Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 203

The Walking Dead: When It’s Time to Leave

Every week for the sixth season of AMC’s post-apocalyptic drama The Walking Dead, Lenika Cruz and David Sims will discuss the latest threat—human, zombie, or otherwise—to the show’s increasingly hardened band of survivors.

Lenika Cruz: When you gotta go, you gotta go. And on this week’s Walking Dead episode, “East,” it seemed everyone had to go—and leave Alexandria and its people undefended even though the likelihood of a Savior attack could not have been more imminent. Carol and Daryl’s separate but simultaneous departures felt like obvious contrivances to scatter everyone outside the community’s walls once again. Why did Rosita, Michonne, and Glenn all have to go look for Daryl? Why did Morgan and Rick both have to go look for Carol—at the same time? These are not two helpless individuals who need a cavalcade of backup.

I’ll be blunt: This was a capital-B Bad episode. The Walking Dead has had plenty of passively bad episodes—episodes where nothing really feels different by the end, where the dialogue is uninspired, where the plot retreads old themes. But “East” was the kind of bad where almost everything that happened felt blatantly illogical or stupid in some way, and its badness was made even more apparent by the fact that recent weeks have given viewers three really good episodes. To go through every single thing that went wrong would be like trying to kill a zombie by stabbing it in the chest with a noodle—why bother?  

But ... I will try. If I had to pick one thing that doomed this episode from the start, it was the central storyline itself: Carol and Daryl running off on their own—Carol because her guilt about killing is consuming her and she can’t kill for others anymore, and Daryl because he wants to get revenge on the Savior who killed Denise. Okay, fine. But The Walking Dead seemed less concerned with their respective reasons for taking such drastic measures, and more concerned with the way their actions could be a useful way to get as many people out into the field and spread out as possible. How this could seem like a rational idea to a group of people who have survived by making tough, strategic choices, always weighing the risks and advantages of any path, was beyond me.

Even if we allow that the decision to go after Daryl and Carol was more influenced by emotion or ego than reason, how is it that there wasn’t even 30 seconds worth of debate on the issue before they left? How did Rick so easily choose to leave his son and daughter behind? And once Morgan and Rick were out on the road, why did they ditch their car? Why, probably hours after leaving the car, did Rick decide it was time to call it quits and let Morgan go after Carol on his own instead? If Morgan found her (and all signs indicate she’d be injured), how was he going to get her back to Alexandria safely without a vehicle?

Sorry—I forgot that I had already decided pursuing each logical inconsistency  in this episode was pointless. But the same problems apply to Daryl’s storyline. Why, after following Daryl all the way out to where Denise was killed, did the group decide to split up? Michonne and Glenn should have known better than to assume they could convince Daryl, with words, to abandon his crusade. Why, after a total of four recent skirmishes with the Saviors (the road explosion, the compound raid, the slaughterhouse incident, the railroad-track firefight), did it seem like a wise decision to return to the last place the group ran into the Saviors, with relatively minimal support? Did they forget the bazillion times that a hostage situation has occurred over the course of the show?

This was a capital-B Bad episode.

I will take a break from asking answer-less questions to praise the one good thing in this episode: Carol singlehandedly taking down that group of Saviors with the machine-gun she jerry-rigged inside her coat sleeve. Her tearful pleas with the Saviors intensified the satisfaction of the actual shootout—the audience knew that her begging gave the Saviors a sick pleasure (ugh, those leering, sneering faces!), but she wasn’t trying to save her life. She was trying to save theirs. Poor Carol realizes she is an effective killer, and to the extent that survival is of paramount importance, she feels she has no choice but to continue to take lives. People will keep trying to kill her, so she will be forced to keep killing them—as much as it destroys her inside. A side note: I liked how her rosary and Father Gabriel’s clerical clothing highlight how differently they’ve come to relate to religion as a way of meaning-making in the apocalypse.

Now, to end on a final note of frustration. I know I wasn’t alone last year in thinking the show bungled Glenn’s almost-death. I respect the creative license of the writers to play with expectations and narrative linearity and all that. Even if that choice was a big risk that didn’t 100 percent pay off, you’d think The Walking Dead would know better than to tease the deaths of other characters in cheap ways. But nah. In “East” alone, the fates of Carol and Daryl were both dangled over a fire, but to no real payoff in terms of story or suspense. The show, I think, knows better than to actually kill a major character off-screen. And if someone like Daryl or Carol is going to actually die, it will milk the hell out of it.

So, yeah, it looks like Daryl got shot at the end, but he’s most likely not dead (who knows though, maybe he didn’t even get shot). The gun going off and the blood splattering on the screen was nothing more than a dumb trick. I think my disillusionment at this point with any efforts to toy with the audience’s emotions has been amplified by the Glenn fiasco. With the show’s current track record of feigning death, why be moved by anything less than a brutal, onscreen end (that can’t be explained away by tricky camera angles)? As someone who has shed a lot of tears for characters this show has killed over the years, I resent the The Walking Dead’s growing comfort with this kind of cynical manipulation. (That said, I really am worried about Maggie’s possible miscarriage. If that’s a fake-out too, I might have to set everything on fire.)

Am I being too harsh, David? What did you think about this whole mess—and the other B-plots? I feel like there’s more to unpack here, but mostly I’m excited for this season to be over, and for Negan to get here and shake things up.

David Sims: You are not being too harsh, Lenika. This was a befuddling episode, both in story and execution. Much like last week, there was a dreamy, impressionistic tone, from that opening in medias res that focused on a static shot of blood dripping from a stake as Carol executed her attackers on the road. It reminded me of some of TV’s best, most unheralded shows, like the Southern Gothic drama Rectify—but there, the dreamlike tone is part of a whole, whereas with The Walking Dead, it’s being deployed to mask odd story decisions and a general lack of forward narrative momentum.

Why did Carol leave? Last week’s episode was supposed to give us that grounding, as she recovers from the horrible events at Negan’s base and decides she can’t live the domestic life anymore. It didn’t make much sense last week, and this week just underlined how baffling her decision was, to pack a bag and drive into the wilderness alone. Days ago, she waged violent war against the Saviors, a society that supposedly governs several settlements in the area. Why on earth would you pick this moment to strike out alone, in a car no less?

