I would like to crawl out from under this
It is somehow October and so, very well, I will put on a hoodie. But I refuse to surrender just yet to the tyranny pants. This is New England after all and all we have is our pride.
Some quick business up top. The date for my We Had It Coming reading in Cambridge is going to be Saturday November 8 at The Sinclair in Harvard Square. Joining me will be the great Dave Wedge, Eoin Higgins, Evan Greer and Bill Shaner and maybe a couple others. Nice and early by the way from 4-6 pm.
The New York City date is Wednesday November 12 at the Francis Kite Club/OR Books space on Ave. C at 6 pm. On that one I have Spencer Ackerman, Kylie Cheung, Grace Robbins-Sommerville and Edward Ongweso Jr. Hope you can come out.
Everything fucking sucks but the Red Sox beat the Yankees last night and the Patriots won over the weekend and if reading that sentence doesn't piss you off you might enjoy listening to me and Josh Gondelman talk about being the only good Boston sports fans in the world on the Thrill of Defeat podcast. It's a real fun one for anyone to be honest. We had a lot of laughs.
I don't know that I am fully Geese-pilled quite yet like everyone else seems to be. Christopher Harris is though and he wrote about the New York band's wild and singular new album Getting Killed for Hell World this week.
Luke O’Neil
In “Taxes,” he admits, “I should burn in hell,” but immediately contrasts his sinfulness with his current circumstances, which belong to all of us: “But I don’t deserve this. Nobody deserves this.” And the title track diagnoses: “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life.” None of this comes across as doomerism. It’s more like gallows humor. Somehow the combination of wild loose motley song structures and un-bitter irony captures Our Current Moment of helpless stupidity better than any music I’ve heard during Trump 2. Getting Killed is a manic mess, and so is the world.
Also today we have another banger from Sean T. Collins on the extremely stupid, fascist-sexy (?) and illustrative of ~~how things are now~~ series The Hunting Wives.
Luke O’Neil
The libidinal appeal of fascism is a perversely powerful motivator. The thrill of exerting brute force against the weak is formidable and irresistible enough for some people — a sort of death’s-head hedonism that grants its practitioners a nigh-orgasmic sense of autonomy not through giving or receiving physical pleasure, but through inflicting physical pain. Seen in this light, fascism is the ultimate form of liberation. It sets you free not, or not only, from propriety, but from our shared humanity itself.
... How do you sexualize a problem like MAGA, then? In part, you follow in the footsteps of the past and stack your cast with dimes is what you do, as discussed above. But the real secret is locating the animating impulse behind contemporary fascist sexuality: Hedonism for me, puritanism for thee.
I was going to make both of those paid-only pieces but I am sick of trying to finesse people into paying for good writing. Please do it if you enjoy what you read here. And if you have a million bucks please give it to me so I can start a magazine. I love editing and paying good people to write about whatever they are interested in.
I was very moved to see so many people remembering Kaleb Horton – who left us last week – so fondly over the past few days. I must have read hundreds of posts from friends and fans sharing his work and hundreds more comments from others saying they were saddened to have never read him before but grateful that they were doing so now. There were some lovely eulogies published on friends’ and colleagues’ newsletters like this one and this one and this one by Matt Pearce –who called him “the last magazine writer” – and this one I really liked by Alex Press. She wrote:
Like a character from an earlier time, too cool for today. As it turns out, that was true: he couldn’t make a living at writing, not in a world where being a genius makes you unemployable. I hadn’t realized just how much trouble he was having until I read Luke’s piece. Plenty of great writers have to do other work, that’s not news, but talking with friends over the weekend, everyone sounded mystified by it. People won’t pay this guy to write? He should’ve been a household name, but the world doesn’t run on “should.” “The last magazine writer” indeed: might as well call it and write an obituary for writing itself instead. He said he wanted to write a novel “about the dust bowl that takes place over the duration of a man’s life and begins in Oklahoma and ends in Bakersfield and opens and closes with the line ‘can you swing a hammer?’” Somebody should’ve strapped him to a chair and covered his room and board until it was done.
What I haven’t seen thus far are any obituaries in any “real” magazines or news sites. I don’t know could be they’re still working on them. Being edited as we speak. But it occurred to me that that’s another grim irony in all of this. One last kick in the balls for us under- or unemployed writers. That there are a scant few places in business anymore to even pitch a story about a writer that isn’t already famous. Almost nowhere left that will let us write, simply, here: look at this beautiful thing I’ve found. This thing I want you to know about too.
