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“Ha! Ha!” said the duck, laughing
May. 3rd, 2025 09:22 amLast night Andrew came across The Show (2020), a fantasy neo-noir scripted by Alan Moore (who also acts in the movie). Initially I was on the other side of the room and just listening to the dialogue, but I got pulled in around the time the protagonist consults a detective agency that turns out to be literally two kids in a trenchcoat (“we don’t do messy divorce cases—we have to be in bed by 9:30”).
It’s a classic noir set-up: a hit man arrives in town (Northampton) only to find the target he was sent after is already dead; and begins to suspect, as his client’s phone calls grow increasingly frantic and profanity-laden, that the old man is less interested in avenging his daughter than he is in retrieving the “family heirloom” gold cross pendant that was not found on the target’s body. But as the coincidences and weird dreams pile up, it also looks like something supernatural’s going on as well.
Being written by Moore, it’s as funny as it is horrifying, and it’s also at least 40% easter eggs and in-jokes by volume— I didn’t pay enough attention to all the graffiti in the background to check if any of it read WHO PUT BELLA IN THE WITCH-ELM, or the in-universe equivalent, but if I spot it on a repeat viewing I won’t be at all surprised.
It’s still not quite as weird as Rudyard Kipling’s “The Brushwood Boy,” which I reread this week for the first time since high school. This one sounds fairly straightforward when described. We follow the protagonist for the first quarter-century or so of his life, from early childhood to becoming the youngest Major in the British Army; and his waking career is intercut with his dreamscape.
George’s dreamscape is one of the most realistically dream-like I’ve ever seen written. There’s a bit where George is on a boat that passes a huge stone lily, floating on the water, which is labelled “Hong Kong,” and thinks to himself “So this is Hong Kong. I always knew it’d be like this.” The first part, before he goes to school, is also a really good depiction of a young child’s view of the world, where everything is huge and the first time hearing a grown man sing is an astonishing phenomenon.
Thing is, I think in most stories the dreams would be presented as some sort of coping mechanism for either the boredom or the violence (depending on the author’s attitudes and experiences) of military life. George Cottar, otoh, thrives in public-school and military environments— he’s the kind of idealized subaltern who never meets a discipline problem he can’t solve by teaching his men to box, and who reacts with embarrassed modesty when awarded the DSO for having carried two wounded soldiers to safety while under fire. But the dreams aren’t a febrile distraction from his Empire-building, either. Kipling appears to consider George’s whole situation an example of balance—a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Anyway I’m still trying to parse it; as I think a lot of readers have been, for decades.
It’s a classic noir set-up: a hit man arrives in town (Northampton) only to find the target he was sent after is already dead; and begins to suspect, as his client’s phone calls grow increasingly frantic and profanity-laden, that the old man is less interested in avenging his daughter than he is in retrieving the “family heirloom” gold cross pendant that was not found on the target’s body. But as the coincidences and weird dreams pile up, it also looks like something supernatural’s going on as well.
Being written by Moore, it’s as funny as it is horrifying, and it’s also at least 40% easter eggs and in-jokes by volume— I didn’t pay enough attention to all the graffiti in the background to check if any of it read WHO PUT BELLA IN THE WITCH-ELM, or the in-universe equivalent, but if I spot it on a repeat viewing I won’t be at all surprised.
It’s still not quite as weird as Rudyard Kipling’s “The Brushwood Boy,” which I reread this week for the first time since high school. This one sounds fairly straightforward when described. We follow the protagonist for the first quarter-century or so of his life, from early childhood to becoming the youngest Major in the British Army; and his waking career is intercut with his dreamscape.
George’s dreamscape is one of the most realistically dream-like I’ve ever seen written. There’s a bit where George is on a boat that passes a huge stone lily, floating on the water, which is labelled “Hong Kong,” and thinks to himself “So this is Hong Kong. I always knew it’d be like this.” The first part, before he goes to school, is also a really good depiction of a young child’s view of the world, where everything is huge and the first time hearing a grown man sing is an astonishing phenomenon.
Thing is, I think in most stories the dreams would be presented as some sort of coping mechanism for either the boredom or the violence (depending on the author’s attitudes and experiences) of military life. George Cottar, otoh, thrives in public-school and military environments— he’s the kind of idealized subaltern who never meets a discipline problem he can’t solve by teaching his men to box, and who reacts with embarrassed modesty when awarded the DSO for having carried two wounded soldiers to safety while under fire. But the dreams aren’t a febrile distraction from his Empire-building, either. Kipling appears to consider George’s whole situation an example of balance—a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Anyway I’m still trying to parse it; as I think a lot of readers have been, for decades.
