “Nick Cave in Conversation” events: an experiment in radical transparency and fostering a community of the bereaved. The first entry in The Red Hand Files was about how he resumed songwriting after tragedy. “Creative people in general have an acute propensity for wonder,” he wrote. “Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. Everything loses its sheen and appears beyond our reach. We were surviving, but we were surviving in exile on the perimeter of our lives, way beyond anything that mattered.” His lifelines were “work and community” — a means of connecting with the suffering of others in order to feel less alone.

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As you can tell, Cave is one hell of a writer. As the author of countless spectacular lyrics, two novels, an epic poem and an unproduced screenplay (a berserk take on a Gladiator sequel), he could surely write a classic memoir but Faith, Hope and Carnage is something else: a series of conversations with his friend Seán O’Hagan, an Observer journalist. Kudos to O’Hagan for having the idea and Cave for running it because it’s an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind book. An alternative title might be God, Grief and Art.

Cave may claim to hate interviews but he is a miraculously fluent talker, incapable of a dull line. Many of the sentences have an aphoristic punch. Creating art is “the act of retelling the story of our lives so that it makes sense”. Hope is “optimism with a broken heart”. Twitter is “just a factory that churns out arseholes”. On lyrics: “A dishonest line tends to deteriorate somehow after repeated singing; a truthful line collects meaning.” On death: “If you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it.”

Cave’s songs have always been saturated with religious imagery and language — first the Old Testament, later the New — but it was never clear how much of a believer he was. Now, he says, he is emphatically religious in the sense of feeling a “deep inclusion in the human predicament”. That sounds just like Leonard Cohen, another great songwriter whose wisdom derived from an idiosyncratic relationship with the divine and an underrated sense of humour. To call this a self-help book would horrify everyone involved but I suspect many readers will find it useful, especially those who have known catastrophic grief.

Cave describes the loss of his son as nothing less than an annihilation of the self. He has been broken to pieces and remade — born again, you might say. His songwriting, too, has required reassembly. He considers Skeleton Tree, mostly written before Arthur’s death but recorded afterwards, as an “unholy” record which he struggles to revisit. But making Ghosteen, via long improvisatory sessions with Ellis, was a “holy” experience in which his son’s spirit felt literally present. “Arthur was snatched away, he just disappeared, and this felt like some way of making contact again and saying goodbye,” Cave says. Over the course of these conversations, which began with lockdown in March 2020, there are other losses: his mother Dawn, his ex-lover Anita Lane, his friend Hal Willner and, most recently, his oldest son Jethro. Covid-19 gives the book an eerie backbeat.

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O’Hagan is a sensitive interviewer — really more of a conversationalist. Cave says that he finds relating his own history “unbearable, mostly”. What’s more, it feels to him like someone else’s life — that of a man who had not yet lost his son. So why look back?

Still, O’Hagan occasionally manages to lure Cave into the past. His idyllic, outdoorsy childhood in Wangaratta, Australia, gave way to a delinquent adolescence, which was blown apart by the death of his father, a teacher of literature, in a car accident when Cave was 19. He was already taking heroin, an addiction that he relates, perhaps surprisingly, to a conservative need for routine rather than the thirst for chaos that animated his music for many years. After the hellfire post-punk of the Birthday Party came the Bad Seeds. Cave remarks that Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld, band mainstays from the beginning until the 2000s, were domineering personalities like himself. “The potential for disharmony is enormous! It’s like having Hitler, Stalin and fucking Mao Zedong trying to make a record together.” Warren Ellis, who joined in 1997, is more like a brother: an equal partner in the studio and a remarkable friend. On the topic of friendship, Cave’s affection for Coldplay’s Chris Martin is delightfully unexpected. “Obviously, there’s a fair amount of daylight between the kinds of music we play, but who fucking cares? I have always been drawn to his generosity of spirit, his engagement with the world.”

When he was younger, Cave thinks, he had too much disdain for the world. Now it inspires awe. He cherishes humility, mercy and mystery; he loathes dogma, cynicism and the morally obvious. He is therefore stronger than most on the subject of cancel culture, to which his objection is more personal than political. He recoils from the punitive impulse; the failure of empathy and forgiveness. I would argue that forgiveness needs to be sought and earned but I think he’s right to say that the online ritual of denunciation can be merely “a kind of sadism dressed up as virtue”. I hope this section doesn’t get clickbaited as “Cave slams cancel culture!” because it’s more about the particular view of human nature that he has arrived at: “I rarely see badness in people; rather, I see layers of suffering.”

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The context is obvious. Towards the end of the book, Cave finally talks about the night of Arthur’s death, and how he and his “astonishing and oceanic” wife Susie negotiated the immediate aftermath. Hard to read, it must have been infinitely harder to speak, but emotional availability is essential to everything he does now. The most common question submitted to The Red Hand Files, apparently, is “Does it ever get better?” To which Cave can now reply: “The answer is yes. We become different. We become better.” Instead of being diminished by loss, he has been enlarged. “I became a person after my son died” is a startling line.

It is impossible to overstate how unusual it is to find this depth of self-analysis and wisdom from a rock musician. Faith, Hope and Carnage makes most rock memoirs look like skips full of rusty anecdotes and grudges. Among other things, the book finally helped me understand why Cave and the Bad Seeds keep getting better. Cave’s growing hunger for “communal awe” makes the shows feel genuinely necessary. And he believes himself to be a more generous and expansive person than he was before, so he has more to give.

“We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around,” he tells O’Hagan. “Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is.” He knows now.

You have to love the fairytale serendipity of that backstory: one chance encounter and a life is changed — but another kind feels increasingly common. While watching Normal People, I looked up Daisy Edgar-Jones and learned that she was the privately-educated daughter of a film editor and the former head of entertainment at Sky. Does that make her performance any less impressive? Not a jot. But it does make her a nepotism baby.

Back in February, a young Euphoria fan called Meriem Darradji tweeted: “Wait I just found out that the actress that plays Lexie is a nepotism baby omg [crying emoji]. Her mom is Leslie Mann and her dad is a movie director lol.” Darradji’s surprise was surprising. Apatow has a distinctive surname and five of her seven big-screen credits are in movies directed by her dad, so she’s hardly working undercover. Still, the phrase took off with TikTok users, who quickly improvised a taxonomy of nepotism — actors with wealthy, well-connected parents are less suspect than those with bona fide movie stars in the family for example. Some said how disappointing it was to click on the Wikipedia page of a hot young newcomer and see that their parents already had their own blue-linked entries, while others were enthralled by this Hollywood quasi-aristocracy.

Whether the phrase is contemptuous, affectionate or ambivalent depends on who’s using it but, as the softness of the word baby implies, the tone is usually more playful than angry. It’s an amusing way to interrogate privilege, inequality, the limits to social mobility and the promise of meritocracy. Nepotism, which entered English from the Italian in the 17th century, isn’t quite the right word for this phenomenon. It strictly means favouring one’s relatives with privileged positions, which is easy to achieve in business and politics but less so in an industry where employment is episodic and unpredictable. You couldn’t make Succession about a family of actors because there is no glittering prize to bestow on a favoured son or daughter. The advantages that second-generation celebrities enjoy are more nebulous. Connections, of course. A familiarity with how things work, from film sets to the paparazzi. And, let’s be honest, genes: beautiful people make beautiful people. (Exhibit A: Zoe Kravitz.)

No industry, therefore, has as many nepotism babies as modelling, where the likes of Lila Moss, Kaia Gerber, Iris Law and the Hadid siblings make the old tradition of scouts plucking gorgeous unknowns from provincial shopping centres seem quaint. Conversely, musical talent does not seem to be hereditary; very few major artists have famous parents. In fact, as Julian Lennon or Jakob Dylan will tell you, there is such violent suspicion of anyone seen to be trading on a famous surname that failure is more likely than not.

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Acting, a field in which looks and charisma go a long way but aren’t enough on their own, falls somewhere in between. Hollywood has always been a place where the American dream could seem like more than spin. As the title of his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, indicates, Kirk Douglas literally went from rags to riches. Marilyn Monroe grew up in foster homes and orphanages. “I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house,” she said. “When I heard that this was acting, I said that’s what I want to be. You can play.”

At the same time, it was an industry where dynasties mattered: the Barrymores, the Hustons, the Fondas. Liza Minnelli, Carrie Fisher, Jamie Lee Curtis and Isabella Rossellini all had at least one very famous parent. No doubt it is easier to get a break if you’re the child of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher but many of these celebrity scions felt anxiety about their privilege and how it was perceived. Nicolas Cage changed his surname from Coppola to avert suspicion of favouritism and begged interviewers not to mention the fact that his uncle directed The Godfather.

“I’m really a product of nepotism,” Jeff Bridges once told me. “I was literally carried onto a film set when I was six months old… Usually one of the hardest things is getting your foot in the door so that was kind of handled. But I had to prove to myself that I didn’t get the job because of whose son I was — that I had some real talent. It took a few years for me to say, oh, OK, I guess I have some value of my own.” Of course, Bridges went on to have a far more substantial career than both his father Lloyd, who is best remembered for the Airplane! movies, and his brother Beau, which suggests that ultimately it’s the work that counts. That takes time though.

It was a while before it became obvious that Ben Stiller or Michael Douglas were stars in their own right. “As the child of someone, you get access other people don’t have, so the playing field is not level in that way,” Gwyneth Paltrow (daughter of Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow) recently explained to model Hailey Bieber (daughter of Stephen Baldwin). “However, I really do feel that once your foot is in the door, which you unfairly got in, then you almost have to work twice as hard and be twice as good because people are ready to pull you down and say… ‘You are only there because of your dad or your mum.’” The phrasing is typically tone-deaf — are other actors half as good and working half as hard? — but Paltrow earned her place. Like Stiller and Bridges, she eclipsed her parents.

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Nepotism babies inspire ambivalence because most of them are clearly talented and apparently charming. A list of the most interesting young actors around would include Dakota Johnson, Margaret Qualley, John David Washington, Zoe Kravitz and Riley Keough. Even those whose unusually prestigious debuts would appear to scream nepotism — Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper in Licorice Pizza; James Gandolfini’s son Michael playing the young Tony Soprano in The Many Saints of Newark — garnered great reviews across the board.

Perhaps the only really glaring case of unearned familial privilege is Brooklyn Beckham, who is true celebrity royalty in the sense that he has nothing to offer except his bloodline. Fame is both his birthright and, in lieu of discernible talent, his job. The smart ones are honest about their advantages. “I think I’ll get a couple chances on their name and then if I suck, I’ll get kicked out of the kingdom,” Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) told People. “And that’s what should happen.”

This new fascination with nepotism reminds me of the fuss, a decade ago, about old Etonian or Harrovian actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne. They were obviously gifted, and nobody seriously believed that the headmaster of Eton could phone a movie director and secure a plum role as easily as a starter job in the City. Yet there were so many of them, all at once, that something smelled off. Individuals became lightning rods for a broader concern that the game — meaning society rather than Hollywood — was rigged.

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That debate came in the wake of the financial crisis and the Occupy movement. Talk of nepotism babies coincides with another wave of economic anxiety and heightened awareness of inequality. Yet the conversation is for the most part refreshingly clear-eyed, curious and nuanced. It’s not the individual that matters; it’s the ecosystem. If there is still diversity of experience and opportunity, and most actors haven’t grown up in the industry, then a nepotism baby is an object of curiosity rather than a systemic problem. There is a healthy sense of perspective, too. As long as people like Eric Trump exist, one can’t get too het up about Maude Apatow.

I think that Bridges and Paltrow are right to suggest that Hollywood is not a meritocracy in the short term but becomes more so in the long term. Talent outlives good fortune. The perfect test case is Sofia Coppola, who experienced what you might call a nepotism baby do-over. After Winona Ryder dropped out of The Godfather Part III, Francis Ford Coppola cast 18-year-old Sofia as Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary. She bombed. On top of her lousy screen presence, the impression that the role was entirely undeserved inspired such brutal reviews that she gave up acting all together. “I didn’t realise how much pressure I would be under — people want to see Francis’s daughter fall on her face,” she told Entertainment Weekly. A decade later, though, she directed The Virgin Suicides, a debut so confident, distinctive and unbeholden to her father that she could start again. You can’t help noticing that all of her films have been about the privileged and unhappy.

Newly married to Jennifer Lopez (we’ll get to that), Affleck turns 50 today. He is of the same generation as Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Ethan Hawke and his friend Matt Damon, but he’s the one whose career best illustrates the ups and downs of modern movie stardom, on and off the screen. He has never enjoyed an imperial phase, when he could do no wrong, nor a real Benaissance, when all is forgiven. Tom Cruise, who recently turned 60, is perhaps the last true movie star due to his somewhat inhuman denial of vulnerability. Affleck, with his candidly acknowledged flaws and regrets, is Cruise’s opposite. I find him fascinating. As Dave Itzkoff wrote in a 2016 New York Times profile, “you may find yourself envying, pitying and disliking him all at once”.

Affleck was born into a working-class family in California and grew up in Massachusetts with his younger brother Casey, who also became an actor. Their mother was a teacher and activist. Their father was a sometime actor, a gambler and an alcoholic. Affleck met Damon at school and the two travelled to auditions together, but their paths diverged. While star student Damon went to Harvard, the bright but distractable Affleck dropped out of the University of Vermont after a few months. Self-consciousness about his class and education has been a nagging drumbeat throughout his career. He always has something to prove, and something to atone for. In a 2016 Buzzfeed profile called “The Unbearable Sadness of Ben Affleck”, Anne-Helen Petersen argued that his defining feature was shame: “about the roles that he’s taken, the relationships he’s made public, his lack of education, his drinking habits, and, most recently, his tattoo”.

Handsome in a brash and bro-ish way, with an oblong head and beefy, six-foot-four physique, Affleck started out playing jerks in School Ties, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused and Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. He graduated to doofus in Chasing Amy but even his nicer characters weren’t very smart. So when he and Damon broke through in 1997 with their Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting, the impression was that, off screen as well as on, Damon was the star and Affleck the sidekick. I still remember a waspish line from Esquire’s film critic, to the effect that Ben Affleck was put on the earth for the sole purpose of making Matt Damon look like the clever one.

Their next moves compounded that stereotype of art vs commerce. Damon moved into prestige pictures such as Saving Private Ryan and The Talented Mr Ripley, before striking oil with the Bourne franchise. Affleck became an action star in Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Daredevil and The Sum of All Fears, none of which played to his strengths. In a recent interview with Damon, Affleck joked about feeling “deeply jealous and developing a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing” but it wasn’t entirely a joke: he wasn’t getting the same opportunities. “It’s not as if actors are turning down something way better,” he once told me. “It really doesn’t come down to X vs Y so much as X vs nothing.”

In smaller movies, he was once again a braggart (Shakespeare in Love) or an asshole (Boiler Room), which might explain why his brief experiment with romcoms never paid off. Only Roger Michell’s 2002 drama Changing Lanes, in which he clashed with Samuel L Jackson, was a persuasive advertisement for his acting chops. Meanwhile Gwyneth Paltrow, his girlfriend from 1997 to 2000, publicly described him as a “complete knucklehead”, which didn’t help. “What many people don’t know is that he’s crazy smart, but since he doesn’t want that to get awkward, he downplays it,” said David Fincher years later.

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Affleck never seemed at ease in blockbusters. If I were ranking his performances, I would put his brilliant comic turn in the DVD commentary for Armageddon in the top five. He’s like a college smart-alec heckling the screen, only he’s actually in the movie. Unfortunately, it’s not a great look if you come across as thinking you’re too good for the movies you’re being paid handsomely to star in. He recalls challenging director Michael Bay on an absurd plot point in that thoroughly absurd film: “He told me to shut the fuck up.” The real joke’s on Affleck for thinking he’s above it all.

All in all, Affleck’s reputation was in a precarious state when he met Jennifer Lopez on the set of Gigli in 2001 and everything went awry. Gigli was the kind of brutal, unqualified flop that might as well have police tape around the scene of the crime. Their next movie together, Jersey Girl, also tanked. The hostile reception was inextricably tied up with the stars’ two-year relationship and the rise of celebrity media at its cruel, carnivorous worst. Affleck later blamed snobbery and racism: even his taste in women was deemed trashy. Whatever the reasons, no relationship could have survived the obsessive scrutiny applied to “Bennifer”. Their wedding was first postponed and then cancelled. The backlash left them both shellshocked. When Affleck bumped into Damon around the release of Gigli he said: “I’m in the worst possible place you can be. I can sell magazines, but not movie tickets.”

GQ called Affleck “the world’s most over-exposed actor”. The Los Angeles Times wrote a long autopsy called “Ben Big’s Fall”. Yet Affleck was never a bad guy. Critics often praised his capacity for self-doubt and self-deprecating humour, so it’s apt that he won his first acting awards for playing George Reeves in 2006’s Hollywoodland, the Sixties Superman actor who was sent flying by fame and brought to earth with a humiliating crash. He’s stayed on good terms with his exes (very good in Lopez’s case) and he’s loyal to his friends. Directors including Linklater and John Frankenheimer have called him one of the nicest actors in the business. He’s always been a great interviewee, providing a clear-eyed running commentary on his career.

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Now married to his Daredevil co-star Jennifer Garner, Affleck rebounded by moving behind the camera for his directorial debut, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, starring his brother Casey. “Nobody knew whether he was going to be any good or not, so people were surprised,” Casey told me at the time. “But I wasn’t surprised. I knew that he’s so much smarter and more interesting than the person that’s depicted in the gossip magazines.” Suddenly there were comparisons to Robert Redford, the gold standard for actors turned directors, but Affleck still appeared bruised and wary when I interviewed him. Whenever talk turned to his rough patch, he began nervously flicking a bottle opener. Poker players would call that a giant tell. He still seemed to think that his comeback was fragile.

Affleck directed another satisfying crime thriller, The Town, in 2010 and then Argo in 2012. “We were wrong about Ben Affleck,” wrote the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane. “Few of us, watching Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, could see a way out, or back, for an actor so utterly at the mercy of his own jawline.” But Hollywood’s ambivalence towards him was betrayed by the fact that he was only the fourth person in the history of the Academy Awards to win Best Picture without getting a Best Director nomination, as if Argo’s excellence had nothing to do with its director and star. OK, he wasn’t the ideal choice to play CIA agent Tony Mendez, but who else was going to give him a part like that?

Affleck took a giant step backwards with the snoozy 2016 mob drama Live by Night but he still has a better actor-director track record than George Clooney. He’s shown real flair for action sequences, and a talent for getting great work out of ensemble casts, steering five actors from his first three movies to awards buzz. So it seemed incomprehensible when, in the afterglow of Argo, he signed up to play Batman. Affleck is always torn: while he may have a low opinion of superhero and action movies, he can’t quite let go of stardom. He didn’t seem like he really wanted to be Batman but then he was playing a Bruce Wayne who didn’t want to be Batman anymore either: angry, jaded, bitter. He might have pulled it off with a better director than Zack Snyder. A 2017 alcoholic relapse put paid to a solo Batman movie, which was probably for the best.

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Affleck has had bad luck with superheroes. His recent action movies, The Accountant and Triple Frontier, are background noise. He’s also struggled to find sympathetic directors. Unlike his contemporaries, he’s never worked with Scorsese, Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Steven Soderbergh or the Coen brothers. His movie with Terence Malick, To the Wonder, was one of the director’s weakest. The towering exception, and his best performance to date, was David Fincher’s Gone Girl. With a perfect blend of charm and menace, his Nick Dunne is a fuck-up who could be victim, villain or both. Affleck isn’t playing himself but he’s playing with who people think he is. “I think it’s interesting how we manage the best version of ourselves,” he told the New York Times, “despite our flaws and our weaknesses and our sometime tendencies to do the wrong thing.”

Where does Affleck find a lane these days? The failure of Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, which Affleck co-wrote and appeared in, confirms that the movies he really likes barely exist in cinemas anymore. He was sensitive in The Tender Bar and convincing as a recovering alcoholic in The Way Back but neither move made much impact. At the same time, he’s yet to commit to a prestige TV series in the vein of True Detective or Mare of Easttown. His slate of forthcoming projects looks underwhelming: two more outings as Batman, his eighth Kevin Smith movie, and a sci-fi thriller called Hypnotic. His return to directing with a film about Nike co-starring Damon could go either way. I’d love to see him play a role that fully exploits his talent for exhausted masculinity and gallows humour — Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, perhaps.

At least he seems happy now. More than any other movie star, Affleck is relatably candid about life not working out as planned. He has a consciousness of disappointment and failure that you don’t find anywhere else. Cruise and DiCaprio are too successful, McConaughey too upbeat, Johnny Depp too weird. It makes me want to root for him, which is why I find his recent marriage to Lopez, 20 years after their last attempt, so cheering. We’d all like to believe that life gives us second chances.

Hollywood cottoned on quickly. By his own account, Gaiman “spent 30 years successfully battling bad movies of Sandman”. In the early Nineties, he was not yet the bestselling author of Coraline, American Gods and The Ocean at the End of the Lane; a writer on Doctor Who; the showrunner of Good Omens; and a celebrity with almost three million Twitter followers who has played himself in The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory. He could block bad adaptations, but he couldn’t make a good one happen. A two-hour movie was never going to be the right format anyway. Now, at last, there is a ten-part Netflix series based on the storylines ‘Preludes and Nocturnes’ and ‘The Doll’s House’. Allan Heinberg is the showrunner but it feels very much like Gaiman’s baby.

The Sandman became the jewel in the crown of DC’s concerted effort to appeal to older readers. For a young, ambitious British writer in the Eighties, the quickest way to make a splash in America was to dust off a dud from DC’s library of characters and submit it to a radical reinvention, because the stakes were so low. Before he co-created Watchmen, Alan Moore made his reputation by rehabilitating Swamp Thing. Grant Morrison turned D-listers Animal Man and Doom Patrol into cult sensations. Only then would DC trust them with a blue-chip property such as Superman or Batman. Gaiman, a former journalist, hustled his way through the door with a gorgeously strange three-issue series about a bargain-bin character called Black Orchid before making his big pitch.

In European folklore, the Sandman was a sinister supernatural force. “He is a wicked man,” according to an influential 1817 story by ETA Hoffmann, “who comes to children when they won’t go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children.” This was definitely not the Sandman that Gaiman discovered in a box of comic books when he was a six-year-old living in East Grinstead. That Sandman was Wesley Dodds, a spooky pulp detective from the Thirties who wore a fedora and a gas mask. In the Seventies, Captain America creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby introduced a new Sandman, an immortal who carried a pouch of dream dust and was assisted by two nightmares called Brute and Glob, but his skintight red-and-yellow costume looked lousy and Gaiman wasn’t a fan. “Still,” he wrote in an essay in issue four of The Sandman, “there was something fascinating about the character. Somebody who lived in dreams… it had potential.”

Gaiman pitched the idea of reviving Sandman to the visionary DC editor Karen Berger in 1987 and he was surprised when she went for it, with one stipulation which turned out to be a blessing: “We’d like a new Sandman. Keep the name. But the rest is up to you.” Gaiman began with the image of a thin, pale man trapped in a glass cell, plucked details of the Twenties “sleepy sickness” epidemic from Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings, and worked out a plan. “I was imagining a comic that wasn’t strictly horror, wasn’t fantasy, wasn’t a super-hero title, but was a strange amalgam of all three,” he wrote.

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The superhero stuff quickly fell away. Other DC characters popped up occasionally, but then so did Shakespeare, Robespierre and Mark Twain. The Sandman isn’t a crime-solving guy in a costume; he’s Morpheus, the emperor of dreams, and he looks like a cross between an elongated Robert Smith and, well, Neil Gaiman. His sister, Death, a sparky goth, resembles a Cure fan’s ideal girlfriend. Siblings, Delirium, Desire, Despair, Destiny and Destruction, complete the dysfunctional pantheon.

Horror, though, was very present in the early issues, from the lurid, distorted artwork of people such as Sam Kieth and Kelley Jones to storylines about serial killer conventions and black magic. The first advertisement for the series misquoted The Waste Land: “I will show you terror in a handful of dust.” The sixth issue, ‘24 Hours’, scarred me for life with its nightmarish stew of sex, violence and madness, which is only slightly diluted in the TV version. Whether it was because Gaiman was evolving as a writer, or because he sensed what his ballooning readership really wanted, the horror subsided and the mythological elements took precedence — but realism mattered, too. As Alan Moore testified: “His best effects come out of people or characters or situations in the real world being starkly juxtaposed with this misty fantasy world.”

Gaiman had modest hopes for the series. “I figured at issue eight they’d phone me up and say: ‘Well, minor critical success, major commercial failure. You’ve got four issues to wrap it up!’” he recently told The Guardian. “Then I’d be done. That would be The Sandman.” By then, though, it was outselling all its competitors in the mature-readers market, in part because it attracted an unprecedented number of female readers. The series won award after award while the collected editions hit the New York Times bestseller list. By the time it ended, in 1996, it was outselling Batman and Superman.

