There’s something a bit fun about coming late to the party and not having to follow the show beat by beat as it figures itself out but taking it in all at once, as a whole. And the sense is the show really is very divided about what it wants to be — sometimes it’s the serial length-version of Triangle of Sadness, a meditation on class in our time; sometimes it’s a Neil Simon-esque collection of witty aperçus from the upper crust; sometimes it’s scenes from gay life; sometimes it’s just a thriller; and sometimes it really reaches for it and tries to be something like the statement of its age.

The first season [SPOILERS throughout this piece] is largely about calibrating its range and is mostly about class. The struggle that I think Mike White had was whether he wanted to create a mathematically elegant plot of the collision of characters producing a set of unforeseen outcomes, somewhere between La Ronde and Sliding Doors, or whether he wanted to stick to a string of parallel plot lines that happen to be resolved in the same physical locale. It’s a tricky conundrum from a plotting perspective and has various repercussions on how he depicts the psychology of his characters. More than just about anything I can think of, White is comfortable depicting psychologically complex, fully-formed people, who nonetheless aren’t in possession of their own wills. That creates a very interesting texture, since in the post-Flaubert age you’re not exactly supposed to write in this way. Characters are supposed to have agency and to be struggling against their given circumstances. What White hearkens back to is an earlier conception of character — it’s like the highwayman in Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild picking the picket of the chaplain while standing on the gallows — where a person is entirely contained within the matrix of their class station or, at another level, their psychological condition. Shane will always and only be a douche. His mother will only be an extension of her class. Nicole will always look down on her husband Mark while she makes more than him; and the tables will only be turned when he manfully tackles an intruder. Paula puts this very explicitly to Olivia, who is in the midst of campus radicalism: “You are like your parents. You think you’re like this rebel, but, in the end, this is your tribe.” This dynamic is particularly poignant for characters who find themselves temporarily on a fault line. Rachel is dreaming of some kind of interiority or other — of being a journalist or just a person with a job — but that’s just not what’s called for for somebody who looks like she does and can slot herself into the economic matrix at the level of, and on the terms dictated by, Shane’s family. Tanya is ensconced in her position of being fabulously wealthy but has the even more intractable problem of being nuts — and, as a result of being both nuts and wealthy, is doomed to being one of life’s victims. “I’m crazy, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” she says to a bemused Greg. Her attempt to exorcize her pain — whether through disposing of her mother’s ashes, or her good deed through Belinda — is one of the more agonizing elements of The White Lotus in general.

The season really centers, though, on Armond, the hotel manager. The point with Armand is that, even as he’s locked into one particular economic matrix — the hospitality manager determined to be “generic and interchangeable” — his gayness and his addictions open him to a very different zone of experience. Gayness, throughout The White Lotus, is where things get blurred, it’s the acid that dissolves rigid class expectations. The kind of peak of the season’s drama is Mark — the Steve Zahn character’s — drunken spiral, a response to discovering that his father was gay, which leads him to hitting on different women and asking questions of strangers, all a pretty typical resort scene up until he’s in conversation with Armond and asks Armond what anal sex is like, at which point Armond looks him full in the face and says, “Do you want to find out?” That’s really the threshold — which different characters keep coming up against in their own ways. It’s the possibility of leaving everything you know, and all the familiar coordinates of the world, for something that really is wild. For Quinn, that means staying in Hawaii and canoeing with the locals; for Paula and Olivia that means flirting with real progressivism, being part of the decolonial reclamation project, one piece of stolen jewelry at a time. For Mark, that’s the clearest zone of transition into something else — being gay and seeing how all the social categories reverse themselves. When he passes on that, the show starts to move inward again, the different characters clustering back within the tribes that they came with, and the threshold of the wild being mostly abandoned. That turn back towards conformity leaves Armond out in the cold — he’s losing his job, he has no tribe to fall back on — and, in the liminal, wild space that’s unavailable to the other characters, he undergoes a spectacular act of self-destruction that also takes him far outside what is permitted to a hotel manager.

I’ve rarely felt as let down by a work of art as I did by the second season of The White Lotus. White seems really to be going for it here, trying to create something that’s well outside the realm of possibility of contemporary television — that’s more about revenge tragedies and ancient legends and grafting millennial life onto these much more robust storytelling structures. We know from the beginning where we are going with it — the story is encoded in the Saracen heads that are scattered around the rooms of the hotel. It’s about lust and jealousy and the way that they have an inexorable logic of their own, so that the dapper millennial quartet vacationing with one another to celebration Ethan’s company’s sale are, once exposed to Sicily, drawn, despite themselves, into the ancient narratives. That story pairs very nicely with sweet Albie slowly forgetting his p.c. Stanford education as he’s drawn into an affair with a prostitute and into discovering for himself much older ideas about masculinity. And, like in the first season, there’s a moment when the show seems really to come up to the threshold of something extraordinarily different — it’s in the scene where Daphne and Harper rent a villa together for the night and Daphne, taking edibles, starts to riff on the kind of people that she and her husband really are. “Honestly, the guys that Cameron works with are very dark triad — for real,” she says. “Psychopaths. I’m not kidding.” The sense is that Harper and Ethan are being slowly drawn into a very different world — the sort of fable where morality and politesse are siphoned off, and all that exists is sex and power, and the further they get into it the more they find themselves liking it. That really is where the series is supposed to end up, with somebody in the quartet killing somebody else — but, as in the first season, White draws back at the threshold, and the ending feels a little bit as if Act V of Othello were rewritten for Othello, Desdemona, and Michael Cassio to all order another round of drinks and then make their plans to vacation in the Maldives next year. White is saying something interesting — that the ancient passions are all there, they’re just tucked more discreetly into the texture of modern life, so that the series’ central quartet finds themselves ever more interwoven, Cameron and Harper maybe having a thing, Daphne and Ethan definitely having a thing now that Ethan is broken in a bit and can access the seamier side of life, and, now that Ethan’s money frees them from the prim, progressive attitudes they used to have, Ethan and Harper are in this other vein of existence that’s all about desires and passions, with sex and death in their closely-knitted tango — but it would have been nice for that to have played out on screen a bit more. Instead, the action is largely about a baroque hit carried out against Tanya, which is kind of fun but is basically just a thriller. Honestly, I had a feeling that the season might be in trouble the second Tom Hollander’s character showed up, and he seems to drag everything into a clunkier genre. White here is trying to say something Mishima-esque, about beauty and the things we do for beauty — “I would die for beauty. Would you?” Quentin says to a flummoxed Tanya — but the whole thing feels more like the scene from Community where Dean Spreck says to Dean Pelton, “Oh you haven’t seen how mean this queen can be” — an over-the-top fantasy of psychopathic gays orchestrating murder-for-hire schemes to defray the cost of their home renovations. White also has the problem of a couple of plotlines that he can’t quite tie in together. He may have been seduced by the possibility of having F. Murray Abraham in his show, and, like everybody else’s in White Lotus, Abraham’s acting is just so good — but that doesn’t ultimately solve the problem of what to do with his character. And White ultimately seems to back himself into a conclusion that he likely doesn’t really intend — that venality trumps all. The triumphant homecoming that Abraham’s character envisions back to his ancestors’ village is thwarted by his relatives’ cheap concern with money and their dimestore psychopathy. The clever twist with the character of Lucia is, again, more a joke about venality than anything else, and after the long tease about being in a gen-yoo-ine revenge tragedy — the portentous credits, the artwork scattered all around the hotel, the vast, slow buildup — we find ourselves in something more like opera buffa.

If White couldn’t get the plane to land in Season Two, I think he really does in Season Three. The change of setting — from Sicily to Thailand — seems to help. If he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that nice sweet Ethan, who has a start-up company and goes jogging in the morning, could be the Othello-style linchpin of a revenge tragedy plot, the Buddhism of Season Three is a softer narrative to graft over contemporary life. Here, we really do believe that Rick, Walton Goggins’ character, is a man of action and fully capable of murder, and we are on a knife’s edge all the way through about whether there is a karmic release in moving forward and in good living or whether the logic of revenge, and of the cycle of violence, demands a bloodier outcome. It is, it must be said, convenient for a writer trying to figure out how to string together the many threads of a complicated show, to plant a Buddhist monastery next door to the main action and to have the resident lay out the main idea while reducing the audience’s expectations. “There is no resolution to life’s questions, it is easier to be patient once we understand there is no resolution,” he says, and if this sounds simple it actually moves the show into a different register. It doesn’t really need to tie up, which is the delusion that Season 2 labors under. It’s more that the main character is the White Lotus itself and each episode of the various assorted characters is like a shadow thrown across the cave wall, each illuminating some different human vanity and each remembered in its own way as a different incident in the story of the resort. So the boy Lochlan nearly dying by the edge of the pool is an extension of his father’s emotional closedness. Belinda’s journey from put-upon labor to great wealth is, similarly, just another turn in the wheel of fate — another manifestation of greed, with Belinda, given half a chance, acting exactly in the same way that Tanya did towards her, and that every selfish rich person has done over the course of the show. The characters who are closer to jumping off the wheel of fate are Frank — Sam Rockwell’s character — Laurie, and the cluster surrounding Rick. Frank approaches it in a ridiculously over-the-top way, seeing if getting himself reamed in a dress with a little Asian girl watching can somehow reverse the history of colonialism or the wheel of fate. Gaitok, the security guard, finds himself on the knife’s edge between Buddhistic renunciation of violence or movement forward in the world, as well as the affection of a pretty girl who in her demure way is actually very turned on by violence — and chooses the path that most people would choose in that situation. Chelsea, of anybody, has the most acute sense of being part of the movement of fate — in her long-suffering, eternally-victimized way, she is nonetheless right to sense that her fate is somehow tied to Rick’s, that she actually nearly does have the power to get him to forget about the imperatives of revenge and of violence, and to just move forward into freedom and happiness, to break the cycle. But she doesn’t have quite enough power, and the point may well be that nobody does, that everybody is trapped in their karmic station no matter what action they attempt to take, and that leaves Laurie, Carrie Coon’s character, with the opportunity to offer the verdict on the season, and the show, as a whole. She says, “I have no belief system, I mean I’ve had a lot of them — work was my religion for forever but I definitely lost my belief there — and then I tried love and that was just a painful religion that made everything worse, and then for me being a mother, that didn’t save me either, but I had this epiphany today, I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning because time gives it meaning.”

It’s one of those rare moments when a monologue cinches everything together, and, in a way, does change the whole aesthetic of what we expect art to do. White seems to start the show, like everybody else, believing in action — Season 1 is fairly traditionally plotted with the building conflict between Shane and Armond and with a series of other nestled conflicts that generally end in disappointment, in a character choosing the safer option available to them. Season 2 plays with moving into the domain of super-charged action, but White can’t quite bring himself to go there — turning the temperature down on the central quartet’s drama just when it’s hitting boiling point. With Season 3, he does seem finally to be saying what he really wants to say — that action isn’t the point, that action is different kinds of shadows thrown on the cave wall and that the real heart of a story is just the progression of time itself, of flawed people moving through life with no hope of resolution and with the wisdom, eventually, to recognize that there isn’t a hope of any.

This can’t be a good habit — what do I really gain from watching “Man Lives Thanks To Heart Stolen From Dead Man” for the tenth (maybe twelfth? fifteenth?) time? Hasn’t there been other comedy since then? As material goes, isn’t the Obama-Romney election — which I don’t remember being a particularly funny election — inherently limited?

And the point to make is that The Onion’s comedy at this time wasn’t just funny or escapist. It was perfect.

If we try to chart out the peaks of human achievement we might well come up with something like this:

• Alec Guinness (1977-1983)

• Radiohead (2007-2011)

• Larry David (1989-2011)

• Lana Del Rey (2012-2014)

• The Onion (2007-2011)

And there are a few things to notice. One is that The Onion’s period of perfection lasted for a comparatively long time — much longer for instance than Lana Del Rey’s two perfect albums before the light started to go out, and that The Onion produced a startlingly large number of flawless segments. Another is that what The Onion was doing was really very complicated — lots of different moving parts at once, between the writing, the casting, the acting, the production design — and The Onion somehow pulled it off with far more elements involved than, say, The Daily Show or Colbert Report. And then the other is that, for the level of peak performance The Onion hit, it’s astonishingly overlooked. I read The Onion regularly during this period but somehow never drifted over to the News Network — and, as far as I know, no one I knew really did either. I was paying close attention to the Obama-Romney election. I worked on the Obama-McCain election. The entire experience of that time would have been very different if we had all been quoting Onion News Network bits at each other, instead of rehashing Tina Fey impressions.

And as a result of its underexposure — it started on YouTube and then had two seasons on the IFC — none of the ONN’s stars broke out, which is astonishing. They’re all really great, but if we had to single out a few, this would be what the top five list might look like:

5.Tracy Gill (Tracy Toth) — The quieter of the two hosts of Today Now, the ONN’s morning talk show, but fully capable of stealing a given segment, either with blithe soccer mom sociopathy or a Stepford Wives-ish inability to hide her inner scream. She is at her best when she utterly loathes the guest — “there’s no light in your eyes K’Rronikka” (1:33); or, best of all, in her encounter with Rebecca, the parenting advice expert who dares to tell you how to raise your child: “You know, I bet a lot of moms watching right now are thinking ‘fuck you’” (1:50).

4.Andrea Bennett (Kyla Grogan) — It’s the very slight gothic turn that sets Andrea apart from the other field correspondents. She never actually does anything particularly Addams Family-ish, but it’s the knowledge that she’s secretly quite a sick puppy that just gives that extra bit of dimensionality to her reportage. Grogan is maybe the best actor of all of them in getting that relentlessly-upbeat-yet-totally-insincere news correspondent tone (“now some boyfriends have been dragging their feet on this issue” 1:48); (“with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vanessa Williams” 1:29) and it’s that feeling of her mind being somewhere else altogether that really makes it work for her.

3.Lauralee Hickock (Julie Brister) — The anchor of the panel. The danger with the panel is that the other panelists can sometimes blur together, although each has their own star turn (David Barrodale’s flailing defense of Obama in “Obama’s Approval Rating Down After Photos Surface Of Him Eating Big Sandwich All Alone”), Duncan Birch’s Being John Malkovich’s burst of self-loathing in “Is Pundit Duncan Birch A Worthless Idjit?”, Jason Copeland’s advice on how to disguise your amateur porn as your grandparents’ in “What Is Your Amateur Porn Telling Your Employers About You?” 1:54) but the panel wouldn’t be what is without Lauralee — her animation whatever the topic is (“Should Adults Be Allowed To Bring Kids To R-Rated Movies Where We Masturbate?” 1:52), her sheer delight at the suffering of others (“New Live Poll Lets Pundits Pander To Viewers In Real Time” 3:00), as well as the occasional bouts of despair when the panel suddenly turns on her (“Should The Nation’s Unemployed Be Buying New Apple Computers?” 2:22) are the panel’s real secret sauce.

2.Jim Haggerty (Brad Holbrook) — This might well be the best comedy performance I’m aware of. It’s one note all the way through, which is the cheery sadistic pleasure a talk show host takes from his guests’ discomfiture, but the note is just perfect. A couple of highlights out of so, so many would be the “Man Lives Thanks To A Heart Stolen From A Dead Man” sketch (“You’re leaving something out there, Dave” 2:26) — and the attempt in “Firefighter Died To Save Unimpressive Teen” to figure out whether the loss of a firefighter for the high school girl he saved (“How will your going to college help to fill in the void left for Sam’s widow?” 1:21) is really a good trade.

1.Nancy Fichandler (Dorothi Fox) — The ONN, knowing the gold they have here, is very sparing in their use of Fichandler — every time she shows up on the panel, she steals the show as the wise old black commentator who happens to be completely crazy. Her excitement about the money fire (1:18) in “Should the Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole” is a good introduction to her, as is her nausea at the Obamas’ love life (1:55) in “Happy, Healthy Obamas Out Of Touch With Miserable Americans,” but the real star turn is “Are Our Children Learning Enough About Whales,” which, for quite a while, seems like a rare bust of a sketch until Nancy breaks into whale song right at the end (2:00). It’s important to notice as well how much Kip O’Leary, as the dilapidated preppie from the Shuttleworth Institute, contributes (2:15) to that sketch.

This is so far from exhaustive. Brooke Alvarez gets a maybe bit overworked, but the bitchy handoffs to Jane Carmichael (“eyeliner, Jane”) never miss. Congressman Ingersol’s dim-witted gravitas is essential to the C-SPAN segment. Omar Al-Farouq, Al-Qaeda’s chill but sinister spokesman (“How would you like it if you spent two months sleeping in a mountain cave planning something really special only for someone to take the credit away from you?” 1:00), is just perfect. Theodore Barrett’s gravel-voiced press secretary is very close to breaking into the top five list (“Press Secretary Spins Wife’s Death As A Positive”). The children guest stars are all stranger than the one before (maybe peaking in “Girl Raised From Birth By Wolf Blitzer Taken Into Protective Custody”). And guest chef Adam Scott probably gets credit for the single best skit of all in “Chef Cooks Dream Omelette That Came To Him In A Dream.”

So how did they do it? First of all, it’s a testament to how far dry humor can go — none of the actors ever come anywhere close to breaking; and I think the ONN’s dryness is why it’s possible to watch the skits over and over again without their ever spoiling. Then, even though The Onion was far from the only program to notice the comic potential of the news, they went much further than anybody else in understanding just how much smarm underlies the news business. Then, they seem to have decided that nothing was out of bounds and there was no such thing as too far in pursuing a joke (school shootings, for instance, turn out to be particularly rich in material, as in “Police Say School Shooter Had History of School Shootings”; as are mental health issues, as in “Is The Government Spying On Schizophrenics Enough?”). It’s very hard to say anything profound about The Onion News Network, but let me try this — much more than any of their competitors, certainly more than the Daily Show or The Colbert Report, which were essentially extensions of Democratic Party politics, they were under no illusions about the United States of America. Even while broadcasting at a relatively optimistic moment, they seemed to sense what was about to come with Trumpism. Everybody in their America is either perfectly lazy or perfectly venal, or often both. Their critiques of America often tend to cut very deep — when the American Dream finally dies as Tuffy the Pennington bartender is changing channels; or when Obama visits a Denny’s and realizes that he needs to drastically scale back his program for America; or when Obama’s ‘hope and change’ vision is revealed to have been a manic episode. In this sense, The Onion is fairly close actually to the “No Values” voters of “‘No Values’ Voters Search For Most Evil Candidate.” There is nothing redemptive anywhere in their take on America; and no hint of anything outside the satire.

Given all that, it’s something like a national tragedy that what might well be the best comedy show ever could disappear without a trace after two seasons, but all is not lost. It turns out, interestingly, that the ONN is better taken in as stand-alone YouTube segments — when you watch it together in half-hour pockets, it’s so brilliant that it gets overwhelming. And if it has a whole new life on YouTube, it also somehow keeps its own era very much alive — all of this is before Trump and before the body politic started to really disintegrate, but there’s something reassuring about seeing the whole thing captured so perfectly in advance. At least somebody was never under any illusions.

