Book Review: Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America (2022). Mark Follman.

By now, after decades of horrifying mass shootings across the United States, in schools, malls, grocery stores, post offices, concerts, movie theaters and anywhere else that groups of people gather, most people have probably lost all hope that we will ever get this problem under control.

Particularly with the perpetual political deadlock and partisan divides on the issue of gun control, mass gun violence in our country seems to be an intractable problem from hell, with no realistic solutions available to stop the killing, and seemingly no one really trying to do anything useful.

Mark Follman’s new book, Trigger Points, provides a refreshing bit of relief from our weary and jaded view of this grim situation, along with many new insights into the nature of the problem. His topic is the field and study of threat assessment, a discipline that can be applied to many different behaviors and real-world situations, but in this case has to do with those experts in law enforcement, psychology, and education who have quietly and slowly begun to piece together a set of tools for identifying those at risk of committing attacks and finding constructive ways to head off or prevent those attacks before they happen.

In the process of telling the history of the small groups and individuals who have done the research and developed theories and practices for application in differing situations, we learn many interesting details of the research data and conclusions of the experts, which often contradict popular beliefs about mass gun violence and its perpetrators.

Some of the most important and surprising revelations in the book have to do with the popular but mistaken beliefs about the categories of people who commit these terrible violent acts. For example, it is widely believed that the perpetrators are almost all young white men, but in fact there have been many men across the entire spectrum of races and ethnic backgrounds, as well as a few women, who have carried out these kinds of mass attacks.

Another widespread but wrong belief is that all these murderous individuals are “mentally ill”. While many or most of them undoubtedly are coping with issues of depression, domestic neglect or abuse, self-loathing and suicidal ideation, only a fraction of these disturbed individuals who commit mass attacks have previous diagnoses of major mental illness. And many of them are leading lives that from the outside appear "normal", while holding down jobs, attending school or otherwise appearing to function in society.

A third misleading and useless popular belief, according to the author and the research, is that there is a useful “profile” of the mass killer that can be used to easily identify who is a likely potential mass murderer. Instead, what the threat assessment researchers have found is that there is a process, a life path followed by the individual, which has common features across many cases, and which can be recognized and interrupted with suitable interventions.

It would be easy to belittle this research, and the experts who have been developing this field of threat assessment, by pointing to the many cases of mass gun violence that continue to occur. The counter argument to that skepticism is the number of cases that have already been prevented by threat assessment experts and teams, and the lives that have already been saved, which the author spotlights from little-known case histories. As bad as it is, it could be worse.

What becomes clear from Follman’s account is the fact that these techniques and insights, developed from extensive research over the past fifty years (including extensive interviews of surviving mass killers), are not yet widely known outside the small expert community. The point is that they should be known, and the techniques and science behind it more widely shared.

Where there are existing threat assessment programs in place, combining the expertise of law enforcement, school officials, HR representatives, and others to help intervene and assist people headed down the road toward mass violence, there have been many successes. It was interesting to learn that the state of Oregon, and now Washington, are among the leading areas in the country for threat assessment programs. We need more of these programs, and many more people trained to recognize and report the common symptoms of troubled people preparing for violent acts in time for interventions to take place.

There will never be a way of anticipating every mass casualty attack, and as the author acknowledges, the number of deaths in mass gun violence events pales beside the ordinary daily toll of gun-related murder and suicide. There is no perfect solution. But in this book, we see sensible, research-based methods of heading off many of the worst gun massacres in our society, and saving the lives of victims and even sometimes the perpetrators.

It is also encouraging to hear the message that even with the huge numbers of guns in our population, the ease of acquiring them and our inability to put effective limits on access to guns due to political hyper-partisanship on this issue, there are still things we can do to improve our situation and lower the risk.

This is an important myth-busting expose’ on a confounding problem which is practically never out of our headlines anymore. It offers hope, insight, an inspiring tale of a few dedicated researchers and activists on a long mission to find effective solutions, and a plan for how we might begin to stem the tide of mass gun violence in our country. Highly recommended. 