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At that point, DC did something that comic-book companies never do: it pulled the plug on a hit series because the original writer bowed out. Without Gaiman, there was no The Sandman. Although he later wrote two spin-offs, Endless Nights and Overture, The Sandman’s reputation as the comic book for people who don’t read comic books (they called them graphic novels) doubtless benefited from his subsequent transition into novels, screenplays and children’s books. As Grant Morrison observed in his book Supergods: “A confident and clever young man with a plan, Gaiman carefully polished and promoted his brand while so many of us were spending our money on drink and drugs and acting as if it would always be this way, always this easy.”

Apart from Gaiman, the only contributor to all 75 issues of The Sandman was cover artist Dave McKean, who specialised in multimedia collages. On a narrative level, the whole series was also a collage: Gaiman exploited the licence of dreams to tell myriad stories, often loosely connected. Multi-issue arcs were punctuated by one-off tales about a man who lives forever, a blocked novelist who enslaves a muse, the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or a conspiracy of cats. Readers grew accustomed to being suddenly plunged into ancient Rome, Elizabethan England or actual Hell. Characters came and went with amazing rapidity; sometimes Morpheus didn’t appear at all. The Sandman overflowed with ideas. In issue 17, the one about the muse, Morpheus punishes the novelist by cursing him with so many story ideas that he loses his mind and babbles them to strangers. Even those thrown-away concepts have legs: “A city in which the streets are paved with time… A man who inherits a library card to the library in Alexandria… An old man in Sunderland who owned the universe, and who kept it in a jam-jar in the dust cupboard under the stairs…”

The Netflix adaptation is, therefore, a giant swing. By following the comic book so faithfully, the series replicates that radical narrative experiment in a medium that is traditionally less friendly towards freewheeling storytelling. This fluidity has its advantages — it’s much easier to book Charles Dance or Joely Richardson if they’re not going to be needed for long — but there’s an awful lot of information to process from episode to episode. The show sensibly bolsters narrative consistency by making the librarian Lucien (Vivienne Acheampong) a regular sidekick and turning the literal walking nightmare the Corinthian (Boyd Holdbrook) into a recurring antagonist, but only up to a point. In television terms, this is more of an anthology show than an epic fantasy narrative, and you’re likely to enjoy some episodes more than others.

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Another oddity about The Sandman is that Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) is a hard-to-love protagonist: sullen, earnest, haughty and remote. Karen Berger once said to Gaiman: “Of course, Dream is you.” The writer replied: “No, I’ve got a sense of humour.” Morpheus, for Gaiman, was less a hero than a skeleton key that would unlock any story he wanted to tell. The real energy flows from the supporting cast, notably Kirby Baptiste-Howell as Death, David Thewlis as John Dee and Jenna Coleman as Johanna (formerly John) Constantine. Even as Netflix has pivoted towards big, empty genre movies that seem designed to be watched with one eye on your phone, The Sandman is uncompromising enough to require close attention.

When he began writing The Sandman, Gaiman was 27: that creative sweet spot when you know enough but not too much. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he told New York in 2015. “And the best part of not knowing what you’re doing is that nobody can tell you not to do something, including yourself. Because you don’t know that it’s a mistake, and not knowing it’s a mistake frees you to do it… I was so very lucky. These days I absolutely know what is possible, and I look at what I did back then and go, ‘How the fuck did that happen?’”

As a co-producer on the Netflix show, Gaiman had the power to rectify any missteps but the diversified casting is the only major change, and Gaiman was always unusually progressive when it came to gender and sexuality anyway. Rereading my old issues of The Sandman for the first time in 30 years, fearing that I would be less impressed, I was dazzled all over again by its audacity and craft. The Sandman was an entirely new kind of comic book. If viewers run with it, it has the potential to be a new kind of TV show, too.

It’s strange that the tipping point for sceptics has been Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder. Any film that features Guns’N’Roses needledrops and Russell Crowe playing Zeus in the style of a sleazy taverna owner alongside a stage four cancer subplot is bound to have some tonal hiccups, and a backlash against the ubiquitous Waititi was in the diary, but it’s still a fun night at the pictures, with a winning lead, a stacked cast, a superb villain and more good jokes than most comedies. Even when the podcast The Big Picture recorded an episode “Five ways to fix the Marvel crisis”, all the panellists agreed that it was the second-best Thor movie (after Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok) and the second-best movie of the MCU’s phase four (after Spider-Man: No Way Home). It pulled in $382m in its first week. Yet a cloud of disappointment has coalesced around it. I was asked by another publication to write an article about how badly Waititi had botched it. I replied to say that I had a really good time and would they like a more positive piece? They would not.

The thunder god has become the lightning rod for a growing sense of frustration and fatigue with the whole enterprise. With the notable exception of Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian, most of the best critics have effectively given up attempting to engage with the MCU, settling for either glib quips or weary contempt, and I don’t hold it against them. Now even enthusiasts such as the Big Picture crew are feeling restive.

Three years ago, it was all roses. In the unlikely event that Disney had decided to leave billions of dollars on the table and wrap up the MCU after Avengers: Endgame in 2019, it would have been acknowledged as the most successful franchise of all time. Not every movie was great, or even good (have you seen Thor: The Dark World?), but mastermind Kevin Feige pulled off a trick that nobody had even attempted before: a 22-movie arc culminating in the colossal pay-off of the most successful movie ever made (at least until a Chinese reissue of Avatar nudged it into second place). As the first person to work out how to translate the interconnected serial storytelling of comic books to the screen, Feige turned average moviegoers into avid completists.

So what exactly is the MCU doing wrong? Everything all at once, apparently. It’s both too frivolous (Thor) and too ponderous (Eternals); too basic (Black Widow) or too complicated (Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness). It’s either overburdened with setting up characters and plot threads for future movies or insufficiently concerned with the big picture; it provides too much fan service or not enough. Back in 2014, when Edgar Wright was dropped from Ant-Man, the complaint was that the MCU’s corporate vision smothered the identity of individual directors, but now that indie darlings such as Waititi and Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao are encouraged to put their own stamp on things, other problems arise.

One thing everyone can agree on is that, thanks to Covid delays and streaming wars, there is far too much material: six movies in the past 12 months and seven Disney+ shows in the last 18. When I was a kid, I would have wept with joy to see just one decent film about a Marvel character. Now I feel like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of Goethe’s poem who enchants a broom to fetch water and ends up almost drowning. Having worked though the most obvious characters in its IP arsenal, Marvel Studios is currently trying to get audiences hooked on the B- and C-list; I used to read far too many comic books and even I barely remember the Eternals. They are burning through talent at a ridiculous pace, hiring actors as exciting and watchable as Awkwafina, Brian Tyree Henry, Barry Keoghan, Kathryn Hahn and Florence Pugh, but not always using them wisely. Watching Moon Knight squander Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke in a dud story was one of the year’s more dispiriting viewing experiences. It’s like hiring a Bentley to drive to IKEA.

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All this surplus generates a powerful sense of déjà vu. Too many plots rely on either processing trauma or repairing broken families and all of them must, by law, climax in an almighty dust-up involving rushed and patchy VFX. Even the winking humour, so fresh and delightful in the first Avengers movie, can feel rote. Bradshaw defines it as “a highly contained form of restricted self-satire or auto-undercutting that is always offset by the huge CGI intergalactic action scenes”.

A bigger problem is that there appears to be no centre and no direction. Cornerstone stars Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans have bowed out, while their most obvious successor, Chadwick Boseman, has passed away. Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury, the original man with a plan, has disappeared. The Avengers have disbanded. Thanos is dead. Without this connective tissue, which gave even the mediocre installments a reason to be there, it’s unclear why any of this stuff matters in the long run. Everything that is supposed to raise the stakes — the time travel, the multiverse, the quantum realm, prehistory, gods, demi-gods, eternity itself, and all manner of cosmic foofaraw — ends up lowering them. “The Blip” caused half the population of the universe to vanish for five years, but we don’t like to talk about it.

Beyond the hardcore fans, the sense that you have to catch them all in order to appreciate the overall vision — indeed, the idea that there is an overall vision — has evaporated. There is at once too much continuity to keep track of and too little cohesion. Whereas the end-credit stings used to tease a larger strategy, they now feel like empty promises. Will we ever again see Brett Goldstein as Hercules or Harry Styles as Eros? Will we care if we don’t?

The MCU is currently struggling with all the ways in which movies are not like comic books. Marvel Comics has always been kept afloat by its big hitters — Spider-Man, the X-Men — while lesser characters have been regularly rebooted, replaced or temporarily shelved. The best work often arises when a new creative team is given a waning character on the verge of cancellation and allowed to take some risks. Failure is always an option on a comic-book budget, and characters can take several years to fulfil their potential. It’s taken as read that some readers will drop out as they get older while the diehards will accept the fact, inherent in a universe that has been around for 60 years, that everything changes. As Marvel scholar Douglas Wolk writes in All of the Marvels, “no creator expects that their readers are familiar with the whole Marvel story to date…What the story wants from you is not your knowledge but your curiosity.” Movies simply cannot afford to sprawl, experiment and confound in the same way.

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For all that, I have to say that I’m still having a fun time at the pictures. Maybe it’s MCU Stockholm syndrome but let’s remember that it’s hard to make one effective blockbuster, let alone (so far) 29. The last movie I watched before Thor: Love and Thunder was 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, an astonishingly bloodless remix-cum-travesty of its two predecessors. None of the post-James Cameron Terminator sequels is better than average; the same goes for the post-James Cameron Alien movies. There are as many bad Star Wars movies as good ones and the content keeps coming. Fox’s attempts at the Fantastic Four were disasters, as were the studio’s last two X-Men films. The DC Extended Universe is chaos. The Transformers franchise is almost entirely dreck. Even now that the writers and directors of the last two Avengers movies have re-teamed for the Netflix spy thriller The Gray Man, its Rotten Tomatoes score is lower than any MCU movie bar Eternals.

You get the picture. I’ve noticed that when friends with older children seek recommendations for solidly enjoyable family movies, MCU is always the no-brainer suggestion because even the worst entries have some memorable moments and a base level of competence. If Kevin Feige is like an ambitious juggler who drops a ball every now and then, most of his competitors are regularly left empty-handed.

Feige’s current problems, then, are imperial ones. He runs an overextended superpower which has probably already peaked but cannot stop growing. It can’t be healthy for a single franchise to exert such hegemonic dominance over the box office and the cultural conversation but nothing looks capable of supplanting it. The curious upshot is that the MCU is too big to fail and yet too big to succeed to the extent that it did with Infinity War and Endgame. While it’s not beyond the wit of Feige and his collaborators to braid all these loose threads into a satisfying narrative rope at some point, that task is becoming exponentially more difficult. The most obvious solution to MCU exhaustion would be for it to slow down and do less, but empires, famously, aren’t very good at that.

Elvis Presley has not exactly vanished from popular culture but his position is greatly diminished. When the private equity fund Authentic Brands Group acquired a majority share in Elvis Presley Enterprises in 2013, estate income, memorabilia sales, visits to Graceland and bookings for Elvis impersonators were all in decline, while two Elvis-based stage shows had flopped. “The reason brands die as they get older is because the older generation goes away,” one brand expert told Rolling Stone. “If you don’t push those brands to the younger generation at all times, eventually you age yourself out. And that’s what was going on with Elvis.”

Elvis has 14.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify: fewer than Elton John, David Bowie and the Beatles, more than Prince and Bob Dylan, about the same as Bruce Springsteen. But Queen’s Elvis pastiche Crazy Little Thing Called Love is more popular than all but one of Elvis’s own songs, and that one song, Can’t Help Falling in Love, is only as big as it is because of an appearance in Crazy Rich Asians. As for his influence on today’s major artists, only Jack White and, arguably, Eminem have a clear debt to Elvis, whereas there are legions of heirs to Bowie, Dylan, Michael Jackson or Stevie Nicks. He’s not just old; he’s old in the wrong way.

This explains why Elvis was made with the energetic cooperation of Elvis Presley Enterprises and the endorsement of the singer’s surviving family members. The idea must have been that the director who blitzed Shakespeare and F Scott Fitzgerald into very long music videos would turn on Generation Z to the glory of the King. Luhrmann has made an $85 million, 159-minute advertisement for Elvis Presley, yet still manages to sell him short where it matters most.

The critics who wrote about Elvis after his death in 1977, at the age of 42, would be astonished that his reputation would ever require such a booster injection. To them he was synonymous with not just rock’n’roll but American culture. Remarking on the atomisation of rock fandom, Lester Bangs wrote in his obituary: “I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.” Greil Marcus went further in his 1991 book Dead Elvis, comparing the cultural impact of Elvis’s death to the passing of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “Elvis did not simply change musical history, though of course he did that. He changed history as such, and in doing so became history.” Public Enemy’s Chuck D delivered a colossal backhanded compliment in 1989’s Fight the Power when he rapped “Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me”. Chuck needed to attack a symbol of monolithic white American culture and that could only be Elvis. To dismiss him so heretically was to acknowledge his stature.

Marcus was right to say that Elvis became history but that’s not the same thing as retaining relevance for new generations. The rock’n’roll of the Fifties, which has long been sidelined even on US classic-rock radio, feels ancient, like a black-and-white movie. Even from that era, none of Elvis’s songs have the undeniable visceral jolt of Tutti Frutti or Great Balls of Fire. You have to imagine your way back to a more sedate time to apprehend the youthquake mayhem caused by Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock. The fact that Elvis didn’t write his own songs (not unusual at the time) increases this sense of temporal otherness, placing him closer to Frank Sinatra than the Beatles. Or perhaps Marilyn Monroe: an icon who your grandparents wanted to sleep with. He doesn’t have that one classic album that sells to each new generation like Rumours or Blue do. And the idea that he was just a pretty white boy who appropriated rock’n’roll from far more talented black artists, though grossly simplistic, has become received wisdom. For all these reasons, he is seen as more of a historical event than an enduring inspiration.

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In Dead Elvis, Marcus wrestles with the stereotype of Elvis that had taken hold even before his death: the idiot savant whose primary talent was erotic and who was played like a marionette by his sinister manager Colonel Tom Parker; the accidental revolutionary who became a tourist attraction. In this version of the story Elvis gets credit for the initial energy flash which lasted from That’s All Right in 1954 to his induction into the army four years later, and for his unexpectedly triumphant 1968 comeback, but gets scolded for squandering his talent on schlock, his fortune on trash, and his health on junk food and pills. This tale has a tragic, mythic quality which makes him a microcosm of America: from young, scrappy and hungry to bloated, decadent and grotesque. What it doesn’t do is explain what that talent was in the first place.

Yet this is exactly the story Luhrmann has chosen to tell. He seems to have taken the 2007 parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story as a how-to manual, revelling in every cradle-to-grave biopic cliché you can think of, and dialogue that could have been written by low-rent AI: “The world needs to hear you sing, Elvis!” Poor old Elvis can’t turn on the television without seeing a report of some epochal assassination. In one frankly astonishing scene, the Manson clan’s killing of Sharon Tate happens just 24 hours before the catastrophe at Altamont rather than, as boring reality would have it, four months earlier. What any of this has to do with Elvis, a man so disconnected from the upheavals of the Sixties that he asked President Nixon to make him a federal narcotics agent, I have no idea.

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So far, so silly but Luhrmann makes the fundamentally terrible decision to have the story narrated by Tom Hanks as Parker, a walking distraction with absurd fat-man prosthetics and an accent that is supposed to be Dutch but sounds more like a Nazi officer in a goofy war movie. Thus we understand what Parker saw in Elvis (dollar signs) but not what Elvis saw in himself. The artist, well-played by the terrifically attractive Austin Butler, comes across as a shallow hillbilly angel torn to pieces by a corrupt world when all he wants to do is sing. Luhrmann pays loving attention to Elvis’s outrageous, explosive sexuality (“Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimetre, tens of thousands of people went berserk,” observed Lester Bangs), but to the extent that he becomes a visual phenomenon rather than a musical one. We never understand why millions of girls who weren’t personally throwing their knickers at him thrilled to his records in their bedrooms — and millions of boys, too. Luhrmann being Luhrmann, he pumps up Elvis’s music with anachronistic new interpretations by Doja Cat and Eminem, as if unable to trust in the power of the real thing.

To really convey the tragedy of Elvis’s final years, trapped and sedated in Las Vegas like a bear in a gilded cage, you’d need a director who was at least sceptical of excess if not nauseated by it. Luhrmann, the man whose sole interest in The Great Gatsby was the parties, is not that director. The movie only really comes alive in Vegas, when everything is too loud, too bright, too fast, too much. By contrast, the earlier scenes of Elvis hanging out in blues clubs on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee have all the rootsy authenticity of an Eighties beer commercial. History says that Elvis was not at his finest in Vegas; the camera says more, more, more.

Elvis’s talent as a singer and arranger is easily underrated. The first time the New York Times wrote about him, in June 1956, it sneered: “Mr Presley has no discernible singing ability. His speciality is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner’s aria in a bathtub. For the ear he is an unutterable bore.” After Elvis’s death, the justifiably envious rock’n’roll pioneer Chuck Berry summed up his legacy with a patronising shrug: “boop, boop, boop; shake your leg; fabulous teen music; the Fifties; his movies.” Forty-five years later, it is even harder to assess the nature of Elvis’s brilliance.

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The popular notion that Elvis was effectively performing musical blackface, and that any pouting, hip-thrusting white boy could have played that role in a racist industry, completely misses his X-factor. It’s true that black, queer Little Richard couldn’t go as far as Elvis did, but then nor could straight, white Carl Perkins. Only Elvis had the voice, charisma and taste to synthesise blues, country, gospel and pop in a way that made him, at the time, a unifying figure rather than an exploitative one. Certainly nobody close to him doubted his genuine affection for black music and musicians. “It was like two feuding clans who had been brought together by marriage,” said Marion Keisker of Sun Records, which released Elvis’s first five singles. Even Chuck D, modifying his claim in Fight the Power that Elvis was “straight-up racist”, admitted that he considered the music industry bigoted rather than Elvis himself.

Elvis had a good (though far from infallible) ear for material. He was exacting in the studio, demanding around 30 takes of Hound Dog even when everybody else in the room thought they’d nailed it. He never just turned up and sang. Luhrmann does grant him one scene of real creativity, in which he whips his vast band through a dramatic new arrangement of That’s All Right for the first show of his Las Vegas residency, dashing madly from player to player. He knew what people wanted to hear and he loved giving it to them. His ambition wasn’t imposed on him by Parker; it was a burning flame.

Luhrmann traffics in myths and fairy tales: nobody went to Moulin Rouge! expecting an accurate portrayal of turn-of-the-century Montmartre. Elvis, which has underperformed but still topped the US box office, has found an audience with its hectic, melodramatic megamix of the singer’s life. But many of those moviegoers will be learning about Elvis in detail for the first time and will leave with the impression of a sweet, somewhat dim, easily manipulated sexual dynamo — a “virtuoso of hootchy-kootchy”, as the New York Times sniffed in 1956 — rather than a transformative musical force.

“Nobody’s going to remember me,” Elvis frets to his wife Priscilla towards the end of the movie. “I never made anything lasting.” Presumably we are meant to think that he is completely wrong because his legend will live forever but Luhrmann never illuminates, nor seems to care about illuminating, the talent upon which that legend was built. The thick sediment of mythology and kitsch that Greil Marcus believed got in the way of appreciating Elvis is exactly what Luhrmann is interested in. Marcus quoted, and challenged, a crushing line from the critic James Wolcott: “As a musical artist [Elvis] doesn’t exist — he doesn’t begin to exist.” It’s unfortunate that the man entrusted with telling his story to a new generation would seem to agree.

Shortly after midnight on 17 June, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate Complex noticed that someone had taped over several door locks in the main office building and alerted the police, who arrested five men for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor. On 6 August, after the intruders were tied to President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, the Washington Post combined the words “Watergate” and “scandal” for the very first time.

Fifty years on, Watergate remains the political scandal, at least etymologically. Illegal parties at Downing Street? Partygate. A beer in Keir Starmer’s hand at a possibly illegal gathering? Beergate. The people who started a harassment campaign against women in the games industry in 2014 called it Gamergate, and that wasn’t even a real scandal. Even some countries where English is not the first language use the suffix. I suppose the sense of something opening, a threshold being crossed, is somewhat apt, but that’s not the reason why it is used. The man who started slapping -gate onto every potential scandal almost straight away was William Safire, a conservative columnist for the New York Times and former speechwriter for Nixon. Not all of Safire’s coinages stuck, and most are forgotten, but the format endured.

Safire later admitted that he might have been trying to minimise his former boss’s crimes, making Watergate just the first -gate of many. If that was the case, then he didn’t succeed. Watergate is the king of scandals for a couple of reasons. First, it epitomises the power of diligent journalists to bring high-level malfeasance to light. Played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the 1976 movie, All the President’s Men, the Washington Post’s dynamic duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are still synonymous with dogged, shoe-leather reporting while Deep Throat (“Follow the money”) is the quintessential informant. Woodward and Bernstein were only part of the story but they gave it a halo of heroism. Second, the scandal had a satisfying conclusion: Nixon resigned in disgrace on the brink of impeachment on August 8 1974. Jimmy Breslin called his bestselling book about the scandal How the Good Guys Finally Won.

Watergate inspires nostalgia for a time when political crimes led to punishment. When Boris Johnson can ride out Partygate (for now) and Donald Trump can survive two impeachments thanks to partisan loyalty, Nixon’s downfall seems refreshingly decisive: truth prevailed and justice was served. Like all historical events, it took on an aura of inevitability after the fact. But the chain of cause and effect was not that simple.

The Washington Post’s first mention of the Watergate scandal, in August 1972, came in the context of despair. During Nixon’s re-election campaign, the paper complained: “Such potentially explosive issues as the Watergate scandal go by almost unremarked.” At that point, it had already been reported that the men who had broken into the DNC offices to plant listening bugs had received money from the Committee to Re-elect the President and that Martha Mitchell, wife of the committee’s director John Mitchell, had been held captive in the California hotel to stop her talking to the press. (Her story is the focus of the new Julia Roberts miniseries Gaslit.) A month before the election, Woodward and Bernstein reported that the FBI believed the break-in “stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election”. Nonetheless, Nixon went on to defeat Democrat George McGovern in a 49-state landslide with more than 60% of the popular vote, the killer irony being that none of the skulduggery was necessary.

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Strange though it seems, at the time, most journalists thought that Watergate was just an amusing caper which cast no shadow on a popular president who was scoring diplomatic coups in Russia and China. Few newspapers bothered to assign full-time reporters to the Watergate beat. On television, only CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite picked up the story. Throughout 1972, Woodward and Bernstein were too far ahead of the media pack, which made Watergate look like the Post’s hobby horse. Nixon’s campaign manager Clark MacGregor accused the paper of using “innuendo, third-person hearsay, unsubstantiated charges, anonymous sources, and huge scare headlines” to cook up a non-existent connection between the White House and Watergate on behalf of the McGovern campaign.

Not until the televised Senate hearings began in May 1973 did Watergate become a national obsession, inspiring comedy albums and novelty gifts such as the “jigsaw puzzle that will bug you”. Around 85% of viewers tuned in at some point. Amazingly, Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew was soon under investigation himself on unrelated charges of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion, and tax fraud. This shocking scandal, leading to his resignation in October, was a mere sideshow to Watergate.

In a scandal, the best defence is confusion. Nixon and allies such as Ronald Reagan shuffled through the full deck of excuses and decoys. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just a few bad apples. It’s a partisan attack by Democrats in cahoots with the liberal media, a witch hunt, a lynch mob. It’s hurting the country. “For America’s sake, let’s get on with the business of government,” said Reagan. In short, move on.

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Having first covered up his complicity in the original crime, Nixon then attempted to cover up the cover-up, and that was the real turning point for public opinion. The administration’s attempt to undermine the Senate investigation let slip the existence of a secret recording system in the Oval Office. Nixon then spent months fighting to block the release of the tapes.

On 20 October 1973, he ordered his attorney general Elliot Richardson to sack the staunchly liberal special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was demanding that the White House hand over the tapes from the Oval Office’s secret recording system. Richardson refused and resigned. His deputy also refused and resigned. The third in line did sack Cox but this “Saturday Night Massacre” was a colossal miscalculation. Only then did the number of Americans who wanted him to resign finally overtake those who approved of his performance. Even if they didn’t understand exactly what he’d done wrong, they could see that he was acting like he’d done something wrong. Congress took the first step towards impeachment proceedings.

Despite all of that, one in four Americans continued to have Nixon’s back, even after the “smoking gun” tape revealed that the President had been involved in the cover-up since the beginning and triggered his resignation. Nixon and Agnew had energetically stoked white rage and resentment, and that was a faithful constituency. Nixon refused to quit until a posse of Republican greybeards sat him down and told him he was done, 26 months after the break-in.

