American Dream

A Journal of the Plague Year 3.0 Day 10

26th December 2020

Why is Boxing Day so called? Do we unbox stuff, hit each other? Or it alludes to the fact we just lie all day watching the box, sprinkled in food and wrappers, and drool. I can’t even remember what I watched.

An entire day appears to have slipped by in the stream. Maybe I did some exercise, entertained the Queen. Maybe I murdered some people in alleyways, trance-like. Might explain all that blood.

It is a little disconcerting. They say add life to your days not days to your life (right up there with Life Laugh Love, Karen), but have I not done anything noteworthy at all? Ah yes, I remember. In the morning I sent an excerpt of The Book to an agent, working for a few hours on the email and intro. This gave me carte blanche to do absolute sweet FA for the rest of the day, imbedded into sofa, mesmerised by a screen. We now have a modern allergy to boredom, even for a few seconds.

I imagine I watched a few shitty episodes of something on Netflix -my list on there I’ve realised is entirely devoted to Films I’ll Maybe Watch But Not Right Now, the kind of bargain basement shit you’d find at the bottom of the DVD pile back in the day, or in the Pound shop. Mediocre movies from 15 years ago, rom-coms that no one ever saw, some flick Someone Now Famous Wished They’d Never Done, a documentary on Something Or Other Interesting That Happened But We Can Dilute Into Numbness By Dragging Out Into A 3 Hour Epic Or Entire Season.

Anything recent that Netflix assures us is fantastic because it funded it, but is really a lacklustre bore-a-thon on human existentialism (the cheapest way to tell a story) packaged into something newfangled or woke/ unwoke. Say a beauty pageant (perhaps for drag queens), or a fat farm, or a gay conversion centre, with a laugh-an-hour at the whole situation, till it gets tired, fast. Why is Americana so formulaic? Anything that does vaguely work (thank you Sundance) is suddenly approached by the Hollywood bigwigs, thrown millions at and the premise beaten to death in a thousand different formats and merch. The Funny Spy. The Angsty Adult. The Revenge of the Angsty Adult. The Cool Mom, The Flabby Dad. The Ethnic Love Story. The Cartoon Creature, Lost. The Funny Guy And His Loveable Neurodiverse Sidekick. The Autistic Kid. The Cursed House. The Innocent Abroad and Their Funny Romance. The Man and Woman Who Start to Warm to Each Other After Contrived Melodrama. Female Struggle But Ultimately Bonding – Girl Friends! It’s all so 2020, or should I say 2017 and counting.

And has anyone seen the description blurbs when you click on a film? So mindlessly cryptic, anodyne and asinine in such a tired formula they’re likely a bot. Or a field of indentured copywriters who might as well be one, clamped under a grate so strict they get electrocuted if they stray. Their mindless recipe for tapwater tries to entice you it’s absinthe -for Schindler’s List they’d put down:

A man on a mission. A people in chains. Their struggle to redeem themselves in a black and white world -but can they outwit these dark forces?

For The Little Mermaid:

A girl seeking a dream. A crab dodging the pot. A man entranced. But can legs save her from destiny?

For Trainspotting:

A youth on the edge. A baby on the ceiling. Scotland will never look the same.

Hit me with something new. The problem with US movies, or series, is that there is so much money to be made. And canyer blame them? Find an ounce of creativity, humour and a refreshing take on something, and sell, sell, sell. You’ll make fortunes overnight, while the iron’s hot. Copy that format till it sticks, you can’t go wrong (because by the time you do -you’ll be rich).

Of course the current dearth of creativity is due to the fact for the last year nothing’s been filmed by any studio due to the infectiousness of a crew, and that everything that was due to be released is reluctant to show until cinemas get back to normal. If anything this year has marked the speeding up of the big screen being replaced by home streaming.

Tried watching some Chinese films, now the world’s biggest market, and what is taking over the Hollywood machine. Our new worldly saviour perhaps. They too have an army of writers, grade A actors, ginormous budgets, special FX and a world of history and tales to draw on. Perhaps this is the new wave? Up n coming, that’s turned around in less than a decade to become a behemoth of creativity. It’s ripe for discovery to say the least.

Well, to put it bluntly… Hell no.