Movie Review: Pearl Jam Twenty (2011). Written and Directed by Cameron Crowe.

Happy After-Thanksgiving day (also known by some as Black Friday). Once again, though, it’s also Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache (which is the fourth Friday of each month).

For today’s post, I’m looking backwards again to a documentary film (and DVD) from Cameron Crowe, one-time youthful rock journalist and now grown-up filmmaker, whose earliest exploits as a teenage rock fan and talented young writer were so brilliantly and amusingly portrayed (in mildly fictionalized form) in Almost Famous (2000), which is still one of my all-time favorite movies.

I’ve always had a mixed reaction to Pearl Jam. They are certainly the most successful long-lasting band to come out of the heady times here in Seattle popularly known as “the Grunge era”. They survived the rush of sudden celebrity, massive wealth, drugs and the punk rock fear of “selling out” to corporate interests which crushed other rock stars of the times, notably their friend Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. And of course, there is the civic pride in having a world-famous band of rock musicians whose origins are here in my own city. 

At the same time, I was never a big fan of punk rock, and was too “mature” in age by the early 1990s to identify with the whole new youth music scene in town, and the new bands coming out of it. I sort of missed the whole thing due to adulthood, and never dove into the various bands, the local clubs and the epoch-defining new music that was being created right downtown by local kids.

Eventually, though, I did hear some of Pearl Jam’s early songs, and they were powerful. It was also impossible not to be drawn to Eddie Vedder’s unique voice and vocal style – a rich, expressive baritone with the ability to range from high-pitched, loud screams to the softest, gentlest soothing tones. The band had the same versatility, switching from driving, passionate powerhouse rock to soulful, quieter and more introspective slower songs. Eventually I became a believer in the band and their music, if never a truly committed or devoted fan.

This was the spirit in which I approached Pearl Jam Twenty. The “twenty” in the title is for the twentieth anniversary of the band’s formation, and in that sense, the documentary was very much about a story that was not complete, since the band continues to sing and record new songs to this day. But it does very much capture the most important story about them and their storied career, which is how did this group of talented musicians find each other at this particular time, and turn their shared drive to make music into one of the most successful rock acts of our era?

Crowe does an excellent job of piecing it all together for us, using a combination of interviews with the band members and others around them, archival footage of past performances, and new performance footage. He begins with a tour through the young rock community of the 1980s in Seattle, the lifestyles of the musicians, and how the eventual members of the band met each other and first played together in other groupings.

From there, we move to the formation of Pearl Jam’s predecessor band, Mother Love Bone, and the crushing drug overdose death of their lead singer Andrew Wood. We learn how that tragedy led to the chain of fortuitous events that brought Vedder to the band from southern California.

Crowe takes us on an in-depth tour of the personalities, the clashes, the alliances and the shifting power within the band, as Vedder’s charismatic live presence and his songwriting began to push him increasingly into the spotlight and to increase his influence within the band. We learn how he and other band members weathered the stress of their sudden success, the pressures of touring, and several cataclysmic events, including a concert in Denmark where a crowd rush caused the accidental deaths of nine fans.

It’s all there – the trip from obscurity to celebrity, from poverty to wealth, the competition, the cooperation, the drugs, relationships, screw-ups and wild successes. It’s a fascinating portrait of how a band which at one time was considered “the greatest rock band in the world” survived the perils of success, and became a band of brothers who could continue to come together regularly to create great music and put on fantastic live shows over a period that now spans more than 30 years.

If you’re a fan of Pearl Jam, and haven’t seen this documentary, it’s probably essential for you to track it down and watch it, just to gather all the inside stories and details you didn’t know before. And if you’re not necessarily a fan but want to know more about them, and the Grunge era of rock in Seattle, or about what sorts of challenges musicians in top bands must face and overcome to succeed in the music business, this is a compelling film history of one of the most successful and popular rock bands of the past three decades. Recommended.

