Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 20

Your Guide to Who's Performing at Trump's Inauguration

It is not true, as a lot of commentary would have it, that Donald Trump’s inauguration will feature “no stars.” Some of the entertainers who have signed on to play have, in fact, built their success on entertaining millions of people. But it is true that what’s considered “the A-list” will be conspicuously absent, as will be acts from other lists: The B-Street Band, a Bruce Springsteen tribute group, backed out from an unofficial inaugural party after outcry; Broadway singer Jennifer Holliday reneged from the main concert event.

The mix of entertainers lined up for Thursday’s “Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration” on the National Mall and Friday’s swearing-in ceremony represents a hodgepodge of ideology and expediency. In a savvy MTV essay about Trump’s national-anthem singer Jackie Evancho, Doreen St. Félix argued that booking the 16-year-old America’s Got Talent runner up was “a matter of scavenging, and then gilding over the spoils”—a description that could apply across the lineup given the many headlines about Trump’s team getting turned down by celebrities then saying that not having famous people is a good thing. But in its relative lack of glitz, and in its coalition of performers well familiar to state-fair stages, this week’s bill may inadvertently achieve the stated inaugural goal of projecting an image not of Trump but of the people who elected him.

One group of musicians have made careers off of earnest performances of support-the-troops patriotism—which is to say they are, for the most part, country singers. Thursday night will bring out Toby Keith, the nation’s reigning musical jingoist, who aired post-9/11 rage and pride in “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American),” “American Soldier,” and “Made In America.” The first song of that list is his most indelible, a reminder of the kind of blow-’em-to-hell rhetoric that the administration of the past eight years has avoided but that Trump has vowed a return to.

Keith will be joined by comrades in genre, like the Frontmen of Country, a trio of Lonestar’s Richie McDonald, Little Texas’s Tim Rushlow, and Restless Heart’s Larry Stewart. He’ll also have comrades in troops tributes, in the form of 3 Doors Down, the post-grunge band known both for early-2000s smashes (“Kryptonite,” “When I’m Gone”) and for a promotional partnership with the National Guard. And he’ll have a comrade in both genre and iconic patriotism: Lee Greenwood, the country singer of 1984’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Jon Voight, the actor who’s been one of the most outspoken critics of liberal Hollywood, will also play some sort of role in Thursday’s concert, as will Trump himself.

There’ll also be performers of less obvious political or aesthetic identification with Trump. Take the unexplained case of DJ Ravi Drums, a self-styled futuristic solo drummer and DJ whose claims to fame include a cameo in The Matrix Reloaded’s party scene, a role on Howie Mandel’s short-lived NBC variety show Howie Do It, and, most internet-famously, a 2008 Wii Music demonstration that many took as unintended comedy. He hasn’t spoken about the politics of this upcoming gig, but his website makes it seem as though his bread-and-butter are corporate and private parties; the inaugural publicity could help with those.

Other acts have put forth a standard line about the inauguration, talking about non-partisan civic duty and a desire to wish the president—any president—well. “I was a participant in the civil rights movement and have seen many positive changes and advancement in my 81 years of living in this wonderful country, but I know we must all join hands and work together with our new president,” the soul singer Sam Moore, formerly of Sam and Dave, said. And indeed, he played an Obama inaugural event in 2008.

Other artists have more visibly struggled with the decision to play. “I just kind of thought that this is for my country,” the 16-year-old Evancho has said, though Trump himself turned her into something of a political prop by taking credit for a boost in her album sales after she became the first recognizable name to sign on to perform. Profiles both by The New York Times and CBS have spotlighted the backlash that has visited the teenager lately; they have also publicized the fact that her sister Juliet is transgender and supports the decision to perform, but will be skipping the inauguration.

Utah’s The Piano Guys, a band of classical and pop players whose videos radiate uplift and dad-next-door vibes, have also given the typical line that they’re performing out of duty. But they elaborated in a lengthy statement to fans about where they depart from Trump’s public image:

Those of you who know us, know we grew up as “nerdy” musicians and we experienced bullying firsthand. We abhor and decry bullying. You know that we honor our relationships with our spouses more than anything else. You know we believe women are Divinely appointed to not only equality, but also respect and chivalrous deference.

The tension between the notion of doing one’s civic duty and the notion that Donald Trump embodies incivility has also drawn attention to the Rockettes, some of whose members reportedly clashed with management over the decision to play, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who lost at least one singer because of the issue. They, along with Evancho, will make their contributions before the swearing-in on Friday, with the Tabernacle Choir apparently set to sing “America the Beautiful.”

Setting aside the American institutions that are the Rockettes and the Tabernacle Choir (and maybe Toby Keith), Trump’s inaugural musicians all clearly might stand to gain by the attention surrounding the event—either because they’re past their heyday or still on a career climb. Whether their careers actually end up benefiting depends to some extent on how they do on stage. But it depends, perhaps more, on what happens in America in the years after.

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The GOP’s Favorite Democrat Goes to Syria

Representative Tulsi Gabbard is traveling to Syria and Lebanon for what her office called a fact-finding trip—her latest controversial move that will likely frustrate her fellow Democrats.

A statement from her office declined to comment on who Gabbard will specifically meet in Syria, citing security concerns, but noted she would meet with “a number of individuals and groups including religious leaders, humanitarian workers, refugees and government and community leaders.” It’s unclear if those government officials include Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who will likely welcome the prospect of meeting an elected American lawmaker as he tightens his grip on power. News of her trip was first reported by Foreign Policy.

The Obama administration and its Western allies have called for Assad’s ouster, and have backed some rebels groups opposed to him in the more than five-year civil war that has spawned a humanitarian disaster. President-elect Trump says the U.S. should focus on the real enemy: ISIS, which is one of many groups fighting Assad. Gabbard holds that view, as well. She recently introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, which would make it unlawful for the U.S. government to support groups allied with and supporting terrorist organizations, some of which are fighting Assad. Still, her visit to Syria, in theory, may constitute a violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits unauthorized individuals from contacting a foreign government that’s engaged in a dispute with the U.S. It’s worth pointing out, however, that no one has ever been prosecuted for alleged violations of the act.

Gabbard is an Iraq War veteran and two-term Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii. She supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, was born in American Samoa, and is the first Hindu to be elected to the Congress. She was mentioned as Trump’s likely choice for U.S. ambassador to the UN—the job ultimately went to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley—and even met with him after the November election.

In a statement after their meeting, she said said the two discussed foreign policy, and criticized what she called “interventionist, regime change warfare.”

Gabbard’s worldview aligns closely with Trump’s stated foreign-policy positions: For instance, she says she believes Assad should remain in power while the U.S. targets ISIS (as does Trump). She has praised Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian strongman, who has cracked down on Islamist groups in his own country after a military-backed coup ousted the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood-inspired president (Trump called him “a fantastic guy.”) She has also lauded Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister whose political party draws inspiration from Hindu nationalism and some of whose members have been linked to anti-Muslim violence (Trump called Modi a “great man.”) And, much like Trump and his supporters, she has criticized President Obama over his reluctance to calls ISIS an “Islamic” group, saying the president “is completely missing the pointing of this radical Islamic ideology that’s fueling these people.”

It is for such positions that The Washington Post dubbed Gabbard “The Democrat that Republicans love and the DNC can’t control.” Gabbard is reportedly a favorite of Steve Bannon, the former CEO of Breitbart News who now is the president-elect’s chief strategist. Bannon, who has described Breitbart as a “platform” for alt-right views, which combine white nationalism and economic populism, has praised Gabbard’s views on guns—she supports some gun restrictions, but not others; her alignment with Republican senators on Syrian refugees coming to the U.S.; and, of course, Islamist terrorism. Indeed, Gabbard’s name was not among the 169 Democratic lawmakers who wrote to Trump criticizing his hiring of Bannon.

