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Today: Rax King, the author of essay collections Tacky and the recently published Sloppy; and we invite you to join us in a fiery welcome for our newest Hydra, J.D. Connor, who teaches Film and Media Studies at USC. Issue No. 454‘The Last Waltz’ Is a Hell of a Movie
Rax King Enter the MAGAZINE WORLD of Flaming Hydra Let’s Remember Some Presidents
J.D. Connor HYDRANYM No. 27
The Editors ‘The Last Waltz’ Is a Hell of a MovieAsk a casual viewer for their favorite detail from The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s 1978 documentary about The Band’s final performance at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, and they’ll likely respond with Neil Young’s infamous cocaine booger. When Young joins The Band onstage for a tearjerking performance of “Helpless,” there it is, a crusty white stowaway dangling from his nose so ostentatiously that no amount of editing was evidently able to remove it. The booger may be what first betrays him, but once you see that, you can’t help but notice Young’s jaw appears to be screwed on sideways, too; he simply cannot keep his teeth from grinding. From there it’s a short leap to noticing how much all these performers sweat, scrutinizing their uniformly saucer-sized pupils, and realizing that maybe Robbie Robertson doesn’t say insane shit like “the beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning” unless he’s high. If you’re not careful, the specter of coke will haunt your entire experience of The Last Waltz. You’ll see it everywhere, and it will derange you, until the songs no longer make you cry because they’re making you feel cheated instead.  I have now watched The Last Waltz for the last sixteen Thanksgivings in a row, once from a bed in the ICU—but even that awful year I had the movie already downloaded onto my ancient laptop so as not to miss this most crucial of holiday traditions. I didn’t have turkey or pie during A Very Hospitalized Thanksgiving, and I missed them, but I would have missed The Band even more. I never feel more right with the world than when I take in the opening shot, a black screen with all-white capital letters declaring that THIS FILM SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD! Of these sixteen viewings, only four have been sober. But even in sobriety, I can’t help but feel charged by the drugs and booze looming over the film. It is, in fact, the exact way I used to feel when I sensed that cocaine was in the room and couldn’t figure out how to summon an invitation to share in it. And in sobriety as well as in active addiction, fixating on the substances means missing the point. The Band played a staggering number of concerts in their sixteen years of touring, but this last performance was unique. It was a festival, a party, a literal Thanksgiving dinner followed by hours of live music with featured guest stars like Young. Without Bob Dylan’s star power especially, the film never would have been greenlit. And the coke booger is, in its way, important, because without the tonnage of cocaine the stars and filmmakers were all doing backstage, the film probably couldn’t have been made, either. The documentary series Mr. Scorsese includes a look at the script the director devised for The Last Waltz: it’s a dizzying marvel of coked-up ingenuity, every word of every song charted out in five columns intended to keep the director’s seven 35mm cameras accounted for, every minute of the night. He made the documentary while also filming his stinker New York, New York, an amount of work I suspect no person could take on without the assistance of uppers. Much to my chagrin as a no-longer-practicing coke fiend, I am forced to hand it to the drug: in at least this one moment, cocaine fueled great art. For a certain type of viewer, the coke booger reads as a betrayal of the craft, exposing that which we all suspected was there but might have preferred not to see. Because Neil Young is on coke while singing about that town in North Ontario, they might imagine that the beauty of the song originates in the coke. If they can’t see the drugs, they can believe Young alone made that magic; reveal the drugs, and they feel like victims of a confidence trick that the hustler wasn’t even skilled enough to pull off properly. As a sober person I’m often tempted to feel the same way when a person’s drug use breaches containment and becomes obvious. An unusually chatty conversational partner is suddenly revealed as just one more coke-mouth outpacing the brain behind it; a person who’d seemed to be enamored of my company turns out to be far more enamored of a substance; in these cases, I end up feeling ripped off. Lied to, at least by omission, because the one thing no coked-up person will ever admit is that the drug is the source of their palpable insights and enthusiasms. And yet, to fixate on Neil Young’s nostril or jaw is to relinquish an opportunity for enchantment, to miss the forest for some very boring trees indeed. I laugh fondly at the sight of it every year, but I’m not about to let a bead of fifty-year-old dried mucus set the terms of my experience with “Helpless,” which in this version is wrenching and ghostly.  