Personal Note: Another New Song and Video Released Today!

I'm very pleased to announce that I released my seventh original music single this morning, with an accompanying lyric video, on all the music streaming services and on YouTube. It's called I'm Watching You, and (despite that ambiguously ominous sounding title), it's actually a happy love story about a young family living their dreams together, with an island sound that's quite different from any of my previous songs.

This song release follows closely on the heels of my two preceding song and video releases, Science Fiction World (released November 9th) and Canadian Girl (released October 6th). If you haven't heard them yet, I'd encourage you to check them out! 

If you'd like to see the videos of any of these songs, please just click the link to my YouTube music video channel on the right column of this page.

In related news, I'm in the process of setting up an email list service for my music audience, as well as for The Memory Cache blog. I am hoping to find new ways to widen the audience for my music and my writing, while also ensuring that I don't continue to send unsolicited announcements to personal friends and family (or anyone else) who may not want to receive them. 

I'm also hoping to find a more efficient and direct way of sharing news of my activities with an intentional audience, without having to rely so heavily on social media platforms.

The new email list service (using the Mailchimp platform) will include pop-up forms on my web sites that allow readers and listeners to join my email list to receive announcements and news from me, and also to easily unsubscribe from the list at any time.  

I promise that emails from me to my list will be brief and only occasional. I don't want to fill up anyone's inbox with spam, so I will always strive to be respectful of your time and attention with any emails I send. With that said, don't be surprised if you see a pop-up invitation to join my email list on this site, and/or an email from me via the new email service, in the near future.

In the meantime, I wish you and your families a very happy Thanksgiving!

Book Review: Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman’s Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front (2017). Mary Jennings Hegar.

One of the historical anomalies of our country's recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been the increasing presence of women in our own armed forces, as well as in some of the other military forces and paramilitary groups involved in these conflicts. 

All wars are followed by the biographies and autobiographies of some of the participants; our own recent wars are no exception. But the fact that a number of these combatants are now women, with a whole new set of female perspectives, experiences, and challenges above and beyond those of their male counterparts, has led to some particularly absorbing new examples of the timeless soldier's memoir. Shoot Like A Girl is one of the best such accounts I've read to come out of the last two decades of American wars abroad.

Hegar starts at the beginning, with her Texas childhood and family. Her young years were spent with a physically abusive father, and a mother who tried but struggled to protect her and her sister from their father's rages. Eventually they escaped, and their mother remarried, providing them this time with a kind and supportive step-father, who played a positive role in convincing Mary Jennings that she could be whatever she wanted. And what she wanted more than anything since she was a small child was to be a military pilot.

From there, she takes us through her college years as an ROTC cadet, her constant striving to be the best, the accidents and setbacks she encountered in cadet training, and direction changes she had to make along the way to realize her dreams. She describes how she took flying lessons on her own to become a pilot, and the near disaster of her first long-distance solo. She tells the story of her sad short-lived first marriage, her first assignment abroad as a young Air Force officer supervising aircraft maintenance, the gender-based discrimination she encountered from the male officers above her, and a horrifying sexual assault by an Air Force physician.

Eventually, though, through sheer force of will, persistence, excellence and a little luck, she was selected for Air Force flight training. She went through the basic flight school for fixed wing aircraft, and learned to fly the Air Force's T-37 trainer, before transitioning to flying helicopters. We experience through her the incredible challenges of surviving the rigorous flight training, and what it took to make it in the macho "man's world" of military aviation.

Once she had her wings, she began flying missions in support of the civilian world: search and rescue, fire fighting, and drug interdiction. But with the onset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was inevitable she would end up there. And so she did. She volunteered, and sought it out, to serve her country, and to face the ultimate personal challenge of combat.

