Messing with Mr. Inbetween

I was pretty stoked to not only cover Mr. Inbetween, one of my favorite-ever crime shows, on the Watch with Jen podcast, but for the opportunity to interview creator and star Scott Ryan. Such a personally gratifying thing to be a part of. Big thanks to Jen Johans for having me on. The episode starts off as a conversation about Mr. Inbetween with Jen, Rob Belushi and me before we're joined for the interview by Blake Howard.

I wrote about my enthusiasm for Mr. Inbetween on this blog three years ago during its third and final season on F/X (streaming on Hulu) and now that it's finished, I'm even more enthusiastic about it. The final episodes really played out the themes incredibly richly and just, y'know, stuck the landing the way you're always hoping the great things do. Think I've watched the whole show through five or six times by now and it keeps revealing layers and themes I'd somehow missed before. 

It's not only one of the funniest and most heart-breaking shows I've ever seen, but I'm hard-pressed to think of an example of gnarlier TV violence. Gorier? Okay. Grosser? Yeah, of course, but violence that can turn your stomach with its cold, brutal bluntness and lack of affectation and style? I'm drawing a blank. Yet, it's still a show I would recommend to normal folks. You don't have to be a basement crazy noirhead to dig it. 

Anyway, I'm still recommending Mr. Inbetween to people who've somehow not even heard of it two years after this interview. Trust me, you're gonna love it.

For anybody interested, I put together a Letterboxd list of the films I watched in preparation for the episode which included all the Blue Tongue films I could get ahold of, the short films of Nash Edgerton (who directed every episode of Mr. Inbetween) and other Australian crime films featuring cast members, and especially films directed by cast members (I think Ryan and Edgerton enjoyed casting directors as actors and really abusing them onscreen).  I revisited Ryan's own The Magician a couple of times and of course Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, and André Bonzel's Man Bites Dog which Mr. Inbetween owes a lot to. Most of Edgerton's shorts can be found on youtube and a few of them are on Hulu as well.

Code 46

Back in the late nineties and early aughts my favorite filmmakers tended to be those uncommitted to a signature style, whose range was broad in scope and whose accomplishment was evenly dispersed across a multitude of genres and tones. Alan Parker was an early favorite, Steven Spielberg too. Steven Soderbergh really grabbed my attention early in the 90s with the very stylish Kafka and the slick indie Sex, Lies & Videotape which he followed up with King of the Hill, The Underneath (his remake of Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross) and the losing his movie mind Schizopolis; each picture stylish in different ways and confident at various volumes. 

Rising roughly in tandem to Soderbergh on the other side of the Atlantic English filmmaker Michael Winterbottom wouldn't really arrive on my radar until his Thomas Hardy adaptations Jude and The Claim treated me rough, but memorably, and I started to look for what else he was up to. He followed up The Claim with 24 Hour Party People, the flashy, funny biopic of Tony Wilson and the Manchester music scene's evolution over a fifteen-year period. It was his first feature to star his longest-running collaborator Steve Coogan, but before they took The Trips Winterbottom dropped the near-future sci-fi romantic thriller Code 46 starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. 

And I think it's a low-key masterpiece. 

The story about Robbins' fraud investigator called to Shanghai to find a forger operating inside a large multi-national company producing travel papers for restricted people. He uses an empathy virus to help him intuit things about people and when he meets Morton's forger he is immediately smitten and lies to his clients about the identity of their black marketeer. The pair spend his single night in Shanghai celebrating her birthday and beginning a love affair that has tragic results. 

If you think it sounds like William Gibson writing a Graham Greene story than you and me are in agreement and if that sounds like a heady proposition to you, let me assure you that it is. In fact you can listen to me talk quite a lot about what I enjoy and appreciate about it on this episode of the Projection Booth with Mike White and Dylan Davis. The episode includes interviews with Code 46 screenwriter and frequent Winterbottom collaborator Frank Cottrell-Boyce and producer Andrew Eaton.

Winterbottom has had a long and prolific career, and I've moved on to my crime obsession, so our paths have less-often intersected than I thought they might for a few minutes there in the early aughts. I do really dig his Jim Thompson adaptation The Killer Inside Me and I'd still love to follow Dev Patel's character from The Wedding Guest through a short franchise's worth of adventures and holy hell his producing of the Red Riding Trilogy based on the David Peace novels remains one of the best projects of the 21st century, so I still have an eye on his output, just nothing as intensely as I did after Code 46.

If I were looking to compliment the sci-fi vibes of Code 46, I'd say it's got DNA in common with... Blade Runner, Boarding Gate, Children of Men, Demonlover, Gattaca, Minority Report, New Rose Motel and Until the End of the World. Do with that what you will.

Heroic Perverts

Reading a lovely and beautiful wisp of a book punching above its wordcount weight on my front porch in the oppressive heat of July last week and found innerworldly cool relief from the briny breeze with every turn of the page. S.L. Coney's Wild Spaces is a tentacle horror, coming of age, southern gothic/rural noir adjacent heartbreaker that I'll be thinking about for a long time (and if you think that genre combo sounds like a gas please check out Chad Crawford Kinkle's Jug Face or Laura Benedict's The Devil's Oven, maybe Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs). 