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Watching his movies was more than I bargained for. It was sort of a shock to look at his filmography and realize that it featured Spartacus and Dr Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange and Lolita — like every interesting, risqué film from a certain era. And that included The Shining also and watching it for the first time made me realize that I’d been missing a solid, like, 2 or 3% of American culture up to that point. I did know what people were referencing when they got a sudden gleam in their eye and said “Hereee’s Johnny” but not that strange look that men of a certain age would give me when I said that I’d been writing and they said “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” and not the scene in so many movies (it’s in Passengers with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, for instance) where a bartender suddenly materializes in a deserted setting. And in retrospect, there’s a guy I know, who, I swear, was modeling his entire personality on Jack Nicholson’s character.

The Shining is nicely accompanied by the documentary Room 237, in which fanatics of the film talk about their theories on it — some involving the moon landing, others more film studies-friendly interpretations. The theory, as Bill Blakemore puts it, is that Kubrick set out to do a different kind of film, a film using the subliminal messaging techniques that are used in advertising — and so what it is in a sense is a film with more in it than other films, sort of in the way that Rembrandt was simply using more paint than anybody else. That maximalism shows up in several different ways. It’s in the careful layering of the background, it’s in the deliberate disorientation of space within the Overlook Hotel so that the architecture of the set seems to swallow up the viewer’s consciousness, and it’s in the insane number of takes Kubrick was doing. You do feel it in the famous scene where Jack Torrance meets Lloyd. That’s again a nice scene to watch paired with Room 237. At 1:39:24, John Fell Ryan is talking, and the scene between Torrance and Lloyd comes into his line of vision and the chuckle he lets out is visceral and from a very, very deep part of himself — it’s a recognition of some sort of a beyond, of a place of such heightened strangeness that it can only be accessed through the sort of obsessive filmmaking that Kubrick practices.

What that place is is indicated in another commentary in Room 237. “I believe that it’s an extremely disturbing story about sexuality, it’s a story of demons who are sexually attracted to humans and are feeding off of them,” says Blakemore. Which sounds a little nuts but if you watch The Shining it’s hard really to come to any other conclusion — maybe not that exactly but something in the ballpark. The Overlook Hotel is of course haunted. ‘The real owners,’ as Blakemore puts it in the film, are demons of some sort. They lobby hard to get Jack to murder his wife and child and they commune with him through Room 237, through the place of primal sexuality. And Kubrick in an interview said about the film, “There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality. There’s an evil side to it.”

This seems to be the crux of it — the exploration of evil and evil connected also somehow to filmmaking technique, the sense that if you relentlessly sand everything down, cut away at the stone as Kubrick does in his filmmaking, then you approach something like the evil itself — which Kubrick gets very close to in The Shining, particularly the bar scenes, in the training sequences in the opening of Full Metal Jacket, and probably also in A Clockwork Orange and the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There’s another view of Kubrick, which actually is what I came across first. It’s in Frederick Raphael’s memoir Eyes Wide Open — and it’s pretty unflattering to Kubrick. To Raphael, the screenwriter of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick is basically a hack. It’s the usual problem of a techie getting in a bit over their head. His Kubrick is deeply insecure — “I’m no writer, I know that”; “I don’t know what I want, I wish I did” — and with a techie’s inability to conceive of imagination (“You’re telling me you made it up, how did you do that?”) as well as a techie’s excitement at seeing Nicole Kidman naked. Reading Raphael, what comes through is an image of Kubrick as basically stunted — not in touch with his own emotions or creative vision and so kind of backing himself into a sheen of winning opacity by obscuring what the work is actually about. There’s a long exchange between Raphael and Kubrick about shape — Raphael arguing that shape is the essence of art and Kubrick being far from convinced of it. (“Day after day, Stanley mocked my obsession with things having a shape,” Raphael recalled.) But that leaves the question of what there is without shape and the strong suspicion from Raphael is that it’s something like Full Metal Jacket with a few brilliant scenes that are polished to the point of perfection but no obvious coherence. (“So much attention was being paid to the trees that we were giving no clear shape to the wood,” he wrote.) And the relationship between Raphael and Kubrick ends as so many relationships have between directors and screenwriters — Kubrick without giving any clear reason discards much of Raphael’s draft and writes his own, which strikes Raphael as clumsy (“what we had written had laid him open to scorn or at least condescension”).

But as sympathetic as I am to Raphael — everything about his Kubrick feels kind of credible to me, the guy who’s fallen in love with his own myth but is secretly in terror of his own lack of creativity — there’s the persistent sense in reading Raphael’s memoir that he actually is in the presence of genius but is both too arrogant and too prissy to really see it.

There’s another view of Kubrick that kind of splits the difference between the hagiography of Room 237 and the myth-busting of Raphael. It’s in Filmworker, a documentary about Leon Vitali, Kubrick’s longtime right hand man, that paints a very complicated portrait of Kubrick. Kubrick, seen through the eyes of Vitali, really is a bit of a monster. “He was always waiting for you to fuck up, so it was always like as much you gave, you had to give more and more and more and more,” he recalls, and that perfectionism stretched out over the course of a lifetime exacted a real tool on everyone around him. The filmmakers go to a certain amount of trouble to demonstrate that Vitali was abused as a child and repeated that pattern of abuse through Kubrick. People who saw them together recall Kubrick being a Frankenstein figure and Vitali as a quivering Igor-type, as the actor Matthew Modine put it. Another interviewee describes the way Kubrick might light into Vitali for a minor mistake: “absolutely, any kind of mistake or error would just be jumped and you could feel totally crucified at the end of it.” And Vitali, who had had a whole career as an actor before walking off set after the shooting of Barry Lyndon and asking to work as Kubrick’s assistant, essentially forfeited his own identity to serve Kubrick. His children remember having almost nothing to do with Vitali — he was a figure by a copy machine endlessly smoking. “When I say I worked 14, 15, 16 hour days that was at Stanley’s place but when I got home it was all telephone work,” Vitali recalled. And at the end of it, Vitali had very little to show — he was always underpaid for what he was doing and after Kubrick’s death he ended up needing support from his own son. With Kubrick’s treatment of Vitali, we get back to what I was talking about earlier — the intrusion of the demonic into the world. Raphael, visiting Kubrick’s apartment, found himself thinking of Bluebeard’s Castle, inhabited by a monster who devours screenwriters (the comparison to the maze-like layout of the Overlook Hotel comes to mind as well). If we think about it literally, the distinction between ‘art’ and life somewhat collapses. The ‘real owner’ of the Overlook, in Blakemore’s phrase, is of course Kubrick — Kubrick is the one who went to all the trouble to construct the horror set. The harrowing hazing process depicted at the beginning of Full Metal Jacket was very much experienced by the actors going through it — and at the hands, no less, of a real Marine Corps drill sergeant playing himself. At some point when you are playing make-believe, and you take it seriously enough, you sort of stop playing make-believe and you become the dark entity yourself. But what’s even darker than that is the sense that this actually is the heart of film. If we think about what a camera is, it’s a cold, unfeeling eye staring at us, totally uninterested in whether we live or die, kind of amused by our suffering actually, and to which we are willing to sacrifice just about anything we have in order to be seen. It is very close to what Blakemore says about The Shining — a demonic entity that has a sexual attraction to us and that we are irresistibly drawn to. Hitchcock was getting at something very similar in his movies, Rear Window in particular — the way that this cruel voyeurism is something like the essence of moviemaking — and this seems to be the best interpretation for what Kubrick is doing, the cold monolith watching us in 2001, which we find ourselves chasing to the outer perimeter of the solar system and which, through the super-computer, is also somehow bent on our destruction; the way that Jack Torrance, with virtually no resistance at all, agrees to exactly what the entities want him to do; the breakdown of personality in Full Metal Jacket until you get to some core kill-or-be-killed self at the bottom of it; the way that both Bill and Alice, in Eyes Wide Shut, are drawn inexorably to their sexual drives, Alice in her infatuation with the sailor, Bill in his determination to attend the orgy, while the figures at the orgy become predatory and voyeuristic, starting to follow Bill around very much like the entities in The Shining. Kubrick is the camera and the camera is committed to subsuming us, to at the same time annihilating and preserving us, but doing so in a way that we find sexually enchanting even as it has no real interest in us at all.

That whole process played out in Vitali’s life — the way in which he allowed himself to be subsumed by Kubrick and then ultimately discarded — but what is striking as well is that Vitali has no regrets whatsoever. He achieves a measure of personal redemption when Kubrick has a sudden epiphany and asks him to play Red Cloak — the leader of the orgy — in Eyes Wide Shut. There’s something about his portrayal that really gets to me. As with the bar scene in The Shining, I’ve found myself watching that clip several times, trying to understand the layer that Kubrick manages to hit. Some of it has to do with Vitali’s muddy accent. Some of it is this sense of the demonic, of a figure in perfect command of their strange reality — there’s an echo to the assured way that Delbert Grady announces to Jack in The Shining’s bathroom scene, “I should know. I’ve always been here.” But there’s definitely the feeling of breaking through, of getting to a layer underneath our own reality — and it can somehow only be done through the brutal butoh-like decades-like process through which Kubrick absorbed Vitali into his own art form. Think about it like that and Raphael seems like a trivial morning glory kind of writer, excited about a few passing fancies, while Kubrick, through his dogged, unrelenting persistence is doing something different — breaking through to this other layer of the psyche and bringing the demonic to life. For his part, Vitali was completely confident about the path he had chosen. “If you said to [Kubrick], ‘I commit myself,’ you’d better mean it, otherwise why would you bother if you’re not going to give everything you’ve got,” he said. And that commitment doesn’t just mean artistic excellence, or even perfectionism. It means — I think — taking it all in. Even if the process is the materialization of the demonic — even if it’s deeply questionable whether it’s a good thing to be doing or not, let alone sacrificing your entire life to — it can only be done all the way. And it’s in that totality, and only there, that art really lives, and where it is possible to extract real meaning out of your life.

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Something interesting happened while I was watching TV last week. I laughed out loud. It was a genuine laugh that went on for several seconds. It was loud and long enough that my wife actually came into the room to ask me what I was watching.

I’ve almost totally stopped watching television, and somehow it didn’t occur to me to actually watch the show, but I’d put on clips I found on the internet — and had exactly the experience James was describing.

What was it exactly? It was like sitcoms had gotten used to showcasing a particular sanitized kind of reality, everything so wonderfully diverse, everybody such good friends with each other, and Tires just felt so gritty and crappy and real, this lousy store where nobody wanted to be and everybody just kind of getting through it. As James writes:

The humor in Tires is grounded in the real world, and mirrors the sensibilities of average, everyday Americans. It’s the type of comedy that happens in service industry environments, where people from genuinely diverse backgrounds are trapped in the same shitty situation together and forced to make the best of it.

The pièce de résistance in Tires is a session of sexual harassment training. The stakes are very high — the training has to be passed to qualify for insurance that will allow management to keep their jobs. But the rank-and-file employees of the tire store are pretty much exactly who you might expect them to be. Gillis, playing a very lightly factionalized version of his own comedy persona (he’s the cousin of the manager with some salesmanship duties but mostly just making the manager’s life miserable), decides to pop in with his own interpretation of a sexual harassment presentation, which pretty closely aligns with that of the rank-and-file. But the real joke is that the sexual harassment trainer is kind of a good sport about it — she’s just doing her job as well, she’s also a little amused at how completely the presentation goes off the rails. The kind of broad diversity vision that is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in every sitcom (Parks and Recreation is a good example of the model) just completely disappears — that’s all just somebody with big ideas; and reality is people doing what they have to do at work and bitching about their boss.

But what comes through as well is the political division underlying everything in the world of the comedy. Tires is set in Pennsylvania, which is very important to the story, and the centerpiece of Gillis’ comedy, as it were, is his move from redneck Pennsylvania to Brooklyn. He becomes sort of the Bellwether Comedian, picking up on trends from the red side and the blue side and explaining them to each other.

Here is Gillis, for instance, on not voting for Trump:

Relax. Relax. I did not vote for him. No, I actually did not vote for him. That was tough. Look at me. His whole campaign was at me. I was watching TV, it was like ‘are you a fucking fat idiot?’ I was like, ‘Yeah dude. Yeah. What are we doing? What the fuck are we doing dude? We’re building walls? Hell yeah.’ I took Skoal out of my mouth to come up here and I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. That makes me like the Nelson Mandela of central Pennsylvania.

And, as the national bellwether, it’s interesting to get a sense from Gillis for where the country is at some tectonic level. The urge is overwhelmingly towards Trump — he’s the id, all of the cultural signifiers code his way, and then what’s appealing at the end of it is that he’s just, as Gillis likes to say, “talking shit.” Here’s Gillis on the first 2016 presidential debate:

The first one was the best one. It’s the Republican primary. Everyone’s up on stage and they’re all still doing their political shit. So the first couple guys that talk are like ‘I’m from Kentucky and I love education.’ And the crowd’s like ‘nice.’ We didn’t know what was coming. And the next guy’s like ‘I’m from Georgia and I love religion.’ The crowd’s like ‘pretty good. This is a good one. This is a heated debate.’ And then it finally got to Trump’s turn to talk and he was just like ‘Rand Paul is ugly.’ And the whole crowd was like ‘ohhh, we didn’t know you could do that in this, you can just do that as your thing.’ And Rand Paul was like, ‘alright everybody settle down we’re trying to have a debate here,’ and the whole crowd was like ‘shut the fuck up Rand Paul, ugly bitch.’

The notion is that just about everything is forgivable if it’s in the right spirit, if it’s guys showing each other up, if it’s all an elaborate joke. That’s tempered, on the other hand, by remembering that it’s all pretty crazy, that a lot of it gets very conspiratorial very quickly, and the voice of the superego (which is as annoying as the voice of the superego always is) pulls one back towards the center.

What’s also surprising in Gillis’ tour of the psyche of the swing voter is how front and center race is. This, I have to admit, is something I really missed about Trumpism. During the entirety of Trump I, I had the feeling that he just wasn’t thinking about black people all that much — that there was all the racism towards Hispanics but that the post-civil rights era consensus was settled even among MAGA. I was really wrong about that, with Trump II rolling back landmark civil rights legislation, and Gillis’ comedy is, in a mild way, a glimpse of how MAGA thinks about race, that race is an obsession and the basic understanding (immune from decades of liberal bromides about how racial differences are largely social constructs) is that black world and white world are intrinsically different. Here is one of Gillis’ bits, about Jackie Robinson:

White people used to be cool in America. Long time ago in America dude. The height of white people being cool was us going like ‘meh.’ That was as cool as we got, we were like ‘meh, see, hehe, meh.’ And then the day white people stopped being cool was was Jackie Robinson’s first game. You can look it up dude, you can find it, you can find the radio call from that game online. You can hear the exact moment white people stopped being cool. You can hear the announcers, they’ve still got the ‘meh, welcome to Chicago where the White Sox take on the Brooklyn Dodgers.’ And we all had cool white nicknames, like ‘up at the mound is Old Curly. He’s a 47-year-old alcoholic, he’s the greatest athlete alive. He runs a six-second 40-yard dash. Fastest man alive, they say.’ Then it happened dude. Then Jackie came up to the plate. And you hear the announcers, like ‘meh. Coming up to the plate is the young college boy from Brooklyn. No way he can hit Curly’s pitch. Here comes the pitch…Fuck home run. Alright.’ That was it dude. Jackie hit the ball so hard he knocked that voice out of all the whites. Not one of us has talked like that since. One swing of the bat, it was like ‘meh, uh, that was pretty good, that was good, it’s time for us to focus on computers.’

It’s kind of complicated to work through the framing here. It’s part of an elaborate set piece on how whites in America are humble in contrast to whites in Australia — the bracket as part of a separate story is a Gillis signature — and the joke is essentially on white people, on white people’s arrogance, but Gillis is also part of the tribe of white people playing in a zero-sum game for power and influence. As much as a comedian like Louis C.K. would, a decade ago, have edged into race, I don’t remember him ever departing from the basic premise of working towards the beautiful rainbow society of the future. With Gillis, there’s a different paradigm in effect. And it’s a bit astonishing to realize how dramatically the Overton window has changed in the society that, in 2019, Gillis was duly canceled from SNL days after being selected to join the cast — the offending incident was some anti-Asian racist material from his podcast, but, as he pointed out, there was really a lot more where that came from — whereas in 2024, Gillis, with barely a whimper of protest, was invited to host and celebrated his return with a monologue about the Confederacy and about wondering if his girlfriend had had sex with black men.

If what was completely verboten is acceptable now, it’s worth asking what’s changed, and how Gillis gets away with doing what he’s doing. And part of it is a certain hesitation, a winning self-doubt, that’s built into his act. He’s constantly asking podcast hosts whether he’s being incoherent, constantly checking in with the audience about whether they’re laughing at a joke of his or not and if not why not. And what’s very much built into the act is a constant bidding war with the audience about how far they’re willing to go or to let him go. “I can see you trying not to laugh at that,” he tells the audience in a bit about the Special Olympics. “From up here that’s a very very funny joke,” he says as part of a complicated gag built around a misogynist joke. The joke itself isn’t funny, but the meta layers of it turn out to be very complex — he puts himself in the place of the women in the audience who are dragged to the show by their boyfriends, who discover the show to be just as louche as they expected, who are getting steadily more indignant, and it’s their indignation, Gillis insists, that is what is funniest of all.

But what he may be getting at, actually, isn’t just the kind of Jiminy Cricket effect of whispering to himself constantly about whether something is ok to talk about or not ok. Gillis seems to have decided a long time ago that it’s all fair game — and a great deal of his comedy is about pushing himself into whatever it is that you’re not supposed to say, whether that’s cheering for ISIS or trying to mine the comedy in school shootings. And the premise is that you only get to a place of real healing if you go all the way. It’s not just a variation of a Louis C.K. bit from the 2010s “of course but maybe” in which Louis C.K. stated the liberally orthodox version of some home truth (the need for adapting to peanut allergies, for instance) before briefly talking a walk on the wild side of imagining what it would like to just let oneself not care about any of that. For Gillis, there’s no liberal home base to return to. He really is mentally suspended between different worlds — to put a name on it, the homophobic, misogynist, deadbeat world of central Pennsylvania; and then the eat-right and be-good world of liberal Brooklyn — and it’s constantly on a pin’s head which way he’s going to fall. But there’s a glimpse of what he’s getting at in a bit about his sister’s heroin addiction. It’s an astonishing bit — his sister seems really to have been an addict (if the bit is to be taken at face-value), and the story is about the family staging an intervention which involves Gillis bringing her to Six Flags while she’s still high and her nodding off in the middle of a water slide. The audience is clearly not really on board with this, and Gillis has to reassure them. “It’s alright. It’s my family. Actually, based on this crowd, it’s probably a lot of your guys’ families. And that’s alright, we’re allowed to talk about it.” To be honest, I find it kind of over the line. As much as he says nice things about her, and she’s kind of the hero of the story, I’d be pissed off if I were Gillis’ sister. But this is the bet that he makes — and is kind of a symptomatic bet for 2025, when the social fabric has already frayed and the toothpaste isn’t going back into the tube. The idea is that comedy isn’t just about walking the walk on the wild side and then retreating to liberal pieties or good taste. Comedy is meant to be all in, everything on the table, whether it’s your pent-up racism or sexism or the family’s dirty laundry. Believe that — whether it’s a good thing to believe or not — and you believe that you can get somewhere on the far side, towards the place where everything is aired out, where you accept that everything is really and truly fucked enough that it’s sort of like everybody’s equally to blame and there’s no point even arguing about it much further and everybody can just sort of forgive each other and learn to be friends again.