Almost every flick is unwatchable. China appears still at the corny end of the spectrum when catering to vast audiences -watch as heroic boy band members save small, stupid children (separated by perhaps following a balloon/ doll/ puppy amidst all the guns-ablazing chaos) from alien bombs, or evil, foreign militia. Female assassins ward off dozens of arrows with a spinning blade… while flying. Buildings/ mountains/ glaciers collapse milliseconds behind the fleeing troupe. Some background sidekick dies -their last breaths given to profess their love of girlfriend/ family/ motherland/ Earth before detonating the key explosion on the baddies. It is an industry conspicuously playing to its own domestic market, and pretty much unsellable outside, unlike say Bollywood or the Korean New Wave, or Iranian arthouse.

You’d literally walk out in a cinema midway, perhaps vom a bit in the popcorn. I don’t think the Chinese mass market has yet reached the level of jaded in the West, to not still be entranced by the stilling waters of Rambo or fucksuit Ironman. As always the smaller productions, and the ones focused on the human story are far more appealing: crime dramas, coming-of-age epics, gothic horrors and modern angst, that win the usual awards. Avoid however the romance and ‘comedies’, and anything approaching swashbuckling adventure -still at slapstick and catering to people who walk into traffic because they’re munching on something.

Historic dramas can go either way -studies of the person behind the mask (usually a villain reaccommodated, or a new feminist perspective), or a dirge of predictable, big budget battlescenes that plays out similar to the blockbusters, whereby you can replace the aliens with Mongols or colonial White people, or the Japanese. Backdrops became such spectacle, with ever more epic budgets and fantastical storylines that China even introduced a law against inaccurately portraying history.

And it goes to show that when the City of Life and Death premiered in 2007, an award-winning biopic on several lives during the Rape of Nanjing either side of the massacre (of hundreds of thousands of civilians during WWII), the director received death threats for his sensitive portrayal of a Japanese soldier, equally horrorstruck and caught up in the maelstrom.

In short Chinese films sell their own version of the Chinese Dream in every move and nuance, just like they do Stateside. This time it’s all about importance of community above individuality, nationhood over life (or even family), of endless sacrifice for the greater good. It’s nauseating. China, please move on. Nationalism is a notoriously tricky device for The Party -handy when it needs to seal over divisions in the 180 ethnic groups, or when a foreign embassy du jour needs a demo or two over some policy atrocity (like acknowledging the Dalai Lama/ Taiwan). But all butterfingers and screaming when it gets out of hand, and people start setting buses on fire.

One good flick I saw recently was Wild Goose Lake, featuring A-lister Hu Ge (back when he was the best paid actor in the world and commanding $60 million salaries), but in a break from form, cast in an arthouse crime-a-rama that was apparently the runner up to last year’s Palme D’Or in Cannes (that went to Parasite). Hu plays a criminal on the run, who teams up with a prostitute on the lakes of you-guessed-it, Wuhan, and tries to get the ransom on his head as high as possible in order to save his wife from going down with him (it’s complicated and subtle, but you get the gist after a while). The bit where the moped suspect gets his head ripped off, the chase in the zoo as the animals watch creepily, and where Liu Aiai spits out Hu’s jizz over the side of the boat, is frankly, quite memorable, and unexpected to say the least.

Sorry about the spoilers, but it’s not like anyone’s ever gonna watch it, really.

Okay, enough enjoyable bitching. The telly is now a god-given right to our quality of life right now in lockdown. Having exhausted the formulae, we demand our manifesto for better. Newer. More. Culture needs to move on, as given this year, demand definitely has, with an aching gap in the market. Potatoes of the world unite!

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A Journal of the Plague Year 3.0 Day 6

22nd December 2020

So finally ventured out to do shopping, and it seemed pretty normal. No mosh pit grannies or flying loaves, or obese people filming each other screaming. Certain chains such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose are now rationing things like rice, flour, bog roll and eggs (and for Waitrose likely its cheapo Essentials range too, e.g. edible flowers and prosecco flavoured crisps), but thankfully not Lidl; maybe the Germans really are just better organised. The streets were still populated and I’d arranged to meet up with D who’s been working home alone all week.

Xmas tree

We met up in Northcote Road which has until recently been doubling as the local version of Soho, ripe with shoulder rubbing and vector for transmission thanks to so much loitering and street drinking -well until this new strain put a dampener on the parade. It rained, the streets were wet and people were scurrying to and fro with their shopping or dogs. We found a dry seat outside an empty pub, the kind built under the awning. About two minutes later a portly policeman politely moved us on; he did tend to lecture but apologised and we apologised back as we Brits are wont to do; though increasingly less so these days. I think we were perhaps representing a grey area -allowed to meet up with our support bubble outside, yet not allowed to stop?