Dr. John, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Rick Danko, Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, and Van Morrison in The Last Waltz (1978) Eight times I had the good fortune to watch The Last Waltz with my father before he died, which was like watching it with a really good DVD commentary track playing. He made sure I knew the lyrics to “The Weight” and “"Up On Cripple Creek,” especially his favorite line about “Spike Jones on the box.” We laughed together at Richard Manuel’s story about stealing cold cuts from the supermarket, laughed at Neil Diamond’s used car salesman outfit. But “Helpless” always made him cry, and I never did find out why. I didn’t even hear the coke booger lore until after my father died, though he’d told me every other piece of Last Waltz trivia and surely knew this one. Maybe he felt the way I do: cocaine alone can’t make music sound this way. Hell, genius alone can’t make music sound this way. Neil Young needed to find himself at a very precise confluence of events in order to do it. In one of the film’s best moments, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson are all backstage futzing around on their instruments when the futzing starts to take the shape of the old time song, “Old Time Religion.” One moment they don’t even really sound like they’re playing in the same key; the next moment dissonance melts improbably into precision and harmony. Robertson never takes the cigarette out of his mouth, and Danko looks like he might pass out in a pool of his own vomit at any second, but the song lives beyond conscious effort for them—and these few drunken bars of “Old Time Religion” sound better than anything I could do sober. The drug use couldn’t be more obvious, but you’d have to be a true cynic to claim that the drugs alone are responsible for what we’re hearing. The moment is responsible: these guys, playing this music, in this film, in this era. Cocaine did it, and so did booze, but so did countless and uncountable other factors large and small. WE HAVE A COOL NEW THINGENTER THE MAGAZINE WORLD OF FLAMING HYDRA: our newest, top tier subscription.  The mockup of our Spring issue: NEW FRONTIERS IN COMBUSTION. You’ll also receive, via snail mail in Spring and Fall, two beautiful, high quality limited edition magazines. PLUS our new, quarterly online-only bonus Broadsheet, for MAGAZINE WORLD subscribers only: a thematic selection of art and stories (both new and old) selected especially for top tier subscribers. The first Broadsheet will be published January 15, 2026, and mid-month in April, July, and October 2026. Our Holiday Sale ends tonight! HYDRANYM No. 27by The EditorsPLAY the word game just for Flaming Hydra subscribers! Check out the rules here. On Friday we’ll publish the best 21 entries received, as judged by a panel of Flaming Hydra editors. You may vote for your FAVORITE(S) at that time. Winners will be announced on Monday. Victors will thrill to see their name and winning entry posted on the glorious ANNALS of HYDRANYM page. Let’s Remember Some Presidentsby J.D. ConnorThe state of Ohio is a place with a lot of boyhood homes to visit—it has been big enough and important enough for long enough that plenty of politicians and inventors and astronauts come from there. And then they mostly leave. When I was growing up in Ohio, the boyhood home was as common a field trip destination as a museum or a factory tour. A number of the former residents of these historic places departed to become presidents, and nearly all of them were bad at it: Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley, Taft, Harding. (Since the absolute worst things keep happening, I imagine JD Vance, born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, will take his place among them soon enough.) Only Grant and McKinley got second terms. McKinley and Garfield were assassinated.  I have been thinking about assassination, and I imagine you have, too. Let’s say it’s because Trump was nearly assassinated last year. For those of us thinking about it, conveniently enough, Netflix has a Garfield miniseries right now called Death By Lightning. There are prestigey credits that show off a clockwork political circus and a prestigey title song, in which Hanni al-Khatib adds a twangy blues guitar to the lyrics the assassin Charles Guiteau sang to himself as he mounted the gallows—the whole thing very much recalling Jack White in his “Union Forever” mode. The show is in four parts that don’t add up to four hours total, produced as a modernized version of the classic ’80s U.S. network miniseries, with a tonal range that veers from American-The-Thick-of-It farce to lumbering, irony-strikes-again portentousness. I didn’t much like it, but the performances are egregiously good relative to the actual script.  Screenshot from the trailer for Death By Lightning The title comes from a letter in which Garfield wrote, “Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning and it is not best to worry about either.” He speaks the line in the show. But the wild thing about Garfield’s assassination is that there was nothing lightning about it. It took forever—two and a half months from the shooting to his eventual death from sepsis. That grinding death plays out for a half hour of screen time as Garfield’s doctor pokes around inside him, needlessly trying and forever failing to fish out the bullet. Alexander Graham Bell shows up to metal-detect the slug and likewise fails. Periodically, the doc slices Garfield open to let the iatrogenic infection drain. That yuck is miles away from the broadly comic earlier scenes where Nick Offerman—a shocking lookalike for Chester Arthur—is running around drunkenly looking for sausages. Maybe others felt the abrupt shifts in tone captured the span of political life in the 1880s. The racial ironies of the series have the virtue of being more or less true. Garfield did meet “a delegation of 250 colored