Tag Archives: murder

Jamie on the Box – Barry, Game of Thrones

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TV Review: Game of Thrones, Barry

Westeros gears up for death, while Barry tries to stall it

HBO used to dominate the prestige TV market, and it very much knew it, even going so far as to rub the networks faces in it with their slogan, ‘It’s not TV: it’s HBO’.

HBO was entitled to crow. After all, it gave the world Oz, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Larry Sanders Show, and many more ground-breaking smash hits besides.

Unhampered by network focus groups or the vested interests of advertisers, HBO could afford to take greater risks with its output. Once show-runners, writers and producers had been freed from the burden of having to please most of the people most of the time, or of having to play to the lowest (or most conservative) common denominator, creativity became king.

The televisual landscape is different since HBO’s heyday, seismically so. Network television has upped its game, and streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are taking the sorts of bold risks that used to be HBO’s exclusive calling card. It’s a testament to HBO’s enduring creative clout that even among this dizzying proliferation of content two of the best shows currently on TV – Game of Thrones and Barry – come from the HBO stable.

As Game of Thrones enters its endgame, it’s gifted us the most hotly anticipated team-up this side of Infinity War. Every hero, villain, vagabond, brother, bastard, king, queen, drinker, thinker, miscreant, meanderer and murderer that ever lifted a banner or a broadsword is assembled in Winterfell for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which basically serves as an hour-long breather (and an opportunity for us to hold our breaths) before a wave of wights and walkers descends from the north to reduce all of Westeros’s problems to one: survival.

An episode of Game of Thrones never feels as long as its run-time. Whether it lasts 48, 58 or 90 minutes, the narrative always twists and clicks around as fast as a man having his neck broken by the Mountain. In the beginning I attributed the greater share of that feat of time-dilation to the show’s vast and sprawling geography – the action flitting from desert to forest to castle to cave over distances of thousands of miles, essentially telling six or more loosely interlocking or wholly separate stories within each episode; keeping the pace brisk to distract us from any mounting sense of boredom – but it quickly became clear that the thing keeping us hooked was purely and simply the sheer, breath-taking quality of every element of the production.

There’s no flitting between locations in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The whole hour (an hour for us, a day for the characters) unfolds in and around Winterfell, where the characters meet, talk, drink, lament, commiserate, drink, and drink some more. There are no battles or blood-shed, but the episode holds us utterly spellbound as it weaves together and pays off dozens of plot-lines, reunions and partnerships, sometimes calling back to feuds and fuck-ups way back in the first season.

There’s not a word or gesture out of place. Everything counts, everything builds, everything works. As always with the show, the rich dialogue springs from character, not circumstance. Some characters are clipped, some garrulous, some truthful, some false, some terse, but every word that comes out of a character’s mouth sounds and feels like it belongs there.

Emotional responses from the audience – whether they be joy, panic, relief, fear, tears or sadness – are worked for and earned. Shows like Star Trek Discovery and The Walking Dead might roll out some emotionally manipulative montage over-played by some puffed up, expository, wholly contrived speech in a bid to stir our souls, but Game of Thrones can provoke the same response with a word, a grunt, or even just a look.

If we became misty-eyed when Brienne of Tarth earned the respect and recognition of her friends and peers, felt touched yet again by Arya and the Hound’s rather gruff and grudging father-daughter act, laughed when Tormund told tales of suckling milk at a giant’s breast, and shouted ‘no’ at the screen as Arya’s final layer of innocence was stripped away, think how we’re going to feel next week when everyone starts dying. I trust you, Game of Thrones, but I’m not ready. Can’t it be summer again?

When you start to describe Barry to someone who’s never seen it, you become conscious of the molten gimmickery at the show’s core. Isn’t this just a Saturday Night Live sketch with too thin a premise to sustain a whole series? (apposite, as the show’s star and co-creator, Bill Hader, is a SNL alumnus). Barry seems like the kind of crazy idea two friends would cook up one night between bongs and back-to-back episodes of Rick and Morty.