Her showdown with those bandits, and that beautiful piece of acting as Carol pleaded with them for their lives, would have worked better if Carol’s motivations had been justified. Instead, I just couldn’t get over how quickly things went wrong for her. Within a day of leaving, her car was taken out and she had to murder four people just to keep surviving! No amount of clever filmmaking or good acting can get my mind past the foolishness of her move, especially on a show that’s still so heavily indebted to comic-book storytelling. These character decisions need to make sense, or the story twists will just feel cheap.

The same goes double for Daryl. I refuse to accept premise that the burn-scarred Dwight, who killed Denise last week in his shocking return, represents a major villain, or the conclusion of some master stroke of plotting that began with Daryl’s decision not to kill Dwight last year. If the show is trying to reinforce Rick’s “kill or be killed” philosophy, which he continued to espouse this week while trying to clean up all this mess with Morgan, that’s not really necessary.

Who will live? Who will die? I just don’t know that I care anymore.

In fact, the show’s attempts to have an ongoing philosophical debate on the nature of killing and evil in a world ridden with zombies and warlords are becoming increasingly ineffectual. The Walking Dead has been airing for six years now. People tune in for action, gripping suspense, and gory violence. The idea that the characters are going to be able to stop waging war with other humans is nonsensical from a story perspective. I appreciate the work actors like Melissa McBride and Lennie James have done to illustrate Carol and Morgan’s internal crises over this fact. It is, indeed, a horrifying world to comprehend, and it’s worthy to explore that. But when the show can’t figure out new ways to tackle this subject, it stops being profound and starts getting desperately boring.

Back to Daryl—he’s a master tactician and pretty much the best fighter in the entire cast. What is he thinking striking out alone, again, days after the raid on Negan’s camp, in search of one random person? The Walking Dead doesn’t work if these characters make such stupid decisions, and the endless tease every season over which main cast member is destined for the chopping block is an infuriating chore, as you mentioned, Lenika. Perhaps Daryl is dead at the hands of Dwight, shot for his infuriatingly thick-headed decision-making. More likely, this week’s cliffhanger ending was a fakeout, and next week we will finally meet Negan and have the whole thing teased all over again. Who will live? Who will die? I just don’t know that I care anymore.

Directors Without Borders

An Irish man and a French woman are sitting in an airport cafe, bickering about their American children. A tall Norwegian lurks offscreen, peering through the lens of his German camera. Everyone speaks English.

This is not an airline ad, or the set-up to a joke; it’s a scene from Louder Than Bombs, a Cannes-feted prestige picture that arrives next month in American theaters. In recent years, a growing number of art-film auteurs have been leaving their home countries to make their first films in English. That lanky Scandinavian is one of the latest, and most talented, directors to join the trend. After shooting two gripping coming-of-age films in his hometown of Oslo, Joachim Trier has teamed with the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne and the French screen legend Isabelle Huppert to film a domestic drama in the suburbs of New York. With its Norwegian director, American setting, and multinational cast, this family portrait is a striking snapshot of the new world order in contemporary movies.  

Huppert plays Isabelle Reed, an acclaimed war photographer and French expat whose mysterious death has convulsed the lives of her husband, Gene (Byrne), and their sons, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and Conrad (Devin Druid). As Gene and the boys prepare for a new exhibit of Isabelle's photos, flashbacks reveal their disparate memories of her life and work. When Conrad recalls how she used to “change the meaning of a picture by framing it differently,” the brooding 15-year-old might as well be describing his family’s conflicting visions of its embattled matriarch—and the multiple, shifting perspectives at the heart of culture-straddling art films like Louder Than Bombs.   

The Reeds are not the first American suburbanites to catch the attention of a foreign auteur. The ’50s melodramas of the German emigré Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind) helped shape the world’s image of the postwar suburbs in the U.S. The Nixon-era dramas of Roman Polanski (Chinatown) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Zabriskie Point) made the sprawl of Los Angeles synonymous with corruption and despair. In more recent decades, the Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee and the British expat Sam Mendes have introduced new audiences to the literature of the American suburbs, adapting modern classics like Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. In their most indelible, zeitgeist-defining scenes, these foreign-directed dramas have brought fresh perspective to the strip malls and office parks Americans drive past every day.

When directors travel to the U.S. to make their first films in English, they are telling stories about global citizens in a newly porous world.

Louder Than Bombs continues this tradition, and takes it one step further. Where the characters in Sirk’s melodramas rarely ventured beyond their picturesque cul-de-sacs, the Reeds are leading conspicuously global lives, with lifestyles and cultural identities that transcend American borders. If Conrad needs a reprieve from his neurotic father, he plays online video games with kids in Japan and New Zealand. If the French-speaking Isabelle feels stifled chez Reed, she grabs the next plane to some far-flung war zone. When directors travel to the United States to make their first films in English, they’re no longer telling stories about residents of Westchester or Brookline, Evanston or Pasadena; they’re telling stories about global citizens in a newly porous world.   

It’s incredibly challenging to tell those stories well. When Trier turns his camera on his culture-straddling characters, he faces the same creative dilemma that Isabelle confronts while photographing a burial in Afghanistan. “[Should] I take a photo that tells their story the way they would if they could tell it?,” she asks herself. “Or shouldn’t I instead use this family to tell something bigger and in some ways more important, at the risk of reducing them to an example?” In Trier’s earlier, homegrown films, he adopted the first approach, crafting fine-grained character studies of one or two of Oslo’s sad young literary men. In Louder Than Bombs, he has embraced the risks of the latter strategy, using the Reeds as his starting point for a broad survey of Big International Themes.

* * *

Trier, whose English is flawless, has plenty of company in tackling a new cinematic language: the expansive esperanto of the multinational art film. As international co-productions become ubiquitous within the film industry, bringing together actors, crew members, and financiers from around the globe, directors of all regions and aesthetic sensibilities are facing new pressures to work in English. Even the most inward-looking auteurs now rely on funders and festivals beyond the borders of their native countries, and there is no better way to thrive on this global circuit than to adopt its official tongue. The last four winners of the Oscar for Best Director—Ang Lee, Alfonso Cuarón, and back-to-back winner Alejandro González Iñárritu—were working in English and outside their countries of origin. At the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, Louder Than Bombs was one of five English-language films in the highly selective competition—still the world’s most prestigious platform for a world premiere—that were made by a director whose first language isn’t English.