Gabbard’s family background is no less interesting. Her father, Mike Gabbard, is a Hawaii state senator, who is perhaps best known for his vocal opposition to same-sex marriage, a position his daughter shared until, she said, she went to Iraq and experienced “what happens when a government basically attempts to act as a moral arbiter.” The elder Gabbard, a Republican turned Democrat, is a practicing Roman Catholic, but has been tied to an extreme form of Hinduism that has been called a cult. Her mother, Carol, is a practicing Hindu, and Gabbard converted to the religion while in her teens. The congresswoman has been a vocal advocate against the persecution of Hindus, especially in Muslim-majority countries, but denies she supports Hindu nationalists groups in India. Gabbard also denies her religion has shaped her opinion of Islam, telling Quartz that her views were shaped by “serving in the Middle East.”  

Before she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Gabbard served in the Hawaii House of Representatives from 2002 to 2004. She was 21 at the time of her election. She joined the National Guard during her term, deployed to Iraq in 2004 as part of a field medical unit, attended Officer Candidate School, and returned to Iraq in 2009. Between the two deployments, she worked as a legislative aide to Daniel Akaka, the longtime U.S. senator from Hawaii. In 2010, she was elected to the Honolulu City Council. Two years later, she was elected to Congress, where she served on the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, and was spoken of as a future governor of Hawaii or U.S. senator. With her visit to Syria, Gabbard is likely to remain in the foreign-policy conversation for some time.

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The (Final) Problem With Sherlock

This story contains spoilers through the most recent episode of Sherlock.

Christopher Nolan is a truly brilliant British creative talent, which makes it all the more ironic that his work seems to have (at least temporarily) unmoored two of that nation’s greatest fictional heroes. In dampening the palette and tone of superhero movies so spectacularly with his trilogy of Batman movies, Nolan created a domino effect that stretched all the way across the ocean, transforming James Bond from a louche, debonair intelligence agent into a tortured, self-medicating hitman, compelled by the death of his parents to hunt down a series of increasingly psychopathic villains. And, as “The Final Problem” revealed on Sunday, Nolan’s influence has similarly transformed Sherlock. A wry detective drama with a twist has turned into a superhero origin story, complete with agonizing childhood trauma, terrifying antagonists with improbable powers, and a final showdown in an ancestral home burned to the ground.

Mark Gatiss, who co-created Sherlock with Steven Moffat, and who co-wrote “The Final Problem,” in addition to playing Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, has hinted before that Sherlock exists in the same fictional universe as James Bond. At the end of season three, Mycroft defends his brother by saying, “As my colleague is fond of remarking, this country sometimes needs a blunt instrument.” The comment alludes to “M,” the head of MI6, who once derided James Bond using the same language, but it also seems to explain what made the fourth season of Sherlock such a mess. Sherlock Holmes is anything but a blunt instrument: He’s the embodiment of brains defeating brawn; of observation and intellect, not firepower, saving the realm. The last three episodes of Sherlock, by contrast, have obsessed over their hero’s emotional and intellectual vulnerabilities, and in doing so have lost touch with what made the show so dazzling to begin with.

It’s a problem that seems to have begun with Mary (Amanda Abbington), introduced as John Watson’s fiancée in season three in “The Empty Hearse,” but then unmasked as a former superspy and freelance assassin in “His Last Vow.” That revelation tipped Sherlock from heightened realism into implausible, comic-book inspired fantasy, complete with a grotesque villain holed up in an architecturally splendid hideaway. The most ingenious scenes in that season showed Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) retreating into his mind palace to reason his way through a series of head-scratchers. But, in the end, brawn triumphed. Sherlock, unable to defeat a tyrannical media baron through brainpower alone, shot him in the head, declaring himself to be a “high-functioning sociopath” in order to justify the act.

The moment seemed to crystallize Sherlock’s evolution (Mycroft’s “blunt instrument” comments came in a scene not long after). And season four’s three episodes have doubled down, focusing largely on the tribulations of the show’s main characters and nodding only occasionally at intriguing puzzles. It’s no coincidence that “The Lying Detective” was the best work of the season—it was the only episode that actually presented Sherlock with a substantial case, namely a monstrous millionaire moonlighting as a serial killer. By contrast, “The Six Thatchers” dealt almost entirely with Mary’s past before dispatching her to provide narrative trauma for Sherlock and John (Martin Freeman), while “The Final Problem” was a climactic mess, seemingly indulging the writers’ instincts to have a lark, consistency be damned. “You got a lot of actual plot for your entrance fee,” Moffat told Entertainment Weekly. “The final sequence running around trying to stop a plane crash, trying to solve a puzzle, and John Watson drowning — I just thought it was breakneck and fun.”

I wrote two weeks ago about being disappointed with Mary’s death, and wondering why such a brilliant show has such problems fitting intriguing female characters into its universe. The emergence of Eurus (Sian Brooke) as Sherlock’s secret sister in “The Lying Detective” seemed to signal how wrong this was, but the Eurus of “The Final Problem” was somehow a completely different character still: a bizarre mashup of the supernatural monster Samara in The Ring and Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva, a wronged former ally/family member intent on revenge, in Skyfall. Eurus, who played three distinct characters convincingly in a previous episode, was suddenly a horror cliché with lank black hair and dead eyes, using mind control to compel others to do awful things, and plotting extravagant riddles for her brother that put his friends in mortal danger.

Things got weaker still when the action suddenly shifted to Sherlock, Mycroft, and Eurus’s childhood home, a pile of stones as stately as Skyfall or Wayne Manor (both of those, you’ll remember, also ended up being obliterated by baddies bearing grudges). John, trapped in a well, discovered the bones of a child (another echo of The Ring), which led Sherlock to discover another memory he’d suppressed, along with any awareness of his sister. Decades ago Eurus, jealous of Sherlock’s closeness with his best friend, Victor, trapped Victor in a well and gave Sherlock a puzzle that would lead to him. But Sherlock couldn’t solve the riddle, Victor died, and Sherlock’s tormented psyche reimagined Victor as “Redbeard,” a dog, while also prompting him to shut down the human side of his personality and clinically investigate crimes for the rest of his life as penance.

It was an episode that resisted attempts to make sense of it. Why did Eurus disguise herself and offer Sherlock clues to a case he was investigating, not to mention disguise herself and try to seduce John Watson? If she managed to escape Sherrinford, the maximum-security island fort where she’d been imprisoned for most of her life, why go back to her cell? Why would she compel Moriarty five years ago to record thousands of convenient gifs and soundbites for a larger plan to get revenge on her brothers but then do nothing when Moriarty forced Sherlock to commit suicide in “The Reichenbach Fall”? Rather than illuminate the complex fabric of the show, as good series finales do, “The Final Problem” poked holes in it, pulling any threads of narrative consistency apart.

It also seemed to conclusively bring Sherlock to an end, complete with a voiceover from the now-deceased Mary essentially declaring that everyone lived happily ever after. Given that it took three years just to get a fourth season, thanks to the stratospheric rise of the show’s stars and their increasingly clogged schedules, it’s fair to assume that new episodes will be a long time coming, if they ever materialize. And, with the direction the show’s taken, it’s easier to say goodbye to it than it might have been a month ago. Modern culture is saturated with superheroes and their nemeses and their gadgets and their secret pain. But Sherlock, at its best, was unlike anything else on air: a celebration of a hero whose primary motivation was simply thinking things through.

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What 'Brexit Means Brexit' Means

British Prime Minister Theresa May laid out in the clearest terms yet the government’s vision for a post-Brexit U.K., saying she hopes to have the best deal possible for free trade with the European Union, but one that “will ensure we can control immigration to Britain from Europe.”

Although May’s remarks offered little in terms of policy specifics, they should put to rest any speculation the British government would somehow reverse the results of the Brexit referendum. The message from May was clear: Britons voted last June to leave the EU and the government would deliver on that demand.

May, who said in June that “Brexit means Brexit,” said the U.K. won’t seek access to the European single market; will control immigration from Europe; and seek free-trade deals with the EU and beyond. She also warned the EU against taking punitive actions against the U.K. for leaving the bloc, saying it “would be an act of calamitous self-harm for the countries of Europe.”

