Entertainment | The Atlantic

The Film That Understands What a Creative Life Really Looks Like

2023-04-12T13:11:59-04:00

Kelly Reichardt’s newest film, Showing Up, is in some ways a remembrance of art schools past. It’s set in Oregon, like most of her projects, specifically in and around a college where the taciturn yet flinty Lizzy (played by Michelle Williams) works a day job while pursuing a career as a sculptor. Reichardt filmed on the old campus of the Oregon College of Art and Craft, which closed in 2019. By using it as her backdrop, she evokes a world that’s slipping away, one where small-scale professional creativity can still exist.

Lizzy is devoted to her craft but not at the cost of her practical responsibilities; Showing Up is not some tale of an artist torturing themselves in pursuit of the sublime. Reichardt’s grasp of realism is peerless. She’s long excelled at building simple story lines toward profound revelations. Showing Up is a terrific example of how she documents low-stakes vagaries, following Lizzy for a week as she prepares for a small show, deals with apartment problems and family foibles, and tries to stay focused on her chief passion. What initially seems to be a slice-of-life drama eventually reveals itself as a paean to the difficulties, and rewards, of making art.

Unlike Reichardt’s previous two films (the incredible First Cow and Certain Women), Showing Up is not based on any literary source material. The director—along with her co-writer and frequent collaborator, Jon Raymond—instead seem to be drawing from a relationship that many artists have to their vocation. Lizzy is obviously talented, but she’s not immune to everyday problems, such as her apartment’s hot water going out just as she’s trying to focus on making new work.

Showing Up isn’t a direct analogue for Reichardt’s successful career as an indie filmmaker. Still, she has a lot of empathy for Lizzy, the character’s need to make something she’s proud of, and her mildly prickly approach to relationships. Lizzy isn’t exactly mean, but she is blunt, with an air of despair. She seems to have a hard time feeling satisfied. Williams, who’s made three other films with Reichardt, essays Lizzy’s intense weariness without ever rising to histrionics. The performance is as understated and mesmerizing as her work in last year’s The Fabelmans was brassy and broad.

The lack of hot water is Lizzy’s most urgent dilemma; never have I prayed so hard for a fictional character to be able to take a satisfying shower. For much of the movie, she leans on her landlady, Jo (Hong Chau), a fellow artist who is slightly better known in town and is preoccupied with her own upcoming shows. As Lizzy’s exhibition deadline approaches, she’s besieged by other minor contrivances: teaming up with Jo to nurse a wounded bird back to health; navigating the eccentricities of her parents, Jean (Maryann Plunkett) and Bill (Judd Hirsch). A complicated, looming issue is her brother, Sean (John Magaro), a distressed figure who appears fleetingly.

Showing Up uses a light, deft touch for its somber interpersonal dramas, letting the audience fill in the years of context behind every exchange. Lizzy’s dynamic with Jo, whom Chau plays with a hilarious mix of charm and grating self-satisfaction, is less fraught than Lizzy’s family relationships are, but it’s still weighted with tiny resentments. Jo’s work is composed of giant webs of wire and string; they’re sprawling and showy compared with Lizzy’s intricate clay sculptures, and that difference is reflected in the artists’ personalities. The movie doesn’t make a value judgment on who is the better artist. It does, however, underscore that Lizzy has to work harder to stand out.

[Read: The death of the artist—and the birth of the creative entrepreneur]

Throughout her career, Reichardt has likewise opted for subtlety over ostentation. Even her period pieces, First Cow and the Oregon Trail drama Meek’s Cutoff, were marked by her quiet style despite their high budget. So watching Lizzy slowly build a creative identity on her own terms is delightful in a meta way. She might grumble about her circumstances and chafe against her buzzier peers, but she is devoted to creating work that’s true to herself. Making good art is a delicate alchemy, and representing that process on-screen is a twofold challenge. Reichardt, thankfully, is fine-tuned to the textures of each layer.

An Institution That’s Been Broken for 200 Years

2023-04-12T12:08:00-04:00

When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, my parents both died. Like many American children, I had been steeped in stories about orphans for years, but the books I had read and movies I had watched (Jane Eyre, Annie) failed to mirror my experience of parental loss. They also contributed to my mistaken understanding of orphanhood and the makeup of our child-welfare system—misconceptions that many Americans hold today.

For one, I believed that orphanages were still common in the United States—the reality is that most closed in the years following World War II. And I had only the vaguest sense of what foster care was, even though that’s where my brother and I would have likely ended up were it not for certain facts of our situation: We were middle-class, white, and had extended family ready to care for us. It wasn’t until I began researching my book on American orphanhood that I came to fully appreciate how much class and race have always determined who gets to have a family.

The two primary ways that the American child-welfare system has functioned over the past couple of centuries—through orphanages and foster care—are the subjects of two new books: Ghosts of the Orphanage: A Story of Mysterious Deaths, a Conspiracy of Silence, and a Search for Justice, by Christine Kenneally, and We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America, by Roxanna Asgarian. These books make clear how both systems have largely disregarded the problem that most families within them face: not necessarily the death of parents, but poverty. This was true even in the mid-to-late 19th century, when the number of American orphanages grew rapidly because of the confluence of mass immigration, a series of epidemics, the Civil War, and the rise of industrialism, which created an unreliable labor market and, in turn, poverty on a new scale. During this period, few children in orphanages—most of which were Catholic or Protestant and housed only white children—were orphans at all. Most had one or two living parents who were simply too poor to take care of them.

The child-welfare system underwent a massive transformation in the mid-20th century when it mostly moved away from private institutions and supplanted them with publicly funded in-home foster care. Now the top reason Child Protective Services removes children from their biological parents and places them in foster care is neglect, a loose category—cited in about two-thirds of cases—that varies by state, but that typically is defined as a failure to meet a child’s basic needs or prevent them from experiencing serious harm. Of course, poverty can make fulfilling those needs—adequate and nutritious food, clothing, and shelter—more difficult. There are also clear racial disparities in the system: Out of the approximately 400,000 children who are in foster care each year, Black and Indigenous children make up a disproportionate share.

Though there are certainly individuals who are committed to their work and have helped kids in dangerous situations, the child-welfare system at large has too often failed to keep safe the children it is supposed to care for. Many children are removed from their families only to experience trauma, neglect, and abuse. Though Kenneally’s and Asgarian’s books focus on specific stories, they help illuminate the repercussions of America’s broken child-welfare system and the ways it has failed to best serve kids and families—showing how urgently the country needs to reimagine it.

In Ghosts of the Orphanage, Christine Kenneally builds on her bombshell 2018 feature for BuzzFeed News, which exposed how Catholic nuns and priests abused children at St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont, for most of the 20th century. Though the experiences of St. Joseph’s survivors form the book’s backbone, Kenneally zooms out to develop a broader condemnation of Catholic orphanages across the U.S., and even worldwide. The result is a damning reckoning with a tragedy she calls a “mass catastrophe.”

[Read: 30 years ago, Romania deprived thousands of babies of human contact]

As Kenneally writes, “the cloistered and cruel world of the orphanage may seem utterly fantastical, but the events that took place there belong very much to reality.” She notes that it was common for nuns to force children to eat their own vomit and to humiliate them by draping damp sheets around them after they wet the bed. Survivors describe nuns and priests hitting them with paddles, locking them in attics, and pulling them out of bed to sexually abuse them. Harrowingly, Kenneally even recounts allegations of at least half a dozen deaths at St. Joseph’s—some of which seemed to be preventable accidents, and some which were alleged murders. A task force composed of state and local authorities, convened after the publication of Kenneally’s BuzzFeed article, ultimately could not corroborate the murder charges; the Sisters of Providence, who ran the orphanage, did not furnish documents requested by the investigators.

Although Kenneally’s focus is on finding out what happened to children at orphanages rather than exploring how they ended up there in the first place, the picture she paints of St. Joseph’s fits neatly into the larger history of orphanhood in America. First, she confirms that in many cases poverty, not parentlessness, forced these children into the institution. Many children were left at St. Joseph’s by their desperate parents or delivered there by authorities who had found their homes “unacceptable.” “Most were extremely poor,” Kenneally writes. “One girl drank milk for the first time at St. Joseph’s and thought it was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted.” St. Joseph’s also represents the outsize role the Catholic Church has played in shaping American child welfare. The orphanage opened in 1854 as part of a nationwide surge that reflected the Church’s efforts to help poor Catholic immigrants, protecting them from competing Protestant organizations that might try to convert and Americanize their children. Its doors closed only in 1974, well after the establishment of the foster-care system.

The eventual fall of orphanages after World War II came as the result of a campaign that began in the Progressive era, when activists decried them as regimented, overcrowded places that provided inadequate care. In 1909, a meeting of child-welfare professionals and advocates at the White House reached the consensus that home life was best for children. But it would be decades before that ideal started to materialize. As Kenneally notes, the number of American orphanages actually peaked in the 1930s, when as many as 1,600 were in operation. Some hung on far into the post–World War II era, and continued to rely on the labor of untrained nuns. Not until the 1990s did former St. Joseph’s residents—by then in their 40s and older—begin to collectively reckon with what had happened to them, pursuing lawsuits against the diocese, Vermont Catholic Charities, and the Sisters of Providence.

Kenneally’s book makes a strong case for the importance of studying this history, arguing that America’s 20th-century orphanages are the “immediate ancestor of its modern foster-care system”—an institution we can’t understand while remaining “blind to the stark realities of the system that preceded it.” She argues that the general public’s murky knowledge of orphanages ensured that what was perpetrated within them stayed hidden. A similar kind of ignorance surrounding foster care might well be obscuring many of the problems in that system.

We Were Once a Family uncovers the failures of modern foster care through the story of the notorious Hart-family murder-suicides. In March 2018, a white lesbian couple drove their SUV off a cliff in California, killing themselves and their six adopted Black children. Jennifer and Sarah Hart had adopted these children from foster care, welcoming them into what had seemed like a happy family whose social-media presence gave the impression of a loving environment. In reality, as Asgarian reveals, the pair mistreated and neglected the children for years, evading CPS in several states.

The media focused mostly on Jennifer and Sarah’s motives and backgrounds, overlooking what Asgarian calls “major questions about the child welfare system’s role in the deaths.” We Were Once a Family fills in this crucial gap by tracing how two Texas sibling groups—first Markis, Hannah, and Abigail, and then Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera—came to be removed from their families and adopted by the Harts, even though the children had family members who were willing and able to take care of them.

Asgarian forged remarkable connections with the birth families, both of whom were largely ignored in the aftermath of the murders. She writes that she was “struck by the lack of dignity in the way these families were treated, as they repeatedly grieved the loss of their children—first to the state, and then to their murderers.” By meticulously showing how social workers, legal officials, and other authorities repeatedly failed the families, We Were Once a Family powerfully uses this one story—though clearly an extreme case—to expose how what happened to these children is indicative of the classism and racism still baked into the institution.

When the United States began looking beyond orphanages, a new profession—social work—emerged. Within a few decades, when state-sponsored CPS was established, caseworkers would investigate families who had been accused of maltreatment. If caseworkers deemed that the children were being harmed, they would place them in foster care until birth parents could prove to family-court judges that they were worthy of getting their children back—or not, triggering the termination of parental rights and making the children adoptable.

This practice is in many ways more logical than the orphanage system, and there are undoubtedly children who have been removed from unsafe homes. But as Asgarian demonstrates, it is also rife with pitfalls. After all, it was CPS caseworkers and judges who took these six children from their birth families and placed them with the women who would eventually kill them. In the early 2000s, when both Texas families’ CPS cases were active, the state comptroller found that caseworkers were saddled with up to 35 children at a time, “more than double the recommended amount,” meaning that some children weren’t visited by a caseworker for months. The family-court situation was also problematic. Asgarian spoke with a number of people who worked with the district-court judge responsible for Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera’s case, finding that they all agreed on one thing: He “prized quick resolutions to cases above all else.”

As Asgarian reconstructs how the children came to be adopted by the Harts, she methodically lays out how federal policies such as the Adoption and Safe Families Act—which accelerated the timeline for termination of parental rights—have disproportionately affected Black children, whose parents are more than twice as likely to lose parental rights as white parents. While the birth families were subjected to intense scrutiny by caseworkers and judges, the Harts received “glowing reports” and had their adoption of Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera fast-tracked—even though the children’s aunt was simultaneously trying to adopt them, and even though one of Hannah’s teachers had already called CPS out of concern for her safety. Asgarian notes that “many people, both inside and outside the child welfare system, held a common assumption: that these six Black children must be better off with the white women who adopted them” than with their birth families.

[Read: The U.S. leaves parents on their own for a reason]

As We Were Once a Family attests, although the country has evolved away from the nightmarish sectarian institutions that haunt Ghosts of the Orphanage, the progress is far from unmitigated. Asgarian explains that most CPS cases deal with families who are “already marginalized” by factors including race, class, and disability. Our country’s “punitive approach” to these families means that often, the root cause of families’ struggles goes unaddressed.

Stories like Kenneally’s and Asgarian’s help show that the government hasn’t provided vulnerable families with the kind of material assistance they need. During the heyday of orphanages, the state ceded this responsibility to private charities; the price paid was, in many instances, the terrible treatment of children. Now families are hurt when they get caught in the dysfunctional web of the foster-care system, and many children are still experiencing mistreatment in government care. Both Kenneally and Asgarian argue that our child-welfare system has never served the best interests of children and families. Fixing it would require a “radical reimagining of what support for parents looks like,” as Asgarian writes. But it also demands something she deems even more difficult for many people to let go of: “the urge to judge and blame parents and … punish them for their failures.”

It’s Okay to Like Good Art by Bad People

2023-04-12T07:00:00-04:00

In 1895, the popular satirist and dandy Oscar Wilde was tried and sentenced to a prison term, with hard labor, for “gross indecency,” meaning sexual acts with men. The ordeal effectively ended his career, shortened his life, and made his name synonymous with depravity for at least a generation. The young Katherine Mansfield, struggling with her alarming attraction to women, wrote to a friend in 1909 that thinking about Wilde had led to “fits of madness” like those that drove him to “his ruin and his mental decay.”

More than a century later, Wilde is a canonical figure, the preeminent wit of Victorian literature and the beau ideal of the queer aesthetic—campy, ironic, a gender-boundary provocateur. To most of his contemporaries, Wilde wound up being a monster. To us, he’s an icon. But if he were held to today’s standards of appropriate sexual behavior, homosexual or heterosexual, he’d be a monster again. Wilde didn’t just sleep with men. He slept with “rent boys” (male prostitutes) and teenage boys picked up for brief trysts.

As far as I know, no one has demanded that high-school students stop putting on The Importance of Being Earnest. This unconcern is a little odd. Other artists—Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Plácido Domingo—have come under moral scrutiny and been declared beyond the pale or at least seriously suspect. Why is Wilde exempt? Because he’s dead? That can’t entirely explain it. After all, the painter Paul Gauguin, who had sex with the teenage girls he used as models during his time in Tahiti, has recently been the object of a major critical reassessment. Is Wilde exempt because his droll quips are still quite devastating, and still hit their targets? Anyone taking on Wilde would have to be willing to come off as one of the sanctimonious buffoons he made fun of. But above all, I think, he’s spared because he represents—indeed, was a martyr to—one of the great causes of our time, which is LGBTQ rights.

I bring up Wilde not to damage his reputation all over again—I love him too—but to suggest that punishment for wayward artists is being meted out erratically. No principles appear to guide who should be deemed unconscionable and penalized as such. “What ought we to do about great art made by bad men?” asks Claire Dederer, a critic and memoirist, in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. The book, which grew out of an essay she published in The Paris Review in 2017, at the peak of the #MeToo movement, is the account of an art consumer (her) who would be virtuous without being philistine. It’s also the latest entry in a new meta-genre: the moral reckoning with the moral reckoning that is cancel culture. Other notable examples are the philosopher Erich Hatala Matthes’s encyclopedic Drawing the Line: What to Do With the Work of Immoral Artists From Museums to the Movies (2021) and the critic Laura Kipnis’s provocative, mournful 2020 essay, “Transgression, an Elegy,” in the journal Liberties.

Some readers may object to the phrase cancel culture. The progressive impulse is to deny that the phenomenon exists or to declare that, if it does, it’s not as dangerous as the right-wing, anti-“woke” version—and anyway, the canceled rarely stay canceled. Allen’s 50th film is currently in production. An exhibit of Gauguin’s portraits, critiquing his use of his Tahitian models, opened in 2019. J. K. Rowling, reviled for comments critical of transgender-rights policies, still sells books, and a new Harry Potter–related video game is doing very well. But to say that an artist hasn’t been canceled because she hasn’t been destroyed is to miss the point. To cancel is to do enduring reputational harm. Tarnished names and impugned works have a way of staying tarnished and impugned.

In Monsters, Dederer ventures into this minefield with a divided soul. On the one hand, she has no sympathy for the men being accused. “I have been a teenager predated by older men; I have been molested; I’ve been assaulted on the street,” she writes. “I don’t say this because it makes me special. I say it because it makes me non-special.” On the other hand, she believes in art. In a clever conceit that lets her avoid appearing to criticize anyone—quite a feat in a book on this topic—Dederer keeps the conversation inside her head: She pits Claire the critic, who doesn’t want to miss out on “the freedom and beauty and grandeur and strangeness of great art,” against Claire the woman, who would like to be a “demonstrably good feminist.” She asks the important questions. How do we weigh an artist’s accomplishment against his personal wickedness? “Do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass?” Should we draw clear distinctions between a transgressive work of art and behavioral transgressions, or would that be letting miscreants off too easy? To her credit, she skirts categorical answers.

No artist troubles Dederer as much as Roman Polanski, clearly her favorite auteur, who balances “the absoluteness of the monstrosity” in life and “the absoluteness of the genius” in his filmmaking:

Polanski made Chinatown, often called one of the greatest films of all time.

Polanski drugged and anally raped thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey.

There the facts sit, unreconcilable.

How would I maintain myself between these contradictions?

Eventually, Dederer makes her way to the view that, in the case of Polanski, she’ll just have to learn to live in a state of cognitive dissonance: “Polanski’s work still called to me.” Like the good critic she is—her interpretation of Lolita as an attack on the seduction of young girls rather than a defense of it is subtle and adroit—she is drawn to paradox.

That Polanski’s movies don’t try to justify pedophilia surely helps Dederer accept his contradictions. Allen is another story. Dederer, a longtime fan, used to agree with the “dominant opinion” that Manhattan (1979) is Allen’s best film. Then she watched it again a few years ago. The movie features a romantic relationship between a middle-aged protagonist, Isaac (played by Allen), and a 17-year-old girl, Tracy (Mariel Hemingway). On this recent viewing, she can’t put Allen’s affair with 21-year-old Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his then-partner, Mia Farrow, out of her mind, and she finds the movie creepy. How could she not have registered Isaac’s sinister nonchalance when he introduces Tracy to his friends at dinner, and their strange nonresponse?