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What I think I was trying to express with my Titanic abstinence was the following:

At the time it came out, Titanic was the heart of the culture, it was maybe the thing alongside Slammin’ Sammy Sosa, that everybody could agree on — it was heartwarming and romantic and good family fun — and, for all of those reasons, I deeply hated it. I was forming some kind of identity that had to do with rejecting conformity and mindless unanimity, and so whatever Titanic was I would be the opposite of that. What I objected to also — the exact dialogue here is lost to the mists of time, but this seems to have been the anchor of a rather-fractious-if-quite-fun conversation during a playdate (in retrospect, a clear precursor to the debates at ) and enough so that the adult driver actually pulled the car over at some point to weigh in — was that the movie seemed clearly to be rooted in clunky writing and a lack-of-realism: I knew enough about key scenes in the movie, and about Jack’s too-good-to-be-true character, to be able to argue, sight unseen, that the movie was based in a sentimental, as opposed to a sharp-and-perceptive, view of the world, and was ipso facto meritless.

Watching the movie at long last, I was pleased to see that most of my criticisms hold up. The dialogue really is very wooden — the chit-chat in the early part of the film is always some topical reference to what we might imagine people in 1912 would talk about (Freud or Picasso) or else some overdetermined bit of exposition. The ‘period piece’ atmospheric setting is always about class conflict and hitting you on the head with the snobbishness of the upper crust. And then Jack is a kind of puzzling amalgam, like a cross between Jack London and some kind of avant garde painter, and he’s honestly so much cooler and more attractive than Rose — whose only real great point is that she can guzzle down a whole beer — that I can’t help but take the perspective of the wiser heads in the film and assume that he’s scamming her. Yes, we know that he acquits himself well during the sinking and that he’s framed for the theft of the diamond, but in a more sophisticated work of fiction what we would say is that we are seeing the, well, rose-tinted view of an older woman and the actual reality is of a lightning romance that, for many reasons, would have ended badly soon after they had reached port. And then I have this incurable habit of always siding with the villains in everything, and I found myself spending most of the movie rooting for Rose’s mother and for Cal Hockley, Rose’s fiancé. Rose’s mother made the excellent point, I thought, that Hockley really was a good match; and the main demerits of Hockney seem to be that he’s dark-haired, which is usually unforgivable in Hollywood, and has a slightly toffish haircut. My view was that he really did love Rose — as proved when he opted to shoot at Jack as opposed to making a rush for the lifeboats — and that he had a point when he knocked over the breakfast table to shout at Rose, who had after all slipped into third class to party with another man the night before, and that he had a really commendable mutual trust developed with his valet (who, let’s not forget, is loyal to him to the very end).

But in the big picture, I was wrong, of course. Titanic is fabulous, and the reason it’s fabulous has nothing to do with my critiques above. It’s fabulous because of the specific attributes that a film, and really only a big-budget Hollywood film, can bring to bear on a story that nothing else can. Filmmaking of the Cameronian school is more a kind of opera, synthesizing everything that’s awe-inspiring in the culture at a given moment. That means, in this case, gear-headedness in the painstaking reconstruction of the Titanic’s interior, and then computer technology that was cutting-edge at the time, and then pop music, and then Leo’s beauty, which is, really, the film’s central plot point. All of that is such an incandescent combination that the only people who could probably quarrel with it are churlish 13-year-old boys just figuring out their identity.

But Titanic is also an unsettling film in a way that I completely wasn’t prepared for. Actually, I was kind of a Titanic kid — a board game, a computer game, a couple of picture books — but, as Brock Lovett, the underwater archeologist puts it at the movie’s end, I didn’t “let it in.” The kind of surface-level Titanic story is that it’s about hubris — the ship being too big and grand and sunk somehow through a combination of the internal contradictions of the class system and through a tendency of the White Star Line to believe their own press clippings. I have always found this unconvincing. The Titanic seems to have sunk through bad luck rather than malpractice — plenty of other ocean liners behaved in exactly the same way as Titanic for many decades, and it was really just Titanic’s mischance that it hit an iceberg — and we really shouldn’t think more of the class components of Titanic’s sinking than we would if a 747 went down somewhere and the crew first helped off the first-class passengers and that as a result more of them survived. It would just be kind of a fact of commercial travel as opposed to an indictment of the society as a whole.

But the deep story of the Titanic — and what the movie illustrates brilliantly — is that as the Titanic sinks, the entire society is inverted and exposed as a hellscape. It’s the aesthetic that runs through the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel, and James Ensor. What ‘disaster literature’ is about is having horror and fear laid over familiar landscapes so that we understand that fear was always a core component of everything familiar, that death, actually, is constantly interwoven with life. What is powerful about the sinking of the Titanic — I had always missed this — is how slowly it took place, so that the society as a whole had time to say goodbye to itself, and to view itself with this horrifying x-ray vision. The bottom compartments flood first — the guys in the boiler rooms, caught behind the automatic doors, the kinds of people nobody thinks about, are the first to die, but they are of course, almost literally the canary in the coal mine, and their fate is soon to be shared by everyone else. Then the lower decks flood, and these cabins that were so reasssuring and cozy to people for the long days of an ocean voyage, are suddenly these labyrinthine death traps. Then a real nerve is struck, which is whether the society more greatly values order or compassion. The premise of the movie — and this is very much a Hollywood-in-the-‘90s point of view — is that there is something monstrous in a society that values order as much as the society of the Titanic does. What Rose allegedly learns by the end of the film is that the society is so claustrophobic — driving her to suicide if not for the miracle of Jack and the shock of the sinking — that it is better to make a clean break of it, to say goodbye to her mother forever, to change her name, and to have a brilliant kind of flapperish, SoCal life, riding horses in Santa Monica and flying planes, and moving entirely out of the sort of gender and class stratification that led to the brutal scenes of the ship’s sinking. But I don’t know. If a ship with a manifest of 2,200 goes down, with — for whatever reason — lifeboats for only half onboard, the evacuation is going to be ugly no matter the underlying class conditions of the society. I kind of am sympathetic to how the crew handled themselves. They rigorously maintained a women-and-children-first principle, and it really was important to prevent a panic, which was done brutally but somewhat understandably by locking off the third class cabins for some period of the evacuation and even at one point shooting passengers who tried to swamp the lifeboats. (Almost everything about behavior on the Titanic during the sinking is in dispute, given that the vast majority of people didn’t survive, but, based on my careful reading of the Titanic’s Wikipedia page, it seems that these scenes did happen more or less as the movie depicts them.)

As we get to the latter half of the ship’s sinking, the Breughel/Bosch effect shifts into high gear. We very literally get the inversion of the society — the ship turning over itself, suspending itself as a tower in the air, and the propeller hovering over everything. The propeller is, in a very important sense, the main character in the film. Early on, after Rose, contemplating suicide, is saved by Jack, she explains herself by saying that she leaned over the stern to look at the propeller — which is of course a complete absurdity, a propeller is the very last thing on her mind, and she can’t even remember the name of it. But, by the end, it’s the propeller ascendant. Every disaster story has a particular image at the center of it. For 9/11, it’s the jumpers; for Titanic, it’s this. In the central image, there’s something incoherent and ungraspable, something that almost nobody sees but that speaks to the full enormity of a society destroyed. What it tends to be about is machinery misplaced, and it’s a very expressionist or Magritte-ish mishmash of images. There shouldn’t be people on the outside of skyscrapers looking to jump. There shouldn’t be people hanging onto the stern of a ship as it’s vertical to the night sky. “God almighty,” says Molly Brown, watching from the lifeboat — which is of course the exact right thing to say. And the propeller becomes whatever metaphor you want it to be — whether it’s the Morlocks switching places with the Eloi, or something or other about the hubris of industrialization, the propeller (which is the real heart of any steamship) taking diabolical command.

Somehow, I didn’t know about the graveyard of the drowning in the middle of the Atlantic. I’d just assumed that everybody quickly got hypothermia and/or drowned. But the reality — as it’s depicted in the film — is much more macabre. The life vests did work, and that meant that hundreds of corpses floated for weeks if not months, with rescue boats coming to embalm them as best they could. It is very hard to envision a scene like this and not to think about Dante’s damned in the ninth circle of hell, or Ensor’s society of the mad, or Malaparte’s horse-heads sticking out of a frozen lake on the Eastern Front. A horror like this is so overwhelming that the human mind can’t help but attach a moral dimension to it — can’t help but conclude that somehow that level of suffering was atonement for the class stratification, and hubris, of the Titanic — and it becomes deeply impossible to think of it just as sheer bad luck.

Given that, it’s certainly understandable that the movie adopted the tack it did — viewing the sinking of the Titanic as a requiem for a whole way of life, with its propriety, its strict class-and-gender divides, the kinds of gentlemanly codes that made a British officer salute smartly before shooting himself or the New York social set dress elegantly and sit in their staterooms waiting to drown rather than accept the indignity of a life preserver or (in the most indelible moment from the ship’s sinking) the members of the orchestra shaking hands with each other and insisting that it had been a privilege to play with one another that night — and with the premise that the world would then pass on from there to something that was faster, looser, more democratic, less Victorian and more Hollywood. From the perspective of the United States in 1997, when Titanic came out, that seemed like a clear win — “Jack saved me in every way that a person can be saved,” Rose recounts at the end of the movie — but there is something sobering about watching the movie twenty years later. It doesn’t feel so much like an elegy for a lost way of life; it feels more like nothing really has changed. It’s become completely accepted in conversation to talk about the “new Gilded Age”; the kind of intense financial stratification of the Titanic is completely familiar to us, with the only difference being that our wealthy have worse clothes and diction. It would be very easy to imagine Succession as being just like Titanic if, in the middle of a season, the characters all suddenly hit an iceberg. The narrative of democratic triumphalism — which, really, was built into every single Hollywood movie of the ‘90s — rings hollow when it becomes apparent that we really are no closer to eradicating class distinctions.

So how did I do with avoiding falling into the mawkish sentimentality that does, notwithstanding much of the above, pervade the film? Pretty well. I could still roll my eyes at much of the dialogue and the touches of ‘authenticity.’ I could see through Jack. I was ready for that Céline Dion song — the wallpaper of the late ‘90s — and listened to it with my lip scornfully curled. I was unmoved by the more ridiculous aspects of the love triangle, when they start running around and shooting each other on a sinking ship. If I was really shocked by the grotesquerie of the suffering as the ship went down, I sat stone-faced as Jack slowly expired from hypothermia and sank to the bottom of the ocean. My 13-year-old self would have been pleased with my stoicism — if chagrined at all the good points that I found in the movie — but, just when I thought it was over, there’s a final scene where Rose, expiring at the end of her long life, visits the first-class quarters and there is John Jacob Astor and Thomas Andrews and Captain Smith and all of the well-dressed dignitaries of her whole vanished world and all of them applauding her and there at the top of the Grand Staircase, waiting for her with his hand out, is Jack, and I did cry — it seemed very hard not to cry at the idea that your whole lost world might somewhere still be intact — but so discreetly that no one would have noticed.

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I stand by this analysis, but more bad news was to be had for civilization’s survival from the victory of Anora at the Oscars. If the problem with the Super Bowl ads was the complete absence of storytelling — in a storytelling medium! — the problem with Anora is the absence of any inner life for the characters, of any purpose to their journey, of any dimension in the story other than the pursuit of status.

Let’s just understand, before we go further, that Anora is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad movie. I started watching it as I usually do — with Apple Notes in hand, ready to take down anything interesting that I might want to reference back to in a review. I gave up on that about halfway through the film, put the Apple Notes away, waited politely for the film to the end and hoped (forlornly) that it wouldn’t drag on too long and I would be able to get some of my evening back. I wasn’t going to write a review about it, or think about it again — it just felt like the kind of smart-ass, tougher-than-thou film that the denim-wearing roll-their-own-tobacco kids in film school make when they think they’re much more talented than they are. The film had a bit of stripping, some arthouse-style sex scenes, got ahold of the cool house (and plane!) of somebody’s parent, but then, in the interminable chase scenes looking for Ivan, was two hours of the sort of exasperation you get when you misplace your keys somewhere and all in order, in the lat few minutes, to build up to something very much like an episode of Jersey Shore. The fact that it was nominated for an Oscar seemed like a novelty — symptomatic of a weak year in which the competition included Wicked and Dune 2; and seemed to have something to do with wherever Sean Baker was situated in his career.

But then it won the Oscar, and I sort of had to reconsider everything and think my Gibbonesque thoughts on the decline and fall. How was that we as a culture, out of all the movies made this year, by all the insufferable rollie-smoking film students as well as by everybody else, settled on this overheated-reality-show-in-Russian-accents as the thing we wanted to celebrate? And the clear answer, it seems, is that we are so far enmeshed in the New Gilded Age that that has just become reality for us, we have come to assume that everything in society is transactional (stripping seems like the perfect metaphor for everything else), and if the son of the oligarch shows up and wants to invite us to the party and overpay us for the week, then, no matter if the son is a puny 21-year-old, with no skills or redeeming features, no matter that he has done nothing whatsoever to earn his wealth and everyone around him despises him, we will regard him as a catch, and we will spend the next two hours running around diners in Queens trying to get him to honor his agreement, or at the very least to get a cut of the family wealth if he bails.

The argument for the film is that this is ‘reality’ and a ‘slice-of-life,’ and, yes, I suppose it is fairly accurate to the mercantile sensibility of sex work, that Ivan is the ticket out and it’s really not worth asking any other questions, and I suppose the film is structured so as to be a completely ground’s eye view of this way of life, so that we are following a not-particularly-consequential episode within Anora’s stripper career that is nonetheless illustrative of wider socioeconomic dynamics, but it is still incumbent on the filmmaker to choose what he wants to say, and Baker seems interested in saying nothing at all — just that this is the way it is, and it’s kind of sexy and kind of fun; and then the Academy and every institution you can think of got in line to agree that this particular cultural object is in some way of value. The filmmaker Emir Kusturica, no prude and no shrinking violet, voiced his objection to the film in terms that I very much agree with. “There is nothing there! No hero, no statement, no human story,” he said.

The other argument for the film is that it’s really well-acted, and, yes, it’s a nice showcase for three up-and-coming actors. Mikey Madison is leaning pretty heavily on her outer borough accent, but Yura Borisov does a near-perfect imitation of his own role in Compartment No. 6 and seems to have crossed cultural lines to become America’s gopnik next door. Mark Eydelshteyn is very talented and captures the vulnerability of a poor little rich boy with his soul and conscience crushed long before he was ever bought his first pair of Ray-Bans. But I don’t think too much should be of the acting ensemble. I mean, look, Russian acting is in general at a much higher level than ours — the length that Borisov is willing to go to develop his characters speaks all by itself to that — and it’s nice to see actors like Borisov and Eydelshteyn get their spotlight. But this is not how the richness that’s in Russian filmmaking and acting should be reaching American audiences. The characters in Anora are an array of Russian stereotypes — the oligarch, the tiger mother, the golden youth, the tough, even the corrupt priest — and there’s really not much movement beyond that. And then, really, it’s just a travesty of intercultural connection. It’s as if, after all those toasts to international friendship that so many boozy, intrepid businessmen spent the ‘90s conducting, all the hope of some post-Cold War liberal world order, this turns out to be the bridge, that the Russian oligarchic class is really not so different from an American reality show — “you’re fucking trash,” says Anora in her star turn at the end of the film, her moment to really tell it like it is.

Anora also, as many commentators have noted, comes across like a housewarming gift for Putin as Trump’s America seems to be solidified under the Putinist cultural imperium. That’s not necessarily the fault of the film — certainly, it’s not as if Russian characters or Russian subject matter should be out of bounds — but the film is a Putinist document. It participates in the fundamental tenets of Putinism — of ironclad, all-encompassing materialism and consumerism; of a near-worship for those who are at the top of the pyramid and a reification of all hierarchies however unjustly they may have come about. Anora’s protest at the end — “your son’s a fucking pussy,” she says of Ivan — is entirely futile and is taken as such. Ivan has already put on his dark glasses, the oligarch laughs over what she says, and Anora herself heads straight back to the mansion to enjoy her last comp’d night there. The hierarchy is entirely in place, and all that’s expected of audiences really is to be impressed with the design of the mansion and to salivate over the plane and to maybe be a bit titillated by the striptease.

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dir. Ridley Scott, written by David Scarpa, with Paul Mescal as Lucius and Denzel Washington as Macrinus

Every generation gets the Rome they think they deserve. The Spartacus generation got a Rome of great hair and loose-fitting clothing on the cusp of a left-wing revolution. The Caligula generation got a lot of ass. The generation of the first Gladiator got a triumphant, globe-striding empire concerned that it might be watching too much television. And, with Gladiator II, the idea we get of ourselves is uh, um, yeah, not good.

I suppose the real tip-off of where you think you are as a society is what starting point you choose for your Roman history, and it can’t be good news for us that the Gladiator II filmmakers have decided to begin in 196, in the reign of the two emperors Geta and Caracalla. If you don’t know your later Roman history, these are the teenagers from hell — constantly quarreling with each other, splitting their palaces in half, refusing to speak to one another on family vacations to subdue the Britons, and then with their spat ending, as all such spats must, with one stabbing the other to death in his mother’s arms and then erasing all memory of him across the empire and into posterity.

This Rome still has a powerful army, still has a functioning state, but it has entirely given up on itself. It’s hopelessly corrupt, politically dysfunctional. Everybody seems to have syphilis or — surprisingly, given that they all live in Italy — serious vitamin D deficiencies. And, for a film made this late in the 21st century, the men are all strikingly effeminate. It’s a real departure from the usual visions of Rome that nobody, even the corrupt emperors, seem to be having sex — and the implication is that we understand ourselves to have passed from the fun kind of decadence into pure inceldom.

What’s most interesting about Gladiator II is how long it took to be made. The producers had an absolute winner on their hands and wanted a sequel a lot sooner and then, astonishingly, they seemed to have a case of writers’ block for 25 years. For a while, they were trying out the worst-of-all-possible-ideas, a script by Nick Cave called Christ Killer in which Maximus — yes — is recalled from the dead and sent back in time to murder Jesus and then ends up fighting in the Crusades, World War II, Vietnam, and working for the Pentagon. But the Cave script was really only one chapter in a whole book of bad ideas, most involving various resurrections of Russell Crowe. What seems to have finally made the penny drop into the slot was, interestingly, the idea of the two Caesars — America had to change enough for a unitary blood-curdling emperor, however corrupt, to recede from our imagination, and for us to conceptually find ourselves not in the later Roman Republic, which was where Rome treatments were for so many years, not in the early part of the Empire with its pregnant analogies about power, but in this really obscure era, where — as a bit of heavy-handed writing would have it — the ‘Roman Dream’ is dead and the ensuing outcomes are just different varieties of chaos.