Before any of this, though, the U.K. must invoke Article 50 of the EU charter, the step by which it can begin official talks to leave the EU. May is expected to do that in March. Talks with the EU are expected to take two years, during which the two sides will negotiate what the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU will look like. May said any final deal with the EU would be put before Parliament for a vote.

In her remarks, May spoke of Britain’s relationship with Europe and beyond. “We are a European country—and proud of our shared European heritage,” she said. “But we are also a country that has always looked beyond Europe to the wider world.”

She said a strong EU was in the U.K.’s interests, but urged the bloc to heed the lessons from her country’s impending exit. She said the EU “bends toward uniformity, not flexibility,” adding its inflexibility on matters important to the U.K. contributed to the Leave vote.

“Britain is not the only member state where there is a strong attachment to accountable and democratic government, such a strong internationalist mindset, or a belief that diversity within Europe should be celebrated,” she said. “And so I believe there is a lesson in Brexit not just for Britain but, if it wants to succeed, for the EU itself.”

Brexit, May said, would mean an end to the jurisdiction over the U.K. of the European Court of Justice, which rules on disputes between member states and ensures European law is interpreted the same way across the bloc; allow the government to “control immigration to Britain from Europe,” and a stop annual contributions to the EU budget. But, she added, the U.K. would seek to ensure “the rights of EU citizens who are already living in Britain, and the rights of British nationals in other member states, as early as we can.”

May said the U.K. was “leaving the European Union, but we are not leaving Europe.” But she was also clear about her country’s future relationship with the bloc: The U.K. did not want “partial membership of the European Union, associate membership of the European Union, or anything that leaves us half-in, half-out. … No, the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union. And my job is to get the right deal for Britain as we do.”

Supporters of Britain’s continued membership in the EU—and indeed even some politicians who supported leaving—have floated arrangements such as those enjoyed by Norway, which is not an EU member, but gets some of the same benefits as member states. May said the U.K. would pursue a new free-trade agreement with the bloc, but will not seek access to the European single market. That issue of has perhaps been the single-biggest obstacle to a smooth Brexit even before the process has been set in motion. The EU says it won’t consider single-market access for the U.K. unless it accepts the “four freedoms”—goods, capital, services, and people. And because the UK wants to limit the number of migrants coming to its territory, single-market membership appears to be a nonstarter—even though Brexit proponents such as Boris Johnson, now the UK foreign minister, had said the UK would remain a member of the single market.

May said any agreement with the EU “should allow for the freest possible trade in goods and services between Britain and the EU’s member states. It should give British companies the maximum freedom to trade with and operate within European markets—and let European businesses do the same in Britain.” Judging by what May appears to be asking for—access to the single market in all but name—that might prove a contentious point during negotiations.

The U.K., May added, would also pursue free-trade deals with other nations. She noted that contrary to President Obama, who warned that the U.K. would move to the “back of the queue” on a trade deal with the U.S. if it voted to leave the EU, President-elect Trump noted Britain is not “at the back of the queue … but front of the line.”

May also warned European officials against trying to punish the U.K. for leaving the EU, saying any such move “would be an act of calamitous self-harm for the countries of Europe.” She said “no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal,” because it would still allow the country to trade with Europe and strike trade deals across the world. But for the EU, she said, among other things it “would mean a loss of access for European firms to the financial services of the City of London.”

The New Celebrity Apprentice and the Scourge of Faux Inclusivity

This post contains mild revelations about the results of season 15 of The New Celebrity Apprentice.

“We now live in an inclusive society where no one’s left out,” Boy George announced during Monday evening’s episode of The New Celebrity Apprentice. He shared this piece of good news while describing the series of ads he and his team had developed on behalf of Kawasaki’s new line of ergonomically customizable motorcycles. “The idea of this campaign,” the Culture Club singer explained to Arnold Schwarzenegger, The New Celebrity Apprentice’s recently installed new host, “was that, you know, anybody can be a biker—not just the traditional person who uses the bike. It’s open to everyone, whatever their sexuality, whatever their age, whatever their gender. And I think that was a really, really positive message.”

A positive message it was. And in response to it, Schwarzenegger replied: “Good.” The actor-turned-governor-turned-TV-host added no more to the conversation. Instead, he went on to fire (or, this being Schwarzenegger, to “terminate”) Kyle Richards, the Real Housewife who had been the project manager for the women’s team. Her firing came partially because the campaign the women had created for Kawasaki had failed to do enough to subvert traditional gender roles. At least, it had failed to do that in Schwarzenegger’s judgment, which is, in the show’s executivecentric universe, the only judgment that matters.

The New Celebrity Apprentice, like so many of its fellow reality shows, is extremely adept at making pageantry out of progress.

It was all, on the surface, a rousing endorsement of diversity and inclusion—a reality show, just as Boy George suggested, serving as a metaphor for reality itself. And it was unsurprising that the show would do that: The New Celebrity Apprentice, like so many of its fellow reality shows, is extremely skilled at making pageantry out of progress. And the newly Schwarzeneggered version of the show, to its credit, offers many of the same things the Trumped-up iteration did: an equal number of women contestants and men, of various ethnicities and backgrounds; a general focus not on contestants’ appearance, but on what they bring to the table; an opening montage that emphasizes moral extraversion by asking, in all caps, “WHAT IF … YOU COULD … MAKE A DIFFERENCE?” The initial episodes of Schwarzenegger’s version of The Celebrity Apprentice divided season 15’s contestants by gender, pitting men and women against each other and implying, in the process, that both groups are equally fit to compete in the only competition the show respects: the dogged pursuit of money (money, money, money, MUH-nay).

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The People Behind The Apprentice Owe America the Truth About Donald Trump

There are many, many criticisms you can make of The Celebrity Apprentice both as a franchise and a phenomenon, only some of them connected to the show’s money-myopia, only some others of them related to the man who was once the show’s host and who still serves, in a major ethical breach, as its executive producer. One argument in the show’s favor, however, is that it treats celebrity as the only currency that matters. In that very particular way, and despite its many absurdities, The New Celebrity Apprentice, which is not a ratings juggernaut but which is a show that airs during primetime on a major TV network, could be a productive force: It could model for its viewers the precise kind of society Boy George was describing in his speech. One broad argument for capitalism, after all, is that it is, as a system, less concerned with a person’s race or gender or age or appearance or sexual orientation than it is with that person’s ability to make money. The New Celebrity Apprentice, say what else you will about it, subscribes to this kind of brute egalitarianism.

But: It does so only on the most superficial of levels. The New Celebrity Apprentice’s sense of inclusion is perfectly attenuated to its genre: It offers “reality” that too often fails to be, well, reality. Boy George made his declaration about the “we” who “now live in an inclusive society” during the same week that will see the inauguration of a man who has publicly mocked the notion of inclusivity itself—a man who was propelled to the presidency with the help of the very show in which the “Karma Chameleon” singer was participating. The New Celebrity Apprentice champions diversity while often, at the same time, questioning its value. And, often, in the manner of its former host, outright mocking it.

Take Monday’s episode. Kawasaki, like many of the show’s previous advertisers (Tyra Banks cosmetics, Trident gum, Welch’s grape juice, King’s Hawaiian barbecue sauce) asked the celebrity contestants to design an ad campaign that would reflect their aspirations to expand their market. The brand, its executives told the contestants, wants to sell to women. It wants to sell to people of all shapes and sizes, not just to the biker dudes of tradition and cliché. And the men’s team, under the project managership of the TV personality Carson Kressley, responded to the request with an editorial-style fashion shoot featuring several celebrities—the drag queen Alaska Thunderf-ck, the comedian Jon Lovitz dressed as a priest, the Motley Crue frontman Vince Neil posing with his puppy, the former football player Ricky Williams posing with a cigar, Kressley  posing in the nude—astride a Kawasaki bike. The resulting images were meant to suggest the very thing Boy George claimed they did: diversity, idiosyncrasy, comfort in one’s own skin. The notion that “anybody can be a biker.”