[Caitlin Flanagan: I actually read Woody Allen’s memoir]

She thinks that perhaps, as an up-and-coming film critic, she’d been too eager to be seen as sophisticated, as the cool girl, so she had suppressed her ambivalence: “I mistrusted and didn’t believe in the central relationship—it seemed to me that the whole film was built on a lie or a fantasy—but I didn’t have the words to say that.” She finds them now. Isaac is “fucking that high schooler with what my mother would call a hey-nonny-nonny,” she writes. Me, I’ve always wondered whether the apparent indifference to the age gap in that scene was meant as a joke (for one thing, Tracy seems more mature than Isaac), but Dederer construes it as an attempted “artistic grooming of the audience”—Allen trying to get us to agree that sleeping with much younger women is no big deal.

Dederer’s reinterpretation can’t be reduced to #MeToo-ism, even if it was prompted by the movement. It’s more interesting than that. She is giving a vivid description of a universal experience. We don’t come to the movies as blank slates; we bring ourselves and our history. And with the advent of social media, we can’t escape knowing about artists’ alleged misdeeds, however long ago they are said to have happened. Biography “falls on your head all day long,” Dederer observes. “We don’t know the real story” behind the allegations, which Allen denies, that he molested his 7-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, she writes, “and we might never know.” She dwells, though, on “the fucking of Soon-Yi,” in her bitter phrase, because she herself grew up with her mother’s boyfriend and loves him like a parent. That such a man would come on to a young woman like the one she had been strikes Dederer as an unthinkable breach of trust. Giving herself permission to mix in this subjective and emotional reaction, as opposed to striving for a purely objective and rational one, is a liberation; after all, her response to Manhattan and Isaac and Tracy was always going to be personal. “I’m just acknowledging the realities of the situation,” Dederer writes.

The film Manhattan is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it’s also myopic and limited in its own right; and it’s also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great … Simply being told that Allen’s history shouldn’t matter doesn’t achieve the objective of making it not matter.

Making it not matter is precisely what Dederer and I were both taught in college to do (I’m a few years older than she is). Don’t commit the biographical fallacy, her professors told her: “The work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure).” I read the Russian formalists, whose subject was the workings of literary language, as well as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. The author was dead; long live the text that stands on its own! The genius whose name was on the work might be louche, but who cared? He (and it was usually a he) had nothing to do with the free play of meaning.

Only after I graduated did deconstruction morph into new historicism and feminist postcolonialism, which sneaked the author back into the classroom by focusing on the particular circumstances in which the work was written. Morality returned too: Now you studied literature to decode the problematic social and sexual relations encrypted in the text. Dederer doesn’t mention these theorists by name, but she asks their question about a critical approach that failed to address itself to the operations of power: Cui bono? Who benefits from keeping biography and history away from art? And she echoes one of their answers: “The winners of history (men) (so far).”

I’m not quite as enthused as Dederer is about the politicization of interpretation. We’re at the point when we could use a little more of the art-for-art’s-sake spirit; could let ourselves luxuriate in sensuality, beauty, and form; should offer more resistance to the pressure to find and deliver socially useful messages. I look back with a certain chagrin at how, as a young critic, I delighted in bucking my high-minded education by hunting down traces of a writer’s mixed motives, bad faith, petty and not so petty obfuscations in his writing. I took hubristic pride in my gotcha criticism and my eagle eye. But what used to feel subversive now feels like an imperative: Either scan the text for signs of immorality or be suspected of reactionary tendencies. You were hoping for aesthetic transport? Back to the consciousness-raising session with you!

[Read: How capitalism drives cancel culture]

Dederer doesn’t want to be a killjoy, but she also doesn’t want to ignore the plights of vulnerable and abused people. There are many ways to signal your disapproval of a blameworthy artist. At a minimum, you can avoid his art; that way you don’t give him financial support, if he’s alive, and in any case don’t appear to your friends to sanction his wrongdoing. The maximalist course is to rally others to a general boycott. Dederer considers cancellation performative at best and dictatorial at worst. “Can I still listen to David Bowie?” is a plaintive query that she says she hears a lot when she speaks on college campuses. She feels the students’ pain: “I was a weird teenager; David Bowie was the patron saint of weird kids.” But when he died, the news spread that he had allegedly slept with a 15-year-old groupie, taking her virginity. And so the fans are bereft. They’ve been betrayed. “This is a book about broken hearts,” Dederer says. Had it been Led Zeppelin, Mötley Crüe, Aerosmith, they would have expected no better from them, Dederer says. “But not our guy.”

The thing is, no one wants to give up their guy. Dederer thinks the students were upset because they felt betrayed by Bowie’s misconduct. She doesn’t say this, exactly, but I think something in them was also balking at the presumption—automatic on their part—that they had to delete him from their playlists. When you have to punish the one you love, you just don’t want to. You could call that hypocrisy; I call it sanity, because maybe punishment isn’t the way to go.

When our guy is the target, what also becomes apparent is that the retributive process is ugly. If we must incorporate a prescriptive morality into our reception of art, at least let it rest on epistemological rigor—on doing our due diligence. Twitter hordes all too often demand that we repudiate our idols in an instant, without second thoughts, before the murk of rumor and uncertainty has been cleared up and contexts understood. Have we paused to examine the evidence? And even if guilt has been established, behavioral norms are changing fast. Maybe we should be less dogmatic about our operative definitions of right and wrong.

Given her visceral aversion to overreach, I find it surprising that Dederer often fails to question assumptions of culpability. She tells the story of a queer punk duo, PWR BTTM, whose passionate fans (many of them in the LGBTQ community) turned on the pair after one of the musicians was accused of sexual misconduct. Their anger “was rapid, bitter, and heartfelt,” Dederer writes. “How could they listen to this beloved music when they felt betrayed by its maker? The songs were soured, or stained.”

Dederer’s account of the incident is pretty cryptic, though, so I looked into it. On May 11, 2017, just as PWR BTTM’s second album was coming out, a person wrote a Facebook post accusing one band member of predatory behavior against others in the fan community; an anonymous first-person account in Jezebel followed, alleging that sexual encounters that had occurred the year before qualified, in retrospect, as sexual assault. By May 15, PWR BTTM’s record label had stopped distributing the new album; the duo’s management agency had dropped them; their upcoming tour had fallen apart; and their music had been removed from Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Spotify.

But did the band member do it? Dederer never says. She’s talking about the fans’ feelings, not about whether the feelings are based on fact. The accused musician apologized for any interactions with fans after shows that may have caused discomfort, and strongly contested the account in Jezebel, saying they understood those encounters to have been “fully consensual.” But the band broke up shortly afterward, so the complete backstory may never become public. Still, when disputed accusations by unnamed parties turn musicians from rising stars to personae non gratae in less than a week, you have to wonder who let PWR BTTM’s followers down, the accused or an industry in a panic.

Dederer takes a similar tack in describing J. K. Rowling’s vilification as a transphobe. You can see why she wouldn’t want to relitigate such an explosive indictment. But her focus on fan alienation, which entails adopting the progressive wisdom on trans issues, winds up seeming symptomatic of the problem: If artists’ political opinions are being deemed unacceptable, the grounds of that judgment surely deserve careful consideration; the verdict of the group shouldn’t simply hold sway.

[Read: How J. K. Rowling became Voldemort]

An ethics that is casual about proof and doesn’t question the assumptions of the moment looks disturbingly like mob justice. Dederer grasps that the besmirching of an artist reflects the workings of a collective unconscious more than of enlightened opinion formation. The most resonant chapter in Monsters explores what she calls “the stain,” a thing that is “creeping, wine-dark, inevitable.” She borrows the term from the music critic Simon Reynolds, whom she messages to ask his opinion of Michael Jackson. How has his relationship with Jackson’s music changed in light of accusations that he sexually abused boys? He responds,

i am currently trying to do the aesthetico-moral calculus thing re. MJ’s music, like, is the Jackson 5 stuff okay? … does the stain work its way backwards through time?

Jackson was a child himself when he was in the Jackson 5, so presumably he wasn’t abusing any children then—in fact, Jackson later said he had been the victim of abuse by his harsh and domineering father. So why would we worry about listening to his early music? Dederer thinks we can’t help it. The spreading of the blotch “is not a choice,” she says. “It’s already too late. It touches everything. Our understanding of the work has taken on a new color, whether we like it or not.”

Dederer’s ultimate recommendation for dealing with immorality in artists is very sensible. We should engage with their art, not quash it, and work through our qualms at the same time. It’s a noble aspiration, but I suspect that the logic of the stain will defeat it. If hearsay about artists’ misdeeds or thought crimes is top of mind when we interact with their paintings, or prose, or poetry, or films, or music, that’s what we’ll look for and that’s what we’ll find traces of—or not, but that will have been our prism.

[From the October 2021 issue: Anne Applebaum on the new Puritans]

As it happens, Oscar Wilde isn’t just the rare genius whose questionable desires have somehow evaded contemporary censure. He was also a philosopher of art whose ideas may help us find a way out of our obsession with adjudicating artists’ conduct. Wilde was an aesthete, meaning not only that he responded deeply to art but also that he was a member of the late-19th-century Aesthetic movement—in fact, the most famous member of it. Aestheticist ideas about beauty emerged in vigorous opposition to the Victorian insistence that art be morally instructive. Aestheticism was a “battle-cry for artists and critics claiming freedom of artistic expression,” in the words of one historian. Art shouldn’t have to justify its existence. It is not required to be wholesome and uplifting. Nor should it be seen as expressing “the temper of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and under whose influence it is produced,” Wilde wrote in his essay “The Decay of Lying.” Elsewhere, he wrote that art and ethics belong in “absolutely distinct and separate” spheres.

“All art is quite useless,” he declared in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. And again, in a lecture: It “has no meaning but its beauty, no message but its joy.” Any critic today who evinced such a haughtily apolitical view of life and art would probably annoy their more virtue-oriented readers. And yes, Wilde had a personal interest in cautioning against the encroachment of ethics on creative pursuits. In the libel trial that led to two criminal trials and, ultimately, Wilde’s conviction, lawyers offered the risqué Dorian Gray as proof of Wilde’s vicious character. I don’t believe you can separate his aestheticism or his buoyant writing from his role as a sexual nonconformist, and I think we should heed his warning about the consequences of a triumph of morality over art: “Art will become sterile, and Beauty will pass away from the land.”

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “It’s Okay to Like Good Art by Bad People.”

The Real Hero of Ted Lasso

2023-04-11T09:54:00-04:00

Ted Lasso, like an athlete meeting the moment, peaked at the right time. The show premiered during the waning months of Donald Trump’s presidency; against that backdrop, its positivity felt like catharsis, its soft morals a rebuke. Soon, Ted Lasso was winning fans and Emmys. Articles were heralding it as an answer to our ills. The accolades recognized the brilliance of a show that weaves Dickensian plots with postmodern wit. But they were also concessions. Kindness should not be radical. Empathy should not be an argument. Here we were, though, as so much was falling apart, turning a wacky comedy about British soccer into a plea for American politics.

The show embraced its sunny reputation, and started clouding it. It built story lines around suicide, trauma, guilt, anxiety, the slow pain of age and decline. It began its second season with … the violent death of a dog. And then Ted Lasso made its most daring and long-running play against its own brand of corrective optimism: The show turned one of its sweetest characters, the kit man turned coach Nathan Shelley, into a villain. It made him bitter. It made him mean. It transformed him into an avatar of regressions that have shaped this moment: selfishness, incuriosity, individualism gone from rugged to rogue.

[Read: The new comedy of American decline]

For many viewers—myself, at first, included—the twist seemed an error: A show known for its subtle character development seemed to be reshaping this one with a sledgehammer. But I’ve come to see Nate’s turn as crucial to the story Ted Lasso is telling. It led, for one thing, to the latest episode’s satisfying showdown: Nate and Ted, now coaches for rival teams, clashing on the field in epic fashion. But Nate’s villainy is also necessary, I think, to Ted Lasso’s broader argument—the one that keeps giving this “massive hug” of a show its uncanny edge. Empathy and cruelty are rarely as distant from each other as we’d like to believe; good guys, under the wrong circumstances, can all too easily go bad. Nate’s descent bears that out. His transformation is jarring and confusing and maddening and a little bit heartbreaking. It turns the show’s fantasies into battlegrounds. If Ted Lasso has argued for earnestness in a time of cynicism, and empathy in a time of cruelty, then Nate is the show’s rejoinder to itself: Speak up for kindness, by all means. But more important, fight for it.

When we first meet Nate, he is a member of AFC Richmond’s support staff. He launders the players’ jerseys, cleans their muddy cleats, gives them drinks when they’re thirsty. He is a man doing the stereotypical support work of a woman, and his character matches his job description: Nate is meek. He is uncomfortable, not in certain settings but in all of them. He is written—and performed, excellently, by Nick Mohammed—as the kind of person who, when he stumbles, might apologize to the ground. When he meets Ted, Nate is shocked that the new coach asks his name. He is shocked again when Ted remembers it.

In those early episodes, Nate serves as kit man for the series too. As Ted Lasso introduced its characters and story lines, Nate did basic work that allowed the show to run its plays and make its points. His first interactions with Ted help establish one of Ted Lasso’s essential premises: that the twangy American who has come into the Greyhounds’ lives is not merely theatrically chipper but also genuinely kind. Nate is a litmus test for other people’s goodness. Jamie, the team’s young phenom, bullies him; this is how audiences learn that the guy who’s great at being a striker is bad at being a person. Roy, the aging star, defends Nate—an early hint that the man who speaks in grunts and growls is also unusually caring.

Nate, in those early episodes, also endures a more passive form of disrespect: When he is not being bullied, he is being ignored. His vaguely feminized role and vaguely childish outlook, the show suggests, exclude him from a team that treats swagger as its currency. (When Ted needs a box that will allow players to submit team-improvement suggestions, Nate brings in a craft project made by his niece: a pink-paper receptacle decorated with stickers and googly eyes.) Nate, as a result, moves through Richmond’s headquarters both omnipresent and unseen.

Ted’s arrival changes that. An outgrowth of the coach’s sometimes cartoonish Americanness is his blithe indifference to hierarchies; he keeps soliciting advice from Nate and keeps getting genius in return. Invisibility, in life as in comic books, can be a superpower, and Nate’s version of it has given him deep insight into the team. Midway through the show’s first season, Nate—pushed by Ted—delivers a locker-room speech assessing individual players in wincing detail. (“You’re more concerned about looking tough than actually being tough,” he tells one. “You’re indecisive,” he tells another—“you second-guess more than a shitty psychic.”) The Greyhounds are initially indignant at being diagnosed in this way by the guy who washes their socks. Their shock, though, quickly becomes appreciation. Nate is right, for one thing, about each of them. And for another, they all know what it’s like to be an underdog.

Nate’s story, in that first season, is one of meekness overcome. He gets promoted. He gets respected. He gets included. Nate himself doesn’t change, really; rather, the person who was there all along—shrewd, funny, insightful, worthy—comes into focus for everyone else. And the club, in the process, benefits from his talents. The message is not subtle: Only when Nate truly joins the team does AFC Richmond start winning its games.

And then: Nate loses himself. He becomes petty, bitter, resentful, cruel. He belittles sweet, hardworking Will, who replaces him in Richmond’s locker room. He betrays Ted in hurtful, maximally public terms. As an assistant coach for Richmond—and then as a full-fledged coach for its rival, West Ham United—Nate imposes autocratic rule. When a play he suggests doesn’t work, he blames the players, and castigates them. The transition is totalizing. Suddenly, the guy who shuffled through life is striding menacingly, each step a territorial claim. His face hardens into a perma-scowl. His hair grays. He dresses in head-to-toe black. Like a superhero sucked into the wrong vortex, Nate negates himself. He is now, halfway through Ted Lasso’s third season, the show’s established antihero. More specifically, he is the anti-Ted.

[Read: When a show about kindness gets darker]

Twists of character, written well, can be even more compelling than traditional plot twists. But Nate’s descent into villainy has read less as a controlled decline than a hurtling nosedive. It has seemed at once too simple and too complex: the show embracing its comic-book undertones and compromising one of its characters in the process. Part of what has made Ted Lasso work, as a series and as a metaphor, has been its ability to play its cartoonishness against its complexity: Its characters begin as tropes and then soften, over time, into real people. That movement supports the show’s lessons about kindness—stereotype is often a direct barrier to empathy—but it also simply saves Ted Lasso from itself. Without that remedial humanity, the series’ sunniness could easily tip over into smarm.

Nate’s heel turn has relied on a different alchemy. It has taken a complex character—one beloved for his complexity—and hardened him back into a trope. Ted Lasso, its co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis has said, is a show about “good and evil.” Nate’s transformation reflects those epic ambitions. It also whiffs of a character being retconned to serve as a foil for someone else. Nate, to his credit and to the show’s, was never purely good or purely meek (his locker-room speech to Richmond’s players was a pep talk that doubled as trash talk). But his embrace of badness has been speedy and stark, playing out less as an arc than as a series of hastily jotted bullet points. His relationship with his domineering father, his sexual frustration, his desire for fame, his fear of fame, his drive to be “a boss,” his disinterest in being a leader, his need to take credit, his inability to take blame, his feeling that Ted was insufficiently appreciative of the gift Nate gave him in a Secret Santa swap—these are among the many reasons the show has offered for Nate’s dramatic descent.

The explanations don’t contradict one another; nor, though, do they fully cohere. They have made Nate’s transformation read, at times, like an essay in search of a story, a heady blend of cultural anxieties—masculinity, meritocracy, the effects of toxic individuality, the fickleness of fame—appended, with more frenzy than focus, to the former kit man. Each idea, applied to Nate, might have been explored with tender specificity; Nate, after all, is someone who has been marginalized, within his team and beyond it. He is working class; he is a man of color; he is physically unimposing. These things have made life harder for him in ways that are indictments not of Nate, but of the society that has failed to see him. He is resentful, and he has a right to be. No amount of success will give him what Ted can take for granted: the ability to walk around with a perennial smile, confident that the world will smile back. As Nate reminds Rebecca, the Greyhounds’ owner, when she tells him how easy it is to own a room: “With all due respect, it’s different for me, Ms. Welton.”