This anglicization of the arthouse circuit is changing more than just the dialogue we’re hearing at the movies. It’s also changing the kinds of stories we’re seeing and the settings and style in which they are being told. When filmmakers make the switch to English, they seem to super-size their narrative ambitions, crafting sprawling ensemble dramas with multiple storylines and a wide range of international settings. They start to look beyond local characters and national concerns to examine the lives of the same globetrotting cosmopolitans who make up their intended audience. As these English-speaking, multinational movies enter American arthouses, they are introducing us to a new cinematic idiom, in which the collision of disparate cultures drives the form and content of every scene.

Consider the example of Youth, released earlier this winter: The director is Italian, the star is British, and the film takes place among the international eccentrics at a Swiss spa. As Michael Caine’s English composer rubs shoulders with Ukrainian masseuses, Argentinean soccer stars, and oil heiresses from the Persian Gulf, the director Paolo Sorrentino derives humor from their fleeting connections and pathos from their failures to communicate. The story’s transnational pastiche is enriched by the film’s multinational cast and creative team, producing a boisterous portrait of the global super-elite.

When filmmakers make the switch to English, they seem to super-size their narrative ambitions.

There’s a similar mash-up in Sicario, released last fall, in which the French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve joins forces with the English actress Emily Blunt and the Puerto Rican badass Benicio Del Toro to tell the story of the Mexican Drug War. With the help of his British cinematographer and his Icelandic film composer, Villeneuve builds the cross-border conflict into such a mesmerizing spectacle that you can almost forgive the film’s action-movie clichés and its dearth of actual Mexicans. The international cast and crew underscore the cross-cultural impact of the violent events on screen, offering a vivid recreation of one of the world’s great transnational quagmires.

Despite their disparate settings and storylines, these films share striking similarities with Louder Than Bombs. They each take elements from their directors’ domestic-language films—a fascination with wealth and aging in Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty; a playful approach to genre in Villeneuve’s quirky Quebecois films; the brooding young men in Trier’s Norwegian movies—and then spread them out across a larger cast of English-speaking characters, a wider range of foreign settings, and a broader set of global themes. And whether it’s the international catwalk by the pool in Youth, or the war zone nightmares in the suburban bedrooms of Louder Than Bombs, these films achieve their visual impact through the juxtaposition of surreal, often dissonant imagery from different parts of the world. Even when the characters on screen are silent, these multinational movies speak a common creative language.

Whether that’s a good thing for the art of cinema is a subject for debate. If a Norwegian miniaturist is now making the same kinds of movies as an Italian maximalist and a French Canadian genre-bender, you can certainly make the case that globalization is having a mainstreaming effect on auteur cinema around the world. Nostalgic cinephiles lament the rise of films like Louder Than Bombs because they represent the demise of “national cinema” and its historical role as a vehicle for social criticism and cultural preservation.

But the switch to English doesn’t have to strip filmmakers of their regional character and stylistic flair. From Olivier Assayas’s Carlos, a French-directed, country-hopping portrait of a Venezuelan terrorist, to Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, a Mexican-directed, U.K.-set dystopian thriller, some of the best new films of the 21st century have been multinational co-productions. The form’s most talented practitioners explore the themes, stories, and lifestyles that unite people across national borders without losing sight of the local identities through which we still make sense of our changing world. Even when working in an increasingly popular genre, and tying their stories to broad global trends, the world’s best filmmakers find exciting ways to keep their characters and settings unique.  

* * *

In Louder Than Bombs, Trier hasn’t yet figured out how to do that. His international debut has impressive elements—its lyrical, shadow-dappled images; Conrad’s affecting and unpredictable story arc—but they are scattered amid a plot as sweeping and impersonal as globalization itself. The film’s incessant shifts in chronology and point-of-view overwhelm the actors’ intimately realized performances, and prevent the characters’ immediate surroundings from snapping into focus. Allusions to international politics grow increasingly detailed, but the Reeds’ hometown remains a blur of leafy streets and American flags.  

Even when the characters on screen are silent, these multinational movies speak a common creative language.

The trouble with a film about everyone everywhere, made for anyone anywhere, is that it can easily lose sight of the fact that each of its characters is also someone somewhere. Louder Than Bombs highlights a paradox at the heart of many of the English-language co-productions that now dominate arthouse cinemas from Tokyo to Toronto: In its aggressive bid for global relevance and acclaim, the film sacrifices the rich feel for character and setting that lent Trier’s Norwegian movies their universal power. Despite his flawless command of English, this gifted filmmaker hasn’t yet mastered the expansive cinematic language in which he and so many directors are now working.

Then again, directors like Sorrentino, Cuaron, and Assayas also struggled in their international debuts, only to emerge as some of our most vivid chroniclers of globalization and its discontents.  And like these stalwarts of the multinational art film, Trier has proved capable of making riveting films about the tension between his characters’ local loyalties and their global influences. The aspiring writers in Reprise (2008) and the recovering addict in Oslo August 31st (2012) were enthralled by British rock songs, French novels, and American movies, yet Trier never lost sight of the daily rituals that lent structure and meaning to their lives in Oslo. Toward the end of Louder Than Bombs, he starts to approach his multi-strand narrative with the same focus and authority, finally anchoring the film’s floating subplots to the rich sights and sounds of his American settings.  

In the film’s penultimate scene, Conrad walks a girl home from a party in the early morning darkness. He’s just stumbled on a disturbing revelation about his mother in the pages of The New York Times and Melanie’s drunken rambling is a welcome reprieve from a night filled with domestic angst. As a spring breeze rustles through the treetops, and the clapboard houses turn gray and solid against the lightening sky, Conrad glimpses the faded outline of his life story, with Melanie’s voice as his imagined narrator:

He could still, many years from now, recall the scene in all its detail. The lock of hair she placed behind her ear. The way the washing label stuck out from the neck of her tanktop. The streetlights that went out as they passed Kevin Anderson’s house. That strangely familiar smell of damp earth that he couldn’t quite place. As a stranger passed, he glanced at them, probably thinking they were a couple.