And the two real possibilities are, on the one hand, the disenfranchised white working class; and, on the other, the Woke Revolution. Roman Virtue is gone; Stoicism is around enough that (in another sign of our times) Marcus Aurelius actually gets quoted from as opposed to just standing around in a beard; the professional managerial class which was very impressive in the opening of Gladiator I is now reduced to a stubby gladiator trainer who gets a stick run through his throat just for the audacity of suggesting a decent pension plan to Paul Mescal. The society very quickly hollows itself out into two poles — the pole of Mescal and the pole of Denzel Washington.

The pole of Mescal is the one we’re supposed to be more interested in, and somewhat straddles both worlds. Mescal is Lucius, the son of Russell Crowe and Connie Nielsen. At the end of the first Gladiator he is — in a bad plan — sent off to Africa where his mother neglects to write to him or to try to incorporate his talents into Roman politics where he is much needed. She also forgets to tell her new husband Pedro Pescal to go easy when he attacks the city where her son is living.

But it all works out. Mescal has been living in almost exactly as pastoral an African paradise as in the opening of Roots. In the best traditions of modern Hollywood, he is mentored by a wise African who treats him very much like a son and he has a girlfriend who both does the laundry and is handy with a bow-and-arrow. The experience is enough to, in a word, teach him streetball. And not only that but he undergoes a Middle Passage and comes out of the passage steeped in post-colonial theory, laughing and smiling with his comrades, getting a bit into the gladiator spirit, even quoting the odd line of Latin poetry, but, almost as if he had read Homi Bhabha’s essay on ‘sly civility,’ keeping his wary distance from the colonial system and, like a good Hegelian, reserving all his hatred for the Pedro Pascal character, whom, through dialectical logic, he is bound to swiftly overcome.

His origin story as a Roman seems to have slipped his mind right up to the moment when it’s time for a plot reveal, at which point he forgets all about Numidia, his adoptive father, his ex (unusually for an action adventure hero he doesn’t sleep with anyone else — although this seems less to have to do with Roman virtue than with the fact that the actress slated to be his love interest disqualified herself by posting too strenuously about Gaza on social media), forgets even about his overwhelming hatred for the Roman general, whom he now views as a basically well-meaning stepfather, gets enthused abut the idea of himself as the true heir to the Roman throne and takes on a new identity — as the white working-class in exile, making airy statements about the past glory of Rome to his chiseled gladiator buddies just before they march from the National Mall to storm the Capitol Building.

We’re now at the real conflict of the film (even if it takes us a while to get there), since meanwhile Denzel Washington as the gladiator dealer Macrinus has swiftly carried out a coup by virtue of all the information he accrues through his season-ticket seating at the Colosseum.

It’s possible that the idea the filmmakers had is for us to be with Mescal all the way while Washington is just a charismatic villain, but I don’t think that’s right. For one thing, it’s very hard to root against Denzel — and when he’s wearing an earring — and, for another, we are invited into plying race politics. This isn’t a color-blind, endlessly-diverse Roman Empire, as we seem to be presented with early in the film. Washington admits that he was born into slavery. “You will never know [my real] name. I have a destiny. You will be my instrument,” he tells Mescal. The fact that he is in denial of his slave origins makes him somewhat akin to the Samuel L. Jackson character in Django Unchained and, by Hollywood logic, ripe for destruction — and it is also not cool that he totally unnecessarily shoots an arrow into the heart of Mescal’s mother — but Macrinus is also smart and skillful and good at politics and, if he is ruthless, we are given to understand that he would actually make a better imperial administrator than Lucius, who really is only capable of repeating the same platitudinous speech, word for word, to spear-clanking, aye-affirming soldiers.

But a black man really can’t catch a break in this country. No sooner does Macrinus ascend to power — “with good fortune and not a little bit of skill,” as he accurately puts it — than the whole friggin’ state collapses around him and Macrinus is reduced to single combat with Lucius with the whole army dully watching.

Lucius wins but that seems more to have to do with the paleo diet that Mescal underwent to transition from Normal People to this role than it does with any inherent right to rule that Lucius has. What is happening here is very interesting and profound, actually. Hollywood is being introduced to the idea of the tragic. This isn’t the triumphalist narrative of every other American big-budget movie that I can think of where the hero’s victory is associated with the success of the state. There is a void at the center of the state, and the two claimants to power each have perfectly viable reasons for wanting it — with force and chance (and good nutrition) as the only determinants of success. As is so often the case with monosyllabic heroes, the best lines in the film go to someone else — in this case to Denzel. And Denzel affirms a perfectly cynical but also buoyant vision of the US / Rome. “The Colosseum is the greatest temple they ever built because this is what they believe in. There is no other Rome,” Denzel says. And a little later: “The only truth in my Rome is the law of the strongest. I was owned by an emperor and now I control an empire. Where else but in Rome could a man do that?”

The idea of where we are placing ourselves in the trajectory of Roman history is that we can forget our Cicero and we longer have to worry about the slippery slope to imperial rule and civic dysfunction — that is already a given. We think of ourselves as already in the era of soldier-emperors duking it out with plutocrat-emperors. The soporific narratives of the American Dream and ever-unfolding progress are quietly retired, and in their place is a hard-headed realism, a flinty-eyed view of the nature of power that at least — as Mescal informs his gathering of somber soldiers — compels us to be a little tougher, to rely on the system less and our own integrity more.

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The excuse for getting into this is the Amazon series, A Spy Among Friends, about which I don’t really have much to say. It’s a serviceable adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s 2014 non-fiction work of the same title. The underlying idea is, instead of doing another reprise of the Philby story, to frame it through the friendship between Philby and Nicholas Elliott. That’s intelligent enough. Elliott was part of the same old boys network that produced Philby. They had a closely parallel career in MI6 and were very nearly best friends. Elliott became the service’s chief defender of Philby after his quasi-outing in the early 1950s. And then Elliott got himself dispatched to Beirut in 1963 to confront Philby with new, and damning, evidence and to extract a confession out of him.

This was a controversial assignment, and it has spawned copious conspiracy theories since then. Elliott did secure the confession, but he also appeared to leave the door wide open for Philby to run to the Soviet Union, which he promptly did. The conventional version of the story — as promulgated by Philby in his 1968 memoir — is that this was gross incompetence on the part of MI6. After securing a partial confession, Elliott — in the midst of uncovering the greatest betrayal in British intelligence history — suddenly had a pressing engagement in the Congo; and the man he deputized to take over Philby’s interrogation had an equally pressing ski holiday. Macintrye argues, plausibly enough, that it was better all around for MI6 to simply let Philby get away: a trial could only air out dirty laundry and lead to scandal. Elliott, in a 1986 interview with John le Carré (included as an afterward in Macintyre’s book), more or less confirmed that theory, saying, “No one wanted him in London.”

The Spy Among Friends series anchors itself on the Philby-Elliott confrontation in Beirut — shouting, atmospheric music, some montage-y sequences of men smoking on balconies — and then engages in a fanciful reconstruction of the scrutiny that Elliott might have been placed under on his return to London. He is interrogated by Lily Thomas, the no-nonsense, Northern-accented representative of MI5, the rival organization to MI6; he tips off Anthony Blunt, another member of the Cambridge Five, about Philby; he engages in a baroque spy-versus-spy game with James Angleton, the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief, who, back in the early 1950s, was taken in by Philby even more thoroughly than Elliott was.

None of this is exactly satisfying. Guy Pearce, as Philby, is the usual Hollywood shortcut — too handsome and too self-possessed (the real Philby, at the time of his confrontation with Elliott, was a falling-down drunk and nervous wreck). Thomas, it turns out, is a composite character, which, in a way, wrecks the entire premise of the show. We are so into the weeds of Philby and Elliott’s careers that to have the third leg of the triangle be a fictional character pulls into a completely different genre. In any case, Thomas’ character is a typical bit of woke-era unimaginativeness. Her African husband is a selfless doctor who is skeptical of her having anything at all to do with the old boy toffs who inhabit MI6. She uses the opportunity of the investigation to land some cutting criticism of the British class system — “my husband is a doctor, he works very hard and helps people, I have no idea what you all have been playing at for the last twenty years.” And, naturally, her feistiness and intrepidity earn her some begrudging inter-class admiration from Elliott. The only real takeaway from the Spy Among Friends series is the growing conviction that casting Damian Lewis is the secret sauce in any TV show you can think of. I could have sworn that I had just seen Lewis be a taciturn American Army officer before this; and before that he was a working man’s billionaire; and before that he was an American congressman with a dark secret; and now he’s a blue-blooded English spy — and is somehow, always, the most magnetic figure on screen.

What’s most interesting about Philby, of course — and which the series elides over — is coming up with a theory for why he did it. Macintyre, in the book, cautions against getting attached to any idea and settles, sagely, on the unknowability of Philby. That was the conclusion of Philby’s own handler, Yuri Modin, who, in 1994, wrote, “He never revealed his true self. Neither the British, nor the women he lived with, nor ourselves [the KGB] ever pierced the armor that clad him.” And anybody who speculates on what Philby was up to invariably runs into a Rorschach Test of their own prior beliefs. For some, it’s ideology — that Philby was a devoted and lifelong Communist (the position that he himself articulated most consistently in his later years). For others, it’s romance — and that’s what Philby is made to say in the show (he fell in love with Litzi Friedmann, a German Communist, in 1933, and stayed faithful to her spirit for the rest of his life). For others, it’s a gradual disillusionment with the West and the service (that’s the perspective of Philby’s stand-in in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). For Macintyre, insofar as he proffers an hypothesis, it’s something closer to duplicity for its own sake, which aligns interestingly with the sensibility of English elite schools. “Philby’s story is that of a man in pursuit of ever more exclusive clubs,” Macintyre writes. “Westminster School and Cambridge University are elite clubs; MI6 is an even more exclusive fellowship; working secretly for the NKVD within MI6 placed Philby in a club of one, the most elite member of a secret inner ring.”

My own pet theory may not apply in this case, but I’d like to indulge it a little bit. That’s that spying, at some fairly early junction of the Cold War, evolved from “straight penetration” to something more like intelligence exchange. For many reasons, this was better all around. It was easier and safer. The hauls of intelligence were much greater. The governments of the  spies’ home countries couldn’t fail but be impressed by what the agencies were bringing in. The agencies themselves came to develop stupendous power — since they were not only in, essentially, diplomatic liaison with their ostensible adversaries but were, in many cases, able to coordinate with them and to maintain a balance of powers. That approach aligned as well with the internationalist sensibility of the upper-crust — setting the British mandarins (and their American equivalents) apart from the more narrowly patriotic crowd that comprised the FBI or MI5.

If you read enough Cold War books, it’s possible to see this idea in the margins. It’s what spies seem to be referring to when they discuss a “higher loyalty.” It has clear roots in the intelligence-sharing that occurred with rings of double or triple agents towards the end of World War II (e.g. Dusko Popov, Reinhard Gehlen), with the spies themselves so thoroughly compromised in loyalty that their only conceivable value is as a conduit of information. It’s depicted with striking fidelity in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in which the obsessive discussion of “moles” and penetration agents turns in a more interesting direction once it’s discovered that a high-level information exchange between the British and Soviet secret services has long been under way. “That’s how the game is played, you know that,” Toby Esterhase, one of its practitioners, says when cornered.

Elliott seems to allude to that idea in his interview with le Carré, saying that a Soviet spy caught and sentenced to 18 years in prison “wasn’t top league” — with the implication that the “top league” spies were exchanging far more intelligence and could do so with impunity. It’s stated very explicitly by Philip Corso, who must be taken with a grain of salt for different reasons, but who really was a Colonel in US Army Intelligence in this period:

The KGB and CIA weren’t really the adversaries everybody thought them to be. They spied on each other, but for all practical purposes, and also because each agency had thoroughly penetrated the other, they behaved just like the same organization. They were all professional spies in a single extended agency and trafficking in information….The CIA, KGB, British Secret Service, and a whole host of other foreign intelligence agencies were loyal themselves and to the profession first and to their respective governments last.

If that’s the case — and I do think that’s broadly true (or at least so logical that it would be surprising if it wasn’t true) — then a great deal falls into place. The old boy network isn’t just understood as classist snobbery — as the Spy Among Friends series is at such pains to make us believe — as a very necessary circle of trust for keeping the secret game from getting exposed by the roughnecks in the ordinary security services. That seems to be behind all the protestations of the value of “friendship” that people like Philby and Elliott are so anxious to emphasize — much to the bafflement of outsiders who couldn’t understand how Philby would have the audacity to speak of “friendship” long after it was known how thoroughly he had betrayed everyone in his life.

Philby comes to be understood as a critical cornerstone of this whole system — having been in contact with the Soviets back to 1934 and playing a complicated double game as early as the Spanish Civil War. Whenever this intelligence-sharing apparatus set itself up (and there was every reason for it to be established during the war), Philby was ideally placed to be a significant conduit of information if not policy. In that context, some of Philby’s more grotesque betrayals — for which he showed no apparent remorse — are more understandable. He betrayed efforts by the West to infiltrate resistance fighters into the Caucasus to fight the Soviet Union and into Albania to fight Hoxha. Those betrayals led to the executions of the agents, but imagining for a moment that Philby’s “higher loyalty” was to the balance of power, as opposed to just the Soviet Union, then those operations seem reckless and a threat to the international order and in need of discreet squashing. The whole Beirut episode makes sense in that line of thinking as well. The club that was involved in information sharing would have very much wanted to treat Philby with kid gloves — and would likely have preferred that he be handled by the broadly-sympathetic KGB as opposed to the rough crowd of MI5 — and made the accommodations for his departure. The long-running conspiracy theory (partly endorsed by the Spy Among Friends series) that Roger Hollis, then-head of MI5, was also a Soviet agent is more comprehensible if one just forgets about nationalities and views an intelligence agency is operating, at its core, in a sort of liminal international space of sharing and coordinating.

Macntyre’s version of these events is more drab and (it has to be admitted) fairly convincing. That’s the conventional story of friendships betrayed. Philby was off on his own (together with his ring), and people like Elliott and Hollis treated him with decorum because of class loyalties, their sheer inability to come to grips with the extent of his betrayal, and their desire to avoid scandal. And there is plenty of evidence to support Macntyre’s position. There is the very real consternation that Elliott displayed at the time of the Philby interrogation and then long afterwards — the moments when he lost his cool and shouted at him; the way he discussed Philby even long afterwards as a Soviet spy who had genuinely fooled him. “Betrayal takes courage. You have to hand it to Philby, he had courage,” Elliott said in 1986. And then there is the inarguable damage that the Philby escapade did to MI6. “Youth and innocence passed away and the dark ages began,” said Peter Wright of the news of Philby’s defection — the idea being that a genuine shock radiated through the system and that the shock was the very understandable reaction of being thoroughly taken in by someone trusted. Imagining that the ‘club’ was a step ahead the entire time — and largely feigning its shock at Philby’s betrayal — does venture into the realm of the conspiratorial and runs into some compelling evidence of how hard people at the time took it.

Like I said, with Philby everybody gets to a Rorschach of their own prior conceptions. I find myself reading and watching these things because I’m looking for hints of the intelligence-sharing theory. Somebody like Macintyre imposes a more low-key frame of friendships constructed and betrayed as the best way to understand Philby. And somewhere at the center of of all it, appropriately enough, is Philby, ever contradictory, ever inscrutable, either a one-off mole or an indication of a very different way of thinking about power.

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I’m working my way through the Oscar movies. As usual here, these are more discussions than traditional reviews — and, really, are meant to be read after you’ve seen the film.

Best,

Sam

THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023)

dir. and written by Jonathan Glazer, based on a novel by Martin Amis, with Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss

Pretty monotonous and heavy-handed. 

There are two genres that The Zone of Interest is sliding between. One is Holocaust Kitsch — Life Is Beautiful, Jojo Rabbit — in which the point is to make the Holocaust relatable and human and, in so doing, to (theoretically) defang Hitler. Mel Brooks is the godfather of this genre with his line, “If you ridicule [people like Hitler], laugh at them, they can’t win.” The other genre is Inside The Third Reich, in which we travel into the heart of darkness and see the Nazis as they saw themselves. Wannsee, Downfall, Valkyrie, etc, belong to that genre. 

I’m far more interested in Inside The Third Reich than I am in Holocaust Kitsch, but it’s an equally tricky genre to deal with. There’s always the question of when it’s too much, when you’re veering into something like retroactive complicity. And that does happen a bit in The Zone of Interest. There’s so much on the minutiae of Höss’ career, on the Höss’ marriage, that you do start getting invested in their domestic dramas, you do have to shake yourself and remember what Höss’ work actually entailed.

In the case of The Zone of Interest, the pressure of not falling too far into either genre boxes the film in, makes it close to lifeless. In the end, it’s like a negation of all the Holocaust movies that have come before. We’re not to see the camp — that’s too obvious. We keep our focus entirely on the picturesque lives of the Hösses — riding horses, picnicking in high grass. It feels like Holocaust Kitsch — the gambit of relatability in Holocaust kitsch — but then there’s all the drama in the soundtrack, the pistol shots and screams from the camp, as a blatant reminder of what the film is really about. And then, in terms of Inside The Third Reich, it probably is a fairly accurate depiction of the lifestyle and state of mind of the Hösses, and of other functionaries like them, but they’re so bland, ensconced so deep in Nazi kitsch, that they just become symbols — living, breathing banalities of evil — without the ability to in any way, over the course of the film, act. 

I was taken by The Zone of Interest as a sort of documentary of the Nazi killing apparatus. And I suspect that the film really gets a lot right — the outfits, the haircuts, the prim sanctimony of the Höss’ class — but there is also a constant need to remind us of their hypocrisy: to be sure that we know that every dress Frau Höss is trying on is taken off a gassed Jewish woman; that we do not forget the Höss’ venality. In the moral universe of The Zone of Interest, there is a pretty direct correlation between how fat your ass is (and how stupid your haircut) and how unreflectingly evil you are.

Without much room to maneuver, the film drifts into something like parable. It’s very anti-office work and anti-gardening. It creates the idea — which Glazer hit home in his Oscar speech — that it’s not really about the Holocaust at all; that it’s an indictment of conventional, bourgeois life in general. All functionaries, the film seems to be saying, have a bit of the Hösses in them — anybody who’s a bit small-minded, a bit conformist, could easily find themselves tending to their gardens and paying no attention whatsoever to the pistol shots wafting in the wind from Auschwitz. 

It’s a powerful idea, of course, but I think it does kind of miss how fanatical, how sui generis, somebody like Höss likely was. I was a bit startled, after watching The Zone of Interest, to learn that Höss had written an autobiography shortly before his execution, in which he frankly discusses his Auschwitz work. From what I’ve read of the book, the banality of evil idea comes through — days before his death, Höss wrote to his son to say, “the biggest mistake of my life was that I believed everything faithfully which came from the top” — but there is also the overriding sense that Höss, like most of the leading Nazis, thought he was building something: something maybe outside good-and-evil but a different kind of civilization. In a comment in which he expressed regret for not having committed suicide during the fall of Germany, Höss said, “We were bound and fettered to that other world and we should have disappeared with it.” 