This alone would have made a worthy origin story for Nate’s villainy. (In comics, few figures are as rich as the sidekick who longs to be the hero.) Nate becomes known as the “Wonder Kid”; the nickname—the result of a pronunciation mistake Nate made during a press conference—celebrates his rise and, at the same time, puts him in his place. Nate hates it. The show might have explored that dynamic in the same way it has explored Roy’s relationship with his age, Sam’s relationship with his brand, and Jamie’s relationship with his father. Instead, Nate’s fraught relationship with fame becomes merely one more explanation for his free-fall. His villainy is epic: big, broad, conveyed through dramatic set pieces. There Nate is, his sweetness gone sour, spitting at himself in a mirror. There he is, taking down Ted’s runic BELIEVE poster and ripping it, defiantly, in half.

Villains can be uniquely compelling characters: delicious, deviant, fun. But Nate’s villainy has been hard to watch—in part because it could read, in its extremes, as one of the show’s own acts of defiance. Ted Lasso may well have been an answer to a president who turned bullying into branding and spent his days finding new loopholes in the social contract. The show, though, also responded to a broader reality. The culture that elevated Trump is the same one that has associated empathy with femininity, fragility, weakness—that has spent decades insisting that nice guy, like wonder kid, is an insult in the guise of a compliment. It is the same one that associates cynicism with intelligence. Ted Lasso defied all that. Still, the show’s remaking of its gentlest character into its biggest threat made it easy to wonder whether Ted Lasso had become a little bit embarrassed by its own nice-guy reputation. Had the show, in spite of itself, come to see empathy as a liability?

[Read: Ted Lasso is no longer trying to feel good]

But there are lessons, I think, in Nate’s addled antiheroism. His transformation is sudden and gaudy and sad. Nobody, Nate included, seems in full control of it. That in itself, in this age of unruly villainy, is poignant. Nate’s transformation, for all its bulky stitching, allows Ted Lasso to make a crucial pivot: from celebrating kindness to questioning it. Through Nate—and the direct opposition he presents to Ted—the show reframes kindness not as an easy slogan but as a complicated, inherently political value. The Trump era brought with it the In This House yard sign and the tote bag advertising EMPATHY. Target is currently selling a T-shirt with Be Kind silk-screened on the chest; this development is both exactly what you’d expect and a reason for pause. Slogans can be tools of political action; they can also preclude it. They can herald progress while doubling as omens. (THE FUTURE IS FEMALE, an earlier era’s T-shirt announced, all but predicting this moment’s brutal backlash.)

Ted himself, that avatar of good, is in many ways an extension of the slogans. (“Believe in ‘believe,’” he tells his team, as a matter of strategy.) His version of kindness is well meaning, simple, tautological; he embodies empathy so effortlessly that he can’t understand, in visceral terms, what a lack of empathy might look like. Even as his show added some hard edges to that ease—Ted’s cheerfulness, it suggested, is a coping mechanism, his friendliness an extension of his fears—it stopped short of complicating the basic premise. It never suggested that Ted could be anything other than a thoroughly good guy. Which is also to say that the show never, through Ted, conveyed the anxieties that underscore its talk of teamwork: Kindness is unstable. It is vulnerable. And when it goes away, everything else falls apart.

It’s Nate, instead, who expresses that threat. In him, kindness becomes something deeper and richer and more reflective of the moment’s political stakes. Ted Lasso, mimicking the sport at its center—with its expansive field and plays that wind and stretch—typically takes its time. The show, as it has moved toward its goal, has all but guaranteed that Nate’s villainy is temporary. He will go good again, clue after clue suggests, and he will in that way live out one of the show’s abiding convictions: Anyone can be redeemed. If so, Nate will embody one of the timeliest morals of Ted Lasso’s modern-day fable: Kindness is best understood not as a trait but as a choice. It is something people are, yes; it is, much more crucially, something people do. And it is something, as such, we can fail to do. That shirt Target is selling, with Be Kind emblazoned on the chest, looks nice from a distance. But it is poorly rated. After the first wash, disappointed reviews have noted, the words begin rinsing away.

A Biting Satire About the Idealistic Left

2023-04-10T07:00:00-04:00

Ask me how much time and money I have devoted, in my adult life, to conscious efforts to be a good person, and I would struggle to quantify it. Of course, I would also struggle to tell you what “being good” means. My ideas seem to change constantly, which means the target shifts. Besides, the world I inhabit does not make goodness easy, for me or anyone else. I put clothes I no longer wear in giveaway bins run by a profoundly inefficient nonprofit; I assiduously recycle despite reports that my plastic is likely “headed to landfills, or worse”; I sign up for shifts at a food bank, then cancel because I have to work. If I were giving away more money, or more of my time, my efforts would surely be wobblier or more questionable still.

Birnam Wood, the third novel by the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton, picks up on the instability of trying to be good, a pursuit the book views quite bleakly. Loosely about the idealistic antics of a guerrilla gardening group, it has no hero but rather an ensemble of antiheroes whose foibles Catton uses to poke, quite hard, at the dreams and pieties of people who believe they can change the world. Such an impulse is a major shift from Catton’s Man Booker Prize–winning second novel, The Luminaries, an intricate, glowing love story set during New Zealand’s gold rush. Birnam Wood, in contrast, is dark in both its outlook and its omnipresent humor.

Catton is especially sharp in her portrayal of Mira Bunting, Birnam Wood’s charismatic founder. Day to day, the group plants legal gardens in donated yards and illegal ones on unmonitored land across New Zealand. Mira feels sure this project will someday generate “radical, widespread, and lasting social change” by showing people “how much fertile land was going begging, all around them, every day … and how arbitrary and absurdly prejudicial the entire concept of land ownership, when divorced from use or habitation, really was!” She is so confident, in fact, that when an American billionaire—who, to the reader, is plainly menacing—offers her a major donation and access to a large swath of land to cultivate, she barely blinks before making the executive decision that the group should accept.

Catton swiftly reveals Robert Lemoine, the billionaire in question, to be a James Bond–style bad guy, a 100-percent-evil evildoer who supports Birnam Wood only because he can use its garden to help conceal his scheme to illegally mine rare-earth minerals from a protected nature reserve next to land he has recently, secretly bought. Simply by linking Birnam Wood to him, Mira puts herself and the group in great danger. Catton draws Lemoine in great detail, but he is less a three-dimensional character than a wall for her to project her other characters against. His static, reliable badness allows—and occasionally causes—everyone else’s degree of goodness to flicker and change.

That concept of goodness gets put to the test first with the group’s debates over whether it’s right to take Lemoine’s money. Before long, though, the novel begins questioning the nature of do-gooding in a compromised and compromising world. It gradually transforms into a sincere interrogation of the relationship between morality and the ability to bring about positive change. Birnam Wood wants to know if a person has to be good to do good—and how to identify what goodness is in the first place.

If Birnam Wood is an exploration of idealism, its characters are the different lenses through which Catton wants us to consider it. Mira is a classic founder, charismatic and self-confident to the point of rashness. She attracts rapt audiences, which means that no one questions her Lemoine plan but Tony, a Bernie-bro type whose strident opposition has the effect of actually pushing the group toward accepting the billionaire’s money. Mira’s loyal sidekick, Shelley, is reliable and slightly gullible in the way that the unimaginative sometimes are. As the two lead a ragtag group of volunteers to camp on Lemoine’s land, their dynamic underscores the extent to which different sorts of idealists, acting in concert, can create chaos instead of change.

Mira cares only for dramatic transformation. Indeed, her minor impulses are not good at all. On the solo trip that leads to her first encounter with Lemoine, she pitches her tent at a campsite with “an honesty box for camp fees that Mira pretended not to see.” Pretended is key here: Alone, Mira has no motivation to do the little right thing; indeed, she feels herself to be above it. Meanwhile, Shelley, who would never walk by an honesty box, feels that she could do more overall good if she could be more like Mira. In this contrast, Catton captures a broader tension: between minor purists like Shelley, unable to compromise on the small stuff yet glad to go along with Mira on bigger decisions, and leaders like Mira, whose ambition leads her far past pragmatism into a dangerous dirtying of her hands.

[Read: What we gain from a good-enough life]

Tony is another sort of purist entirely. He cares about purity on a big scale, and he’s more than willing to fight for it. While the group builds hoop houses and plants seedlings, and Shelley, in the “stout belief that there was nothing more beneficial to group harmony than to ensure the food was plentiful and good,” spends too much of Lemoine’s donation on “cured meats, and hard cheeses, and decent coffee, and kombucha cultures,” Tony marches into the nature reserve near Birnam Wood’s new project, having declared himself an investigative journalist—he has a blog—and decided to expose the Bad Thing he feels sure Lemoine is up to.

Catton balances constantly on the razor’s edge between writing Tony as a comic pest and making him so irritating that he is nearly unreadable. Often, he is redeemed by the fact that he is correct. Tony worships “intellectual rigour;” his signature insult is “You’re not being rational here.” But as he tramps around the reserve, he begins to see that reason is not the only lens for viewing the world, even as his rational powers tell him that Lemoine (whose illegal mining, by this stage in the novel, is well under way) cannot possibly mean either Birnam Wood or the nation of New Zealand well. Tony’s willingness to take on a Goliath such as Lemoine makes him the novel’s only character with a prayer of actually changing things in a major sort of way—unlike Mira, whose attraction to power undoes many of her dreams.

Part of what seems to intrigue Catton is the question of whether it is better to aspire to what could be called Big Good—for Tony, exposing Lemoine’s mining scheme; for Mira and her volunteers, shifting public opinion on land ownership—or Small Good. Before Lemoine came on the scene, Birnam Wood did quite a lot of the latter by growing vegetables on fallow land and donating a large chunk of their yield to the hungry. Mira, plainly, was never content with this work: She wouldn’t even accept Shelley’s repeated suggestion that they launch a community-supported agriculture program, which would have given the group more financial and logistical stability and allowed them to expand their good works. Stability is undramatic, and to a person who sees herself as a mover and shaker, drama is inherently desirable. For much of Birnam Wood, it is tempting to wish Mira had stuck to her small gardens—but Tony is as big a drama lover as Mira, and Catton pushes the reader to hope against hope that he will pull his exposé off.

Tony is not a fun character to root for. Birnam Wood would be, in some sense, a more enjoyable book if Catton made it possible to imagine that Mira and Shelley could somehow band together to prevent the ecological destruction Lemoine’s mining plan will wreak, and then grow the greatest garden of all time. But from the moment the group sets up camp near the reserve, it is clear that Mira is too taken with Lemoine—or, worse still, with the oblique and exaggerated reflection of herself that she sees in him—to resist him in any way. Her infatuation and Shelley’s credulity undermine the usefulness of Birnam Wood’s work and send the novel skidding toward tragedy and disaster.

Ultimately, Birnam Wood suggests that usefulness is the only reliable metric for either Big or Small Good, imperfect though it may be. It would be useful for Tony to expose Lemoine; it is useful for Birnam Wood to feed the hungry. Quite often, Catton seems to be searching among her flawed protagonists for the bits of usefulness they produce, and to take those bits of value seriously without ignoring the ways that each character’s flaws prevent them from doing better. But she also suggests that in the face of badness—or, frankly, in the quotidian, compromising situations that do-gooders less flamboyant than Mira still find themselves in every day—caution grows more necessary, not less. As Mira never quite learns, you get nowhere by going too fast.

The Pornography Paradox

2023-04-10T06:00:00-04:00

Content, some say, wants to be free; so, reportedly, do we. At any rate, such conclusions jibe with at least 9 billion visits a month to porn websites and “tubes,” where professionals and amateurs upload sex videos for others to stream, at any hour we please, at no monetary cost. As many reading this presumably already know. (Not judging.)

Is nonstop free pornography liberating, or is it shackling, leaving us less humanlike than ever? This is one of the contemporary conundrums that the sociologist Kelsy Burke explores in The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession. The answer depends on how you define “us,” because those producing the stuff, as is true of other content providers laboring in the digital sweatshops of our time, are barely scraping a living together. Though Pornhub alone gets more visits a month than either Netflix or TikTok, according to one online guide for budding porn entrepreneurs, a video garnering 1 million views will net its producer roughly $500.

Unlike back in the 1970s and ’80s—the heyday of XXX-rated features with multiday shoots and catering budgets, of ample profits and thriving stars—the new porn economy generates its revenues primarily from ads, accruing to site owners, not performers. The subscription site OnlyFans produces big paydays for a few stars, but elsewhere the story for workers is depressingly familiar, and porn performers are doubly screwed, so to speak. They’re kept busy, as Burke details, creating new content—one-on-one interactions with customers in “camming” sessions, for example—to supplement the content they’re barely being paid for. But even that material often finds its way to free sites.

[Read: Can you be addicted to porn?]

Whether ubiquitous pornography degrades or emancipates us, Burke writes, also depends on whom you talk with. She is less interested in porn as such than in the debates that people keep having about it—arguments about the ills of porn consumption that have only grown more polarized since Congress passed the first of many ineffectual curbs on the distribution of obscene material, back in 1842. In her wide-ranging book, Burke hopscotches among porn producers, viewers, activists, and various experts (including the self-appointed). At the core of her project are interviews with a smallish and nonrandom selection of those invested in these battles: 52 people who align themselves with the anti-porn cause, and 38 whom she calls “porn positive.” Approaching her subjects “with curiosity rather than judgment,” Burke mostly lets their competing views duke it out on the page, challenging myths on both sides while noting where those with divergent beliefs occasionally coincide.

Her anti-porn contingent is largely male, religious, and associated with porn-addiction recovery programs, some as clients, others as clinicians; she also spoke with nonaffiliated proselytizers and activists. Porn does physical and emotional harm to those who watch it, they maintain. Many think that it’s even biologically addictive, snaking its way into our brain and rewiring things. Or that the dopamine system’s response to online porn has the effect of fostering compulsive behavior—scientific-sounding theories abound. Here Burke intervenes to say that she’s found no definitive evidence for such neurobiological claims. But it’s also a thorny question to study under lab conditions, she points out: A subjective topic such as behavioral addiction is “all but impossible” to assess with objective measures like brain scans, and as the sociologist Gabriel Abend observes, the researchers themselves can never be neutral or objective about the morality of human behavior. As to whether we come equipped with hardwired brains dictating that males want to sever sex from romance while females dream of blissfully uniting the two, Burke gives the last word to Cordelia Fine, a psychologist who has spent her career debunking such theories: The word (Fine’s coinage) is neurosexism.

Burke’s anti-porn interviewees—a “strange alliance,” she observes, evenly split along lines of political ideology—also include a secular wing of feminists who lean more on arguments about misogyny and the commodification of sex. Women’s pleasure, they say, is left behind or inauthentically performed to please men. Burke again pushes back: This sort of activism rests on what she considers weak grounds—personal distinctions between good and bad sex, and presumptions about “what authentic sexuality for women should look like.”

Even porn-addiction discourse, she astutely observes, reproduces gender inequality. A woman who likes porn is more readily pathologized than a man who likes porn, her taste seen as a sign of past trauma or victimization. Among men, Burke writes, overindulgence in porn is often chalked up to a strong sex drive, and their efforts to kick the habit are seen as proof of triumph over natural urges. In her view, there’s already more than enough shame and penance-seeking to go around.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

Burke focuses in particular on the growing number of Millennial men committed to overcoming “fapping,” an onomatope for masturbation. (A Reddit forum called NoFap has nearly 1 million followers.) Among the book’s eyebrow-raising revelations is how heavily porn-addiction rhetoric, especially the versions emphasizing purity and abstention, figures in white-nationalist and incel online communities, where porn’s ubiquity is blamed on liberals, feminists, socialists, and Jews (interchangeable villains for this crowd). Actually, plenty of liberal feminists and Jewish socialists are no doubt alarmed themselves that porn-watching is replacing the challenges of three-dimensional sex and real-life relationships for generations of young men.

Burke has the gift of being supremely unruffled about even the most incendiary of subjects, including whether children—first exposed to online porn, according to reports, at ages 10 to 15—are being damaged by pornography, a concern that brings her opposing camps closest together. “All the educators, therapists, religious leaders, and activists I interviewed, regardless of their position on porn,” she writes, “agreed that it makes for bad sex education,” especially the free streaming fare to which kids have readiest access. All emphasize the need for better parent-child communication about porn, including the sex worker and sex educator Andre Shakti, even as she also insists that porn is entertainment, not an instruction manual: “We don’t take our kids to see Fast and the Furious and then expect them to learn how to drive like Vin Diesel.”

[Crazy/Genius: What is pornography doing to our sex lives?]

Anti-porn allies, alarmed by the normalizing of acts, such as facial ejaculation, that teen girls can feel pressure to go along with, endorse a strategy of inculcating the dangers of porn, starting very early (see a “bad picture,” and “turn, run, and tell!”). Some favor removing all electronic devices from children’s bedrooms at night, the digital-age equivalent of Victorians prescribing anti-masturbation gadgets. The “sex positive” approach, born of concern about dating and sexual violence, encourages “porn literacy” rather than avoidance, guiding parents in discussing the difference between real sex and porn sex with their teens. The progressives and social scientists Burke talks with tend to be realists: Sexually explicit media abound in our society, and porn is hardly the single source of all misogyny and bad sex; the priority should be teaching about consent and context. Conservatives (of both the religious and secular stripes) stress harm: “Pornography gets inside your brain and hurts it,” a Christian-themed picture book for children ages 6 and up instructs.

Among Burke’s “porn positive” interviewees, most of whom are women and secular, the focus in general is less on porn consumption than on the production end of the industry. She speaks with sex workers and activists who bridle at the recent conflation of the anti-porn movement with the anti-trafficking movement, which has meant the conflation of all sex work with trafficking. It reduces consent to an impossibility—a paternalism that Burke balks at too. Meanwhile, activists take issue with credit-card companies’ decision to cut ties with Pornhub, arguing that the move won’t significantly diminish its profits (which come from ads) or reduce the posting of nonconsensual videos; it will, though, directly affect legal and consenting porn performers, many of whom have turned to the internet in search of greater safety and control over their work.

Burke also hears from a feminist pornographer who says that taking control of the camera is a way of reclaiming her own sexuality, and from an industry-reform group that has published a “Performer Bill of Rights” that prioritizes consent. The problem, they themselves acknowledge, is that the “feminist” and “ethical” porn produced by porn progressives ends up as just another niche category on porn sites, jostling for views with “anal” and “Asian.” No one should conclude that the reformists are reshaping the industry: Burke has some pretty horrifying and no doubt all-too-common tales about the ongoing sexual and financial exploitation of young women trying to break into the business; they’re ripe for manipulation by anyone who calls himself a “manager” (whose managerial duties might include casting himself as the male lead in his client’s first film).

