In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due.
The Fall's grim cycle of misery began in 2013, when Metropolitan police detective Stella Gibson Gillian Andersonn) was brought into the fold of the Northern Ireland police to investigate a serial killer, the evocatively dubbed Belfast Strangler.
I was intrigued by the tension: horse racing as both a former big ticket event for the masses in the delirious 1920s and 30s, one of pomp and circumstance, versus its present reputation as a grim receptacle of misery.
In the 1920's and 30's Eliot was more like the "insufferable prig" himself, a remote, intellectually disdainful figure, who was consumed with guilt at the antipathy he felt for his impossible wife and who found a grim consolation for his misery in religion.
You could draw a straight line all the way from this thrilling piece of invective to Public Home Is Where the Hatred Is Sampled by Kanye West on My Way Home, this grim depiction of ghetto misery and narcotic misadventures assumed a new resonance in the light of Scott-Heron's own drug addiction.
Bickel unleashes the familiar grim catalog of sledging miseries: backbreaking marches over hummocky ice, sleeping bags frozen into steely coffins, the crucifixion of snow blindness.
Yet this movie, which arranges torn lives into a gaudy collage of misery, is anything but grim.
"I thought we were making what could be a rather grim story of a man's misery".
Laughter and misery, the crazy and the grim.
The press and the TV news may be telling a grim story, with those familiar favourites "chaos", "misery" and "disruption" returning to the headlines.
