I Absolutely Loathe Hydrangeas

Recent roundup: The Scary of Sixty-First, Chinese policy, lesbian pulp fiction, and the Madonna victim memoir

Here are a few books I read recently - an excerpt from an ongoing and ridiculous struggle to find the one book that will magically change my life forever. There, the secret’s out! Every book I read only changes my life a little bit, but everything adds up very quickly. I also watched a film.

The Scary of Sixty-First (2021) dir. Dasha Nekrasova

I attended the London premiere of this film and was slated online afterwards (someone messaged me ‘Why??’). I’d like to keep it on record that I haven’t listened to Red Scare in about six months but that I like Dasha because of her haphazard European sensibilities, and that I very clearly don’t let my morals and politics get in the way of truly important things such as art, vibes and the cultural thermometer.

The Scary of Sixty-First is not scary at all - like the still-superior Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, it’s an absurd artefact which is great fun to watch with a group of people who are on your exact wavelength, but which no earnest moviegoer could ever take seriously. I dread to think what may have happened had some uninitiated newspaper critic walked in. The film revolves mostly around the memetic value of the Dirtbag Left subculture and also relies a great deal on the Jeffrey Epstein case, which had presumably faded from the headlines at some point between filming and release. It won’t exactly age badly - it will be of interest to cynical young people who want a camp curiosity, which is basically a guarantee of relevance for as long as teenagers exist. Perhaps it will be someone else’s Pink Flamingos.

Like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls screenwriter Roger Ebert, Nekrasova is well-versed in film history and arthouse cinema, and we can see the evidence everywhere: the opening sequence is modelled after Rosemary’s Baby, there are several other Polanski nods, there is clear giallo influence when the film gets bloody, and at a crucial point a scene from Eyes Wide Shut is clumsily recreated. None of these references are played up enough to be legibly parodical, so Scary ends up straddling an uncomfortable line somewhere between psychological horror and comedy without making any clear conclusions or saying anything consistent.   

I am not atypical among Red Scare listeners in that I make a huge show of deploring superhero fans who shout out references in the cinema, and am often scathing towards franchise viewers who think their in-universe knowledge means anything or is transferable to the real world. One rule for thee, another for me: at the London screening we all sat contentedly unmasked and clapped and cheered when podcast co-host Anna briefly appeared onscreen. 

The Avoidable War by Kevin Rudd 

I would recommend this book to anyone who is even a tiny bit curious about the past few years of China coverage in Western media. The author’s modelled war scenarios are slightly tedious, but his explanations of hot-button issues should be required reading. Rudd is the only Western ex-head of state who is proficient in Mandarin Chinese (!) and his expertise stretches far past what is usually reported to readers in this area of the world, meaning all analysis is underpinned by knowledge of the actual ideology (or lack of which) fuelling everything from Beijing. This is invaluable - I often find that few people actually know how Chinese communism works, and I don’t blame them because if you just look at the news China is alternately hyper-consumerist and hyper-socialist for no reason. 

The major potential trigger in a USA-China war is Taiwan, and this dispute is explained from its beginning - but there is also substantial analysis of Uyghur persecution and trade war and climate change. This book is time-sensitive (ie. get in there now because chances are the entire picture will have changed by the end of next year) and also extremely important.    

Stranger on Lesbos + Whisper Their Love by Valerie Taylor

Valerie Taylor is a pulp author, but a very gifted one with a poetic style. I enjoyed these two lesbian novels, which work well as literary fiction (sort of like The Price of Salt) and also offer an interesting glance at the lesbian and gay subcultures of the 1950s, with homosexual house parties and trips to gay bars recounted in colourful detail. Whisper Their Love features a university student who has a tumultuous night-time relationship with a member of staff (and there’s also a sideplot about illegal abortion), and Stranger on Lesbos is about a middle-aged married woman who falls in love with a younger lesbian. It turns out that the lesbian predilection for a large age gap is probably just a fact of life and we should all learn to live with it.

Unfortunately (spoiler!) both books suddenly ended heterosexually, despite all male characters being portrayed in the worst possible light throughout. I am still on the hunt for a 50s pulp novel with a happy ending. 

Life With My Sister Madonna by Christopher Ciccone

I am a huge fan of the ‘celebrity victim memoir’ genre and had to read this book, even though I was convinced, and remain convinced, that Madonna is incapable of doing anything actually wrong. Life With My Sister Madonna unfortunately lacked all of the ingredients of a classic tell-all: no exceptional and hence-untold detail, no extravagant set pieces of physical abuse. There is no wire hanger moment. You could probably adapt the memoir into a film but it would be quite dull, and the critical attention would fall not on Christopher Ciccone but instead onto Madonna’s enigmatic lesbian bosom friend Ingrid Casares, or the brief encounters with her Baby Jane-esque nemesis Courtney Love. The book reads as apologetic and reverential. I couldn’t help but think that this would be a way better read if the author had only waited until the subject’s death to write it, or tapped some phones or gone through a dustbin, or recounted every day of Madonna’s life on thousands of index cards like Stanley Kubrick preparing for his unmade Napoleon biopic. We need detail! We need madness! If Old Hollywood has taught me anything, it’s that the victim memoir is key to posterity. 

Key piece of information: Madonna has an odd fixation on the colour white, which is exactly the same as Marlene Dietrich’s fixation, as described by Maria Riva in her victim memoir. Again, Madonna is master of the exact breed of poetic irony needed to keep Studio Hollywood alive. It’s significant that Dietrich’s real name was Marie Magdalene.