Another hitch for those attempting to move “ethically” through the maze of online porn is that our sexual desires don’t always line up with our values or our politics. A queer feminist sociologist bemoans being less aroused by homegrown feminist porn than by the nasty mainstream stuff, despite being appalled by the sexism, racism, and terrible labor practices. A Christian woman who says she is a masturbation addict found she had to quit watching even such profoundly anti-libidinal TV shows as The Handmaid’s Tale, lest she slip. That’s the problem with having an imagination: Anything can be porn. And the porn that turns you on doesn’t necessarily correspond to the sexual identity you embrace: Recall the poignantly hilarious scene in The Kids Are All Right in which the two gay-mom characters watch gay-male porn to try to perk up their sex life. In 2017, Pornhub said that 37 percent of its viewers of gay-male porn were women.

As someone who is occasionally baffled by why I choose the subjects I do, I always wonder about the personal impetus for ostensibly scholarly book projects. Burke doesn’t leave us in the dark about hers. As a teenage born-again Christian, she discovered that she liked looking at her father’s hidden stash of Playboys, knowing she was committing “the sin of lust” and also beset by queer fantasies—“homosexual perversion,” in the language of her adopted tribe. Now grown, she’s devoted her academic career to navigating the same antipodes: “Sociology became the tool I used to make sense of my sexuality and religious faith and the persistent ways that sex and religion collide more broadly in American culture and politics.”

[From the June 2017 issue: Screw wisdom]

Though I count Burke as fortunate to have been saddled with such a productive dilemma, I also wonder if those teenage prohibitions led to certain conceptual lacunae as she mapped her inquiries. Because of her focus on the pitched battle, you’ll search in vain to find anyone in her pages, male or female, who simply likes porn without needing to turn it into a therapeutic mission or a cause. Nor will you learn anything much from Burke about the actual content of porn, although after sifting through studies, she concludes that 21st-century porn is more violent than earlier porn, and that the victims of that violence are disproportionately people from marginalized groups. (Of course, popular culture in general has become more violent, which goes unmentioned.) The details that do surface suggest some interesting untapped themes. Incest porn was among the top searches on Pornhub in 2014, she notes in passing. What might be said—aside from hot stepmoms being a perennial fantasy—is that porn has always been dedicated to taboo-smashing and impropriety, which may be something we rule-saddled humans like about it.

But, as if looking too hard at porn might still be verboten, Burke shies away from thinking very much about why, aside from the obviously compelling fapping opportunities it supplies, such large numbers of people are as devoted to pornography as they are. You won’t catch her wondering whether there may be more complexities and emotional lures to the experience—perhaps even a few deeper human yearnings.

Those lures bring me to the other issue I kept expecting Burke to take up, given how thoroughly religiosity permeates her work: the terrain that porn and religion share. To be sure, religion offers purposes and consolations that are alien to porn. Yet both address a common desire—to get outside ourselves, to break free of this world, if only temporarily. Porn doesn’t have to be read only literally: Women can fantasize about being men and men women, and about rebelling in other potentially liberating, and dangerous, ways. And porn-on-demand promises abundance (whatever you want, whenever you want it), unboundedness (a world without inhibitions), maybe even a little transcendence, or at least an escape hatch.

In an essay titled “Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood,” the Yale literary and queer theorist Michael Warner, now an atheist, writes that “religion does things that secular culture can only approximate.” Without wanting to reduce religion to sex, he nevertheless finds overlap, as have others, Georges Bataille and Harold Bloom among them. Religion offers rapture; it “makes available a language of ecstasy”; it gives us the “strobe-light alternation of pleasure and obliteration.” As does sex at its most intense.

Though Christianity is always pretty queer in Warner’s telling (“Jesus was my first boyfriend”), his teenage struggles sound quite similar to Burke’s. The “two kinds of ecstasy” on offer became an agonizing dilemma for him as well; having to choose, on a nightly basis, between orgasm and religion was excruciating: “God, I felt sure, didn’t want me to come.” At the same time, religion’s celebration of ecstasy offered a way of understanding “transgressions against the normal order of the world” as a good thing.

Burke takes a less transgression-celebrating path to reconciling her own antinomies. The anti-porn and porn-positive camps she’s been chronicling actually care about the same things, she concludes: “human rights, sexual consent, and living a fulfilling life.” Everyone wants to achieve “a real and authentic sexuality” and break away from the “fake sex that surrounds us.” Her perspective is reassuring, and no doubt the authenticity of tender, caring sex with another person has much to recommend it. But it’s out of reach for many, and even the sound of it is a little tedium-inducing.

[From the December 2018 issue: The sex recession]

Pornography’s immense audience suggests that a lot of us would like some respite from authenticity, too. Porn offers a world where you don’t have to deal with other people’s personalities and expectations just to have sex, a world where (even more fantastically) men and women want the same things in bed, a world where (as in the Freudian unconscious) there’s no “no” or sexual scarcity. It’s utopian in the truest sense: a world that doesn’t exist.

Nor will a world ever exist in which the great porn wars are settled—a world where sexual morality triumphs, or a world without sexual prohibitions. The combatants themselves, Burke found in the course of her interviews, are well aware of this. No one thinks they’ll win this fight. What both sides do mostly agree on is that the porn sites everyone would be better off without are the ones you can stream for free. Now just convince the users.

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “The Pornography Paradox.”

Succession Finally Did It

2023-04-09T22:00:00-04:00

This article contains spoilers through the third episode of Succession Season 4.

He is … not risen?

I think? For three-plus seasons, Logan Roy has ducked and weaved his way past near fatalities—a hemorrhagic stroke, multiple corporate coup attempts, a congressional investigation, a troublesome UTI, a collapse in the Hamptons—like a hirsute, cashmere-clad Road Runner. Hostile board meeting? Meep meep. Attempted patricidal veto under the Tuscan sun? Fuck off. You could be forgiven, after all this, for thinking him immortal. Which is why it was so unsettling to realize, as the Roy children did, via a phone call from Tom, that Logan’s revels might now finally have ended. That Logan actually was, despite all evidence to the contrary, human.

There was something perfect, too, about the way Logan’s end was presented, after so much time spent anticipating it: It happened off camera. As his three youngest children arrived in New York for Connor’s wedding, Logan boarded a plane for impromptu crisis negotiations with the tech mogul Lukas Matsson. Early in the episode, Logan had instructed his youngest son, Roman, to metaphorically knife Gerri, the interim CEO of the Roys’ company and Roman’s surrogate mother-lover, whom Logan had decided to arbitrarily fire. (“You two are … close,” as Logan brutally put it.) Just a few minutes later, he had collapsed on the floor of the airplane, his face not visible. Succession is always meticulous about blocking: In virtually any scene Logan is in, he’s the focal point, the black hole drawing everything else into his gravitational vortex. He doesn’t typically share space with other characters the way that, say, the Roy siblings do. Other people might be shot slightly askew, but Logan is usually right in the center of the frame. In his final moments, though, he was so diminished in status that we could see only fragments of the man: his chest as a flight attendant performed CPR, the side of his head as a phone was placed next to it for his children to say goodbye.

[Read: The real Succession endgame]

Whether or not the timing of this episode, airing on Easter Sunday, was intentional, the show’s seeming reluctance to concede that Logan was really dead was grimly funny—and more than a touch reminiscent of The Death of Stalin. The episode, matter-of-factly titled “Connor’s Wedding,” was indeed set at a wedding, usually a harbinger of doom on a series where love never goes unpunished and marriage is just one more contract that can ruin a person. But it also seemed only natural to expect Logan to gasp, clutch his chest, viciously shove away the woman working to save his life, and ream out his CFO, Karl, for drinking his whiskey. Instead, he just lay there, while his kids sparred among themselves over what was reasonable to deduce about their father’s condition. Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, and Sarah Snook were all extraordinary in these scenes of chaotic shock. Kendall veered back and forth between adult mode (“I can’t forgive you. But it’s okay, and I love you,” on the phone to his father) and heartbroken child (“Get the best heart doctor in the world, and the best airplane medical expert in the world … and I would like that in the next two minutes,” to his long-suffering assistant, Jess). Roman made himself uncharacteristically quiet and small. But Snook, in particular, was devastating: the pitch of Shiv’s voice shooting up an octave as she realized what was happening, the way her composure seemed to physically disassemble on-screen.

And Connor! The eldest of Logan’s children—first pancake, political laughingstock, collector of gruesome Napoleonic memorabilia, defender of Ebenezer Scrooge as an unappreciated “wealth creator”—hasn’t always been afforded the breadth of humanity that his younger siblings are intermittently allowed. But last week’s episode, “Rehearsal,” gave us the gift of seeing Connor’s naked, prickly, unwatered soul. Compared with the other Roy scions, “needy love sponges” all, Connor declared himself to be invulnerable, “a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me.” At his wedding, which his father didn’t even plan to attend in person, we learn more about how Connor got to be this way: The wedding cake, a Victoria sponge, inadvertently triggered the groom because it was the only thing he ate after his mother was institutionalized at his father’s behest.

[Read: The unexpected tenderness of Succession]

Knowing all this, there was something oddly touching about Connor’s fiancée, Willa, admitting to him that yes, the money and safety he represents to her are a substantial part of why she’s with him, but she’s also basically happy by his side. Their relationship is the only intimate partnership on Succession that’s actually strengthened over the course of the show, possibly because everyone’s expectations were so very low to begin with. (And, let’s face it, Willa has no future in theater.)

And so Connor and Willa were married with almost no one in attendance. Meanwhile, Logan’s body was carried off a plane, with Kendall watching from afar. In some ways, we’re right back where we started in the show’s first-ever episode. Logan is done, and the people he tormented for much of his life are vying to succeed him. There are a few new dynamics in the mix: What will become of his assistant/friend/adviser, Kerry, grinning “like she caught a foul ball at Yankee Stadium,” as someone puts it? And what of Tom, seemingly weeping not over Logan’s death but because he may have sacrificed his marriage to Shiv for a losing bet on a deceased man’s loyalty? Essentially, though, we’re about to see what Succession does in a new mode, without Logan’s contaminating physical presence. The prospect of what could come next feels huge, and filled with foreboding. Can his children reconstruct their lives to have meaning and ambitions of their own despite decades of conditioning and trauma? Can they move past Logan’s final pronouncement of them all, in last week’s episode, as “not serious people”? Will anyone be allowed a happy ending? To paraphrase the late Logan Roy: We don’t know. We can’t know. But I’ve got my fucking suspicions.

A Return to the Freaky, Awkward Glory Days of SNL

2023-04-09T13:02:36-04:00

When Molly Shannon auditioned for Saturday Night Live in the mid-’90s, she received some appallingly bad advice. A scout warned her against doing the character Mary Katherine Gallagher—a geeky teenager who stuck her hands in her armpits and smelled them when she got nervous—because the show’s executive producer, Lorne Michaels, wouldn’t like it. “He’ll think it’s weird, that dirty little character,” Shannon recalled being told. Despite listening to that guidance for her first round, Shannon surfaced Mary Katherine during her second, and Michaels saw the potential. Which is why last night, more than 20 years after her last appearance on SNL, we got to see Shannon as host teaching the Jonas Brothers how to smell their armpits. And though Mary Katherine didn’t make a full appearance, Shannon’s episode was a striking reminder that character work was once essential to SNL’s success.

When Shannon joined the cast in 1995, the show was attempting to correct the previous year’s slump. Characters were a way forward, and Shannon became a major player. In many ways, she was the character queen. There was Mary Katherine, of course, but she also introduced viewers to a wealth of other weirdos who paved the way for the likes of Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon to chase their ideas down more outrageous paths. Along with her fellow cast members Cheri Oteri and Anna Gasteyer, and the writers Paula Pell and Tina Fey, Shannon began to shift the notion of SNL as a boys’ club and reveal new possibilities. Her often extremely physical comedy reveled in excess, challenging cultural expectations of what women in the industry should and shouldn’t do. She created characters who were, more often than not, too much: too strange, too brash, too subdued.

On a variety show that changes every week, characters establish familiarity and consistency, helping determine viewers’ favorite eras and cast members. After Shannon’s departure in 2001, new cast members developed a fresh array of peculiar personalities. Yet, outside of Ego Nwodim’s Lisa from Temecula sketch, this season of SNL feels noticeably light on the sorts of characters who have helped it become a comedic institution.

Thank goodness, then, for Shannon, who reprised two characters from her collection last night: the aging performer Sally O’Malley and the dreadfully bad stand-up comic Jeannie Darcy. As Shannon recently shared with Jimmy Fallon, “I actually did [Jeannie] toward the end of my SNL run ’cause I was like, Uh, it’s so hard to be thinking about making stuff funny all the time that I thought, I want to do something that’s really dull.” Pursuing dullness seems antithetical to SNL’s purpose, but part of what worked when Darcy first appeared was the live audience’s strained response. The jokes, and Darcy’s painful delivery of them, were meant to be so bad that they forced an awkward laugh. Unfortunately, last night’s Jeannie segment (a satire of Chris Rock’s live Netflix special) was pretaped, which felt more regimented and robbed the bit of the real-time non-reactions that fuel Shannon’s zany energy.

At the end of the show, Shannon let loose as the 50-year-old O’Malley, who had been tasked with helping the Jonas Brothers’ choreography team (Chloe Fineman, Bowen Yang) reimagine their upcoming Las Vegas residency. O’Malley’s aging perspective (“I got half a century of sizzle in my lady schnizzle”) and high-riding pants, which she took her time pulling up higher and higher up to create a noticeable camel toe, caused both Fineman and Yang to break. “Okay, you know, I’ve engineered my entire life so I would never have to see what I just saw,” Yang’s choreographer cracked. The sketch felt designed to create a viral moment when the Jonas Brothers finally joined O’Malley. Dressed in her signature red pantsuit, they mimed her kick-lunge-kick routine while she coached them. “Let’s put some bone-as in your Jonas,” she said.

Throughout SNL’s history, the biggest breakout performers have tended to be those with the largest—or loudest—arsenal of characters. In recent episodes, both Nwodim and Yang have generated viral or near-viral moments thanks to some characters that have seemed to have the potential to reappear: Barry the midwife, the no-nonsense upstairs neighbor Mrs. Shaw, and even the recently deceased Glenda. Whether they’ll return remains to be seen. But revisiting some of Shannon’s more eccentric personas last night felt like a throwback to the show’s glory days, when characters weren’t an anomaly but an expectation.

A Comedy About the Misery of Having It All

2023-04-08T08:00:00-04:00

The first time I saw Amy, Ali Wong’s character in Beef, I found myself sitting up a little straighter and leaning a little closer toward my TV. I knew Wong had a starring role, but Amy caught me off guard. Wearing a cream-colored bucket hat, her hands gripping the steering wheel and her face frozen in fear, she looked nothing like what I expected of the faceless driver I’d just watched in the show’s opening minutes—the one who’d careened recklessly across lanes, taunting, threatening, and throwing trash at a stranger.

Then again, Beef likes toying with assumptions of who its characters might be and where its story might veer next. The half-hour-episode Netflix series from the first-time showrunner Lee Sung Jin (Silicon Valley) is hard to categorize; it’s simultaneously a black comedy, a domestic drama, and a psychological thriller. It starts with a road-rage incident that Amy sets off when she flips the bird at Danny (Steven Yeun) in a parking lot after he nearly backs his truck into her Benz. Like a gnarlier Changing Lanes, their ensuing feud leads to an escalating series of vengeful acts that build from petty pranks into horrifying, morally questionable schemes. That the show feels balanced at all is down to how well drawn both leads are. Amy is a wealthy entrepreneur with a loving husband, a cute daughter, and a state-of-the-art mansion. Danny is a contractor barely making rent who shares a cramped apartment with his slacker brother. Both are deeply, desperately unhappy.

Yet of the two, Amy is less immediately sympathetic. Danny lives a difficult paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle, his every failure deepening his belief that the world works against him. Amy, meanwhile, has no obvious reason to be miserable. She has it all—if “all” is defined as a stellar career and a nuclear family. Lee, who was inspired to create the series after getting caught in a road-rage incident himself, initially conceived of the character as a white man, matching the identity of the driver he’d encountered in real life. But quickly—in “maybe half a day,” Lee told me over the phone—he dropped the idea; he didn’t want the series to be merely about racial dynamics or to boil down to a culture clash. Later, with Wong in mind, he envisioned a new character: a woman whose self-made success is the cause of her downfall. Not that Beef tears Amy apart; instead, the series grants her more and more achievements, dissecting how her suffocating ambition pushes her to act on her worst impulses against a complete stranger. She is TV’s most compelling antiheroine of late: someone who knows she’s her own worst enemy and who, as Lee explained, “feels very much trapped in a maze of her own creation.”

[Read: A comedy special about wanting to cheat on your husband]

Consider how Amy constantly questions her power and instinctively tries to hide that self-doubt. She may appear to be a Strong Modern Woman—she agrees to photos with fans and participates in glitzy panels about female entrepreneurs, where she says things like “Despite what everybody tells you, you can have it all!”—but she’s uncomfortable with the image. The show doesn’t place her in a male-dominated field; she owns an artsy, minimalist plant business, and she’s working on selling her company to the female owner of a retail chain. In the presence of similarly well-off women, she wears a permanent smile through gritted teeth. She dresses in soft knits and unwrinkled silks, as if to distance herself from the girlboss uniform of power suits and pencil skirts. “There was something interesting to us as writers about someone who has so much chaos going on inside but [who’s] trying to cover that with as much calm and people-appeasing energy as possible,” Lee said. Amy knows that expressing her discontent with her apparently perfect life would ruin people’s impression of her as a role model. And despite her reluctance to play the part, she likes knowing that she is considered an inspiration.

Besides, when she does try to explain how she feels, the people closest to her can’t understand why she’s uneasy. In one wrenching scene, Amy divulges her malaise to her husband, George (Joseph Lee). “There’s this feeling I’ve had for a long time,” she says, squeezing out her words between pauses. “I don’t remember when it started; I can’t pinpoint exactly when or why … It feels like the ground, but, like, right here.” She gestures to her chest as she begins to cry. George reacts in a supportive manner: “I know a lot of people who battled depression and won,” he says—but the statement only causes Amy to shut their conversation down. His words are too positive, too insistent that she beat whatever she’s got. Through her, Beef highlights a complicated twist on loneliness: Amy has a healthy network of loved ones, but the more encouraging they are, the worse she feels. She’s fortunate to have a doting husband and the means to seek help. So why can’t she do what’s expected of her and feel better?

The idea that existential sadness can come for anyone is personal for Lee: He told me that the scene of Amy’s confession came directly from a moment in the writers’ room during which he attempted to describe his own anxiety, and ended up weeping in front of the staff. Like Amy, Lee hasn’t been able to shake off the weight in his chest: “That feeling is still very much there. It doesn’t go away … Writing this character was figuring out a way to accept that—that for some of us, that feeling is just permanent.” Amy’s attempts to find catharsis lead her to make decisions that range from farcical to frightening, if not outright criminal. In her, Lee conveys the thrill and desperation of that never-ending search for release—a journey that pushes Beef forward, step by fascinating step. Wong sells each of them. She’s never been funnier, or more heartbreaking.