‘So there’s this guy, right, and he’s called Barry, and he’s a cold-blooded killer, right? I mean he does it for a living. And this one time he wanders into an acting class when he’s stalking a target, and he decides he wants to become an actor, give up the killing business. But he has to kill someone in the class, that’s his target, right, but he falls in love with this acting chick who’s friends with the guy he has to kill, and he ends up betraying the Ukrainian mob, and his handler won’t let him quit, and the police are hunting him and every time he tries to walk away from killing and murder he gets pulled in ever harder and… em… [scratches head] are there any more Cheetos?’

Barry, though, is much more than just a quirky premise. It’s a smart, wicked, wickedly funny show that’s got just as much room for fatal and farcical shoot-outs and misunderstandings as it does meditations on mortality, culpability, life, love, death and fate. Grim reality goes toe to toe with macabre fantasy in a heightened world populated by characters both urgently real and grotesquely cartoonish. Instead of conflicting with each other, all of these elements coalesce into something beautiful and funny and horrifying and black. It’s a show that makes you feel. Really feel.

Season two is all about redemption, betrayal and root causes. Can Barry be redeemed after his multitude of murderous sins, the first of which – his first government-sanctioned kill – is coaxed out of him at acting class by his mentor, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). Gene uses Barry’s pain as a way to explore and over-come his own; the grief he feels at the disappearance of his girlfriend who, unbeknownst to him, was dispatched by Barry at the close of the first season. Gene, too, is trying to redeem himself. He’s reaching out to his estranged son, who Gene abandoned long ago in pursuit of his own selfish wants, needs and aspirations. Meanwhile, Barry and Gene continue to develop a deep bond, more father-and-son in nature than mentor-and-student. Given that Barry is the root cause of Gene’s pain, he may be looking for love and absolution in a particularly ill-advised place.

Barry (the show) is good at making you feel complicit in the crimes of its eponymous lead. A few episodes ago, Barry decided against carrying out a hit, and we applauded his personal growth. Then, he declined to pull the trigger on Hank (the hilarious Anthony Harrigan), even after the metro-sexual mafioso had just tried and failed to assassinate him. Again, we admired his restraint. Good for you, Barry, we said. But, in episode four, What?!, when Sally’s abusive ex shows up, we found ourselves cheering ‘KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!’

It’s a delicious irony that Barry – an angry, empty, clinically-depressed man with PTSD who’s probably murdered far in excess of 100 people – has more scope for redemption and capacity for empathy than the wannabe actors with whom he shares a class, especially his girlfriend, Sally, who is so self-absorbed that she can walk into a room that’s been riddled with bullet-holes and not even notice.

The whole show is a joy to watch, and Henry Winkler and Bill Hader continue to turn in exceptional performances. Westeros may be preparing to draw the final curtain, but I hope there’s plenty of life – and death – in Barry’s future. If the rug-pulling ending of What?! is anything to go by, I’d say the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.

Say What, Momma?

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mawOf all the things you might expect to hear your mum say to you as you walk into her house, this probably isn’t even in the top 500: ‘Are you here because of the murder?’

I had no idea what she was talking about. It was rather easier to predict what she would say next, and indeed she didn’t disappoint my expectations: ‘There’s been a murrrrdddeeeeerrrrrrr,’ she said, followed by a chuckle; a chuckle that seemed to say, ‘That’s a cracker, that one. Bet no-one’s ever said that after a murder before.’

According to my mum, a man had been stabbed to death in a local pub a mere mile from her house and had then staggered a few hundred yards down the road to his house, whereupon he promptly died. Her source for this information? Twitter: the cyberspace equivalent of a gossiping conga line stretching across a billion tenement back-fences. Fuck you, Reuters! By the time the story had been banded about the kitchen a few times, the villages of Polmont and Brightons were on lock-down, armed coppers were perched in sentry towers, people were being detained and then airlifted for extraordinary rendition in Germany, helicopters were commanding the skies like a swarm of angry wasps, and martial law had been declared. In addition, six old ladies were shot coming out of the butchers, which at least spared them the horror of the nuclear blast that erupted from ‘Auld Nessie’s Cat Charity Shop’ across the road.