As Leon Neyfakh’s brilliant 2017 podcast Slow Burn (the source material for Gaslit) argues, it could have turned out very differently. What if Nixon had destroyed the tapes, or there had been no recordings in the first place? What if the Democrats hadn’t held a majority in both houses of Congress? What if partisan polarisation had been as extreme then as it is now? What if influential news outlets had maintained throughout that it was all a smear campaign and reduced the scandal to a political litmus test? Much depended on the integrity of key officials. Elliot Richardson’s loyalty to the administration did not dissuade him from approving the investigations into Nixon and Agnew, even at the cost of his job. John Dean, White House counsel and Watergate conspirator, chose to collaborate with federal prosecutors. The FBI did its job. None of this was guaranteed.

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Yet for all the might-have-beens, Nixon did fall in the end. If it took an awful lot to bring down an election-winning heavyweight in 1974, then it’s even harder now, although it’s worth saying that the UK is in a better place than the US. Johnson may still be in office but a majority of voters, and 148 of his own MPs, want him to resign over Partygate. In Washington, meanwhile, only one Republican Senator voted against Trump during his first impeachment and only seven in the second. Even after the storming of the Capitol, his approval rating stood at 34%. Despite the damning findings of the House’s January 6 committee, Trump is still expected to run again in 2024 and may well win. When one Nixon loyalist was asked in August 1974 if new facts such as the smoking gun tape would change his mind, he replied: “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” During the Trump years that would made him a typical Republican.

Perhaps this failure to punish an attempt to overturn an election is a long-term consequence of Watergate. In 1964, 75% of Americans said that they trusted their government to do the right thing most or all of the time; in 1974, after a decade of gradual decline, it plunged to just 36%. It is currently 21% and has only once achieved a majority, immediately after 9/11. By cratering voters’ faith in politicians in general, Watergate bred a pervasive cynicism which took the air out of most subsequent scandals and explains why so many -gates have fizzled out without inspiring high-level resignations or prosecutions. If you think they’re all as bad as each other, then even egregious wrongdoing can seem like filthy business as usual, to the benefit of the worst offenders.

Thus the most paranoid of presidents gave birth to an age of national paranoia. Immediately after Watergate, this suspicion was dramatised by movies such as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor in which the truth either doesn’t come out or, worse, doesn’t matter. In All the President’s Men, Robert Redford plays a role in changing history. At the end of Three Days of the Condor, his CIA researcher, Turner, boasts to a senior official, Higgins, that he has told the New York Times all about a rogue operation and the murders the agency committed to cover it up. But as he walks away, Higgins shouts after him: “Hey Turner! How do you know they’ll print it?” Redford’s face says it all.

If the movie were remade now, I think the question would be even more cynical: sure, they’ll print it, but how do you know it will make any difference? How do you know enough people will care?

Their story was one of the first I learned when I was getting interested in the history of pop music because the simplified, mythologised version was so easy to grasp. Britain was grotty, violent and boring. Everyone was listening to prog-rock keyboard solos. And then punk happened and everything changed! Was it true? Not entirely, but what a narrative!

For Craig Pearce and Danny Boyle, writer and director of the new Disney+ series Pistol, the compressed timeline cuts both ways. It helps in terms of dramatic unity: no long slog to the top, no slow decline. It hurts because the crucial events are so well-known. The convergence of a mediocre rock band called the Strand, manager Malcolm McLaren and the snot-haired outcast who became Johnny Rotten. “Anarchy in the UK”. The accidental scandal of the Bill Grundy show. The calculated scandal of “God Save the Queen” and the Silver Jubilee boat trip. The arrival of Sid Vicious. The record labels who decided they were too hot to handle before a young Richard Branson took a punt on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Their final implosion in San Francisco: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” The hideous coda of Sid and Nancy. What more is there to say? What mysteries to reveal? It all happened too fast.

The release of Pistol in time for the Jubilee, alongside a somewhat tawdry reissue of “God Save the Queen”, reaffirms the peculiar connection between the Sex Pistols and the Queen: two radically different visions of England, both now united by nostalgia. Boyle, who managed to squeeze both of them into the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, brings his usual wit and velocity to the show — the concert scenes are thrilling — but the actors are far too attractive and say implausibly tidy things like “We’re outlaws and tonight we’re going to change the world” and “No one gives a shit about us so we don’t give a shit about no one else”. Pearce, who has written five screenplays for Baz Luhrmann, makes this too much of a jolly showbiz caper and even the tragedy is sentimentalised. Pistol entertains but it doesn’t disturb.

Pistol does at least recognise that the Sex Pistols were an unstable compound from day one because the key players were not great friends and they had very different missions. Guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook and original bassist Glen Matlock wanted to make noisy rock’n’roll. “From that day on, it was different,” Jones later complained about the Bill Grundy furore. “Before then, it was just music; the next day, it was the media.”

But to Malcolm McLaren, who advertised that the Pistols were more incompetent players than they really were, it was never just about the music. It was a Situationist art project that would help him flog T-shirts and give him a reputation as a devilish impresario. “The only rule I had was that if it didn’t annoy anyone and create problems, it wasn’t worth doing,” he explained.

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This was easy to say if you weren’t on the frontline. The combined impact of Grundy and “God Save the Queen” made life very difficult for the band — tabloid fury, cancelled gigs, physical assaults, vilification on a breathtaking scale — but to McLaren, who saw them as components in a chaos engine rather than vulnerable young men, it was all fabulous publicity. In his eyes the Sex Pistols were nothing if they weren’t a media event. The writer Fred Vermorel astutely describes the Sex Pistols as “a masterpiece made not of paint and canvas but of headlines and scandal, scams and factoids, rumour and fashion, slogans, fantasies and images and (I almost forgot) songs”.

As for Matlock’s replacement Sid Vicious, effectively a feral child, he was the true embodiment of the famous line that McLaren fed to Jones: “Actually we’re not into music. We’re into chaos.” And Johnny Rotten, with his gargoyle stare and indelible sneer, wanted to express his fathomless contempt with everyone and everything, himself included. So it was entirely appropriate that the band would self-immolate, on the stage of San Francisco’s Winterland theatre, in a hateful mess with Rotten snarling “no fun” over and over again. They were a timebomb all along.

If the participants could not agree on what the Sex Pistols were, then nor can their fans. To Noel Gallagher, who borrowed their exhilarating hostility and tsunami of guitars on Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, Never Mind the Bollocks is “a fucking laugh”. But to the Manic Street Preachers, whose misanthropic masterpiece The Holy Bible also came out in 1994, the vital ingredient was the annihilating disgust of “Bodies” and “Holidays in the Sun”.

Whereas the Clash were sociable humanists, the Pistols were so thoroughly alienated that their politics landed somewhere truly unnerving, beyond Left and Right. The Sun wasn’t wrong to compare them to the marauding Droogs in A Clockwork Orange. In his review of the album, the critic Robert Christgau was both blown away and freaked out: “The only real question is how many American kids might feel the way Rotten does, and where he and they will go next. I wonder — but I also worry.”

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You can assess the Sex Pistols in historical terms, as the greatest rock catalyst since Bob Dylan and the Beatles. The Damned’s “New Rose” may have been the first punk rock single but it was the Sex Pistols who licensed people to think: “I could do that.” Straight away, there were bands like the Clash and Joy Division who formed or reinvented themselves as a direct result of seeing them play. “They were terrible,” Joy Division’s Bernard Sumner once said. “I thought they were great. I wanted to get up and be terrible too.” His bandmate Peter Hook said: “I wanted to tell the world to fuck off, just like Johnny Rotten.” Down the years, the example of the Sex Pistols has inspired the Specials and Depeche Mode; U2 and Simple Minds; the Smiths and the Fall; Nirvana and Green Day; the Prodigy and Eminem; Trainspotting and Natural Born Killers. The Sex Pistols were the birth of something new and immense. After them came the flood.

Yet if you think about what the Sex Pistols actually were rather than what they initiated, you’re struck by their deathward trajectory — the denial and negation crystallised in Rotten’s cry of “No future!” Public Enemy’s Chuck D called them “art kamikazes” and that spirit of self-destruction, of being consumed by the fire you started, comes from Rotten alone. The music was thrilling and immediate but trying to get to the bottom of what Rotten was doing can lead you to some very strange places.

In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus uses a coincidence of names as an excuse to write a long digression about the murderous millenarian cult leader John of Leiden, who subjected Münster to a reign of terror before being tortured to death in 1536. It should be an absurd stretch but it doesn’t feel like one. Disfiguring every syllable he sang, Rotten had the energy of an apocalyptic preacher, unleashing a power that frightened him as well as the listener. He once said he was scared to approach the microphone because he was shocked by how he sounded. Even though he’s associated with the cultural revolution of 1976-77, he sometimes seemed like a creature from another time: a folk devil, a bug-eyed lord of misrule.

Johnny Rotten, a name invented and owned by McLaren, only lived for two-and-a-bit years. It was as John Lydon that he launched Public Image Ltd, the truest expression of his musical radicalism, advertised butter, appeared on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, and so on. Lydon has repeatedly insisted that he was never an anarchist and has nothing against the Queen, and talks about the Sex Pistols with a weird blend of pride (in his own role) and contempt (for everyone else’s). Predictably, he waged a legal battle with his former bandmates in an attempt to stop Pistol using their music, but he lost. Before it had even been made, he called the series “the most disrespectful shit I’ve ever had to endure”, which is a strong claim from someone who was once knifed because of a pop song.

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Lydon’s support for Brexit and Donald Trump has disappointed many fans but I don’t think that it’s inconsistent with his original mission to demolish the status quo. Populism is much better at knocking things down than building something better. As the Atlantic’s James Parker argued in 2016, Trump “co-created a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock”. In his memoir, Fred Vermorel, allegedly quoting Baudrillard, writes about “the ecstasy of making things worse”. Perhaps Rotten then, and Lydon now, would counter that things couldn’t get any worse, but however much we talk about punk in terms of community and DIY creativity, it was also about the glee of smashing things to pieces. Heath Ledger understood this perfectly when he partly based his version of the Joker on Rotten: some people just want to watch the world burn.

I doubt you could put on screen the writhing confusion and alien menace of Johnny Rotten in a way that was both true and palatable to a Disney+ audience. Lipstick Traces: The Movie? I don’t think so. A Malcolm McLaren version of the Sex Pistols story would have to be a postmodern comedy in the spirit of 24 Hour Party People. Pistol, meanwhile, is based on Steve Jones’s memoir Lonely Boy, so what we get is an energetic, well-made biopic of a rock band. Fair enough, but being a rock band was far from the most interesting thing about the Sex Pistols.

“As you know — two objects can occupy the same space and time — if they vibrate at different speeds!” Allen explains with a superhero’s typical fondness for exclamation marks. “My theory is, both Earths were created at the same time in two quite similar universes! They vibrate differently — which keeps them apart!” As the fastest man on (his) Earth, Allen vibrated so fast that he “tore a gap in the vibratory shields separating our worlds!”

Allen’s account of the physics may have been somewhat unreliable but readers didn’t flinch. Two worlds, two Flashes? Got it. That was how DC entered what the science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock would soon christen the “multiverse”.

Right now, the multiverse is box-office gold, as Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness collides with the extraordinary word-of-mouth hit Everything Everywhere All At Once. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has already been universe-hopping in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Loki; DC will follow suit with next year’s The Flash. While writing Everything Everywhere All At Once, directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels) saw multiverse storylines in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Rick and Morty and worried that the concept would be old hat by the time their movie was out. Not a bit of it.

The multiverse began as an alternative answer to a confounding question. In the Twenties, experiments in the revolutionary new field of quantum mechanics demonstrated that sub-atomic particles such as electrons behaved as if they were in many places at once, like a waveform. Yet as soon as they were observed, these myriad coexisting possibilities concertinaed into a single, measurable state, which we call reality. How? In the traditional Copenhagen interpretation, the act of observation itself causes a phenomenon known as waveform collapse. This made sense to quantum physicists but not to anybody else.

One sceptic was Erwin Schrödinger. In 1935, he illustrated this paradox with a “ridiculous” thought experiment. A cat is placed in a box with a vial of lethal poison which will only break open if a radioactive atom decays. The odds are 50/50. If it were equally possible for the atom to have both decayed and not decayed until it is observed, Schrödinger argued, then it would be equally possible for the cat to be both alive and dead until the instant that the box is opened. Yet we instinctively feel that the unseen cat must be either alive or dead at any given moment, not alive and dead.

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In a 1952 lecture, Schrödinger said something that he warned might seem mad: what if all the possibilities were real but we could only apprehend one of them? The quantum theorist, he said, talks about probabilities and alternatives. “The idea that they may not be alternatives but all really happen simultaneously seems lunatic to him, just impossible.”

Five years later, an American doctoral student called Hugh Everett proposed what became known as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, later developed by Bryce DeWitt and David Deutsch. In this theory of the waveform, every possible outcome of every event, right down to the subatomic level, spawns a new universe. So the release of the poison in Schrödinger’s box splits off another universe: the cat is dead in one but still alive in the other. There are, in fact, innumerable cats in innumerable universes. In some of these universes, Schrödinger dies in the First World War, or is never born, and nobody has even heard of his cat. As John Gribbin puts it in his book Six Impossible Things: “an electron in a distant galaxy confronted with a choice of two (or more) quantum paths causes the entire Universe, including ourselves, to split. In the [many-worlds] version, there is an infinite variety of universes (a Multiverse) corresponding to all possible solutions to the quantum wave function.”

The popularity of the multiverse in superhero stories has less to do with physics than commerce. DC and Marvel embraced the concept as a means of rehabilitating old characters, fixing continuity errors and rewriting history. In the world of the central narrative (Earth-One in DC, Earth-616 in Marvel), numerous rules had to be obeyed (Don’t kill Spider-Man!) but in other universes writers could do whatever they liked. The problem was that these new universes accumulated their own inconsistencies while lowering the stakes across the board. If anything can happen, somewhere, then, as the nihilistic antagonist of Everything Everywhere All At Once says, “nothing matters”. The whole thing became such a mess that in 1985, DC swept the board clean and abolished the multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths. This comic-book take on waveform collapse was a neat solution, if mind-bogglingly genocidal if you thought about it for a minute.

By making the multiverse central to its Phase Four, the MCU runs that same risk of making the action both bewildering and inconsequential. Fortunately, the new Doctor Strange is anchored by a simple question asked by Scarlet Witch: “If you knew there was a universe where you were happy, wouldn’t you want to go there?” Demented by grief and regret, she says yes, of course. The rest of Sam Raimi’s movie, drenched in a 12-certificate brand of Lovecraftian interdimensional horror, tells us why she’s wrong.

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Everything Everywhere All At Once also asks if there is a happier version of you, to a much wilder, funnier, sadder effect. Daniels have spoken about wanting to write a film that explored family dynamics, mental health and existential anxiety in the playfully philosophical spirit of Kurt Vonnegut, Charlie Kaufman and Douglas Adams, which is quite different from wanting to make a multiverse movie and working out what to put in it. In place of rock-solid superhero IP, their film gives us a fraught Chinese-American family which runs a failing laundrette. For Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), preoccupied by “laundry and taxes”, the multiverse is not a known entity but a mind-bending revelation.

True to its title, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a whole lot of movie. It’s an absurdist comedy, a psychedelic action movie, a tender domestic drama, an allegory for the immigrant experience, a meta-commentary on cinema and a profound meditation on choices, regrets and the purpose of life. Whichever way you slice it, the grit that makes the pearl is Evelyn’s dissatisfaction with where her life has ended up, shadowed by the haunting awareness of bad decisions and wasted opportunities. “Across the multiverse, I’ve seen thousands of Evelyns,” says one version of her husband Waymond. “If you can imagine it, somewhere out there it exists.”

As far as we know, we are all blessed and cursed with only one life. We have opportunities to correct course or repair damage but every decision we make, from what to have for lunch to who to marry, is fundamentally irreversible. The 1998 romcom Sliding Doors, a multiverse movie in disguise, has become synonymous with the notion that an apparently insignificant decision or random incident can end up defining the course of a life.

Equally, the world has a single history. We all have to live with what has happened. In his novel Player Piano, Vonnegut describes “Why did it have to happen?” as “the question humanity had been asking for millenniums, the question men were seemingly born to ask”. Indeed, one character kicks off Doctor Strange by asking that very question: “Did it have to happen that way? Was there any other path?”

The appeal of the multiverse is that nothing had to happen, because in other universes it didn’t happen. It dramatises the contingency of history. Anything and everything could have been different and, somewhere out there, it is. “It’s a very confusing time,” says Stephanie Hsu, who plays Evelyn’s daughter Joy in Everything Everywhere All At Once, “so a multiverse story is a way of tapping into this question of, ‘Why is this reality the way that it is? Is it the only reality and does it work?’”

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It seems to me that whenever something dismaying happens in the world, many people react by throwing themselves into the political multiverse. When a leaked opinion revealed that the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v Wade and enable state legislatures to outlaw abortion, the sadness and outrage on Twitter produced a rash of counterfactuals that would have denied the conservative justices a majority: What if the Democrats had found a way to seat Merrick Garland in 2016? What if Hillary Clinton had won? What if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had retired under Obama rather than dying under Trump? What if? If only…

This happens all the time. Fans of Jeremy Corbyn routinely describe him as the best prime minister we never had. Democrats still torment themselves with the knowledge that a few thousand votes in Florida would have handed the White House to the environmentalist Al Gore rather than the neoconservative George W Bush. Geopolitical analysts, both professional and amateur, dream up scenarios in which Putin never invaded Ukraine. Covid partisans argue over whether lockdowns should have happened earlier or not at all, and what decisions in Wuhan might have obviated the question of lockdowns in the first place. We spend a lot of time mentally exploring the roads not taken — but is it time well spent?

Fundamental to politics is the desire to imagine a better future, and then to act to bring it about, but counterfactuals imagine a better past and present and there is nothing to be done about them. Compounding the impotence of the exercise is the fact that most of the people speculating on what could have been have never been in a position to make the fateful decision. I guess some people find it helpful to process the shouldas, wouldas and couldas, but to me it’s a form of horrendous masochism because it is too late to do anything and you never had the power to do anything in the first place.

The only useful counterfactual is the kind that teaches us lessons for the future. Modelling might-have-beens for Covid, for example, can help to prepare us for the next pandemic. More often, however, the exercise is about assigning blame and claiming foresight. It’s not so much “If only this hadn’t happened” as “If only you had listened to me”. Trump’s election victory in 2016 has been variously pinned on Hillary Clinton, the media, non-voters, Russian interference, James Comey and Susan Sarandon, to name just a few. The possible culprits behind Jeremy Corbyn’s failure include Blairites, Remainers and the media (again), as well as Corbyn himself. In the realm of counterfactuals, humility is a rare commodity. It’s unusual to find somebody who declares that if their advice had been heeded, then things would have been much worse.

The multiverse remains just a theory, albeit an increasingly popular one, because the existence of other universes has neither been confirmed nor disproved and, many quantum physicists argue, never can be. Some say that therefore it is not a scientific hypothesis at all but a philosophical concept. If, like the Flash, we could move between worlds, then we could know for sure where every possible branch in the road would have led and settle every argument for good. But we remain firmly stuck in the only universe we have ever known.

Not to spoil either movie, but both Everything Everywhere All At Once and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness wind up rejecting the escapism of the multiverse by suggesting that every alternative version of us has its own problems and that the most decent and rational choice is to learn to live better in our own universe. I think that’s the wisest response to the temptation of political counterfactuals as well: Here we are, like it or not. What do we do now?

When the rock duo Wet Leg appeared out of nowhere last summer, they reminded me of Broad City, if the stars had lived in the Isle of Wight rather than New York’s outer boroughs and preferred indie-rock to hip hop. I’m happy to play the music-critic game of ticking off musical antecedents — Elastica, Pavement, Courtney Barnett — but my first impression was that I was watching a sitcom about two best friends who formed a band for a laugh. On the cover of their self-titled debut album, Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers have their backs to the camera, arms around each other, heads close together as if sharing a hilarious secret.

That album topped the UK album charts in its first week, outselling the rest of the top five put together — a field which included not just new albums by Father John Misty and Jack White, but platinum juggernauts Ed Sheeran and Olivia Rodrigo. That’s a pretty remarkable achievement for an indie-rock band, let alone one that didn’t exist in the public eye this time last year. What makes Wet Leg’s breakout especially pleasing is the sense that it could have gone either way after their debut single, Chaise Longue, was hollered about last summer by everyone from Iggy Pop and Dave Grohl to TikTok teens.

With its garage-band simplicity and absurdist chorus, Chaise Longue felt more like a sketch than a pilot episode. Their delightfully weird deadpan humour (“Is your mother worried? Would you like us to assign someone to worry your mother?”) is the kind of lyric-writing that makes an instant splash but doesn’t necessarily lead anywhere. I wondered if they would ultimately be an indie-disco novelty act like Art Brut and Electric Six or, like LCD Soundsystem and Arctic Monkeys, a band whose initial offering of observational gags about deluded hipsters was just the tip of the iceberg. Jokes get people’s attention, but now what?

Not to worry. Wet Leg’s album is not just the year’s most briskly efficient hook machine; it has depth. Their superpower is making disappointment sound sprightly. They may be thoroughly jaded on Angelica (“The ambience was overrated at the party”) and I Don’t Wanna Go Out (“Now I’m almost 28, still getting off my stupid face”), and the line of lousy boyfriends may stretch out to the crack of doom, but these cherry bombs of melody and noise will surely soundtrack a lot of good times this year by returning indie-rock to first principles: life plus guitars.

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Teasdale’s bulging quiver of tart put-downs and goofy innuendos suggests someone who sneaked out of the party with her mate to build her own kind of fun: a private garden where wallflowers can bloom. Unlike their myriad evil exes, hungry for cultural and erotic capital, Wet Leg remind us that you can form a band as a lark, a whim, a public extension of a private bond. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian, “they have taken their friendship and set it to music”. Everything’s rubbish except them.

The song Supermarket, about going shopping while “too high”, is uncannily similar to the Broad City episode where Abbi and Ilana take mushrooms and freak out in Whole Foods. As the creators of The Monkees realised back in 1966, bands often resemble TV shows: when the personalities are big enough, you feel like you’re tuning in to the colourful adventures of a gang of friends, although the genres vary. Oasis was a soap opera, with Noel and Liam as Grant and Phil, Nirvana a tragic HBO miniseries and Madness a Saturday morning kids’ show. Metallica, at least as seen in the documentary Some Kind of Monster, is a workplace sitcom. And it was hard to watch Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back without thinking of it as a reality TV show: Big Brother with the world’s most fascinating housemates. The story of a band can be as potent as the sound.

Conversely, there are TV shows that feel like bands. Lena Dunham’s Girls, which debuted almost exactly a decade ago, had a classic four-person line-up. Marnie was the singer, beautiful and vain. Hannah would be the guitarist who writes all the songs and causes most of the problems. Jessa had the dry cool of a bass-player, while Shoshanna could be the space cadet on drums. The arc of the show suggested a band coming together and falling apart without ever actually managing to get anywhere. I suppose this makes Adam (played by Adam Driver) the singer-songwriter bro who goes on to enjoy far more solo success than his female peers.

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The excitement attending Wet Leg reminds me a little of the initial hullabaloo around Girls, not to mention Fleabag, Insecure and, most recently, the Norwegian movie The Worst Person in the World. There is still something sharp and fresh about witty, charismatic young women honestly describing their messy lives, and it’s about time a band struck that chord. Your twenties can feel like a tumultuous comedy drama in which your personal narrative is in flux and fun coexists with anxiety. Anyone who can capture the essence of that wild ride, on screen or in song, is on to something.

The song that pipped Wet Leg’s Chaise Longue to pole position in the Guardian’s best songs of 2021, and likewise went viral on social media, was I Do This All the Time by Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self Esteem. Taylor is in her mid-30s, with the modestly successful indie band Slow Club behind her, but she explores similarly unstable terrain — regrettable late-night texts, awkward parties, social pressure to get a grip and settle down — in the form of a spoken-word internal monologue which summons universal emotions from extremely specific storytelling. For example, the narrator talks wearily about going to an ex-boyfriend’s birthday drinks, “to congratulate you being the age I already thought you were, or not, I don’t know/ It’s a miracle I’ve remembered at all”. When I first heard it, I thought not of other songs but of the Billie Piper TV show I Hate Suzie.

It’s no surprise that Taylor is friends with the show’s writer, Lucy Prebble. In a conversation for the Observer last year, Taylor told Prebble that the song emerged from a period of falling short and feeling that she had nothing to lose by being entirely herself: “I stopped trying to have a hit and then had one.” Wet Leg have a similar story. Teasdale and Chambers both dropped out of a music course at Isle of Wight College, where they met, and both had emphatically unsuccessful solo careers before deciding to make music together. “I just wanted to do it for the fun of it,” Teasdale has said.

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The almost self-sabotaging silliness of their name illustrates Wet Leg’s refreshing nonchalance about success, which feels like a throwback to Nineties slacker culture in an era of performative striving and self-actualisation. Granted, you don’t get a manager and a deal with Domino Records if you have no ambition at all, but there is nothing cooler than appearing as if you could take it or leave it. What really matters is making that statement. All the TV shows I’ve mentioned are about confusion, failure and working out what to do with your life when you suspect you’ve already blown it. “Now that we have all grown up, all my friends have given up,” Wet Leg sing on Too Late Now.

