(As for Trump, the lunatic narcissism of someone prepared, as David Remnick notes, to turn a mass killing into a bleat of squalid self-congratulation suggests that his ability to exploit these deaths for his purposes can be limited only by his own apparently limitless fatuousness and self-involvement).
The report describes a squalid environment where self-harm was endemic and conditions filthy and degraded.
In another chapter, at the conclusion of an otherwise deliciously squalid account of the self-righteous hippie tripfest known as Burning Man, LeDuff actually assumes the role of God, a choice both perplexing and redundant.
Its squalid brand of anarchy and self-referential surrealism is present in everything from Mitchell and Webb and The League Of Gentlemen to Little Britain and The Daily Mash.
In the third act of "The Late Henry Moss" (2000), a dead father comes back from the grave to berate his son, Earl, for not having saved him from a squalid exile and from his self-destructiveness: HENRY: You coulda stopped me but you didn't.
"For weeks he won and I lost until he died and I didn't". The hospital itself he describes as miserable and squalid, displaying "meanness, hysteria and self-sacrifice in equal measure". An eminent surgeon came regularly to operate, so that "increasing numbers of patients had ever-decreasing numbers of thoraxes and larynxes". The only-in-it-for-the-money theme is also repeated.
By the end of the film, he is a frightened, ravaged shell of his former self, living in a squalid shack with a harridan.
The writer, David Ayer, who grew up in South Central, has an easy, authoritative way with the threats, oaths, and squalid jokes of street toughs, the self-pitying complaints of mangy ex-cons.
Starting with the hero imagining himself on trial for his life's squalid mediocrity, it exhibits his paranoia, self-loathing, insecurity and isolation, as well as his verbal vitality and talent to abuse.
The protagonist, Marie, suffers from a litany of misfortunes, whose sheer number may at first seem wearying: self-harm, compulsive promiscuity, drug abuse, squalid poverty, teen pregnancy.
Or rather, the work has come to be seen as a cartoon-strip of the alarming life and times of Francis Bacon, man of extreme appetites, genius painter, drunk, gambler, sado-masochistic homosexual, emotional monster and millionaire who worked in a tiny, squalid Kensington studio which was as much one of the artist's self-dramatising, theatrical invention as the work itself.