It’s that phrase ‘that other world’ that’s haunting — that speaks, I think, to who somebody like Höss really was and which doesn’t come through in the movie. Glazer’s Höss is a nihilistic bureaucrat — fantasizing about gassing even the other Nazis when he attends a meeting of camp commandants. The real Höss was a Freikorps member from 1918 and a Nazi from 1922, who voluntarily served a ten-year prison sentence for a murder carried out by his Freikorps brigade, who described his marriage as carried out “so that we might share the hardships of the life we had willingly chosen,” who, systematically, pushed past own scruples and feelings of pity during his Dachau posting in order to, as he put it, “exercise perpetual self-mastery and unbending severity,” and who describes himself, in the construction of Auschwitz, as “living only for [his] work.” Viewing him as a creature comfort-minded factotum misses much of the point: he was, as he put it, “a cog” in the system but he was also a true believer, an idealist in the peculiar Nazi mold, a self-made monster. 

ANATOMY OF A FALL (2023)

dir. Justine Triet, written by Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, with Sandra Hüller as Sandra

Like the platonic ideal of a Cannes movie: hyper-civilized, multilingual Europeans (even the blood spatter expert is très à la mode) and then, possibly, savage ferocious violence underneath all of it. The lawyers are witty and have cool long hair. The existential crises are, more than anything, about writer’s block. Even a scene of domestic violence is, for the most part, a deeply-analyzed depiction of the inside of a relationship, child care versus career, the tendency to portray oneself as a victim, that kind of thing. 

The question is where it all goes: if a serious romantic relationship eventually turns into one person murdering another (or badly wanting to) or if even the impulse towards violence is reflective of a deeper bond, of being ‘soulmates’; and then if a society like this, so composed, so evolved, is, in fact, all tending towards emasculation, frustration, and a towering rage emerging out of it. 

The central narrative of Anatomy of a Fall is figuring out what went wrong in Samuel’s life — or, as the defense lawyer Vincent puts it in an important peroration, “what was the final year like of Samuel Maleski’s life?” Samuel is charming, handsome, intelligent, a dedicated father. He should, by any possible expectation, find fulfillment. But, basically, it’s death by a thousand cuts — the house renovation takes longer than it should, the writing just isn’t coming, his wife is more successful than he is, his wife is starting to stray. Of the witnesses called for the prosecution, the most scathing is his therapist — who pins it all on Sandra. She emasculated and castrated Samuel, the therapist claims. There was a pattern of making him feel ever smaller. The culminating (or penultimate) conversation in Samuel’s life — his recorded argument with Sandra — is all about whether Samuel is a “victim” or not. To Sandra, it’s absurd — how could anybody living in a house that looks like this possibly have anything to do with victimhood? But, of course, within 24 hours, he absolutely is a victim — whether that’s at the hands of his wife who is so enraged by his passivity, his chronic mediocrity, that she finally applies the coup de grâce; or whether some inner drumbeat has just gotten too loud for him and he hurls himself from the balcony.

Which leads into the second guiding narrative: of whether the messy center of an adult life, of a long-term relationship, will always more or less look like Sandra and Samuel’s marriage just before his death. There will be fighting, long-simmering resentments, power imbalances, maybe some cheating, some physical violence. “There are times when a couple is a kind of chaos,” Sandra says. In the context of a criminal trial, it seems like dysfunction, seems like monstrousness — Sandra’s habit of “plundering” everything in their lives for her novels, the recording of their fight and the really vicious things she says to him — but Sandra’s claim, always, is that that’s not the “reality” of it. Even what’s caught on a recording — even what’s said to a therapist — is not actually truth. What’s on a recording is a snippet, what’s said to a therapist is, inevitably, a litany of grievances. There’s another side to it, which is that the two of them really are sharing a life, co-parenting, every so often (or at least so Sandra claims) cuddling on the couch — that she is there for his slide into self-loathing and despair, that she keeps waiting for him to pull himself out of it. 

I was always expecting the other shoe to drop. [MILD SPOILERS] I had the feeling that if Isabelle Huppert were in this movie — I kept picturing her in the lead — Sandra would have of course been stone-cold guilty, driven by some sadistic, remorseless pit at the center of her. But Triet wanted to make a different kind of film — a black box, based on unknowability, and gesturing towards the unfathomable complexity of relationships, of lived life. 

In the execution, it sometimes is more truncated than it should be. The fight captured on the recording is a bit mannered. The court scenes can drag into procedural. The discussions of writing have the usual tropes that writing-as-depicted-in-movies always seems to have: there’s either writer’s block or runaway, near-effortless success. And, maybe most importantly, Sandra’s relationship with Daniel is never as fleshed out as the film’s underlying structure calls for — it’s clear that she’s cold to him, but the real heart of the movie should be (and isn’t) his wrestling with his difficult relationship with his mother, his clear preference for his father but his epiphany in the midst of the trial that he must do everything, bend the truth if he has to, to save his mother. That’s all nestled in there, but there’s so much indirection in the Daniel scenes — so few actual interactions between mother and son — that it doesn’t quite come through. 

The other difficulty with Anatomy of a Fall is that I’m not entirely sure what the point is — what it wants to say. The movie sometimes seems to fall in love with its own steely reserve, its faithfulness to the processes of a trial. The emasculation-at-the-heart-of-contemporary-life theme is there. The married-life-is-too-complicated-for-even-highly-professional-lawyers-to-get-to-the-bottom-of theme is there. But we’re left looking for clues, say in the last shot. [SPOILER] Instead of the triumphant scene of Sandra reuniting with Daniel, Daniel goes to bed early, and Sandra is left to cuddle on the couch with Snoop (the much-misused family dog). In the end, I guess, it’s about loneliness, anomie — if Sandra knows what happened (and she probably does know more than she lets on), she’ll take the secret with her to her grave. 

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I’m catching up on Oscar movies and sharing a discussion of a couple of them. As usual, these are more meant to be read after you’ve already seen the film. At the partner site writes on Erica Jong and interviews Henry Jaglom.

Best,

Sam

POOR THINGS

dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos, based on a novel by Alisdair Gray, with Emma Stone as Bella

This is a great movie and I’m staggered, actually, by how great it is. Lanthimos has gotten to a place of complete confidence and almost total freedom. In The Favourite that had to do with a very specific kind of loneliness. In Poor Things, it’s about female sexuality — a whole footloose, Candidean epic of female sexuality. 

Lanthimos seems to solve a few problems all at once. He solves the problem of how to do historical fiction — a stiff, problematic genre — by making it timeless. We’re in the fin de siècle, but a fin de siècle of its own imagination, with Victorian primness crossed with flying trams and a really-cool-looking Jules Verne-ish ship. In this fantasia, that “looks like nothing that could never exist in the real world,” we approach pure play — Wes Anderson tries the same thing but is, for me, less successful. And Lanthimos solves the problem of how to talk about female sexuality, and the violence and cruelty inherent in it, by just going for it, by taking all the different stages of female sexuality as fact, by treating the tendency to allow oneself to be exploited and controlled, the fascination with prostitution, etc, all as part of the journey of self-exploration.

The basic premise of Poor Things is that social interaction does virtually everything in its power to inhibit honest conversation about female sexuality, but Bella, by virtue of being uninhibited, is able to talk about it simply and directly and, to a surprising extent, get to the end of its mysteries. A society woman may think herself clever by saying, “Why would I keep it in my mouth if it’s revolting. I have said that to Gerald before if you catch my drift,” to which Bella promptly one-ups her by saying with complete guilelessness, “Oh because you mean his penis. Duncan’s can be salty.” Duncan may be horrified by Bella’s whoring, but Bella finds a very simple formula for it: “I have examined my situation. I need sex and money. Hence I must seek employment in your establishment.” And if Bella seems to be getting exploited at different points of the story — by Duncan, by General Blessington — she is in those relationships entirely of her own free will, and, as it turns out, she gives at least as good as she gets. 

The kind of central organizing joke of Poor Things is that she never wants to be with Max. This is explained on a surface level as that she can’t help but hold Max in contempt for his subservience to Godwin, but, as everybody in the film knows, there’s more to it than that. She can’t bear to be with Max precisely because he loves her, treats her well, wants the best for her. The ending is, I think, meant to be genuinely happy, [SPOILER] Max and Bella as a true partnership running the surgery together. But it takes a long time to get there. She prefers Duncan, even though he is cruel and insufferable. And then she prefers General Blessington even though she must have an intuition of how sadistic he is. The point being made is that, from the standpoint of female sexuality, the road to wisdom must pass through degradation. This is very different from the usual arc of finding-oneself epic narratives, which tend to be about men and focus on the moment of heroism, of courage. That’s alluded to glancingly in the figure of General Blessington, who has apparently achieved all possible tests of manhood on the field of battle and has nonetheless emerged from them vicious and simple-minded: “my life is dedicated to the taking of territory,” he says with commendable self-awareness, “that is the long and short of it.” 

Bella’s journey is somewhat different, a bit like Candide, a bit like Fanny Hill. The really challenging moments in it are the encounter with Astley on the ship — and Astley’s buddhistic introduction to Bella of the infinitude of suffering. This is meant to be only a preliminary step on Bella’s journey — Astley, as she astutely notes, is “just a broken little boy who cannot bear the pain of the world” and is playing at philosophy mostly to hurt Bella. But Bella undertakes the next, more difficult stage — with Madame Swiney the brothel keeper as her deeply absorbing, deeply untrustworthy guide. “We must experience everything,” Swiney says. “Not just the good but degradation, horror, sadness. This makes us whole Bella, makes us people of substance.”

And that is the real heart of Poor Things. Madame Swiney is of course not to be relied upon for a second — she is saying what she is saying largely to keep Bella continuing to work in her house, to bring her to ever deeper layers of the abyss. But Bella takes her seriously, and the end of the movie appears to redeem Bella’s faith in Madame Swiney’s equivocal wisdom. Female sexuality is something to be undergone, seen through to the end, not — as in General Blessington’s simple-minded problem-solving — excised. The path to self-knowledge and strength for a woman is not so straightforward as for a man (this is one of the reasons why there are so few epics about women), but there is the feeling that Bella actually does get to a spiritual clarity — certainly, she ends up further along in the game than her predecessor Victoria, with her prudishness, her fear of sexuality. It’s a harrowing journey — much more complicated, for instance, than the journey Max is taking over the same period of time. It passes through degradation, humiliation, but — just as Madame Swiney advised — it also is the way out of flightiness, the way to ground, to really know yourself. 

PAST LIVES

dir. and written by Celine Song, with Greta Lee as Nora

Very flat. I’m really astonished that this got the accolades it did, got nominated for an Oscar, etc. The dialogue is often very wooden — “We were babies then” / “We were still babies when we met twelve years ago”; or “Is this how you thought your life would turn out? Laying in a bed in a tiny apartment in the East Village with some Jewish guy who writes books.” The characters are lacking in chemistry —which is kind a must in a story about how they are ineluctably drawn to one another. Nora, as the center of the triangle, is supposed to be somehow uniquely alluring, but all we get from her is that we are told — not shown — that she is a grade-grubber and an ambitious writer, that she is “a fun person to talk to,” that she has a mean streak to her. The cinematography is uninspired. The long redolent pauses often just feel uncomfortable instead of evocative — you can almost see the thought bubbles over the actors’ heads wondering when there will be a cut. And, more and more as I was watching, I found myself drawn to the ‘melancholic music’ chyron in my closed captioning, which seemed so often to stand in for what was supposed to be happening on screen. 

So!, having said all that, let’s try to focus in on what genuinely does work about the film. And, in its way, it is doing something very ambitious and contemporary — and trying to be the voice for the sort of urbanite laptop social class, which is also my class. The point is that people’s real lives, in our atomized, over-polite society, are often buried very deep down — maybe completely inaccessible beneath the patter, the takeout food, the well whiskies, the bonhomie of easy living. Nora — unusually for a film heroine — has taken all of the less-challenging choices. She has ignored the narrative of the lifelong love affair with Hae Sung, decided that what matters more to her is assimilating to New York, is her writing program and her artist residencies. Arthur, her husband, has a moment of well-earned panic about this — realizing that their lives are very insubstantial, that they have taken very few actual risks, that there is no great story that has led to their making out with and then marrying somebody in the exact same social class, going through the exact same life trajectory. 

As befits the vanishingly minimalist style of Past Lives, it never gets more heated than that. The three of them go out for a drink, have a nice time. [SPOILER] Hae Sung appears to start to say something meaningful and then lets it dissipate into millennial shrugginess: “What if this is a past life too and we are already something to each other in our next life? Who do you think we are then?” / “I don’t know.” / “Me neither.” And then Nora, after saying goodbye to him and returning to Arthur, dissolves into long bitter tears. And those tears do, to a great extent, redeem the rest of the movie and make it fit together. The tears come from somewhere beyond Nora’s own life and the fairly conventional choices she’s taken. They do seem to swell up from the accumulation of all of her past lives — of her undeniable In-Yun with Hae Sung. There is something vast about any person, any collection of people who happen to be drawn together. Their actual lives are just a surface ripple of that. 

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The sensation (and this is one of the best things about culture) is of having some experience that you think is somehow specific to you — e.g. finding yourself for some reason really excited every time Lewis shows up on Curb — and then realizing that everybody else feels exactly the same way.

Lewis wasn’t exactly a core member of the Curb universe — he’s not Larry, Cheryl, Jeff or Suzie. And he was the one who seemed least to get with the program — he broke more than any of the others (you’ll notice, by the way, in how many of Lewis’ best scenes, the camera has to be on Larry) and he tended to forget that he was supposed to be the straight man and to instead try to one-up Larry. But there was something just so agreeably bizarre about him — the black clothes, the string of ill-starred relationships, the bottomlessness of his anxiety — and he represented (I’ll say more about this) something vital in Curb’s structure.

Curb, let’s face it, hasn’t been itself for awhile. The falling-off began somewhere in the thick of the #MeToo movement, when the episodes suddenly started getting a bit more defensive and explicitly tackling cancel culture questions. Then it veered into self-parody — Larry being too much, too many people commenting on Larry being too much. Then everybody got old. Marty Funkhouser died (or “went to China,” in the show’s euphemism). Shelley Berman died. Richard Lewis died. And that — more than the limp to the finish line with Irma Kostroski or Maria Sofia or whoever is on the show now — is the real finale. 

So, if we’re trying to write an obituary for Curb, let’s try to figure out a little bit of why it’s as funny as it is. There’s the sort of obvious armature of comedy — which is Larry pushing far, far past the point of shamelessness; and Larry inhabiting a pleasant curmudgeonly amorality (the “no hugging no learning” dictum that is supposed to have made Seinfeld the breakthrough that it was). But lots of other comedians do that. A great deal of it is that the amorality and the curmudgeonliness broke through layers of sentimentality that almost everybody has when they express themselves in public and got down to a kind of bedrock of how people actually live — which is in a state of vague, constant annoyance. A tremendous amount of Curb and of Seinfeld (the “show about nothing” principle) is that it deals with all the ambient irritations of contemporary life that most people pass over but that everybody recognizes, and in so doing it seems to colonize much of daily life. It’s very difficult to have a “stop ’n’ chat” or a “sneeze ’n’ shake” or to consider whether it’s possible to bribe a maître d’ as opposed to bribing a pharmacist or to look at a phone in the doctor’s office or to hear that somebody needs a kidney transplant without thinking about the relevant episode in Curb. Nicholson Baker, by the way, does the same thing in literature, but Seinfeld and Curb have broken under the skin of the culture in a way that nothing else, really, has. A friend of mine once overheard two business people, bumping into each other on a train, run out of topics on their own lives and then spend the entirety of a long train ride happily swapping Seinfeld bits. In the Sheila Callaghan play Elevada, a woman with a terminal illness, thinking through what she’s missed out on in life, discovers that she’s never really watched Seinfeld — and then spends her last remaining months binge-watching episodes and quoting them to everyone she meets. At times I’ve found it very difficult to meditate because I get Curb episodes running through my head. And god knows how many lonely people in hotel rooms, or skimming around late night TV, have found themselves watching the three or four channels that seem to have become entirely Seinfeld channels and finding that Seinfeld (and Curb) are somehow the only thing that really gets daily life.

The main point of Curb is how well observed it is. The next point is that it’s so well structured. As some old acquaintance of Larry David’s put it, “If it was up to him he would just set everything in a Chinese restaurant, but then he got into plotting and of course now he’s the master of it.” I’m absolutely convinced that the real secret of Curb isn’t Larry’s orneriness or the banter or maybe even the hyper-neurotic perceptiveness; it’s mathematics. My sophisticated analysis of this is that each Curb episode has three major threads (one usually connected to the season arc) and one motif. The motif is usually something small and is often the punch line at the end of the episode. The three threads cross-cross, bringing Larry to the brink of some social catastrophe, and then painlessly resolve themselves (ideally with something from one thread neutralizing the problem of one or both of the other threads).

So, pretending we’re Northrop Frye or something, here’s the breakdown of a couple of episodes. In ‘The Surrogate,’ a sort of workhouse episode from Season Four, the overarching thread (connected to the season as a whole) is that Larry must pass a physical in order to continue performing for The Producers. He’s in perfect health (other than a separate scrotal injury), but he keeps failing the physical in large part because he comes to appreciate the value of having heart-monitoring electrodes strapped to his chest: anytime somebody tries to punch him (that happens twice in this episode) he can pull up his shirt and pretend he’s having a heart attack. That turns out to be an effective, if cowardly, gambit, but unfortunately sets him back to square one for the physical since he keeps being delivered to the hospital after the fake heart attacks and can’t convince the doctors that he’s faking it. The second thread is the puzzle of whether or not to get a present for a surrogate mother at a baby shower, and this leads to an escalating series of crises, with Larry getting a present for the surrogate (which offends everybody else) and then inadvertently convincing the surrogate to keep the baby, which then prompts the intended father to threaten to beat him up, which Larry hears about as he’s on the treadmill for his physical, which causes him to once again fail the physical. The third thread is Lewis dating a black woman and being nervous about his penis size compared to the black men she might previously have dated, which leads to Larry interrogating the different black women he comes across about their past boyfriends’ penis size and which leads to Larry trying to sneak a peak at Muggsy Bogues’ penis when Muggsy is peeing in the urinal next to him, which leads to Muggsy trying to throw a punch at Larry and then Larry faking a heart attack and being admitted to the hospital and once again failing his physical. Then the motif is about getting interrupted while leaving voicemails. Larry tries to call David Schwimmer’s father to apologize for something that happened in an earlier episode but is rear-ended as he’s making the call and curses out the guy who hit him, forgetting about Schwimmer’s father. This is dropped. The various threads all resolve themselves: Larry finally can take off the heart holter, the surrogate has changed her mind and agreed to give up the baby, black men’s larger penis size turns out to be a myth, much to Richard’s relief. But then the motif returns with Larry letting a call go to voicemail and David Schwimmer’s dad cursing him out. 

In this one, the threads interact but resolve themselves on their own. In ‘Wandering Bear,’ from the same season, the threads resolve one another. The three threads are 1) Larry putting a condom on the wrong way and giving Cheryl a numb vagina; 2) Larry’s secretary Antoinette having a problem with her boyfriend, which causes her to fall apart on the job and then to threaten to quit and expose Larry’s “web of bullshit” to the world; 3) Larry almost hitting Jeff’s dog Oscar with his car, which emasculates Oscar. Wandering Bear, a Native American yardman, solves problems 1 and 3 — he cures Cheryl’s vagina and de-emasculates Oscar. Meanwhile, problem 1 solves problem 2, since the numbing agent on the condom, when applied the right way, solves the premature ejaculation of Antoinette’s boyfriend and saves their relationship and keeps her from quitting. 

