The Metropolitan

It's Mixtape week in The Metropolitan, which means it's time for our usual monthly playlist.
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More realistic stakes are also less idealistic ones, apparently. This super-spy isn’t capable of dispensing justice, serving their country or saving the world; he can only look after himself.

We spent January looking for comfort viewings, but a rewatch of the Bourne trilogy revealed some discomforting insights.
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Last month’s Mixtape features some perfectly boring history books to lull oneself to sleep with; this is a good thing, as making history interesting always seems to require taking some liberties.
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The writing must be excellent; mangled sentences, repetition, stupidity and boring vocabulary keep me awake. The subject matter must be non-fiction (novels are too involving), and it must be something I’m genuinely interested in.

In January’s Mixtape, we’re recommending some good books to fall asleep to (complimentary).
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I can’t help but feel that part of the ‘problem’ with J-Lo is that she is brassy, not classy. She hasn’t apologised for rudely continuing to exist and make oodles of money. She didn’t get down and stay down until someone told her she could get up.

Whatever has stopped Jennifer Lopez from being a bigger movie star is not talent, at least not judging by her excellent early performance in Steven Soderberg’s 1998 thriller ‘Out of Sight’.
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One way of answering the question ‘Whatever happened to Jennifer Lopez?’ is: She has been successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. She has starred in dozens of movies, has made a string of studio albums, and has a residency in Las Vegas.

Watching her performance in Steven Soderberg’s 1998 thriller ‘Out of Sight’ prompts us to wonder why Jennifer Lopez is not a bigger movie star. The answer appears to be, because she’s too busy.
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The Metropolitan has been thinking about Jennifer Lopez, which meant revisiting Steven Soderberg’s ‘Out of Sight’, which then meant thinking about George Clooney and ‘ER’
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Clooney is very beautiful, and has a carefully modulated and charming hyper-awareness of same. (Take that thing where he catches his breath in the middle of a sentence and then chuckles; I always interpret this as him happily remembering what his face looks like.)

Steven Soderberg’s 1998 thriller ‘Out of Sight’ features early big screen appearances for both Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney.
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There is a fertile period, memory-formation-wise, that kicks off around the age of 10 and peaks somewhere between 15 and 25. This explains why cinemas are full of billion-dollar remakes of ‘80s comic books, why Facebook groups are full of crumblies posting about Spangles, and the existence of this newsletter.

The comedy we watch as teenagers, like pop music, becomes an intrinsic piece of our characters, creating core, inescapable, memories.
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This week we’re visiting Tudor England with Edmund Blackadder, who is hardly the first historical villain to get the benefit of the doubt.
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It is often claimed that it was Elton who brought the nob gags to Blackadder II, but this flies in the face of the evidence: there are plenty of rude jokes in The Black Adder. They’re just not very good.

‘Blackadder II’ was one of those rare things, a sequel that was not only as good as but which vastly surpassed its predecessor.
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‘On the box’ this week is ‘Blackadder II’, co-written by Ben Elton, who also co-wrote the anarchic alt-sitcom ‘The Young Ones’.
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Producer John Lloyd said The Black Adder looked a million dollars, but unfortunately cost two. But it was nevertheless recommissioned, because this was a time when the BBC was willing to give shows a chance.

This week we’re re-watching ‘Blackadder II’, one of the great happy miracles of BBC comedy.
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There’s an undeniable correlation between situations in which introverts feel comfortable — intimate conversations, small groups of close friends — and situations in which the introvert gets to hold forth and be constantly affirmed.

Introverts complain about social situations, but is the real problem awkwardness or egotism?
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Rowan’s piece this week on how her introversion makes her avoid social situations may be related to the fact that they’re awfully noisy too.
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Introverts can be social; they can happily give a presentation at a conference or go to the pub. What makes you an introvert is when, after doing these things, you have an immensely strong, almost sub-cognitive need to sit by yourself in a quiet room for a few hours.