The women, as has been the case in many of the new season’s challenges, had a harder time. They did their photo shoot in downtown LA, featuring themselves—the boxing champion Laila Ali, the basketball champion Lisa Leslie, Kyle Richards, Real Housewife Porsha Williams—posing on the bikes, in an effort to celebrate women’s empowerment. The actor and TV host Brooke Burke-Charvet enlisted the help of her husband, the former Baywatch star David Charvet, to pose with her on the bike—the idea being that she would be driving, with him in the back, because 2017 and women’s power and all that.

Charvet, however, adamantly refused. The man who would agree to be driven by his wife, he informed his wife, angrily, “is a stupid guy. That’s a stupid husband.” (“You’re not gonna look wimpy, because I’m a great driver!” Burke-Charvet said, further trying to convince him. Charvet responded, “Are you out of your tree? I would never trust you.”) Later, in a talking-head interview, Burke-Charvet tried to apologize for her husband: “He’s very macho,” she said apologetically, “and he’s not the most cooperative guy.”

And he really is not: The Charvets ended up doing the photo shoot with David in the driver’s seat of the Kawasaki, his wife clutching his midsection. The photo that resulted was pretty; it was not, however, terribly celebratory of the empowerment of women.

For that, Burke-Charvet almost got kicked off the show. For that, too, Richards got fired. That it all played out as it did would seem to suggest that the show wanted Burke-Charvet in the driver’s seat, with all that that implies. And so would the exchange about the photo that took place in the board room. “He could have just asked me to sit on the back of the bike,” Schwarzenegger told Burke-Charvet. “I would have been more than happy. I have no qualms about it—to look feminine sitting on the back of a motorcycle with a woman.”

“You would’ve gotten on the back of the bike?” Burke-Charvet asked, incredulously.

“Yes, absolutely,” Schwarzenegger replied. “Any time. For a photo—for selling something like this, I would do it in two seconds.”

Burke-Charvet, still incredulous, followed up. “And what about in real life? Would you have let me drive you on the back of a motorcycle?”

Schwarzenegger seemed to sense a trap. A look of discomfort crossed his face. “Absolutely. I would sit in the back of your bike,” he replied. “Of course I would…” His voice trailed off, awkwardly. They moved on.

There was The New Celebrity Apprentice in a nice, if awkward, nutshell: the performance of egalitarianism, pitted against the reality of it. For a photo, I would play the woman’s part. For selling something, I would do it in two seconds. When the issue is “real life,” however, the swagger switches to uncertainty. When things get real, “looking feminine” by being a passenger on a motorcycle is much less appealing for the man at the center of The New Celebrity Apprentice.

The New Celebrity Apprentice is a show that professes a kind of brute egalitarianism—progress, by way of a single-minded focus on fame.

The “reality”-versus-reality disconnect repeated itself several more times during Monday’s episode. There was, on the one hand, Kressley describing his team’s work like so: “Everyone was coming together in a spirit of love and togetherness. It’s a bike to remove barriers, and you should feel like you’re included, and it’s everyone’s bike. Anything’s possible. Everyone’s welcome.” And then there was on the other the MMA star Chael Sonnen, who was a part of that team, saying in a talking-head interview, “At some point the governor’s gonna say to me, ‘Did you have anything to do with the gay man and the drag queen on the motorcycle?’ And I’m gonna say, ‘Governor, what do you think?’”

There was Lovitz, watching Kressley’s nude photo shoot and making jokes about Purell. There he was again, caught by the show’s camera holding hands with Kressley as the men’s team reviewed the results of their photo shoot—and then saying to the former Queer Eye star, “Let’s not hold hands too long.” There was Kressley, narrating the campaign meant to celebrate society’s having surpassed its stereotypes, explaining one of the images the team created with this: “She’s the typical girl. She loves to shop.”

Again and again: The words, colliding against the reality. The pageantry of inclusion, proven, behind the scenes, to be messy and chaotic. In that, The New Celebrity Apprentice is a kind of metaphor, just as Boy George suggested—not necessarily for an inclusive society, but for a Hollywood that still struggles, so obviously, with representing America in all its shades and stripes.

The New Celebrity Apprentice is a show that professes equality between men and women, but is hosted by a man who was accused, in 2003, of sexually harassing six different women. Here is a show that used to be hosted by a man who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”—and who, in a 2013 board room conversation, commented to contestant Brande Roderick that “it must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.” The Apprentice is a franchise that tries to have it both ways—in many, many ways—not just when it comes to its now-enormous political conflicts, but also when it comes to the broader project of modeling social progress. It knows what it wants to be; repeatedly, it falls short of fulfilling that desire. That’s the problem with reality TV: Sooner or later, it’s going to have to reconcile with reality.

Will Hollywood Learn From Hidden Figures’s Success?

Hidden Figures has been the breakout film of 2017 thus far. Starring three African American women (played by Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monae, and Octavia Spencer), it focuses on an unheralded piece of American history: the work of black female mathematicians and engineers at NASA in the 1960s. Released to strong reviews, Hidden Figures seems destined for a few Academy Award nominations next week. Since it expanded nationwide, it has spent two weeks at the top of the box office, ahead of big-budget films like Monster Trucks, Patriots Day, Live By Night, and Oscar frontrunner La La Land. Made for a comparatively small $25 million, the film is essentially guaranteed to gross at least $100 million in the United States alone, posting a very healthy profit for its studio, 20th Century Fox. The viewing public’s desire for a film like Hidden Figures is indisputable. So why does Hollywood make so few of them?

In 2015, only 32 of the top 100 films at the box office featured a female lead or co-lead; only three of those leads were women of color, and almost half of them did not feature a black female character in any capacity. After having an all-white slate of acting nominees for two years in a row (spurring the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite), the Academy is trying to diversify its voting body with the hope of rewarding a broader selection of films. But Hollywood at large is showing few traces of change. Last year’s most successful films, largely superhero sequels and animated blockbusters, lack for variety in their storytelling. The slow nature of film production means it can take years to really reflect a shift in studio thinking, but Hidden Figures still feels (disappointingly) like an anomaly rather than a sign of a real transformation.

That said, it wouldn’t be hard for major studios to increase the number of films written by women: The ratio in 2015 was 69 percent male to 31 percent female, but by commissioning just five new scripts by women per year, things would be equal by 2018. But the supposed “surprise” of Hidden Figures’s success feels especially galling because it repeats a similar conversation from a year ago. Films like Creed and Straight Outta Compton were smash hits, clearly refuting the discriminatory maxim that films about people of color are more of a box-office risk for studios. A year later, Hidden Figures is “disproving” that trend yet again—even though that kind of backwards thinking about diversity should feel entirely irrelevant by now.

In its first weekend of wide release, Hidden Figures defied tracking numbers that saw it grossing less than the fourth weekend of Rogue One; it made $22 million, also beating out that week’s new blockbuster, Underworld: Brood Wars. For the subsequent four-day Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, Hidden Figures actually increased its gross, making $26 million and staying at number one, holding off the expansion of La La Land, the horror film The Bye Bye Man, and Paramount’s broad-skewing children’s adventure Monster Trucks.

That last film provides a particularly interesting lesson in Hollywood economics. The industry, in general, has focused in recent years on films that have the potential to be launching pads for major franchises. As the movie business becomes more globally focused and tries to compete with TVs that can offer a near-theater-quality viewing experience at home, splashy big-budget extravaganzas have become a routine matter of course. This is frequently put forward as an explanation for why Hollywood seems loath to cast actors of color in leading roles, because they supposedly have less market pull worldwide (an argument soundly disproven by hits like the Fast & Furious franchise or Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as well as many smaller-scale films).

And yet Monster Trucks is a patently silly piece of kids entertainment about a young man who finds a squid-like monster living in his truck. It stars Lucas Till, hardly an A-lister (though he had a small role in the recent X-Men movies), and cost $125 million to make—$100 million more than Hidden Figures. Devoting such a large budget to a film with little brand recognition that was basically guaranteed to get terrible reviews was quickly regarded as a disastrous decision. Viacom, the company that owns the Monster Trucks studio Paramount Pictures, took a $115 million write-down in earnings last September in anticipation of its failure (it opened to a lackluster $15 million last weekend).