No shortage of writing every fucking day about our worst people however. Our worst living person. Most often lying or euphemizing. Sanding down the edges of his singular cruelty. And there is a lot to write about this week. I don’t think I want to do it right now personally. I am ready for another topic to emerge. I would like to crawl out from under this.
Rusty at Today In Tabs captured yesterday's dire and ominous spectacle well I thought.
Earlier today, America’s Drunken Stepdad of War Pete Hegseth gathered all the top leadership of the U.S. military to tell them no more Blacks, gay stuff, or beardos will be allowed from now on, not in his America’s Department of Warfighting Lethality. Not even in the Navy, perhaps.
...
“Lethality is our calling card,” said Hegseth, “and victory our only acceptable end state.” Big talk for the leader of a military that hasn’t won a war in 80 years. After forty-five solid minutes dropping blood-and-guts Reichsparteitag applause lines into a dead silence, the visibly dehydrated Hegseth was left licking his lips desperately between each word, the only recourse for a man who believes that drinking water is for queers. After explaining that he plans to fire every woman and minority in the U.S. military as well as any “fat generals” he might find, Hegseth rallied the rest of the troops by recommending that if they don’t like doing war crimes they should quit. He closed his remarks to a universal lack of acclaim followed by the most polite smattering of applause imaginable, then walked confidently offstage to beat a wife.
Hegseth was followed by Donald Trump who came on to tell the assembled military leadership to get ready to invade America.
Everything is so fucking stupid and so fucking funny and so fucking scary all at once. I guess there's a reason why sad clowns feature so heavily in the history of horror. Stabbing and laughing and crying and stabbing and laughing and crying.
Here's Hamilton Nolan today on the military.
Hamilton Nolan
It is common for people in the military to point out that they took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and to imply that their allegiance to that oath would prevent them from carrying out truly unjust orders. I can’t help but notice that the point at which this moral duty to stop obeying orders kicks in appears to recede forever into the future. We, the citizens, are assured that there exists some ill-defined moment at which the personal moral code of military soldiers and officers will kick in and stop an out-of-control Commander in Chief from using the military for purposes of tyranny.
Well? The tyrant is here. Talk is cheap. This theoretical guardrail of our democracy would be much more comforting if it were ever possible to see it produce some tangible action.
Hold on I just got an email. It was my physical therapist telling me her rates are going up. I haven’t been in a couple weeks because what’s the point? I’ve been in so much pain for so many months now. I got stoned the other night and was staring at my forearm contemplating chopping it off at the elbow. Not really but you understand me. Then after looking so intently I realized that that’s the side with the much better tattoos. I can’t afford to squander that investment. Not with what they’re charging for physical therapy these days.
I'm so sick of hurting and being hurt all the time. All of the meanings of that.
Other times I find it hard to write about what's going on because I am no longer in possession of my right to free speech. Probably never really was.
Here's a quick unrelated piece from the book.
I do care about writing so much though. Maybe the only thing I truly care about right now. I guess I have some hope that the book will resonate with people. That people will – like you all so often tell me – find it depressing, yes, but also strangely hopeful. A reminder that our humanity is worth holding onto.
Who cares. Let's move on.
I’m getting killed by a pretty good life
by Christopher Harris
In Casablanca, Victor Laszlo drowns out a Nazi anthem with a stirring tavern rendition of “La Marseillaise.” God, he’s so fucking serious. His right arm keeps furious time and his eyes shimmer at Ingrid Bergman like he’s just now this exact moment winning the war. Of course it’s 1941 and 50 million more people must be starved and slaughtered before actual victory arrives for…um…it says here…the good guys? Nevertheless, Laszlo’s overweening expression will be familiar to anyone who’s ever rebuked fascism with a devastating social media post. That’ll learn ’em.
I’m tempted to say fuck protest music. A thousand Chilean guitarists play “El Derecho De Vivir En Paz” in the streets of Santiago. Folks in Hong Kong belt out “Do You Hear The People Sing” from Le Miz so frequently the Chinese government blocks it from streaming services. What changes? Pete Seeger and Sam Cooke and Joan Baez. Woody Guthrie singing “All You Fascists Bound To Lose.” But are they? What goddamn good, when a government makes evil sport of destroying lives? Nowadays “protest music” is a TikTok star putting out a call for civility 24 literal hours after Charlie Kirk’s murder. (“No one should get killed / No blood should be spilled / Charlie shouldn’t have died.”) Nowadays you and I quip and whine on an oligarch’s microblog website, or listen to our favorite bands’ lyrical discontents on a different oligarch’s musician-starvation machine. We’re all Victor Laszlo’s furious right arm, beating vehemently, touching nothing.
