Blood Jump #13: Speed Run
An abbreviated issue featuring The Iron Claw, boygenius, and Nabokov's Speak, Memory.
Blood Jump is off to a slow start this year… but for good reason! I’m working on a longer piece for an external publication that’s demanding the better part of my writing and viewing hours. I’m very excited about it and will share more as soon as I can. In the meantime, I’m hesitant to let this humble little rag gather too much dust, so I’m checking in with an abbreviated lightning round of movies, books, and music. Think of this as Blood Jump’s Quibi, but without funding from a table of coked-out fintech veneers. Or funding from anyone. There’s a good chance I’ll experiment with this newsletter’s form more and more as I get the ball rolling with further projects, so please do reach out if this iteration is or isn’t working for you. We’ll all get through it together.
Chicago has been brutally cold. To say nothing of the weather’s effect on our city’s migrant crisis and existing unhoused population, subzero temps and midwinter’s eternal gray can be kick in the chest to one’s mental health. Take care of yourself and the people you love.
This is a short issue, so we’ll dive right in. This week’s Blood Jump takes pop-shots at The Iron Claw, boygenius, and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Let’s begin.
Anatomy of an exposition
There are a lot of good reasons to admire The Iron Claw, a movie that devastates not only through the Von Erich family’s impossible pain but for the way the film sees love thread through its tragic topsoil. Zach Efron hits a career best, The Bear takes the belt for the reigning champ of hot ugly guys (eat it, Davidson), and director Sean Durkin somehow manages to keep a story with so much untimely death they had to cut a whole Von Erich brother from the script from ever feeling like a punishment. One of Iron Claw’s most impressive moments, though, comes within its opening act.
Kevin Von Erich and Pam Adkisson’s (Efron and Lily James) meet cute is a Tesla coil of exposition. It’s an effective scene even on its surface: Pam is the couple’s emotional driver, and a lesser movie might have stuck Kevin as meathead non grata, a friendly doofus who aw-shucks’s his way into a wife and two kids in between pounding the mat. But Kevin unfurls a vulnerability as believable as it is surprising, matching Pam’s interest toward his family and brothers with his own enthusiasm for her career and dreams. Kevin and Pam take shape for both the viewer and each other in perfect time, and their connection reaches a harmony that lets their date crackle—but the scene’s real muscle is under the hood.
Pam’s function here is as audience surrogate; a first date is a good Trojan horse for exposition, and her probing about Kevin’s family and ambition helps to cut the tedium of Big Biopic’s traditional first act. But The Iron Claw has more at stake: Why is a movie about professional wrestling—i.e., a fictional document of a “fake” sport—worth your time? Pam asks just as much, and Kevin’s response takes the cadence of a business card, one he’s rehearsed and can distribute at the ready. Pro wrestling carries the same stakes as any other career, he explains. If you perform well enough, you’re recognized; if you’re recognized enough, you’re promoted (in this case, a belt). If Kevin is annoyed with Pam’s question, though, Efron lets the ice melt before he can finish his spiel and even relaxes enough to appreciate Pam’s curiosity. The scene takes equal nuance in its introduction of the Von Erich “curse.” When Pam labels Kevin’s affection for his family as “oldest brother syndrome,” Kevin is forced to correct her: he had an older brother who died when he was six, an accident that queues up in a great series of tragedies that plagues the family.
There is an economist’s efficiency to Kevin and Pam’s date, one that renders every line of dialogue an opportunity for table-setting without hanging weight from the relationship’s budding agency. May every biopic that follows The Iron Claw take such care.
Death to moody covers
A newsletter about media that “makes your blood jump” inherently skews positive. But sometimes a piece of art makes your blood boil instead, and like something rancid wafting from the basement or an itch that starts from the other side of your skin, you can’t be satisfied until you find a rat under the floorboards, until your nails are broken and your cuticles peeled back.
I’m generally agnostic about boygenius; I like Bridgers and Dacus, but I’ve aged out of the right demo for Oberst-era journal poetry, and neither their debut EP nor LP quite grabbed me. I’ve never been particularly offended by their output, though, until they released a cover of Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One”—a near perfect pop song—a week or two before the holidays. boygenius’s cover is a deliberate narrowing of scope, a sullen reduction by way of prayer-circle harmonies that trades Twain’s full emotional spectrum for a disposable mood piece. But a subpar cover isn’t a crime; what makes boygenius’s “You’re Still the One” stick in your throat is its capacity to fill the relief of something darker.
