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Dana Scully and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit

In the first new episode of The X-Files, returning after a more than decade-long hiatus from conspiracy theory-ing and little-gray-men-ing, Dana Scully wears precisely the outfit you’d expect her to: a black suit, with a blouse (white, collared, buttoned) underneath. It’s an outfit that at this point is downright iconic. It’s what most Dana Scully Halloween costumes entail. It’s what the Dana Scully Barbie wears. It’s the uniform, essentially, of mid-’90s feminism—an outfit that is only in the loosest sense an “outfit.” Strategically drab, insistently un-insistent, it’s fashion fit for a character whose complexity goes far beyond her clothing: a thorough badass and also a thorough nerd, the debunker of Fox Mulder and also his partner, the skeptic and also the believer.

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But that suit, fan service by way of wardrobe, is only one of the many that made Dr. Dana Scully an extremely unlikely, and also deeply appropriate, fashion icon. The slow evolution of Scully’s style—shoulder pads! tapered ankles! pants so profoundly pants-y that they beg to be referred to as “slacks”!—spawned, in the early days of the Internet, passionate online discussions. It gave rise to everything from dedicated Tumblrs to Vogue-published appreciations of “Scully’s #GirlBoss Looks.” But it also suggested, within the universe of The X-Files, Scully’s meaningful progression as a character: her strength, her romanticism, her ability to be open to the world’s unlikeliest possibilities. Scully’s fashions, precisely because of their lack of Fashion, helped her to become that rarest of things: a character who is at once a sex symbol and a feminist heroine.

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Fox

Scully, and The X-Files along with her, emerged during a time that perhaps more than any other equated the wearing of suits with the enjoyment of power. (The “power suit,” an offshoot of the broader impulse toward “power dressing,” emerged in America in the 1970s, but it became a widespread phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s.) For women in particular, the suit was laden with meaning. On the one hand, to wear one was subversive in the manner of Marlene Dietrich and Diane Keaton: It co-opted the quintessential garb of the working man on behalf of the working woman. And yet to wear a suit was also, as wearing a suit always will be, deeply conformist. The power suit, donned by a woman, suggested the triumph of the women’s movement by suggesting the banality of the women’s movement. It made feminine power ordinary, and wearable, and fashionable.

The gender-bending power suit took the culture’s new insistence on egalitarianism and realized it through mutualized frumpery.

And Scully, of course, would not be the only ’90s TV heroine to rock a suit. She was in the company of Murphy Brown and Samantha Jones and Ally McBeal and many, many others—heroines who all embraced the gender-bending trends of the ’90s, whether they involved wrist-spritzes of the unisex fragrance CK One or nodded approvals of Julia Roberts’s red carpet pantsuit. Here was the culture’s new insistence on egalitarianism, realized through mutualized frumpery.

And yet Scully was also notable—she was also singular—for how far she veered from Sam Jones’s bra-less blazers and Ally McBeal’s micro-hemmed pencil skirts. She instead espoused an early form of normcore that you might call competencecore. The X-Files first aired in 1993, and Scully started things off right at Peak Pantsuit: Her ensembles included pants that were wide of leg, jackets that were thick of lapel, each individual garment so generous of cut as to suggest that the biggest revelation The X-Files might have in store was that its costumers were in the pocket, so to speak, of Big Fabric. Scully’s blazers, in those early days, were often double-breasted, because why not add more fabric; the (usually silky) blouses underneath were typically primly buttoned all the way to the top. And those layers were often topped off by wool coats whose cuts—boxy, shoulder-padded, lapelled—mimicked those of the suits themselves.

The layered look of the original ScullySuit—a wearable parfait of practical, wrinkle-resistant fabrics—came in a rainbow of shades. There were some khakis in there, sure, but there were also fire-engine reds and jade greens and other colors ostensibly chosen to complement Scully’s rosy skin and red hair. Oh! And there were also patterns. So many patterns. (Remember that tartan blazer? THAT TARTAN BLAZER.)

Fox

Scully’s first forays into FBI power-suit-ing were accessorized, as they would continue to be throughout the show, with a single, simple necklace: a small gold cross that would be revealed to be, soon enough, a relic of Scully’s Catholicism. A cross whose omnipresence would mean that Scully would spend her years on The X-Files—shooting guns, cartwheel-kicking monsters, side-eye-ing Mulder—with the ultimate symbol of I Want to Believe dangling delicately on her neck.