In depraved times, then, maybe best merely to reflect the madness.
Geese’s new album called Getting Killed, released Friday, isn’t a protest and it sure isn’t serious. A dervish of funk beats and time changes and lovely melodies and yelling, Getting Killed was recorded in ten days in Los Angeles, where I live, during the most recent wildfires. Fires that reminded us just how tenuous all of our American lives really are. Nearly everyone reading this is one bad break away from some variety of ruin. Health insurance won’t save you. Cops won’t save you. Religion might give you some pretty words, but as this crazy Geese album’s closing track “Long Island City Here I Come” would have it:
I told poor Joan
You’ve been talking to You-Know-Who
And if you can talk to Him, you can talk to me, too
And Joan of Arc, she warned
The Lord has a lot of friends
In the end
He’ll probably forget he’s met you before
Or as lead singer Cameron Winter says in a different song: “Doctor, heal yourself.”
It’s up to us.
This album is great and it’s unhinged. It sounds loose and jammy, with ass-shaking grooves and random trumpet and saxophone bleats. It can verge on noise-jazz then immediately give you a pure drop of sunshine like the second half of “Taxes,” which would be the radio hit if radio still existed. Sometimes there are arena-style drums and the big riffs rock music is supposed to have, and sometimes there’s a sample of a Ukrainian choir. Winter has a giant tenor that can hold a note when he wants but he’s a truly strange singer, elongating words where you wouldn’t expect, warbling like a lounge lizard at odd moments, and withholding meaning as you wait for the previous vowel sound to resolve into the next stanza, which often turns out hilarious. I should say that this isn’t usually necessarily my thing! I’m not a freak for experimental stuff. I mean, listen, it’s still rock music, it’s not damn Javanese gamelan. But as musicians, the members of Geese are definitely toying with conventions. “100 Horses” is funk that insists “all people must go dancing / out on the dance floors,” but then seems to slow down just enough in the middle to make it undanceable. On “Half Real,” they’re doing the Geese version of a ballad but refuse climactic catharsis. “Bow Down” is jazz-rock until it isn’t, and then the handclaps start up, and it is again. I don’t know, man.
And I haven’t even gotten to the lyrics. Geese aren’t trying to solve shit. They aren’t really directly addressing shit. Often Winter just seems to be saying whatever comes into his mind in the moment, and it’s funny. “Yeah there’s a horse on my back / And I may be stomped flat / But my loneliness is gone.” Okay, buddy! Also, though, in the middle of the opener “Trinidad,” which starts out with Winter’s falsetto sounding a little like Thom Yorke, suddenly the chorus comes and he repeatedly shouts, “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!”
In “Half Real,” he sings:
I’ve got half a mind
To just pay for the lobotomy
And tell ’em, Get rid of the bad times
And get rid of the good times, too
In “Taxes,” he admits, “I should burn in hell,” but immediately contrasts his sinfulness with his current circumstances, which belong to all of us: “But I don’t deserve this. Nobody deserves this.” And the title track diagnoses: “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life.” None of this comes across as doomerism. It’s more like gallows humor. Somehow the combination of wild loose motley song structures and un-bitter irony captures Our Current Moment of helpless stupidity better than any music I’ve heard during Trump 2. Getting Killed is a manic mess, and so is the world.
I love this record. I’m also fascinated by its reception. Once upon a time, I wrote a novel about a rock band, one theme of which was the death of The Rock Band. My characters came along too late to experience the spoils of “the business” as they used to exist…and this was set in 2016! The real-life musicians I followed around back then couldn’t understand why the dreams of stardom—or at least financial solvency—that seemed so possible a few years before now eluded them and most everyone they knew, and obviously the rock biz has only gotten bleaker and more fragmented since then. There probably is no zeitgeist anymore, but if there is, new rock songs aren’t in it. I got an advance of Getting Killed a couple weeks ago and it sounded big and weird and to the extent I “get” it now, it took a bunch of listens. It wasn’t easy. It didn’t sound like a thing that would break through.