The scene has all the density and detail of the best suburban dramas from our cinematic past, weaving Conrad’s inner fantasies into the colorful streetscapes of an American community. But these are not the same tree-lined laneways explored by Sirk in the 1950s, or even the ones that Lee and Mendes depicted in the 1990s. Conrad lives in a new American landscape, filled with newly mobile, less locally loyal people, and the disorienting new stories that shape their lives.

In this dawn walk home, Trier’s American narrative and his global narrative finally intertwine. Trier rediscovers the quality that made his earlier films stand out, a virtue that can no longer be taken for granted in an era of directors without borders: a sense of place. For a brief, exhilarating moment, his character and his audience know where they stand in the world.

Schooled into Slavery

In Senegal, thousands of children are exploited by their teachers in the name of Koranic education. Called talibes, the Arabic word for students, some 50,000 boys are forced into child labor, according to Human Rights Watch. Photographer Sebastian Gil Miranda spent two months last year traveling around the country to document the conditions of these youths. “Families do not have money to pay for the religious education of their children,” Miranda said, “so for them it is logical that the child himself be the one to finance their own education.” Housed in deplorable conditions in daaras, or schools, teachers demand talibes deliver daily begging quotas or be beaten, starved, or left out in the street.

Zayn Malik and Pride and Prejudice: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

The Ongoing Allure of Pride and Prejudice

Katy Waldman | New York

“If Austen’s restraint suggests treasure left beneath the surface, the paradoxes she sustains in her writing keep us from feeling as though we’ve figured her out. Who but she can conjure such ardencies in readers while remaining so pragmatic and demure? Who else splices so much light-fingered subtlety with so many fervent (and occasionally cruel) opinions?”

How Zayn Malik Keeps Refining the Art of Shade

Rob Sheffield | Rolling Stone

“Zayn's latest (and best) solo hit has the quintessential boy-band title ‘BeFoUr,’ which is a great moment in the history of human subtlety … But of course, 1D’s final album with Zayn was Four, back in the days BeFoUr he quit, leaving only FoUr of them to Be2Gether until their recent hi8Us. Also the capitalized letters spell BFU, which possibly means he’s sending a Big Fuck You to whoever he’s singing about.”

Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu Get One Basic Thing About TV Very Wrong

Todd VanDerWerff | Vox

“This has always been television's chief storytelling advantage. Instead of having lots of time, TV actually has less time—in that each episode is a short story in and of itself—but it can use its smaller stories to give the appearance of larger ones. The episode itself is the most important single unit of storytelling on TV, not the season or even the series. Without good episodes, shows inevitably end up feeling muddled and aimless.”

You Won’t Believe How Nike Lost Steph to Under Armour

Ethan Sherwood Strauss | ESPN

“It’s not immortality, but it might be as close as an athlete gets in the ephemeral world in which we live. So Curry and James aren’t just salvos in a battle between brands; it’s a personal war to see whose cultural impact resonates years after they’ve retired. It’s a fight for something even bigger than a basketball career. And right now, despite four MVPs and two championships, LeBron James is losing.”

Drake’s Very Own: On Dennis Graham’s Instagram

Doreen St. Felix | The New York Times Magazine

“But then there is Dennis Graham, father to Aubrey Drake Graham, the biggest rapper in the world, whose feed lies somewhere between celebrity-backed extravagance and boring supermarket trips. It’s a doting, excessive, almost embarrassing record of his life with his son, a virtual refrigerator door where fans can discover scores of new information and Graham, above all, can flex on his progeny.”

The Brothers Grimsby Trots Out a Demeaning Racial Trope

Wesley Morris | The New York Times

“When it comes to art and spectatorship, depicting black life turns tricky fast, especially when a white outfit like the motion-picture academy takes notice. But Mr. Daniels’s harsh yet fulsome artistry is a sealant against pity … Mr. Daniels introduced Ms. Sidibe as triumphantly free from the movies’ traditional racial circumscription: the idea that fat black women are there to serve white people.”

The Birth of a Beauty Criticism

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano | The New Inquiry

“The new beauty criticism sites are for women, but they don’t let that constrain their attention. They’ve learned that a female audience means an audience that has absorbed ‘the personal is political’ and can handle a little intellectual roughhousing mixed in with the best nude lipsticks of winter.”

Lots of Love for Garry Shandling

Sarah Larson | The New Yorker

“In 1984, before doing a gig in Lake Tahoe, he told a young Judd Apatow, who was interviewing him over the phone, ‘The most important thing a comic can do is write from his insides.’ This idea—writing comedy from within, honestly, and not just casting about for jokes—strongly influenced his peers.”

The Silicon Valley Boys Aren’t Just Brilliant—They’re Part of a Comedy Revolution

Brian Raftery | Wired

“That communal ethos is part of why comedy has become one of the most skillfully executed pop-cultural commodities we have, a never-ending swirl of Good Stuff, regardless of medium. It’s genuinely ridiculous how much ace comedy is out there, and how it encourages happy gluttony … Every day, it seems, there’s something new and boundary-warping to get passionate about. And it’s all instantly within reach, via a gazillion different (and still evolving) formats.”

Twilight of the Superheroes

In his review of X-Men (2000), Roger Ebert begins with an evocation of the mythological gods of Ancient Greece, and ends with a plea to die-hard comic-book fans, whom he wishes would “linger in the lobby after each screening to answer questions.” Sixteen years later, viewed from a cinematic present overrun by the cape and cowl, Ebert’s words read as both prescient and portentous.

The rise of the superhero blockbuster, which began in earnest with the release of Spider-Man, in 2002, is comparably bifold, driven by two dissimilar but potent cultural forces: a civilization’s ancient, collective need for a self-defining myth, and the thoroughly modern drive to commodify that desire. Superheroes have become the contemporary American equivalent of Greek gods—mythic characters who embody the populace’s loftiest hopes, its deepest insecurities, and flaws. Between 2016 and 2020, an estimated 63 comic-book adaptations will receive a major theatrical release, with scores more scheduled to take the form of TV shows, video games, and every salable medium in between. The public’s appetite for these properties appears blind and bottomless, its stomach willing to rupture long before it’s sated. If American culture is indeed in a state of decline, these are the stories built to survive its demise.

