What the 🫎is Performance Anxiety (the Podcast) !?!?

Catch us on Michael Portillo talking about the #JamesBond #007 casting.

Apparently, Jane Austen adaptations are getting Jane Austen wrong. A curious complaint, given that the whole point of an adaptation is to make something else. But there’s something distinctly contemporary about this obsession with getting culture ‘right’. The less confidence we have in making sense of the world, the more we insist that art conform to our understanding of it. Interpretation becomes a threat rather than a pleasure. And the culture war is only makes it worse. This is precisely the sort of thing we want to unpick on Performance Anxiety. Watch this space. We’re back. bbc.com/culture/article/2026…

Our very own @MadamMarenT in a lovely extended conversation. Enjoy!

Hands off our stories? No. Hands off our artists. I’m on the Battle of Ideas panel on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — and after the fight over Greta Gerwig’s Narnia, the timing couldn’t be better. Artistic freedom is worth fighting for. Come and join the fight.

The internet has apparently discovered the greatest betrayal in the history of Harry Potter: the new one looks new. And annoyingly, they’re not entirely wrong. It does look less real. The old Harry Potters were shot on film and the new one has that very contemporary digital thing going on: LED lighting, colour grading, that green mystical wash. There is a genuine loss of directness. If we want to get horribly semiotic about it, it’s the old question of indexicality, the photograph as a footprint of reality, light hitting things and leaving a trace. Now the image can feel as if every inch has been decided upon. Which is possibly why something can look incredibly detailed and somehow less real. But I also think people have confused Harry Potter with their memory of Harry Potter. The first film came out 25 years ago. That particular look now is Hogwarts for a generation. But is it actually better, or is nostalgia being confused with aesthetic judgement? And are we capable of letting a new generation have a different Harry Potter without constantly putting screenshots next to each other and declaring that something has been ruined? Also, this is television, not eight very long remakes of the films. A series has different narrative demands. The books are overwhelmingly organised around Harry because that’s how Rowling controls what we know. But the story is much bigger than the plot. Things are happening in that world which Harry doesn’t see and which therefore aren’t directly narrated. Television can dramatise that material. It probably has to, because other characters need to carry narrative strands rather than Harry being in virtually every bloody scene. So when we inevitably get scenes “that weren’t in the book”, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve invented something. It may have always been happening in the story without being part of the plot. Anyway, there’s something here about nostalgia and our increasingly weird idea that loving an artwork means insisting nobody is ever allowed to make it strange again. Maybe first Performance Anxiety of the new season …

Excellent from @MadamMarenT

People who say Elliot Page’s character should be a masculine warrior are missing the obvious point. There’s no escaping that the character is fronting masculinity - pretending be masculine. They should not be in battle. This is why the character’s death is so traumatic to Odysseus. Who better to play this than someone who’s masculinity is obviously absent?

Is there more to Christopher Nolan’s version of the Odyssey than a crazy culture war? Yes! It’s an amazing artistic achievement that uses genius casting to give a particularly Nolan take on a particularly Nolan theme …

Here’s our take on the new and massively successful Ryan Gosling film Project Hail Mary. The reason that Project Hail Mary is so successful commercially is because people want to watch it. And people want to watch it because it is successful artistically. It feels like Hollywood getting some of its mojo back. Hollywood is returning to a genre it has been neglecting - the proper studio picture. A studio picture has at its centre something that invites people to the cinema - a big star that everyone knows and wants to watch. But this on its own is not enough. The story itself also has to be involving and compelling. The way Hollywood makes stories compelling is by using a formula. The formula goes like this - the star plays a recognisable, relatable character that goes on a journey in which the stakes could not be higher. Through the journey the character transforms themselves for the better. The character’s transformation in turn makes the world in which the character lives a better place. The audience watches this formula play out and leaves the cinema satisfied. This structure is the basis of every Hollywood film. The key for movie makers was always to make the formula fresh and interesting through the use of different stars, different genres, different journeys. Compare this to what Hollywood has been turning out for the past few years - endless sequels, franchise sludge and self-important, worthy films. The studios turned their backs on their own winning formula. Characters were not going on transformative journeys any more because they had to be representatives of the human resources department. The old studios, the engines of popular storytelling, seemed embarrassed by the very thing that made them great. What made Hollywood great was never sermonising, it was artistic craft coupled with star power. It was the ability to make audiences want to leave the house, buy a ticket, and sit in the dark with strangers. The old formula delivered this: a magnetic lead, a story that went somewhere, scenes designed to be seen on a big screen, and an ending that paid off. Project Hail Mary scratches this itch in a profoundly satisfying way. Ryan Gosling is allowed to be a film star rather than a brand extension or a eunuch in trainers. The story is told through impressive spectacle and charm. It is funny. It is not ashamed of being entertaining. In present conditions, this practically revolutionary. This is not to overstate the case. One decent film does not mean Hollywood is back and firing on all cylinders. But it does suggest that the old machinery is still there and can still work when someone bothers to use it properly. And after years of lectures, sludge and synthetic franchise rubbish, this is enough to feel hopeful.

Find out why we think the nee version might just be inspired! youtu.be/d3sxQp0Smh8?si=I2PS…