But what happens when you run out of failure? One key difference between bands and TV shows is that bands can’t deny their success by hiding behind characters. Even when Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer were winning awards and getting movie roles, the Abbi and Ilana of Broad City remained goofball underachievers fumbling their way towards their 30s. But it’s hard to insist on the ordinary once the lifestyle gap between band and audience becomes unignorably wide. The Streets, Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys all became detached from the everyday scenes that they documented with such a keen eye and were forced to evolve their songwriting, with varying degrees of success. You can’t keep singing about bad parties when everyone knows you’re getting invited to great ones.

I suspect that Teasdale and Chambers have the wit and tunes to see them through. Perhaps they will find new experiences to be amusingly disappointed by. But worrying about where they go next runs counter to the fizzy, here-we-are vivacity of Wet Leg’s debut. My favourite moment comes during Ur Mum when Teasdale says, “OK, I’ve been practising my longest and loudest scream, OK, here we go, 1, 2, 3…” The scream, like the album, is silly and cathartic and genuinely desperate all at once. The video is framed as a traditional Eighties sitcom, with you-have-been-watching credits in yellow type. Even though I haven’t seen them live yet, I already feel like I’m watching their show.

If I’m right in thinking that none of these real-life horror stories has yet been adapted for the screen, then I’m surprised, because the scam, the fraud, the grift, the hoax, the long con, has become a cultural obsession. In the space of three months, Netflix alone has given us The Tinder Swindler, Inventing Anna, The Dropout, Bad Vegan, and Trust No One. False identities and weaponised charm are at the heart of the BBC dramas The Serpent and Chloe. There are hit podcasts about fiendish deception, too: Tortoise’s Sweet Bobby and the BBC’s The Missing Cryptoqueen. These stories have some of the attraction of the paranoid thriller, except that most of them are true and the victims aren’t nearly paranoid enough.

Popular culture has always magnified and marketed our fears — the Bomb, terrorism, technology out of control — and it’s not hard to see why we are currently preoccupied by deception. The 2008 crisis revealed that the global financial system was a Ponzi scheme built on the repackaging of mortgage debt, and almost nobody went to jail for it. Since then, a number of ballyhooed tech start-ups and cryptocurrencies have turned out to be built on sand. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes — the subject of The Dropout, a book, a documentary, a podcast series and the forthcoming Adam McKay movie Bad Blood — is only the most extreme example of a slick entrepreneur who exploited hype and greed to pull in vast sums of money for digital snake oil.

In the world of politics, we have seen an American president whose entire career was a series of escalating lies and a Russian president whose name has become synonymous with disinformation, while the sphere of online political commentary buzzes with unreliable narrators. We have also become more comfortable with amateur psychology. I don’t remember this much talk about sociopaths, narcissists and toxic fantasists a decade ago. I don’t remember gaslighting.

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Pulling all these strands together is the internet, whose initially exciting promise of the freedom to build a new identity online has, perhaps inevitably, led us into a Kafkaesque maze of scammers, fantasists and catfishers. We haven’t all been fooled into transferring our life savings into a fake account but we all know that it could happen because we’re constantly bombarded with fraud warnings and phishing emails. According to Which?, UK account-holders lost around £2.3bn to scams in the financial year 2020-21. So-called “romance frauds”, the cruellest of the lot, stole £100m in 2021. The prospect of being scammed isn’t an exotic possibility, like being eaten by a shark; it’s one careless click away.

Traditionally, there are three ways to tell the story of a con. In a movie like The Sting or Hustlers, the viewer is embedded with the scammers, who are usually charming rogues relieving gangsters and corporations of their ill-gotten gains. As a genre, it overlaps with the heist movie: you can applaud their chutzpah and artistry guilt-free. The new movie Operation Mincemeat, like Ben Affleck’s Argo, depicts an ornate ruse targeted at a tyrannical regime in order to save lives. Who could object to a story about scamming Hitler?

Conversely, a movie such as The Spanish Prisoner plants us in the clammy hands of the person being scammed. There is always that stomach-emptying, blood-freezing trapdoor moment when the victim finds out that their charismatic new friend’s “office” is empty and their “company” no more than a letterhead. In the third category, The Talented Mr Ripley supplies the paradoxical double pleasure of identifying with both scammer and scammed. You find yourself simultaneously rooting for both Ripley and his pursuers: catch the bastard, but not quite yet.

The fresh ingredient in the current wave of griftervision is the internet, presented here as a machine for lying. Only The Serpent is set in a different era — Charles Sobhraj murdered at least 20 tourists in southeast Asia in the Seventies — and involves crimes that would have been impossible to cover up in the age of social media updates and CCTV. Then again, you can imagine how a modern-day Sobhraj would adapt to the online age, sculpting new identities on digital platforms rather than razoring passports. That’s how Erin Doherty’s imposter Becky (aka Sasha) infiltrates Bristol’s bourgeois elite in Chloe. The show ultimately cops out by having her uncover crimes far worse than pretending to be a posh gallerist with demented dress sense — the people she is deceiving are the real rotters — but the details of her process are compelling. All the information she needs to inveigle her way into their lives (and by extension yours or mine) is freely available online.

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Like Tom Ripley, or Aubrey Plaza’s Instagram-addicted character in the black comedy Ingrid Goes West, Becky is a frustrated outsider who uses her wits to penetrate a bubble of smug privilege. Her imposture is a form of class warfare. Scam stories are misleadingly easy to savour when they target the vacuous, obnoxious rich rather than vulnerable pensioners in small towns. “Stories about blatant con-artists,” writes Jia Tolentino in her essay The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams, “allow us to have the scam both ways: we get the pleasure of seeing the scammer exposed and humiliated, but also the retrospective, vicarious thrill of watching the scammer take people for a ride.”

Tolentino awards the title of quintessential millennial scam to the Fyre festival: “the most gleefully covered disaster of 2017”. Promoter Billy McFarland, who attempted to organise a luxury festival in four months despite never having so much as attended a festival, is an appalling dolt but he was fleecing the kind of people who would consider blowing $400,000 on a VIP beach house at the behest of an Instagram influencer, so that made it funny. The Bahamian workers who got stiffed received far less attention in a story that became the Coachella of schadenfreude, the Instagram Altamont.

The story of Anna Delvey, played by Julia Garner in Inventing Anna, has a similar soak-the-rich quality. Delvey was an art-school dropout who blagged her way into the high life by posing as a German heiress. In reality, though, the victims of scams often have neither money nor power. The Missing Cryptoqueen cuts between the glamorous antics of Dr Ruja Ignatova, architect of a pyramid scheme based on the bogus cryptocurrency OneCoin, and the ordinary lives she has ruined. The series drives home the human cost of her multi-billion-dollar grift by ending on some of her victims in Uganda. The best scam narratives are as concerned with the victims as they are enthralled by the swindlers.

Money is at least a comprehensible motive for ripping a hole in somebody’s life. Sweet Bobby unravels how a successful young woman ensnared her cousin in a catfishing scam which lasted eight years and involved more than 60 fictional characters, but never why. The culprit, Simran Bhogal, seems to regard it as a consensual game, a fantasy to pass the time. She comes across as tetchy and aggrieved by the suggestion that she’s the bad guy. The successful scammer combines delusional self-belief with nihilistic contempt for the suckers, yet when they are exposed it often feels as if there is really nothing there. You rip off the mask and the face is blank.

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If the only information available about modern dating were from TV, movies and podcasts, nobody would dare do it. Catfish: The TV Show, inspired by the 2010 movie about online deception, is now in its eighth season. Simon Leviev, the villain in The Tindler Swindler, was an Israeli conman who used the money he’d tricked out of one woman to convince the next woman that he was a wealthy playboy, and so on to the tune of $10m. Like “Bobby” in Sweet Bobby and Anthony Strangis in Bad Vegan, Leviev crafted an elaborate narrative, buttressed with phoney digital evidence and dramatic twists involving pernicious foe. Strangis built an even more ambitious alternative reality around his mark, the vegan restaurateur Sarma Melngailis. “I feel close to former cult members because we understand one another,” Melngailis said recently. Theranos, OneCoin and LuLaRoe, the fashion line-cum-pyramid scheme covered in the documentary LuLaRich, have also been compared to cults. The object of the scammer is to inspire belief and silence doubts.

Such stories won’t be the last. In the most generous reading, they are useful cautionary tales, like very expensive fraud warnings, which equip us to deal with the next German heiress or Israeli diamond dealer who comes along and asks us for a bridging loan. “I want this stuff to be useful, not merely fodder for people’s creepy entertainment,” Melngailis said.

It’s a nice thought but in practice these stories often inspire victim-blaming rather than empathy. By anatomising the plot after the fact, they invite viewers both to marvel at the reality-bending audacity of these charismatic devils and fully believe that they would not have fallen for it. Why someone would maintain an eight-year relationship with a person they’d never met can seem as inexplicable as why someone would pay £160,000 to a company that they had no history with, or invest in a cryptocurrency that doesn’t work, but it happens. Being vulnerable and credulous is not a rare condition. So I worry that this kind of entertainment breeds suspicion and paranoia, but I worry more that it is justified.

His critics countered that he has not only severed all connections with Left-wing outlets but attacks them with vindictive ferocity, and can now be seen regularly on Carlson’s show, where they get along famously. I interpreted Bump’s description as a deadpan provocation, challenging the idea that Greenwald’s long-running identification with the Left matters more than what he now says and does. A bigger question, not new but intensified by the Ukraine crisis, is whether “Left” and “Right” are remotely adequate descriptions of the current political landscape.

I’m bemused by the idea of “the Left” as a unified, monolithic entity. (For this reason I don’t capitalise “Left” or “Right” except when it is a publication’s house style.) History supplies no evidence to support this notion of homogeneity. The Labour Party, for example, often feels like a marriage of convenience between people who hate each other. No Conservative can needle a Corbynite as much as a Blairite can, and vice versa. When I read some publications, “the Left” encompasses everyone from Joe Biden to a bearded millennial with a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter handle, but then I turn to Twitter and see Owen Jones denouncing Paul Mason, an actual loud-and-proud Marxist, as a “neo-McCarthyite” and remember that the Left is diverse and fractious.

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine have been educational. Few western commentators are stupid enough to be explicitly pro-Putin but a significant number, including Greenwald and Carlson, are anti-anti-Putin. You can identify them by their obsession with Nato, “legitimate security concerns”, “poking the Russian bear”, the Azov battalion, and hypothetical biological warfare laboratories, all of which are popular Kremlin talking points. Their arguments usually begin with some throat-clearing variation on: “The invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent but…”

Some of them were once associated with the Left but now occupy a more chaotic space: former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Labour MP George Galloway, former comedian Russell Brand and former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. (This is the world of the former.) Some, like Carlson, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon, are clearly on the Right, if not the far-Right.

Some appear to be nothing more than contrarian narcissists who trade as “free-thinkers”. Others, who can be found in varying proportions in organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition, Democratic Socialists of America and Young Labour, come to anti-anti-Putinism via the far-Left. It will not surprise you to learn that many of the above made regular appearances on the now-banned Russian television channel RT.

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Owen Jones gets into trouble because he insists on describing marginal groups as “the Left” and springing up to defend their honour. When the Labour leadership demanded that 11 MPs withdraw their signatures from a Stop the War statement, Jones decried it as “an excuse to purge the Left” — even though those 11 constituted about 5% of the PLP and one-third of the Socialist Campaign Group. Either the Left is a major political force with popular support for its policies, or it is a fringe of the fringe. Which is it?

The idea of a Left-Right spectrum originated with a seating arrangement. After the French Revolution, members of the new National Assembly who supported the king gathered to the president’s right and revolutionaries to the left. “Left” and “Right” caught on in Britain during the Spanish Civil War, which at the very same time exposed how inadequate those definitions were. Writers such as George Orwell and Franz Borkenau observed with horror that Stalinists in Spain murdered and defamed socialists and anarchists, employing tactics similar to those of the fascists they were fighting. The study of totalitarianism developed from those early efforts to explain the puzzling kinship between mortal enemies on the far-Left and the far-Right.

During the Forties, the likes of Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Andre Gide and Albert Camus became known as the “Non-Communist Left”. To them, the difference between Stalinism and democratic socialism was night and day — Clement Attlee suspended five Labour MPs for pro-Soviet sympathies — but this fundamental divide in the Left often confused conservatives. When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.” In the early Sixties, rejection of Soviet communism was one of the founding principles of the New Left, even if many of its members went on to mimic the error by lionising Mao.

Despite these major fractures, Left and Right were useful labels so long as economics and class interest dominated politics. Party policies on tax and welfare may still cleave that way but voting behaviour does not. People regularly vote against their class interests, prioritising cultural values and identity over economics. If you hadn’t noticed before 2016 that parties of the Left were becoming, relatively speaking, more middle-class and parties of the Right more working-class, then Brexit and Trump made it unignorable. In the UK, while Labour broadly leaned towards Remain and the Tories towards Brexit, there were enough Thatcherite Remainers and socialist Leavers to create unlikely new alliances. (Then again, in the Seventies, the two most prominent Eurosceptic MPs were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. Europe has that effect.)

Strange bedfellows have been a growing feature of the past decade in what we generally call populist movements even when they’re not popular. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the gilets jaunes in France, or people who spread conspiracy theories about the White Helmets in Syria, it can be almost impossible to tell whether the person talking is on the far-Left, far-Right or has no coherent ideology at all. The rise of identity politics has fractured the Left, too. There are Marxists who reject it outright and socialists who gravitate towards the socially conservative Blue Labour. The language of politics has not yet caught up.

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The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.

The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.

At the risk of sounding like Walter in The Big Lebowski — “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” — old-fashioned Stalinism had a certain logic. The USSR was for a long time the world’s only socialist country, and many people believed that if socialism failed there, it would fail completely. So they shut their eyes and ears to the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor and so on, until the denial became intolerable. Malcolm Muggeridge compared the British human-rights activists who whitewashed Stalin’s Russia to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut cutlets”.

Campists don’t even need the advertisement for nut cutlets, because they do not know what they stand for, only what they oppose. This is how you end up making excuses for dictators who bomb hospitals while demonising the people who pull the bodies from the rubble as terrorists and/or CIA assets. This is how people who define themselves by their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq find themselves claiming that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. It is obscene.

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye popularised the Horseshoe Theory, which argues that the extremes of Left and Right curve towards one another rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line. Hotly disputed by people who consider it a “smear” on the Left, it has the drawbacks of simplicity as well as the benefits. It does not mean that the far-Left are no different from fascists, any more than Stalin was a Nazi. I see it as an observation rather than an ironclad prescription. I know people far to my Left whose moral and intellectual integrity is unimpeachable, but I’ve also encountered antisemites, Assadists and Putin apologists who claim to be socialists. Another term for this, again harking back to the Thirties, is “red-brown alliance”.

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Back in 2009, Michelle Goldberg observed that Infowars host Alex Jones occupied “the shadowy territory where the far-Right curves around and meets the far-Left”. The invasion of Ukraine has made the existence of this tendency undeniable. Last week, Iranian state television broadcast a conversation between suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson, sacked university professor David Miller and prominent Stop the War member Lowkey about alleged Zionist influence in Ukraine. However that confederation of ghouls might define itself, it does not represent any Left that I identify with. Yet you can see for yourself how many influential people on the Left rallied to the defence of Williamson and Miller over allegations of antisemitism not so long ago.

In Britain, Left-wing writers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Daniel Randall have long been fierce critics of campism. In recent weeks, Leftists from Ukraine and Syria have denounced it, too, while the Polish group Left Together has withdrawn from Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 and the dubiously named Progressive International for their both-sides framing of the invasion. “You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond,” wrote Zosia Brom in a furious piece called “Fuck leftist westplaining”. They have had enough of this nonsense, and who can blame them?

We are currently experiencing a moment of rare political unity on the subject of Putin and Ukraine, which makes the spectrum-scrambling dynamics of anti-anti-Putinism brutally clear. The Left-Right axis became popular because it helped to clarify existing political positions but now it obscures reality so frequently that I wonder we are so addicted to an archaic binary. Whether someone describes themselves as Left-wing or Right-wing no longer interests me. The only thing that matters is what they’re actually saying.

These quotes all relate to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, but similar things have been said about The Batman, the new movie directed by Matt Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson.

“Maybe every ten years Batman has to go through an evolution to keep up with the times,” his co-creator Bob Kane said. But The Batman’s glum rearrangement of old ideas made me wonder if the character is that flexible after all. His arch-enemy, the Joker, is far more fluid, his origins and motives obscure, while the basic facts of Batman are ironclad. Young Bruce Wayne sees his parents gunned down and vows revenge on all criminals. He uses his physical prowess, detective skills and immense wealth to fight crime in the guise of a bat while pretending to be a vapid playboy. Most of his enemies are maniacs.

Something about this outline lends Batman a gritty prestige that other superheroes lack. The Academy’s snubbing of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight in 2009 was so contentious that it led to an expansion of the Best Picture shortlist. Both Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix have won Best Actor for playing the Joker. There is no compulsion to take Superman, Thor or Iron Man seriously — we know they’re not real — but Batman and his enemies have no superpowers and they scrap it out in a gothic nightmare version of New York City, so they have a perceived gravitas that transcends the comic-book genre.

In a recent interview, Pattinson said: “It’s kind of such an insane thing to do: The only way I can live is to dress up as a bat.” Well yes, it would certainly be bizarre if he were real, but he’s not, so I don’t see how his choices are any stranger than, say, Spider-Man’s. This peculiar obsession with pretending that his world is ours hits a wall with The Batman.

Bob Kane lived to see a lot of Batman movies, dying in 1998 at the age of 83. Kane negotiated sole credit for “the Bat-man” but it was his less hard-headed collaborator, Bill Finger, who wrote most of the early stories and made some crucial design decisions: the pointy cowl, the scalloped cape, grey tights instead of red. Batman was a masterpiece of synthesis, jamming together popular tropes from silent movies, radio serials and pulp fiction.

He got his swashbuckling from Zorro, his socialite alter ego from the Shadow, his murdered father from the Phantom, his freakish rogues’ gallery from Dick Tracy and his detective skills from Sherlock Holmes. The result was the saturnine Rolling Stones to Superman’s sunny Beatles. “Superman’s brand of essentially optimistic problem solving found its cynical counterpoint in Batman’s obsessive, impossible quest to punch crime into extinction, one bastard at a time,” says comic-book writer Grant Morrison in Supergods.

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During his first year, Batman was a lone vigilante with a gangster-movie disposition. “Much as I hate to take human life, I’m afraid THIS TIME, it’s necessary!” he roared as he machine-gunned two thugs to death. With some newspaper columnists already railing against comic-book violence, editor Whitney Ellsworth soon introduced the first rule of Batman: no guns, no killing. Kane and Finger further softened the character by introducing young Robin, partly to appeal to younger readers and partly to give Batman a Watson-like sidekick to talk to. The “winged figure of vengeance” became a paternal pseudo-cop.

Almost everything we now associate with Batman had been introduced by 1943: Robin, Alfred, Catwoman, the Joker, the Penguin, the Scarecrow, Two-Face, the Batmobile, the Batcave, the Bat-signal, and so on. His origin story (parents, gun, bat) was laid out in just a dozen panels: a classic trauma story decades before that became a cliché. Finger took the name Gotham from a jewellery store in the telephone directory.

The biggest influence on Batman’s post-war evolution outside of DC was a psychiatrist named Frederic Wertham, whose 1954 polemic Seduction of the Innocent brought to a head the moral panic about comic books and juvenile delinquency. Using sketchy anecdotal evidence, Wertham claimed that “the Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies… In these stories there are practically no decent, attractive, successful women… The atmosphere is homosexual and anti-feminine.”

Wertham’s crusade brought the industry to its knees, and the remaining publishers were forced to adopt a stringent Comics Code or die. With anything sinister, sexy or subversive now verboten, Batman writers had to resort to far-out Space Age plots involving aliens, time travel, Bat-Hound and Bat-Mite. Batman himself would routinely be transformed into something ridiculous such as a grey-bearded Rip Van Batman or, most regrettably, Bat-Baby. Batwoman and Bat-Girl were introduced to shore up the hero’s heterosexuality.

DC eventually tried to restore some edge but the goofy spirit of the novelty years fed into the 1966-68 TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. Batman was a camp pop art romp (Andy Warhol turned up to the launch party) that I can never quite forgive for licensing sub-editors to use “Kapow!” in the headline of any story about comic books. Apart from turning the Riddler (reimagined in The Batman as John Doe from Se7en with a Gab account) from a subs-bench Joker into a canonical foe, its primary legacy was giving future writers something to repudiate.

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After the Batmania bubble popped, DC gave the comic book a hard reboot, aimed at older readers. Writer Denny O’Neil dispatched Robin to college, made Gotham City a gothic hellhole and repositioned the villains as lethal chaos agents rather than crooks with wacky gimmicks. Neal Adams’s cinematic artwork redefined Batman as a brooding spectre who perched on gargoyles, wrapped in an improbably vast cape. “If the script called for a daytime scene, I would simply change it in the artwork to a night-time scene,” Adams said.

Years later, as editor of all the Batman titles, O’Neil drew up the “Bat-Bible” for writers. “The basic story is that he is an obsessed loner,” he explained. “Not crazy, not psychotic… Batman knows who he is and knows what drives him and he chooses not to fight it. He permits his obsession to be the meaning of his life.” Gotham City should feel like New York, specifically “Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at 3 am, November 28 in a cold year”. One challenge to Batman’s pretensions to realism today is that Gotham has never really outgrown the dirty, dangerous New York of Abe Beame and Travis Bickle. “Batman works best in a society that’s gone to hell,” says Frank Miller in the anthology Many More Lives of the Batman. “That’s the only way he’s ever worked.”

Miller arrived in New York from rural Vermont in 1977. Being mugged at knifepoint (twice) gave him a personal incentive to depict vigilantes beating the crap out of criminals in alleyways, and that talent earned him the job of reviving Batman yet again in 1986. In Batman: Year One, a young Bruce Wayne swings into action in a city that’s corrupt to its core. In The Dark Knight Returns, a bitter fifty-something Batman comes out of retirement to become a militarised “god of vengeance” at the helm of a vigilante army. “Is Batman a Fascist?” asked the Village Voice. Miller’s implied answer was: Probably, so what?

Miller was still slamming the Sixties TV show (“For me, Batman was never funny”) but he was kicking a corpse. Two more landmark graphic novels — The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean — cemented Batman as an ultraviolent nocturnal avenger, tormented from within and without. The fans loved it. As Glen Weldon puts it in The Caped Crusade: “Sure, Batman may have been created for children, but Frank Miller and Alan Moore had brought him into the real world, a place of bloody violence and stark sexuality, and now, finally, everybody would see him for the badass the fans had always known him to be.”

Tim Burton brought the gist of this new kitsch-killing Batman to a mainstream audience with his 1989 movie. I’m not sure that Joel Schumacher’s contributions to the franchise, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, amount to a pendulum swing. He aspired to make “a living comic book”, but the bright, boisterous comics of his childhood memories bore no resemblance to the prevailing Nineties mood of bone-breaking, gun-toting, kick-ass nihilism. A funnier, freakier Batman might have worked but it certainly didn’t in Schumacher’s hands.

After that, Christopher Nolan’s beloved Dark Knight trilogy wasn’t so much a revolution as a restoration, returning Batman to the stygian Gotham of Miller and O’Neil. It is, as Zack Snyder already proved with Batman vs Superman, as hard to follow Nolan as it was easy to improve on Schumacher. The Lego Batman Movie’s brilliant parody of the grim-and-gritty approach now reads as a pre-emptive strike on The Batman: “I don’t talk about feelings, Alfred. I don’t have any, I’ve never seen one. I’m a night-stalking, crime-fighting vigilante, and a heavy metal rapping machine. I don’t feel anything emotionally, except for rage. 24/7, 365, at a million per cent.”

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Reeves’s movie feels like a doleful remix of The Dark Knight, incorporating the rain-sodden urban hell of Se7en and the husky, noir voiceover of Rorschach from Watchmen. Pattinson’s Batman says things like, “They think I’m hiding in the shadows — I am the shadows” and, “The city’s angry, scared — like me.” His Bruce Wayne, glum, reclusive and clearly a Nine Inch Nails fan, is no playboy. Nor is he much of a detective, having somehow failed to notice that Gotham’s crooked officials routinely hang out at the nightclub run by the mobsters they’re taking money from.

For all the promotional talk of making this Batman an emo “weirdo”, inspired by Kurt Cobain, the only difference is a matter of degree: he is more withdrawn, more unhappy, more obsessed. Given that his formative psychic wound is the same as it was in 1940, it seems futile to ask again why he is like this. The movie’s politics, such as they are, are as incoherent as Nolan’s in The Dark Knight Rises. Once again, we have an aggrieved underclass whose legitimate gripes with Gotham’s self-serving elite are undermined by all the serial killing and terrorism. So what’s new? What speaks to our particular 2020s anxieties?