It’s these tightly-wired, Rube Goldberg-ish contraptions that, I believe, are the real heart of the show. It’s a very similar style of writing, by the way, to O. Henry or Saki, who rely also on a pristine sense of geometry. Curb isn’t a status-based show in the way that Blackadder or Fawlty Towers are status-based, but status is important. Part of the trick is that Larry is actually higher-status than everyone around him — with the exception of Jerry Seinfeld and, in a way, Cheryl. As The New York Times once put it, “One of the subtler jokes of Curb is that Hollywood can never get rid of Larry.” And that means that Larry, always, is in a special category — nothing bad can ever happen to him, which means that we’re free, always, to laugh at his misfortune. Richard Lewis is one of the few exceptions to Larry’s high-status, which accounts in large part for why Lewis is always so enchanting to watch. Larry has had a better career, but that is counter-balanced by Lewis’ success with women, and when they meet it’s very often a kind of suspension in the airtight geometry of the show and, in an odd sense, comic relief from it. Lewis has his various neuroses that can slot into the structure, but their meetings are often something very close to pure play — the two of them trying to out-banter the other, and with both of them sometimes seeming to tire of comedy altogether and preferring to talk about history or sports.

Part of the mythology of Curb, like Seinfeld, is that it isn’t ‘about’ anything, and Larry’s particular psychic disorder is to get fixated on the trivial. But there is ‘meaning’ studded within it. Part of it — and this becomes obvious watching the show years after it first aired — is that it really is a kind of chronicle of the neurotic and slightly pervy inner history of our era, and a memento to all these different (easily forgotten) technologies. Yes children, there was a time when everybody had problems with the service on their flip phones, meaning that calls would sometimes drop out just when important information was being delivered. And, yes, people used to have physical porn stashes and had to make pacts with their friends to sneak the porn out of their houses in case they should suddenly die. 

It is also, of course, a document of a certain era for American Jews — completely assimilated, very successful, but somehow a little different from everybody else. That’s the gist of so many of Larry’s arguments with Cheryl: that Cheryl thinks it’s nice to have a drink before going to a different place for dinner; that Cheryl likes having dinner parties in which the conversation never moves beyond small talk — and Larry is basically always bored unless people are laughing or fighting.

The other point of the show — and this emerges only after a long period of time — is the idea that this American Jewish sensibility is, actually, a great cultural unifier, one of the only things that everybody can agree on. This came through surprisingly directly when Larry, amalgamated with Bernie Sanders, launched a kind of neurotic bid for the presidency on Saturday Night Live in 2016. Curb had always been set up as the edgier version of Seinfeld: where Seinfeld had virtually no black characters, Curb leaned into race, with Larry endlessly misstepping on race and the show seeing what it could get away with. And the amazing thing is that, even airing in the teeth of cancel culture, Curb was largely unaffected. The truth is that Leon plays into all possible stereotypes. That Larry is actually pretty homophobic (see ‘The Special Section,’ ‘Club Soda and Salt,’ ‘The Five Wood’). And the show sometimes does push things pretty far on race. But nobody seemed to have the heart to even think of canceling Curb.  

In the end, cancel culture did get to Curb — Season 10 was largely an unsuccessful effort to tackle it head on — but what’s remarkable is that the show lasted as long as it did. Everybody in it had long passed their ostensible cultural moment. Everybody was getting old. The jokes, more and more, dealt with the very “first world” problems of well-heeled, old white people (country club memberships, seating at dinner parties, etc). But the show just continued to sail forward. The real point is that — even in a very puritanical era, even with everything in the culture scrutinized for being insufficiently representative, for tonal missteps — the culture as a whole couldn’t help but respect the craft in Curb. It was just so well-observed, so well-knit-together, so well-acted, that, even with so much of the culture playing it safe, Curb was allowed to see just how far it could push. 

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I’m catching up on movies. These are more discussions than traditional reviews. Hopefully, there is something of value in these if you haven’t the film but they’re written with the assumption that you have. At the partner site , interviews Lore Segal. I have a piece up at on political homelessness.

Best,

Sam

AMERICAN FICTION

dir. Cord Jefferson, based on Erasure by Percival Everett, with Jeffrey Wright as Monk and Sterling K. Brown as Cliff

One of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. 

The feeling here is of waking up from a dream — and there have been a few works of art that have been instrumental in it. Jeremy Harris’ Slave Play poked fun at the pieties of wokeism. ‘s This Is Pleasure and Todd Field’s Tár took seriously the stories of the canceled and of the moral complexities of their experiences. American Fiction is a chance to shake ourselves out of the mindset completely, realizing how much bad faith, self-delusion, and plain absurdity went into the Woke Period. 

Percival Everett is the perfect figure to carry out that society-wide cure. He is smart, subtle, and — much to the consternation of the mainstream press — has, throughout his career, resisted easy classification. I was very impressed with Dr. No. I sort of didn’t realize how funny and idiosyncratic he really was until I saw American Fiction. 

The point with American Fiction is that wokeness — particularly as it manifests in art — is a great reducer of human complexity and that that reduction to racial categories, and stereotypes of racial categories, brings no benefit to black people, even notwithstanding some tactical gains. In a sense, the main plot of the movie is Monk’s stalking of Sintara — his attendance at her reading, his agreement to participate in a panel of judges that includes her, his badgering her with questions — and what he’s trying to figure out is if Sintara is broken by her selling-out, if there can possibly be good faith behind a book like We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.

“You’re not fed up with it?” he says. “[Portrayals of] black people in poverty, black people as slaves, black people being murdered by police….I’m not saying these things aren’t real, but we’re also more than this.”

Sintara holds her own in the conversation — she thinks Monk is elitist, that Monk is fixated on some vision of upward mobility — but the point goes to Monk. “I think I see the unrealized potential of black people in this country,” he says — and what that means, really, is a completely different aesthetic and a society-wide ability to grapple with nuance: an understanding that a black man can write a book about Aeschylus’ The Persians and be no less ‘black’ as a result (“They want a black book,” Monk’s agent calls to complain, to which Monk responds, “They have one, I’m black and that’s my book”); a willingness for movies to say what they have to say without neat resolutions (“I like the ambiguity,” says Monk to a Hollywood director, who, of course, vastly prefers a shootout scene); a greater granular attention to the actual messiness of people’s actual lives. “I’m ok with giving the market what it wants,” says Sintara in her slot for a rebuttal, and that really is a damning critique not only of the Woke Era but of many American aesthetics that have come before it — the market wins; the stereotypes and the tidy stories prevail; and a complex, idiosyncratic writer like Everett ends up being denied a place in the culture. 

There’s another, even more cutting, critique of the aesthetics of Wokeism. It’s in Monk’s line to his agent, “White people think they want the truth, but they don’t. They just want to feel absolved.” With that, the aesthetics of the last decade are seen for what they are — not a dealing with black people or black lives but a Great Awokening, evangelical-ish drama of forgiveness and redemption. Meanwhile, a different religious sensibility emerges through American Fiction — a tougher, more grounded and grown-up sort of religion — and it’s part of the strength of the film that Monk has to work hard to really take it into himself. 

In American Fiction, Monk’s sister Lisa is the first adherent of this religion. The elegy she writes for herself, and which Monk reads, is a masterpiece of groundedness and clear-eyed maturity. She writes: 

If you are reading this, it's because I, Lisa Madrigal Ellison, have died. Obviously this is not ideal, but I guess it had to happen at some point…Irrespective of how I went, I ask that those closest to me not mourn all that much. I lived a life that made me proud. I was loved, and I loved in return. I found work that aroused my passions. I believe I gave more than I took, and I did my damndest to help people in need.

I’m skipping over the funny bits in that elegy, but these lines convey the real point: that it’s possible to live a good, proud life without airy narratives of redemption or social revolution, just by really grounding oneself, accepting one’s singularity and doing the best that one can. Cliff, Monk’s wild brother — who seems to have picked up a good deal of Lisa’s edifying influence while Monk was off with his books — takes that religion as deeply into himself as Lisa does. “People want to love you,” he tells Monk at a difficult moment in their relationship. “You should let them love all of you.” 

If Cliff is unhinged where Lisa is responsible, he also has the ability to harmonize all the different sides of himself — even as Monk, so smart, so intellectual, boxes himself in with his secrets and compartments. Where Monk gets to by the film’s end isn’t quite the level of self-possession of Lisa or Cliff — he accedes to the Hollywood director’s idea for the smoke-‘em-up end of the film; he finds himself sitting on a studio lot and locking eyes with a black actor in a slave costume, both of them struck by the distance it will take to really be free; his compartmentalization and secret-keeping have cost him a good relationship with Coraline — but the sense is that he’s on the right track. He’s put one over on the market, he’s become a better son and brother, and, in some sense most importantly, he’s become more sure of his aesthetic: he knows that the absolution tropes (Sintara’s path) are just a marketing gimmick and that real art and real freedom come from dealing honestly and unflinchingly with the complexities of his own life. 

THE HOLDOVERS

dir. Alexander Payne, written by David Hemingson, with Paul Giamatti as Paul and Dominic Sessa as Angus

…And speaking of all of which, there’s The Holdovers, which in its well-meaning but bumbling way epitomizes kitsch in our era. 

Essentially, The Holdovers is two crappy, played-out genres combined together. There’s the prep school elegy — with the long shadow of A Separate Peace and Dead Poets Society, not to mention The Catcher in the Rye, the tale of the prep school misfit looking to escape the confines of the dress code and stultifying patriarchy — and then there’s the Woke Manifesto, the revelation through a skeptical, sort of strategically-placed black character, of just how incurably racist and depraved American institutions are. 

And, in The Holdovers, both genres are distilled down to their milquetoast essence. The prep school hell becomes the can’t-miss-it-bonding-experience of the Holdenesque student held over for a full winter vacation, forced to form a human connection with his unlikeable-yet-as-is-turns-out-surprisingly-sympathetic teacher tormentor. And, as for the Woke Revolution, we get not only the wise black cook but the wise black janitor and we get the injustice of the system with in-your-face clarity: the cook’s son, the only black student at Barton Academy, is also the only one to die in Vietnam. It’s worth comparing Mary in The Holdovers with Lorraine in American Fiction as a kind of object lesson in treacle and filmic sophistication: Lorraine, with only a fraction of Mary’s screen time, is far more arresting, with her romantic subplot and the complex loyalties of her service with a black family; while Mary just kind of smokes and drinks and dispenses nuggets of rough wisdom and, in the reductivized cosmology of The Holdovers, is understood to be not only superior to everybody else in the movie, infinitely suffering and infinitely competent, but (it can be quietly observed by how much better they are their paprika dosage) even the black line cooks working for her in her kitchen are superior to the whites.

I found The Holdovers pretty tough to get through, but there is something interesting in it that comes across by the end. And that’s a sense of really heightened unpleasantness — of two men, Paul and Angus, being in such excruciatingly close proximity to each other that they can’t help but notice a certain shared resemblance. In The Holdovers, awkwardness and unpleasantness are sort of permanent afflictions — Angus will always be disliked; Paul will always be strange and unpleasant. There’s no chance of somehow overcoming their character deficiencies — and they can never quite bring themselves, even in the thick of bonding, to enjoy the company of the other one. In The Holdovers, it is a long, long way to their somewhat stiff handshake at the movie’s end.

“Keep your head up,” says Paul.

“I was going to tell you the same thing,” says Angus.

And in the context of this time and this world and the insuperable awkwardness of males with other males, that’s as close as they can get to the long-awaited bonding — a shared, limited acknowledgment of each other’s humanity and each other’s struggles.

The strongest moment in The Holdovers is a line that Paul delivers after he meets a college classmate of his and omits the painful story of how he came to be expelled from Harvard. “Why did you lie to that guy?” innocent Angus asks him. To which Paul says, “He’s not entitled to that story, I am.” 

It’s a good line, departing from the usual American movie formula of hugging and crying. Openness is the solution in most films — certainly, in films that are as genre-bound as The Holdovers and in films dealing with the ‘60s — and Paul’s line seems to come from a tougher and more sophisticated movie, with a recognition that most adults live their lives actually in very closed ways, that being closed can be an important means (especially for people who have gone through real pain) of retaining pride. 

But if lines like that one point towards something strong and mature, Hemingson’s script has a way of collapsing into broad brushstrokes. Do we really believe that shy Paul, at a bar in Boston, would lecture a working-class Santa on the Classical Greek origins of the Christmas story? Does Paul really mutter the word ‘philistines’ to himself and does he, as an intelligent adult, actually recite the prep school motto with no trace of irony?

The writing is a somewhat obvious target in The Holdovers, but this is also the place, I believe, to say for the record that Paul Giamatti is not good at acting. I don’t have some sophisticated critique here. It’s just that his instincts aren’t what they should be for an actor who’s gotten the kinds of accolades he has, and if he’s able to compensate for that with an intelligent, sympathetic approach to his roles, he also has a tendency towards scene-chewing. Comparing Giamatti with Jeffrey Wright (both of whom were nominated for an Oscar today) is a good exercise also in comparing Woke-ish art like The Holdovers with a freer, edgier, uninhibited work like American Fiction. There is something very safe about Giamatti’s performance in The Holdovers. He knows that the audience will be on his side — the loser with the heart of the gold — and the beats of his character seem determined from the first time we see Paul and his unfortunate sweater. Meanwhile, in American Fiction, Wright is constantly taking risks: he’s moving in and out of black stereotypes, he’s flirting with a very unattractive cynicism. Very often in American Fiction, we are not at all sure if we are rooting for Monk — he can be pompous, selfish, impossible — but Wright is invested in getting at all the uncomfortable corners of his character (and Wright is also just an unbelievably talented actor, who, in the way that some athletes can hang in the air longer than others, seems to have an ability to suspend a beat in a way that no one else can) and the result is a movie that’s immaculately crafted and, also, really risky — a movie that powers its way out of the overwhelming kitsch of our era.  

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I’m catching up on movies and sharing a couple of discussions. As usual on this Substack, the attempt is to think from a slightly broader perspective — whether aesthetic or historical — than is available from most criticism. At the partner site , shares an excerpt from his new novel and writes on Martin Luther King and the humanities.

Best,

Sam

BARBIE (2023)

dir. by Greta Gerwig, written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, with Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken

I guess they really are an unlikely pair, Barbie and Oppenheimer, but whatever. They came out at the same time and broke all the box office records together and saved Hollywood together, so you sort of have to write about one with the other. 

And the way I’d think about Barbie and Oppenheimer is that they represent two rival, or at least divergent, aesthetic traditions. Oppenheimer is of course realism or, specifically, historical fiction. It’s based on a very real series of events and, to a surprising extent, it trusts in the audience’s ability to really get in under the hood of a pivotal moment in history — not so much the science, which is elided over in a series of Sorkinesque exchanges and the usual montages of hard-thinking physicists — but the nitty-gritty politics of the McCarthy era. I have this fantasy that Christopher Nolan made a bet with someone that he could get the teens of America caring about anything he wanted them to care about — and, sure enough, every 16-year-old in the nation spent the summer of 2023 thinking about Edward Teller’s relationship to the rest of the Los Alamos physicists and about Robert Oppenheimer’s Q clearance. But the strength of a project like this is supposed to be its relevance to our world, which, in the case of Oppenheimer, is two-fold: there’s the invention of the atomic bomb, which is still our seminal geopolitical event, and then there’s the much-discussed analogy to AI and the theme of runaway science. 

But, at the end of the day, Oppenheimer was a sort of high-budget History Channel program. Barbie is a much better movie. And the real reason is that its aesthetic tradition — I’m calling it The Imaginarium — is, at the moment, more robust. What I mean by The Imaginarium is ‘world-building,’ or a fantasy realm that’s adjacent to our own and in which the artistic creators get to create the rules any way they want to.

I’m not really sure what the aesthetic history of world-building is. Maybe the key event is the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and then some of the core ideas drifted into American imaginative space. But the sense is that world-building and fantasia have become steadily more important as a means of serious expression. Charlie Kaufman and Forrest Gump are a kind of world-building. Inglourious Basterds and Get Out are world-building. Barbie is a beautiful example of The Imaginarium aesthetic reached a very high level of maturity and with a tremendous amount of industry resource behind it.

What’s challenging about The Imaginarium — and is, I’m sure, very nerve-wracking for the creators, is that it doesn’t have the storytelling rules of some hallowed genre behind it. You don’t actually know where the turns are going to be in the way that you would with Oppenheimer — not so much because of the actual biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer but because any story of a scientist has to follow a particular Promethean arc, with a pairing of brilliant innovation and of bitter remorse. In The Imaginarium, the story creators are always fighting for structure and coherence — and there are moments in Barbie where they absolutely seem to lose the thread, just aren’t quite sure how to get all the different pieces to fit together. 

The story of Barbie turns out not to be, as initially advertised, the story of Barbie finding the sad girl who is playing with her (her connection with Gloria is kind of the weakest part of the film) or Barbie sealing up the rift between Barbieland and the real world. There’s the story of feminism — the whole film as a kind of symposium on the confused state of feminism in the 2020s. And then there’s the story of a relationship — Barbie and Ken working through a difficult moment in their dynamic and then concluding, essentially, that she’s just too emotionally mature for him. 

It’s not at all easy to get that plane to land, and Greta Gerwig and the film’s creators do so basically by means of a few throwaway jokes — the Gilbert & Sullivanish conclusion of the Mattel leadership’s arrival in Barbieland and then a laugh line right at the end. The idea Gerwig banks on is that she doesn’t need a ton of structure — the 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof at the beginning, the breaking of the fourth wall at different points in the film, are meant to show that Barbie can largely stay in the realm of hijinks and banter and not figure out too, too much what it’s really trying to say. 

But it is at the same time an intelligent film with a lot of thoughts on feminism. The opening narration, “Thanks to Barbie all problems of feminism and actual rights have been solved!” is actually a more cutting piece of satire than it might at first appear. Feminism, over a half-century, really did reductivize itself to empowerment. Just have the right role models and the right mottoes, went a very powerful school of pop feminism, and it really was possible to produce feminist paradise. “Because Barbie can be anything women can be anything,” continues the opening narration. “And this has been reflected back onto the little girls of today in the Real World. Girls can grow into women who can achieve anything and everything they set their mind to.” Or, as Barbie (living her best self in Barbieland) puts it: “We fixed everything so that all women in the real world are happy and powerful.”

The focus on empowerment is, the film is saying, missing some very critical steps. It’s not engaging with the Real World. It’s not dealing with the complexities of sex. And much of it involves simply taking the world-at-is and putting women in charge: it’s Barbie’s Dream House and, as she realizes at one point in the film, she has absolutely no idea where the Kens live. 

The arc of the film is mostly pretty silly — it’s about deprogramming the other Barbies from the very simple Patriarchy that the Kens have created. It’s also about finding a certain acceptance between the more programmatic beliefs of Gen Zers and their more jaded moms (the bonding plot between Gloria and Sasha). And, most importantly, it’s about trying to get out of the narratives altogether. “What do you want?” says an at-this-point very annoyed CEO of the Mattel Corporation. “I’m not really sure I know what I want anymore. I’m not really sure I have an ending,” says Barbie. And the ending turns out, basically, to be Ordinary Barbie, comfortable with disappointment, with not having some empowerment arc. Or, as Barbie more optimistically puts it, “I want to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made. I want to do the imagining not be the idea,” which is beautiful but awfully specific — like the whole arc of feminism is to follow Greta Gerwig’s turn from actor to director. 