Another accessory that took Scully through the course of the show: heels. Even in the field—even fleeing pizza-delivering vampires and liver-eating mutants and the U.S. government—her shoe of choice was a pair of pumps. At the outset of The X-Files, the shoes were as practical as any pair of pumps can possibly be: kitten-heeled, sturdy, as expansively cut as Scully’s taper-slacked pantsuits. They were pumps, indeed, that had a whiff of wartime austerity. But the shoes evolved as both Scully and footwear trends external to The X-Files’s universe did, to the extent that in the reboot of the show, Scully is wearing heels that are essentially stilettos. And they signal just what they did in the ’90s: femininity that will insist on itself even when it is impractical. Scully both heralded and embraced a Hollywood trope that continues today: professional women, be they detectives (Jules O’Hara in Psych) or executives (Claire Dearing in Jurassic World), clad in footwear that is, literally and otherwise, highly impractical.

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For that, and also for a myriad of reasons that can be shorthanded as THAT TARTAN BLAZER, it’s become popular to mock Scully’s sartorial choices. Rebecca Traister, in an otherwise loving ode to the sci-fi heroine, referred to her “ill-advised jewel-toned pantsuits.” The fucknoshoulderpads Tumblr has a post tellingly titled, “Oh, Dana Scully, No.” Paper Magazine recently wrote that “pop culture’s foremost alien huntress … has terrible style.”

And, indeed. The ScullySuit is, ultimately, the sartorial equivalent of mom jeans: trying at once too hard, and not enough. Scully herself, however, cannot be fully faulted for her fashion faux pas. Not just because the ’90s had their way with us all, but because even the most garish and most marmish of her outfits have their message to send about who—and, indeed, why—Scully is. The X-Files is ultimately a show about institutions: about our ability, and possibly our complete inability, to have faith in the bodies that give form to government and culture and society at large. Trust No One, and all that. And what represents The Institution writ large more than a dull, black pantsuit? As worn by other characters—the Smoking Man, in particular, and his variously smoldering henchmen—suits, in The X-Files’ universe, take on a menacing quality. They represent both conformity and conspiracy, and the show’s ultimate conviction that those two things might actually be indistinguishable.

The ScullySuit is the sartorial equivalent of mom jeans: trying at once too hard, and not enough.

In that sense, Scully’s fashion missteps establish her, from the outset—despite her official assignment as the Bureau-appointed babysitter of Spooky Mulder—as that rarest of things: trustable. Hers is a uniform of non-conformity. It acknowledges the reality of Scully’s workplace (“a lot of what we’re constrained by is the actual restrictions of the FBI,” Molly Harris Campbell, the show’s costume designer, told The New York Times, noting that “this is very much a show that concentrates on being realistic”). But its colors and patterns and occasional abandonment of slacks for skirts also carry a broader message within The X-Files’ moral cosmology: Trust No One makes an exemption for one Dana Scully.

Scully in her element: suited, side-eye-ing (Fox)

Scully’s outfits—and they are technically designer outfits, by the way: Max Mara coats, suits by Calvin Klein and Emporio Armani—are also the uniform of a woman who is playing a traditionally masculine role. (“‘Baby’ me,” she informs an epithet-wielding assailant at one point, “and you’ll be peeing through a catheter.”) She is “Scully,” not “Dana.” And her suits are evidence of a strategy many women-in-a-man’s-world have relied on: the striking of a careful balance between standing out and fitting in. They acknowledge femininity—the silk blouses! the bright colors!—while also de-emphasizing it (boxy cuts! pants! suits!). Her suits insist that Scully—shooter of guns, dissector of corpses, author of a doctoral dissertation on Einstein—is, as it were, “just one of the guys”; they insist at the same time that she most definitely is not.

And they continue to do that throughout the show. Scully’s suits—with the exception of season two, when Gillian Anderson’s pregnancy led the show’s costumers to offer up blazers and coats that got, against all odds, even roomier than they had been before—become progressively slimmer-cut. They get darker in tone. They get sleeker. They get more revealing. The black suit Scully wears in the opener to the show’s 2016 season features not only a skirt, but one that is decidedly body-conscious. (The episode also features Scully wearing scrubs—scrubs!—that are themselves notably tailored to her shape.)