There are routes to making Batman interesting again. One would be an off-its-rocker horror movie with an 18 certificate. Another would have a discernible sense of humour and warmth, probably involving Robin. You could even tap into the wild fantasies of DC’s Elseworlds series: Victorian Batman, sci-fi Batman, Twenties Batman, whatever you like this side of Bat-Baby. Just shake the kaleidoscope.

For the 2005 reprint of Batman: Year One, David Mazzuchelli produced a short comic strip about the history of the character and his own role in it. “With Year One, we sought to craft a credible Batman, grounded in a world we recognise,” he wrote. “But, did we go too far? Once a depiction veers toward realism, each new detail releases a torrent of questions that exposes the absurdity at the heart of the genre. The more ‘realistic’ superheroes become, the less believable they are.” Grant Morrison, the writer of Arkham Asylum, recently made a similar point: “Using kids’ adventure heroes to make hackneyed observations about typical human behaviour that does not in fact apply to made up comic book characters strikes me as — I don’t know — whimsical? Dilettantish? A squandering of energy and creativity?”

That memo has yet to reach Hollywood, where poor, sad Bruce remains stuck in a cul-de-sac of scowling trauma and urban decay. If we must have more Batman (and we surely must), then next time let’s make him unreal.

The series arrives as Kanye is in the thick of one of the more excruciatingly public divorces of recent times, his Instagram feed a bilious froth of resentment towards Kim Kardashian and her new boyfriend Pete Davidson. He also recently took against Billie Eilish for showing concern for crowd safety, which he somehow interpreted as a dig at his friend Travis Scott.

There’s more where that came from. West’s public life has become an endlessly dispiriting spectacle at the same time as his records have become increasingly hard to love. While he continues to throw giant listening parties for them, and will be headlining this year’s Coachella festival under his new legal name, Ye, his music now “sounds like an afterthought, some extra sounds to have as a treat”, as Pitchfork put it. All in all, it’s not the ideal time for four-and-half-hours of television dedicated to his genius, but that is precisely what makes jeen-yuhs so compelling.

The origins of the documentary are suitably complicated. In 2002, Clarence “Coodie” Simmons jacked in his career as a stand-up comedian and television host in Chicago to move to New York and chronicle the rise of a fascinating new 24-year-old rapper-producer that he had first met four years earlier. Coodie was there for two years, sometimes with co-director Chike Ozah, up to the release of West’s sensational debut album The College Dropout in February 2004.

Had it come out in 2005, the documentary would have charted the birth of a superstar, but West blocked it. “Kanye said he wasn’t ready for world to see the real him,” Coodie explains in his genial voiceover. “He told me he was acting now — playing a role.” Gradually, Coodie was frozen out. The two men didn’t see each other at all between 2007 and 2014 and filming resumed in earnest only in 2019, making the third episode of jeen-yuhs a bizarre and messy coda. To cap it off, Kanye demanded (but did not receive) final approval, so the series has been released without his blessing.

It would be difficult to make a conventional biopic about Kanye because the narrative arc doesn’t land. The classic pop star story goes something like this: ambition, achievement, crisis, recovery, redemption. That redemption might have happened for West with 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs was such an aggressive breach of celebrity etiquette that even President Obama called him a “jackass”. (It’s remarkable to think that Joe Biden is the first 21^st-century US president not to have expressed a strong opinion about Kanye West.)

The rapper weathered the almighty backlash by hunkering down in Hawaii with three studios full of collaborators working 24/7 on an operatic magnum opus. “It’s never explicitly discussed, but everyone here knows that good music is the key to Kanye’s redemption,” wrote one journalist who covered the sessions. “With the right songs and the right album, he can overcome any and all controversy, and we are here to contribute, challenge and inspire.” There is, however, a big difference between vindication and redemption. West learned that if his music was good enough he could get away with anything — so what happens now that it’s not?

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West is both the most significant and the most polarising artist of his era. Significant because he made hip hop so huge and omnivorous that the beats-and-rhymes model depicted in the 2002 footage now appears parochial. In 2012, the Atlantic described him as “the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music”. Polarising because he touted his wares with a manic grandiloquence that raised the bar for rap braggadocio. “For some kids right now, I am what Michael Jackson was for me,” he once said, as if Jackson weren’t the crowning example of a sweet, supernaturally talented kid who became destroyed and dehumanised by fame.

I’ve met West on two occasions. The first time was in Los Angeles in 2005, when he was launching his second album, Late Registration. Playfully bombastic, he framed his legendary arrogance as a form of entertainment in its own right: “It’s like I’m walking on this tightrope. It’s like the reason why you go to a circus — it’s more entertaining. It’s like, damn, what if he falls? And if I do make it, it’s like, damn, he made it! But either way you’re saying damn. Everybody else is just walking on the ground.”

The second time was in London, a decade later, between the cyborg roar of Yeezus and the colourful melee of The Life of Pablo. I remember thinking that I’d never met a less relaxed person in my life. He told me he was “extremely fucking happy”, but the only time he smiled was when his mother-in-law Kris Jenner walked into the room with his daughter North. Otherwise, it was like talking to a balled fist.

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You didn’t need to see him up close to witness this hardening and shuttering. Many of the College Dropout songs we see him recording in jeen-yuhs (‘We Don’t Care’, ‘All Falls Down’) are interested in other people, situating West in the broader community of we. He became much less, well, collegiate over the next few years. Even when his albums were as vast and populous as imperial palaces, they had an air of claustrophobia and loneliness, with more mirrors than windows. Paranoia is a species of narcissism after all. On stage, too, he conveyed a terrible solitude. No Glastonbury headliner has ever shown less interest in bonding with the crowd than he did in 2015. We were there to witness a moment, not to share it.

A year later, West experienced a breakdown which led to hospitalisation and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This partially (but only partially) explains the most chaotic episode in the history of pop stars venturing into politics. It began when he celebrated Donald Trump’s victory during a concert, triggering a chorus of shocked boos. Later, he took to wearing a MAGA hat, posing for photo opportunities with Trump and saying that slavery was a choice: they just didn’t have enough gumption to be free. In 2020, he ran for president himself on a platform that sounded rather like theocracy. He won 60,000 votes.

Even before all this, West mocked his disappointed fans in the 2016 track ‘I Love Kanye’: “I miss the sweet Kanye, chop-up-the-beats Kanye.” Well, the good news is that there are three hours of that guy in jeen-yuhs: performing a daffy Stevie Wonder impression on the porch of his childhood home; gawping like a tourist at the lights of Times Square; giddy with delight when Jay-Z lets him rap a guest verse on ‘The Bounce’.

You can’t help rooting for him because everything was a struggle. He was a hot producer who wanted to be known as a great rapper and his neediness is heartbreakingly apparent. In one mortifying scene, he tries to impress a small boy by reeling off the names of hits he has produced. “Cool,” the kid says politely. A receptionist announces him as “Cayenne West”. Beside the suave virtuosity of Jay-Z or Mos Def, his rapping is tense and effortful, like he’s pushing a boulder up a hill.

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During this difficult period, he had no greater cheerleader than his mother, Dr Donda C. West. He’s talked about Donda often (and named two albums after her) but it’s something else to see her in the documentary, the quintessence of maternal pride, and to observe how boyishly humble he is in her company. “This is so exciting isn’t it? I love it!” she says with a brilliant grin. “Anybody that does something that much and that long and is that good, it’s gotta pay off”. Her death during cosmetic surgery in November 2007 is the decisive rupture in West’s life: the start of the chaos years. In 2015, I asked him what he had sacrificed for success and he didn’t hesitate: “My mom. If I had never moved to LA, she’d be alive”. He refused to elaborate, lest he start crying.

In the documentary, Donda offers caution along with her encouragement: “It’s important to remember that the giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing”. Coodie runs with this metaphor, implying that West took it to heart, but he’s hardly an objective observer. His attempt to wrap up the story with gooey platitudes about God’s plan and friends reunited doesn’t square with what his camera captures, whether it’s a distressing bipolar episode or West delightedly viewing a clip of Tucker Carlson praising his anti-abortion position. The bridge that Coodie tries to jerry-rig back to 2002 collapses because he wasn’t there to document the transition from that Kanye to this one and unpick the rat king of grief, fame and mental illness that brought it about. The narrative doesn’t conclude; it just stops.

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Perhaps the problem is that West really does see nothing when he looks in the mirror, and what reads as preposterous self-confidence is really fathomless insecurity. In 2002, West had every reason to feel thwarted and undervalued, and to turn that frustration into rocket fuel, but that feeling never went away. Having conquered popular music, he had to find new areas in which to be misunderstood (fashion, politics) and new role models to emulate (Walt Disney, Picasso), the result being that he can never, ever be satisfied.

For a long time, that insatiability propelled his music to greater heights; now it distracts from it. Seeing the look on his face as he receives some kind words from Pharrell Williams or plays some tracks for Donda, you have to wonder if this period was as good as it got, before he realised that recognition wouldn’t bring happiness after all. Thus jeen-yuhs becomes a cautionary tale of ambition without end. The unique tragedy of Kanye West is not that he failed but that he could never allow himself to acknowledge that he’d won.

In the UK, Hicks was acclaimed as the stand-up who might define the Nineties but back in the US he felt stuck. “Today he would be a mad prophet of the airwaves,” comedy manager Jimmy Miller says in Cynthia True’s Hicks biography American Scream. “He’d be on HBO, interviewing people, saying whatever’s on his mind. But back then the comedy business just hadn’t matured. They didn’t know what to do with him.” Miller said that in 2002. Twenty years on, Hicks, who died of cancer in 1994, wouldn’t need an HBO deal; he would be hosting a podcast.

Stand-ups played a foundational role in the podcast industry. In 2009, just as the format was becoming mainstream, Marc Maron launched the interview show WTF and Joe Rogan recorded the first episode of what became The Joe Rogan Experience. Two early podcast networks, Earwolf and Nerdist, were established by comedians; Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick compared podcasting to the comedy LP boom of the Sixties.

The symbiosis of comedy and podcasting isn’t hard to understand. Stand-ups love to hear themselves talk and a rambling chat is a much more congenial vehicle than the intense, time-consuming labour of writing and honing a tight one hour of killer material. With a successful podcast, a comedian can circumvent the usual gatekeepers and build a cultishly loyal fanbase without even having to leave the house or — and this is crucial — worry about being funny. What do you call a comedian who doesn’t make people laugh? A podcaster. Ba dum tss.

While old-fashioned one-liners and wry observations are doing just fine, many of the innovations in comedy are in the realm I call post-funny. Some of the most acclaimed comedian-fronted projects of recent years — including Master of None, Feel Good and Bo Burnham: Inside — see laughter as a secondary concern. The Closer, Dave Chappelle’s final Netflix special, is a prickly monologue about cancel culture and why he’s not actually transphobic, with occasional jokes. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette was a Netflix sensation in 2018 precisely because Gadsby deconstructed her duty to make people laugh: “I must quit comedy. Because the only way I can tell my truth and put tension in the room is with anger.”

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Comedians increasingly want to be philosophers. (No philosophers want to be comedians, except perhaps Slavoj Žižek.) This can make them rather pompous. Over the weekend, Whitney Cummings tweeted: “Comedians did not sign up to be your hero. It’s our job to be irreverent and dangerous, to question authority and take you through a spooky mental haunted house so you can arrive at your own conclusions.” To which Marc Maron replied: “Maybe add ‘to be funny’ to the list.”

The first great philosopher-comic was Lenny Bruce. In Comedy at the Edge, Richard Zoglin describes the evolution of stand-up comedy between the Forties and the Seventies as “a long march from joke-telling to truth-telling”, with Lenny Bruce as its gung-ho general. Starting in 1953, he was not alone in reinventing comedy but he established a new template for the stand-up: raw, authentic, discomfitingly honest, ferociously intolerant of hypocrisy and cant and sometimes messy. Comedians in that mould couldn’t just make people laugh; they had to offer a point of view. “With Bruce a smile is not an end in itself, it is invariably a means,” wrote the critic Kenneth Tynan.

As Kliph Nesteroff explains in The Comedians, some critics didn’t consider what Bruce was doing to be comedy at all. Time complained that he “merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the world”, while the Los Angeles Times deplored his “soaring, if uncertain, egotism rooted in the eroded soil of unlettered knowledge, snippets of cliché liberalism, borrowed erudition, and a conviction he has a Messianic message”. Bruce, who died of a drug overdose in 1966, claimed for comedians the radical freedom not to be funny all the time.

At that time, only three kinds of people enjoyed the privilege of speaking their minds to an audience for an hour: politicians, preachers and comedians. In fact, the priest delivering Bruce’s eulogy said “he was in a sense an evangelist, on a street corner”. After Bruce’s death, the baton of comedian as social critic passed to the likes of Richard Pryor (“the Picasso of our profession,” according to Jerry Seinfeld) and George Carlin, whose aphorisms now circulate, like Orwell’s or Gandhi’s, in the form of earnest Twitter memes.

These pioneers cast a long shadow. A 2017 Rolling Stone list of the best stand-ups of all time was topped by Pryor, Carlin and Bruce, with others in the same tradition — Louis CK, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle — close behind. At number 13 was Bill Hicks. “To me, the comic is the guy who says ‘Wait a minute’ as the consensus forms,” Hicks told the New Yorker in 1993. “He’s the antithesis of the mob mentality.”

The politics of this brand of comedy are, more often than not, libertarian. Comics want the freedom to say whatever they like as long as it’s funny so have often ended up on the frontlines of the battle for free speech. Bruce was twice tried on obscenity charges, while Carlin was arrested for disturbing the peace when he performed his celebrated routine ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’ in 1972. When an English vicar complained of blasphemy in Bill Hicks’s 1992 show Revelations, he replied: “This is about freedom and freedom of speech and words can’t hurt you.”

The culture has changed somewhat since then. In comedy, at least, there are now more taboos on the Left than on the Right and the spectre of cancel culture is to someone like Chappelle what the NYPD was to Lenny Bruce, minus the court cases. In The Closer, Chappelle expresses the comedian’s licence to say anything in a less noble form than Hicks: “Comedians have a responsibility to speak recklessly. Sometimes the funniest thing to say is mean. Remember, I’m not saying it to be mean: I’m saying it because it’s funny.”

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This licence is immensely powerful. Take Jimmy Carr’s Roma Holocaust joke, for example. In the context of his recent Netflix special, it’s still, I think, grotesquely misjudged — but Carr goes on to talk about the forgotten victims of the Nazis and why he made the joke. It clearly didn’t shock the audience in the room, nor the huge number of people who watched the special during its first six weeks. It only became scandalous when a 40-second clip went viral on TikTok and Twitter: the land of no context.

Even in a stand-up environment, though, Chappelle’s disclaimer isn’t enough. I don’t buy the popular binary division between comedy that “punches up” (good) and the kind that “punches down” (bad). Comedy doesn’t cleave so neatly, and nor does society. But I’m equally unconvinced by the “just jokes” defence.

For one thing, it’s not the case that anything goes. No major comedian currently delivers the kind of racist jokes that were commonplace in the Seventies, however deftly constructed they might be. (Carr celebrates Black Lives Matter in his Netflix show before getting laughs out of the Roma.) For another, it’s inconsistently applied. Ricky Gervais has arguably replaced Richard Dawkins as Britain’s most famous atheist and on that issue he wants to be taken seriously. Increasingly, comedians want to say whatever they like even when they’re not being funny.

You can see this double standard at work in Jon Stewart’s famous appearance on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004. I agreed with Stewart that Crossfire was a toxic travesty of debate but notice how he positioned himself. When Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson criticised him for asking politicians soft questions, Stewart replied that he’s on Comedy Central: “The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.” But when Carlson complained, “I thought you were going to be funny, come on, be funny,” Stewart said, “No, I’m not going to be your monkey.” Depending on the moment, he is Schrödinger’s comedian: just a funnyman but also not just a funnyman.

Rogan uses this trick, too. He would not be interviewing politicians, authors and epidemiologists if he were only about the laughs, but he keeps his comedian’s licence in his back pocket in case of emergency. Last April, Dr Anthony Fauci criticised him for advising young, healthy people not to get vaccinated. In his self-deprecating response, Rogan said: “I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking moron and I’m a cage fighting commentator who’s a dirty stand-up comedian who just told you I’m drunk most of the time and I do testosterone and I smoke a lot of weed. I’m not a respected source of information, even for me.”

This is very convenient. Rogan is half a conspiracy theorist: he has the curiosity but not the commitment. To his credit, he sometimes admits to being wrong. But he has that particular blend of scepticism (towards mainstream expertise) and credulity (towards anybody challenging it), so he becomes a conduit for false information, even when he’s not explicitly endorsing it. In the case of the present Spotify controversy, whether Rogan himself is an anti-vaxxer (he claims he isn’t) is a moot point if he is sympathetically conversing with vaccine sceptics to an audience of millions.

Russell Brand, too, has been described as “a powerful voice for anti-vaxxers”. He’s been on a journey. In 2013, Brand abruptly transformed himself from verbose dandy lothario into revolutionary seer in a Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman in which he urged people not to vote. His ensuing book, Revolution, was a peculiar mix of rehab memoir, New Age mysticism and solid policy proposals from Left-wing thinkers such as David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, liberally salted with self-deprecation: “I’m not Noam Chomsky, you’ve probably noticed; I’m happy to be Norman Wisdom.”

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During the pandemic, Brand’s obsession with political alienation and challenging official narratives has led him a long way from Piketty. The breathlessly clickbaity titles of his YouTube videos are often indistinguishable from those of the conservative guests he gently interviews on a regular basis: “Why The Left Can’t Handle Donald Trump”, “Vaccine Gold Rush: Do You Trust Gates?”, “They’re Eliminating FREE THOUGHT!! Billionaires’ Plan To CONTROL The Internet”, the latter bearing the hashtag #GeorgeSoros.

Brand claims that he is “breaking down the news, providing you with information you won’t get in mainstream media”. Is it true? It doesn’t matter. “What do I know?” he says in a recent video defending Rogan. “What could I claim to know? I’ve never been to university or higher education of any kind, except for showing-off school.” To his fans, of course, this makes him all the more reliable: one of them, not one of Them. That video is called “The Truth”.

Comedians should be free to switch lanes, but when Al Franken runs for the US Senate, or David Baddiel writes Jews Don’t Count, they aren’t doing so as comedians and they are making a choice. Comedians who express political opinions through the discipline of stand-up (a discipline which inevitably tests and sharpens those opinions) are also making a choice. Just as a musician has more freedom in a protest song than in an essay, or a film-maker more liberty in a drama based on a true story than in a documentary, the criteria are relatively clear. Rogan and Brand raise an interesting question: does the privilege of comedy apply even when you’re not doing comedy?

I do wonder if Hicks, with his nascent taste for conspiracy theories and spiritual self-discovery, would have wound up in a similar role. 70 years after Lenny Bruce’s comedy revolution, Rogan and Brand represent a very modern, very online mutation which is both post-funny and post-truth-telling. Rather than establishing a point of view and crafting it into a routine, they offer a muddy, non-committal version of “anything goes” in which misinformation is simply another interesting idea for the open-minded to consider and pushback is establishment intolerance of free speech.

By hedging their bets, they have achieved a freedom that Carlin and Hicks could only have dreamt of. If you say they should clarify their own positions, or take responsibility for the opinions they promote, well, they say, they’re comedians, not intellectuals. Why so serious?

You know what she means. The pop records made between 1980, the birth of synth-pop, and 1987, when hip hop and house began to reconfigure the sound of the Top 40, have a lasting glow. At wedding discos, they unite revellers who grew up on them with kids born decades later. Advertisers also use them as generational glue: McDonald’s recently went for Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now while John Lewis staked their Christmas campaign on a breathy cover of Together in Electric Dreams by Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder.

It’s not just that old hits are doing gangbuster numbers on Spotify. When artists such as Taylor Swift, Angel Olsen, Laura Mvula and Mitski want to pivot to pure pop, they turn to Eighties signifiers. You can hear it, too, in the glittery ebullience of Dua Lipa and Jessie Ware. There are even meticulous Eighties fetishists who create multiverse remixes of recent hits: Initial Talk made Lipa’s New Rules sound like Tiffany and Dead or Alive, while Louis La Roche turned Adele’s Easy on Me into the Madonna ballad that never was.

Top of the pile right now is The Weeknd, whose latest album Dawn FM is framed as an oldies radio station playing in purgatory. It’s the dream hybrid of new wave, electro and Thriller-funk that the Canadian has been working towards for a few years now: his neon-bright 2019 single Blinding Lights is the biggest Billboard single of all time. Among Dawn FM’s blatant homages to the mega-pop era are a monologue by Quincy Jones, a song named after Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero, and a very peculiar English accent. The Weeknd has long aspired to be the kind of pop colossus who bestrode the Eighties, so why not explicitly sound like one?

What’s significant here is not that the Eighties are back, but that they have been back for so long that these influences have seeped into the bedrock of popular music. The self-conscious Eighties revivalism of the electroclash scene is now 20 years’ old, as distant from us as it was from the heyday of The Human League. In 2016, Vulture had enough material to produce a solid list of “the 50 best modern songs that sound like the Eighties”, including Bon Iver, Chvrches, Mark Ronson and Haim. An ongoing Spotify playlist called “Modern indie songs that sound like 80s music” is currently 44 hours long. Guilty pleasures are now simply pleasures. Music that was once regarded as shallow and impermanent has proven itself eternal.

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Pop is the trickiest genre to pin down. In theory, it simply describes music that is popular but in reality it is defined by the absence of obvious genre identifiers: if it’s not squarely rock, country, hip hop, R&B, then it’s pop. What happened in the Eighties was a paradoxical combination of diversity and consensus, with disparate artists coming together under the friendly, giant umbrella of pop. “The Eighties were a great decade for pop in America,” writes Kelefa Sanneh in Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, “because musicians from different genres — R&B, various strains of rock’n’roll, the dance music underground — were all experimenting with electronic production, and converging upon similar styles.” When I asked my 15-year-old daughter what she liked about Eighties pop, she said that it sounded “united”.

The Eighties pop hegemony followed a deeply fractious period when the rockers hated the disco fans and the punks disdained both. The great unifier was the fast-evolving synthesizer. While the stigma suddenly attached to disco forced Prince, Michael Jackson and Nile Rodgers to invent new forms of dance music, members of the punk generation who preferred Kraftwerk to the Sex Pistols hatched synth-pop and the New Romantic movement, driven by a refreshingly impertinent hunger for mainstream success. In 1981, the pop polemicist Paul Morley celebrated a move “away from rock, grey independence, submission, austerity” towards “pop, disco, colour, lights, action”.

The New Pop Jacobins derided rock’n’roll as stuffy and earnest but songs such as Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark and Van Halen’s Jump used brash synth fanfares to revitalising effect. Sonically curious art stars of the Seventies, including David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, became mainstream phenomena by way of Fairlight synthesizers and gated drums. To be big, bright and, most of all, new was a common cause. “The world’s Top 40 is like an audio shot in the arm for everybody,” said Van Halen’s Dave Lee Roth. “We’re all different and we’re all being consumed by the radio for no other reason than we’re all 128 beats a minute and damn good looking.”

As Michaelangelo Matos describes in Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Become Pop’s Blockbuster Year, this was the triumph of consensus pop; the zenith of music as a monoculture. Technology helped. The Sony Walkman made pop music portable while MTV made it visible. In I Want My MTV, Rob Tannenbaum calls the new network “the sun around which pop culture rotated” — an ultra-modern star-making machine which rewarded those artists who fully embraced pop’s potential for sensory overload and outrageous spectacle. Music videos often conspired with movies, as Hollywood producers sought synergistic hits. Can you think of The Breakfast Club without hearing Simple Minds’ air-punching Don’t You (Forget About Me) or Top Gun minus the slo-mo throb of Berlin’s Take My Breath Away? (The title of the Weeknd’s Take My Breath can’t be a coincidence.)

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Consensus didn’t mean homogeneity. In terms of race, gender, age and sexuality (not that most gay artists were out yet), pop was remarkably diverse. The top of the Billboard Hot 100 had room for a mysterious polymorphous genius, a balding prog-rock drummer, a cross-dressing reggae fan from Kent, New York punk pioneers and a dancer from Detroit. Pop was even more transatlantic than it had been during Beatlemania: one week in 1983, almost half of the Billboard Top 40 was British.

The critic Lester Bangs once wrote that “we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis”, but then he didn’t live to see 1984, when just five albums, the fewest ever, topped the Billboard 200: Thriller, Prince’s Purple Rain, Springsteen’s Born in the USA, the Footloose soundtrack and Sports by Huey Lewis and the News. Three of the UK’s 10 bestselling singles of all time — Last Christmas, Do They Know It’s Christmas and Relax — came out that year. Nor did these represent competing constituencies: it was not unusual for a single record-buyer to own all of the above.