Passed the new Wetherspoons on the corner (having taken over from the vodka bar, Revolution, literally up n running within 48 hrs of its demise), now shuttered up and proclaiming massive posters in its windows, about Daily MFail reports that the virus is a lie and that it’s all a conspiracy to stop their business. Haha, what a writhing bag of wankers, notably fat cat boss Tim Martin, fresh from his ongoing campaign for Brexit (which cost him £600m as Remainers left in droves).

Xmas gammon

In the end we bought a few bevies from Co-op and retired to the grounds of the estate; I lost a bottle of cider to the fountain and had to fish it out again, lest it sozzle the koi. Am so off sweet cider these days, and switching back to beer.

Last night’s hammy hammer horror – the 1959 rendition of the Hound of the Baskervilles -was camp as Christmas. Valiantly acted with Peter Cushing superb as Sherlock Holmes, and opposite another great icon of the macabre, a young Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville (Lee would go on to take over the role of the famous inspector a decade or two later). A leetle bending of the original tale sees a few characters combined to introduce a brazen Spanish harridan, luring her target to the jaws of death, and liable to run away whenever a man talks to her -thus starting an automatic chase, as I think that’s how flirting was constituted in those days. When caught she may or may not force a kiss on him/ herself as he shakes that feminine mystique outta her. Why young woman? Why… did you run away!? Before the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s came along, courting pretty much meant stalking the woman till she caved, or in this case sprinting after her across bubbling bog and quicksand.

Yes, very camp -the blood as shiny and vivid as the thinly disguised enamel slopped onto the tors, the ‘mire’ a pool with sawdust and sand on top, and the moors a mix of genuinely shot vistas and creaky, Dry Ice-laden sets of cardboard and houseplants. Night time is that blatantly sunny scene shot with a heavy filter. But it all added to the premise; there is a certain je ne sais quoi to these strangely shadowed film sets of yesteryear. Despite coming from the infamous house of Hammer, any horror was very subdued, with action verging on farce then over in seconds -early days for the seminal producer.

Although utterly unscary, it has been a welcome escape, that artfully balance between so-bad-it’s-good and so good-it’s-bad, plus a healthy dose of bittersweet every time. Positively refreshing -I should do this more often. I mean, how exactly has my soul so been saved by a dose of B-movie, high British schlock?

Fuck Netflix, fuck Hollywood, that’s how. Stop fucking gurning and clapping and thinking everything’s so fab and worn on your glitter-laden sleeve ye damned cartoons of characterisation. Every time. Get a damn life, and perspective, and some mystery; I mean do we HAVE to promote the American Dream in EVERY move, sentence and facial nuance? Priorities in a pandemic now, -wtf am I gonna watch for the Xmas movie?

The Eyebrow of America

I mean seriously fuck you all.

691 people died of C-19 today in the country, 30,000 truck drivers are stranded at Dover, shitting in the bushes as Hard Brexit looms, and a second new strain just landed from South Africa, that’s even more infectious. #Plagueisland has been trending all day on the world’s social media. Ho fucking hum, bah fucking humbug -let’s move on shall we?

I’ll need to buy the Xmas food soon, and when I say food, I mean booze. Can’t believe it’s Christmas; for the first time I actually feel a bit grown up, now that I’m the one organising it rather than going to the folks’.

I will try very hard for the next two days to be merry and bright, regardless of the shitshow. No pissing on people’s bonfires n all that – I may even watch my nemesis, Elsa at it (Elsa‘s a homicidal maniac, but that was just a phase -it’s more important to remember she was empowered doing it, and above all, she’s pretty). I may also watch The Road, for a touch of festive 2020ism, no one should mind aTALL if I stick that on after lunch.

Ho fucking Ho, fucking hoes.

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A Journal of the Plague Year Day 62

Tuesday 19th May 2020

Having exhausted all possibilities on a Netflix blocked by algorithms, I resorted to watch one of its latest offerings, Extraction. Starring Thor Chris Hemsworth, getting ever more typecast into the action hero role of the Great White Hunter, it’s set in Bangladesh -what a welcome surprise! No Hollywood film would ever think that as a film location, with few even knowing the difference between India or where, what and who it is on a map. Ask your average Joe and Josette on that side of the pond what they think of Bangladesh and the likely answer will be ‘what?’ and if lucky, followed up by ‘poor’ (this side we have enough Bangladeshis, notably running most of our ‘Indian’ restaurants, to know what their food tastes like, and that insofar, they exist) .

