If it's there, you will find it
Spires and castles of erotic narrative
History is narrative is fiction is history — this much is known. Of the historical stories that have captured the collective imagination over the centuries, two with enduring power which have been most enthralling to me are that of the Lost Franklin Expedition and the Beatles. They’re not similar at all, you say—ah, but you are mistaken.
David Kajganich, showrunner for The Terror, has described the challenges and surprises of creating a story featuring an ensemble cast of all male characters. When everyone is a man, nobody is—that is to say, the uniformity of the cast allows for an exploration of gender, with at first different men having to occupy variously gendered roles in the ship’s company, and subsequently the very concept of masculinity decaying along with the physical bodies of the men.
As Francis Spufford observed, “the travails which so assuredly made men of [explorers] also, in a sense, made them women; which produced a sort of sympathetic equivalence between mariners surviving the huge indifference and overmastering cold of the Arctic, and the travails of a lonely governess amidst a chilly household.”
Environmental specifics aside, this dynamic can be observed, in minuscule, in other single-gendered groups—say, rock bands and sketch comedy troupes. Paul McCartney and John Lennon as mother and father; Eric Idle as misfit child amidst two feuding couples.
What the Beatles and the Franklin Expedition have in common is a sense of universality, a sense of dense and powerful, deeply human mythos that only swarms so thickly around disasters or miracles. Discussing the upcoming Brian Epstein biopic Midas Man, writer Peter Paphides observed: “Everyone is doomed or sort of fated to become a fictional character of one kind or another, they start off real and then over the years become fictionalised versions of themselves.”
Put more succinctly in the eternal words of the Doctor, we’re all stories in the end.
This fate, afflicting Beatles even as they yet live and breathe, is also the doom of men like James Fitzjames, whose remains were identified through DNA testing this week by the archaeological team at Parks Canada, with the help of Fabiënne Tetteroo, a Dutch researcher whose initial entry into Franklin obsession was watching The Terror.
Will the next fictional version of Fitzjames’s story reflect this new development, which in turn came about because of the influence of a show that included a previous version? There is a season, turn, turn, turn…
The feedback loop of obsession, imagination, and representation is very much present in Beatles fandom, as every tiny little detail is dug up and turned over by devotees, to become raw material for interpretation. I am very hopeful that Midas Man will be good, though not necessarily optimistic. Brian is one of my guys of all time but the production suffered notable issues (3 different directors!) and I’ve heard they’ve changed/obscured some of his complicated history with various men.
But I’m sure I’ll at least enjoy the experience of watching it, like I have with most Beatles movies. For better or for worse I just really like when there are a bunch of dudes—an ensemble of same-y guys through which the whole human experience can be refracted and observed. Maybe that is lame of me, simplistic, reflective of immature taste. Maybe I just imprinted too hard on the late season of LOST where the Man In Black and his brother represented the universal symbolism of the battle of good versus evil.
It gets back a little bit, too, to the “Thoughts On Yaoi” question—the circular, endless discussion that has been occurring since at least the 1980s, why do girls ship dudes? My friend sent me a TikTok of the latest iteration where people were pondering the question as if it had never been asked before. Everyone in the comments section needs to read Joanna Russ, I responded. We as a species (subspecies: homo sapiens fujoshi) love to form, from the raw materials of generic dude-dom, spires and castles of erotic narrative in which all elements of human psychology can be represented...
Clip of the week
What if the Solution to Men’s Loneliness Is … Freemasonry? - For my debut at Slate I interviewed a bunch of Freemasons from Reddit about what they like about being a member of a historic fraternal order. The answer might surprise you…
There’s something for everyone in Freemasonry. A reliable “found family” of loyal friends on hand when you need them, as Tyler recounted, or deep dives into the centuries of Masonic lore and history, for the nerds. Community service is a big part of Masonry and associated groups like the Shriners, and men find support for big life events like divorces, deaths, raising children, and career changes from among their lodge family, including from older men who have been through it all before.
“I think that fraternal orders can satisfy [both] the desire for male companionship and mentoring without toxic masculinity,” said Paul, a 28-year-old Mason from Ontario. He grew up in Hamilton near the Scottish Rite building and always wondered what happened inside. Eventually, posts on Reddit convinced him to join, and he soon found himself a member of a nonjudgmental brotherhood which has become a vital support system for him. “There’s a sense of community and trust that I have never found anywhere else, that nothing is off-limits.”