In Which We Interrupt To Bring You A Special Broadcast

Sixty Minutes

by KARA VANDERBIJL

The Hour
creator Abi Morgan
Wednesdays at 10 on BBC America

Imagine for a moment that Ben Whishaw last appeared on screen as John Keats. We might feel a little impatience towards his character, Freddie Lyon, in Abi Morgan’s summer drama The Hour. How can a man whose latest accomplishments involved stroking small woodland creatures, kissing Abbie Cornish and dying of consumption convince us that he is anything other than the tender romantic? We knew nothing of Whishaw before he was the perishing poet, yet Freddie is as far from Keats as a puppy is from a man.

The eager curls have been greased back. His lips harden around a cigarette. Any residual softness hides in the huggable tweed suits, in the circumference of fingers around a steaming cup of tea. In a show that is half the actual life story of Peter Jennings and half an Agatha Christie mystery, Whishaw’s character balances precariously between the romantic and the cynic. He carries the show as gently as he carries the raincoat of a man he killed. The image has not been altered in any way, but it has been tailored to fit all of your secret fears.

Clocks appear in almost every scene of The Hour, yet for the entirety of the first two episodes almost nothing progresses. A watch on Freddie's wrist moves in and out of focus. He and Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) work for the BBC, which in 1956 primarily aired newsreels of society's upper echelon getting engaged and winning croquet tournaments. He is idealistic, she ambitious.

They have tired of the mundane, and it seems like they are about to get a break when an acquaintance, Clarence Fendley (Anton Lesser), organizes a team for a new current affairs program called "The Hour" and nominates Bel as its producer. Tempers flare when Freddie’s attempts to become the face of the show are thwarted by the charming Hector Madden (The Wire's Dominic West), a disaster barely appeased by Bel’s promise that Freddie can work with her to make the show everything they have always dreamed a news program should be.

Ruth Elms

When his childhood friend Ruth Elms (Vanessa Kirby) asks Freddie to investigate a hastily dismissed murder, he finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy that eventually leads to her death, rumors of Soviet espionage and the involvement of the British secret service, MI6. To make matters worse, the BBC refuses to endorse or help Freddie in his investigation.

Everything stagnates until the crisis in Suez, when Bel and the team step up to the plate and deliver the story from an angle nobody else in England is brave enough to explore. Their insistence to bring an unbiased presentation of facts to the British people gives the show popularity while dealing out obstacles that they will have to fight to overcome.

People nowadays watch the news for entertainment, a concept that had just begun to expand in the late 50s. Word of the Suez crisis has the office assistant Sissy Cooper (Lisa Greenwood) panicking — but with excited eyes — about the outbreak of a third World War.

Outside of the television studio characters grapple for copies of old newspapers, search dusty archives, protect sensitive film reels from the elements. News still took time to travel, arrived by precious mediums, and the consumption of it hinted at privilege. Freddie brings home hot chips wrapped in old newspapers to his father, who devours them eagerly. This is decidedly British but it is also decidedly symbolic. Freddie only picks up a pen to decode the printed word, to turn it into "real" information — that which is seen, that which comes to pass. A viewer of "The Hour" confides that watching the program makes the world seem unbearably real. What did people do before live footage, before blog posts with pictures?

Bel jokes that "The Hour" is "a news show, not vaudeville" but it is farce that drives the story: the farce of British democracy, the farce of an illicit love affair, and the farce of Soviet spies in the BBC.

The ability to make somebody afraid of something constitutes true power, one that Bel and her colleagues attempt to dispel by showing the story behind the rumors. Hector Madden’s wife discovers that Bel has been sleeping with her husband under the pretense of "work" and reduces her to tears over a cup of tea. Freddie discovers that it is his father — not secret agents — who has been sacking the apartment looking for artifacts of the past. Truth is beauty. If it is not beautiful, make it so ugly that the spectator will be unable to tear his eyes away.

Chemistry between the characters gradually loosens into a sort of comfortable tension. Freddie loves Bel, which she either does not realize or pointedly ignores. Bel’s feelings for Freddie range between maternal protectiveness and intimate friendship; Hector, weirdly inarticulate and married, fails her again and again yet still manages to get in her pants.