Gillian Anderson recently referred to Scully’s wardrobe, politely, as “limited”; she was the one, InStyle reports, who charged the costume designer from Hannibal with updating Scully’s clothes for The X-Files’ new episodes. The mandate was to respect “the demure aspects of her wardrobe.” Which makes sense: Chris Carter, The X-Files’ creator, has talked about the remarkable ability Anderson—only 24 when the show began filming—had to bring “a certain need-to-prove-yourself quality to the character”; her costumes, with all their complexity, helped her to do that, and continue to do so. They de-couple Scully’s femininity from her everything-else: her intellect, her empathy, her abilities as an FBI agent, her relationship with Mulder.

Fox

One of the more subversive elements of The X-Files—beyond its insistence on government-run conspiracies and its protagonist’s belief that his sister was abducted by aliens—is the gender-bending it brings to the partnership between Scully and Mulder. Mulder, in general, plays the traditional woman’s role: Languid of eye, loopy of walk, he is dreamy and woozy and romantic. And Scully, for her part, is effectively the masculine one: practical and industrious, indulgent of her partner’s flights of fancy but able to ground him when she must. It’s revealing that Scully’s primary catchphrase—despite multiple seasons of crackling dialogue between the two—has been, and remains, the no-nonsense “Mulder, it’s me.” Scully does not enjoy wasting time.

Except, you know, when she does. The X-Files presented itself in its early marketing as a sci-fi thriller: a nerdy drama about aliens and conspiracies. But what it was, at the same time—and what it became, even more fully—was a rom-com, with Scully made even more of a bombshell by her utter disinterest in being one, and Mulder being “basically a walking pheromone.” Theirs was, at the beginning, a static electricity—latent, buzzing, omnipresent—and that fact alone was able to put the “tension” in “sexual tension” better than most shows ever could. It was truly an open question, for a long time, whether these two people would ever, finally, consummate their mutual attraction.

The suits they both wear—Scully’s neat and pressed, Mulder’s puppy-dog floppy—legitimize, in their weird way, The X-Files’s rom-comic inclinations. As does the fact that Scully, wardrobe- and otherwise, certainly has a softer side: t-shirts and soft cardigans at home, torso-hugging vests at parties, that amazing white-lace number she wore on a date during the show’s first season. But both Scully and Mulder spend the majority of their time together wearing suits—uniforms of the working world—and that suggests, in turn, that both are effectively immune to the superficial concerns that can unite and divide couples of more standard issue. Their attraction exists in spite of those suits. It smolders on, shoulder pads and all. Their partnership transcends their clothes. Their suits are, yes, soulful.  

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The X-Files’ “Barbie and Ken” gift set (eBay)

And Scully’s suits are particularly so. The X-Files was initially the story of Fox Mulder: The Truth Is Out There, I Want to Believe, all that. Its story was initially told, by default, from his perspective—with Dana Scully sent to him, essentially, to be a spoiler. Very early on, though, that premise flips. The X-Files becomes Scully’s story. She is the one who evolves—indeed, she is the only one, Mulder being what he is, who can do much evolving. Mulder carries with him the banality of the true believer; it is Scully, the scientist, who espouses the tension of agnosticism. Will they or won’t they may be a favorite, driving question of The X-Files; equally important to the show’s mythology, though, is will she or won’t she? Will Scully, finally, believe?

As she sheds layers of clothes, season after season—as blouses go unbuttoned, then give way to tight t-shirts and slight camisoles; as blazers get belted and nipped and shortened; as coats shrink to fit her form—Scully sheds something else, as well: her belief, and indeed her default trust, in all that she has taken for granted. The big things so many of us take for granted. Government, religion, culture, the carefully constructed intellectual infrastructures that give the world its order ... all of those, as The X-Files goes on, get called into question. Scully’s clothes become a metaphor for her willingness to believe in disbelief. They become a visual symbol of how far her rationality has taken her. Scully, her clothes suggest—her weighty coats and bulky pants jettisoned in favor of more freeing options—might finally be able to share Mulder’s faith in faithlessness.