This week Rowan Davies is writing about what a revelation the idea of a social battery was in handling her own introversion.
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This week Rowan Davies is writing about how being an introvert makes maintaining social contacts hard, which is where having a ‘firecraker’ friend can come in very useful indeed.
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Most of us aren’t thinking about most other people, most of the time. This rubric explains 99% of petty social hurts. ‘They’re probably not thinking about me’ is a life hack, not an opening of hostilities.

There’s a famous dunk in Mad Men when a kid says to Don Draper ‘I feel bad for you’ and Don Draper devastatingly replies ‘I don’t think about you at all.’ But is this put-down actually advice for social awkwardness?
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Science fiction is simply another form of game playing, of imaginative exercise. But play has a purpose. It is a practice as much as a pleasure, a way of modelling reality and thinking about it.

We’re making a gentle start to 2026, playing among the stars with Iain M. Banks’ ‘Excession’.
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The Wasp Factory Iain Banks (1984, Macmillan)

We’re re-reading some of Iain M. Banks’ sci fi this week, but we’ve written about his literary fiction before and his smash debut, ‘The Wasp Factory’.
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Hugo Gernsback’s definition of scientifiction begins: ‘a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision’. That romance, that sense of wonder is a key part of science fiction.

This week we’re re-reading Iain M. Banks’ ‘Excession’, which remains spellbinding in its depiction of his high tech ‘luxury space anarchy’
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A man old enough to know better, holding a hat and a set of cue cards, gesturing wildly in an attempt to distract his audience from his ineptitude

Just before Christmas we wound up our season on Sherlock Holmes and, not coincidentally, went on a little ‘Blue Carbuncle’ themed walk round London. Here’s Tobias holding both forth and Mr Henry Baker’s hat.
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This was fiction by and for engineers, men like Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, who could conjure fascinating scientific possibilities but who couldn’t write believable dialogue.

The Metropolitan is starting the year with some science fiction: Iain M. Banks’ ‘Excession’, which is considerably more interesting than the genre’s reputation might have you believe.
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By depicting a recognisable and familiar world, and making Father Christmas himself a recognisable and familiar grumpy old man, he is insisting on this most mysterious quotidian magic.

Part of the magic of Christmas is how it enchants the everyday world and part of the magic of Raymond Briggs’ book is how he reversed that, making the ‘Father Christmas’ part of the ordinary world.
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This week we’re snuggled up with Raymond Briggs’ ‘Father Christmas’. This isn’t the first seasonal comic book we’ve featured, but Posy Simmonds’ ‘Cassandra Darke’ is more a much older audience.
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Small children live in a small world; small matters such as household brand logos — mysterious, impenetrable, laden with occult meanings — receive the full focus of their attention.

The detailed realism of Raymond Briggs’ 1973 hard-working night-in-the-life of ‘Father Christmas’ shows how well he knew his audience.
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An All Too Magical Christmas #1 Watch now | In which a magician (second class) is mocked in the street by teenagers before being mocked at home by a clockwork robot

This week we’re revisiting Raymond Briggs’ very British ‘Father Christmas’ and for another appearance by the old man, can we recommend our sister Substack’s Christmas story ‘An All Too Magical Christmas’?
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Father Christmas, inspired by Briggs’s father’s own experiences as a milkman, is a fully recognisable British working man of the period, begrudging and swearing his way through the night shift.

One of the chief delights of Raymond Briggs’ 1973 picture book ‘Father Christmas’ is that the lead character isn’t a jolly old elf or mystical, magical being but just another hard working stiff.
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The Coens’ Gen X fans appreciate their penchant for splicing together wildly different approaches and sliding gleefully across genres, as if the canonical guidelines weren’t there. (Which, of course, they’re not.)

The Coen Brothers are notorious for their refusal to explain or comment on the themes of their films, something that only makes them more appealing to those of us inclined to ‘reading too much into things’.
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The Wish List - Item 11 Alfie wishes he could escape the warehouse.

The Metropolitan’s sister substack Christmas Stories is now almost half way through this year’s story: ‘The Wish List’, the story of Alfie, who takes a seasonal job packing boxes, only to discover that the warehouse contains a good deal more than just presents.
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