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And yet, as of late movie superheroes have seemed less inclined to heroics. Consider, for example, the upcoming Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a horizontal consolidation of superhero properties set to premiere this March. Based on the film’s five trailers, the director Zack Snyder has recast Superman (Henry Cavill), that paragon of American exceptionalism, as a kind of inadvertent terrorist, a questionable savior for whom destruction is a prerequisite for rescue. Enter an aged Batman (Ben Affleck), never broodier, to serve as humanity’s last line of defense, his Batsuit more SWAT vehicle than Kevlar. And who’s supposed to be fighting crime while the superheroes fight each other? It doesn’t matter, because, as the trailers make unabashedly clear, the heroes will join forces well before one pummels the other into submission. Once again, the fate of humanity rests in the hands of a superhuman few. But unlike previous iterations in both franchises, Batman and Superman have bigger concerns than saving the world: punching each other to no end.

A similar fate has befallen Marvel’s the Avengers, who also find themselves thrust into an arbitrary civil war in the aptly titled Captain America: Civil War. Scheduled for release less than two months after Batman vs. Superman, the movies recall a misbegotten arms race, with each vying to package in as much unwanted internecine warfare as possible. There is, too, a trend in both films toward a darker handling of the subject matter. The Batman franchise, already dimmed considerably by Christopher Nolan, now looks as if it’s filmed through a filter of soot. The playful banter of the Avengers has been subbed for the slap-fighting words of jilted teens. (“He’s my friend,” Captain America says to Iron Man. His response: “So was I.”) The animating energy of both enterprises recalls the worst of Internet fan fiction, or children bored with their action figures. To illustrate, compare Tobey Maguire’s pie-wholesome Peter Parker to the murderous, cuss-spewing Deadpool. Our superheroes have lost all interest in being heroic. In the name of brand consistency, they’ve lived long enough to resemble villains.

This progression has a complicated explication but a simple trajectory, wherein the blue skies of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy darken gradually into the eternal night of this year’s Suicide Squad. In that film, the villains of the DC universe have been convinced, albeit temporarily, to moonlight as heroes for the day, acting as short-term contract laborers for justice—supervillains do, after all, lay equal claim to the prefix. Whereas other hybridized superhero stories, like the pseudo-heist film Ant Man (2015), or the gritty noir Jessica Jones (2015), have contrived to settle their protagonists into an ethical grey area, Suicide Squad eliminates all pretense and contrivance. Its grey area is more tar pit. And its arrival represents the uncovering of the harsh truth at the core of the superhero mythos.

In the name of brand consistency, our superheroes have lived long enough to resemble villains.

For 15 years, the superhero blockbuster has allowed American audiences to project an illusory dual image of its character, a fiction in which it’s at once helpless victim and benevolent savior, the damsel in distress and the hero coming to her aid. Where Batman vs. Superman and Captain America: Civil War strive and likely fail, Suicide Squad presents a much more honest, holistic image of America as superpower in the 21st century. It’s the conclusion to an argument whose articulation has been 15 years in the making. We’re neither the victims nor the heroes, it suggests. The resemblance isn’t passing. We simply are the villains.

Super villains in ‘Suicide Squad’ (Warner Bros.)

In spite of Roger Ebert’s tepid review, X-Men went on to earn a global box office of nearly $300 million, approximately four times its production cost. The movie was, for its era, a mammoth success, a green light for studios to reconsider the viability of superheroes as intellectual property. Along with reboots of the Batman and Superman franchises, Spider-Man was a direct result of this renewed interest, and its then record-setting performance—$114 million in its first week, $871 million global box office—was a bellwether in cinema.

The sub-genre of the comic-book movie consumed the mainstream, in turn becoming the mainstream. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) received eight Academy Award nominations. The Avengers movies ultimately became two of the 10 highest grossing films in history. Even non-comic book franchises like The Fast and the Furious began to imbue their otherwise normal characters with superhuman powers. There are 16 annual Comic Cons in the United States alone. For the characters on the screen as well as for the people in the seats, being a superhero has become the norm.

We’re neither the victims nor the heroes, it suggests. The resemblance isn’t passing. We simply are the villains.

The explanation for this preponderant interest in superhero stories could be traced, potentially, to that transitional period in American history, bridging the summers of 2000 and 2002, when a newfound enthusiasm in comic-book stories arose in the American moviegoer. What may account for this increase, as it does for so many of America’s ongoing syndromes, is the advent of the age of terror, and the stories that audiences needed to hear in its wake. These were, of course, tales of impossible heroism in the face of evil, a commitment to ultimate justice at all costs. The superpower had been rendered momentarily vulnerable, and its media may have adapted to capitalize on that vulnerability.

Observe how willingly films like Man of Steel (2013) co-opt the iconography of destruction, or how, in The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s Joker threatens societal order with terroristic chaos. The tone and tenor of superhero blockbusters have long paralleled the public’s view of American interventionism abroad, following the oblivious self-assuredness of the past into the darker, more complicated self-reflection of the present. 9/11 may have been the reboot of the American character. If so, every year since has been a rehash of an old origin story.

That our superheroes have become contemptuous and combative shouldn’t surprise: The theater’s screen has always doubled as a mirror. In Spider-Man, the rose-colored surety of Peter Parker’s character was a true reflection of the American public’s. Today, those sentiments appear from one angle alluringly innocent, from another profoundly delusional, but therein lies their tensive power, the unsentimental truth they convey about the human compulsion to escape normalcy, no matter the cost. Our superheroes have shrunk down to the size of an ant, grown to stand head and shoulders over skyscrapers—it feels like progress that the only path these myths have left to stride is the one toward reality. May we arrive there sooner than later. For nowhere are fantasies of heroism more cherished than in the land of villains.

This post appears courtesy of Kill Screen.

Brussels Attacks: What the Belgians Missed

Belgium’s prime minister was contrite after the Islamic State’s deadly attack on one of world’s most important cities.

“We have to do more,” Prime Minister Charles Michel said, “and we have to do better.”