Her role in Afghanistan was to fly injured soldiers out of active combat areas. It was a dangerous job, with long days spent on duty, flying constantly, and frequently into "hot" landing zones. She describes it all, and how much she relished the mission, even with the pain and heartbreak of the constant injury and death around her. She also relates the range of experiences she had dealing with her fellows, including incredible solidarity and close friendships with many of her fellow servicemen and women, but also ongoing discrimination and harassment from some of the men in her units and chain of command.

She also describes the one mission where she was wounded in combat, lost her aircraft to enemy fire, and still managed to fly out on another helicopter's landing skid while firing her rifle at enemy fighters at the landing zone. That exploit earned her a Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor, as well as a Purple Heart, and made her a decorated war hero.

At the end of her story, we see how she ultimately ended her flying career with the National Guard, then became a political advocate, who helped lead the national fight to remove limitations on women serving in combat roles in the military. She also reveals that she did ultimately find happiness with another man from her Texas hometown, who became her husband and partner in her civilian life, which was a nice happy ending.

This is a very readable and inspiring adventure story of how one woman managed to live her dreams of flying and military service, even against the headwinds of institutional resistance to women serving in the Air Force, and how in the process, she became an American hero, and a force for positive change in the military. Recommended.

Movie Review: Thirteen Lives (2022). Amazon Prime.

This new movie directed by Ron Howard is an amazing and inspiring story based on a real-life incident from 2018, which we all probably remember (it was only four years ago), where the boys on a Thai youth soccer team and their coach were accidentally trapped deep in a cave, and were rescued under harrowing conditions in by an international volunteer effort that combined with the Thai governmental response.

There was enough coverage of this near-tragedy that turned out so well that any of us who followed it in the news probably know the outlines of the story. What Ron Howard has done is to provide us with a brilliant “you were there” docudrama, showing us an inside view of the boys, their families, the Thai governmental officials and Navy SEAL special operators, and especially the small group of foreign rescue divers (led by two late middle-aged British divers portrayed perfectly by Viggo Mortenson and Colin Farrell) who provided the expertise to devise and carry out the dangerous and improbable rescue, which ultimately saved the lives of all 12 boys and their coach.

In an event that went on for about two weeks, and involved more than 5,000 volunteers as well as legions of international press, it’s hard to capture all the dimensions of what it took to save the trapped boys, and how they got so stuck in the cave in the first place, but this film does a thorough job of revealing added dimensions of the story which I didn’t recall from the news coverage at the time. I will discuss some of them below, so if you'd prefer not to know in advance, you can stop reading now, and just see the movie (i.e. spoiler alert!).

I didn’t realize (or maybe remember), for example, that it was the torrential downpours of the Thai rainy season that caused the boys to become trapped, as a massive storm flooded the cave behind them right after they headed into it. This rain continued to flood the cave throughout the incident, causing treacherous rivers of water to flow rapidly through the cave so that only divers could pass through narrow tunnels that are ordinarily accessible by walking and crawling.

I definitely didn’t recall that there was a massive team of volunteers on top of the mountain, led by a Thai-American hydrology expert, who worked on plugging and diverting the continuous flow of rain water away from the cave, and into the surrounding agricultural fields. This ruined the crop for the local farmers, who were later compensated by the government for their losses, but who agreed to the flooding in the moment, in order to help save the boys' lives.

Most thrilling, though, are the scenes of the divers, including the international volunteer divers and the Thai SEALs, who repeatedly fought their way into and out of the cave to a depth of more than 3 kilometers, through narrow, dark passages full of sharp rocks and fast-moving water, to bring the boys food, medical aid, batteries and hope.

The scenes of the rescue itself are absolutely astonishing and terrifying, since the divers believed the only way to bring the boys out was to sedate them, put them into full-face scuba masks, and tow them in a sleeping state, so they wouldn’t panic underwater and accidentally kill themselves. It was an incredibly risky approach, which they took because there was no other option open to them that seemed to have any chance of success. 