Not Just the Janitor of Abbott Elementary

2023-04-07T12:15:39-04:00

Of all the characters on Abbott Elementary, there’s one who never fails to make me laugh. I’m talking about Mr. Johnson, the janitor whose dry humor and droll facial expressions make him one of the funniest personas on ABC’s hit comedy. Here’s what we know about Mr. Johnson: He’s probably in his 70s. He’s worked at Abbott forever, his institutional knowledge rivaling that of the longest-tenured teachers. He has alluded to past lives as an Olympic athlete, a nude model, a champion rib eater, and Dorothy Hamill’s paramour. He thinks that lizard people live under the Denver Airport and that the Illuminati run the world. He does not believe in the moon (not the moon landing—the actual moon). All of this is to say that Mr. Johnson’s origin story is mostly a patchwork of jokes: We don’t know anything substantial about the guy, not even his first name.

In a lesser comedy, he’d be a two-dimensional character who floats through the background, peppering in laughs as necessary. Not so with Abbott. Even without a fully fleshed-out past, Mr. Johnson has become a core part of the show, a character who seems to exist entirely in the present tense. He’s crucial enough that the actor who plays him, William Stanford Davis, was promoted to a series regular in Season 2. As the school’s janitor, Mr. Johnson is the gatekeeper to Abbott, bringing us in and contextualizing the everyday interactions within the school.

[Read: 20 perfect TV shows for short attention spans]

In contemporary English, janitor refers to someone whose job it is to take care of a building, usually a hospital or a school. The job entails cleaning and keeping a place orderly by sweeping floors, wiping down counters, and taking out trash. But that’s not all janitors do. The word comes from the Latin janus, which means “arch” or “gate” and is also the name of the two-faced Roman god of doorways and portals. This etymology makes sense when you consider that people like Mr. Johnson are also ushers and space definers: They prepare a building before we even enter it, look after it while we are there, and continue to care for it after we’ve left. Part of their job is to pay attention—to the structures they oversee, yes, but also to people who pass through their doors.

Mr. Johnson encapsulates this role perfectly. He’s seemingly everywhere within Abbott’s walls, meaning he notices the emotional weather of the teachers and students inside. In Season 1, he’s among the first people to detect the romantic feelings between the teachers Janine and Gregory, raising his eyebrows at what looks like a lover’s quarrel. In Season 2, when the history teacher, Jacob (Chris Perfetti), has no idea why his students are obsessed with a show about talking socks, Mr. Johnson appears in the classroom doorway and begins speaking the program’s indecipherable language with bewildering fluency. He knows what the young people are up to just as much as he knows what the adults are thinking. Sometimes he’s the school’s protector: He also knows that if the scoreboard in the gym goes above a certain number, it’ll come crashing down. When the smooth-talking businessman Draemond fails to convince a gym-full of parents that Abbott should become a charter school, it is Mr. Johnson who sweeps him off the stage, physically enacting everyone’s disdain.

[Read: The comedies that understand what peak scammer TV does not ]

It’s not just that Mr. Johnson sees everything; everyone sees Mr. Johnson too. In a late Season 2 episode, the teachers at Abbott vote on which of them should get two free tickets to an NBA game. The prize is supposed to go to an educator, as a paltry show of appreciation from the district. But the principal, Ava, announces Mr. Johnson as the unanimous winner, to his delight. When someone complains that he’s not a “real teacher,” he retorts, “You know how many classes I subbed?” He knows he deserves the tickets—he may not have the credentials, but viewers have seen him called to “teach” class after class, filling in the cracks of a broken (and broke) public-education system.

Ava asks the obvious question: Why did everyone vote for Mr. Johnson? One teacher, Melissa, responds that she chose him because she was annoyed with everyone else. But his landslide victory shows just how enmeshed he is in Abbott’s fabric. He’s the person every teacher thought of first, besides themselves, to put on the ballot. He is a vital part of the school, so much so that he’s almost synonymous with it. Abbott Elementary is a show that puts the hilarity, grossness, frustration, and joy of public schools on full display, so audiences can see how much energy and love goes into these institutions. They’re places where children learn, places of work, places where the community gathers to handle crises and hold celebrations. Wry, hardworking, and a little bit quirky, Mr. Johnson embodies the many-faceted world of Abbott in all its splendor and stumbles.

Air Has More Substance Than You’d Expect

2023-04-07T11:47:55-04:00

Air faces a steep challenge, in terms of winning its audience over. Ben Affleck’s film, set in the mid-1980s, wants viewers to root for Nike—yes, that Nike, the shoe company, the one that’s done pretty well for itself over the past few decades. Will these plucky Oregon underdogs box out their rivals and achieve success by selling a Michael Jordan–branded shoe? The answer to that question seems to be a fairly uncomplicated “yes,” so credit goes to Affleck, his screenwriter Alex Convery, and his star Matt Damon for conveying what it was like to create the Air Jordan brand.

More than a decade ago, Affleck solidified his reputation as a serious auteur with Oscar-lauded films such as The Town and Argo. Then, in 2016, his leaden Live by Night performance underscored just how much his skills had migrated to directing and away from being a movie star. Yet, for years after that, Affleck was bogged down in the DC Comics universe, playing a very grumpy Batman. Air is a great return to Affleck’s original impulses as a director: It’s a fun, well-made film for grown-ups that gives its actors room to flesh out their characters and, most important, doesn’t rely on Affleck’s star persona.

Here, he’s filling a supporting role that recalls his performance in The Last Duel, a medieval epic from 2021 that he co-wrote with Nicole Holofcener and Damon, who assumed the lead role. Affleck played a bored lordling, dispensing advice and funds to the other characters while remaining above their foibles. In Air, Affleck plays Phil Knight, the Nike CEO who was once known as a renegade but, by the mid-’80s, had become yet another restless mogul; he dawdles in a cavernous office wearing wraparound sunglasses and longing for excitement.

Luckily, excitement arrives—in the form of corporate competitors, frenzied phone calls, and, eventually, the invention of a new kind of personal branding. Air is about one of the most obvious business decisions in the world: monetizing an amazing basketball player on the rise, whose athleticism and fame could function as a self-sustaining advertisement for an ever-expanding product line. Many viewers will be at least dimly aware of the Michael Jordan shoes’ longtime popularity. Air, however, introduces some suspense by rendering the Nike headquarters as a dinky backwater, a mess of cubicles staffed by middle-aged businessmen clinging to relevance.

Sonny Vaccaro (played by Damon) is the king of that schlubby brigade, a marketing executive struggling to launch Nike into the basketball world, at that time dominated by Converse and Adidas. He sees Jordan, a college star about to enter the NBA, as a potential savior, and he convinces Phil to offer Jordan the company’s entire athlete budget rather than spreading it around to a bunch of mid-tier players. But that budget isn’t big enough for the prodigy. Affleck primarily focuses on the interplay between business and personal as Sonny tries to win over Jordan by both increasing the bid and appealing to the athlete’s mother, Deloris (Viola Davis).

[Read: The mythos of Michael Jordan continues]

By and large, Air is an energetic corporate comedy, full of top-shelf talent. Damon plays Sonny as a lovable nag who needles everyone around him into action. Jason Bateman is perfectly hangdog as his boss, Rob Strasser, and Chris Tucker turns up the fast-talking banter as Sonny’s office-mate, Howard White. Chris Messina delivers about 15 minutes of blistering, profanity-filled speeches as Jordan’s bullheaded agent David Falk, who wants to stop the athlete from signing with what he perceives as an uncool brand. These are all serious stars who can deliver witty patter effortlessly, but Affleck (unsurprisingly a consummate actor’s director) lets them take their time, keeping the camera still for every major monologue as they tease out their personal motivations.

The film shines best during the conferences between Sonny and Deloris. Both characters believe that a sneaker collab could transform society—that Jordan is not just a good basketball player but an inspirational force as well. Sonny has put significant financial backing on the line and is eager to validate that decision, whereas Deloris is more invested in her son’s long-term future than in one big payday. Watching Damon’s devout intensity bump up against Davis’s calm assuredness is an understated thrill. Air mainly takes place in drab offices, yet the cast’s expert performances transform those spaces much in the same way that Michael Jordan transformed courts and sneaker racks—by turning them into sites of magic.

When the Human and the Artificial Collide

2023-04-07T10:00:00-04:00

Humanism is a tradition that prizes, above all, the irreplaceable experience of being a person. In her new book, Humanly Possible, Sarah Bakewell aims to revitalize the philosophy’s emphasis on morality, reason, and optimism. But Bakewell’s book has landed at a curious time, Franklin Foer writes: Her way of thinking is imperiled by a changing culture—especially recent developments in artificial intelligence. As these advancements threaten to upend the primacy of “the faculties of the independent mind, the very core of intellectual personhood,” Foer writes, humanism could use a champion. (Unfortunately, Bakewell’s defense fails to meet the moment.)

Eric Schmidt, who co-wrote a book on AI with Henry Kissinger, told my colleague Charlie Warzel last month that “the reason we’re marching toward this technological revolution is it is a material improvement in human intelligence.” But, as Warzel points out, we don’t actually know how generative AI will change human lives. Matteo Wong considered whether it might become an accelerant for conspiracism or a new way to spread the kinds of disinformation humans have always been susceptible to.

Of course, our unaugmented capabilities are what make large language models such as ChatGPT and its successor, GPT-4, possible. “Every chatbot is created by ingesting books and content that have been published on the internet by a huge number of people,” Wendy Liu writes. “So in a sense, these tools were built by all of us.” As a result, the move to monetize these products is an attempt to privatize what she argues should be collectively owned: “the informational heritage of humanity.”

Our concerns about technological discoveries have always reflected what we actually value about humanity. In the mid-20th century, Isaac Asimov wrote some of American culture’s most influential tales about artificial intelligence; in story after story, his robotic characters long to be real men. Asimov “was, deep down, a humanist,” Jeremy Dauber notes, and the subjects in his stories crave what he cherished: imagination, connection, love. Likewise, Dauber points out, “AI networks … are our creatures as surely as Asimov’s paper-and-ink creations were his own.” They are “machines built to create associations by scraping and scrounging and vacuuming up everything we’ve posted, which betray our interests and desires and concerns and fears.”

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What We’re Reading

Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty

Can humanism save us?

“Between the time that Sarah Bakewell shipped her final draft of Humanly Possible and received finished copies of the book, her subject began to stare squarely at its demise. What her book set out to defend is an intellectual tradition, admittedly ill-defined, that stands for reason, the ennobling potential of education, and the centrality of the ‘human dimension of life,’ as opposed to systems and abstract theories. But in the intervening months, advanced chatbots descended; so did the possibility that they might soon imperil the whole of that enterprise.”

📚 Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, by Sarah Bakewell

Erik Carter

What have humans just unleashed?

“But, according to experts, to actually parse why a program generated a specific result is a bit like trying to understand the intricacies of human cognition: Where does a given thought in your head come from?”

📚 The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, by Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocheron

The Atlantic; source: Getty

Conspiracy theories have a new best friend

“To argue that new technologies, whether social media or AI, are primarily or solely responsible for bending the truth risks reifying the power of Big Tech’s advertisements, algorithms, and feeds to determine our thoughts and feelings. … The messier story might contend with how humans, and maybe machines, are not always very rational; with what might need to be done for writing history to no longer be a war.”

Ben Hickey

AI is exposing who really has power in Silicon Valley

“To recognize that these problems are larger than any one company isn’t to let OpenAI off the hook; rather it’s a sign that the industry and the economy as a whole are built on unequal distribution of rewards. The immense profits in the tech industry have always been funneled toward the top, instead of reflecting the full breadth of who does the work. But the recent developments in AI are particularly concerning given the potential applications for automating work in a way that would concentrate power in the hands of still fewer people.”

Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

What Isaac Asimov can teach us about AI

“The humanity of Asimov’s robots—a streak that emerges again and again in spite of the laws that shackle them—might just be the the key to understanding them. What AI picks up, in the end, is a desire for us, our pains and pleasures; it wants to be like us. There’s something hopeful about that, in a way. Was Asimov right? One thing is for certain: As more and more of the world he envisioned becomes reality, we’re all going to find out.”

📚 I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
📚 The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
📚 The Naked Sun, by Isaac Asimov

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Emma Sarappo. The book she’s reading next is When the Angels Left the Old Country, by Sacha Lamb.

Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.

An Ode to Bananas

2023-04-07T06:00:00-04:00

Don’t rush it.

There’s something so very friendly and edible about a banana, from its helpfully tubular design to its yielding texture to its mild and alkaline flavor; something so easy, you just want to shove it into your face. It could be astronaut food, almost: a specially engineered, hygienically sealed nutrition cylinder in high-visibility yellow. Slurp it down, Major Tom. Reset your potassium levels and get back to your Martian rock samples. The peel will float off, anemone-like, in zero gravity.

But to slurp it down, to eat it heedlessly, is to waste the banana. It’s to waste, first of all, the duration of a banana. Are you, like me, a wistful nonsmoker? Do you envy the smokers their philosophical interludes, their moments of drifting peace? Then eating a banana, slowly and reflectively, is the closest thing you’re going to get to a cigarette break. Except better, because you can do it on public transportation.

There’s an orthodox, old-school surrealism to the banana: its cartoon yellowness, its absurd curvature, the fact that when we think about a banana, we think about it upside down. The banana grows upward, doesn’t it, jostling for sunlight with its fellows—but in our mind, we reverse it. We put its broken stem on top, like a nose or a little horn, and so we create a strangeness around the banana. We put it in banana quotes.

But the banana is not, or not just, a free-floating, self-signifying object. It is fragile and organic: There are processes at work inside the banana. If battered or neglected, it will flush an angry dark brown. It will become its shadow. It should be a tarot card, one of the big ones: the Fool, the Hanged Man, and the Black Banana. Pull that card and change your life.

And you don’t want to waste the taste, either—the cordial blandness of a banana. Me, I like a mottled one. The greener end of the spectrum is too fibrous and anxious for me. Green bananas squeak when you peel them. I like a deep, mature yellow, with sunspots. That’s a fulfilled banana, a mellow banana, a banana that’s been around the block. It’s loaded with the sugars of experience. It’s in the last blaze of its bananahood. Enjoy me now, it says with its banana grin. I was created for your pleasure.

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition.

‘Notice All That Disappears’

2023-04-06T06:00:00-04:00

Imagine you are looking at a flowering tree branch in a vase on a table. You think of trying to write about it. As you look, you’re aware of your own breath, the warmth of your clothes. You smell the fragrance of the flowers. You struggle to keep your attention focused on the vase. You reach to touch the branch and notice some unopened buds. Do they have their own way of communicating? You recoil, ashamed to be part of the damage of removing the branch from the tree. You imagine the tree. You place your hands over your eyes, and now your mind and its images occupy the space where the blossoms were. What message can you take from this encounter? There is the beauty of the blossoms, the damage to the tree, and the inescapable progress of your consciousness as you react to both.

For more than four decades, Jorie Graham’s poetry has documented the complicated, multidimensional, ever more uncertain sallies of human perception into the bristling presence of trees, birds, streams. Virginia Woolf followed Mrs. Dalloway and others over the course of 24 hours in London. Graham, whose lines are Woolf-like in their walks about the page, tracks a minute in the life of a raven. Her forays also lead her to strangers, art, angels—and recent poems have ventured to speak in the uncanny idioms of artificial intelligence and machines. The free play of her attention gives rise to precise descriptions of what she sees, hears, smells, and touches, but the unfolding drama of consciousness is always an indispensable part of the poem.

The urgency of the poet as messenger animates Graham’s new collection, To 2040, her tenth since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1996. Its poems address the demise of the world—the vase of blossoms on the table, the tree from which they came, even the human mind attending to them—which has provided poetry with so much of its material and its source of power. Imagine, they say to the desolate future, how this world once existed, how we once lived alongside other species. They exhort us, her readers in the present, to “look behind you, turn, look down as much as you can, notice all / that disappears.”

“I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way,” writes John Ashbery, also a poet who follows the unpredictable play of the mind. “And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.” Graham is a poet who, for much of her career, has tried out various ways of putting it all down, and of reflecting on the mind’s and body’s leaps and limits in that quest. In her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), the fraught enmeshment of the human in the natural world had already oriented her eye and ear: “When a forest / burns, the mind / feels compelled to say / I did it, I must have / done it,” she wrote in “Mimicry.”

That ecologically attuned perspective has intensified since. “The earth said / remember me,” begins the final poem in Runaway (2020). You can sense the focus in the titles of the three preceding books, Sea Change, PLACE, and fast. It is explicit in their subjects (melting glaciers, the pollution of the seas, “systemicide,” war and occupation, famine, empty riverbeds), and in a newly wide-ranging polyvocal style (underwater voices and nonhuman beings, machines and computers, bots and surveillance technology). At the same time, the theater of human action is vivid. Poems starkly address the haunting experiences of caring for children and grandchildren in a warming climate. They report, with blunt candor, a cancer diagnosis, and they sit vigil by the deathbed of a father.

Graham by now has poetic company in wrestling in versatile ways with the existential questions and apocalyptic shadows that accompany climate change, as Natasha Trethewey, for example, does in her memoiristic portrait of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Beyond Katrina. Graham’s own poems have sometimes included the rhetoric of arguments, propositions, or essays. But they are about perception, not policy, even as they implore us to think of the two as closely related. Her work sets the scale of the damaged human body in relation with the global scale of the planet in crisis. When her poems find fault, they find fault with the human tendency to turn off, tune out, step back, and detach. A poem called “Other,” from her 2005 collection, Overlord, puts it this way:

This is what is wrong: we, only we, the humans, can retreat from ourselves and
not be
altogether here. We can be part full, only part, and not die. We can be in and out of here, now,
at once, and not die.

The presence of the human has irrevocably changed nature. But the absence of the human—our recusal from bearing witness to the changing world—perpetuates its own form of damage. In her new book, Graham’s poems continue to exhort us to be present, and she has found a startlingly intimate way of situating an individual consciousness among its precarious cohabitants.