So what a refreshing take to think hundreds of millions round the world would now be introduced to the country, inevitably exposed to the culture, the backgrounds, the characters.

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The opening shot however was not encouraging.

There is a certain mustardy filter that has become a meme among US films, actively promoted by Hollywood and almost every Netflix production. That whenever setting a scene in the Global South (read: poor and hot) you cast a yellow glaze on all things -redolent of a dusty, dirty atmosphere. Dhaka, the capital of 21 million, was seething with it, as if a sudden sand storm had just blown in over the jungles of the world’s largest river delta, that sees in 4x the annual rainfall of London. Welcome to a giant broiling city of mass poverty, open drains and endless grit, like a Star Wars or Dune location (incidentally all scenes were actually filmed in India).

This should be called as to what it really is, a poverty filter, and racist projection.

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Mexico is particularly prone to this same cast, the minute one steps over the border from a sunny California, and just as avoidant of the glittering city centres in favour of seamy bordellos, desert ranches and shantytowns.

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This has its roots in the US Army office in Hollywood. When hiring out its weapons, fatigues and aircraft carriers it operates a PR scheme alongside which one has to agree to. This is understandable, who’s gonna lend out work if the crew in question is seeking to take down your establishment? Akin to gearing up a production and helping in all advice, while they advertise how shit and baby-killing you are.

This office has guidelines to toe, and Hollywood has fallen into step. Note how Western (read: White) locales have a certain blue tinge that psychologists put as making audiences alert, whilst promoting a sense of cleanliness and calm. However you’ll have to up this tint if dealing with Eastern Europe (notably Russia) to make it uncomfortable -overtly cold, calculating and emotionless, rife with degradation and akin to any horror flick. Meanwhile, we’re getting conditioned to warm colours equated to dirt, as any non-Western, poverty stricken nation is assumed to embody.

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The seminal film that influenced a lot of this was Saving Private Ryan, whose use of desaturated colours became iconic. This in turn led to Black Hawk Down, a film notable in the fact it had to run past an Army and White House committee for approval. Directed by Ridley Scott, its beautiful cinematography and gritty realism at battle proved to be an operatic groundbreaker. Telling the true story of the chopper crew attacked by a mob in Mogadishu, and the ensuing gunfight that killed 19 American soldiers (and led to the withdrawal of the US from Somalia), it showed harrowing shots of firsthand experience.

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One scene shows a Somali woman yelling angrily at the soldiers amidst the bullets. The soldier gallantly tries to avoid hitting her, hissing repeatedly at her to scram, but in the end he’s forced to shoot and she goes down, mad robes flailing. That snapshot employs the gritty realism the film was noted for, portraying the true-to-life decisions of every soldier, and winning the audience over in droves. -Or did it truly portray things? The reality was not that a few civilians were caught in the crossfire, and that the soldiers ummed and arred about taking one or two belligerent, bloodthirsty innocents down. It does play a bit like Zulu, the civilians shown dancing and gibbering like animals even as they’re fired at.

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Journalist Mark Bowder who wrote the book on the Battle of Mogadishu even complained about the fake ‘realism’ in their translation. In reality over 1,000 Somalis died in the battle, not just soldiers but hundreds of civilians callously mown down -albeit posthumously portrayed as armed with AK47s and rocket launchers, or women and children employed as human shields by their own militia. The mob mentality against the US ‘peacekeeping’ presence in the conflict had long been united by the highest rate of collateral deaths since the Vietnam War, with 500-600 killed (inc. militia) and 2,000 wounded in that short time, plus high profile murders, torture and assaults on civilians committed by US soldiers.

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Anyhoo, I digress. This isn’t so much an anti-US diatribe (all warring countries commit the same acts of violence and crime abroad – in Somalia Canadian soldiers were also caught torturing civilians), but a stab at the complicit narrative that democracy installs. As philosopher Jacques Ellul points out, democracies have just as extant a use of propaganda as autocracies, exacerbated by the fact just five right-wing families control most of the world’s ‘free’ media.