I love a good story about courage and heroism, and people banding together to accomplish something decent and worthwhile for others in the face of incredible adversity and danger, especially outside the context of war. With all the trauma and darkness of the past few years, it’s uplifting to see whole communities of individuals from around the globe come together, and in some cases risk their own lives, to help others in distress. This is one of the most miraculous such true stories told in film I’ve seen in a while. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Elvis (2022). On Demand.

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to watch the Elvis movie which came out earlier this year. It was definitely worthwhile and very well done, and brought a fresh perspective and new light to the Elvis story.

I can still remember grown-ups talking about “Elvis the Pelvis” in scandalized voices when I was a child in the late 1950s, but my excitement about rock music and its stars didn’t really get going until the Beatles arrived in early 1964. Even though I remember listening to the pop hits of the late 1950s and early 1960s as a boy, on my first transistor radio in bed late at night, Elvis and his origins story were a few years before my time. 

By the time of his Vegas residency years in the 1970s, Elvis had also become somewhat passe’ compared to all the newer music and musicians of the 1960s – most of the young people I knew weren’t paying much attention to him anymore. Yet everyone knows that Elvis was the King of rock and roll, and a singing movie star too (I do remember watching his movies). So what did those of us who were too young to be his fans miss?

This very good biopic does a nice job filling in the historical gaps, and providing a convincing depiction of the power of Presley and his music, his grip on his audience and especially his magnetic effect on the adoring girls and young women of the 1950s. In a world where Elvis impersonators are a joke, or a hackneyed Vegas lounge act, and a dime a dozen as party entertainers, I’m sure many people feared that Austin Butler, who portrays Presley both on and off stage, and actually performs some of his songs, would just be the latest in a long series of forgettable copies of the master.

But I don’t think he is at all. Butler is a very good character actor, who looks the part, and who is as convincing as Elvis the poor young boy, just looking for recognition and a lucky break as a country singer, as Elvis the electrifying singer and on-stage performer, driving the girls mad with the suggestion of those forbidden desires that so offended the repressed and uptight sexual norms of the 1950s.

In an early scene of the unknown Presley first breaking through a sleepy Country and Western audience’s torpor, and nearly starting a riot among the young girls who were present, Butler (as Presley) looks as surprised and delighted as anyone by the effect his performance is having on the audience. It’s an exciting and very illuminating scene, beautifully acted, that sets the table for what is about to happen to Presley's career and his life.

There are also a number of interesting social and political aspects of the Presley phenomenon, and its ultimate effect on the growth of rock and roll as well as American culture, that I didn’t really know, and was very interested to learn more about. It’s well known, for example, that rock and roll, as a form of music primarily rooted in black music and performers, didn’t break out to wider acceptance until white artists and audiences began taking to it.

This was definitely true, for Presley as well as other early rock artists. As the movie shows, Presley personally knew, liked and played with black musicians, and was heavily influenced by their songs and style, but ultimately became vastly more successful than most of the black players ever did because he was white. So was this just cultural expropriation?

Perhaps it was, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the conservative resistance to Presley, his musical style and his sexually suggestive performance moves was rooted in racism, at the time that the civil rights movement was just getting started in the South. The movie highlights the extent to which the authorities controlling venues and the success of Presley’s career were afraid of and despised the growing popularity of black music, and its increasing traction with white kids. And they made Presley pay for it, by reviling him in the press and closing off venues to his shows.

The most shocking result of this racist backlash was Presley’s forced enlistment and two year stint in the U.S. Army just as his career was taking off, which his manager and promoter Colonel Parker (portrayed convincingly by Tom Hanks, very much against type) devised as a way to “cleanse” Presley of his reputation as an “un-American” friend of blacks (and thereby probably also a Communist, according to the twisted political logic of the early Cold War era).

The movie as a whole, in fact, focuses heavily on the cynical role Colonel Parker played in creating the Presley phenomenon and hysteria, while also corruptly benefiting from it, and manipulating and deceiving Presley throughout most of his career. It’s a sad tale, but one which is inseparable from the larger story of Presley’s own successes, artistic genius and setbacks.