Some poetry makes a virtue of compression. A red wheelbarrow, plums in the fridge. Gwendolyn Brooks’s sonnets, Rae Armantrout’s images. Graham has often explored the possibilities of dilation instead: lines that travel far across the page, passages that move from one detail to the next as her attention is stoked by the emergence of the world and by the mind’s own self-scrutiny. That’s not to say that her poems have ever lacked form or structure. On the contrary, they develop their music from the tension between the poetic line and the grammatical sentence. Here is an excerpt from the middle of “The Bird on My Railing,” a poem from PLACE (2012), which manages a feat of complex unfolding:

you are not seeing it with your own
eyes: look:
this light
is moving
across that flower on
my sill
at this exact speed—right now—right here—now it is gone—yet go back up
five lines it is
still there I can’t
go back, it’s
gone,
but you— what is it you are
seeing—see it again—a yellow
daisy

Note the shifting rhythms in this description of a daisy. Graham’s single sentence (from “this light” to “daisy”) gets interrupted multiple times as the speaker pins down the light to the exact moment (“right now—right here”). At that point, the poem aligns itself with the reader’s mental image of the flower: “it’s / gone, / but you—/ what is it you are / seeing—see it again.” She recognizes that no reader will see the same image of the daisy, but every reader will experience the call to see the flower and the vanishing of the flower when the poem moves on. Then, as we shuttle between the somewhat longer lines and the shorter ones, the speed of the poem increases, slows, increases again. Graham is like a conductor orchestrating multiple claims on our attention while bringing the parts of the poem together into a whole.

Whereas Graham’s earlier books cast their lines rhapsodically and elegiacally—and, for some readers, confoundingly—across the page, To 2040 puts its messages in bottles. Many of the poems have four-line stanzas with short phrases and only a few words in each line. The effect is not one of scarcity or exhaustion, but rather of exact construction—of distillation instead of dilation. “Are We” is the title of the first poem and the beginning of the first sentence:

extinct yet. Who owns
the map. May I
look. Where is my
claim. Is my history

verifiable. Have I
included the memory
of the animals. The animals’
memories. Are they

still here.

Typing out these lines, I felt the dramatic kick of each word. I was reminded of Earth Took of Earth (1996), the anthology of 100 Great Poems of the English Language that Graham edited—“some of the songs people … have sung (have needed to sing) to keep themselves spiritually, morally, and emotionally awake”—and of the accents of the Old English poetry in that book, which drop like stones into the short lines (“Earth took of earth earth with ill; / Earth another earth gave earth with a will”). In “Are We,” the absence of question marks flattens the tone and pulls each phrase down to the same plane as the next. What better source for these new elegies to the Earth than an elemental poetry of close-ups, one that keeps our eyes trained on the Earth?

As a reader, you are invited to see what appears directly in front of your face: a raven, which lands and flies off. The sheen on his feathers makes them bright: “His coat is / sun.” When the raven looks at the speaker, cicadas begin to sing. This scene exists only in the mind, because “the / raven left a / long time ago,” and the cicadas are long gone too. The poem, addressed to the future, re-creates the past experience of everyday astonishment at the arrival of a bird. At the same time, the poem also captures, on the sparse stage of its apocalyptic setting, the human capacity for image-making, the untethered drift of the mind, the pull of distraction and the return to focus.

To 2040 guides the reader slowly and carefully from solitary witnessing to bodily suffering to a set of interspecies and interhuman encounters. Those trail blazes should not suggest too orderly a sequence, given that all of the poems attempt to follow and transcribe the interwoven movement of conscious thought and emergent nature, but they do signal Graham’s ambition.

Her book begins by asking if we are extinct yet and ends with a summons to physical presence, and I was struck by its resemblance to the kind of triptych often found as part of an altarpiece. The first section comprises poems “seeking to enter the in- /conspicuous”: The speaker, generally alone, remembers looking at the raven, at tracks on the ground, at a stream, at herself in the mirror, at the light on snow. The second section inhabits the body under duress. “Dis-ease came,” we learn, and in the next poem, the speaker places a clump of her hair on the ledge of the shower. In the third section, the set of characters expands. The speaker converses with “a small personal drone,” which “was old, had been / patched thousands of / times, maybe more, was medalled with debris,” itself a repository of history; she listens as her granddaughter looks at fallen cherry blossoms and asks why; she herself feels ashamed, looking at a vase of quince branches and reflecting on the harm done to the tree.

In the book’s coda, “Then the Rain,” the speaker places her head in her hands as rain, long awaited, begins. It’s a summarizing gesture of lamentation, of remorse, but also an exposure to tactile sensation, and an expression of being overcome by amazement. The poem has given us a litany of “after”s—“after the trees,” “after the animals,” “after it all went.” Graham ends with the arrival of the “unknowable / no matter how / quantifiable.” The rain comes from the “accident of / touch,” of one atom by another, a lesson for the speaker to emulate, as she looks at her hands and imagines their command to “touch, touch it all, / start with your face, / put your face in us.”

What is it like to put your wet face in your shining palms? She asks that question at the end of “Then the Rain.” What is it like to watch the snow falling at dawn, as the speaker does in the title poem? Or to listen to the sound of your own breathing, which “Can You” implores us to do? In “They Ask Me,” we follow birds into a field

in rising ground-
mist, in the pull of its fast
evaporation as that strange
sun rose, arms
outstretched &

laughing, out of
breath, we ran to chase them
till they dis-
appeared.

To preserve the world in poetry is to transform it, to make it almost unrecognizable, to push us to recognize it anew—not only through close attention and careful description, but also through the accidental, generative capacities of ordinary language. In the poem “Translation Rain,” the speaker wonders if her words, like the absent rain, have been exhausted, rendered extinct through use. “Each word I use I have used before. / Yet it is not used, is it? It is not used up, is it? Because what is in it stays / hidden.” And suddenly “the words / appear again as if / new. Rain, I say. Rain now.” The power of Graham’s new poetry is that, in its return to words we’ve used before, “it will touch everything. It will make more of the / more.”

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “The Poet Facing Down the End of the World.”

When the Royals Showed Their Human Side

2023-04-05T07:00:00-04:00

Claiming that a single royal couple saved the centuries-old British monarchy might be going a bit far. But King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, by an accident of history and through personal qualities that earned the admiration and support of the British public, may have done just that during some of the most challenging times the country had ever seen. George VI had been crowned King just three years before the outbreak of World War II, and his and Elizabeth’s nerves, perseverance, and courage would be severely tested during the conflict—especially when Britain itself became a battlefield. Nowhere is this more obvious than during the Blitz, when the monarchs broke with protocol and mingled directly with the people. Their actions during those days set the pattern for their leadership during the most critical year of the war.

George VI and his wife, Elizabeth, were unexpected rulers: Only when his older brother, King Edward VIII, abdicated in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, battering the monarchy’s reputation, did the then–Duke of York reluctantly wear the crown. Almost immediately, the new royal couple faced a challenge to the United Kingdom’s very existence. Although eight unnervingly quiet months passed on land after Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, an onslaught from Hitler’s forces was inevitable.

The pace of conflict accelerated in the summer of 1940: Italy went to war with Great Britain and France on June 10, and days later, France formally surrendered to Germany. Britain was now on its own in Europe. The first inkling of the Battle of Britain came at the end of June, with scattered German air attacks on ships and south-coast ports. At the outset, they inflicted little damage. But the bombings intensified over the summer, when the Germans tried to destroy the Royal Air Force and hit factories, airfields, and other defense facilities. A deadly new period of ferocious aerial bombardments began on Saturday, September 7, when Germany shifted from daylight raids aimed at military structures to what would become known as the Blitz, beginning with a 57-day continuous assault on London. It was a savage campaign, carried out mostly at night, to terrorize the citizenry and destroy vital infrastructure.

[Read: The virus and the Blitz]

This article has been excerpted from Sally Bedell Smith’s new book, George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy.

The second week of September 1940 was a dramatically dangerous one for the King and Queen. A bomb landed next to Buckingham Palace, where it sat unexploded for 48 hours before detonating—the first of nine direct hits on the palace and its grounds between that day and summer 1944. The war had come directly to Britain, and its citizens were now as integral to the country’s defense as its frontline military. The danger from the air meant that everyone—monarch and commoner—was on an equal footing. Nothing symbolized this new dynamic more than the attack on the home of the sovereign.

On the morning of Monday, September 9, George VI spent three hours with Captain Euan Wallace touring bomb-damaged neighborhoods in the East End and south of the Thames. They saw burned-out docks and visited several shelters; in one of them, 50 people had died, including three children whose grieving mother the King comforted. As people removed their belongings from a damaged apartment house, a woman cried out, “Are we downhearted?” “No!” came the hearty reply from her neighbors.

Captain Wallace was struck by the King’s interest in talking to “all and sundry.” He “insisted on carrying out the program in full,” Wallace wrote. “It is almost impossible to believe that he is the same man who took the oath before the Privy Council less than four years ago.”

On September 11, George VI returned to the East End, and the Queen joined him for the first time to tour the poor neighborhoods of Camberwell, Lewisham, and Lambeth. “The usual collapsed houses & homeless people who had lost all their belongings,” he recalled. “But here again their fortitude in adversity is amazing.” As the royal couple passed one heavily damaged block of workers’ flats, a small crowd cheered for them and sang, “There’ll always be an England.”

They made an unscheduled stop that underlined the risk of such outings. When the air-raid alarm sounded, a police car sped them to a basement room in the Lewisham Police Station. As the King and Queen entered the dimly lit shelter, uniformed policemen, court officials, and other staff looked at them with disbelief, and then burst into cheers. The royal couple sat down; he lit a cigarette, and they waited to have some tea. Even after the “all clear” sounded, the King insisted on staying. Canteen workers served them biscuits along with tea in thick china cups, and the Queen said it was delicious. Such spontaneous moments would be a regular feature of their wartime tours. As the Queen later recalled, “I think we must have taken refuge in every single police station in London. We were always given a cup of very, very strong tea.”

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) inspect the damage to a cinema building on Baker Street after it was destroyed by Nazi bombing in an air raid over London. (Popperfoto / Getty)

Their insistence on connecting with citizens continued through the attacks. On Friday, September 13th, after narrowly escaping injury and death during another Buckingham Palace bombing, the King and Queen picked themselves up and went out as planned for a tour of damage in East London. One official who accompanied them said that knowledge of the bombing the couple had endured “made their reception even more enthusiastic.” “Their Majesties appeared to be quite unshaken by their experience,” observed The Times of London.

[Read: The Queen Mother’s odd letters]

The appearances were deceptive. Elizabeth told the King’s mother, Queen Mary, that as they walked down an empty street past evacuated houses, London felt like “a dead city.” Through the broken windows, “one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left.” They visited a bombed school that had collapsed on 500 people; 200 were still buried in the ruins. “It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction,” she wrote. “I think that really I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous and full of fight.”

On Thursday, September 19, George VI and Elizabeth went to Chelsea, Fulham, and Marylebone on the western side of London. The Times noted that they moved freely among the people “with whom they are sharing—and with the same cool tenacity—the peril from the air … Men, women, and children brushed shoulders with Their Majesties as they made their way among scenes of destruction.” In Fulham, George VI and Elizabeth walked with difficulty, hemmed in by the pressure of a crowd in a narrow alley. “Let us give three cheers for our King,” shouted a workman. The response was “thunderous.” Hitler may have been hell-bent on killing the monarch and consort, but he’d failed to anticipate the galvanizing effect of the Buckingham Palace bombings. Churchill told the House of Commons that the attacks “unite the King and Queen to their people by new and sacred bonds of common danger.”

The King noted in his end-of-year reflections that the second half of 1940 “certainly showed the world what we can stand.” The Royal Air Force had demonstrated its superiority over the Luftwaffe, and by early November, the 57-night continuous assault of the Blitz had effectively concluded, though the violence was not yet over. The cost of the total campaign was horrific: More than 1 million homes were destroyed or damaged, and some 20,000 Londoners died. German forces would continue to drop bombs on Britain until March 1945, but the King and Queen’s contact with the people didn’t waver—throughout the war, they came to Buckingham Palace most weeks for appointments and tours of the city’s destroyed neighborhoods. The King found it vital for the pair to circulate widely around Britain regardless of the risks.

[Read: The second Elizabethan age has ended]

In a September 1940 public message delivered as the Blitz was raging, George VI said, “Like so many other people we have now had a personal experience of German barbarity, which only strengthens the resolution of all of us to fight through to final victory.” He told his mother privately that in comforting the bereaved and homeless, he and Elizabeth “both found a new bond with them as Buckingham Palace has been bombed as well as their homes, & nobody is immune from it.” Elizabeth went even further: “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.” Their new solidarity and repeated displays of compassion, especially toward those in the poorest neighborhoods, lifted morale. For the King and Queen, showing their vulnerability and humanity was part of a steadfast commitment to duty and service; it also helped shore up the badly damaged reputation and primacy of the monarchy, setting the stage for the rule of their daughter, Elizabeth II, who would become one of the most popular monarchs in British history. Their actions ensured that the nation would continue to revere its once-fragile monarchy—not only through the war but also in the years of austerity that followed.

This article has been excerpted from Sally Bedell Smith’s new book, George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy.

The Emotional Genius of Ryuichi Sakamoto

2023-04-04T16:17:04-04:00

Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese composer, producer, and actor who died last Tuesday, was a musician of sophisticated talent. For many, the way he intermingled cacophony with dense synth, and his interest in both silence and sound, made Sakamoto timeless and avant-garde. But for me, Sakamoto was first and foremost a conjurer of layered emotion, as exemplified in his many film compositions.

Sakamoto’s scores weren’t tinkly and whimsical like Alexandre Desplat’s, nor were they sweeping and dramatic like John Williams’s. Sakamoto wrote music that made living in an emotional in-between space audible, as in several of the orchestral songs in The Last Emperor and in the opening piano of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Sakamoto’s music was interested in the intersection of beauty and terror, the way a soul can survive even as a body falters.

Before I learned to love Sakamoto, my mother loved him. After her days studying textiles in a women’s college in our hometown of Nagoya, Japan, she would go home and play the Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence theme over and over on her upright piano. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was Sakamoto’s first film score, and the work that brought him global attention. The movie follows the complicated relationship between a captain in the Japanese army (played by Sakamoto) and his prisoner of war (David Bowie) during World War II. The theme is delicate, pensive, and thunderous all at once—a testament to the desire and disgust at the core of the film. The song explores wanting something while simultaneously being terrified of it, how the possibility of connection between people tangles with the cruelties of war.

When my mother sat at her piano bench, she was trying to mold herself into the most appealing woman and bride that she could be. Still, her childhood desire for a bigger life refused to die. It makes sense that Sakamoto’s testament to the mercurial, convoluted nature of wanting would wind so tightly around her. Years later, when she played Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence on that same piano, now transported to our Chicago home, her hands would crash down on Sakamoto’s percussive, distraught bridge. I wondered if she was thinking about how her younger self could never have imagined the reality of living away from her home and family. Both the joy of a dream fulfilled and the sorrow of its stark realities commingled in Sakamoto’s score, pervading our living room.

Sakamoto’s other film scores also work at this exquisite, distressing junction. His theme for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky is almost schmaltzy at the beginning, tracking the stalling romance of the film’s two lead characters. But just as the piece begins to soar, bringing to mind a swoon on the cover of a paperback romance novel, Sakamoto takes us into a quiet tumble, the strings playing in a deliberate loop. During a sex scene between the characters, I understood that these two people were pitiable—not by their weeping or murmuring but through Sakamoto’s score. The swelling emotion and mutterings of anxiety in his music illuminated the feeling of being bound to someone even as a relationship fails.

Following in my mother’s footsteps, I too learned to play Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. In my early and mid-20s, I found myself sitting at various pianos, playing Sakamoto’s theme because it was the only one I had memorized. I played it in an open music room at college, where my first forays into depression accompanied the giddiness of spring with new friends and the gorgeousness of becoming my own adult. I played Sakamoto again in my then-boyfriend’s grandparents’ sitting room, the piece now reflecting my struggle to see how my Japanese and American self could fit into this white extended family, even though I was in love.

[Read: The eerie comfort of liminal spaces]

Sakamoto’s genius for articulating the contradictions of existence arises again and again: in the score for The Revenant, with the musician Alva Noto; in the looping meditation of “Bibo no Aozora”; in the startling quiet of his last album, 12. In my life, his music has continued to score the liminal spaces where words falter but emotions thrum. I’m still playing Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, now at the electric piano in my living room, as I puzzle through becoming a new mother, frightened and elated at once. Maybe someday my daughter will hear me play Sakamoto’s music, and it will help her understand her life too.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie Gives the People What They Want

2023-04-04T15:22:48-04:00

Hollywood’s previous attempt at a Super Mario Bros. film tried to translate the cartoon goofiness of Nintendo’s video game into something more cinematic. The result was strange and ambitious: A British character actor took the title role; Bowser was transformed from a fire-breathing turtle into a slick-haired industrialist, and the world he ruled was filled not with power-up mushrooms but with industrial catwalks and dripping slime. The film is a fascinating failure but a failure nevertheless, a baffling effort to plumb deeper into the tale of, well, a pair of heroic plumbers.

The new Super Mario Bros. Movie has zero such curveballs. It is cheerfully animated and deeply committed to a world that audiences might recall from playing any one of the franchise’s games over the past 30-plus years. The film comes from Illumination, the animation studio that has long pumped out movies featuring the Minions, those cute canary-yellow imbeciles who are chemically designed to delight children. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, out Friday, is no different. It’s a 92-minute injection of kid-friendly joy that whizzes by fast enough to keep adults from getting enraged or bored.

I am not a Mario skeptic. I’ve been playing the games for as long as I’ve known how to work my opposable thumbs, and I’m not above being pandered to. I was happily surprised by the appearance of Kamek, a bespectacled turtle-wizard that is hardly among the games’ A-list ensemble. I got goosebumps at a couple of cues in the soundtrack that pull from the legendary Koji Kondo’s original theme music. When Mario donned his famous raccoonlike Tanooki Suit in one crucial action sequence, I let out an involuntary yelp of glee.

But my role here is less to count off nerdy references for elder Millennials like myself and more to evaluate this film on its own terms. The directors, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, are best known for their zippy, satirical work on Teen Titans Go!. Here, however, they seem focused on re-creating the fun of the original Mario rather than subverting it. The setup is simple: A sibling pair of Brooklyn plumbers, Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day), get sucked into a magic pipe to the Mushroom Kingdom, where the diplomatic Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) recruits them into a grand battle against Bowser (Jack Black), the king of the turtle-adjacent Koopas.

In this fantasyland, you can punch a question block and consume what emerges; it’ll make you big and strong. The red flowers help you throw fire, the brown leaves turn you into a raccoon, gold coins hover everywhere, and the architectural style is heavy on floating platforms. Why does Peach, a human woman, govern a kingdom of toadstool-headed children? Nobody really knows, and it doesn’t matter. Why is Bowser, a 10-foot-tall fire-breathing monster, so intent on marrying Peach that he’s willing to go to war to make it happen? Because that’s what Bowser does. Stop asking questions!