Anyway, it got me thinking about themes of transformation transcendence, transgression, evo/devolution and adaptation which inevitably lead me to think of David Cronenberg. If you're a fan you might check out the anthology of essays and short fiction inspired by the earliest films of his, Children of the New Flesh edited by Chris Kelso and David Leo Rice. 

You can read my interview with Rice about the book at Southwest Review. I was particularly pleased with his definition of and ruminations on Cronenberg's use of the heroic pervert archetype. The heroic pervert is easily plugged into science fiction and supernatural horror, but its often effective in more crime blog-relative spaces like drug fiction, gutter stuff and generally transgressive fiction.

I wouldn't call Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World crime though some of the stories touch its outer boundaries, but I recently enjoyed following her heroic perverts on their downward spirals and knuckleball pitches. I haven't read her crime novel Eileen, but I did catch William Oldroyd's adaptation starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway and I'd be happy to see everybody involved continue down the dark path (really need to see Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth too - Johnny Shaw recommended it here).

Sara Gran's Holistic Detective Agency

Recently had occasion to recommend a detective novel to someone without any real idea of their taste and the first thing that came out of my mouth was Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran. Didn't think about it till the next day what a strange one that was to take off the top of my head. I think it might have been because there's something for everybody in it. Of course, there's a lot for everybody to be turned off by too. It's traditional, but it's very weird, it's cerebral, and it's explosively violent. It's definitely not boring and Claire DeWitt is a series character who doesn't outstay her welcome - only three books (so far).

Anyway, I'm a big fan of Sara Gran and I'd like you to be too. Here's something I wrote for another site way back when Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead was first released in 2011.

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Here’s a blurb from Lee Child on Sara Gran’s amazing 2006 novel Dope:

“If Raymond Chandler knew then what we know now, he might have written a book like this”

It was a classic hardboiled detective novel set in the romantic era that Chandler wrote in but had the gilt-edging stripped away with the perspective benefit of fifty years’ remove. Well, brothers and sisters, with the release of her latest, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, I pose this question: could Chandler have written anything like this even with a fifty-year forward-glimpse? Answer: I doubt it.

No slight to Chandler, gawsh I love his stuff, but it’s kinda refreshing to read an American PI novel where his ghost hand is not immediately visible, hovering over the author’s. Claire DeWitt is the most bracingly original fictional sleuth I’ve seen in years, which is not to say that her influences aren’t apparent, (some Nancy Drew here, some Columbo there, a touch of Holmes, and some Sam Spade too) only that her particular cocktail of parentage has so many previously antithetical and adversarial qualities packed snugly into her frame and sounding cozy behind her first person narrative, you’re going to get dizzy trying to keep up. She’s terribly new-agey, knows the I Ching, combs through her own dream interpretations for clues and is so sharply spiritually tuned, she’d shame Dale Cooper and Dirk Gently even if they teamed up against her in an intuit-off. On the other hand she’s also an angel-dust-smoking, tattooed, gun enthusiast, hand to hand fighter and generally just kind of a badass – “I’d shot four people. I’d killed two. None were in self-defense.” (Check out Sara’s blog The Abbott Gran Medicine Show that she keeps with Megan Abbott for more on the origins of Claire DeWitt.)

She sees her vocation as a detective as nothing less than her sacred duty and moral destiny and speaks so earnestly about her desire to ‘solve mysteries’ that at first I cringed. It was like listening to my favorite band discuss openly their desire to ‘be cool’ and proven strategies toward that goal. I want my rock stars to be cool without ever addressing it, and yeah, I generally appreciate some tasteful reluctance on the part of my investigators, but Gran bids us immerse ourselves in Claire’s world, and who am I to resist? That world (this time out) is New Orleans, so regal in its ruin and exotic in its very Americanism (N.O. has always been our national funhouse compact mirror), and Claire changes its already charged atmosphere simply by entering it. She’s come to town to find a missing person who disappeared in the storm (yeah, this is 2007) and once accepted, she’s prepared to solve the case and uncover the truth regardless of who is hurt, angered or exposed by it.

She takes as a matter of course that no one really wants her to find the truth (nevermind what they say or think). She’s prepared to be unpopular because she’s committed Detection by Silette, the voice crying out of the wilderness that all elect investigators understand to be their very own guru-prophet-philosopher-L. Ron Hubbard to memory and faithfully adheres to the wisdom and guidance it provides. The origins of Silette and his near impenetrable tome are mysterious themselves and a good deal of Claire’s backstory revolves around the sisterhood she founded with two childhood friends when they discovered the book, hidden away like the object of great power from any classical myth, and decided to become detectives. Twenty years later, one of them has disappeared and Claire is estranged from her remaining former companion. Her back-story is at least as intriguing as the central, forward-moving case, but reserves resolution for a later date, and I suspect that it is this over-arcing storyline that will be the real hook for the series.

Bringing together the mystery element of Dope and the touch of the supernatural that played a more prominent role in her first two novels, Saturn's Return to New York and Come Closer, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is perhaps the most distilled essence of Granishness we’ve yet been privy to, and I can’t wait for another shot of the hard stuff.

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The DeWitt adventures Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway and The Infinite Blacktop followed and I have reason to hope there will be a fourth Claire DeWitt title someday. 

Meanwhile I've got The Book of the Most Precious Substance sitting on my shelf waiting for the right moment to surprise me with whatever the fuck its deal is.