Critics such as Bob Stanley and Simon Reynolds like to draw a line at Live Aid in the summer of 1985, separating the playfully subversive drive of New Pop from studio-drunk MOR decadence, the career of The Eurythmics being the perfect case study. I don’t think it’s quite that neat (Exhibit A: the Pet Shop Boys) but very quickly the ambition and hi-tech sheen of Eighties pop came to be regarded as overblown, avaricious and rootless. Genre distinctions reasserted themselves. The consensus shattered. Authenticity made a comeback. Even Madonna sounded serious.

During the Noughties, the quintessential products of the Nineties inspired hungover nausea. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), the Eighties is when everything goes garishly awry: too much money, too much cocaine. When artists such as Beck and producer Stuart Price foregrounded Eighties’ influences in 1999, many critics assumed it was some kind of ironic prank. Soon, though, the virtues of Eighties pop were being seriously reassessed. Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant praised electroclash because “it’s not trying to be normal. In the Eighties, pop was aspirational. Then it got taken over by being one of the lads: rave, football, Britpop. It stopped being aspirational and it celebrated ordinariness.” Steadily, the Eighties was reborn as the apogee of pop as larger-than-life escapism. Its hugeness — sonically, melodically, emotionally, commercially — was no longer embarrassing but admirable.

Over time, younger artists emerged for whom the Eighties were an idea rather than a memory. In 2002, LCD Soundsystem mocked “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Eighties” but for someone like The Weeknd, born seven weeks after the decade ended, this absence of first-hand experience is what allows for a potent simulation of the era, as distilled and romanticised as it is in Stranger Things.

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In this dream of the Eighties, half-real, half-fantasy, there is Prince but no Huey Lewis; Depeche Mode but no Howard Jones; the vibe of a John Hughes movie rather than the songs that actually appeared in John Hughes movies; and an unreasonable amount of neon. A record like Blinding Lights, M83’s Midnight City or The 1975’s A Change of Heart is not a sonic reenactment of the Eighties but a fresh riff on our collective (mis)understanding of the Eighties.

Why does Eighties pop have such inexhaustible talismanic power? Partly because it is thrillingly colourful, glamorous and dynamic next to the jaded minimalism of much post-hip hop pop music. Partly because it recalls a time when futurism still outweighed nostalgia and fame still looked like fun. It also represents a period when hits could have universal appeal without being bland and a song could be both gauche and glorious.

But there is another, more underrated factor. When Tamara Lindeman was asked why she loved Eighties pop, she didn’t cite production values or style. “It’s the music that’s about longing and desire and despair and unrequited love,” she said. The mood of an archetypal hit — Together in Electric Dreams, A-Ha’s Take on Me, Madonna’s Borderline — is urgent exuberance with a streak of melancholy and yearning. A common narrative, in both the lyrics and the videos, is transformation and escape from the mundane. As Prince’s 1999 or Alphaville’s Forever Young make explicit, the fear of imminent nuclear annihilation played a part in this compulsion to live fast and large.

Knowing that so much of Eighties pop’s energy came from a passion for the right-now and the what-next, I want to avoid the irony of simple nostalgia and a fusty dismissal of what is happening in pop today. But when someone as commercially dominant as The Weeknd is using the Eighties imaginary as a winning template, then and now can’t be so far apart. He is plugging into the closest that pop music has ever come to attaining its utopian ideal of being everything to everybody.

***

Listen to Dorian’s ‘Misremembered Eighties’ playlist here.

This field of inquiry doesn’t just include behavioural science books such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and Ian Leslie’s Conflicted. James Graham’s new play Best of Enemies, currently running at the Young Vic, and Jon Ronson’s recent Radio 4 series about culture wars, Things Fell Apart, are in the same business. Both men are known for their empathy and even-handedness: Ronson has written thoughtful bestsellers about extremists and online shaming, while Graham’s work for stage and screen gravitates towards periods of disruption and division. Taken together, their latest projects shed light on the crucial distinction between debate and dialogue.

Best of Enemies is based on a 2015 documentary about a series of landmark televised debates. In the summer of 1968, the struggling ABC network decided to build its slim coverage of the national party conventions around 10 debates between William F Buckley Jr, the editor of The National Review and host of Firing Line, and Gore Vidal, the novelist and playwright. Born just a few weeks apart in 1925, both men were sons of dynastic privilege who had run for office and attained considerable celebrity, both on screen and in print, by being as combative as they were erudite. But as Buckley later remarked: “There is an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable and that which is highly illuminating.”

Casting Buckley and Vidal was a vote for viewability. For one thing, they represented not Republicans and Democrats but the most radical expressions of conservatism and progressivism: what we would now call culture warriors. Neither, for example, cared for the eventual Democratic nominee, the cheerful moderate Hubert Humphrey. Electoral strategy and policy platforms interested them less than a battle for the soul of America.

For another, they displayed mutual disgust. Each man considered the other not just dangerous but obscene. Even before the vicious exchange of slurs that made their penultimate meeting notorious, the debates were a gruesome display of smirks and sneers, sly digs and barbed crosstalk. The host, Howard K. Smith, often seemed taken aback by the heat of their animosity. Vidal dubbed Buckley “the leading warmonger of the United States”; Buckley branded Vidal “an agent for the end of democratic government”.

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The debates shot ABC from the bottom of the ratings heap to the top. In 1968, the spectacle of two very clever, eloquent men tearing chunks out of each other was a delicious novelty. Even today, in the play, many of the biggest laughs come from verbatim re-enactments of their showdowns, which Graham structures like the bouts in a boxing movie.

In hindsight, the two men’s ideas and rhetoric seem impressively hifalutin but viewers tuned in for the sizzle not the steak, and that became their legacy. To this day, broadcasters like to frame debates as a spicy clash between two irreconcilable points of view. I’m not the only journalist to have lost a radio booking by admitting that they don’t entirely disagree with the other guest; the disappointment in the booker’s voice is palpable.

On YouTube, meanwhile, the likes of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are billed as rhetorical gladiators who DESTROY and CRUSH their opponents. Vidal had it right in the final 1968 debate: “I think these great debates are absolutely nonsense. The way they’re set up, there’s almost no interchange of ideas, very little even of personality. There’s also the terrible thing about this medium that hardly anyone listens.”

Some would say that the Vidal/Buckley clash was a crass corruption of the noble art of debate; but perhaps they merely tore the mask off. The value of adversarial debate is vastly overstated by politicians and journalists who belonged to the tiny of minority of students who participated in them at university (and are rarely sound advertisements for their educational benefit) because it is ultimately a sport rather than an exchange of ideas — and a bloodsport at that.

“Competitive debating takes argument’s essential features and reimagines them as a game,” wrote Sally Rooney about her time as a star college debater. “For the purposes of this game, the emotional or relational aspects of argument are superfluous, and at the end there are winners. Everyone tacitly understands that it’s not a real argument.”

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The American novelist Ben Lerner came to similar conclusions about his own prowess as a competitive debater in high school: “The speeches required decisiveness: clear rather than complex answers won rounds, and you learned to stud a speech with sources the way a politician reaches for statistics — to provide the affect of authority more than to illuminate an issue or settle a point of fact.” Although this experience appears to have done neither novelist any harm in the long run, Lerner did not like what the game did to him: “I became a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the smallest provocation; I dominated; I made other debaters cry.”

Debates have a place in election campaigns because the goal of both is to win and to leave your opponent, as Vidal said of Buckley, a “bleeding corpse”. More often, though, the challenge of politics is to resolve painful disagreements through dialogue and compromise. There is no perfect quip or killer statistic, flourished like a duellist’s blade, that will deliver an enduring piece of legislation. Law-making is not good television because it requires listening. Even the politicians who are most adept at Prime Minister’s Questions resent the time it consumes because its theatrical aggression has so little to do with the rest of their job.

There are better ways to talk about the issues that divide us. In Things Fell Apart, Jon Ronson tells eight stories about formative moments in the culture war which still influence how we argue today. The most popular episode is also the most uplifting. ‘A Miracle’ revisits the 1985 conversation between the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker and a gay priest with Aids named Steve Pieters. As Peters, still alive today, relates, Bakker’s unexpected compassion built a bridge between evangelical Christians and gay men at a time of rampant homophobia and demonisation of those with Aids: “People in that audience got to see a real live human being.” Their conversation is the polar opposite of Buckley vs Vidal because Bakker really listened. (Fittingly, she is the subject of a stage musical that James Graham is currently writing with Elton John and Jake Shears.)

‘A Miracle’ chimes with ‘Many Different Lives’, which describes how a transwoman called Nancy Burkholder managed to foster a respectful (albeit short-lived) dialogue in the Nineties between the women’s festival Michfest and her fringe gathering Camp Trans. Burkholder’s guidelines for fruitful debate are so self-evidently helpful yet so rarely followed that they are worth quoting in full: “Listen carefully and remain calm and patient. Do not call anyone names or belittle their point of view or imply that they are irrational. An atmosphere of love and joy will attract people to us. Anger and hostility will turn them away. We are all on this planet trying to figure out a lot of complex stuff together.” In these episodes you can hear Ronson, a culture war pacifist, exhilarated by the possibility of breaking a deadlock.

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Like any war, a culture war is a failure of diplomacy. Unlike most wars, it can never be won, whatever the noisiest and most passionate combatants would like to believe. Polls consistently show that most people don’t want to participate in culture wars, if indeed they even know what they are. They want compromise and settlement, without which a democratic society cannot function.

Binary extremism may reap viewers, clicks, followers and donations but it is also brutalising and corrupting. The more we have of debate as a game rather than debate as dialogue, the worse things get. As the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg lamented in a recent piece about January 6: “The addiction to good-versus-evil narratives pitting the honourable and decent ‘us’ against the villainous and sinister ‘them’ is as strong as ever — and there is little appetite for the kind of argument and persuasion that sustains democracy.”

Towards the end of Best of Enemies, Graham imagines the kind of honest, vulnerable conversation that Buckley and Vidal might have had when the cameras weren’t rolling: “no performing, just talking,” as another character says. It’s an instinctive bridge-builder’s fantasy of good-faith disagreement, where the goal is understanding rather than victory. Ronson’s series closes with a more explicit plea: “I think people are just exhausted by how things have fallen apart and what they’re longing for instead is connection.”

Buckley died in 2008 and Vidal in 2012. Neither sought a significant online presence. Yet it is on the internet where their 1968 desire to fight and win at any cost, to generate heat and damn the light, has become overwhelming. In the 2015 documentary, former ABC executive Richard Wald sadly observes: “Argument is sugar and the rest of us are flies.” What he doesn’t say is that the sugar is poisoned.

Mattis was thinking of the philosopher’s Meditation on First Philosophy, championed the importance of doubt by hypothesising that everything he thought he knew about reality might be an illusion created by an evil demon. Of course, The Matrix is about a lot more than that. The Wachowskis themselves have cited a litany of influences: ranging from Homer’s Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville to the cybernetics expert Kevin Kelly, Schopenhauer, Buddhism and Jean Baudrillard, whose 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation appears in the movie. The phrase “desert of the real” comes from its very first page, although the man himself sniffed that “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce”.

Critics and fans have suggested numerous other influences: Plato’s cave, Hilary Putnam’s brain in a vat, Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine, Philip K Dick, Plato, Socrates, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Dostoevsky, Sartre and even Doctor Who. The essays in the 2002 book The Matrix and Philosophy contradict each other to hilarious extent: It’s Buddhist! It’s Christian! It’s Marxist! It’s postmodern! Yet none are wrong exactly because the movie is a mash-up of ideas, not a thesis. When the Wachowskis were asked in a web chat how many of these perceived allusions were intentional, they replied in the teasing spirit of a Sixties Bob Dylan press conference: “All of it.”

In the week that Matrix Resurrections, the fourth film in the franchise, opens, it’s worth remembering that before The Matrix was released in March 1999, it was unflatteringly compared to the 1995 flop Johnny Mnemonic, another film about virtual reality starring Keanu Reeves.

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But it was no Johnny Mnemonic. Raking in almost half a billion dollars, it proved that Hollywood could tap into the new immersive nature of gaming, paved the way for the superhero imperium, and (to the immense benefit of Christopher Nolan) made explicitly philosophical non-franchise blockbusters a going concern. Better still, and despite two widely disliked sequels, it became a cultural touchstone. The Wachowskis talked about “making mythology relevant in a modern context” and they succeeded in spades. The Matrix has become a modern myth and, like any myth, it has been interpreted in radically different ways.

The brilliance of The Matrix is that it can make anybody feel clever. It signals that it is about something profound but the basic conceit is very simple. You could grasp it by knowing your Descartes or just by listening to Queen: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”

Reeves’s character believes he is a coder called Thomas Anderson, living in a boring 1999. In fact, he resides comatose in a gooey pod in the late 22^nd century, where he serves as an organic battery for humanity’s new AI overlords. His life has been a simulation, a dream, the Matrix. Waking up is a kind of rebirth. At the end, he tells those damned dirty machines that he will usher in “a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible”.

The Matrix was perfectly timed. The AI law enforcer Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) explains that the Matrix takes place in an infinite 1999 because it was “the peak of your civilisation”. Movie-goers in that period would have had a different impression. There were multiple examples of what the critic Joshua Clover calls “Edge of the Construct” movies, in which “reality” is revealed to be a hi-tech charade created for nefarious purposes: The Truman Show, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor. Then there were what you might call “Work sucks” movies: Fight Club, American Beauty and Office Space — in which the cubicle is a prison cell.

“That decade was so comfortable,” Mattis told Raftery. “The stock market was up, and people were making money. But there was a splinter in the mind’s eye: something felt wrong. In all of that comfort, people started thinking, ‘There’s something missing here.’” It’s no surprise that the film’s climactic song is Wake Up by Rage Against the Machine, the band who soundtracked the enormous protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle a few months later. Still, there’s a temptation to tell the filmmakers of 1999, y’know, things could be worse.

The Matrix also reminds us how new and raw the internet felt in 1999. Even with the first dotcom boom in full swing, online culture retained a freewheeling, anarchic energy. For many message-board users, the internet was an opportunity to craft a new identity from scratch and an online community could be far more rewarding — more real — than one in “meatspace”. Even within the Matrix, Thomas Anderson lives a double life as the hacker Neo, the hacker being the quintessential cyberpunk hero.

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One consequence of online culture that was already evident in 1999 was the spread of conspiracy theories. The Matrix, in which everything Neo knows about his life is indeed a lie propagated by a malign conspiracy, was a timely text. The last movie to use imagery from Lewis Carroll’s stories so prominently was Oliver Stone’s JFK. “This world has the Matrix all over the place,” Lana Wachowski said at the time. “People accept ways of thinking that are imposed upon them rather than working them out for themselves. The free-thinking people are those who question every sort of Matrix, every system of thought or belief, be it political, religious, philosophical.”

These are worthwhile questions to ask but the answers aren’t always pretty and the cult of The Matrix has taken a sinister turn. In 2012, a group of men’s rights activists founded a subreddit called TheRedPill. In The Matrix, the human explication machine Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) gives Neo two pills and a choice. “After this there is no turning back,” he says thrillingly. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.”

Neo’s choice is a fable of courage, self-discovery, empowerment and radicalisation. To TheRedPill users, the idea of a world which favours men is the simulation and systemic bias against men is the reality. Feminists are the Agents, I guess. You can see why men’s rights activists might relate to Trinity’s (Carrie-Anne Moss) assessment of Neo: “I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer.” He’s the discontented nerd who becomes a kick-ass messiah.

The metaphor has achieved broader popularity on the Right, from incels to Infowars, and QAnon to full-blown neo-Nazis, so much so that when Maroon 5 called their 2017 album Red Pill Blues, they had to clarify that they were simply Matrix fans and not fascist conspiracy theorists. Ironically, the red pill represents being awakened, which is also the meaning of woke.

There are, of course, other readings. To one group of fans, the red pill bears a suspicious resemblance to the brand of prescription oestrogen that was popular in the Nineties. Lana came out as a trans woman in 2012 (after a decade of rumours), followed by Lilly in 2016. Inevitably, this gave rise to the theory that The Matrix is a trans allegory, in which the “splinter in your mind, driving you mad” is gender dysphoria, names and bodies are mutable, and Morpheus is Neo’s therapist, guiding him into his new identity.

In 2016, Lilly approved of this theory in the-more-the-merrier terms, “because it’s an excellent reminder that art is never static” and “the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components in our work”. Four years later, however, she went further: “That was the original intention but the world wasn’t quite ready.” The androgynous character Switch was originally intended to be a man in the real world and a woman in the Matrix. “The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation but it was all coming from a closeted point of view,” Lilly said.

Yet this alone doesn’t justify one Atlantic writer’s bald claim that the film itself is “an allegory of gender dysphoria, as its creators have repeatedly said”. In fact, I couldn’t find a single mention of a trans subtext in any of the books about The Matrix published prior to Lana’s transition. The tortuous passages about it in gender-critical feminist Helen Joyce’s Trans are a good illustration of the problem with taking this idea too literally. To quote the trans writer Andrea Long Chu: “Allegorically is the least interesting way to read anything. Nothing ruins a question like an answer; the world is weirder than that.”

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An allegory is a story where the author’s message is coherent and undeniable. A myth is fluid and ambiguous, open to diverse and contradictory interpretations. In a revealing 2012 New Yorker profile, Lana Wachowski remembered being confused and frustrated as a child by the black monolith in 2001 until her father told her it was a symbol. “That simple sentence went into my brain and rearranged things in such an unbelievable way that I don’t think I’ve been the same since,” she said. “Something clicked inside.” It’s not just that the monolith is a symbol; it’s that Kubrick refused to explain what it symbolised. It is more myth than allegory. In a single interview, Kubrick could have made the movie half as interesting.

The Wachowskis are not so taciturn. Last year, when Elon Musk tweeted “Take the red pill” and Ivanka Trump replied “Taken!”, Lilly tweeted back: “Fuck both of you.” I can see why the sisters might want to reimpose some authorial control over the meaning of The Matrix now that “all of it” includes some horrific stuff. Like Matt Furie, the cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog, they’ve seen their work appropriated by the far-Right and that can’t feel good. But the price of creating a modern myth is that it can’t be controlled — and any attempt to do so can only diminish it.

As some viewers prepare to unravel the ideas in Matrix Resurrections, it’s important to remember that the first movie is not a philosophical treatise but a wildly entertaining Hollywood spectacle. Of all the answers the Wachowskis have given to the eternal question “What is The Matrix about?”, my favourite is the most flippant: “It’s about robots vs kung fu.” True enough. If it weren’t also about that, we wouldn’t be talking about it at all.

Political satire has been in a confused state these past five years, since Donald Trump short-circuited it so dramatically that it is yet to recover. It became a cliché to say that the things Trump said and did on a daily basis would have had you laughed out of any writers’ room if you’d invented them. How could you parody a man who, vaccinated against embarrassment by his total absence of humour, parodied himself? Boris Johnson is a very different character — a sense of shambolic comedy is his sword and shield — but similarly hard to spoof because he caricatures himself.

After The Thick of It, Iannucci went to the US and launched Veep, bringing a dissonant note of panic and incompetence to a country where fictional presidents are usually very good (Jed Bartlett from The West Wing) or very bad (Frank Underwood from House of Cards), but generally on top of things either way. He left the show after three seasons in 2015 so that he could direct movies, just in time to avoid having to grapple with the conundrum of a president who made Veep’s Selina Meyer look relatively decent and proficient. David Mandel, his replacement as showrunner, didn’t so much solve the problem as ignore it. Veep remained very funny but it lost much of its relevance by unplugging itself from the wild new reality of Washington DC. It ended in 2019, a few months after House of Cards.

Nothing has come along to replace those shows. The old warhorses of satire roll on — Have I Got News for You and the revived Spitting Image in the UK; Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show in the US (a British version of SNL is in the pipeline). But where are the dramas and scripted comedies? Politics is not where the action is.

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When I interviewed Iannucci recently, he chose Succession and The White Lotus as the most biting satires around. Both shows coolly dissect the callousness of the very rich, and show the casualties they leave behind. Inevitably, some of that wealth comes from tech. Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton) in The White Lotus is the CFO of a popular search engine. In this series of Succession, Waystar-Royco’s old-media empire is seeking a life-saving deal with Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgaard), the bored and ruthless CEO of the streaming company GoJo. The most powerful character in Iannucci’s own Avenue 5, a sci-fi sitcom about a society under pressure, is tech billionaire Herman Judd, played by Josh Gad as a vain man-baby. And it’s telling that Adam McKay, whose 2018 movie Vice was a black comedy about Dick Cheney, is making his next picture about Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal.

There’s a novelty factor here. Next to most politicians, the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are fascinatingly weird characters with literally cosmic ambitions. Mark Zuckerberg, in his public appearances, comes off as less a human being than a beta-version AI — a flesh-and-blood demonstration of the uncanny valley. This is good material. Take Christopher Evan Welch in Silicon Valley, whose character Peter Gregory always looked as if he were on the verge of teleporting back to his home planet, Oscar Isaac’s malfunctioning hipster hermit in Ex Machina, or Nick Offerman’s glumly deranged schlub-genius in Devs. Succession’s Lukas Mattson combines a killer instinct with airport-bookstore self-help mantras and the distinct impression that he could tank GoJo’s share price with a single ill-judged tweet composed while tripping at Burning Man.

But tech gurus aren’t just a fun new toy for writers to play with. Satire follows power, and power is not where it was. In Western democracies there is a general sense that politicians are hamstrung and hopeless while tech companies are busy changing the way we communicate, think and act. After a mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, for example, social media companies did far more to dampen Trump’s efforts to overturn the election than Congress did.

Iannucci told me that his final episode of Veep, which ended with a deadlocked electoral college, “seemed to me to sum up where American politics is”, which is to say paralysed. While Joe Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda depends on the vanity of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Jeff Bezos is flying into space and earning $143,000 a minute. Which man is the more fertile source of both comedy and outrage? In Succession, Logan Roy has the power to bring down one president and handpick another, yet even he is at the mercy of Lukas Mattson’s whims.

Charlie Brooker, who rivals Iannucci as the UK’s most celebrated satirist, was ahead of the curve with Black Mirror, where politics is a sideshow if it features at all. In its very first episode, The National Anthem, broadcast ten years ago this month, the Prime Minister is a sympathetic character who accedes to a horrific televised humiliation for honourable reasons. The real villains of the episode are the people who watch it. Nosedive, the first episode after Black Mirror’s move to Netflix, is a dystopia without a dictator, where lives rise or fall according to an app. In Smithereens, Brooker finally introduced a modern-day tech bro: a pseudo-hippie with a man-bun, evidently modelled on Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who has lost control of his own creation.

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Brooker is sometimes stereotyped as a grumpy technophobe (“what if phones, but too much,” as one brilliant parody put it), but the world is coming around to his point of view. Who would have thought that a social-media platform that started out by rating the attractiveness of Harvard students would end up, 15 years later, facilitating genocide in Myanmar? There aren’t many takers these days for the old Silicon Valley utopianism. Perhaps the only heroic tech billionaire in popular culture, before his death, was Marvel’s Tony Stark, but his enemies were usually also tech billionaires, so that balanced out nicely.

This antipathy to Big Tech isn’t confined to the screen. In the realm of fiction, its most dogged opponent is probably the American novelist Dave Eggers, who has just published The Every, the hefty sequel to his 2013 bestseller The Circle. Eggers has called smartphones “technological crack” and compared our relationship with technology to “being in a relationship with a very controlling, needy, obsessive person. You’re never free; you’re always paranoid. You’re simultaneously on a leash and under a microscope”.

Several years on, the social media giant The Circle has acquired an online retail platform nicknamed “the jungle” from its spacefaring founder (the thinness of the disguise is a running joke) and rebranded itself as The Every. (The novel was finished, by the way, before Zuckerberg renamed Facebook’s parent company Meta.) True to its name, The Every seeks to permeate and control every nook and cranny of human existence — all for the greater good, of course.

Refuseniks who choose to live outside The Every are labelled “trogs”. Eggers is a proud trog and The Every is an unashamedly old-fashioned novel of ideas. It goes on for too long, as angry people often do, because Eggers has so much to get off his chest. Though ostensibly about the efforts of one employee to infiltrate and destroy the company, it is less a story than a series of conversations about increasingly berserk innovations.

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In a neat satirical twist, the company cloaks its unrelenting assault on personal privacy and freedom in the language of political correctness. It is obsessed with veganism and reducing carbon emissions to the point of demonising pets and bananas. Once something is deemed “problematic”, it is not long for this brave new world where totalitarianism wears a tight smile and shame is a weapon of mass destruction. As for politics, The Every runs the world’s dominant voting software (no account, no vote) and kills the presidential campaign of its leading opponent in just minutes. To The Every, democracy is a bug to be ironed out.

Likewise in the real world, if you really want to look at how the world works, you’re better off writing about a CEO than a president. As Boris Johnson’s hapless behaviour this week showed, a politician as smoothly machiavellian as Frank Underwood or his British predecessor Francis Urquhart would be no more plausible than one with X-ray vision. Perhaps, looking back, the panicky impotence of the characters in The Thick of It and Veep was a sign that political satire was running out of road. The day somebody writes a successful new satire on politics, politicians should welcome it with open arms. It will mean they matter again.