But it kind of has? Geese got a huge writeup in GQ, a 9.0 Pitchfork review, a thinkpiece in The Atlantic (okay, it’s just a review, but isn’t everything in The Atlantic a thinkpiece?), and more ecstatic appraisals than you can shake a stick at. If something as pedestrian as a rock band can feel ubiquitous in 2025, last week Geese felt kind of ubiquitous. They are kids. (Sorry. If you were born in the 2000s, you’re young enough to be my children.) On their label debut, Projector, recorded while they were still in high school, they sounded like they wanted to be the biggest band in the world, which is to say like a Strokes knockoff. The 2023 follow-up, 3D Country, was a step up because now they were doing Led Zeppelin rip-offs, too.
Okay, that’s not fair…once I internalized Getting Killed, going back and re-experiencing 3D Country reveals proto-weirdness that didn’t stick with me a couple years ago. But Getting Killed feels like the first time Geese isn’t trying to directly please us with their influences and thereby become the 2020s version of huge. And thus, through laws of irony, they are, in fact, becoming the 2020s version of huge.
I understand part of it. For instance, I understand—from afar, as my own generational footprints get eroded by the tide—why a certain kind of Zoomer would be ready not for sermons, not for bubblegum, but rather for something desperate and funny. In his warbly way, Winter acknowledges, “There is only dance music in times of war,” which means he knows he’s in a time of war. And later he also sings:
Maria cried out to me,
You can either leave
Or you can stop playing that cowbell with your gun
The kids this country has been hurting their entire lives can use someone who understands their impotent anger and defense mechanisms a lot more than they can use an old dude striking up the national anthem.
But something’s also weird about Getting Killed’s reception. The reviews I linked to above include outlets you’d expect, like Consequence Of Sound and Stereogum. Heck, it even makes sense The Guardian would clock this record’s pain management via laughing gas. But The Wall Street Journal? (They do say, “Mr. Winter’s vocal approach is highly idiosyncratic and not for everybody,” which is probably true most of all for readers of The Wall Street Journal.) And the Financial Times, whose album reviews just before Geese were for esoteric jazz supergroup Trio Of Bloom and a recapitulation of the 1956 musical My Fair Lady? Well, these aren’t the folks you’d think would seek the pulse of kids who are exhausted, kids who are disappointed, kids who don’t believe in deliverance…at least not the kind of deliverance that comes via business or government.
Which means what? That this “most 2025” album of 2025 is prodding something real and deep that even the suits can feel? That it’s hard to control a demographic who looks at our current self-inflicted disasters and can only shrug and laugh? And so maybe it’s also a low-risk gambit? Give the young wackjobs in Geese a little more exposure, an extra taste of the good stuff. After all, capital subsumes all critiques into itself, right? Fill the Geese kids up with a sense of their own importance, and then maybe next time they’ll start singing strident prescriptions for a lost world after all. Nobody listens to those.
Chris Harris has an MFA from UMass and is the author of four novels. He also spent eight years at ESPN, and currently covers the NFL at HarrisFootball.com. Find him on Bluesky: @harrisfootball.com
Heil If You’re Horny!
by Sean T. Collins
“If you run [for governor], everything changes. You really want people looking at the way you have fun? The way we have fun?”
“Oh, hell, people don’t care about that anymore. They don’t want a Boy Scout, they want a man!”
—from The Hunting Wives
The libidinal appeal of fascism is a perversely powerful motivator. The thrill of exerting brute force against the weak is formidable and irresistible enough for some people — a sort of death’s-head hedonism that grants its practitioners a nigh-orgasmic sense of autonomy not through giving or receiving physical pleasure, but through inflicting physical pain. Seen in this light, fascism is the ultimate form of liberation. It sets you free not, or not only, from propriety, but from our shared humanity itself.
Artists, however, have long taken “the libidinal appeal of fascism” more literally. Beginning in the 1970s, an entire cycle of art films that eroticized agents of the Axis powers — for varying purposes and to varying ends — flourished, made largely by filmmakers from those countries themselves.
Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties shows an Italian tough guy (Giancarlo Giannini) whose cavalier assumptions about his own machismo are destroyed by the war, and by a sexually predatory female concentration camp guard (Shirley Stoler) who assaults him after he is incarcerated for desertion. Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence uses the unstated sexual obsession of a Japanese officer (Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto) with a British prisoner of war (David Bowie) to show how racist assumptions about the otherized enemy are often shot through with a desire so intense it is transmuted into hatred.
Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter depicts the rekindling of a sexual relationship between an SS officer (Dirk Bogarde) and the much younger concentration camp prisoner (Charlotte Rampling) he repeatedly raped until she warmed to him, and he to her. It explores the way we derive pleasure from our worst traumas, and how we excuse our own crimes by sheltering them under love’s penumbra. Most infamously of all, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, by the martyred director Pier Paolo Pasolini, reduces fascism’s entire political program to the sexual torture of teenagers by a quartet of middle-aged grotesques. Even beyond the metaphor, one need look no further than Jeffrey Epstein’s guest lists or Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees to understand the truth behind Pasolini’s scatalogical metaphor.