men” during his front porch campaign; the Fisk Jubilee Singers also visited, and Garfield was effusive: “I hope and believe that your voices are heralding the great liberation which education will bring to your lately-enslaved brethren. You are fighting for light and for the freedom it brings; and in that contest I would rather be with you and defeated, than against you and victorious.” Garfield and Frederick Douglass did get along well—Douglass campaigned for him, and Garfield appointed him recorder of deeds for The District. And Charles Purvis, a doctor who cofounded the Howard University Medical School, did attend Garfield and was pushed aside for the useless bullet-digger. What does it mean, to tell this unremembered chapter in the squandered legacy of Reconstruction? The creators’ sincerity seems deeply felt. Michael Shannon, who plays Garfield, can be found everywhere insisting on the need to restore the value of “civil service.” But however heartfelt the above-the-line participants are, when it came time to shoot Death by Lightning, Netflix followed the tax credits to Hungary, where the production services are very high quality indeed, and where the blobby autocrat Viktor Orbán still rules. When you plop Death by Lightning’s Ohioans in the Hungarian countryside, you are striking a particular sort of bargain: narrative support for racial equality and liberal democracy; financial support for illiberal democracy and the right wing nativism that engendered it. The company set up a story that opposes everything Trump stands for, and to get it made they funneled a bunch of money to one of Trump’s, and Putin’s, international allies. Maybe you think that on balance it’s worth it; maybe you just hope no one notices.  Betty Gilpin as Crete Garfield. Photo by LARRY HORRICKS/NETFLIX - © 2024 Netflix, Inc., via IMDb And yet the political aesthetics of Death by Lightning, both on the screen and behind it, insist explicitly that people must notice what deserves noticing. In the final installment, Betty Gilpin as Crete Garfield delivers her great set-piece speech to Guiteau about how Garfield will be forgotten—and so will Guiteau. It plays as a culminating irony for the audience: why, of course I won’t forget Garfield! I’ll remember it all! Arthur and Conkling and Blaine, too… I just won’t sit through the credits. Crete went back to Ohio and, among many noble endeavors, burnished Jim’s legacy. Thus James A. Garfield, briefly president, has a National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio. Lots of school groups go there and visit. It hasn’t made a difference in Garfield’s notoriety. Lots of Hollywood productions have gone to Hungary, and many of them, like Death by Lightning, tell stories of democratic resistance: Denis Villeneuve’s Dune; Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner 2049; Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist; James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg. Many don’t, like the game show The Floor, Now You See Me, Now You Don’t, or the recent John Wick films. Budapest Reporter, the local English-language industry news site, is happy to promote them all. If Hungarian conservatives have a problem with the swarms of Hollyweird liberals, it’s not enough to make much difference. Local companies have been pouring money into state-of-the-art facilities, and the country has extended its handsome 30% tax credit to 2030. Even the credit is cosmopolitan: Unlike most other such schemes, spending outside Hungary—on, say, postproduction in the UK—is still eligible for the full rebate. Production has nearly doubled since 2019, exceeding a billion dollars this year. From Hollywood’s perspective, local politics matter less than local economics. Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984) was one of the productions that put Prague on the map for Hollywood; the upcoming Amadeus miniseries shot in Budapest. Ohio is also a place with many Halls of Fame: College and Pro Football, Aviation, Rock & Roll. The chief characteristic of a Hall of Fame is that it depends on a selection of notables from among so many football players or pilots or rockers to begin with that you would never remember them all. But you think you should remember some of them, and so you come up with some criteria, make choices, and get down to the business of reminding people who Walter Payton, or Amelia Earhart, or the Rolling Stones are, or were. You also get to the business of reminding-people-but-really-you’re-just-telling-them-for-the-first-time about (perhaps) Marion Motley, William F. Bahret (“the father of stealth”), and Solomon Burke. Which is one reason why Trump’s Presidential Walk of Fame is the stupidest thing in the world. You could certainly have a Walk of Presidents the way Disney has the Hall of Presidents. Lexically, that’s absolutely fine. It’s the “of Fame” part that rankles: there are a countable, memorizable number of presidents—and they’re all included in the Walk, not just the famous ones, or the best ones. The only exception is that Joe Biden appears as a photo of an autopen rather than in an official portrait, because Trump is a petty little dick. The Walk was hastily installed along a colonnade near the hastily paved-over Rose Garden, so the photos are likely to curl and mold in the D.C. summer. I can’t imagine even Vance will want to keep it, should he (somehow) get the job. They’ll pop the brass letters off the wall, and fill in the holes they leave behind, and folks will forget it was ever there.
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