This is what Hollywood’s emphasis on big-budget films with “broad appeal” inevitably leads to: hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on toy-focused action films with no real audience. For the cost of Monster Trucks, Paramount could have made five Hidden Figures—smaller films, focused on telling grounded stories to fill a market gap that studios continue to ignore. That Hidden Figures’s success has to serve as a lesson to Hollywood in 2017 is ridiculous, but the lesson is nonetheless there to be learned. Audiences are hungry for films that look beyond the movie industry’s narrow worldview. It’s time to start delivering them.

Finding Meaning in Going Nowhere

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.

Doug McLean

A few weeks ago, Ottessa Moshfegh, the author of the new short-story collection Homesick for Another World, sent me a video of the Scottish-born singer Lena Zavaroni. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of her: Zavaroni’s performance of Neil Sedaka’s “Going Nowhere” is so charismatic and emotionally affecting that she seems destined for the brightest fame. Then I read the story of her tragic, too-short life. A child star with a grown-up voice, people once thought she’d be the next Barbra Streisand. But anorexia, a lifelong struggle that started in her early teens, drew her inward and ultimately away from public life. Zavaroni’s final, most dramatic attempt to save herself was to request experimental brain surgery—the exact details are unclear. Some accounts suggest the procedure was successful, but we’ll never know: She contracted pneumonia in the process, an infection her starved body couldn’t handle, and she died at 35.

In a conversation for this series, Moshfegh explained how the lyrics to “Going Nowhere” recall her own struggles with depression, eating disorders, and ennui. We discussed how writing helped her find purpose and a place, and how the creative process brings her into occasional contact with something even more transcendent: the state of heightened receptivity you glimpse in Zavaroni as she sings, a feeling good enough to guide a life and give it meaning.

The protagonists of Homesick for Another World are alienated outsiders, desperate to find home somehow but not sure how to get there. (Maybe the child narrator of “A Better Place” says it best: “Earth is the wrong place for me, always was and will be until I die.”) As her characters—a motley assortment of weirdos and grotesques—seek solace in romantic infatuation and sexual debasement, Moshfegh’s frightening, funny, and oddly tender portraits explore the ways some people come to love the things that most disgust them.

Moshfegh’s first novel, Eileen, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize; her stories have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications. She spoke to me by phone.

Ottessa Moshfegh: I discovered the singer Lena Zavaroni online in 2012. When I saw her performance of “Going Nowhere,” I was completely stunned. The lyrics don’t especially move me, the way they’re written on the page. It’s her performance—you’re watching a woman who is so clearly struggling to find a reason to live. And her delivery elevates the lyrics somehow, helps you realize the words are just so honest and true.

It’s a TV program, probably one of those variety TV shows. The music starts, and then it pans over to her onstage. She’s wearing this long-sleeved, skin-colored gown, and looks so fragile—but absolutely self-possessed. Like she’s carrying the entire weight of the world inside of her. Her eyes are totally clear. When she’s singing you can see into her mouth, which looks like the mouth of a child. I find that really moving, somehow. She’s not a woman, though she's certainly not a child anymore. She’s something else. Like an angel of pain.

When you’re performing onstage, you can’t see anything. The lights are in your face, and it’s total darkness. So she must not have been able to see the audience—she belted out this song from the bottom of her heart into the abyss. As the song goes on she gets more and more into it. You can see her working herself up. Not in the Mick Jagger, I’m-losing-my-mind kind of way. You just get the sense she’s feeling every single word. “Most of you would tell me that I’m crazy, yes I’m crazy / I can’t help it,” she sings, and you believe her.

When the song ends, she’s kind of stunned. She blinks as though she’s coming out of a trance. Then people start applauding—which has always seemed ridiculous to me, to politely applaud this brutal song that grapples with the deep-down meaningless of everything. But she responds so sweetly, and you can tell it makes her feel wonderful—the way she almost giggles, placing her hand on her heart.

I always wonder what happened once she went offstage.

Her story just breaks my heart. She was one of those terrible cases of anorexia. There was nothing anyone could do to help her. Eventually, she insisted on having what sounds like a partial lobotomy in an attempt to cure her depression. Also electro-convulsive therapy, and drugs. I don’t think Lena ever had the appreciation from the world that she deserved, because she was so ill mentally and physically, and because she died so young. She was something of a mystery to people.

If there is a reason to live, maybe it is just in the relating to one another and making beautiful art.

I can’t imagine growing up in the spotlight the way she did. She was discovered in Scotland at a very young age. Wasn’t a beautiful, pretty child or anything—her incredible spirit and ambition made her stand out, and her phenomenal musical talent. My sense is that her mom was insane; in 1989, she burned down the house, destroying all her daughter’s career memorabilia. Reading between the lines, it just seems like—this is your punishment for leaving me, for trying to have a life of your own. That’s all I can assume. I don’t think an artist gets this complicated and deep unless they’ve been totally betrayed by their family. Her mother committed suicide.

In this performance of “Going Nowhere,” I can see that Lena’s singing career probably saved her life and ruined it at the same time. She’s clearly tapping into the divine. She’s possessed by the spirit of the song, and speaking for all of humanity in this moment:

And still you try to hold the world together,

Make it happen, give it children

Who in turn are turning onto going nowhere.

And all the strength they’d ever need to help them

Has been wasted, remains hidden,

In the confusion of going nowhere.

The absurdity captured in the refrain of the song is something that I have felt in my own writing life a lot. It’s like, what’s the fucking point? Why do we do anything? When I’m depressed, that is the existential depression for me. It’s not like I need to be brilliantly happy all the time, and have everybody telling me I’m wonderful. I don’t need that. But if I’m not going anywhere, why don’t I just be dead?

I don’t know what the answer is, except that here’s this gorgeous song that has moved many people. If there is a reason to live, maybe it is just in the relating to one another in this way, and making beautiful art.

My nature is not to feel thrilled at being alive. I’m 35 now, but up until my 30s, I really just wanted off the planet. I also have been somebody who felt pretty helpless about my own eating disorder. Nobody came to my rescue, and it was really depressing. I think eating disorders are a way of trying to change who you are because you feel powerless to change the world. It’s a way of turning inward, telling yourself, “Well, this is the one thing that I can control.” The sad thing is that it ends up controlling you, taking you out of the world. I spent a lot of years in an anorexic and bulimic blackout. I don’t remember what my life was because I was so possessed by this devil.

Writing saved my life. It really did. Fiction provided ulterior universes that I could escape into and manipulate. It gave me a semblance of control. Then, there is the great satisfaction of getting something right. Materializing an idea. It’s not unlike music, that feeling: the way that, when you hear a piece of music, your whole body responds. There’s a chemical reaction. Hormones get released. It resonates in you, and you feel moved. When I’ve written something that I know is correct, it resonates in me powerfully. I feel blessed.

I’m not one of those writers that sits there scratching my head being like, “What should I write next?” The thing calls to me, and when I get to it, I’m in ecstasy. When I’ve hit the vein, I feel immortal. There’s a lot of pain around it too, but I wouldn’t do it if I weren’t in ecstasy 10 percent of the time. I feel then as though I’ve discovered something, and honored it—that I’ve made it happen by being a conduit. I have faith in that ability to move beyond myself, and it’s made me strong and self-reliant. This is why I believe in God. I usually write in the first person, and when I’m channeling a voice, I really do feel there’s part of me that’s just a conduit. But then there’s also part of me that’s thinking, and manipulating, and pushing. I think about the character; I look for resolutions to whatever he’s struggling with. Maybe I won’t take him there, but I do have to understand, at least. In doing that I tend to learn things about myself along the way.

We make art about our own ineffectuality, and in doing that, somehow we are no longer ineffectual.

Some characters in my work are willing to be changed. Some won’t be. They’ll be shown the door, and they’ll be like, “I don’t like the look of that door. I acknowledge it, but I’m not opening it.” That’s my life sometimes, too. I can’t take every opportunity for growth—it’s too exhausting.