What’s interesting about the film, and which created some pretty inane meta debates, is that the Barbie-Ken relationship is less central than might appear. That relationship gives the movie most of its laughs, but saving Barbieland from Patriarchy is actually a bit of a shaggy dog story and distraction from the guiding thread of Barbie’s existential angst. Basically, Ken isn’t in Barbie’s league, and he acts out and then he cries and goes off on his sad lonely journey to try to find himself. 

So what the movie is, in the end, is the feminism disquisition, and then it’s The Imaginarium, the sense of sliding around all possible different genres (slapstick, musical, opera buffa, parody, road movie, you name it) with the filmmakers just looking to land their jokes and quips wherever they can get them. It works great, and it helps to show just how effective The Imaginarium can be, especially in contrast to an essentially staid period piece like Oppenheimer. What will be interesting to me, aesthetically, is how realism fights back. In the 2010s, realism seemed to break new ground by diving very, very deep into minute interactions — in Mad Men and in Annie Baker’s plays. As entranced as I can be by The Imaginarium, I also have the feeling that it has its aesthetic limitations — Barbie is somehow less than the sum of its parts; there’s a slight soap bubble feeling to the whole enterprise — and I would like to see realism really fight for being the aesthetic with the most to say. 

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023)

dir. Martin Scorsese, written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese and based on a book by David Grann, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest, Robert De Niro as Bill Hale, Lily Gladstone as Mollie

There’s something very melancholic and very upsetting about Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s in, I suppose, the iconic image of the film (or somewhat heavy-handedly designed to be iconic) — the house burning out in the distance of the prairie, the image smudged, Blind Willie Jefferson playing on the soundtrack. The sense with it is that the abiding myths of Americana and western expansion have been unavailing — that there isn’t actually some redemption at the end of the story, that at the very least, new myths are called for.

In that way Killers of the Flower Moon is a kind of capstone to, and masterpiece of, the Woke Era, with its presumption that American history needs to be, as it were, told in reverse to the usual triumphalist version — as unremitting expropriation and exploitation, a genocide ending in amnesia. 

And the sort of unsettling core of the film is — strange to say, but vital — the dumbness of Ernest Burkhart, the Leonardo DiCaprio character. Protagonists are supposed to be the driving forces in their stories, but this is history, and — as court records make clear — the real Ernest was “dumb as rocks,” in The New York Times’ phrasing.

He is acted-upon, rather than acting, and if that means that the film is always somewhat at risk of trivializing itself (the question hanging over it is whether the Osage murders are genuinely reflective of larger dynamics or are a somewhat unique set of circumstances featuring an exceptional sociopathy), Ernest’s ingenuousness serves as a prism through which all the larger accompanying forces can be glimpsed. 

And, through him, the entire westward current of American settlement and expansion is reduced to its underlying factor: greed. “I just love money,” Ernest says — sincerely — every time he’s asked to explain himself. 

Really, that’s sufficient to explain the arc of Killers of the Flower Moon (as well as a great deal else). “They are a flock of buzzards who steal from us,” says Paul Red Eagle of the whites of Osage County, and that can stand in for every one of the white characters in the film with the lone possible exception of the FBI agent. 

But if the love for money gets to the heart of what’s driving the conspiracy against the Osage, other justifications proliferate. “Osage are the finest and most beautiful people on God’s earth,” says Bill King Hale, and really means it, but then the other — the acting — part of him holds that “their time is over” and that, given the ineluctabilities of history, the only question now is who gets the spoils. The other justification for the murders is more frankly racist and gets to the cognitive dissonance of both western expansion and of this whole era of world history. John Ramsey is a family man, moral man, would never think of shooting anyone in cold blood — right up until the point he’s told that his mark is an Indian. “That’s different,” he says. 

It’s a strange, almost-hard-to-imagine psychology, and the sense of Killers of the Flower Moon is of entering into a very strange and hard-to-understand world, from a sort of intermediate phase of American history. It’s not the classic frontier and there is a delicate modus vivendi in Anglo-Indian relations, at least in Osage County (which the spate of murders, of course, utterly destroys). The Klan is just another civic organization. Masonic Lodges are a pillar of town life. The great homogenized culture — suburbs and radio plays — is soon to catch up to the frontier, but the frontier (at least at the start of the story) has a more complex and diffuse character than the homogenized culture can quite comprehend. Watching the film I kept thinking about a line I’d recently read from Colin Woodard in which Woodard argued that America’s “first national consensus point, frighteningly enough, was the ethnonational white supremacist version of the 1910s and 1920s.” And that may be a useful way of understanding the tectonic structure of Killers of the Flower Moon — the whites of Osage County are forming a consensus, racist and genocidal, and willfully forgetting the complexities of even their own lives. “I thought you were calling me a squaw man,” says Ernest to Bill Smith when the two of them are having a fight, to which Bill’s response is, “That’s something I would never call another man” — and this in a conversation between two men who are both married to Osage women. 

What’s complicated about the film — and is its real emotional center — is that Ernest and Mollie do somehow love each other. (That would seem to be hard to do given that Ernest is in the process of actively exterminating Mollie’s entire family, but such is the power of cognitive dissonance.) There’s an attraction, there’s familiarity, there’s a shared life, and towards the end of the film Mollie is close to forgiving Ernest for everything — except that he can’t quite bring himself to be honest about just how diabolical he’s been and insists that he hasn’t been poisoning Molly. In the cosmology of the film, it’s that dishonesty of Ernest’s — that refusal to look at or comprehend his own guilt, even more than the guilt itself — that causes the final rupture. “I haven’t done anything wrong in this world,” he says at one point, and, a little later, “My soul is clean now,” and it’s that manic insistence on innocence that is, in the end, what’s most unforgivable. 

In a fundamental sense, what the film is about is what was at the time called miscegenation (one of these retired words). In our 21st century, post-Civil Rights perspectives, we’re supposed to feel that, of course, inter-racial marriages are to the good and signify progress; that only biased old people (like Ernest’s parents calling out the word “savage” in a stressed moment) would have any trouble with it. But Lizzie, the Osage matriarch, is equally opposed to any of her daughters marrying white men — and, of course, she’s absolutely right: the white men are all snakes, all in it for the money. The premise is that there isn’t reconciliation, isn’t some happy harmonious ending. There is an original sin at the heart of America. The racist, jingoistic consensus that formed as the “national myth” of the early 20th century didn’t, of course, work. And so, in the attempt to keep the guilty country together, a new myth takes its place — an acknowledgment of the theft and exploitation; an atonement. 

There’s an odd sense too that Scorsese is in some way atoning for his whole career. He has been the patron saint of the unreconstructed gangster. But, in the totality of things, the cheerful ripping-off of Wall Street dupes or even of the United States government isn’t such a big deal; on the other hand, the extermination of the Indians is. Ernest identifying his uncle to a jury is a haunting reflection of Henry in Goodfellas executing the same gesture with his confederates. In Goodfellas, that’s melancholic — a betrayal of the gangsters’ code. In Killers of the Flower Moon it’s something different: a bid for justice. And the unexpected ending has that same sense of requiem and last rites. It’s very distracting, to say the least, for the director to make his cameo in the closing shots of the film, but Scorsese’s appearance there isn’t so much cameo as elegy — one old person reading the obituary of another, bringing to an end a very long, gangsterish, ebullient phase of American history, making his quiet plea for absolution.

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I’m sharing a couple of write-ups of movies I recently watched. These, like the book ‘reviews’ on this Substack, are intended for people who have already seen the work discussed. Totally flagrant spoilers are avoided, but these may not make much sense if you haven’t seen the movies. At , has an absorbing discussion of manhood, masculinity, et al.

Best,

Sam

TOP GUN: MAVERICK (2022)

Why was it such a strange experience watching Top Gun: Maverick? 

For one thing, because I watched it after everyone else did. It was such a big deal in 2022 — Steven Spielberg argued that it single-handedly saved Hollywood — that I’d stored it in my head as a slicker, CGI-updated version of the original. Lots of stunts, lots of explosions. Super-cool. 

What I wasn’t expecting was for it to be quite so….middle-aged. Kelly McGillis had apparently aged out of consideration for a role. Val Kilmer, battling with throat cancer, was reduced to a non-speaking (although important) part. But, more than that, it was fundamentally about very grown-up sort of stuff — how to navigate a mature relationship and get along with one’s partner’s children; how to think about stagnation at work; how to find the right moment to retire.

What it’s really ‘about’ though, surprisingly directly (and it’s a surprise that this didn’t get picked up on more) is PTSD. Maverick has never gotten over the death of Goose. He’s unable to move forward (“It’s time to let go,” types Val Kilmer, to which Maverick, movingly, says, “I don’t know how”) and he can’t advance in his career: everybody else he knows have become admirals; he’s still a test pilot, still returning over and over again, as it were, to the scene of Goose’s death. And in the way of PTSD veterans, certain skills (his instincts in the air) have held tight while the rest of him is disintegrating: his credit cards are getting declined; he’s become an old man standing outside the bar staring in. 

It turns out — poignantly — that that’s the epitaph to a whole era. It was, in film history, the period of the ascendance of American air power — from Star Wars to Independence Day, with Top Gun right in the middle. There was nothing, nothing, that was more evocative of the mood of Morning in America than Tom Cruise on his motorcycle racing the fighter jets; than the efficacy of nimble, dogfight-ready fighter jets in handling any possible problem, whether it was a Death Star, an alien invasion, Soviet MiGs randomly in the Indian Ocean (and there was no better credentialing for the presidency than Bill Pullman’s still-fresh ability to handle a fighter plane).

That era, and mindset, ends with a whimper — Maverick suffering PTSD; mean Ed Harris trying to scrap the Navy’s fighter jets for a drone program.

But Top Gun: Maverick is — even more than most sequels — a love song to the original movie, an homage to its soundtrack, its iconic shots, and a way of saying goodbye to the mentality underlining it. We’re also pretty much right back to the movie tropes of the time. The Top Gun Fighter School has become impressively diverse, but in the end the tough-yet-friendly black men are waiting on the ground with hugs and smiles while the white guys fly around dealing with their daddy issues. But the movie often seems to be getting tired of its own tropes. In maybe the nadir of on-screen chemistry, Miles Teller at a dramatic moment tells Cruise, “I saved your life,” to which Cruise says, “I saved your life, that’s the whole point,” and then they sort of stand around with nothing else to say to each other — they’re supposed to be bonded by battle by now, but, instead, they both seem a bit weary of their own clichés. It’s a sad-yet-somehow-fitting end to that whole exercise — the Reagan Revolution, the Global War on Terror, air power invictus. Instead, it’s survivors’ guilt, awkward male bonding, budget cuts. And good riddance. Time for a new national myth. 

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (2022)

Wow, this was not what I was expecting — as dark and ambitious a movie as I can remember. 

For one thing, it’s really a testament to what craft can do — slow, patient scenes; a skilled ensemble cast; a way of letting the audience know even in the long stretches of time when nothing much is happening that they’re in good hands and should go wherever the film leads.

And, oh, the places the film gets to. The first real turn is the swimming scene — a passenger breaking the class barriers for a moment for everybody on the ship to swim off the slide. That’s a creepy, almost terrifying moment — the pretense of equality in a society where everything is unequal; the deep discomfort of all the members of the crew at the moment when they’re asked to break their roles. 

The next turn is the seasickness scene — the moment when the society (having just had a crack in its edifice with the swimming) now turns into a nightmare. Each exquisitely prepared dish — viewed with the ship and camera tilting — becomes disgusting. The seasickness scene is an extension of the Captain’s moral ambivalence — the psychic fissure that makes him an alcoholic, that makes him perversely insist on holding the Captain’s Dinner in the middle of a storm. The fundamental absurdity of the whole society is ultimately only expressive through a breakdown — through everyone getting sick, the Captain and Dimitri getting roaring drunk and taking over the ship’s loudspeaker. “Here we are a Russian capitalist and an American Communist,” says Dimitry. “Yes, on a $250 million yacht,” says the Captain — an exquisite set of paradoxes that finally resolves itself in mayhem.

The turns in the island scene are so sharp and (to me, at least, unexpected), but they are of a theme — that the power dynamics are completely ineluctable. Within hours of her landing, Abigail has become a potentate with a strict hierarchical structure that is obeyed by everyone — and with Paula in the exact same role as stewart and subaltern. The sexual marketplace is exactly the same — only a bit more explicit. “I said, I love you, you give me fish,” Carl says. “And do you know why that’s so beautiful — just like you —because it’s the truth,” Abigail tells him. The pretense that Abigail is creating a matriarchy is of course completely threadbare — Abigail is able to convince Yaya of this exactly at the moment that Abigail is most ruthlessly manipulating her. 

Part of the reason Triangle of Sadness is so unexpected is that it belongs to a genre completely its own. There’s something very undisciplined in the structure — the way characters and plot points are summarily dropped, the way that the focus shifts quietly away from Carl and he turns out to be a more a symbol than a protagonist —and that’s part of the point. No one really acts as themselves. Everybody acts in their sort of archetypal class role — Dimitri picking the jewelry off of his drowned wife; Carl once again in the gray area of prostitution; Abigail so determined to never again be a toilet manager that she’ll do anything to preserve her newfound status. What it really is is a return of the sort of vanished genre of the allegory — like Pilgrim’s Progress or something.

We haven’t taken the allegory seriously as high art for a long time, in part because we believe that it is too crude an instrument to take in the psychological nuances of a modern society. The implicit argument of Triangle of Sadness is that there is no psychological nuance whatsoever: everybody is their class position. That makes the allegory a very effective tool of revolutionary art, and if The Revolution does one day break out Triangle of Sadness may be remembered as having the same sort of relationship to our era as, say, The Marriage of Figaro did to the ancien regime. 

It participates in a trope has worked its way into popular art — in The Maids, The White Tiger, Parasite, etc — in which the sole, overpowering desire of a subservient class (far more even than their own self-interest) is to kill their masters. And it adds a new contribution to the discourse, which is that our current Gilded Age is a terrible condition; that inequality is really the only fact of the contemporary world (Succession makes a similar argument); and so even the wonderfully egalitarian opportunities of the desert island lead to a reification of the class structure, with some temporary disturbances in status but with the castaways making their alliances pretty much exactly as they would have on the yacht. The only possibility — and this seems to be what Abigail has in mind in the closing shot on her; this seems to be what the perplexing, very final shot signifies — is a complete breakdown, a genuine revolutionary circus. 

I’m not entirely sure how much the filmmakers believe this themselves (they certainly believe it to some extent) and there are moments when it feels like the film is pushing, is in love with itself and its sense of carnival. This is the case in the jewelry-stripping scene, in the ‘head in the clouds’ trope, in the final shot. But it seems ungrateful or something to criticize a movie like this: it’s so dark, so brave, so innovative.  It really does seem to create a whole new genre and does so with complete confidence. It’s a reminder that films don’t just mirror the tastes of their era but create them. 

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I’m sharing an in-no-way topical or relevant discussion of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The idea with posts on books or movies on this Substack is less to offer some kind of a review than to engage with a work as something like a friend. This post is also on .

Best,

Sam

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

I had a sleepless night this week and at a certain point there was clearly nothing for it but to watch the entire seven-part Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (the BBC show from 1979, not the movie remake of 2011). 

This is not the first time this has happened, and it made me wonder what it was exactly about this show that seemed to be the only tonic for certain kinds of moods. By the way, if you haven’t seen Tinker Tailor, you probably should stop reading, pour yourself a sherry and watch the entire seven episodes before returning to this post. I’m trying not to have any too-direct spoilers, but I’m writing assuming that you know who the main characters are.

Tinker Tailor is famous for being a spy story that’s not really a spy story — everyone has their roles to play in a (really knotty) Cold War drama, but as the story opens out to take in all the ancillary characters, and slows down (The Washington Post described it as “madly atmospheric”), all these different lives get caught in outline and the real subject turns out to be the psychic toll of service. As a YouTube commentator writes, “Tinker Tailor is as much about bureaucracy as anything else.” That’s a reasonable way to put it — and places the show in the company of The Wire (another breakthrough in television drama, which, not coincidentally, showcased the ability of a procedural to, instead of focusing on the crime, focusing on the bureaucracy and the ways that bureaucracies cripple everyone associated with them). When I first saw it as a teenager, Tinker Tailor became one of my very first glimpses of what adult life — and the “trenches” of the workplace — were really like, and a great deal of it has only became clear to me more recently. It turns out that, even within the high-stakes procedural drama, Tinker Tailor isn’t exactly about catching a spy. It’s about how vendettas, greed, cliques can rot out an institution. In narrowing down the mole to a handful of suspects, George finds that they are all, in a real sense, guilty — one is overtly working for Moscow Center but the others are pulled into the conspiracy and are invaluable to the mole’s machinations. I think I must have watched the show three or four times before I understood what all the endless fuss about Merlin and Witchcraft was really about. As George puts it, “Ever bought a fake picture? The more you pay for it the less inclined you are to doubt its authenticity.” In other words, as people move up the greasy pole, as they become wedded to their ambitions and to their bureaucratic domains, it becomes almost impossible to retain any sense of integrity or intrinsic worth. Corruption — Tinker Tailor emphasizes — is almost wholly inextricable from adult life.

But, fittingly, there are wheels within wheels, and in some higher sense, Tinker Tailor isn’t about bureaucracy or corruption any more than it is about catching the mole. What it is really about — I believe — is waste. And, for me, since pretty early adolescence, this has been a very particular aesthetic taste — I find myself moved when I come across it more than I am by anything else. It’s in the third act of Our Town, it’s in Forrest Gump, and Tinker Tailor is riddled with it. This is the real meaning of every one of the interviews that George conducts — with Connie, Sam, Jerry, Jim — each one “madly atmospheric,” each one ripe for ruthless cutting in any more conventional TV show. We really do get a lot of Connie’s tutoring schedule, of Sam’s croupier job, of Jerry’s bar bill — everybody in the ruins of their own life — and we understand, at some point in the conversation, what went wrong. Somewhere or other, every one of them dedicated themselves to an ideal — Connie, Jerry, and Sam sticking their neck out for some piece of intelligence, Jim devoting every part of himself to the service — and every one of them ends up with absolutely nothing to show for it. From a plot perspective, the summa of the ‘Karla Series’ comes at the very end of Smiley’s People, George through a lifetime of patience, tradecraft, emotional repression, an unendurable psychological toll, lands the big fish and mutters to himself “oh my dear god,” but the moment of redemption and fulfillment is understood to be a vanishingly rare event and is not available to Connie, Sam, Jerry, Jim, or any of his other dozen or so other interlocutors. Far more common in the world of Tinker Tailor is the moment when it all goes up in smoke — Control sitting in his office on the fifth floor, hearing that his desperate operation is blown, that the mole has beaten him, and his lifetime of patience, tradecraft, emotional repression, etc, is all for nothing, and that all that’s left to do is get himself a cab and go home.