The script, by Matthew Fogel, assumes that the audience already understands the rules of the Mario world and provides only the barest context for the poor newcomers who might not. Mario himself is at first an outsider, as perplexed as the next guy, but he picks up the physics of the universe pretty quickly: Eat mushrooms, jump high, land on turtles’ heads, repeat. On a side quest, he and Peach visit the Jungle Kingdom to try to get help from the Kong family, recruiting the upbeat but aggro Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) to their cause. At another point, everyone participates in a big go-kart race simply because that’s another thing Mario does in the games.

The narrative provides just the loosest nudges from scene to scene, and the colorful animation renders every set piece with polish. Pratt, an odd choice to play an outsized Italian American stereotype, hardly speaks after the first act of the film once the plot gets consumed by heady action. Black gets to do more as Bowser, singing emotional rock ballads and grousing over romantic rejection with his characteristic dorky rage. But almost every other part of the movie makes clear that the studio wanted the filmmakers to avoid straying too far from the hallowed source material.

[Read: Mario, everyman]

The movie doesn’t dare uncover something profound about the main character or even question the ridiculous video-game logic of the wider world around Mario. The intellectual property has become intimidating, too profitable to warrant risk-taking—so instead, audiences are served an appetizing confection. But kids do love candy, and I’m sure that around the world, they’ll have just one command for their ticket-buying parents: “Let’s-a go!”

TV Has a Cynical Message for Humanity

2023-04-04T10:52:00-04:00

Reality has no order—that’s why we’re always trying to impose our own framework on it, with the help of notions such as “karma” and “Mercury in retrograde.” The conventions of storytelling, conversely, are blessedly clean and concise; they allow us to at least pretend that a plot might cohere into some sort of plan. Lately, though, the rules have seemed trickier to follow. On television, the most ambitious parables about humanity are also the ones having the hardest time conceding to narrative, as though they can’t imagine anymore that a hero might be coming to save us. What happens when stories start to break down in the face of relentless human failure? Well, we get things like Apple TV+’s Extrapolations and Amazon’s The Power: sprawling, cynical, extraordinarily expensive exhalations. Characters are strangely passive; they react to circumstances rather than act on their desires; they shuffle through riots and Category 4 hurricanes and political turmoil without any point or purpose of their own.

In real life, this kind of static inertia is desperately plausible. On television, though, it’s deadening. Both shows left me feeling not so much numbed as etherized after I sat through eight or nine hours of erratic, unstructured angst. Extrapolations, Scott Z. Burns’s speculative anthology series about the potential future of Earth amid climate change, has one of the starriest lineups of any non-Marvel product this decade, yet every actor seems nothing short of exhausted. In one scene, a zoologist played by Sienna Miller apologizes to a communicative whale (voiced by Meryl Streep) about humans’ infinite capacity for lying; in another, a character played by Matthew Rhys (and clearly inspired by Donald Trump Jr.) is gored to death by an avenging walrus. Oddly, neither scene is played for comedy. I laughed, but I don’t think I was supposed to.

The Power, Amazon’s nine-part adaptation of the 2017 novel by Naomi Alderman, initially seemed more promising, even if it arrived with the kind of hot-pink branding and creative musical chairs that usually spells trouble. The book had extraordinary timing; it was released in the U.S. the same month that allegations against Harvey Weinstein ignited a mass movement against sexual abusers. Its timely premise was that teenage girls have developed the power to generate electricity—a power they can also awaken in older women. Vaguely described as akin to the abilities of electric eels, and seemingly related to the estrogen in girls’ bodies, this capacity turns them into live weapons, upending social and political hierarchies of power. Events in the years since—protests in Iran over women’s freedom of choice, a social-media-driven crisis of despair among teenagers, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—have only heightened the intrigue of Alderman’s alternate timeline. Who wouldn’t want to lightly zap a person or two, these days?

[Read: What if women had ‘the power’?]

The show initially winks at this impulse. It opens with Margot Cleary-Lopez (played by Toni Collette), the mayor of Seattle, making a speech before being led away by two armed guards. “We never dared to imagine it,” she says. “A world that was built for us. Where we made the rules … Where we were the ones to be feared.” As she continues in voice-over, we see a montage of characters: a woman having her hand kissed by a soldier on his knees, a girl with a halo of light behind her dark curls, another girl walking confidently down a school hallway. Fingers start to crackle; quickly, we see cities—and people—burn. “Every revolution,” Margot says, “begins with a spark.”

Barely, though, is there a moment to enjoy the provocation of the premise. Like the novel, the show focuses on several female characters, each intended to illustrate different iterations of power and all the ways that power can and will be abused. Margot represents political drive. Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz), the loudmouthed 17-year-old daughter of a London mobster, is a young woman trying to make it in a hypermasculine environment, and her new abilities and lack of scruples make her physically ferocious and emotionally volatile. Allie (Halle Bush), a foster child who goes on the run after killing her abuser, reinvents herself as a dubious spiritual leader after connecting with a powerful, maternal voice in her head. Margot’s daughter Jos (Auli’i Cravalho) reveals how teenage girls are drastically liberated—and enabled in not entirely positive ways—by a total lack of fear. Tatiana Moskalev (Zrinka Cvitešić), the wife of a gruesome autocrat in the fictional nation of Carpathia, seems destined to wrest some of her husband’s brutal authority for herself.

The show clearly wants to underscore that women, given too much power, would be as bad as men. But in focusing so dogmatically on its central argument, it forgets to inscribe any of its characters with a motivating force. Roxy bumbles around London, annoying people by shooting sparks at them. Allie bumbles around a convent populated by other lost girls, occasionally following the instructions of the voice in her head. Margot and her husband, Rob (John Leguizamo, desperately wasted), have the same quarrel over and over again about her lack of interest in anything other than her job—her suddenly extremely demanding job as mayor of a major American city where planes are falling out of the sky, girls are being zip-tied at school, and politicians are considering putting hormones in the water to try to defuse those with the power.

Globally, things are less repetitive. The travels of Tunde (Toheeb Jimoh), a journalist and a wannabe male ally, let the show explore how this new power—explosive outburst disorder, or EOD—is triggering revolutions around the world. In Saudi Arabia, after a woman is beaten for setting off sparks in the street, women riot, charging on armed guards and electrocuting soldiers inside tanks. In Nigeria, women meet secretly (and joyfully) to dance, smoke, and send out sparks. In Carpathia, Tunde documents women kept in sexual slavery who turned on their captors, and refugee camps populated by men who have fled packs of avenging women. “It is awe-inspiring to see,” Tunde observes. “This power, this new freedom, being passed from one hand to the next.” He is hopelessly naive, the show wants you to think. (And hopelessly one-dimensional, I’d add.) But these scenes, for me, were the highlight of The Power—rare glimpses of catharsis, drama, and action.

These are necessary elements in any kind of narrative, even one underpinned with such a dark thesis. But the fact that the show’s nine episodes barely tackle half of Alderman’s novel abruptly cuts off its dramatic arc. (Presumably, the good stuff is being saved for a potential second season.) The Power is also so committed to emulating the structure and themes of the book that it largely ignores everything that’s changed since it was published. This is a world without TikTok—you can’t tell me enterprising teenagers wouldn’t have posted effervescent EOD tutorials within minutes of their first spark—without discussions of reproductive freedom, and with only minimal acknowledgment of trans people, whose existence complicates the novel’s rigid gender binary in ways the show doesn’t really explore.

Relating the show to the world we live in now would have been an opportunity to make it more urgent. I had infinite questions: Would men, faced with women who now physically threaten them, just arm themselves with more guns? How would trans men, who, according to the logic of the book, might develop the power, feel about it? How would parents manage sibling disputes where one child can seriously hurt another? (For all of Margot’s “sparklefingers” bonding sessions with Jos, she has not a single conversation with her teenage son, who’s left to lose himself down a men’s-rights rabbit hole.) The idea of teenage girls evolving out of necessity to protect themselves—and then burning things down—is such a vivid allegory that the way the show squanders it feels like malpractice.

We need these kinds of stories. But they need to immerse us in well-structured action in which credible characters still have the capacity to want something, and to irrevocably complicate their lives to seek it out. Extrapolations, like The Power, seems more concerned with its fatalistic, unimaginative take on human nature than with animating itself dramatically. The show begins with the assumption that nothing will be done to stop the world getting ever hotter. (Fossil fuels, as Aaron Bady pointed out in the Los Angeles Review of Books, are somehow never mentioned.) When characters aren’t laboring through expository dialogue about how the bees are almost all gone and why a Miami synagogue is falling into the ocean, they’re asserting again and again that humans are too flawed not to fail at saving the planet, and themselves. This conclusion isn’t necessarily wrong, but it neutralizes any momentum the show might have had. Extrapolations is television’s first major dramatic exploration of the climate crisis, yet it’s bizarrely inert, defanged by its own starting point. If there’s nothing to be done, you might wonder, why should we keep watching?

[Read: Climate activists are turning their attention to Hollywood]

Initially set in 2037, and jumping forward through time to examine a world doomed by wildfires, mass animal extinctions, heat so extreme it kills humans in minutes, and the inevitable ascension of a megacorporation that patents everything it can put its logo on, Extrapolations occasionally plays like a gloomier Black Mirror, without the twisted, self-aware humor. The first episode introduces a handful of the characters who recur over the course of the show: Nick Bilton (played by Kit Harington), the sinister founder of Alpha, the aforementioned megacorporation; Marshall Zucker (Daveed Diggs), a rabbi trying to reconcile his faith with his dystopian 21st-century reality; and Rebecca Shearer (Sienna Miller), an animal researcher watching species after species go extinct. Rather than think creatively about the practical consequences of climate change, Extrapolations goes theoretical, with self-indulgent, hour-long theses about the meaning of religion at the end of the world, the defensibility of living on a doomed planet, and the disturbing ways corporations could monetize an epidemic of human loss.

The show also centers its curiosity on wealthy Americans and Europeans who are at least somewhat insulated from the worst consequences of their lifestyle choices. This strange failing is underlined by the show’s one digression, an episode by the playwright Rajiv Joseph about a driver in India hired to transport mysterious cargo to an unknown woman. The episode is charged by all of the most crucial ingredients in storytelling: action, intrigue, riveting characters, an all-consuming imperative, a world that shows you elements of its grim reality rather than haranguing you from a safe remove about how grim it all is. The episode is so propulsive and well crafted that it makes the philosophical waffling of the other installments feel even more congealed. “Are we bad people?” Rebecca asks at one point, after making a choice that prioritizes her family over the future of the planet. Extrapolations clearly knows what it thinks. It just doesn’t know how to make you care about the answer.

Street Photography From ’80s and ’90s New York

2023-04-04T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Jamel Shabazz

In 1980, after three years in the U.S. Army, Jamel Shabazz returned home, in his words, “to a war.” “I came home to a situation where a lot of people were dying at the hands of other young people,” he told me. In an era when the crack epidemic and mass incarceration were tearing families and neighborhoods apart, Shabazz saw photography as a form of “visual medicine.” Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, he traversed the streets of New York City armed with a 35-mm camera, his business card, a chessboard, and several photo albums, which he would produce to build trust with his subjects by offering evidence of his past work.

Jamel Shabazz

The albums were more than just a useful street-side tool; for Shabazz, they were also cherished objects of family heritage. Since the late 1800s, generations of his southern relatives had passed down treasured household photo albums. Shabazz’s father, a photographer in the Navy during the 1950s, had transformed their Red Hook, Brooklyn, apartment into a weekend studio and spent hours compiling albums and making collages while his son watched. “All of my uncles had photo albums,” Shabazz said. “When I would go to their homes, and my grandfather’s house, the first thing I would do was hit the photo album up, because it allowed me to time-travel and get a greater understanding of who they were.”

[Read: What ordinary family photos teach us about ourselves]

Jamel Shabazz

Shabazz’s own photographs captured the young, stylish men and women he met on his walks, at work and at play, posed yet relaxed. The images in a new book, Jamel Shabazz: Albums—presented in a format that allows viewers to experience how his subjects might have first encountered his work—are testament both to these personal rituals and histories and to the improvisational collectives of Black and brown faces that Shabazz so carefully created and preserved, persisting in spite of their precarity.

Jamel Shabazz

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “Live Albums.”

The Unexpected Tenderness of Succession

2023-04-02T22:00:00-04:00

This story contains spoilers through the second episode of Succession Season 4.

The Roys of Succession tend to go out of their way to prove they’re not delicate people. They reject any opportunity to talk about their feelings. They’d rather drop f-bombs than share hugs and kisses. And they relish their daily boardroom showdowns: Reneging on deals, jousting in bidding wars, and tearing apart competitors is, for them, a way of life.

So when the patriarch of the show’s central, fractured family stumbles over his words, something’s clearly gone wrong—or perhaps, finally, right. In the second episode of the HBO drama’s final season, Logan (played by Brian Cox) meets with Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) for the first time since he stopped them from taking over his company. But although much of the anger emanating from the younger Roys feels familiar, the summit is bizarre. For one thing, it takes place in a garishly lit karaoke room rather than a glass-walled office. For another, Logan is unusually hesitant and deferential. When his children press him to apologize, he does. When they ask for clarity, he appears to grant it. When he admonishes them, he accompanies his criticism with an admission of love. “Look,” he eventually concedes, “I just want to get us all together.”

The emotion in his voice is striking; Logan, after all, isn’t often sentimental. As a result, the scene becomes a forceful reminder of how the show is fueled by its rare displays of tenderness. Even as the drama’s ouroboros-ian plot giddily cycles through shocking alliances and estrangements, its most powerful, gasp-inducing moments are almost always the ones in which the Roys allow themselves to be sweet, or as close to sweet as they can be.

[Read: The real Succession endgame]

Sure, Logan’s call for harmony could be a charade, a way to push a business deal forward. But glimpses of care exist amid the Roys’ familiar biting patter. When his half-siblings snipe at Logan, Connor (Alan Ruck) implores them to let their father finish his point. When Roman grimaces at Ken and Shiv celebrating how they drove Logan away, Ken reassures his younger brother that they’re just joking. The very fact that they’re in the world’s saddest karaoke room says something too. Roman may consider Connor’s dreary rendition of Leonard Cohen “Guantanámo-level shit,” but still: All of the siblings have gone there, together, to support their dejected oldest brother.

And as the show nears its end, these moments have come to define Succession, at least for me. The images from earlier seasons that linger in my mind are the few times the Roys have been vulnerable around one another. I picture Roman and Shiv placing their hands on Ken as he squats, defeated, on the ground. I see Shiv rubbing Ken’s back as he weeps into her shoulder. I think about Ken checking on Roman after Logan hits him. These scenes can get overshadowed by the story’s backstabbing brutality and comic dialogue, but they’re effective in part because of how infrequently they occur. As a viewer, you end up craving genuine openness the way the Roys so obviously do but can’t admit without turning such displays of affection into a joke. And most of all, they make clear the tragedy of being a Roy: They need one another deeply, but they’ve long come to believe that such need is a fundamental weakness.

The exchange in the karaoke room is heartbreaking for how the siblings fail to see a path toward reconciliation, even when the opportunity falls in their lap. That’s not entirely their fault; after being manipulated by Logan all their lives, they don’t have the language for compromise. They misunderstand the notion of family and of love itself, so over and over, they cut Logan off—a move that means Logan never approaches what they want him to do: hold himself accountable for how he’s done them wrong. They refuse to let him fully speak his mind, so he wraps their discussion up with yet another insult. “You are such fucking dopes,” he says. “You are not serious figures.”

But if Logan’s retreat to berating his children is predictable, Connor’s speech is not. As he gets ready to leave, the overlooked, eldest Roy child makes an observation that sounds logical, even incisive—an uncommon occurrence for the family’s laughingstock. “You’re all chasing after Dad saying, ‘Oooh, love me, please love me, I need love, I need attention,’” he tells his siblings. “You’re needy love sponges.” Connor could be lashing out after the gloomiest engagement party ever, but he’s right: The root of the relationship between Logan and his offspring is too rotten to overcome. The grievances from their childhood can never be fixed. The past several years of their schemes can never be erased. And yet, Ken, Shiv, and Roman try for love, while simultaneously having no idea how to give or accept it. To them, Logan’s morsel of emotion spelled trouble.

They’re proved right, but only because they rejected Logan’s olive branch. At the end of the evening, Roman visits Logan to check up on him and finds his father heartier than ever. “There’s a Night of the Long Knives coming,” Logan proclaims, evidently energized by his children’s dismissal. Roman should have known that Logan would be fine. Ruthlessness has always been easier than remorse for the Roys to express.

Road Rage Is Relevant Again. SNL Just Proved It.

2023-04-02T13:02:00-04:00

Here’s one more piece of evidence that the ’90s have returned: Road rage is back in style. Stories of people who turned traffic frustrations into acts of violence were mainstays of that decade, rendered in news and in pop culture. A little bit true crime, a little bit morality tale, they captured the moment’s creeping suspicion that life was much less stable than it might have seemed.

Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live featured a new take on the old story, this one a matter of satire, and a comment on its era. “Traffic Altercation” featured the episode’s host, Quinta Brunson, and the cast member Mikey Day. Set in a traffic jam, the scene played out as a series of insults was lobbed from one driver to the other—and rendered, primarily, through pantomimes. Brunson’s character cut him off, Day’s character claimed, with the help of scissor fingers. She signaled, she retorted, her hand mimicking a flashing blinker. They never established who was right or wrong; part of the joke was that neither cared much. They were stuck in traffic, they were probably bored, and trolling each other was a way to pass the time. The road-rage story, whether it’s real or fictional, will typically involve some form of unnecessary escalation: a minor affront spiraling into something major. “Traffic Altercation” reflected that idea and mocked it. Its characters’ game of charades became ever more elaborate, and ever more ludicrous—and, in that, ever more poignant.

The sketch was most clearly a takeoff on Beef, the new Netflix show co-starring Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, which applies dark comedy to a road-rage incident that spirals into off-road struggles. As with Beef, “Traffic Altercation” used cars to convey insights about drivers. And, also like Beef, it considered how the road itself can shape drivers’ behavior. In actuality, though, “Traffic Altercation” was really satirizing the age of social media. Online, people interact in roughly the same way they do in their cars: anonymously, from a distance, with speed and swerve and stakes that tend to be very high. The decade that brought all of those stories about road rage was the same one that found people acclimating to the web; they called it a “superhighway.” We are still caught in its traffic.

In SNL’s skit, the characters were both protected by their anonymity and emboldened by it. “Why don’t you roll down your window and say that to my face?” Brunson’s character said. Day’s character refused, choosing instead to mock the cranking motion she made in the era of the push-button car window. The pair’s furious gesturing, as they remained safely in their seats, suggested one of the fundamental questions of the social-media age: Would they treat each other this way if they were standing next to each other? The simple setup—two cars, just a little too close to each other—conveyed claustrophobia. These people were stuck, both in their cars and in their argument. They couldn’t escape each other.