Costner was exaggerating but not by much. Around that time, 77% of Americans told pollsters that they believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was not solely responsible for the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Phrases from the case had long ago entered the national vocabulary: magic bullet, lone gunman, Zapruder film, grassy knoll, patsy.

Stone’s movie did not actually do much to shift the numbers. What it did do, in generating $205m, eight Oscar nominations and an almighty debate, was introduce a mainstream audience to the mindset of conspiracy theories: the obsessive accumulation of data, wild deductive leaps and spinning of yarns.

I know because I was one of them. JFK was my gateway drug into the thrillingly murky world of post-war dirty tricks and black ops, where I was often unable to distinguish between actual conspiracies such as Watergate and MK-ULTRA and fanciful speculation. As a reformed conspiracy theorist, I’m familiar with the seductive power of that adventure into an underworld where there are no coincidences, only connections. “My eyes have opened,” says Costner’s Garrison, “and once they’re open, believe me, what used to look normal seems insane.” And vice versa, of course.

JFK coloured a decade which, though remembered as relatively stable, was riddled with paranoia, from The X-Files to the fantastical Right-wing conspiracy theories swirling around the Clintons. Yet today, as Stone releases a 30^th anniversary documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, JFK’s legacy is even more complicated.

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Christopher Hitchens wrote that “modern American conspiracy theory begins with the Warren Commission”. In fact, the first counter-narrative was published within a month of the assassination. An article in the National Guardian by Mark Lane, a young lawyer hired by Oswald’s mother, caused a sensation in the UK as well as the US. Worthies including Labour MP Michael Foot, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper promptly formed the Who Killed Kennedy Committee.

The Warren Commission, under pressure to reach a unanimous conclusion before the 1964 election, left many inconsistencies unaddressed and alternative perpetrators unexplored; ironically, its critics largely relied on the commission’s own published evidence, which ran to 27 volumes and 10.4 million words. Two years later, when Lane’s massive bestseller Rush to Judgment led a pack of anti-Warren books including Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash and Richard H Popkin’s The Second Oswald, half of Americans said that they disbelieved the commission’s lone-gunman theory.

Lane’s theories later inspired the 1973 movie Executive Action, a weirdly boring dramatisation of a hypothetical plot to kill Kennedy. By then, an an assassination completist would have amassed around 2,000 volumes of speculation about the accuracy of Carcano model 91 rifles, doppelganger Oswalds, Cuban exiles, mobsters and spooks. It was already, as Stone says in JFK Revisited, “the most thoroughly documented crime in American history”. By 1979, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy and (based on later discredited acoustical evidence) probably a fourth shot from the grassy knoll, Kennedy conspiracy theories were thoroughly mainstream. “Next thing you know they’ll be blaming World War II on Hitler,” joked talk-show host Johnny Carson.

The 25^th anniversary of the assassination, 1988, was a busy year. Don DeLillo, American literature’s great scholar of conspiracy and paranoia, fictionalised the story of Oswald and “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” in his bestselling novel Libra. In the UK, ITV broadcast The Men Who Killed Kennedy, a two-part documentary so tenuous that director Nigel Turner was censured by regulators.

This was also the year that Stone met a publisher and former Garrison staffer named Ellen Ray, who gave him a copy of Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins. Until then, Stone told Esquire, “I thought that people like Mark Lane were crazy. I thought Lee Oswald had shot the president.” No longer. After giving Garrison a three-hour grilling, he optioned the book and plunged down the rabbit hole.

Garrison, as fans of the film will know, is still the only person to bring a criminal prosecution in relation to Kennedy’s murder, identifying a CIA-connected New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw as a key conspirator. He failed. Newsweek called the 1969 trial “a merry kind of parody of conspiracy theories, a can-you-top-this of arbitrarily conjoined improbabilities”. Yet this patriotic military veteran who came to believe that his country had been betrayed at the highest level was to Stone the ideal protagonist for an “outlaw history or counter-myth” about the crime that marked the end of America’s innocence.

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That’s why Stone cast the Republican Costner as an all-American truth-seeker in the mould of James Stewart or Gary Cooper and commissioned a John Williams score that sounded like a Fourth of July parade passing through a horror movie. A Vietnam veteran, Stone believed that Kennedy would have averted the conflict, broken up the CIA and ended the Cold War, thus making the assassination nothing less than a coup d’etat. As Costner says in the movie: “The ghost of John F Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder at the heart of the American dream.”

Stone wanted to tell the story not just of Garrison’s investigation but of Oswald, Dealey Plaza and military escalation in Vietnam, to which end his research team consulted around 200 books of assassination lore. He pitched JFK to Warner Brothers’s Terry Semel (who had produced All the President’s Men and The Parallax View) as a Rashomon-style tapestry of conflicting perspectives rather than a coherent thesis. But that’s not the film he made.

In purely cinematic terms, JFK is a masterpiece of casting, editing, cinematography and storytelling. For a film which runs to 188 minutes (206 in the director’s cut currently available on Amazon Prime) and consists mostly of not just dialogue but lectures, it is both comprehensible and exhilaratingly watchable: part pseudo-documentary, part star-studded paranoid thriller. The ultimate effect is overwhelming, phantasmagorical, a bad dream.

Roger Ebert, a Warren sceptic and bullish supporter of the movie, argued that this eerie mood made JFK’s myriad historical inaccuracies and fabrications beside the point. “I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares,” he wrote in a retrospective piece. “As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact.”

But did Stone agree? There are gestures towards ambiguity in JFK — Costner’s Garrison often signposts a theory with “Let’s suppose”, “My guess is” or “What if” — but we are obviously meant to believe that he is on the right track. “My own conclusions go harder and further than the film,” Stone admitted to Ebert.

Elsewhere, the director insisted: “We clearly differentiate between fact and theory in the film. Any person familiar with film techniques knows that when we cut to something like [Jack] Ruby picking up the bullet in the hospital in black and white, it’s a hypothetical image.” But this is disingenuous. Even if you assume that the average cinema-goer is au fait with the semiotics of film stock, JFK is too sense-alteringly fast and dense for cool-headed scrutiny. And some realistic-looking scenes, such as the manic hotel-room confession of Joe Pesci’s David Ferrie, are completely imagined. Compare it to David Fincher’s Zodiac, which evokes obsession and paranoia without cooking the historical books or pretending that its hero is not somewhat of a crank.

Still, it is hard not to feel sorry for Stone over the backlash against JFK, which began with Lardner’s article two months before the movie had finished shooting and rolled on throughout 1991. He was attacked in almost every major newspaper and magazine, and mocked on Saturday Night Live. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association, went so far as to compare him to Leni Riefenstahl. “Saddam Hussein did not receive half the vituperation the op-ed crowd has aimed at JFK,” Ebert protested.

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Stone went on the counterattack, firing off a fusillade of angry letters to publications to defend his movie’s veracity, all of which were reprinted in JFK: The Book of the Film, a heavily annotated screenplay followed by 400 pages of press clippings. One recipient, the New York Times veteran Tom Wicker, had a pithy response: “The director of JFK is not, as he claims, an artist. He is a polemicist.”

I’d suggest he is (or was) both. Let’s suppose, in Garrisonian style, that just as conspiracy theorists claim there were two Lee Harvey Oswalds, there were two Oliver Stones: the artist who made the movie and the polemicist who defended it. My guess is that what seemed like a concerted effort to pre-emptively discredit JFK led him to identify too strongly with Garrison, a man of “lone-wolf integrity” who was “accused, pandered, ridiculed and humiliated”. So he doubled down on the movie’s claims and rejected the licence of fiction. He has been stuck in that defensive posture ever since. “There’s nothing in the movie that I would go back on,” he said in 2013.

With the release of JFK Revisited, the polemicist has decisively defeated the artist. More like the book of the film than the film itself, this investigative essay is earnestly insistent on backing up JFK’s claims with evidence declassified since 1991. “Conspiracy theory,” Stone declares, “has become conspiracy fact”. He promises to “piece together what really happened that day”.

Those are bold statements. In a way, JFK succeeded too well. As Stone had hoped, it led the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, which has since released almost every piece of evidence gathered by the Warren Commission and the HSC; the process is due to conclude by December 2022. Yet to this day the only smoking gun is Oswald’s Mannlicher. There have been no decisive revelations, no incriminating leaks, no deathbed confessions to wrap things up. On the contrary, books such as Gerald Posner’s Case Closed and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History have methodically debunked many of the claims in JFK.

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And so JFK Revisited feels like an old rock band on tour, mixing classic hits with underwhelming new material. Minus the artistry and stardust of the first movie, it resembles a high-end version of one of those YouTube documentaries which promises to tell you the truth about 9/11 or Covid-19. The assassination buffs interviewed by Stone are still effectively in the same position they occupied in 1966: capable of casting enormous doubt on the Warren Commission’s flawed account but unable to replace it with a convincing narrative of their own. They remind me of the researcher in Libra: “He knows he can’t get out. This case will haunt him to the end.” No wonder that the percentage of Americans who believe in a conspiracy has slipped from a high of 81% in 2001 to 61% now, or that the last major film about the assassination, Jackie, concentrated on grief rather than guilt. A theory cannot thrive on scraps forever.

But there is a darker context. Rewatching JFK made me nostalgic for a time when conspiracy theories seemed titillating, exotic and largely well-intentioned. These days, Stone’s once-reasonable request that viewers do their own research is the mantra of every crank. The anti-imperialist Left and authoritarian Right come together to smear the White Helmets and deny President Assad’s use of chemical weapons (Stone himself has praised Putin as a “stabilising force” in Syria). Donald Trump convinces tens of millions of his followers that the last election was stolen. A pandemic breeds theories about a “plandemic”. Alex Jones is sued for claiming that the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax and the grieving families and survivors merely “crisis actors”. On and on. This mindset has poisoned the world.

The Kennedys are infected, too. Last month, QAnon believers gathered in Dallas to await the return of John F Kennedy Jr to become Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate. (Generally believed to have died in 1999, he did not show up.) Robert F Kennedy Jr, who appears in JFK Revisited, is America’s most influential anti-vaxxer.

“Conspiracy theory thus becomes an ailment of democracy,” Christopher Hitchens wrote sympathetically in 1991. “It is the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version.” But we can see now that conspiracy theories spring up even when the official version is much more solid than the Warren report. Which authority is to blame for the obscene fantasies of Alex Jones? What space are QAnon or Pizzagate moving into except a zone of epistemological chaos — the ruins of our shared reality?

Thirty years on, it is clear that JFK is not remotely a good movie about the assassination but it is a peerless dramatisation of how it feels to be a conspiracy theorist. Perhaps that makes it more valuable than ever.

I wonder what Lumet would make of studios greenlighting entire movies to “state the reasons”. Largely thanks to Emma Stone’s spiky charm, the 101 Dalmatians prequel Cruella made $233m on its release in May. If Hollywood can rehabilitate a puppy-skinner who is basically called Cruel Devil, then all bets are off. Following prequels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ratched) and The Sopranos (The Many Saints of Newark), get ready for the origin stories of Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and Gru from Despicable Me. The ubiquitous Timothée Chalamet is currently shooting the Roald Dahl prequel Wonka. Now that Netflix has acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company, the only obstacle to a Young BFG movie is that he would sound too much like a rapper.

Blame, in part, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which bucked William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” maxim by building a series of interconnected movies into Hollywood’s dream scenario: a safe bet. Constructing a universe around beloved IP is the business model of our times, besides which inventing characters and worlds from scratch looks like a terrible bother. But the MCU has six decades of comic-book mythology to work with and, because it had a plan from day one, relentless forward momentum. Most IP-juicing requires starting with well-known movies and working sideways or, increasingly, backwards.

For the Star Wars empire, whose first three prequels notoriously depleted global supplies of exposition, that means Solo and Rogue One, both set prior to the Star Wars movies that people fell in love with. For The Wizard of Oz, the blockbuster musical Wicked asks how those witches ended up so mean. Meanwhile in the world of superheroes, Joker reaped 11 Oscar nominations by presenting Gotham City’s murderous chaos agent as the product of bullying, insufficient mental health care, urban decay and toxic showbiz. Not so judgemental now, Batman.

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Some of these are successful entertainments but, nonetheless, ones that nobody asked for. I doubt that any child has ever watched the Wicked Witch of the West and thought, “Huh, what’s her story?” Most of these stories were originally written before the rise of pop psychology, when it was OK for a character to be wicked or bizarre without inviting an investigation into nature, nurture and the long-term consequences of trauma.

It’s not that there are no successful attempts to mine a character’s past for information that might decode their behaviour. Citizen Kane’s Rosebud or Vito Corleone’s salad days in The Godfather Part II are gold-plated arguments for the value of an artful backstory. But screenwriters are obsessed with providing damp-squib answers to questions that nobody was asking. I enjoy reading interviews with the people behind prequels as they try to justify the exercise without admitting that the only important question these movies are answering is “How can we squeeze more money out of this IP?” Ever wondered how Han Solo got his name? Me neither. Turns out he was alone a lot. Cool.

Television has its own version of rubber-ducky syndrome, now that flashbacks are de rigueur and grief has replaced alcoholism as a short cut to depth of character. Baptiste was already the most depressing cop show on TV — Camus of the Yard — before they killed off Baptiste’s daughter and his hallucinations of a stuffed toy elephant turned tragedy into accidental comedy. Another recent BBC procedural, Vigil, was grippingly assured in the present-day scenes but drifted off course in the flashbacks. It was as if writer Tom Edge didn’t trust us to believe that a woman would feel uncomfortable investigating a murder on a submarine (pretty stressful!) unless she had previously experienced her own watery calamity. Watching these shows back-to-back with Mare of Easttown, I began to wonder if a shocking bereavement was a requirement of the job. It feels a little crass to milk grief so frequently, and unnecessary, too.

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How much do we need to know about a TV detective to be invested in a whodunnit? Columbo had an indelibly eccentric personality (mostly improvised by Peter Falk) but no stated first name and no private life except for a wife we never saw (unless you happen to have watched the flop 1979 spin-off Mrs Columbo). Columbo was what he did, and that was enough.

What Lumet and Chayefsky were really getting at with their rubber-ducky quip was the pretence that explaining everything is akin to psychological veracity. We are all shaped by our experiences, good and bad, but rarely in a clear or simple way. Psychotherapists don’t identify one essential turning point in a client’s life (“Hmm, Dalmatians, you say?”) and then close the case. Sometimes, one can know every factor and still encounter a terrifying, unilluminable void at the heart of a personality. In real life, not everybody who does appalling things is misunderstood.

There is, of course, a humane liberal impulse to understand how circumstances can corrupt an individual; how the abused can become the abuser. It is the job of psychologists and the criminal justice system to get beyond the idea that certain people are irredeemably sinful, and the task of historians to fathom how seemingly ordinary people could become complicit in atrocities. Authors such as Gitta Sereny (who wrote about the Nazis Albert Speer and Franz Stangl and the 10-year-old child-killer Mary Bell) and Gordon Burn (who chronicled the serial killers Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West) dedicated their lives to interrogating the problem of human evil.

Disney and Warner Brothers, needless to say, are not engaged in that painful work but in the trivialising of trauma to give profit-seeking entertainment a veneer of psychological curiosity. It is both morally dubious and narratively absurd. In storytelling, villainy often has a theatrical boo-hiss quality that requires no elucidation.

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Why is Cruella a canicidal fashionista? Because otherwise Dodie Smith’s story would have been just a bunch of dogs running about. Why is the Joker a cackling killer? Because the joylessly uptight Batman needed an antithesis. In Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, a pompous psychologist appears on a talk show with the Joker to argue that he is not so much evil as horribly mistreated. The Joker promptly kills him, and everybody else in the room, with glee.

It’s true that Miller was a law-and-order conservative who enjoyed poking fun at bleeding-heart liberals but, like Christopher Nolan, he also knew that the Joker is compelling because he is beyond understanding. Ridley Scott squandered a great deal of time and money on making two prequels to his own Alien, even though the unknowable menace of the creature was what made the 1979 movie such a taut shocker. More often than not, additional information makes antagonists less intriguing.

As one of the showrunners of Lost, Damon Lindelof was as responsible as anybody for the backstory epidemic, creating a time-hopping narrative tangle that concluded with a crushing disappointment. He was then a co-conspirator on the Alien prequel Prometheus. On his next show, The Leftovers, he learned his lesson and leaned into his characters’ reactions to the mysterious disappearance of 2% of humanity rather than the reasons for the event. Trauma was the cake rather than the icing, and therefore taken seriously. In becoming so comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, Lindelof made one of the finest shows of the decade. The theme tune of the second series summed up the ethos of the whole show and the reason behind its success. It was a song by country singer Iris DeMent: Let the Mystery Be.

Today, these darts could easily be thrown at Wes Anderson, whose new anthology film, The French Dispatch, revolves around a New Yorker-style magazine published by the French bureau of a wealthy Kansas newspaper between 1925 (also the New Yorker’s birth date) and 1975. Framed as articles in the magazine’s final issue, the stories draw on characters and episodes from the New Yorker’s history, many of which are named in the credits. Owen Wilson’s Herbsaint Sazerac covers “hobos, pimps and junkies” much like the legendary reporter Joseph Mitchell, while Jeffrey Wright’s melancholy, hilarious food writer Roebuck Wright is James Baldwin with a dollop of AJ Liebling.

The ecstatic testimonials quoted by Yagoda could also apply to Anderson. One staff writer calls his first contract “my pass to an enchanted kingdom”. The narrator of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying says: “It was not that I merely read the New Yorker, I lived it in a private way. I had created for myself a New Yorker world.”

Anderson’s ability to create his own enchanted, self-contained world is well-established. Twenty-five years after he debuted with Bottle Rocket, film-goers know what they make of him and he has no apparent interest in changing their minds. It’s not true that he never changes. The Fantastic Mr Fox was a triumphant venture into stop-motion animation, while The Grand Budapest Hotel deepened his obsession with fastidious eccentrics who create beautiful sanctuaries from the ugliness of the world by pitting one of them, Ralph Fiennes’s Monsieur Gustave, against the extreme ugliness of totalitarianism. His appetite for new storytelling techniques is underrated, as are his emotional rug-pulls, which are all the more effective because his characters are so reluctant to broadcast their feelings.

Still, he does what he does. Critics have exhausted the metaphors of snowglobes and dollhouses to describe his meticulously curated out-of-time worlds. Arguments about style versus substance (as if they were two distinct qualities in cinema) are old and tired. Fans know how his characters will talk, dress and move. There is even an art book called Accidentally Wes Anderson, featuring travel photographs that conform to the director’s love of symmetry and colour. Anderson effectively operates on a subscription model rather than hustling for passing trade.

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The only surprising thing about The French Dispatch is that it took him so long. A New Yorker reader since his teens, he owns a collection of bound volumes going back to the Forties; the magazine’s sensibility is as foundational to Anderson as grindhouse movies are to Quentin Tarantino. The Royal Tenenbaums in particular is infatuated with the aesthetic of the mid-century Upper West Side intelligentsia, striking a tone somewhere between a New Yorker cartoon and the short stories that J.D. Salinger published in the magazine.

But what exactly is that sensibility? It’s not the confident diversity of David Remnick’s 21^st-century New Yorker, where ageless cartoons featuring wry exchanges in offices and desert islands can decorate longform explorations of hip hop and Instagram while the website does roaring traffic. No, Anderson’s New Yorker is the one that has inspired films, plays and dozens of histories and memoirs: the mythologised golden age of editors Harold Ross (1925-51) and William Shawn (1952-87). Its hallmarks were urbane sophistication, dry wit, scrupulous attention to detail, and a certain squeamishness about abstract ideas, sexuality and intense emotion. (A sign in the office of the French Dispatch reads: “No Crying.”) All of this gave it immense cultural cachet. In the post-war years, it was reluctantly acknowledged that many subscribers were using the magazine for the purposes of home decoration rather than reading material.

Closing in on its centenary, the New Yorker is by some distance the most celebrated and fetishised magazine in the world, and with good reason. Between 1962 and 1965 alone, it spawned Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Its pages have given us Salinger’s Glass family, James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, John Cheever’s The Swimmer, Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and The Addams Family.

Like Monsieur Gustave, Steve Zissou or Mr Fox, French Dispatch editor Arthur Howitzer Jr (Bill Murray) is a version of Anderson the director, but in New Yorker terms he is three parts Ross to one part Shawn: two very different men united by their heart-and-soul devotion to the magazine. Ross, a journalist and war veteran of enormous energy and charisma, co-founded the New Yorker with his wife Jane Grant, funded by his wealthy poker buddy Raoul Fleischmann. A member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, he made the magazine a vehicle for the qualities in journalism that he admired (wit, clarity, accuracy, charm) and a rebuke to those that he loathed (sentimentality, pretension, “bunk”). “We don’t cover the news; we parallel the news,” he explained.

Ross hired women reluctantly and black people not at all, but he cherished those he did employ. “Don’t fuck the contributors,” he would tell new editors, using a word he would never tolerate in print. “Moreover, we don’t hire the people you do fuck.”

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Crammed into ramshackle offices on West 45^th Street, cantankerous, hard-drinking talents such as James Thurber, EB White and Wolcott Gibbs produced a magazine that was as pristine as its creation was chaotic. By its 25^th birthday, however, the operation was so professional that fiction editor Gus Lobrano said with some regret that the party at the Ritz-Carlton “seems generally to be regarded as a success, despite the fact that nobody got insulted, nobody fell down stairs, and there were no fist fights”.

The war had forced gravitas upon the New Yorker, a development epitomised by the decision to give over an entire issue in 1946 to John Hersey’s 31,000-word report from Hiroshima, and which left its founder ambivalent. “I started to get out a light magazine that wouldn’t concern itself with the weighty problems of the universe, and now look at me,” he told a friend shortly before his death during lung surgery in 1951.

The veteran staffer who persuaded Ross to run Hiroshima was more attuned to the post-war mood. William Shawn was a shy, self-effacing man who nonetheless amassed imperial control over the magazine’s output. He was a brilliant talent-spotter and an endlessly curious and patient listener who made his writers feel not just appreciated but profoundly understood. This could make him indulgent to a fault. Joseph Mitchell took five years to deliver his classic 1964 profile Joe Gould’s Secret, then never published another word in the magazine, despite continuing to come into the office to write (and draw his $20,000 salary) for the remaining 32 years of his life. One minor French Dispatch character represents the chronically unproductive older writers who used to joke about which of them would die most in debt to the New Yorker.

Both Ross and Shawn combined a relaxed approach to commissioning (it was considered ungentlemanly to specify deadlines or fees) with a maddeningly rigorous, comma-crazed editing process. EB White joked that the magazine’s style guide was longer than Gone with the Wind, and Thurber complained that Ross’s zero tolerance for ambiguity meant that he seemed to be editing for the benefit of “a little boy or an old lady whose faculties were dimming”. Shawn was no less exacting. Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan compared the arrival of marked-up proofs to an “artillery bombardment” while the fabled film critic Pauline Kael grumbled that she “spent more time and effort restoring what I’d written than writing it”.

However annoying this may have been for writers, New Yorker readers could feel confident that every sentence had been considered and every fact verified. To this day, you may not feel like reading 10,000 words on the controversy tearing apart America’s oldest heron sanctuary but you know that they’re the best damn 10,000 words on the controversy tearing apart America’s oldest heron sanctuary that you could ever hope to read.

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What fascinates me about the New Yorker is its remarkable consistency of taste and purpose. Of its five editors to date, only Robert Gottlieb (fired after five years) and Tina Brown (quit after six) have stayed for less than two decades. Some contributors have had even longer tenures: Mollie Panter-Downes wrote ‘Letter from London’ from 1939 to 1984. While most magazines are susceptible to desperate personnel changes and flailing redesigns when the circulation dips, the New Yorker disdains sudden moves. Shawn didn’t even accede to publishing a table of contents until 1969. When Brown introduced photography, subheads and proper bylines in 1992, some traditionalists reacted as if she had added Page Three girls, but she still didn’t dare meddle with the illustrated covers or the headline typeface designed by Rea Irvin in 1925.

When Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, bought the magazine in 1985, Shawn wrote an open letter to readers, reassuring them that its values would not change: “At an age when television screens are too often bright with nothing, we value substance. Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And we believe in the beauty of the English language… And if any single principle transcends all the others and informs all the others, it is to try and tell the truth.”

The New Yorker’s purism and gentility under Ross and Shawn closed it off from some thrilling developments in American prose. Shawn despised the flash and swing of New Journalism (“a debased form of journalism and a mistake”) and sent rejection letters to spiky young fiction writers as important as Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegut. Snooty and short-sighted? Probably, but such omissions are the price of taste: every aesthetic needs boundaries.

Which brings me back to Wes Anderson and the pleasure of seeing a director doing exactly, and exclusively, what he wants. When talented young directors routinely go straight from indie movies to the inevitable compromises of the franchise machine, Anderson’s complete lack of interest in mainstream audiences feels like a rare privilege indeed. You can love or hate his artistic choices but even in his weakest films, they are always deliberate. As Howitzer tells his writers: “Just try to sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” And Anderson’s long relationships with key collaborators, from Owen Wilson to composer Alexandre Desplat, echo Shawn’s passionate loyalty to his writers. His movies about families and quasi-families have nurtured one in real life.