Antagonists rise and fall like playing cards, each less threatening than the last. Morgan would have us believe that people slept together in narrow twin beds and survived solely on a diet of buttered white bread, chips, and whiskey. The Hour's six episodes have been helmed by three different directors, each defining the relationships between characters with dramatic lighting straight out of a film noir, faces blurring in and out of focus. Stark, almost industrial interiors contrast sharply with the modernity of Bel and Freddie’s project.

The Hour is particularly unkind to the elders, depicting them as senile or desperate for another bout of youth. Bel’s mother paints her face garishly and stuffs a middle-aged body into a slinky dress for a night on the town. Freddie's father spends his evenings moving chips from the paper to his mouth in front of the television, refusing to answer his son’s questions. Head of News Clarence Fendley cannot be trusted in a moving vehicle.

We might arrogantly suggest that the rapidly modernizing world — a world of nukes, of strange overturned revolutions and faces in front of a camera — belongs only to the young. In a tender, more wistful way The Hour tips its hat to a generation of people who gave up their best years to survival, to evenings in the basement with the blackout curtains drawn. We tried to make the world better for them, and succeeded in making it complicated.

Mad Men forever defines anything pre-1970; walking in the footsteps of this giant,  Morgan tries hard not to drown in its shadow. The script aspires to something like His Girl Friday and fails, while misogynistic jabs thrown in Bel’s general direction sound like they have been included just for the sake of it. Romola Garai consistently seems as if she is about to say something, but then she never does. The era undoubtedly sells well, but requires more than a few nice costumes, people enjoying smoking and clever parallels between their political situation and ours before we'll buy.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about how to become an Anthropologie girl. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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In Which We Finger Plush Towels

How To Be An Anthro Girl

by KARA VANDERBIJL

It is the query on the tip of everybody’s tongue these days: how can I become an Anthropologie girl? This boutique is Urban Outfitters’ older sister, eating disorder outgrown and T-shirts intact; she wears makeup, has a job, and travels the world instead of riding around the block on her seven hundred dollar bicycle. The business supposedly caters to 30 and 40-year-old professional women who can afford their sky-high prices, but their catalogue has become the holy scriptures of every self-proclaimed “twentysomething” woman who is trying to make her way in this world. Admit it, ladies: Anthropologie is your happy place, and if you make more than $20 a week you have probably spent more within their four walls than necessary.

For those of us who can only walk past their doors with longing or browse their endless mazes of delightful fashions and home goods until we are asphyxiated by the stench of their exotic candles, here are a few tips on how to become a little bit more like Ms. Anthro:

* Shun modernity. No e-readers, Helvetica, non-whistling teapots, or mp3 players for you. You bask in the glow of a million candles at your desk while you write with a delightfully scratchy fountain pen. You will paw anything that looks like it was made circa 1960. In your most vulnerable moments, you pull an iPhone out of your Katherine Hepburn-style wide-leg pants, and pay $300 for a pair of oxfords that you will claim belonged to your grandmother.

* Use the word ‘culture’ a lot. As an Anthro girl, you are in touch with all the peoples of the world. You wear the fabrics that they made with their hands, and although the average blouse on the rack will cost you half your week’s wages and only return about a dollar to its original makers, you feel as if you are one with them. You are Elizabeth Gilbert, reveling in your spiritual transformation, your connection with the world. You might be able to say, “I got this tunic on my recent voyage to Bali.” There, you played soccer with the natives and sat silent around a campfire while they grasped your hands in peace. Your mere white presence makes their lives more tolerable, and you give them meaning by blogging about them.

* Take up eerily attractive hobbies. Nothing comes to you more naturally than riding a bicycle or the study of ancient textiles. People flock to you like moths to a flame when you mention a proclivity towards interpretive dance routines of Out of Africa. You offer workshops on flower arrangement in wind instruments at a local coffee shop.

* Talk about how much you love your city. Waxing poetic about the cramped train, the humid concrete, and the skyline you observed at sunset while standing barefoot on your fire escape in a chiffon dress constitutes the average weekday post on your blog. On the weekends, a few obscure poems delineate your emotions about an unnamed and possibly non-existent male. You show up at neighborhood bars wearing organic cotton in colors that have never before been seen in bars, and when you ask for gin, nobody cards you.

