High Fidelity

My family is engaging in that proud American tradition of hopping between streaming services. We just canceled our commitment to Peacock. My wife watched Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote solve more murders than the quaint little fictional town of Cabot Cove could have possibly had in a dozen generations. Now it’s time to move on.

I have wanted to pick up Hulu for a while now, after hearing so many good things about the Shogun series that recently ended. My wife and I watched the first episode, which was compelling if disturbingly littered with graphic violence.¹ I’m surprised that I haven’t read more about the brutality of the show after so many people have commented on the high quality of the first season. I guess it’s another sign of how we have just become accustomed to over-the-top violence in our entertainment.

Hulu has the movie High Fidelity in its catalog. As I recommended to my son that he watch it, I realized he has never had to engage with pretentious record store clerks, so he would only partially get some of the stereotypes on which the characters are based. Whereas I can still remember a record store jockey telling me, “Don’t believe the hype,” when I bought a used copy of Slint’s Spiderland on CD in the mid-90s.

Slint - Spiderland (believe the hype - post-rock at its finest)

1. A baby is murdered for the transgression of its parent, a Christian has his head suddenly and mercilessly liberated from his body while trying to comfort someone and a man is shown being boiled alive (his screaming last for several minutes of the show). ↩︎