It’s like the line from this song: “The things that tend to change you, tend to hurt you.” I relate to that a lot. Growth is painful, especially when there’s nobody to hold your hand. I had to wait until I was an adult before I could figure how to recover from my eating disorder—it took so long to learn how to take care of myself. It was a lot of work, but I don’t regret it. What do they say—no pain, no gain? My physical experience in this body has certainly been that way. Change in the body is rarely comfortable. Growing pains, all the self-destructive things I’ve done to myself to change what my body is. Recovery is painful. The ego tends towards stasis, and every time it gets hurt it does all these gymnastics to rationalize why it should remain intact and static. That’s in “Going Nowhere,” too, in these lines:

And everywhere

They shrug their shoulders, tell themselves that they don’t care,

And all the while they make believe they’re happy, oh they’re happy,

But not really.

That seems like the saddest thing to do. This gesture of telling yourself—whatever, this isn’t bothering me. I’m going to lie to myself that I’m happy, but I know that I’m not. That’s what people tend to do. We get stuck in our indifference to our own pain.

Waking up out of that is excruciating. I just finished the first draft of a new novel in which the protagonist sets out on this project to recover from the trauma of her past by sleeping for a year, attempting hibernation. (She finds out very quickly that this is most easily done using tons of prescription drugs.) It’s a book about putting yourself to sleep in an effort to heal. But it’s also a book about waking up, and what that feels like: intolerable, but also absolutely beautiful. It’s both. Being born, the first thing we do is scream our heads off.

Most of the time, I feel pleased that I’m living my purpose on this planet. A lot of my work confronts the devastating concepts in this song. We make art about our own ineffectuality, and in doing that, somehow we are no longer ineffectual. That’s the good news about being a human: We are creative. We feel compelled to make something new, to forge new paths through consciousness and grow. Nobody is going to save me—that’s how I’ve always felt. It’s up to me. It’s either do or die, and I decided to do. Maybe we’re going nowhere, but I chose to find meaning anyway.

Monica Crowley and the Limits of Trump's Dismissal of the Press

There are few pithier ways to broach the strange story of the rise and fall of Monica Crowley’s career in the White House than the title of her 2012 book, What the (Bleep) Just Happened?

Here is what the bleep just happened: Crowley was busted for plagiarizing, from a variety of sources, in dozens of cases in that book. A few days later, she was busted for plagiarizing in her 2000 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University. A few days after that, CNN’s KFile, which found the original thefts, revealed that the dissertation pilfering was even more extensive. And on Monday, Crowley announced she would not take a job on the National Security Council in the Trump administration.

Related Story

Donald Trump Meets, and Assails, the Press

Crowley is the first bonafide scalp for Trump’s critics, although a relatively minor (if amusingly amateurish) one. But the brief episode is potentially instructive. It comes at a time when the Trump administration is escalating its feud with the press, portraying it as entirely irrelevant to the president-elect, but it shows the ways the White House-in-waiting is susceptible to media pressure.

Though Trump has been dismissive of the media throughout his brief political career, he has been particularly bellicose in recent days, since reports emerged about an intelligence dossier full of lurid allegations of both the personal and political varieties about him. His first press conference as president-elect, which he did not hold until nine days before his inauguration, kicked off with stern scoldings from spokesman Sean Spicer, Vice President-elect Mike Pence, and then Trump himself. During the press conference, he dismissed a request to release his tax returns, saying, “You know, the only one that cares about my tax returns are the reporters, OK? They’re the only who ask.” This is false—polls show a majority of voter want him to produce the documents—but he insisted his electoral victory invalidated the request. Since he’d won, Trump argued, the press was irrelevant.

Over the weekend, another tiff broke out after incoming Trump Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said the new administration might evict the White House press corps from its lodgings in the West Wing, perhaps to the Old Executive Office Building next door, which also includes administration offices. Priebus and other Trump aides said no decision has been made yet, though the White House Correspondents Association moved to condemn even the idea.

“I made clear that the WHCA would view it as unacceptable if the incoming administration sought to move White House reporters out of the press work space behind the press briefing room,” WHCA President Jeff Mason told Politico. “Access in the West Wing to senior administration officials, including the press secretary, is critical to transparency and to journalists’ ability to do their jobs.”

The Trump transition team was also initially dismissive of the stories about Crowley. “HarperCollins—one of the largest and most respected publishers in the world—published her book which has become a national best-seller,” a spokesperson told CNN. “Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country.” That was the party line right up until the moment when Crowley announced she would not take the job. “After much reflection, I have decided to remain in New York to pursue other opportunities and will not be taking a position in the incoming administration,” she said.

In some ways, Crowley’s demise seemed inevitable. The transition team’s borrowing of HarperCollins’ credibility evaporated as soon as the publisher announced it was yanking Crowley’s book while it assessed the content. And since Crowley’s resume was built on her Ph.D. and her career as a pundit— she has little in the way of government national-security experience—there was no real justification for her job once those pillars were knocked out.

Or rather, it would have seemed inevitable in what used to be thought of as normal times. But given the extent to which Trump defied standard procedure, surviving a range of moments during the campaign that almost certainly would have been fatal for any other candidate, and given his defiance of the press, it wasn’t inconceivable that Crowley would try ride out the storm.

There are a few possible lessons to be drawn from this. One is that when you’re caught with hands as red as Crowley’s, there’s simply no good comeback. A second, related one is that Trump was far more willing to jettison a minor figure like Crowley than he would be a closer confidant or a Cabinet candidate, and indeed stories about other nominees, from Rex Tillerson to Tom Price to Scott Pruitt, have not derailed them so far.

There are more structural lessons as well. The White House press corps has been the subject of a long string of critiques in recent years. The reporters in the Brady Briefing Room are squeezed on two sides—by successive administrations that have worked to close off their access to the president as much as possible, and by the impression (not unrelated) that few big stories come out of the White House beat anyway. In a column over the weekend, Jack Shafer celebrated Trump’s rise as the logical end of this process:

Reporters must treat Inauguration Day as a kind of Liberation Day to explore news outside the usual Washington circles. He has been explicit in his disdain for the press and his dislike for press conferences, prickly to the nth degree about being challenged and known for his vindictive way with those who cross him. So, forget about the White House press room. It’s time to circle behind enemy lines.

That means focusing in other directions, from executive-branch agencies to Congress, Shafer wrote. The Crowley stories are one example of that, and it’s a juicy slab of poetic justice that they were spearheaded by CNN—the very network Trump ignored and berated as “fake news” during his press conference.

But Trump’s repeated claims that the press was irrelevant and powerless should never have been taken at face value, and Crowley’s withdrawal underscores this. Trump’s political genius was not in steering away from the press. It was recognizing how important the press was and figured out ways to marshal it to his own ends. When he blasted the press as powerless early in the campaign, it was disingenuous posturing. Throughout his career as a businessman, Trump grasped the power of using the media to his own ends, and that may be the most important lesson he brings to Washington. (By the end of the campaign, his attacks on the media seemed to become personal, as he got angrier and angrier at the stories about him.) The Crowley affair shows that while the president-elect may be unusually skilled at manipulating the press, he is not omnipotent.

The OA and the Dark Side of Science

In the month since it premiered on Netflix, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s series The OA has inspired close analysis from viewers intrigued by the scientific, philosophical, and religious implications of the show’s trippy sci-fi exploration of near-death experiences and faith. On Reddit and elsewhere, you can read dissections of The OA as a Christ tale, as biocentric, or as descended from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

On Thursday, I spoke with Marling, the show’s co-creator and star, to ask about the research and abstract thought that went into the show. This conversation has been edited.

Spencer Kornhaber: Were you reading any religious or philosophical texts when creating The OA?

Brit Marling: Not necessarily any religious texts. I think we were reading a lot about near-death experiences themselves, like Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life and Sam Parnia’s research. It’s fascinating as storytellers to find this area where the science is largely being conducted through storytelling. Near-death experiences are difficult to measure, record, or find definitive scientific proof of, and yet there’s a convergence across so many cultures, so many different religious backgrounds, of similar types of sensation.