The French Dispatch opens and closes with a dual obituary for both editor and magazine. This elegiac tone is typical of Anderson (whose films are usually about the end of something) and of writing about the New Yorker. The final words of Yagoda’s book are “rapidly receding past”, while the title of Renata Adler’s elegantly brutal 1999 memoir is Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker.

Anderson also shares with Ross and Shawn a mission to bring together diverse talents to create something beautiful, and an incorruptible integrity that is uncommon because it is hard to maintain. He is so entirely himself that his films have the same proud energy as the standard reply that one of Ross’s more hardline staffers would send to complaining readers: “If you don’t like us, read something else.”

The pivot point of Squid Game, the captivating South Korean miniseries that has become Netflix’s most popular series at launch, is its second episode. By now the premise has been vividly established: 456 financially desperate people have been transported to a private island to compete in a series of homicidally souped-up children’s games to win a jackpot of 45.6 billion won (£29 million). The winner takes all; the losers die.

It’s not hard to track the DNA of this death-game concept through The Hunger Games and Purge franchises, the 2000 Japanese smash Battle Royale, and the 1970s Stephen King novellas The Running Man and The Long Walk, all the way back to Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game. Usually, though, such contests are conducted by the state in a near-future dystopia. While the island resembles the micro-dystopia seen in the Sixties TV show The Prisoner — with which Squid Game shares a playground colour scheme, tone of sinister courtesy and replacement of names with numbers — the world it inhabits is present-day South Korea.

Another traditional premise that showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk rejects is the idea that there is no escape. According to the rules, contestants are free to abandon the game and return to society if a simple majority votes to do so, which is what happens in episode two. Game over? Of course not. The show then explains how the characters’ everyday lives are so brutally, intolerably restricted that even near-certain death seems like the better option. During the vote, one character says: “Will it be any different if we leave? Life out there is hell anyway, damn it.” Another agrees: “I’d rather stay here and die trying than die out there like a dog.” Ultimately, 93% of the contestants choose to rejoin the game. The episode is called “Hell”.

These scenes of lives under hideous financial pressure are not a world away from the work of Bong Joon-ho, whose 2019 film Parasite, the most successful South Korean movie ever, won four Academy Awards. Whether he’s working in a realist mode (Mother), science fiction (Snowpiercer) or a hybrid of the two (Okja, The Host), Bong is obsessed with inequality and injustice, although his conclusions, especially when it comes to solidarity among the have-nots, are diverse and contradictory. He is not alone: Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 arthouse hit Burning also depicts the human cost of economic desperation.

Squid Game may not have the thematic complexity of Parasite but both are thrilling class-war allegories with mass appeal. (It has received the ultimate phenomenon-confirming accolade of a ridiculous moral panic about schoolchildren mimicking games which are, minus the fatalities, simply old-fashioned children’s games.) But even though inequality has recently become a common undercurrent in Hollywood movies, from Nomadland to Joker to Us, there’s no equivalently popular explicit satire in the US, which raises two questions: Why are these stories coming out of South Korea? And why are they sweeping the world?

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“Korea, on the surface, seems like a very rich and glamorous country now, with K-pop, high-speed internet and IT technology,” Bong told the Guardian last year, “but the relative wealth between rich and poor is widening. The younger generation, in particular, feels a lot of despair.”

Starting in the Sixties, South Korea experienced a hyper-accelerated version of capitalism which pulled tens of millions out of poverty. In recent decades, GDP growth has only dipped once, during the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis. But this frantic expansion also introduced an unfamiliar dog-eat-dog mentality to Korean society. “Korea achieved economic development in a short span of time, which is why competition can be more intense here than in other countries,” says Jung Ho-Yeon, who plays the sullen North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok. The net worth of the country’s top 20% of earners is 166 times that of the bottom 20% and rising fast. The birth rate is falling because many young people feel unable to afford a family.

Hwang, who conceived Squid Game in 2008 when his own family was struggling with debt, believes that inequality in South Korea had to get worse before anyone would commission it. “Sadly, the world has changed in that direction,” he recently told Korea Times. “The series’ games that participants go crazy over align with people’s desires to hit the jackpot with things like cryptocurrency, real estate and stocks.”

South Koreans work some of the longest hours in the world but that is not always enough to stay on top of rocketing house prices, inflation and medical bills, so many workers turn to get-rich-quick schemes. South Korea is the world’s third largest market for cryptocurrencies, some of which are fraudulent. When Squid Game’s main character, the shambolic gambling addict Seong Gi-Hun, is first invited to join the game, his initial response is scepticism: “Is this some sort of new pyramid scheme?” He’s not wrong.

The other option for the so-called “dirt spoon” is debt. Squid Game incorporates a real TV news clip reporting that the GDP to household debt ratio has risen to 96.9%, but it is already out of date: by the end of 2020 that figure was 103.8%. The average debt equals 171.5% of annual disposable income, rising to 270% for millennials in their 30s. It’s no surprise that debt is the leading cause of suicide in South Korea — or that it is debt, rather than poverty, which plagues most of Squid Game’s players.

South Korea is at a stage where social pressure to succeed no longer aligns with the chances of success. Squid Game, then, is an extreme example of a common malaise: what happens when people who have been told they can thrive as long as they work hard and play by the rules discover that the game is broken and they cannot win after all?

But the show also combines this economic reality with Korea’s long tradition of satire, to which the concept of han is fundamental. Dating back to the 1910-45 Japanese occupation of Korea, the meaning of han is so fluid and contested that it is effectively untranslatable, though the scholar Suh Nam-dong gives a taste of its complexity and inadvertently captures what it’s like to watch Squid Game: “a feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong — all these combined.” This version of han breeds a potent satirical blend of black comedy, violence, protest and despair.

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Squid Game may not be strictly concerned with class — some players never had anything; some had it and lost it — but they have all encountered more snakes than ladders. Debt and desperation are the great levellers. Key characters symbolise different fractures in Korean society. Kang Sae-byeok speaks to the lasting trauma of a country split in half in 1945. Player 244, a corrupt pastor, represents the evangelical megachurches that sprang up in the Eighties and Nineties. Abdul Ali is an undocumented Pakistani migrant trapped by an employer who refuses to pay him. The embezzling banker Cho Sang-woo shows that even overachievers can be destroyed by their aspirations. One of the show’s many tragedies is that nobody really needs 45.6 billion won. After a certain point, the survivors could split the pot and all escape their financial abyss, but sharing the spoils is antithetical to the rules of the game.

The black-masked “Front Man”, who runs the game for its unseen creator, insists, in an episode called “A Fair World”, that it is more just than capitalism: “Everyone is equal while they play this game. Here, the players get to play a fair game under the same conditions. Those people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we’re giving them the last chance to fight fair and win.” Even before we discover that this is complete bullshit, we see how the game breeds its own inequalities, whether by fomenting division between the players or requiring them to make choices without understanding the consequences. In the second game, players must choose one of four shapes before learning that they must carve it out of thin honeycomb with a needle. “What kind of a sick game is this?” protests one doomed player. “Why do some get an easy shape when others are stuck with difficult ones?”

Squid Game’s most hateful characters are the cold-eyed realists who understand that morality is a fatal luxury in this game. Empathy and collaboration occasionally pay dividends but the gangster Jang Deok-su finds that violence and ruthlessness are just as useful in the game as they are in real life, while the canny Sang-woo proves adept at abusing the letter of the rules. Inside and outside the game, fairness and equality of opportunity are perfomatively celebrated but not practised. There is no relief from han.

The show’s only serious blunder is the introduction of some super-rich VIPs whose cartoon villainy reminded me of a line from The Simpsons episode “Kamp Krusty”: “Gentlemen, to evil!” Hwang says that they represent “the power elite, the global CEOs” but a sustained metaphor for structural injustice does not benefit from a gilded clique of irredeemable bastards. Unlike Parasite, which is smart enough to make clear that the solution to an unjust system is not simply nicer rich people, Squid Game threatens to squander its satirical momentum.

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Fortunately, the finale is a suitable downer, confirming that the game is not just a sham but so corrupting and brutalising that victory cannot be enjoyed by anyone with a conscience. (Its bitterly ironic title, “One Lucky Day”, references a classic 1924 Korean novel about backfiring aspiration.) For all the memes and merchandising opportunities, Squid Game is so shatteringly bleak that I find it hard to agree with Jung Ho-yeon that it teaches viewers “to have faith in humanity”.

But even if you frown on its spectacular violence and relatively broad strokes, you have to acknowledge that this savage allegory for a splintering society is reaching exponentially more people than Burning, or even Parasite, and you have to ask why. For ultimately, the sense that the game is rigged is not just South Korea’s problem. Squid Game has the power to fill anyone with han.

It would be an exaggeration to say that The Sopranos whacked the kind of movies Chase loved, but it certainly helped to put television and cinema on a more equal footing. As Hollywood gave up on the once-fertile territory between blockbusters and low-budget indies, viewers found that their appetite for sophisticated storytelling could be met by the likes of HBO, AMC and, later, Netflix. Today, The Sopranos’ successors dominate the cultural conversation and provide safe harbour for fugitive movie stars and directors who are tired of scratching around for movie financing.

The days when the inner conflict of a dangerous man was sure-fire Emmy material may be over, but The Sopranos remains the Beatles of prestige TV: it was the first and, in many people’s eyes, it is still the best. In 2019, the Guardian crowned it the greatest show of the 21st century so far, ahead of The Wire and Mad Men. A soup-to-nuts Sopranos rewatch became a popular lockdown activity among a certain constituency, who revelled in the skewed black comedy, eccentric detours and endless subtleties. Talking Sopranos, a nicely timed hit podcast by former cast members Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, has led to a book deal for an oral history. If there hasn’t been a backlash yet, there never will be.

Yet even in 2010, three years after The Sopranos’ fearless cut-to-black finale, Chase was still conflicted about his role as the godfather of prestige TV. “Look, I do not care about television,” he told Brett Martin, author of Difficult Men. “I don’t care about where television is going or anything else about it. I’m a man who wanted to make movies. Period.”

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Eventually he did make one, but his rock’n’roll coming-of-age-story Not Fade Away suffered the fate of many serious mid-budget movies. Released in 2012, it earned just $600,000 from a $20m budget. I’m sure that Chase sincerely wanted to make a Sopranos prequel (now 76, he doesn’t do things he doesn’t want to do) but I suspect that his latest project was also his last shot at the big screen. Thus The Many Saints of Newark, released this week, finds him leveraging his phenomenal success in a medium he doesn’t respect to get him back into one that he reveres. As Alessandro Nivola, who stars as dapper capo Dickie Moltisanti, recently told Rolling Stone: “For a movie like this to be made at all was an anomaly, and it was only being made because [of] the IP of the show, the brand of the show.”

Chase and co-writer Lawrence Konner offer fan service to a fault. As the movie begins in 1967, most of the cast have the tricky task of embodying unfinished iterations of some of the most memorable characters in modern television, with mixed results. Corey Stoll is deftly hilarious as Tony Soprano’s uncle Junior, a tetchy, charmless sub’s-bench gangster desperate for a level of respect that he is incapable of earning, but John Magaro gives a sketch-show impersonation of Steve Van Zandt’s Silvio Dante, with his tonsorial slapstick and perpetual fuhgeddaboudit grimace. Michael Gandolfini excels at the emotionally gruelling job of playing the younger version of his late father James. He has the same melancholy weight, that physical unhappiness, and the sense of someone caught reluctantly, but not reluctantly enough, in the tractor beam of familial violence.

This embryonic rogues’ gallery revolves around the most important new character introduced by the prequel, Nivola’s Dickie, the doomed father of serial fuck-up Christopher Moltisanti. He foreshadows Tony’s agonies of leadership far more than Tony’s own father, played by Jon Bernthal as a dim, swaggering thug. By comparison, Dickie is a Shakespearean figure whose attempts at operating by a moral code (well, by Mafia standards) are ruptured by uncontrollable outbursts of violence and poisoned by guilt.

Casting Goodfellas’ Ray Liotta as Dickie’s monstrous father, whose laboured grunts through the bedroom wall are somehow the most disturbing sound in a film that also features a hideous bit of freelance dentistry, is much more than a mob-movie in-joke — but it adds a layer of irony, given that the Mafia depicted here is pre-postmodern. The mobsters in the TV show were shaped by seeing themselves on screen, as if performing a wise-guy routine for an invisible audience. Would they have behaved in quite the same way before The Godfather? Tony has a famous line in the pilot episode — “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over” — which suggests that he grew up in the glory days; now those glory days are on the big screen, but the only thing more glamorous about them is the wardrobe. There’s already the stink of decay.

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What’s genuinely new for a franchise that previously confined people of colour to supporting roles is the introduction of Newark’s black population, specifically Dickie’s runner-turned-rival Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.). The movie uses the famous riots of 1967 both to cover up a crime and to spur Harold into demanding more than scraps from the table. Once it snaps into the 1970s, we see how the growth of radical black consciousness filtered into organised crime and glimpse the white flight that turned the Sopranos into suburbanites, although there’s a sub-plot for Harold which unpleasantly plays into the Mafia’s racist paranoia.

This conflict between the declining Italians and insurgent black gangsters invites unflattering comparisons to Fargo’s similarly themed fourth season, which has enough time to give both sides of that war equal attention, and much more besides. Harold’s transformation relies on clumsy shorthand (ballooning afros, a Last Poets concert) in lieu of scenes that might have given him real depth and agency. He is less a person than a symbol of the social change that the Moltisanti/Soprano empire can’t even understand, let alone halt, and his arc is wrapped up in a mid-credits sting which feels like a mildly insulting afterthought. Vera Farmiga as Livia, Tony’s mother and master of mindfuckery, also smoulders with untapped potential.

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I have no bias towards television. Some potentially great movies have been fattened into slow-moving miniseries solely because that’s where the money is. But it’s hard to watch The Many Saints of Newark, entertaining though it is, without wondering why it needed to be a movie. Solidly directed by Alan Taylor, whose spotty CV ranges from some of the best Sopranos episodes to the absolute worst Marvel movie (Thor: The Dark World), it’s neither as strange and grubby as the TV show nor particularly cinematic. With its ensemble cast and myriad sub-plots, this is a narrative that could have done a lot more with six hours (at least) than with two, and ends with Dickie’s story concluded but the adolescent Tony’s just beginning. Had it come out as a stand-alone movie in 1997, we wouldn’t be wondering about these alternatives, but our viewing metabolism has changed, and it was The Sopranos that changed it. Like Tony, Dickie and Harold, we want more.

“Someone once said that movies are a cathedral, and I do still feel that,” Chase told Brett Martin. “A cathedral is big. It’s epic. It’s intense.” It’s almost tragic that Chase made a watershed TV show that was as big, epic and intense as any movie and then refused to accept it. Now he’s made a movie that feels smaller in every way. I want to tell him that he built his cathedral years ago.

This is far from uncommon, for it’s increasingly common for critics to adopt the brace position before daring to dislike something that many people enjoy. Back in May, the Guardian’s Scott Tobias became Twitter’s baddie of the day for battering Shrek on the occasion of its 20^thanniversary: “Shrek is a terrible movie. It’s not funny. It looks awful.” I found the reaction extraordinary. Tobias was called, at best, a cynical, click-hungry contrarian; at worst a twisted, misanthropic snob. “Shrek Fans Diss ‘Joyless Chud’ Guardian Critic Who Called Film ‘Unfunny and Overrated,’” reported The Wrap. His crime, let’s say it again, was hating an old, animated movie about an implausibly Scottish ogre and his donkey friend.

Critics have never been the world’s most beloved people. Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Czech author and sometime critic Karel Čapek wrote about the consequences of a harsh review: “I’m reconciled in advance to the fact that [the author] considers me unfair, cliquey and incompetent. It’s definitely his right. I, too, use this right when an unfair, cliquey and incompetent critic, who gives my book a bad press, hurts me. To cut a long story short, there’s an eternal conflict between artist and critic. ‘Praise me, or I’ll hate you.’”

Nonetheless, there used to be an understanding among readers that any worthwhile critic, whether it be William Hazlitt, Kenneth Tynan or Pauline Kael, would need to hate as well as to love. As the late Clive James (who was skilled on both counts) wrote in a 2013 defence of hatchet jobs: “You can’t eliminate the negative. It accentuates the positive.”

Now critics are often up against readers who resist the very notion of criticism. A few popular lines of attack pop up regularly. There’s faux-objectivity: You said this movie wasn’t funny but I laughed, ergo it is you are factually wrong and unprofessional. Taking offence: How dare you imply that everyone who likes this movie is a tasteless dolt? Assumption of bad faith: You’re only saying this for clicks and notoriety.

Character assassination: You’re a vindictive killjoy who’s no fun at parties. Moral disapproval: Why would you waste your precious time being mean about something when you could be praising something else? Some people mix and match these accusations into strange hybrids like the schoolmarm-turned-troll: Why can’t you be more positive, you dumb piece of shit?

What these responses all have in common is not so much disagreement with the critique but fury that it was written at all. Thumper the rabbit’s famous maxim, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” might have been good advice for Bambi but it’s fatal for the appreciation of art. “Criticism is not nice,” writes AO Scott of the New York Times in Better Living Through Criticism. “To criticise is to find fault, to accentuate the negative, to spoil the fun and refuse to spare delicate feelings.”

For an entertaining reminder of a more knockabout era of criticism, I recommend the Ringer’s current podcast series Gene and Roger, presented by Brian Raftery. Between 1986 and 1999, when they hosted the half-hour TV show At the Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were the most (and perhaps only) famous film critics in America, appearing on David Letterman and Saturday Night Live as celebrities in their own right and introducing many viewers to the concept of film criticism itself.

Central to their appeal was the intensity of their opinions, which often clashed. The show turned disagreement into entertainment. While they were both important champions of overlooked or misunderstood movies, one of my favourite comfort reads is Ebert’s 2000 anthology of pans, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. It is an unfortunate truth that it is much easier to be funny when you’re being mean, but Ebert wasn’t just going for cheap laughs; he knew how wonderful cinema could be and was indignant when millions of dollars were squandered on crud.

Why has negative criticism become so contentious? One factor is the growing vulnerability of both journalists and the artists they cover. When there is less space for book coverage, it makes sense to foreground good work than cackle over the bad, except when a real stinker from a big name hoves into view and critics can take the gloves off with a sigh of relief. Smaller journals can be a little spicier, though: Becca Rothfeld’s masterly evisceration of Sally Rooney’s “riskless and conciliatory” novels in The Point last year was a bracing antidote to Rooneymania.

In the world of music, when most albums don’t make money, it is understandable for critics to pull their punches. The world of album reviewing now is so much more collegiate than the knives-out music-press culture that I grew up on. I’m glad that young critics no longer have to make their names with an act of ritual cruelty towards a soft target, but the really thoughtful takedown is an endangered species without which music journalism is merely PR. Older critics tend to lose their taste for blood while, as Clive James wrote, “among young writers, there seems a shortage of critics unhampered by excessive good manners.”

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I would suggest, though, that it’s as much a question of self-preservation as good manners, due to social media’s abolition of context. When Siskel and Ebert panned a movie, regular viewers knew that that was not all they did. In fact, the duo might well rave about another film in the same episode. But when a review goes viral now, most of the people reading it (provided that they do actually read beyond the headline) will have no idea who the writer is, so he or she is reduced to the status of an HM Bateman caricature: The Man Who Hates Shrek, The Woman Who Hates Ted Lasso. Scott Tobias, for example, has written dozens of anniversary pieces for the Guardian, the vast majority of which are celebratory. I suspect he would have been delighted if his ode to, say, Alan Pakula’s 1971 thriller Klute had gone viral and Klute had become a trending topic, but of course it didn’t, because nothing fuels virality like outrage. Thus a negative piece is damned as “clickbait” by the angry people who are clicking on it while ignoring all the positive pieces. Whose fault is that?

Social media has also given us the militarisation of fandom. Major artists and franchises attract armies of fans who demonstrate their fealty by mobbing naysayers. There are DC fans who genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that critics are secretly paid to praise Marvel movies and denigrate their DC rivals, but then Marvel fans are no more reasonable. No movie that Martin Scorsese has made in recent years has generated as much attention as his mild dismissal of the MCU two years ago. Fortunately, the world’s most profitable movie franchise has survived his lack of interest.

All of this makes criticism an increasingly hairy business. Woe betide the outlier who costs a film its 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. When the critic Ann Powers published an ambivalent essay about Lana Del Rey in 2019, it was denounced by Del Rey herself to her 9.5 million Twitter followers, thus sending an avalanche of abuse in Powers’ direction. Complaints to employers are common, as are death threats. It’s hard to imagine a review of a major artist as famously scathing as Greil Marcus’ take on Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait (first line: “What is this shit?”) in the age of Twitter. You want to take an axe to Korean boy band BTS and their ride-or-die followers? Lock your account first.

The instinct to abuse critics is justified by the idea that it is “punching up” at elitist gatekeepers. But unlike Siskel and Ebert, modern critics are neither famous nor wealthy nor powerful. They may have influence en masse, via review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (there is safety in numbers), but the days when one critic could make or break a movie, album or anything else are long gone. Yet fans still see them as dream-crushing monsters from which million-selling musicians and billion-dollar movies must be defended at all costs.

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Why we love to hate Imagine

By Dorian Lynskey

Perhaps there is so much ambient hostility online that critics are too easily lumped in with the trolls and “haters” who plague your timeline. There are of course some contrarians, bullies and attention-seekers who have built a brand on performative contempt but they are not typical. The author Matt Haig is nonetheless adept at painting his detractors as bitter, shrunken souls whose arguments are therefore invalid. Last weekend, the Thumper of British publishing crystallised the Haigist theory of criticism in a tweet that was ostensibly about Sally Rooney’s sceptics but implicitly about his own: “There is so much jealousy of Sally Rooney. If you don’t like her books, don’t read them. The great thing about books is there are lots. There have literally never been more books. Why spend your time dissing authors other people like when you could be championing ones you do?” It’s all there: the unfounded assumption of jealousy; the nonsensical idea that you can know you don’t like a book before you’ve read it; the suggestion that negative criticism is simply a waste of time. To voice disappointment or antipathy, in Haig’s world, is a moral failing.

Similarly, anyone who resists the gentle charms of Ted Lasso, which received a Peabody Award for “offering the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity, both on-screen and off, in a moment when the nation truly needs inspiring models of kindness”, risks being accused of hating kindness itself. The success of the show, so unlike caustic 2000s sitcoms such as Extras or Curb Your Enthusiasm, is itself symptomatic of a general desire for more warmth and less cynicism.

But the Peabody citation acknowledges that the premise “has all the markings of a formulaic cornball dud,” so it is inconceivable that some people, not all of them unfeeling bastards, wouldn’t indeed find it a formulaic cornball dud. It’s particularly tricky right now for black critics who dislike politically well-intentioned work by black creators. After Angelica Jade Bastién caught flak for shredding the generally well-received new Candyman movie, another writer responded: “one of the frustrating things about this era of didactic capitol b Black art is the idea that serious criticism amounts to some kind of disloyalty.”

I suspect that this hypersensitivity to critical voices has been compounded first by the ugly intensity of politics and then by the pandemic. If you think Candyman was made by good people with timely things to say about racism in gentrification, then you might be inclined to forgive its didacticism. And if Ted Lasso or Shrek made your lockdown a little more cheerful, then you might overreact to someone stomping all over them. But I worry that enthusiasm is being mistaken for a moral virtue, and negative criticism for a character flaw: What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just like things?

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Quentin Tarantino's mummy issues

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We all know, in our own lives, that everything isn’t for everybody. Any night of the year there are heated disagreements in living rooms and cinema lobbies, and negative reactions are no less worthy of representation in public discourse than positive ones. Disliking certain things is not just normal but essential. Hate is the back of the mirror, without which you would just have a piece of glass. “It can be positive,” Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys wrote in a terrific 1992 polemic on the virtues of hate. “It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about… To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really caring about others. If you like everything, you deal with nothing.”

Personally, I find that the act of disagreeing with a sharp takedown sharpens my appreciation of the work in question. If I have to think a bit harder about what I like and why I like it, that’s fine by me, especially when it’s something that has been almost universally acclaimed. I was wowed by Jia Tolentino’s essay collection Trick Mirror but I got a kick out of Lauren Oyler’s brilliant demolition job in the London Review of Books last year, as did Tolentino, who gamely retweeted it. “I’ve been idly waiting since my book came out for a truly scathing review of my bullshit, which seemed inevitable given the rest of my good luck & also like it could be useful,” she wrote. “It finally came: a cleansing, illuminating experience to be read with such open disgust!”

Tolentino’s suggestion that negative criticism is not just valid but useful would have surprised Karel Čapek. In the current climate, it verges on the saintly. It’s not that I long for an epidemic of gleeful brutality but I will always cherish the right of critics to express their hate, hate, hate in the ultimate service of what they love, love, love.