* Be wealthy, but not the kind of wealthy that makes anybody feel bad. Rather, just chuckle softly whenever you mention your latest trip to Europe or the top of the Empire State Building. “Oh, we rode camels out to Petra,” is the phrase most often uttered at the end of your summer vacations. You justify long periods of inactivity on white-sanded beaches by making sure they took place in third world countries, and you donate a dollar or so to whatever charity is currently advertising on Tumblr.

* Speak to your house plants. No comment.

* Deserve take-out. Nobody understands your depth of soul or your unique suffering. The love you experience, which you calmly and resolutely reveal by missing a button on your blouse or by weeping softly in your local subway, undeniably entitles you to eat any sort of fried food of dubious origin in the porcelain abyss of your claw-foot bathtub.

* Be a ‘natural’ woman. Nothing about you is put on; nothing about you is askance. You are at all times completely genuine and completely within your element (earth or water). You respond to crises by lighting a candle, by fingering plush towels. Plucking is out of the question. You crochet on demand, but only in penumbra.

* Never match. Yellow shoes are always acceptable. Plain black? Never.

* Always have the right dish. You have bowls specifically for walnuts, hats for afternoons spent indoors, and cups crafted for lemonade. They are charmingly chipped in all the right places. The Upholstered Chaise Lounge represents you as a person, like it did for proto-Anthro girl Betty Draper. You search high and low for ampersand-shaped coat hooks, and live in rooms comprised completely of ottomans.

* Spontaneously sleep outside. That’s what your outdoor bed is for.

* Say things like, “We’ll honeymoon in Mexico.” “I’ll put her in an immersion school when she’s born.” “Oh, I don’t eat frozen vegetables.” “This? This is the child I’m sponsoring in Nepal.” “I made these earrings from turquoise I found in the Arizona desert.” “I’d like to illustrate children’s books.”

* Become a selective eater. Refuse to eat anything not dubbed ‘organic’ OR anything that was not made whilst wearing a frilly apron OR anything that cannot be eaten with a grapefruit spoon. Revel in food groups generally embraced by the average rabbit. When asked what you ate for breakfast, your eyes glaze over and you mention tea and great gulps of oxygen. Your friends rave about your spread, but they generally mean the tablecloth underneath.

* Store things in glass jars. For some reason people still use plastic?

* Embrace the occult. Your superstitions—such as which sweater to wear while reading the morning newspaper — extend to your unguarded preference of zodiac-inspired dishtowels. You practice food augury, which you understand to mean eat as little as possible so as not to hide the design of the dish. When your favorite tea saucer breaks, you buy a new one.

* Become too knowledgeable about something. When asked about your favorite Stendhal book, your effervescent enthusiasm borders on hysteria. Medieval Italian music, multi-volume science fiction novels, and alternatives to name-brand cleaning products cause you to spasm in delight. Your eccentricity borders on social-unawareness just as your backyard borders on a virginal forest preserve. When asked your thoughts on any subject you retreat to an adjoining room moodily wearing too many scarves. “Years from now,” acquaintances whisper of you, “people will say we knew her.”

* Never be in a picture with a man, ever. You roam alone, from room to room, lit golden by the chandeliers in your lacy nightgown. Your wallpaper is peeling at the corners near the ceiling. You like the culture it creates. Another living being would upset the balance, put the brightly colored throws in disarray.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. You can find her website here.

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In Which We Say Goodbye To Gryffindor

Multiple Personalities

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
dir. David Yates
130 min

Voldemort dies. Through a slightly confusing turn of events, Harry sacrifices the part of Voldemort’s soul that was imprinted on him, dies, comes back to life, and kills Voldemort. Voldemort has an issue with being killed, because he has been trying to kill Harry since roughly 1997. The flesh melts off of his face and turns into black smoke and disappears in the sky. Early on in the film, his bare feet are covered in blood as he passes through rows of corpses. His presence is unsettling, although perhaps not in the ways we would expect of him.