I promise you, from the bottom of my heart, that The Hunting Wives isn’t doing anything nearly this interesting. Adapted by Rebecca Cutter from the novel by May Cobb, this Netflix soap hit the top of the streamer’s opaque Top 10 list this summer and got a lot of people, critics included, buzzing happily about their new guilty pleasure.
The show stars Brittany Snow as Sophie O’Neil, a Boston (Cambridge, actually, she specifies) native who moves to Texas when her architect husband (Evan Jonigkeit) lands a job with right-wing oil baron Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney). Sophie, who is recovering from the trauma of killing someone while driving drunk — poor her, right? — quickly falls for Margo (Malin Åkerman), Jed’s beautiful and flirtatious wife.
As Sophie ingratiates herself with her new crush and the show’s eponymous circle of gun-totin’, God-fearin’, beer-sluggin’, affair-havin’ girlfriends, Sophie is drawn into the murder of a teenage girl similarly caught up in the Hunting Wives’ psychosexual shenanigans. Twists, turns, and topless scenes galore ensue.
The show is not without its charms; sex scenes between Malin Åkerman and Brittany Snow are foremost among them if you’re at all oriented in that direction. Even if you’re not, there’s Brad (George Ferrier), Margo’s 18-year-old boytoy; or Sheriff Jonny (Branton Boxed), the hulking, bearded lawman who enjoys taking it up the ass from his wife Callie (Jamie Ray Newman), Margo’s best friend and secret girlfriend; or Jed (hunk of long standing Mulroney), who does the whole Big Daddy thing.
The Hunting Wives is a deeply stupid show, made for stupid people, the kind who need a character to say “Signal? What are you sending encrypted messages for?” to make sure everyone out there in TV Land knows what Signal is. It’s a show in which a character does donuts in a parking lot while yelling “Woo! We’re doin’ donuts!” It’s Second Screen City, in other words.
Nevertheless, it provides an instructive example, if we are to answer a question that’s haunted me as a critic since Trump’s openly fascist third election campaign began: What’s sexy about these disgusting motherfuckers?
Seriously. The observation At least the Nazis dressed well has passed back and forth from offensive to banal many times, but the appeal of Dirk Bogarde in his full Hugo Boss kit, or Charlotte Rampling out of it, is clear enough. Ditto the contest of wills between world-historically good-looking art-rock icons Bowie and Sakamoto. I may be straight, but I’m only human, and as Gang of Four sang, I love a man in uniform.
The uniform adopted by today’s Nazis, by contrast, is sartorially risible. They wear camo in the middle of city streets in broad daylight. They hide their identities with the sunglasses you see the dads of the shittiest kids in your kid’s grade wearing. They compensate for a lack of physical fitness one usually associates with television critics by wearing skull-emblazoned neck gaiters, impairing their breathing as they unsuccessfully chase fleeing delivery guys.
Then look at the leadership. Nazi upper echelons have always been a haven for the most chinless Innsmouth-looking degenerates ever to claim to be a master race, this is true. To a man and woman, however, Trump and his reichsministers look like one of three things: octogenarian stroke victims, rejected Archer characters, or a Garbage Pail Kid named “Brain-Worm BOBBY.” Just when you think you’ve seen the limit of fascist hideousness, along come some real innovators in the space.
How do you sexualize a problem like MAGA, then? In part, you follow in the footsteps of the past and stack your cast with dimes is what you do, as discussed above. But the real secret is locating the animating impulse behind contemporary fascist sexuality: Hedonism for me, puritanism for thee.
Jed and Margo enjoy a life of unimaginable luxury and splendor compared to the vast majority of people in the history of the planet. As an oil magnate and Republican politician, Jed is determined to deny that luxury and splendor to as many other people as possible through a combination of economically and ecologically ruinous policies. You know, the usual.
But even as he’s fearmongering about immigrants — “personas malas,” as he puts it — and going to a megachurch and sharing the rest of the Texas’ characters constant, reflexive vitriol toward liberals and liberal policies, especially abortion, he’s living the life of an ancient sybarite. His wife bids him a fond goodnight while two escorts jerk him off in their jacuzzi. They share reports of their interests and conquests. The deal isn’t a fair one, of course — Jed is free to have sex with as many women as he wants; Margo is also free to have sex with as many women as he wants — but it’s substantially better than anything they’re willing to cut for anyone else in the state or the country.