If people are having these out-of-body experiences—they can remember the details of hospital rooms and spaces that they couldn’t possibly have seen—is something leaving the body? Where does it go? How does it return? That area felt really like an interesting place to set a science fiction landscape in.

In terms of philosophy, later as we were editing the show [we read] Martha Nussbaum’s work. She has this book called Upheavals of Thought talking about how emotion has been disregarded in philosophy as a feminine afterthought, the important thing is more masculine, linear logic and reasoning. She’s coming in and being like, “No, emotions are incredibly valuable. They determine what is important to us and what direction you should go in as a being in order to flourish.”

I think that dovetails with a lot of the ideas of the show in terms of a return to movement and instinct and feeling. These things are all very important, and we maybe have let go of them as technology takes us further and further into living just from the neck up.

Kornhaber: A lot of people have watched The OA and seen Christ allegories or seen echoes of Russian folktales. Is any of that in your head as you’re writing the show?

Marling: Certainly the Russian fairytales, we were reading those at the time. I don’t know if you’ve ever read, for instance, the Russian fairytale Vasilisa. It’s basically Cinderella, but it’s the version of Cinderella before it was processed through a more Judeo-Christian interpretation. There’s no glass slipper, for instance. It’s about this young woman who has to go into the woods and encounter this character Baba Yaga, who isn’t a fairy godmother and isn’t a witch either. Through the girl’s cleverness and goodness she manages to get what she needs from Baba Yaga. And eventually she goes and wins the heart of the prince, all through her own effort and agency.

When that story gets retold and packaged further down the line in time, it becomes a very different story about the mythology of makeovers—your fairy godmother descending and giving you the most amazing dress, and then you win the prince. I think in general we have to go back and find the most ancient seed of a story because there’s usually a greater wisdom there. Those early Russian fairytales certainly entered the mythology of the story, which was more about a young woman’s agency than passivity in response to trauma.

Kornhaber: Why have Prairie be from Russia in the first place?  

Marling: We both had seen the documentary on Pussy Riot, and that was really illuminating, hearing those young women speak so clearly and passionately. Also [Russia] is a landscape that feels easy to set this in because—at least from the outsider perspective—it has these extremes: the extreme of colds and the extreme of the oligarch families. When the OA begins telling her story it has the kind of heightened quality, the way kids daydream. It just felt right.

Kornhaber: Obviously the characters have some very allusive names—how much thought went into names like Abel and Homer?

Marling: Oh, interesting. Zal is particularly brilliant at coming up with names and titles. The OA as a title is from his mind. Sometimes [characters] have names right away that just appear. I remember when we were first talking, he was telling me this idea of a parent-teacher conference. And [the teacher’s] name just appeared: Betty Broderick-Allen. And then other times things don’t appear. Like Stephen Winchell had maybe four or five different names before we landed on that particular one.

I think Nina Azarov was slightly inspired by [Anton Chekov’s] The Seagull. Homer came of course because of the idea of the Odyssey. I guess it’s just part of the weird unconscious well—stuff just comes out.

Kornhaber: Were you looking to any particular spiritual traditions about the afterlife, reincarnation, or resurrection?

Marling: I don’t think we looked at anything specifically. One of the interesting things about Georgetown, where Zal and I went to school, is that one of their requirement classes is called “The Problem of God.” It’s a very broad overview of all the religious texts—the Bible, the Koran, Buddhist principles. I think that’s a beautiful requirement because I’m not sure that theology would have necessarily been something I gravitated towards—I was an economics major. Reading all those texts, it’s certainly there in the background.

In terms of this particular story, we tried to use what we’d read about all the different case studies about near-death experiences. You know: What is always described as a light at the end of the tunnel, or a sudden openness into a new expansive space and a different landscape. We picked those things and then gave ourselves the freedom to play inside of them.

So for Homer, for instance, the classic light at the end of the tunnel becomes, oddly, the space above what seems like an office. Or like Khatun’s space was a product of Alex DiGerlando, who’s the production designer, riffing about what that space could be like. It was Alex’s idea that it could start out in this open tundra, then there could be this little ice-fishing hut, but then when you went into that space it became infinity. That kind of playing with the laws of physics hopefully gives you the sense of wonderment that is the truth of that experience.

Kornhaber: You mentioned that NDE research is based on storytelling; that’s because in real life you can’t run experiments like Hap does in the show. How did you conceptualize his research?

Marling: A lot of that was inspired by an article in Harper’s called “The Quietest Place in the Universe,” which is about an astrophysicist who is looking to understand dark matter and decided that the best place to do that is deep beneath the earth where it’s most quiet. It’s an interesting flip of astrophysics, because normally we think about that as trying to put the biggest telescope on top of the highest mountain and capture the light of the night’s sky. Here’s this guy deep down in an abandoned mine in South Dakota basically listening for vibrations, trying to record and measure neutrinos.                                                             

The thing that was most interesting in that article was the idea of a male scientist who’s obsessed with listening. And the stillness that’s required. As a culture we look more than we listen. This character, Hap, has this lab underground connected to this mine, and he’s there listening for some unquantifiable, intangible thing.

Kornhaber: Did you have any thoughts about how to make his character different from the trope of the evil scientist?

Marling: We talked about that a lot. Hap was a difficult character. Zal and I must have written 20 different character background or profiles for him: from this place, from that place, this kind of father, that kind of mother, over and over and over. The thing that finally cracked Hap was this idea of someone who’s deeply sensitive to sound. When you first see him in the beginning, he has his earplugs in Grand Central Station, and you can tell that the cacophony of the subway to him is overwhelming.

He’s a deeply curious, interesting mind, and the audience and Prairie are smitten with him in the oyster bar. But then you see the turn his focus has taken. In pursuit of needing to know, and his egoic belief that he can know, he’s lost his morality. The audience can draw their interpretations about what they feel or think about who he is; our job was just to present him clearly. Certainly in Chapter Six, when you see his mentor as being darker and more compromised and corrupt than he is, that also throws Hap into an interesting light.

Kornhaber: Do you think about that dark side of science a lot? In the show, science is a bit of an evil thing.

Marling: I think everything can have a light and a dark expression. Can you imagine the first images from the Hubble telescope coming back? What?! It’s insane. The whole world, the collective consciousness just opens up when you touch something that’s so awe-inspiring. At the same time science is also manipulated and twisted into not-very-good ends. Certain pursuits can lead to the atomic bomb or Agent Orange or to chemical pesticides that are killing the bees. It depends on the scientist.

“The show has echoes of Bluebeard: the idea that a woman has to go into a dark space and let go of her naiveté.”

Kornhaber: What was with the kids being asked to leave their doors open when listening to the story?

Marling: I’ve noticed that seems to be sticking in peoples’ minds and I hesitate to explain it too fully. It’s one of those things that is like a feeling rather than a thought. But the feeling is that she’s asking this group of boys to be receptive and to be listeners—like Hap’s also a listener. In order to do that, they have to make some physical gesture. What’s crazy is that when they do that, it feels so bold. They’re just leaving the door open—it’s not that big of a deal. Especially in America we think of our houses as little fortresses and our lives as little fortresses: Don’t let anybody in. So there’s something very provocative about leaving a door open as an invitation.

I think one of the original stories that was influential actually comes from Jewish mysticism. Do you know it?

Kornhaber: Is this leaving the door open for Elijah at Passover?

Marling: Yeah. It’s so beautiful. I think it’s amazing to try and use that as a reminder of trying to stay open. I struggle with that all the time. You get scared and you close the door. But I think The OA, she’s inviting them to let a new thing in.

Kornhaber: At the same time, her openness gets her into trouble. She’s open to following her visions of her father, and she’s open to going with Hap.