As far as I know, there’s never been another cinematic treatment of the story of the King’s rise and fall, and his indispensable role at the dawn of the rock and roll era. This is a very entertaining and informative attempt, well-acted and nicely presented. There are too many years to cover, and too many events, to fully explore every detail of Presley’s decades-long life and career, but this film does a more than credible job of depicting and interpreting the man and the legend. Highly recommended.

Personal Note: My new song, Science Fiction World, is released!

In a moment of marvelous distraction from what's going on in the outer world, I scheduled the release of my newest song, Science Fiction World, for today -- the day after a momentous election, upon which almost everyone's attention has been hyper-focused (including mine). 

I just overlooked the significance of November 8th on the calendar, and didn't consider whether people would want to listen to a new song, and see a new video, the day after the election! Fortunately, though, it's a relatively calm morning after, so we'll continue on with life as usual, and hope for the best.

Anyway, I'm very excited about this new song and video release. The song has a particular retro sound from the psychedelic rock era of the late 1960s I haven't tried to create before, and I'm thrilled with how it turned out. If you haven't seen it (and would like to), just click on the link on the right column of this blog (at the bottom) for my YouTube Channel. The video is a lyric video, and it's a little more abstract than most of my other music videos, but it is very colorful. 

I wrote the lyrics and music, and I played all of the guitar parts, except one short but tasteful guitar part Matt Taylor added during the bridge. I sang the nominal lead vocal too, but for the first time I have other strong voices joining mine: my multi-talented recording engineer and friend Matt Taylor (who also produced the song, as well as mixing and mastering it), plus Karyn Michaelson, a very talented local Seattle singer-songwriter and musician with her own solo recordings.

In his role as producer, Matt also recruited two friends to add instrumental parts, Tim Delaney (electric bass) and Rich Rowlinson (piano).  I'm very grateful to all four of these fine musicians for their contributions to this song. It was just so much fun to work for the first time with other musicians (in addition to Matt, who's contributed drum parts on all my songs), and all together, I think it makes for an exciting and rich sound. 

By the way, in addition to the music video on YouTube, the Science Fiction World song is also available now on all the music streaming services, along with all my other songs.

One other musical note for the near future: even though I've released two singles already this fall, I have yet another song finished which is scheduled for release on November 22nd. It's called I'm Watching You. It too has a totally different style from any of my previous songs, with an island lilt and a story of love and family which will arrive just in time for Thanksgiving. I haven't announced this release anywhere else, so you heard it here first.

Enjoy, and I'll be back soon with more reviews!

TV Review: Extraordinary Attorney Woo (Season 1). Netflix.

A friend who recently found her way into the vast world of South Korean television on Netflix suggested we take a look at this show. We were not disappointed, although it was quite different in many ways from any other show I’ve watched before.

There were a couple of hurdles we had to get over when we first started watching it. The first was that, like most foreign TV shows, it required reading sub-titles. That problem resolved itself while we were watching one of the later episodes in this first season, when I noticed a message while bringing up the show in Netflix that dubbing in English was now available. 

Without doing anything to my settings, when the show came on, it now had American English and slang coming out of the characters' mouths. That was actually a little jarring at first, since we knew from prior shows that these are Koreans in their own native land, who definitely aren’t speaking English. But we got used to it, and it did help not to have to read the sub-titles thereafter.

The other hurdle was getting used to the different norms, cultural standards and behavior of South Korean society, as opposed to our own, and figuring out from the plot what those differences were. It took a little while to get used to that, but it was well worth it, and also culturally enlightening.

But now, the show.  The series tells the story of Woo Young-Woo (played enchantingly by Park Eun-bin), a petite young Korean woman just beginning her career as an attorney. However, she is no ordinary new lawyer, as we find out wonderfully from the opening scenes from her childhood. 