Margo’s conquests range beyond the terms of the arrangement, however. For one thing, she has a passionate affair with Callie, unbeknownst to her husband, a gubernatorial candidate, and Callie’s husband, a sheriff with ambitions to be “the next Joe Arpaio.” (He acts like any other cop on TV, though; it’s a poorly written show.) Catching feelings, or encouraging others to catch them, is not how this is supposed to work.
For another, she’s fucking Brad, the son of Margo’s friend Jill (Katie Lowes) and her husband, the megachurch pastor. As with Callie, she’s shitting where she eats. She’s also fucking a man, which is expressly forbidden. Moreover, though this is never stated outright, in no way does it seem this relationship began with Brad’s 18th birthday.
This kind of double standard is endemic, even intrinsic, in these characters. The loose gun laws they institute, which enable them to concealed-carry and go on boar hunts for the ‘Gram, enable shootings and murders in their hometown that they race to blame on immigrants. As they conspicuously consume the fruits of Jed’s fossil-fuel labors, power outages plunge their town into darkness. They gasp with horror over the concept of abortion, a medical procedure they are more than happy to sneak off to have themselves when need be. They live lives of pornographic privilege.
Here, I think, we’ve located the core of Erotic MAGA: Not merely “if you’ve got it, flaunt it,” but “if you’ve got it and they don’t, flaunt it.” We see every day how fascism gives its adherents a license to steal, to kill, to behave like abominable children. Why wouldn’t it also give them permission to act like oversexed teenagers even as they move to rigidly police everyone’s sexuality? Why wouldn’t it allow them to commit the kind of sex crimes they luridly invent and pin on people they want to punish?
In reality, this has been borne out time and again. Virtually the entire MAGA leadership consists of legendary philanderers, serial sex pests, and bizarre messianic tech perverts, with an adjudicated rapist at the top. Elon Musk allegedly got a shiner from Stephen Miller for fucking his wife. Corey Lewandowski and Kristi Noem are an item. Laura Loomer is the Gatekeeper to Trump’s decrepit, senescent Keymaster.
MAGA politicians and pundits are famously pornbrained, from Jordan Peterson crying over milking fetish videos he believed were real CCP facilities to that “Nude Africa/Black Hitler” freak. Pedocon theory has been lab-tested and peer-reviewed. They are willing to burn the country to the fucking ground to block the release of the goddamn Epstein files! That’s a real thing that’s happening!
This is what Jed’s getting at in the quote that opens this essay, when he says right-wing voters no longer want do-gooders. As Matt Christman once wisely noted, the conservative trajectory is encapsulated in how they went from depicting Obama as the Joker as a pejorative to depicting Trump as the joker as a compliment.The Hunting Wives was written and takes place prior to the advent of Trump II, and the stakes are accordingly lower.
The instincts animating Margo and Jed, Callie and Sheriff Jonny, and their clique, however, are entirely consonant with President Pedophile and his coterie of ghouls. Fascism is, at root, a politics of lies; nothing is true, everything is permitted. You get to enjoy whatever you want, whenever you want, no matter what people say, and you can punish anyone who disagrees, and the hypocrisy of it all doesn’t even muss your perfect hair.
As Margo memorably puts it to Sophie:
“I’ll tell you my deal: I believe in doing whatever the fuck I want. Because what else is there? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love God, and I love my husband. But in this life, what else is there, really?”
Despite its often nonsensical plotting and first-draft dialogue, The Hunting Wives is surprisingly provocative with this understanding of MAGA in mind. In the hands of more adept filmmakers, a Trumpian fantasy of total freedom at the expense of others’ submission could be made both compelling and revolting. But now, at least, I think I get how the art filmmakers of the future will depict the libidinal appeal of American fascism: a high heel, jammed into a human mouth, forever.
Sean T. Collins is a critic who has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone,Vulture, Decider, Pitchfork, and others. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House, published by Mutual Skies in 2021. Together, Sean and Julia Gfrörer are the co-editors of Mirror Mirror II, an anthology of horror and erotic comics and art, published by 2dcloud in 2017. They live with their children on Long Island.
He previously wrote for Hell World on Sinners, Fargo, The Curse and the 2024 election; Sexy Beast, vampires and class warfare; Godzilla Minus One and the trauma of war; and The Curse, The Zone of Interest and Skinamarink.