Marling: Completely. I think too there’s something in the structure of the show that has echoes of [the French folktale] Bluebeard: the idea that a young naïve woman has to go into a dark space and figure out how to let go of her naiveté in a way where she can come of age and navigate the light and the dark. Bluebeard has a lot of that because she’s let into that room finally, and she sees who she’s married and has to figure out what to do with that knowledge once she has it.

Kornhaber: At Vulture there was an essay proposing the show had a “gentle queerness” because of the trans character, the use of dance as a weapon, and the notion of creating new families. What do you make of that reading?

Marling: As storytellers you’re doing a lot of things unconsciously, picking things up from the world around you. From the beginning, Buck was always there, that was one of the names that just came. And he was always trans, Asian-American, 14 years old, F to M. It was amazing to then find that boy. [Casting director] Avy Kaufman worked so hard and she couldn’t find anybody that met that specification, and she finally posted something on the internet and all of these auditions came in because that community is very organized online. We saw ’s tape and were just blown away. He had made that in his bathroom, on his own; he had never acted before, his parents didn’t even know he did it.

And then movement was certainly always a part of the story—the idea of a more intangible return to the intelligence of the body and instinct and intuition.

What’s amazing is the audience is maybe better than you are at threading all the needles—they can see what the eye is at the very center of it. Certainly it is really about constructing family with unusual pieces. Storytelling is a big part of stitching that fabric between people—people who might otherwise not talk to each other, people who sit at opposite ends of the cafeteria.

Why Europe Is Worried About Donald Trump's Latest Remarks

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t been shy about sharing his views about the world, in general, and Europe, in particular. He was criticized during the presidential campaign for questioning the value of NATO, praising the U.K.’s decision to leave the EU, and linking terrorist attacks to the million or so asylum-seekers who have arrived in Europe since 2015. Trump’s supporters and political analysts attributed those comments to campaign-season rhetoric, and said he would pivot on these and other issues before the general election. But with less than a week before the inauguration at which he’ll be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, Trump gave a joint interview to The Times (of London) and Bild, the mass-circulation German tabloid, during which he described NATO as “obsolete,” called the EU “basically a vehicle for Germany,” and said other countries would follow the U.K.’s lead and leave the bloc.

Trump’s remarks about the Atlantic alliance don’t quite amount to the rejection of the group, nor did he suggest the U.S. might abrogate its treaty obligations to its NATO partners as he appeared to last July. Indeed, when asked by the two publications if the U.S. would guarantee Europe’s defense in the future, as it has since the end of World War II, Trump responded: “Yeah, I feel very strongly toward Europe — very strongly toward Europe, yes.” But that came after he called NATO “obsolete,” and noted that only five of its 22 members—the U.S., Greece, Estonia, Poland, and the U.K.—were spending their share on defense, which under NATO’s guidelines constitutes 2 percent of GDP.

Trump’s remarks appear to conflict with those of James Mattis, the retired Marine Corps general who is his nominee for defense secretary, who said last week during his confirmation hearing that “if NATO didn’t exist today, we’d have to create it.” Mattis accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to break up NATO—and it’s that possibility that many European officials fear, as well. Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, its continued support of separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, speculation that it has territorial designs over the Baltic states and Scandinavian countries, and its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, have all led to the belief that Russian interests are at odds with Western interests. Traditionally, it was the U.S. that was the bulwark against possible Russian aggression in Europe—and European leaders fear Trump will not keep that commitment. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Trump’s remarks “caused astonishment and excitement, not just in Brussels,” where both the EU and NATO have their headquarters. NATO, he said, had heard the comments “with concern.” He added: “This is in contradiction with what [Mattis] said in his hearing in Washington only some days ago and we have to see what will be the consequences for American policy.”

Trump’s past remarks about Russia haven’t elicited much confidence, either. He’s suggested he’d recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, praised Putin as a strong leader, and appeared for a time to take Russia’s word that it didn’t interfere in the U.S. election though the intelligence agencies that he’ll soon be running have repeatedly said the opposite. He appeared to suggest in his latest interview that he’d be open to lifting sanctions against Russia in exchange for “some good deals.”

“For one thing, I think nuclear weapons should be way down and reduced very substantially, that’s part of it,” he said. “But you do have sanctions and Russia’s hurting very badly right now because of sanctions, but I think something can happen that a lot of people are gonna benefit.”

Then there’s the future of the EU.

The political establishment in Europe and the U.K. are still reeling from last summer’s vote by Britons to leave the EU. Although the nature of the U.K.’s future relationship with the bloc is unclear, and the source of much political debate, the economic impact, so far, has been far from the catastrophe that was predicted before the vote. Trump was an early supporter of Brexit—and his interview this week with the Times was given to Michael Gove, the U.K. lawmaker who was a lead campaigner for the “Leave” movement. He doubled down on his earlier comments in his interview.  

“People don’t want to have other people coming in and destroying their country,” he said. Adding later: “People, countries want their own identity and the U.K. wanted its own identity but, I do believe this, if they hadn’t been forced to take in all of the refugees, so many, with all the problems that it, you know, entails, I think that you wouldn’t have a Brexit. It probably could have worked out but, this was the final straw, this was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.

“I think people want, people want their own identity, so if you ask me, others, I believe others will leave.”

Trump appears to be conflating thelongstanding opposition to immigration among some U.K. voters to increased immigration to its refugee policy. The U.K. pledged to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees last year, far fewer than other major European nations—though the fate of that commitment is unclear.

Trump also said in the interview that he doesn’t care one way or the other whether the EU is a single entity or several countries. U.S. administrations of both parties have promoted European unity for decades—though there have areas of disagreement.  

“Personally, I don’t think it [a stronger EU versus stronger nation states] matters much for the United States,” Trump said. “I never thought it mattered. Look, the EU was formed, partially, to beat the United States on trade, OK? So, I don’t really care whether it’s separate or together, to me it doesn’t matter.”

Those comments, in particular, appear to have rankled in Europe, where support for EU membership is high in most member states, even if there’s resentment toward some EU policies. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said: “The best response is European unity.” Speaking in Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “We Europeans have our fate in our own hands.”

Merkel came in for special mention in Trump’s interview. He criticized the German chancellor’s open-door policy for Syrian refugees, calling it a “one very catastrophic mistake.” He also described the refugees who are fleeing more than five years of civil war as “illegals.” He elaborated on those comments about Merkel, who is facing re-election this year and opposition after several terrorist attacks in the country.

“I think it was a big mistake for Germany,” he said of the policy. “And … I think we should have built safe zones in Syria. … Would have been a lot less expensive than the trauma that Germany’s going through now.”

John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, criticized the remarks: “I thought frankly it was inappropriate for a president elect of the United States to be stepping into the politics of other countries in a quite direct manner,” he said on CNN. “He will have to speak to that, as of Friday he is responsible for that relationship.”

But of all the comments Trump made in his interview to the Times and Bild, it’s his remarks about trade that are most likely to upset Germany and others in Europe.” When asked about BMW’s plans to open a facility in Mexico in 2019, Trump responded: “I would tell them, don’t waste their time and money—unless they want to sell to other countries, that’s fine—if they want to open in Mexico … but I would tell BMW if they think they’re gonna build a plant in Mexico and sell cars into the U.S. without a 35 per cent tax, it’s not gonna happen, it’s not gonna happen. … They can build cars for the U.S., but they’ll be paying a 35 percent tax on every car that comes into the country.” The remarks caused shares in BMW and other German carmakers to fall.

The EU is the U.S.’s largest trading partner, and as such German officials would be likely to retaliate against a 35-percent tax on the automaker. Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s deputy chancellor and minister for the economy, told Bild in a separate interview that BMW’s largest factory was already in the U.S.

“The U.S. car industry would have a bad awakening if all the supply parts that aren’t being built in the U.S. were to suddenly come with a 35 percent tariff,” he said. “I believe it would make the U.S. car industry weaker, worse, and above all more expensive.”

When asked about Trump’s remarks that trade between the two countries was “unfair” because “you go down Fifth Avenue, [and] everybody has a Mercedes-Benz, [but] how many Chevrolets do you see in Germany?” Gabriel responded that U.S. automakers should “build better cars.”