Those comments were made in November 2015 after ISIS, as the Islamic State is also known, attacked multiple locations in Paris, killing 130 people and wounding scores of others. On Tuesday, Michel made similar remarks after ISIS struck Brussels, killing more than 30 people and wounding 300 others.

“What we feared has happened,” he said. “We were hit by blind attacks.”

The terrorist group’s strike at the heart of Europe—Brussels is both the Belgian capital and where the EU has its headquarters—showcases not only its ability to conceive, plan, and execute attacks outside the Middle East, but also highlights the intelligence failures that allowed ISIS to carry out attacks in two European cities four months and 200 miles apart.

There were warning signs—several of them—before the Brussels attacks: Belgium has long been known as Europe’s hub for Islamist radicals. More Belgians have joined ISIS as a proportion of the population than have people from any other Western country. Many of the Paris attackers were Belgian nationals or residents. One particular Brussels neighborhood, Molenbeek, has come under scrutiny from counterterrorism officials as well as the media as the epicenter of Belgian jihadism. Another, Schaerbeek, where police raids in the aftermath of Tuesday’s attacks were carried out, will likely face similar scrutiny soon. Europol, the EU’s police agency, warned as far back as January that ISIS “special forces” had planned to target European cities in attacks like those on Mumbai, India, in 2008.

But in the aftermath of Tuesday’s attacks there appear to have been as many opportunities missed by Belgian intelligence agencies as there were chances to stop the carnage. Belgian officials have not explicitly connected the Brussels and Paris attacks, but there are enough commonalities—including the attackers’ activities in Brussels itself and the name of Najim Laachraoui, who authorities say was one of the suicide bombers that struck Brussels airport and who they say made suicide vests used in the Paris attacks. These commonalities indicate that had Paris been prevented, or its alleged logistical mastermind, Salah Abdeslam, caught sooner than last Friday, then an examination of the intelligence missteps that led to Tuesday’s events in Brussels may have been unnecessary.  

Although it might be tempting—and uncharitable—to attribute the attacks to Belgians’ love of “eating chocolate and enjoying life and looking like great democrats and liberals,” as one Israeli minister did, Tuesday’s attacks point to a far more systemic problem. Europe’s intelligence services—with the exception of Britain’s and to some extent France’s— have long been viewed skeptically by their counterparts elsewhere. Of these, Belgium is seen to have one of the weakest.

There are several reasons for this. Belgium, which my colleague David Graham described as “a fragile artificial creation, riven between French- and Flemish-speaking citizens,” not unlike the Middle East, has been described as “a nation without a state.” And like the Middle East—and unlike the Europe in which it sits—illegal weapons are readily available, a legacy of the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s.

Belgium has a weak central government and several powerful local municipal entities that are often at odds with one other. This spawns a gigantic bureaucracy. The Brussels area, where 1 million people live, is governed by 19 municipalities and is served by six police forces, each of which answers to a different mayor. Their actions are often hampered by rules such as no police raids between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.—rules that could politely be called comical.

The case of the Abdeslam brothers is a case in point. They’d been on the radar of at least one Belgian intelligence service as far back as July 2014. Another Belgian intelligence service, however, said it became aware of them only in January 2015—six months later. The brothers were among the terrorists who struck Paris on November 13, 2015, and one of them, Salah Abdeslam, is believed to have been the only survivor. Abdeslam spent the next few months on the run. Belgian authorities came close to capturing him once, two days after the Paris attacks, but couldn’t raid the apartment in Molenbeek in which he was believed to be holed up because of the restrictions on when police can carry out raids. By the time they made it to the apartment, Abdeslam was gone. When he was eventually captured last Friday, four months later, he’d been hiding under everybody’s noses: in Molenbeek.

After the Paris attacks, Committee P, a government agency that serves as the police watchdog, identified several “deficiencies and weaknesses” in how authorities handled information on the Paris attackers. RTBF, the Belgian state broadcaster, reported that the watchdog cited several reasons for the failure, including technological ones. “Certain IT problems were not resolved,” it said, according to RTBF, and the watchdog criticized a lack of “qualified personnel.” Another issue was one of information-sharing: a nom de guerre used by one of the Paris attackers featured in several Belgian police databases, but not in the central one, the watchdog said. Then there are more mundane—but possibly more serious—problems, including misspelled names in terrorism databases that prevent efficient information-sharing not only in Belgium, but across the EU. All of which leads to Tuesday and Brussels.

The Belgian federal prosecutor confirmed Friday what Belgian media had reported earlier this week: that Najim Laachraoui was one of the suicide bombers at Brussels airport. Laachraoui, a Belgian, was an associate of Abdeslam and is believed to have made suicide vests used in the Paris attacks. His DNA, and Abdeslam’s fingerprint, was found in a Brussels apartment in December. Belgian authorities asked the public for information about Laachraoui after Abdeslam’s arrest last Friday. It was too late. On Tuesday, he, along with another suicide bomber, blew himself up at Zaventem airport.

There appear to have been both general and specific warnings about the threat to Brussels itself. Haaretz reported that Belgian security services knew the airport would be targeted. On Wednesday, a Turkish official said Turkey had deported Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, who Belgian authorities say attacked the airport along with Laachraoui, to the Netherlands last year and had warned that he was a foreign fighter captured on Turkey’s border with Syria. Nevertheless, el-Bakraoui was released. So far, no one has lost his or her job. Justice Minister Koen Geens and Interior Minister Jan Jambon both turned in their resignations this week, but the prime minister declined their offers.

When asked who was to blame, Geens said: “It is clear it is not one single person, but it is true that we could have expected from Ankara or Istanbul a more diligent communication, we think, that perhaps could have avoided certain things.”

And he added: “Our own services should perhaps have been more critical about the place where the person had been detained. When someone is arrested there in a city few people know, it is clear enough for insiders that it could be a terrorist. Here, though, he was not known as a terrorist. It is the only moment we could have linked him to it. And that moment, perhaps, we missed.”

That missed moment—and the ones that preceded it—proved costly.

What’s Next in the Jian Ghomeshi Saga?

Former Canadian radio star Jian Ghomeshi’s acquittal Thursday on multiple sexual-assault charges did not end the high-profile legal saga, with another trial set to begin in June.