Harry’s life has quite literally led him to this moment, to face off with the most powerful wizard in the world amidst the ruins of Hogwarts. His parents, his friends and his classmates have all sacrificed something to preserve him for this moment. Somehow, he and Ron and Hermione are still alive after chasing the horcruxes and destroying them and meeting up with people who are not on their side.

Conveniently, it is easy to tell in the wizarding world when somebody is on your side: they don’t disappear trailing a cloud of black smoke or have skulls tattooed on their wrists. The only person in the story with ambiguous allegiance is Snape, but he doubles for Dumbledore at a high price: the woman he loves must be protected. We have no chance to wonder if losing Lily Potter will push Snape to the dark side — he simply crawls back to Dumbledore. When people say they learned more about doing the right thing from Harry Potter than from anything else, I laugh a little bit. What moral isn’t represented in this story? Take your pick.

Yates saw the final two parts as quiet, almost reverent in their solemnity, and bordering on restlessness. The action lacking from the first half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows manifests in short, dream-like sequences. Any dialogue is exceptional, and for the most part, useless. Near the beginning of the film Harry and his friends spend ten minutes talking to Olivander about Bellatrix’s wand, but only three minutes are devoted to Snape’s early memories of Lily, Harry’s mother.

Where was Ron’s comic relief, I wonder, and does Yates know anything about what happened to Ginny Weasley? Or the centaurs? Or Hagrid’s half-brother? Or Dumbledore’s back story? Or anything else that Rowling wrote about in the series, except for Voldemort’s face?

Yates is obviously not afraid of Voldemort or else so afraid of him that he must ridicule him. If he hadn’t given Mother Weasley her “Not my daughter, bitch!” before exploding Bellatrix into a million pieces, we might have all stood up and left.

Choice and its many consequences run like a silver thread through this messy little movie, the final part in the coming-of-age saga we were all beginning to search for circa 1999. People choose to die for Harry for no apparent reason other than they are biased against noseless wizards. Hermione randomly chooses Ron over Harry, although Yates’ tête-à-tête between Hermione and Harry in a tent in Part 1 would have had us believe otherwise.

Slytherin punks choose to spend the duration of the grand battle in the dungeons, Snape chooses to remain faithful to Dumbledore, Malfoy chooses to be the stock coward, the Grey Lady chooses to disclose the location of the lost diadem of Ravenclaw, and Harry chooses to die. Some of it is fate, yes, but most of it is just long shots of Harry looking into the distance with Ron and Hermione behind him and nothing but angst over what should be done.

It was simple when it started. Harry’s voice had not yet changed and Ron was vomiting frogs into a bucket and Hermione was still the obnoxious bookworm. They did things a certain way because they had been programmed to, maybe by their parents or just Rowling herself sitting alone in coffee shops writing while her baby slept upstairs. Maybe a curse had left a scar with a memory in it on their foreheads. Voldemort didn’t have a face back then, he was just pure evil, and when you are little it is so very easy to hate evil and be plucky and play Quidditch and do right.

In a heartbeat you are at King’s Cross station and it is a little bit like Heaven and Dumbledore is there, but there is also a screaming baby covered in blood that has Voldemort’s face, and you feel pity towards it or perhaps a little bit of love. “Do not pity the dead,” whispers Dumbledore. “Pity the living.” No one is totally clear on what that's supposed to mean.

Harry loses himself for a moment in the bright white light and forgets what to do. It is the only moment where he vocalizes any sort of self-doubt. Why go on living, if it is such a pity? Later, he snaps the most powerful wand in the world in two and throws it over the side of a bridge. Suicide. This strange and almost blissfully carefree behavior underlies every current of heroism in the film.

Do you choose your end, or is it chosen for you? Few people complained about the differences between Rowling’s books and Yates’ films until recently. This is so rare in screen adaptations that it would be an oversight not to call attention to it. Perhaps what is most shocking to us is that someone should choose to see a story differently than we have.

We grow up, and realize we have no idea what it means, so we grow our bangs to cover our scar and run around trying to destroy the evidence that we are here, splitting our possibilities in half with every step. There is another film, another Harry Potter, another J.K Rowling out there somewhere where the other choices — the ones we never picked — live until they have names we can say out loud and faces we can see.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about books to read in the summer. She reviewed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One here. You can find her website here.

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