In 2006, a recording of Mat Weddle—under the stage name Obadiah Parker, cribbed from his old youth group band—performing an acoustic cover of Outkast’s “Hey Ya” went viral. It was hardly the first time a white artist had rendered a hip-hop song delicate enough for discerning indie ears: Obadiah Parker followed the lineage of Dynamite Hack’s “Boyz-In-The-Hood,” The Gourds’s “Gin and Juice,” Jenny Owen Young’s “Hot in Herre,” and Ben Folds’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit.” There’s a litany of good reasons for white people not to cover hip-hop (don’t say the n-word jumps off the page, here), and the phenomenon has by and large aged out (though not before becoming ubiquitous enough for the parody to double back on itself).
Obadiah Parker’s cover is hardly as offensive as many of the cute white covers that came before and after it, but it still chokes in a cloud of condescension. André 3000’s original, one of the biggest and best pop songs of my life, is the “Born in the USA” of its time, a tragic story of a doomed relationship couched in a bouncy, major 1-4-5 chord progression. “Hey Ya’s” power pulls from that dissonance, and Weddle’s performance is a teacher’s pet’s hand shooting into the air to declare it read the text, an exercise of sonic minstrelsy that pins a ribbon to its chest for making a rap song palatable for white church lobbies.
There is nothing so sinister in boygenius’s cover of “You’re Still the One,” but it plays with the same trite and stunted moodiness that earned Obadiah Parker’s “Hey Ya” a slot on an episode of Scrubs. Remaining inoffensive in a vacuum doesn’t put much gas in the tank if it evokes the ghosts of something awful, and a psychic nausea haunts “You’re Still the One’s” acoustic chords. Let this be the year the moody cover learns to die.
The Iceman Thaweth
I won’t make you listen to me bloviate about Vladimir Nabokov’s talent (good writer, ever heard of him?), but an undersung joy of going through his work is discovering what a petty little bitch he could be. He was a notorious hater in regard to other writers and would regularly and loudly take shots at everyone from Hemingway (“a writer of books for boys”) to Pound* (“a total fake; a venerable fraud”) to Plato (“not particularly fond of him”). The tea spills liberally in his memoir, Speak, Memory, making ample space to drag the legacies of childhood playmates, family servants, teachers, peers, and pupils between scoring a lifelong passion for studying butterflies and a nepotistic lineage that makes Cazzie David look like Joe the Plumber.
Speak, Memory is one of the great literary memoirs, not only for its collection of Nabokov’s myriad grievances with mankind but for its chin-trembling beauty when that ice melts away. These moments punctuate Memory’s chapters regularly, but two stand out in particular. The first comes via an account of one of the Nabokov’s long-term nannies, a French woman the author calls Mademoiselle. Nabokov is hardly generous toward his old governess and writes at length of “the bitterness of her temper, the banality of her mind,” painting her a miserable woman prone to hysterics and cloaking even his fonder memories of their time together with a shade or two of irony. But our ideas of each other are brittle, and Nabokov watches his idea of Mademoiselle unravel completely when, upon gifting her a hearing aid in her later years, he notices she lies about its efficacy to spare his feelings. “I catch myself wondering whether, during the years I knew her, I had not kept utterly missing something in her … that I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart.”
The second moment sees a wholesale stripping of Nabokov’s trademark arch for a tender recollection of the birth and first few years of his son, Dmitri. It’s among the more beautiful passages of a book I’ve read, and I’ll end this issue of Blood Jump with one of Speak, Memory’s final passages. Nabokov twists himself in ten directions with academic swings to understand the peace and the pause in consciousness that a newborn can render, some holy foot slamming down on copper synapses, before yielding to joy’s beguiling simplicity. We are animals who indulge and delight in survival, and of all Memory’s moving musings on Nabokov’s newfound fatherhood, it’s the following that resonates the most:
There is also a keen pleasure (and, after all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the initial blossoming of man’s mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafing which allowed first of all the formation of Homo poeticus—without which sapiens could not have been evolved. “Struggle for life” indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast’s crazy obsession with the search for food. You and I have frequently remarked upon that maniacal glint in a housewife’s scheming eye as it roves over food in a grocery or about the morgue of a butcher’s shop. Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday.
*Go off, Queen.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again soon for the next issue.