Ontario Judge William Horkins acquitted Ghomeshi of four charges of sexual assault and one charge of “overcoming resistance by choking,” all of which allegedly occurred in 2002 and 2003. (Canadian law allows for jury trials, but Ghomeshi waived his right to one.) Prosecutors originally brought eight charges of sexual assault against Ghomeshi but dropped two of them in May 2015, citing a low likelihood of conviction. Another charge will be tried separately this summer.

The five charges in the first trial stemmed from allegations made by three women. Two of them are unidentified under Canadian laws shielding the identities of sexual-assault victims. The third, Lucy DeCoutere, is a well-known Canadian actress and Royal Canadian Air Force captain who went public with her story in 2014.

Ghomeshi was a well-known musician and host of Q, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship radio program, before his sudden firing in October 2014. Ghomeshi accused CBC of terminating him for his personal sex life and sued for $55 million. (He withdrew the lawsuit a month later and paid the broadcaster $18,000 in legal fees.) The same day, the Toronto Star published accounts from eight women, including DeCoutere, describing a pattern of abusive behavior toward them by Ghomeshi that ranged from sexual harassment to choking and hitting. Toronto police launched a criminal investigation, and prosecutors filed the first charges against him the following November.

More than 20 women eventually came forward against Ghomeshi. The wave of allegations shocked Canadians and drew comparisons to Bill Cosby, the American comedian whose lengthy history of sexual-assault allegations came under fresh public scrutiny around the same time. Like the Cosby case, Ghomeshi's scandal also highlighted issues of celebrity impunity and the struggles faced by survivors when confronting abusers in the criminal-justice system.

Ghomeshi initially defended himself by claiming the encounters were rough consensual sex and said he lost his job due to a “campaign of vengeance” by a “jilted ex-lover and a freelancer writer” in a now-deleted Facebook post. After his arrest, Ghomeshi hired Marie Henein, one of Canada’s most prominent defense attorneys, who meticulously pored over details in each accuser’s story during cross-examination and, with an eye toward reasonable doubt, highlighted any inconsistencies she found.

Among them were discrepancies in how one of the unidentified women described her post-incident interactions with Ghomeshi. The judge also characterized the other woman’s recollections of events as an “evolving set of facts.” But a crucial moment came when Henein revealed a series of post-incident emails between Ghomeshi and DeCoutere, including a photograph of herself in a bikini, dinner invitations, and a sexually explicit note. DeCoutere challenged Henein’s suggestive interpretation of the correspondence and insisted they didn’t mean Ghomeshi hadn’t assaulted her that night.

“After I testified, I felt like I had to go up to every person in the world and apologize for ruining the case,” she said in an interview before the verdict.

The defense strategy succeeded. In his verdict, Horkins wrote that all three witnesses’ credibility had been undermined by their own testimony. “The success of this prosecution depended entirely on the Court being able to accept each complainant as a sincere, honest and accurate witness,” he concluded. “Each complainant was revealed at trial to be lacking in these important attributes. The evidence of each complainant suffered not just from inconsistencies and questionable behavior, but was tainted by outright deception.”

Prosecutors have a 30-day window to decide whether they’ll appeal the verdict. Even if they don’t, they’ll have another chance to prosecute Ghomeshi this summer. Another sexual-assault charge is set for a separate trial because of differences between it and the other complaints.

Most of the allegations centered on his personal dating life, but the remaining charge is connected to his former workplace, CBC. The venerable broadcasting institution came under heavy criticism after an independent report found CBC managers repeatedly ignored complaints about Ghomeshi’s behavior and allegations of sexual harassment.

The next criminal trial is expected to begin on June 6.

Naming the Dead in Brussels

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday Americans were among the more than 30 people killed in Brussels in Tuesday’s attacks.

“The United States, I want you to know, is praying and grieving with you for the loved ones of those who have been very cruelly taken from us, including Americans, and for the many who were injured in these despicable attacks,” he said in Brussels alongside Charles Michel, the Belgian prime minister.

An unnamed U.S. official later said two Americans had been killed. Neither has been publicly identified. Before Friday, those victims of the attacks who have been named so far weren’t identified by embassies or government officials, but by families on social media.

Victims from more than 40 countries are among the dead and injured, which could account for why governments have been so slow in naming the dead publicly. Two forensic teams have been working to identify the bodies. The nail-packed bomb blasts and damage to the bodies may also have made identifying the dead more difficult.

So far, eight people have been publicly identified.

Adelma Tapia Ruiz’s death was confirmed in a Facebook post by her brother. She was a 36-year-old mother of twin daughters, originally from Peru, who had lived in Brussels nearly nine years.

Leopold Hecht was a law student studying at the Université Saint-Louis in Brussels. The president of the university posted a Facebook message Wednesday confirming Hecht had died.

Olivier Delespesse worked for a company that helped French speakers in Brussels, called La Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles. The company confirmed Delespesse’s death.

David Dixon, a British father living in Brussels, was also confirmed dead Friday by his family, as was Bart Migom, a Belgian student, whose death at the airport was confirmed by his father.

Three Dutch citizens, a brother and sister who lived in New York, and a woman who was on her way to New York for a funeral, were among the dead.

CBS in New York reported the family of Sascha and Alexander Pinczowski, the siblings, sent a message to the news organization Friday, that read: “We received confirmation this morning from Belgian Authorities and the Dutch Embassy of the positive identification of the remains of Alexander and Sascha. We are grateful to have closure on this tragic situation, and are thankful for the thoughts and prayers from all.”

The third Dutch victim was identified as Elite Borbor Weah, who was about to fly to the U.S. for a funeral.

China said at least one of its citizens died in the attack. Morocco said three women were killed.

Then there are those still missing.

The families of Justin and Stephanie Shults have not heard from them since the bombings. He was from Tennessee, she from Kentucky, and the married couple had lived in Belgium for the past two years working as accountants. Stephanie Shults’s mother had visited, and the two had dropped her off at the airport around the time of the attack. On Wednesday, Justin’s brother, Levi Sutton, tweeted that the U.S. State Department said the couple had been found. Then Sutton tweeted there’d been a mistake. He wrote,“I am disgusted that the information given to us wasn’t 100% correct.”