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Anyhooooooo, back to the film. Yes. Great for the acrobatics of camera, with some almost seamless shots following the violence from room to room to window to falling to bouncing to the landing crash below, or out one windscreen into another as the explosion hits. One pounding shot lasts 12 minutes. Directed by Sam Hargrave, the stuntman double for Captain America, these are fight scenes as memorable as the Matrix trilogy, though not as groundbreaking. However, it does fall into a pit of the dated action movie, the formula being the Great White Straight Man/ White savour meme rescuing darkies and mostly shooting them down too. It is a different time these days, and Rambo is no longer as poignant or searingly poetic.

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It is the kind of cliché where the American Aussie hero is repeatedly bulletproof even from machine guns a few feet away, is lone in his rescue of the locals, with superior strength and skillsets to be in foreign awe of, and is heartbreakingly haunted by the past. The foreign roles are extras, the one woman (immaculate, ball-breakingly ruthless) hinting at a love history and nothing more, the villains (cackling, hand-rubbing, sadistic) as single-faceted as a stage demon allows.

As farce it’s delicious for the ride, though it does repeatedly, weakly try to pretend it’s Jane Austen, with guns. You’d easily enjoy it if you forgot the attachments. But fuck you, too late. Nazi baby killers.

As mentioned, Bangladeshis watching this film will be offended for sure. Why Bangladesh? Well, no other country would have their police force mown down as the forgettable baddies, populating each bloodied action shot as unit after unit is gunned, stabbed, run over and er raked multiple times in every available body part as they bumble onto screen. The action starts off in India, but decamps to Bangladesh to portray the entire police as corrupt and in league with the venomous, casually torturing drug lords.

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Imagine this, let’s take the NYPD. The head honcho of the force gets in league with the cities local mafia don, and orders the arrest of the hero and his rescued kidnap victim. Does Hollywood then wordlessly allow every policeman turning up to become bullet bait, making up the majority of a body count of 183? There would be outrage. No reviewer’s picked up on that, despite castigating the film for its plot and ridiculous scenarios, yet missing the disconnect with respect in a portrayal of a people.

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This is why the film had to be set in a forgotten, forgettable small country and shot outside it -not India (too large, too important), not Mexico (too close), not the Middle East (too sensitive, plus a nasty reminder gunning down the civilians is what we do), not Eastern Europe (too White, the audience might notice/ identify that those being mullered are actually humans). Africa? NO, don’t even think abouddit, that just wouldn’t look good for er, historical reasons. Despite having a population of 165 million, none of these Bangladeshis matter, none of their voices deserve to be heard, slinking onto screen to be unworthy and fully deserving of their coming demise.

To finish off, some images of the city. We’re not going to pretend it isn’t poor, it isn’t sweatshoppy, it isn’t hot and steamy. But there’s more to it than a vast, festering crime-slum. Welcome to Dhaka.

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Garment workers protest for higher wages in Dhaka

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A Journal of the Plague Year Day 50

Thursday 7th May 2020

So discovered Amazon Prime today. The last time I popped in it was the equivalent to the back end of the video store circa 1996, the section littered with films you’d never heard of -for a reason. Low budget TV movies, talky melodramas and an endless flow of has-been flicks everyone had seen some decade or two before. Like How To Make An American Quilt, Moonlighting, A Fish Called Wanda, Jaws IV The Return, The Buddy Holly Story. If they bought this year’s Cats they’d be streaming that 15 years later and touting it on every headline as event of the century.

Well today it looks as if they’ve upped their game. Everyone has of course copied the inordinately successful Netflix format, which makes you scroll for longer than you watch. And right now TV is like a civil right, anathema to an otherwise imprisoned populace likely to riot.

Well last night’s vision was Jexi, a comedy centring on a new bitchy equivalent to Siri or Alexa. The trailer promised it all: Man buys phone, realises something amiss, phone takes over his life in a winning way, makes him a winner via it becoming his snappy, denigrating wingman. Him being a winner means getting rich, sporty, having mates and most importantly, laying a beautiful, intelligent woman (either/and virtual or real).

