Title: A Visit From the Goon Squad
Back story: Sasha is a troubled young woman, with a thing for other people’s things. Her New York apartment is a nest of stolen possessions, connected only by their power to spark contractions around her heart. Her record executive boss Bennie gets his kicks from gold flakes in his coffee – it cures post-divorce numbness and brings back lust for old-fashioned rock n’roll. Goon Squad might use the collisions between characters to explore the crises of the digital age, but it’s the way it makes you feel the past’s sharp pull that kills you.
Stats: Goon Squad shuttles between the past, present and the dystopian future to show how destruction and decay shape its characters lives. But though it owes its tempo to HBO’s The Sopranos, its view of temporality is firmly Proust – it’s the weightlessness of the current moment that wins out.
Vintage: Facebook addiction, text-speak and vinyl obsession.
Pickup line: “But the deep thrill of these songs lay, for Bennie, in the rapturous surges of sixteen-year-old-ness they induced; Bennie and his high school gang – Scotty and Alice, Jocelyn and Rhea – none of whom he’d seen in decades yet still half believed he’s find waiting in line outside the Mabuhay Gardens, in San Francisco, long-haired and safety-pinned, if he happened to show up there one Saturday night.”