“This is exactly what we were trying to avoid,” Sutton tweeted (the account is now private), “and now I’ve told friends and family members things that weren’t true.”

Killing ISIS’s No. 2 Leader, Again

In August of last year, U.S. officials announced the death of Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali, the No. 2 to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and something of a weapons and logistics manager for the terrorist group. It was the second time in less than a year the ISIS leader’s top deputy met with an early demise.

On Friday, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter added Haji Imam, the Islamic State’s finance chief who went by several names, to the growing list of seconds-in-command to die at the hands of American forces.

“Striking leadership is necessary,” Carter said on Friday, “but as you know it’s far from sufficient. As you know leaders can be replaced. These leaders have been around for a long time — they are senior and experienced and eliminating them is an important objective and result. They will be replaced and we will continue to go after their leadership.”

This dynamic is in many ways a continuation of the U.S.’s decades-long battle against al-Qaeda. Consider this 2006 headline from The Onion: Eighty Percent Of Al-Qaeda No. 2s Now Dead.

But it also speaks to the surreal nature of the battle against ISIS. As my colleague Kathy Gilsinan noted in October last year, U.S. officials estimated that 20,000 Islamic State fighters had been killed since the American bombing campaign began, leaving the overall ranks of ISIS at 20,000 to 30,000 strong—the exact same number of fighters as when the the U.S. started its campaign. Explanations for this strange accounting ranged from early miscalculations to ISIS’s strength at recruiting foreign fighters.

Carter’s announcement caps off a week in which the Islamic State’s capacity to strike two targets in Brussels and kill dozens of people was attributed to a desperate adaptation amid the group’s weakening as well as a flexing of the group’s tactical sophistication and the reach of its networks.

In a news conference with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry expounded on the former of these theories:

And the very reason that Daesh is resorting to actions outside of the Middle East is that its fantasy of a caliphate is collapsing before their eyes; its territory is shrinking every day; its leaders are being decimated; its revenue sources are dwindling; and its fighters are fleeing.

What Kerry didn’t mention was that, for at least the third time in 18 months, ISIS would need a new No. 2.

Zayn Malik, Why So Serious?

All the Sad Young Men, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1926 short story collection, may need its title repurposed for today’s pop landscape. Fifteen years ago, Justin Timberlake bid farewell to boy-banddom using an irrepressible brew of Spanish guitar, beatboxing, and Neptunes party rhythms. Two decades before that, his inspiration, Michael Jackson, transcended pipsqueakdom with one of the most joyful disco sets ever recorded. But today, whether seeking to banish the image of a sweet Degrassi teen (Drake) or of a purple cardigan and bowl cut (Bieber)—or whether simply and sacrilegiously seeking to become the “new Michael” (The Weeknd)—pop’s men prove their maturity with prayer hands, bitten lips, and slow songs about the profound burden of dating supermodels.

Maybe all these grim assertions of adulthood come out of the same malaise fueling 21 Pilots’s hit whine “Stressed Out,” which is to say they’re either a symptom of Millennial economic insecurity or of Gen-X parental coddling or of social-media-induced anxiety. Or maybe we’re just at one end of the pendulum swing for pop aesthetics. In any case, Friday’s release of the debut solo album from the ex-One Direction member Zayn Malik may mark peak sad-cool-dude. Which isn’t a knock—Mind of Mine might be the best chart-pop album this year’s provided. But after these 18 (or 20, depending on the version) decadent airings of sexualized angst hit the marketplace, it’s hard to imagine further efforts like it won’t feel redundant. The pout has gotta be on its way out.

Frank Ocean’s producer, Malay, has a heavy presence on the album, and it opens with the sonic signifier that will date today’s hits very soon: a vocal onomatopoeia pitch-shifted to sound like the yelp of an anime fairy (see also: “Sorry,” “Roar,” “Out of the Woods,” “I Really Like You,” every Skrillex song). But it’s hard to dismiss Malik as a trend-hopper when he has, for so long, seemed to want to make an album just like this. Once the dour/mysterious foil to the happy-go-lucky rest of One Direction, he’s spent the press tour for Mind of Mine indicating that his old group’s bubblegum rock was never to his taste. Instead of jock-jam hand claps and riffs stolen from Martin Scorsese’s favorite songs, Mind of Mine swirls with synthetic studio mist and slithers to the tempo of R&B.

Malik’s played coy about whether he expects people to have sex to this album, but he definitely expects people to have sex to this album and maybe cry afterwards. If the music itself didn’t make that clear, there would still be all the non-pejorative uses of the word “fuck,” as well as allusions to it: “I get her wetter than ever / four letter are never a question," he sings on “Wrong,” one of many dread-tinged odes to a manic hipster dream girl. The she of “She” is snorting coke and wants Zayn’s body; the dreamy and insistent chorus makes the interaction sound all good under a club’s strobe lights, but his wails elsewhere suggest that he’s not sure he should give her what he wants. And the lead single “Pillowtalk,” which may have rocketed to No. 1 thanks to his fearsome fan base but stayed in the top 10 due to its slow-mo pole-vault of a chorus, sums up the duality that rules this album and many like it: “It’s a paradise / and it’s a war zone.”

The intricate, lush production and mannered yet powerful performances from Zayn make the album into an excellent mood piece for whatever-you-want-and-chill sessions, not unlike Rihanna’s Anti earlier this year. But the vibe is so singleminded that it can be tough to tell many of the songs apart, and at a certain point you’re left wishing for a moment, any moment, of pure abandon. Profiles of Zayn have painted what sounds like a fantastic life of playing with crossbows outside of his own personal pub, and yet his latest music video, for “BeFoUr,” is all about nostalgia for his pre-fame days where he could hit up a chip shop freely. The closest we get to the sound of out-and-out fun is on “Do Something Good,” a reggae track about smoking pot and playing video games, relegated to the Target-exclusive edition of the album. Even there, if you listen closely you’ll hear not only a lightsaber noise but Zayn shaming himself for enjoying the day off. Bobbing your head almost feels wrong given the implication: The kids may be all right, but the new adults aren’t.