My mate and I did some car-based reconnaissance. One tiny street with a pub in it was cordoned off, and two coppers were standing outside of a house. Miami Vice, motherfuckers. As we drove past the first cordon, my mate clocked the police tape and asked thoughtfully, ‘What do you think the police would do if we just ran through that tape like we’d finished a marathon?’ A tenner for anybody who does that at the next murder scene they stumble across. Twenty quid if they’re a copper (thirty if they’re the suspect). Do it in slow motion, though, yeah?

taggWe rounded the corner from the pub, past the local Spar, and clocked a heavy-set man coming out of the store wearing a fleece that said ‘NYPD’. We couldn’t help but share a giggle. ‘Jesus,’ said my mate. ‘They’re really taking this case seriously.’ Well played, NYPD guy. Well played.

Back at my mum’s house, we sat down to watch Scotland Today on STV. A murder in a sleepy hamlet in Falkirk? There’s no way that won’t feature on the news, even if it only merits a few solemn sentences. So we watched. And waited. Yadda yadda yadda underage drinking. Yadda yadda yadda kids voting. And then we were treated to approximately twelve minutes – TWELVE MINUTES of a twenty-seven minute news show covering all of Scotland – about tonight’s Celtic vs Barcelona football match. TWELVE MINUTES of interviewing Celtic’s coaches, directors and managers, where we gleaned such insights as: ‘It should be a good game,’ ‘I hope we win,’ and ‘The players just need to go out there and play the game.’ Fuck me. Then a woman in a near-empty stadium told us how exciting it was to be standing in that near-empty stadium, just knowing a football match was about to happen. Then we were treated to an ‘interview’ with some young Barcelona fans who were enjoying a couple of pre-match pints in Glasgow city centre. Shockingly, they hoped Barcelona would win, but whatever happened they thought it should be a good game, and urged the players to just get out there and play the game. They were then asked to sing a typical Barcelona terrace song – in Spanish obviously – which I can only hope was about shagging the bodies of their dead foes.

What a coincidence that STV had the broadcast rights to the same football match it plugged for twelve minutes during its own fucking news programme.

I get that it’s a Champions’ League match, and that the event has great cultural significance and entertainment value, but surely if the story’s featured in THE FUCKING NEWS it should be covered thusly: ‘Celtic are playing Barcelona at home tonight.’ What more is there to say? SPORT is not NEWS! Was there nothing else of any significance happening elsewhere in the country? No bribery, corruption, controversial legislation, or, oh I don’t know… MURDER??

dugWell, yes, there was something better than all of that, actually (but not as good as football, obviously). Some fat guy with long hair was so angry about tourists rubbing the nose of Edinburgh’s Greyfriars’ Bobby statue  that he went on TV to complain about it. They captioned him as a ‘Campaigner’. A campaigner for what? A blacker nose on a pretend dog? Bono’ll be in touch soon, my man.

The fat guy went on to tell us that his mate’s been putting shoe polish on the dog’s nose to dispense some rough justice to the tourists. Tourists? TERRORISTS more like! (impulse to write ‘ruff’ instead of ‘rough’ resisted)

Here’s a genuine quote from that news story:

‘It’s amazing how the tourists feel when they come away with a slightly grubby, waxy hand after doing something they shouldn’t be doing.’

So said the fat man, with a proud, steely look in his eyes as if he’d just participated in the vigilante murder of a child killer – instead of what he’d actually done, which was to over-see the repainting of a statue’s nose. Pulitzer’s all round.