And then came another escalation: Their shared inescapability became … possibility. They were yelling at each other, and then they were yelling with each other, and then they were simply having a conversation. They were both divorced, the back-and-forth revealed. They were both, maybe, a little bit lonely. Maybe they were not just arguing but also flirting. Maybe this wasn’t a fight, the sketch hinted, but a rom-com in the making: road rage as meet-cute.

[Read: The SNL sketch that perfectly mocks our upside-down reality]

For a moment, it looked like these two avatars of online insult mongering might find a better way. But they didn’t. The insults won. It was Brunson’s character who wouldn’t budge, in the end, and that made the sketch’s conclusion all the more effective. Brunson created and stars in a sitcom that is an exploration of squandered possibilities. Abbott Elementary is a traditional sitcom, lighthearted and heartfelt and casually quirky. It is also an ongoing argument about a country that claims to love its children but neglects the schools that shape their days. Brunson ended her monologue last night with a plea: to treat teachers better, and thereby to treat students better. It was an idea that was echoed, in a roundabout way, in “Traffic Altercation.” Road rage has endured as a cultural preoccupation because it captures the fragility of the most seemingly basic social compacts. Whether the matter at hand is a commute or a conversation or an education system, it can all go so wrong, so quickly. Roads are tidy metaphors. Everyone’s trying to get somewhere. The question is how they will accommodate all of the other people who have their own places to go.

The Throwback Hero That Video Games Needed

2023-04-01T07:00:00-04:00

The “next-gen remake” is the latest and safest cash cow in video gaming. Take a hit title that came out a decade or more ago on a prior console, spiff it up with updated graphics, controls, and maybe even some new content, and sell it at full price to a nostalgic audience. Since its 2005 debut on the Nintendo GameCube, Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 has been lightly reconfigured for a dozen different devices. But the most recent edition is a soup-to-nuts revamp, meant to bring in a new generation while still satisfying longtime players like me who are just looking to relive the glory days.

I was introduced to Resident Evil 4 in college, and I’ve replayed it countless times over the years as it’s been “ported” to new consoles. When it was first released, the game marked a departure from the rest of the Resident Evil series, in which the player navigates the fictional Raccoon City during a viral zombie outbreak. The first Resident Evil pioneered the “survival horror” genre, asking players to conserve ammunition, solve puzzles, and withstand jump scares as enemies swarmed from every dark corner. The best-selling horror franchise spawned rival series such as Silent Hill and Left 4 Dead, but by 2005, the Resident Evil formula had grown creaky, having gained sequels and prequels for almost a decade to diminishing returns.

Resident Evil 4 aimed to loosen things up. Capcom added more dynamic action, simplified the disorienting, maze-like landscape of the earlier games, and changed the setting from Raccoon City to rural Spain. (Yes, you read that right: rural Spain.) The protagonist is Leon Kennedy, a rookie cop in Resident Evil 2 and now a steely government agent assigned to a special mission: rescue the president’s daughter, Ashley, who has been kidnapped and locked in a dungeon by mad cultists. And this, dear reader, is why I love Resident Evil 4 the most, and why I happily slapped my money down for this latest remake on the day it was released.

To put it simply: The game is very, very silly. Yes, it’s filled with gory violence, awesome weaponry, and a distressing atmosphere, but it’s basically about a zealous do-gooder hero rescuing a princess in a castle. Its depiction of contemporary Spain is laughable, rendering it as a community filled with medieval, dull-witted farmers; hooded cult members; and preening villains who seemed to have stumbled out of the Napoleonic Wars. The plot is a Super Mario adventure crossed with straight-to-video thriller nonsense, to immensely satisfying effect. Leon Kennedy brings much of the magic; he looks like he was transplanted from the set of a mid-2000s boy-band video, his blond, hairspray-slicked locks falling perfectly over his forehead as he takes aim at hordes of enemies. Midway through the game, Ashley becomes Leon’s chirpy companion, wearing impractical boots and constantly needing assistance.

My deep fear with the Resident Evil 4 remake was that a lot of this cartoonish nonsense would be scrubbed away. The trend, these days, is for video games to be serious, and lavish, “triple A” games that aim for the highest sales are the most serious of all. The Last of Us, recently adapted with fawning faithfulness by HBO, is a prime example of that category, featuring a dense script, motion-capture performances by great actors, and some meta ruminations on gaming’s violent themes and the bleakness of the horror genre. The original Resident Evil 4 arrived before any of that forced navel-gazing; I wondered if this latest remake would have to indulge it, in order to justify the high retail price and expansive budget.

[Read: The Last of Us Part II tests the limits of video-game violence]

Thankfully, all of the updates are instead focused on the technical side of things. The game nicely reflects the huge strides the industry has made in physics and artificial intelligence. Villains no longer stagger toward you brainlessly, but dodge and swarm with surprising grace. The game demands accuracy and rewards lateral thinking, encouraging you to not just mow down villains with your weapons but lure them into traps or even pit them against each other. The environment remains hilariously frozen in time, with Leon in his Kevlar vest navigating a world of wooden huts and stone citadels, but it’s illustrated beautifully, be it a fortress dimly lit by torches or a farm strewn with zombie corpses.

The dizzy heights of modern gaming do not bother me. I am a huge fan of extravagant works such as The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption, and The Witcher, and I’m endlessly impressed with how games keep advancing their story lines to match their glitzy tech. But Resident Evil 4 does something that the high-concept blockbusters can’t always achieve: It lets me unplug my brain. I can just have fun for an hour. Not everything needs to be elevated; narrative foolishness mixed with pitch-perfect gunplay and heaps of gore will always be an easy way to get me to pick up a controller. I look forward to the next remake, likely to arrive a decade-plus from now, as long as it keeps Leon as airheaded as ever.

Is Stanning a Sin?

2023-03-31T12:13:17-04:00

Both slang for “super fan” and the title of a terrifying Eminem song, the term stan refers to a distinctly modern phenomenon depicted in the controversial new Amazon Prime series Swarm. In the horror-comedy created by Atlanta’s Donald Glover and Janine Nabers, a young woman takes lethal revenge on people who talk poorly about her favorite pop star. A smartphone enables her to constantly consume content by her beloved singer—and to smash the skulls of people who make nasty jokes on Twitter.

Swarm’s contemporary trappings are a bit of a feint, however. The show portrays a kind of devotion that’s old, even ancient. The most famous examples of fans who stalk and murder predate the modern internet (RIP John Lennon and Selena Quintanilla). And given that no known stan has ever massacred a bunch of haters, to find a real-life precedent for the actions of the show’s anti-hero, Dre (played with blank-eyed brilliance by Dominique Fishback), you have to look beyond pop music. Questing around the nation, smiting anyone she sees as a heretic, Dre resembles a holy crusader, or a terrorist. Swarm is about religion, and it condemns the sin of idolatry.

[Read: Atlanta and the anxiety of fame]

To see condemnation in this series is to differ, slightly, from many readings of Swarm thus far. The show’s audacious filmmaking, writing, and acting have earned deserving admiration, but many reviews posit that Swarm raises more questions than it answers. Some viewers have critiqued Glover and Nabers for—among many other things—neither seeming to understand fan culture nor having many coherent thoughts about it. Glover himself alleges that their show isn’t making an argument about our own world. He told Vulture, “I don’t want people to study this and be like, ‘Oh, this is a very true depiction of blank.’”

Yet nearly every episode begins with an assertion of truth, in text reading This is not a work of fiction and Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional. The fashions, music, and biographical details of the fictional superstar Ni’Jah closely resemble those of Beyoncé. The casting of Billie Eilish, Paris Jackson, and Chloe Bailey—a pop star, a pop star’s progeny, and a pop star’s protégé, respectively—heightens a sense of meta-commentary. On some level, this is a work by famous people expressing something about the very people who admire them.

Almost explicitly, the show pursues plot-level mystery along with a broader cultural mystery: Why is Dre this way?, which is a way of asking, Why are some fans so extreme? The sixth episode takes a formal detour into the style of a true-crime docuseries. A detective hunts to find Dre and understand her motives. “There are usually some factors that contribute to a child lashing out,” explains a social worker who once knew Dre, growing angry at the nosy cop who’s digging for more insight. “You need there to be a reason she was so messed up so you don’t have to sweep your own front door and realize that you are just as flawed.” This monologue is double-speak, directed unmistakably at the audience.

[Read: Why fangirls scream]

As it turns out, there is not a reason for Dre’s crimes. There are many. Acute grief is foremost. Childhood bullying and abandonment lie under that. A number of characters remark that something is off about Dre—code for perceived mental-health conditions. The show even flirts with the cliché of killer queerness, leading viewers to wonder if Dre’s admiration for Ni’Jah expresses her long-thwarted desire for women. These personal issues are fed by cultural ones: the distortions of social media; the holes in our social safety net; the prejudices facing Black women. The bottom line is that society’s many failings have left Dre starved for belonging and connection. A shimmering visage on her phone screen, singing about liberation and love, fills that hunger. Stanning, Swarm says, is a symptom of a sickness we all help cause.

That this sickness is spiritual would be obvious even without Dre encountering a New Age cult midway through the season. At one point we see a fan refer to Ni’Jah as both a goddess and a sister, similar to how real pop fans intermix deification with cries of “Mom,” and similar to how various real-world faiths regard higher powers as parental figures. The conflation helps explain Dre’s behavior: Killing to protect one’s family, and murder by extremists in defense of faith, are not abnormal in history. Swarm gets progressively more disturbing as it untangles the inhumane logic of righteous violence, showing how the hope for otherworldly redemption—in heaven or a backstage pass—can choke off someone’s ability to accept real love when it’s offered. The finale’s title: “Only God Makes Happy Endings.”

Swarm’s take on these matters is bold but not fresh. Op-ed pages and church pulpits are hardly lacking for sermons saying that celebrity worship reflects community collapse and secular emptiness. Conspiracy theorists have filled the internet with feverish, bloody fantasies of self-deifying stars hypnotizing the masses. Swarm uses satirical extremity to offer a jolting reminder, a soul-deep yuck—perhaps in hopes that viewers check how much of themselves they see in Dre. A scene in Episode 6, in which another of Ni’Jah’s superfans is interviewed, captures this. The fan mulls whether he would kill in the name of his idol—and appears hilariously unsure about his final answer of no.

Swarm pointedly downplays the upsides of fandom: the authentic community, the nourishing sense of purpose. And it flattens the artist-celebrity into the glistening silhouette of Ni’Jah rather than recognize that the canniest stars create obsession by flaunting complication and flaws—as Beyoncé has, as Glover has, as Eilish has. The show’s stark, stylized polemic is all the more chilling given how eagerly it draws attention to its own authorship by fawned-over entertainers. The message is the same one Eminem offered in “Stan,” a song imagining his biggest fan to be a monster. Many of our modern gods are, quite clearly, afraid of their congregants.

What California Means to Writers

2023-03-31T10:00:00-04:00

What about California captures the imagination of American writers? The state—the country’s most populous, and one of its most diverse—provides fodder for every sort of author.

This week, Ross Perlin wrote about Malcolm Harris’s new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, which argues that the titular city, as well as Silicon Valley at large, is responsible for “wreaking havoc on the planet and immiserating so many of its people.” But Perlin is slightly more optimistic: He thinks we could leverage the state’s history to positively change the course of its future. Californian geography can also affect us deeply, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson argues. His book The High Sierra: A Love Story is a celebration of the Sierra Nevada, and explores a phenomenon he calls “psychogeology”: “the feelings and perceptions caused by the exposed rock, the light, the thinner air at altitude.” As Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote in July, Robinson’s book not only details his own sublime encounters but shows us how we might find “our own transcendence.”

Back at sea level, Anthony Veasna So’s story collection, Afterparties, evokes a completely different world, in what one character calls the “asshole of California”: In So’s fiction, Stockton and its outskirts are filled with relatives, insular communities, and family-run businesses. His characters are second-generation Cambodian Americans living in the “patchy remembrance” of the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, and yet, according to the writer Zoë Hu, they are “just as likely to roll their eyes as they are to flinch” in response to stories about Cambodia’s concentration camps.

The “California writer” is an archetype that could not exist without Joan Didion. She was born in Sacramento and spent time in Berkeley, but is perhaps most associated with the southern part of the state. Last year, Caitlin Flanagan visited the places she lived, looking for the “Joan Didion who invented Los Angeles in the ’60s as an expression of paranoia, danger, drugs, and the movie business.” Around the same time, Eve Babitz invented a Los Angeles of her own. Babitz trafficked in gossip; in L.A., she wrote, “we don’t like news, we like artifice.” Both writers, who died in 2021 within days of each other, were undeniably shaped by the city. But their work also created a version of it—and of the Golden State—that lives on in the minds of their readers.

Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What We’re Reading

Illustration by Matt Chase / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Is Silicon Valley beyond redemption?

“California is worth fighting for, and so is Silicon Valley. If not at Stanford and in Palo Alto, the dynamic and destructive love triangle between technology, capitalism, and higher education would surely be happening somewhere else. (An Austin System might be even worse.)”

📚 Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World, by Malcolm Harris

Dennis Stockton / Magnum

A love letter to the ‘best mountain range on earth’

“[Kim Stanley] Robinson is no stranger to epiphany; many of his earliest Sierra outings included an acid trip along the way. But he never tries to lead us into the experience of epiphany, however it manifests itself. He’s alert to his own emotions but willing to stand outside them a little, not to diminish them but to understand how they complement his modest, pervasive rationality.”

📚 The High Sierra: A Love Story, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Getty; The Atlantic

Welcome to the afterparty of the American dream

“Rather than stage his characters in easily comprehensible postures, gathering them around the mythic American dream at self-serious angles, [Anthony Veasna So] shows them to us as they loll about in the dream’s afterparty. Here the lights are dimmer, the truths blurrier, the hangover incoming..”

📚 Afterparties, by Anthony Veasna So

Illustration by Wayde McIntosh

Joan Didion’s magic trick

“I wanted to feel close to her—not to the mega-celebrity, very rich, New York Joan Didion. I wanted to feel close to the girl who came from Nowhere, California (have you ever been to Sacramento?), and blasted herself into the center of everything. I wanted to feel close to the young woman who’d gone to Berkeley, and studied with professors I knew, and relied on them—as I had once relied on them—to show her a path.”

📚 Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
📚 The White Album, by Joan Didion
📚 Democracy, by Joan Didion

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

The ‘L.A. Woman’ reveals herself

“Gossip, [Eve] Babitz suggests, is a different, subaltern way of knowing—disdained by the (male) structures of power, but with a power (and an appeal) all its own.”

📚 Eve’s Hollywood, by Eve Babitz
📚 Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A., by Eve Babitz
📚 I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz, by Eve Babitz

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Maya Chung. The book she’s reading next is The Birthday Party, by Laurent Mauvignier.

Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.

A Romantic Comedy You Never Want to End

2023-03-30T13:14:24-04:00

A quirky meet-cute? Check. Grand romantic gestures? Check. A memorable supporting cast, a climactic conflict that threatens heartbreak, and a message about how love triumphs against all odds? You name the rom-com trope, and Rye Lane, the new film streaming on Hulu tomorrow, probably has it.

And yet, that only works in the movie’s favor. Rye Lane may be the most unconventional conventional romantic comedy in years, delivering the genre’s trappings in such fizzy, gleefully inventive ways that even predictable beats feel new. The first-time feature director Raine Allen-Miller combines the structural simplicity of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy with the emotional exuberance of Richard Curtis’s ensemble efforts, yielding a love story that’s thoughtfully made and thoroughly charming.

It helps that the lead characters seem fully formed from the very first scene. Yas (played by Vivian Oparah) and Dom (Industry’s David Jonsson) are both 20-somethings reeling from tough breakups, but whereas the extroverted Yas is approaching life with gusto, soft-spoken Dom has been unable to move forward. The two begin to chat after Yas hears Dom sobbing in the adjacent stall in a gender-neutral bathroom, and they wander the South London neighborhoods that surround the titular street, dipping in and out of shops and squares and alleyways. They swap horror stories about their exes. They go on comical side quests, one of which involves a spectacular cameo I won’t spoil. They reveal their tastes, hopes, and insecurities. But whether they’re sitting in silence on a park bench or struggling to hear each other over the cacophony of a karaoke bar, their conversation always crackles with excitement. Their curiosity about each other builds from scene to scene, and the film tracks how the buzz of meeting someone new can morph into mutual attraction—and, eventually, genuine affection.

The film matches Yas and Dom’s buoyant energy with equally dynamic visuals. When they share anecdotes, those memories are depicted with a surreal touch. Yas’s account of her breakup is presented as a stage play, with a theater full of Doms reacting to every twist and turn. When Dom learns that a friend of his had brunch with his ex and her new boyfriend, he envisions their meal as The Last Supper, a dramatic gathering of friends and foes alike. These flourishes are as amusing as they are meaningful. They underline how deeply Yas and Dom have been feeling about their recent troubles, while subtly conveying how similarly they think. By the time they share their first big kiss—a kiss you’ll have been anticipating—you’re invested not only in its happening but also in how each interprets the moment.

[Read: Nora Ephron’s revenge]

I first caught Rye Lane at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and was struck by how much I wanted to see it again—for the pleasure of rewatching, yes, but also for the chance to study what Allen-Miller packed into every shot. Something—a man shimmying through the streets dressed as a cowboy, a pair of young girls filming a choreographed dance—is always happening in the background of Yas and Dom’s journey. Every now and then, the director uses a fish-eye lens, giving her duo’s adventure a dreamy bent. And the characters seem allergic to white or black or neutral shades; instead, they’re clothed and lit in vivid hues. The film, as a result, feels as youthful as its lovebirds. It’s endlessly fun to watch, capturing the thrill of a budding romance and the lively neighborhoods that serve as Rye Lane’s backdrop. Allen-Miller, who grew up in South London, has created a visual time capsule of the area before its gentrification, letting the din of the surrounding streets accompany the eclectic, British-hip-hop-heavy soundtrack that serves as the film’s heartbeat.

In less than 90 minutes, Rye Lane proves that an original romantic comedy can work on a small scale, with a simple premise. Despite regular reports of its failing health, the genre has never actually died; it has instead often adopted the characteristics of other, more box-office-friendly styles to survive. (At the moment, the action rom-com seems to be thriving: Think Shotgun Wedding or the forthcoming Ghosted.) But Rye Lane rejects the idea that a romantic comedy needs anything more than good chemistry and good vibes. It proudly deploys the genre’s formula to serve characters and locations rarely seen on-screen. And like a good first date, it’s the kind of rendezvous you never want to end.