Faith, Family, and the American Farmer

For the past year, photographer Elliot Ross has been photographing the world of farmer Jim Mertens. Inspired by the empathetic imagery of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration, Ross created an essay that examines the relationship between the farmer and the land, giving both characters equal focus in “The Reckoning Days.” The grains of wheat and the cracked palms of laborers are given the same attention, depicted in a mesmerizing palette of blues and yellows. This is how bread, the most basic staple of our diet, is made. “Society is generally removed from the processes in which bread and hundreds of other products reach our baskets,” Ross said. "We must protect, nurture, and celebrate the salt of the earth.”

Making a Murderer and the Manosphere: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Dead Certainty: How Making a Murderer Goes Wrong
Kathryn Schulz | The New Yorker
“Ultimately, Making a Murderer shares that flaw; it does not challenge our yearning for certainty or do the difficult work of helping to foster humility. Instead, it swaps one absolute for another—and, in doing so, comes to resemble the system it seeks to correct. It is easy to express outrage, comforting to have closure, and satisfying to know all the answers. But, as defense lawyers remind people every day, it is reasonable to doubt.”

From Pickup Artist to Pariah
Rachel Monroe | New York
“You can either unquestioningly accept society’s fictions—blue-pill thinking—or grasp the true power that comes from taking the red pill and facing the painful truths that most people deny. In the manosphere, the red-pill truth is that men are victimized by a contemporary culture that is biased toward the female perspective.”

How Racially Skewed Are the Oscars?
The Economist
“Throughout the 20th century, 95 percent of Oscar nominations went to white film stars. It is an embarrassing anachronism that the prevalence of white Academy electors has been allowed to continue into the 21st century, a trend that the Academy’s (black) president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, has vowed to end.”

Rachel Bloom’s Twisted Comedy
Susan Dominus | The New York Times Magazine
“In person, Bloom comes across as someone who takes honesty to its natural conclusion. ‘I like deconstructing things,’ she told me when we met in December … There’s something almost earnest about Bloom’s desire to discuss the realities of biology—sexual, anatomical, or otherwise—that the rest of humanity tries so hard to gloss over.”

An Oral History of A Special Thing, the World’s Most Important Comedy Message Board
Rick Paulas | The Kernel
“For an art scene to exist, for artists within it to make the leap into greatness, hubs need to exist. Like-minded people need a space where their ideas can commingle and become better, where they can borrow, hook up, network, steal, and stab each other in the back. In the past, this meant a physical locale … With the Internet, people no longer needed to share the same physical space within the same hours of the day. If their computer was plugged in, they were there.”

A Story of a Fuck Off Fund
Paulette Perhach | The Billfold
“You graduated college and you’re a grown-ass woman now. Tina Fey is your hero. Beyoncé, your preacher. If any man ever hit you, if anyone ever sexually harassed you, you’d tell him to fuck right off. You want to be, no, you will be the kind of woman who can tell anyone to fuck off if a fuck off is deserved, so naturally you start a Fuck Off Fund.”

Our Band Should Not Be Your Life
Amos Barshad | The Fader
“These days, signing with a major [label] feels less and less important, or desired. The middle class of bands lives with a certain understanding of their limitations: A vibrant artist’s life can be accomplished, but gilded dreams of fame are left back with a previous generation.”

The Remarkable Influence of David Lynch

It would be tough to look at the roster of television shows any given season without finding several that owe a creative debt to Twin Peaks, the short-lived ABC series created by the filmmaker David Lynch. Lynch’s manipulation of the uncanny, his surreal non-sequiturs, his black humor, and his trademark ominous tracking shots can be felt in a variety of contemporary hit shows, from The Sopranos to Lost, even if few manage to combine all these elements to such hypnotic effect. Twin Peaks, which was canceled 25 years ago, has often been cited as a major influence on today’s era of binge-worthy, auteur-driven dramas. So when its revival airs in early 2017, Lynch will be returning to a television landscape that has evolved largely in his image.