(another tenner’s going spare for anyone who paints a big cock on Greyfriar’s Bobby)

And still no murder. Does nobody give a shit? Why is this not deemed important enough to share news space with a rubbed statue? So we switched to Reporting Scotland on BBC1. The headline? The murder rate in Scotland has dropped by 32 per cent. What? Not only was there nothing about the murder, BBC1 was actually reporting the absence of murders (Admittedly, if the news editor had already decided to lead with a story about how there’s no murder in Scotland  – possibly at the behest of the police and government – then they wouldn’t allow a pesky little thing like a fresh murder to come along and waste the composition of the news bulletin)

Now I’m not even sure if there’s been a murder at all. It’s funny how the rumour mill goes into meltdown when something horrid happens on your doorstep. Anyway, a man has died, and it’s a horrible tragedy, whatever the circumstances. Of that I’m sure, at least. I just thought the news – the Scottish news at least – would tell us more about this, and rather less about a man getting angry about a statue.

I’m off to not watch the football.

Oh, For Fucked Snake…

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A true account of snakes and death.

The road where it all happened...

George Orwell once wrote a short, heart-wrenching essay about the death of an elephant. This won’t be like that. And it won’t be as exciting as ‘Snakes on a Plane’. This is ‘One Snake on a Road’, and I don’t think Samuel L Jackson would’ve starred in that movie:

‘Get this motherfucking snake off this motherfucking road.’

‘OK, Samuel, that’s me shifted it.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Anything else I can help you with?’

‘No, that’s fine. It was just the snake I was concerned about.’

‘Cool. You going to be OK now?’

‘Yeah. So long as there aren’t any motherfucking toads in that motherfucking grass.’

I was walking down the side of a rural road in Turkey with my girlfriend when two guys zoomed past us on reasonably shit-looking mopeds. I say zoomed. Imagine the noise of a coin-operated hair-dryer from a cheap motel passing you at the speed of evolution. One of the guys, who was rather fat – a reasonably irrelevant observation, but I just wanted you to be able to picture him; he had a moustache too, if that helps – made a sort of ‘Ahhhh-ooooop’ noise as he realised he’d ran over something. It was the noise of guilt, but a half-assed guilt. After all, he quickly discovered, he’d merely run over a snake. It’s not like it was a mouse or a puppy. ‘Fuck snakes,’ his ooooop seemed to say, ‘I actually found its maiming quite funny.’ If any crippling was to have its own pompy, trumpet-based theme-tune, then this would be the one. 

The snake after its moped incident. Not a happy snake.

We walked to the middle of the road to check how much damage had been done to the poor fella. He was a thick, long and black snake, his head, tail and body immobile. I got down on my haunches to look deep into his tiny snake eyes. They were red-rimmed and staring. His little forked tongue, still and silent, was poking out from his open jaws. Blotches of blood and bits of brain stained the concrete. I prodded his body with a stick I found near-by and watched as his length pathetically swished, curled and twitched from side to side; not knowing whether his movements were caused by some posthumous reflex, or indicative of a last-ditch fight for life. Whichever way I looked at it: that snake was fucked. 

The ideal method of reptile euthanasia.

I used the stick to push it to the grass at the side of the road. So what to do next? I’d never put a creature out of its misery before. I understood the noble inevitability behind the act of animal euthanasia in cases of extreme injury and illness, but always hoped I’d never have to administer it. Especially since this was no cosy vets’ surgery with a sterile needle and a panpipes’ tape. I was at the side of a Turkish road with a snake and a bunch of rocks.

So I picked one up. It was slightly bigger than the palm of my hand, and felt hot from the sun. It wasn’t terribly heavy, but heavy enough to turn a snake’s head into bloody mashed potato. Was I really going to do this?

‘Maybe it’ll get better and be able to slither away itself,’ worried my girlfriend. ‘Or grow a new head or something.’

Deep down, we both knew that this snake wasn’t going to dust itself off and belly into a hedge to gub a shrew. It had chomped its last rodent, terrified its last sandal-wearer. Still, the thought of pulverising this wounded creature made me feel uneasy, despite the mercy aspect.