What exactly is being conveyed in these long shots? Control on the fifth floor, the muscles in his face starting to spasm. Jim sitting in the pews of the school chapel where he is now teaching, shaken despite himself by a Bible verse. Connie in her shabby apartment talking to her dog Flush after everyone else has left the room. It’s a glimpse of what real dignity looks like. It’s a lifetime with nothing to show for it — if the mole hasn’t directly undermined each of these people, then petty rivalry, bureaucratic intrigue, have — but, somehow, each of them is potent in their own way, much in the way that Forrest is potent sitting at a bus stop all day with nothing better to do than wait for his son to come home from school; that Mother Gibbs is, after a lifetime of selfless and upright conduct, to, with perfect composure, tell Emily that “our life now is to forget all that and think only of what’s ahead.” It’s very different from the look that the heads of the Circus have when the mole is uncovered and their unwitting part in his activities revealed: that’s waste of a very different kind, the kind that nobody (least of all these venal civil servants) can possibly look at honestly in themselves.

If Tinker Tailor is a monument to this sort of unheralded, unrewarded dignity, what it is not is idealistic. It’s never really clear if George is fighting ‘for the good’ or not — as Connie puts it in Smiley’s People, “it’s grey, half-devils against half-angels.” George’s more sophisticated interlocutors are of the belief that George has a residual schoolboyishness, an antiquated patriotism, with no resemblance to the world as it actually is. As the mole says when he’s caught, “The Circus talent spotters, they picked us when we were golden with hope. Told us we were on our way to the holy grail, a lifetime of glory ahead of us —” and then breaks off into a mixture of tears and laughter. “It was necessary,” he continues, for somebody to see past those illusions, for somebody to exercise a real inner freedom, to navigate the rockier shoals of venality, of the real world, without some illusory guide like schoolboy patriotism. Various characters within Tinker Tailor — not least George’s wife — become convinced of the essential validity of this way of thinking, that it actually represents a higher ideal. As Jim puts it, “ you can’t judge him by things like that he’s got different standards.”

And, actually, Tinker Tailor offers no real rebuttal there. It’s far from clear within the context of the show that ‘The West’ is any better than the alternative, that Britain is a cause worth fighting for, that “the wretched Cold War” offers anything beyond “technical satisfactions,” as George puts it, for those playing the game of it. All of George’s interlocutors seem to have learned, from the experience of a lifetime, that the best thing is “to get a bit of love,” to “devote oneself to the profession of forgetting” — that there’s not much to be said for causes, except for the dignity that they generate and the curious light that they cast.

Every time I’ve watched Tinker Tailor there’s been something that arrested me about the Peter Guillam character and this time I think I finally sort of got it. Guillam is, along with Tarr, the closest analogue in Tinker Tailor to a conventional movie-ish James Bond figure. He drives fast cars, is adept in ‘wet work,’ does ‘tough guy’ courses in martial arts, but his life isn’t that. The nearest he comes to real clock ‘n’ dagger secret agent work is to steal a file from a library. He finds himself in middle management — his evident stylishness not at all a barrier from the withering disdain of his superiors. And, contrary to the cool guy vibes that might be expected of him, Guillam leads with class snobbery — is tongue-laceratingly sharp with Tarr and Fawn. There’s something in the Guillam character that makes it clear how the British Empire really ran itself — Guillam was, as Connie puts it, one of the “poor loves who was trained to empire, trained to rule the waves” — and it was done not really with merit or bravado but with a microscopic attentiveness to status. But Guillam, compared with the other sons of empire, is in a more equivocal position. George, Bill, even Control, are sustained by a vision of halcyon days — it’s one of the more evocative points that the buildings of Cambridge University are used for the episode credits. “We used to be rather a classy bunch, how did we turn so vulgar?” asks Bill. Peter has no real memory of that. His hero turns out to be a traitor. His experience of the service is of endless bureaucracy, constant politicking — “you had all the qualifications for dismissal,” George says to him, “you were good at your work, loyal, discreet.” And yet Peter continues assiduously in his work and does well enough at it to earn a brief, awkward pat on the back from George — “you helped tremendously.” What is it exactly that sustains him? It seems, as far as I can tell, to be a burning inner rage. As Michael Jayston plays the part, Peter is constantly seething, constantly on the verge of some act of violence or other. The older, sager Mendel believes that he’s wired too tight — “one of the tough ones who crack at 40” — but George believes in Peter and the rest of the story bears him out. For Peter, what seems to matter is craft — he has to be good at what he does, whether he’s working for the Circus or for George’s renegade band. His explosion at Percy — “I haven’t seen him! Who’s playing games? Not me, you are. So get off my back!” — is one of the better moments that any subordinate has ever had on television, and seems to be deeply, profoundly felt, no matter that Peter is lying through his teeth. For Peter, there is an endless pride in what he does — and if he keeps slipping through the cracks professionally, keeps running afoul of the leadership structure, that is, in some important way, no hinderance to his sense of self. It becomes possible to carry oneself with dignity in a sort of vacuum — to do work adeptly, even ferociously, with no idea what it’s for, with no idea whether it will pay off or not.  

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I’m sharing some reflections on Succession and Game of Thrones. There aren’t any spoilers exactly, but this pretty much assumes that you’ve seen all of both shows.

Best,

Sam

HBO’S ROMAN HISTORY OBSESSION

You may have noticed, if you’ve been watching Succession, that the characters — for lowest-common-denominator-feeding media moguls — are surprisingly well-versed in Roman history. 

At an important meeting with the Pierces (a stand-in for the Sulzbergers), Logan Roy announces helpfully, “Like Romans among the Greeks. I’m sure you find us all rather, you know, big, vulgar, and boisterous.” Of an encouraging defection, a businessman remarks, “She could be our Coriolanus.” Watching a gala, Ewan Roy aptly notes that “Tacitus comes to mind. He’s made a wasteland and calls it an empire.” 

The allusions extend to the names as well. Rhea (the ‘Coriolanus’ character) is a pretty classical name for a 21st century woman. And Roman Roy isn’t just called Roman — his father’s pet name for him is “Romulus,” a reference both to Rome’s founder and to its last, forgettable emperor. And the rest of the inner circle seems to be in on it as well. With the team brought to a fairly humiliating look-over in Sweden, the general consul remarks, “They can be Vikings but we’ve been raised by wolves.” 

And when Tom Wambsgans — avowedly middle-class, from an outsider middle-American background — is facing a jail term, he checks out, of all possible reading material, “a big book on Roman history to read in prison.”

The not-so-subtle allusions (the show’s characters themselves get sick of them, with Logan telling his COO to “take your library card and fuck off” with his Coriolanus reference) are, taken together, meant to anchor a very particular narrative for the show. America is the Roman Empire is the basic premise. And the arc of America can then be charted with confidence — a loss of fundamental values and virtues; a tilt into autocracy and corruption; and then gradual, inexorable decline followed sooner or later by catastrophe. 

What’s interesting about us as a society is that, a long time ago, we wrote our own epitaph; we just know that this is how it’s going to end. Much of it is the explicit structuring of American government on the Roman Republic — the Senate; the consciously Neo-Classical architecture; the Latinate phrasation; the myths of Washington as “Cincinnatus,” Adams as “Cicero,” and so on — and then, with the pronounced turn towards Empire around the time of World World II, and with it, an extension of the imperial power of the presidency, it’s become a fusty genre to simultaneously decry the abandonment of republican virtues while assuming that nothing really can be done about it. (It’s treated as kind of a given of Roman history that, after 500 years as a republic, the turn towards empire was irrevocable; once that system was established, ‘the die cast,’ there was never a serious attempt to turn back the dial, to restore the careful republican balances.) 

Succession maps itself exactly on this set of ideas. On one side of the divide is Ewan, the embodiment of republican virtues, with his personal integrity, his store of classical quotations; and then, all the way on the other side, is the image of the collapse of the civilization, the stony-eyed protestors in the show’s penultimate episode standing for the barbarians; Matsson and his Swedish techies meant to suggest Viking pillage. The Roy media empire is what takes us from one point to the other — the diet of bread-and-circuses, of populist and yet-self-aggrandizing politics, of the steady consolidation of power — and the premise is that the perspective advanced by Ewan (and by other ‘noble’ republicans like the Pierces or Senator Eavis) is completely unavailing against the sheer animal force of the Roy empire, of money and power in their naked, essential form. 

And I suppose what’s most interesting about Succession is that it doesn’t attempt to fight this narrative at all — takes it for granted. The various claimants to the purple try, at different times, to present themselves as espousing some better set of values. Shiv’s shtick is that she’s fighting the patriarchy; that appeals, above all, to the Pierces. Kendall has some idea of being a cleaner, more humane version of the empire; more tech, more charts, less office brutality. But, as the characters approach the sanctums of power, the pretenses fall away. In probably the show’s most memorable line, Logan tells Kendall, “You’re smart and you’re good, and nowadays maybe [it’s different], but you’re not a killer. You have to be a killer.”

Which is feedback that Kendall really takes in — and, the next time we see him, he has a very different look. Same goes for Shiv anytime she comes near the top. The liberal, feminist sensibility turns out to run very thin, and proximity to power for her always means back-stabbing and betrayal, an ironclad sense of power as a zero-sum game. 

There is never even a hint that some other system might actually prevail — nothing like the concluding scene of Gladiator, where the dying Russell Crowe gets the bright idea of turning Rome back into a Republic. And, sort of astonishingly, there is even less optimism in Succession than in HBO’s other great Roman Empire-themed show, Game of Thrones.

Recently (trying to keep up with my 9-year-old brother and his encyclopedic knowledge of history) I’ve been reading about the Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE — a period that’s poorly documented and rarely thought about — and sort of couldn’t believe how much that period matched up with Game of Thrones. There’s Hadrian’s Wall falling into abeyance; there’s the start of the barbarian incursions; the emergence of palace eunuchs; of mothers wielding outsize power over child emperors; of adventurers-turned-emperors; of potentates serving as regent-for-life in the name of pliable emperors. Even many of the names (e.g. Valyrian) line up. As far as I can tell, Joffrey is Heliogabalus, Cersei — Julia Maesa, Bron — Philip the Arab, Theon — Valerian; Tommen — Gordian II; Euron — Stilicho; Yara - Bodicaea; the Sparrows — the Christians; the religion of the Red God — Mithraism; the Wildlings invasion — the Great Conspiracy. 

But, in Game of Thrones, despite the incessant breakdown of the social order and the flourishing of various sociopaths, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Game of Thrones, in its historical references, mashes up the later Roman Empire with the High Middle Ages, and if there is a sense at the end of Game of Thrones of the world dissolving into medieval mythology (Daenerys, Bran), there is also, more pertinently, an idea that shrewd, enlightened figures (Tyrion, Varys) could create, in a word, the Renaissance, push past the medieval mumbo-jumbo and the zero-sum sociopathic politics and develop an efficient, technocratic state built on something other than brute force. 

Succession — which more closely mirrors contemporary American reality — offers no similar path out. The premise is that money has captured the political system (Logan may be exaggerating when he calls the president “an intern” but only slightly) while oligarchy and nepotism have supplanted the meritocracy. People who are working their way up the ladder — like Tom, like Rhea — are well-served by displaying the absolute minimum of personal initiative or integrity, by slavishly turning themselves over to whomever happens to be in charge. 

It is an extraordinarily bleak vision — and the show’s creators are brilliant in making it as bleak as possible. As the finale makes clear, the show is really about Kendall — and always had been. Kendall’s central problem — as Logan had observed; and which underscores the constant criticism of him by other characters within the show — is that he’s fundamentally a pretty nice, gentle person. He’s not — using the terms that are regularly thrown out for Logan — “a brute,” “a silverback,” “a bastard.” And nobody can ever forgive him for being not that; for being not his father. 

There’s a parallel scene in Game of Thrones in which Daenerys revisits the Dothraki years after she had been their queen and finds them to be fairly pleasant, low-key barbarians, far less musculatured or ambitious than what she is used to — and is thoroughly disgusted with how far they have fallen. From the perspective of Daenerys or the Roy siblings or the mindset we get into as we watch these shows, we might be upset with the Dothraki and with Kendall for being weak, for not having what Kendall calls the “magnificent awful force” of Logan.

But — the shows’ creators keep quietly insisting — this is not a good way to think. Societies get into dangerous places when they venerate force; when they fall for the charisma of raw power. It can work for a generation or so, with the sort of leader who combines authority with a degree of benevolence (e.g. Robert Baratheon), but sooner or later it fractionalizes and, in the scramble for power, it’s the sociopaths who have all the advantages. Kendall seems, throughout the show, like a somewhat weak, somewhat awkward figure, who’s not really ready for the challenges of running Waystar Royco, but that’s actually not what the show is about. What it’s about is the breaking of a fundamentally good man — of someone who would have been a fair, reform-minded administrator but who cannot compete with a veneration of force (and, with that, of sociopathy) that runs through the culture.   

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dir. Todd Field, based on a novel by Tom Perrotta, with Kate Winslett as Sarah, Patrick Wilson as Brad, and Jackie Earle Haley as Ronnie

Startling in its ambition. The claim with Little Children is that castration—both figuratively and literally—is the price to pay for living in the suburbs, for normalcy. 

This castration occurs in many different forms throughout Little Children. It’s in the story of Brad’s long emasculation—the overriding arc of the film is, essentially, his one last stint of youthful glory before he settles down and takes the bar exam. It’s in the story of Sarah, frenetically underlying the passages of love poetry that remind her of Brad, pressing flowers into books, and advocating for adultery in her book club meeting. It’s in the thwarted hedonism of Richard, Sarah’s husband, who holds that “if there was one thing life had taught him it was that it was ridiculous to be at war with your own desires,” but whose desires are manifest in an affair with a woman he had “seen only as a digital image” and who is able to act out on them only by masturbating to a pair of panties sent to him in the mail. In the world of the film, everyone is lusting after everyone else, everyone is having affairs at any available opportunity, and the entirety of the actual life of the community exists in fantasy—while the ‘real world’ of jobs and houses and responsibilities is neutered, valueless. And these tensions are most fully realized not with the protagonists—the Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson characters, who are essentially just carrying out a summertime fantasy—but with the marginals, the Noah Emmerich character Larry in desperate need of some sort of redemption, and the pedophile Ronnie who makes literal the physic castration that everybody else is too shy to openly articulate. 

I sort of can’t believe that Little Children was actually made. Apparently its own production company couldn’t quite believe it either and effectively buried the movie, losing millions of dollars on it and possibly costing themselves several Oscars. And I certainly can share the queasiness of the New Line executives—there’s the castration scene, the pool scene, and the structuring that makes Ronnie, together with his mother, by far the most sympathetic character. The creepiness of the pool scene is difficult to take in—the pervert as a lost little child like all the other children lining the pool staring at him; and the pervert as some very strange other sort of creature, in his flippers and goggles, diving underwater to escape for a moment from all the stares. 

Probably the most vivid moment in Little Children is the date between Ronnie and Sheila. A moment of real apparent empathy—Sheila discussing her breakdown and Ronnie accepting it as it is, treating it as something that makes her interesting as opposed to broken—and then, as soon as Ronnie is alone in the car with Sheila, masturbating furiously and threatening to kill her if she tells on him. With the point being that sex is an untamable desire—that sex makes us not ourselves; and that there is no bridge between a ‘normal,’ ‘healthy’ existence and the tangle of our sexuality. 

dir. Todd Field, based on a short story by Andre Dubus, with Sissy Spacek as Ruth Fowler and Tom Wilkinson as Matt Fowler

I saw In The Bedroom when it came out; was definitely too young to take in what it really was. 

It’s about as ambitious, and shattering, a film as there is—an attempt to go right to the heart of grief, to really understand what happens to parents when they lose a child, and, at the same time, to create a work of art that’s as embronzed, as eternal, as any Greek myth. 

At the time I saw In The Bedroom I hadn’t lost anyone. A few years after that I lost a friend who was around the same age as Frank, similarly a golden boy, and whose parents reacted very much as Frank’s did—the mother who talked about nothing else, the father who never talked about it. Internally, I pictured the marriage as looking a bit like Matt and Ruth’s—the impossibility of communicating; the never-ending recriminating, second-guessing; the never-ending misery. The sense that everything in the world reminded them of their son; that everything in the world had curdled on them. 

And In The Bedroom, in its grippingly intense, small town-ish way, does offer some kind of a path towards peace and closure. Which is a very Greek sense of things—that if your son is murdered by someone else in the town then, eventually, as part of the grieving process, you need to coolly, deliberately execute your son’s murderer. 

In the world that Field and Dubus create, a bloodied finger actually can close up and heal. It actually is possible to get away with a clean murder. A grieving mother actually can love her husband again—can make him his morning coffee and a hearty breakfast—when he comes home having finally done the deed. It’s a very different vision from anything in the culture—which is all about forgiveness, moving-on, being healthy, letting time heal grief. In In The Bedroom, however—which is the same perspective as Clytemnestra’s or Medea’s—certain crimes are unforgivable; certain griefs only dealt with by returning to the source and closing the circle. It becomes clear after not too long that that’s the only possible way to handle loss on this scale. “Did you ever think about moving away?” Willis, Matt’s friend, asks him. “Yeah, we did, it wouldn’t matter,” says Matt. “No one should ever have to hear stuff like that,” says Matt to Ruth when the two of them have fully broken the ice, had their major fight. And Ruth replies, “No, you’re right, Matt, I am horrible”—in other words, they have gotten to the psychic floor, to a place where all the usual American coping mechanisms are unavailing; and which calls for a treatment that is more Old World i.e. revenge, blood passion. It’s very fitting that Ruth is the conductor of a Balkan chorus. And it’s fully appropriate, in this world, that the attempt at reconciliation by Natalie—such an important figure in the whole tragedy—is met with a hard slap by Ruth, who then puts her headphones back on, listens to her Balkan music (and that’s the last we ever hear from Natalie).

Every scene in In The Bedroom—and the same could be said for every scene in all three of Field’s films—is a masterpiece. Every shot perfectly composed. Every line significant, resonant. The scene of scenes in In The Bedroom is a regular poker game played after Frank’s murder—a silence falling on the group at the moment when Matt, as is his habit, dawdles too long looking at his cards. “Say something for chrissake,” says Matt. “Quit pussyfooting around me. ‘You want me to stare at these cards all night?’” At which point all the other poker players, in unison, look to Carl, an otherwise unimportant character, who happens to know swathes of poetry by heart, and Carl recites:

There are things of which I cannot speak 

There are thoughts that may not die 

There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak 

And bring a pallor into the cheek and a mist before the eye

And the words of that fatal song come over me like a chill 

A boy’s will 

Is the wind’s will 

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts

I don’t entirely know why that poem is the perfect poem for the moment, for the movie. Why the image that stays with Matt in the end—the sole loose end of his crime, so to speak—is a photograph of Richard and Natalie hanging on Richard’s bathroom wall. And Matt can’t explain it either. “What, Matt, what?” Ruth asks him. And Matt replies simply, accurately, “I don’t know.” The point is that there’s something not quite contained in the tidy circle of the revenge drama—something about youth, the infinitude of youth, the joys of not knowing what life brings, that have a resonance and immortality all of their own.