She carries the heavy burden of a serious autism condition, with many of the characteristic abnormal physical mannerisms, difficulties with noise, touch and sensory over-stimulation, and the tendency to make abrupt “too honest” statements that create awkward social situations for her. She also carries the built-in disadvantage (perhaps even heavier there than in our society) of being one of the few women in an ancient profession dominated by men.

But she is also “extraordinary” in that she has a photographic memory, an IQ of 164, and the ability to rapidly analyze every law and statute of the South Korean legal code in her head, and apply it to finding creative solutions to the civil and criminal cases before her. This brilliance, which led her to being the top student in her law school, is a super-power, but it also makes her (at least initially) the envy of her fellow young aspiring attorneys, who are all jockeying for position in a high-end law firm.

Then there is the curious mystery of her parentage. We know who her father is, and he is the loving parent who has raised her, who she loves and with whom she still lives. We don’t know who her mother is at the outset, but as that plot line develops, it becomes another important part of the story, and adds to the more serious and dramatic aspects of Woo Young-Woo’s new life situation as an adult and a lawyer.   

And of course, eventually there’s romance, although it’s no ordinary challenge for her to navigate that otherwise normal life process. How does a person with her disabilities and especially her aversion to touch navigate learning how to love and be close to another person in a romantic way? Yet the results seem both realistic and very satisfying.   

This is an almost unbelievably sweet and enjoyable entertainment. Not unlike most of our TV shows from the United States, the cast is filled with good-looking young actors who are persuasive and engaging in their roles. But at the center of it all is Woo Young-Woo, and the amazing performance of Park Eun-bin in the role, with all her endearing odd behaviors, her kindness, gentleness and wisdom, her search for a role for herself centered on her search for justice and fairness in a tough and complex world, and her encyclopedic knowledge of and love for whales. 

Apparently the show has been renewed for another season. And it’s just so fun!  It's one of my favorite new TV series from the past year, and a great introduction to South Korean television. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Summerland (2020). Netflix.

This pleasing family drama was a historical period piece about England during the Blitz in World War II, exploring one more of the endless possibilities of circumstance, individuals and relationships that faced life-changing pressures under the savage bombing attacks of a brutal megalomaniac and his industrialized war machine.

I’ve often wondered of late whether the war in Ukraine will spawn a very similar literature over the course of the next hundred years. If it does, I hope they translate the best of it to English. There are few such similar historical analogies before or since World War II, of a modern peaceful urban population suddenly facing an unjust onslaught of death and destruction from a murderous dictator. The millions of Ukrainians who have had to flee with the non-combatant members of their families, or stay and fight and endure, will have countless compelling and dramatic stories to tell, or provide the scenarios for fictional versions of what they and their entire society are currently experiencing.

In Summerland, an irritable young female English writer (peevishly played by Gemma Arterton) in the rural seaside west of England is assigned a young boy evacuee (Lucas Bond) from wartime London during the worst of the bombing, to care for and harbor in her little house. The boy arrives with no warning, and is presented to her by a local civil defense volunteer, who offers no opportunity for the writer to decline the duty of hosting the uninvited pre-teen guest.

In the beginning, the young woman behaves predictably badly. She tries ignoring the boy, and leaves him more or less to fend for himself. But of course as any parent who has lived with a child underfoot knows, that’s not a very promising strategy in the face of a real and present young person with traumas, individual needs and a personality that require an adult hand, direction and wisdom to survive, develop and prosper.

With time and passing events in their daily lives, the writer and the child start to build a bond, a sense of family and caring for each other. And to her credit, she slowly manages to become the generous person and responsible adult the boy needs, even before she learns the surprising news about the real personal connection in her own life that had brought the boy to her.

It’s a charming and heartwarming story, with a happy ending and plot twists I can’t reveal (spoiler alert). It is definitely worth watching, especially if you’re feeling a need for stories of people under duress rising to the occasion, and being kind to each other in the face of unimaginable horrors and dangers. Recommended.