It tries hard to undo the previous roles that Hollywood’s Americana long promoted: white collar, White-or-impossibly-Jewish protagonist (working in business, law, mid-management), cheerleading romantic interest (blonde, vacuous, skimpily dressed), playing out their lives in a fun American city (sunny, towering, occasionally multicultural). But dear lord, today’s version is still as formulaic and sycophantic to the American Dream, just as steaming with bullshit. The jobsworth is now in the creative fields with a hip, open-plan office (dreaming up social media clickbait yet aspiring to proper journalism), his love interest is now intelligent, fully clothed and mixed race (namedropping that she gave up her winning job at Amazon to open a hipster bike boutique), and the city is now populated with European cars, cyclists and historic housing. But still endearingly studded with minority ‘characters’, so casually, comically obnoxious one does wonder what ‘tolerance’ means to the writers.

Jexi is yet another propagandic offering from the complicit factory that is the American Dream, just as unreachable and just as false. And evil. Like Nazi-evil and baby killing.

The vast majority of Americans do not live in million dollar apartments in heritage clapperboard, with stunning views of the Bay Bridge. They do not ride bicycles (tellingly the night scene showed them up without lights) or drive Minis/ Teslas, or so openly engage into mixed-race relationships (a fraction of what it is in the UK even after four centuries). In short a film that tries so hard to upend the bullshit of the past merely replaces it with its own brand of tripe.

It’s gotta piss off Americans themselves, surely. Everything Sundance was against, but now having to redraw the lines.

Yes, it’s a comedy about a phone, and a sassy virtual assistant. But it’s hard to ignore the lurid attempts to show off from the background, constantly in-yer-face and obliterating the humour -the upturned nose, the ratcheted volume and roving eyes no different from the stage before. Yaaaahs I was just shopping in Monte Carlo darling! has now transmogrified into Yasssss I was just biking round Bra-zil bro! A little embarrassing from a non-American perspective, where living urbane, with history, holidaying, driving small cars or er, cycling isn’t something to constantly namedrop.

It’s not so much embarrassing anymore but tiresome; it feels like a constant dick measuring contest that is thinly disguised State-posturing: a commercial branding of a civilisation. And the way they sell Americana these days is increasingly disconnected with the reality; it jars quite some with the blaring headlines, with the viral vids, with the voting results when we switch channels. -And why oh why is every tale of the downtrodden still coming from the echelons of the upper middle class? Would even just a normal middle class tale so crack the bubble? would -heaven forbid- someone working in a banal office job forever destroy that magical aura? In this day and age, where information defines our era, the suspension of disbelief is no longer one of escapism, rather a weaponised reminder.

Well, ba-limey. All that from just a rom-com. I barely talked about the virtual assistant to which the film gets its name (she has her moments). It was just so screechingly awful and formulaic. Talking about sex or having a dick pic is no longer a brazen, run-round-the-room-screaming display that gets you roaring with laughter. Dating a mixed race woman isn’t the daring, border-jumping adventure into the abyss. Being creative -and making money from it -isn’t throwing off your societal chains. And riding a bike isn’t the coolest, most groundbreaking thing ever, fecund for urban escapades and hilarity. Methinks they doth protest too much.

Next time I watch a cartoon I’ll tersely report on the socio-economic costs of childhood fantasy in our lives.

I do wonder though what would be the equivalent today of breaking form -like really breaking it? What is it we don’t talk about at dinner parties, if not sex, drugs and rock n roll? Maybe a rom-com where dating differing genders (without it becoming a thing) would do the trick -with the world of a non-binary spectrum awaiting. Or having a female lead that isn’t… (please hold on to something solid) a model. Or not dating at all -dear lord, the end of Western civilisation if we had a rom-com where the end goal wasn’t perfunctorily getting laid. A setting that was a suburban town whose shiteness they could easily use to comedic affect. Professions that didn’t define their every standing in life, and was (like to most of us) just a way to a wage -yet just as peppered with kooky characters and situational enterprise.

I think finding magic in the everyday, in the banal is what would make a film stand out. Accepting it’s shitty and going at it with humour would resonate. We kinda need that now. Escapism, though very pretty, isn’t working.

Or maybe we should be rom-comming about a trans Nazi in love with a horse, perhaps a cat. In a Tajik hill village. Ze’s obese, and a dam salesmanperson, struggling to win a contract that will save the countryside (a key scene where ze plugs the hole with zir’s voluminous behind). She’s an animal. With needs and wants and liberated imperfection, battling for veganism. Ze’s a misunderstood extremist, battling for acceptance and the supreme race. Together they find love in a hopeless place.

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