‘You’re going to kill a snake?’ my girlfriend asked.

‘I think I’m going to kill a snake,’ I replied. 

An old Turkish peasant woman. Not the one I met, in fact this looks nothing like her. She was fatter and less buckled looking.

At that moment an old Muslim woman – head covered, and dressed in peasant apparel – approached us on her way up the road. She didn’t speak any English, but I decided to cross the language barrier by way of mime. I pointed to the snake’s unmoving body, making sure she noted its injury. Then I pointed to the spot on the road from whence I’d flicked it, making sure she saw the blood. I then mimed a man on a motorbike running over a snake. This was the strangest game of charades I’d ever played (sounds like ‘ooooooooop’). I showed her the rock in my hand, and then mimed me bashing in the snake’s head, but made sure to keep a sad expression on my face to let her know that I wasn’t relishing the prospect. After every mini-mime along the way of the long dramatisation of my intended snake-kill she shrugged her shoulders and nodded, a look of nonchalance on her leathery old face. She finally walked off, still nodding and shrugging, leaving me feeling vindicated. After all, this woman was as close to a resident expert on snakes I was likely to find. And, being Muslim, of course she was going to be supportive of a good stoning. The decision was made. I was going to kill that motherfucking snake. 

The snake's stomping (or slithering) ground.

Fine in theory, but I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t even like squashing spiders, hideous nether-beasts though they are. I clenched the rock in my hand, felt its hardness dig into the base of my fingers. I imagined what it would feel like to drive this object through living flesh, but couldn’t, having no frame of reference with which to compare. Maybe it was just resting. Maybe it was in shock, collecting its thoughts, watching its little snake life flashing before its blood-darkened eyes, waiting, just waiting, for some spark, some scintilla of strength to carry it swishing and bobbing back to the safety of its home in the long, lulling lengths of grass and swaying reeds; back to the snakestead; back to its little snake babies, and its anxious snake wife, who’d been so worried about her husband’s absence that she hadn’t even prepared his daily dinner of half-regurgitated rat, and was instead hissing a soft, sussurating lullaby to all the little baby snakes as they cried and cried and cried and cried for their SPLATT! THUD!! BIFF!! KERSPLURGE!!

Like 60’s Batman, but with more snake-blood. 

I couldn't find a picture of a smashed snake, so I chose this one of a bludgeoned woman instead.

By the time I knew what was happening I’d hammered its head about six times with the rock. Then I placed the rock on top of what was left of its skull and stomped down about another six times. Goo was on the roadside, and blood speckled my fingers. My girlfriend said I looked like a maniac. I just wanted it to be dead – medically and incontrovertibly dead – to deliver it from any further agony. The aim was to euthanise the snake, not subject it to a Guantanamo Bay-style shit-kicking.

Mission accomplished: it was dead. It now looked less like a formerly-living creature, and more like the end of a flex of cord that someone had dipped in tomato sauce. And the act of killing it had felt no more unpleasant than slamming a paperweight into a block of warm butter. Those are the kinds of sentences that serial killers smuggle out of prison when they’re writing their memoirs. ‘It all started with the snake. From there, hitch-hikers were easy…’

A German couple walking down the road saw me do it. I approached them, bloodied-rock in hand, shouting: ‘I’m not a snake murderer!’ and then attempted to explain my actions to them. They didn’t speak very good English, so I’m not sure what impression of British people I left them with.

A little farther along the road my girlfriend and I encountered a stray dog, hobbling and panting in the heat.

‘Poor beast,’ I said. ‘Looks on its last legs.’

She looked at me and smiled, ‘You’re not going to bash its head in with a rock, too, are you?’

‘No,’ I laughed. ‘No, of course not, no. Certainly not…’

‘no…’

‘…at least…’

It was a very poorly dog.

‘…I don’t think so…’