And yet that show, with its heady and immersive storytelling, is just one chapter in the story of how Lynch—who turned 70 this week—cemented his status as one of the most influential American auteurs in the last quarter century. To fully understand how Lynch shaped modern film and TV, it’s worth studying three of his most iconic films, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive: works that paved the way for everything from the body-horror genre and TV’s female antiheroes to suburban dystopias and bingeable, serial storytelling. Made over the span of 25 years, these films track the evolution of Lynch’s particular sensibility—one that both celebrates American culture and holds a funhouse mirror up to it, forcing viewers to question their own values and sense of reality.

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Lynch’s first full-length feature, which is in part about the paralyzing fears of child-rearing, could be described as both a difficult birth and a labor of love. After five years of erratic production schedules and troubled financing, Eraserhead reached the midnight-movie circuit in 1977, where it gradually won a cult following. The film focuses on the strange and banal Henry Spencer as he discovers that his on-off girlfriend is pregnant. Once the baby is born, the film descends into a Kafkaesque nightmare rife with humor and despair. With the help of a malevolent-sounding ambient soundtrack, Eraserhead builds a dystopian landscape that mirrors Spencer’s fraught relationship with everyone and everything around him.

Among Eraserhead’s many admirers was none other than Stanley Kubrick, who appropriated a great deal from Lynch’s film for his own horror masterpiece, 1980’s The Shining. The latter uses the same relentless background noise and lingering shots to build a sense of dread that eventually crescendos into a fever dream of madness. Even The Shining’s famous “Room 237” is a not-so-subtle allusion to Spencer’s sultry neighbor’s apartment room 27. In The Shining as in Eraserhead, sex masquerades as an escape but ultimately propels its central character further into his downward spiral.

Beyond its outsize impact on The Shining, Eraserhead may also be responsible for an entire subgenre: body horror, which focuses on the deterioration of the body by showing it in various states of decay or mutilation. In its visceral investigation into the anxieties of caring for a newborn, Eraserhead was one of the first films to portray the human body as something frightening and repellent, not to be nurtured but rather feared. Spencer’s vile offspring is only the most overt instance of body horror in the film; the title, after all, alludes to a dream sequence in which Spencer is decapitated and his head is used to create erasers at a pencil factory. This simultaneous fascination and repulsion with the human body and its infinite variety of deconstructions would go on to inform the work of David Cronenberg and Clive Barker in films like The Fly, Videodrome, and Hellraiser.

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Coming on the heels of Lynch’s infamous commercial flop, Dune, 1986’s Blue Velvet marked the director's return to personal, idiosyncratic storytelling. Telling the story of a clean-cut college kid (Kyle MacLachlan) who slips ever deeper into the sadistic underbelly of his sleepy North Carolina town, Blue Velvet received the kind of wildly polarizing reception reserved only for the most provocative films. The film was immediately derided by many as filthy and misogynistic (nuns from the actress Isabella Rossellini’s Catholic high school called her to let her know they were praying for her daily). Meanwhile, several critics, including Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, called it the best film of the decade.

Lynch’s sensibility both celebrates American culture and holds a funhouse mirror up to it.

Blue Velvet’s influence is perhaps most apparent in the films of Quentin Tarantino. The director picked up on how Blue Velvet not only stylized violence but created a new tone for it—one that was as fascinated with the minutiae surrounding perverse lives as it was in the brutal acts themselves. The infamous scene in Reservoir Dogs in which Michael Madsen’s Mr. Blonde cuts off a kidnapped cop’s ear while listening to K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the ’70s is a not-especially-subtle nod to the ear discovered early in Lynch’s film.

Reservoir Dogs and to an even greater extent Pulp Fiction intersperse their grisly set pieces with amusingly mundane dialogue, visual riddles, and hints at fetishism. Pulp Fiction’s infamous pawn-shop scene is a jolting play on the seedy-underbelly motif so thoroughly explored in Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Much like with Lynch, Tarantino’s early films are so compulsively watchable because all the subversive behavior takes place in a landscape of cultural conformity. With its Flintstones and Speed Racer T-Shirts and ’50s film posters, Pulp Fiction serves up the life of crime garnished with beloved artifacts of American culture. If this responsiveness to—and playful attitude toward—popular culture seems ideally primed for television, then it’s only fitting that Tarantino recently said he’d consider making a TV series as his next project.

Most importantly, Blue Velvet changed the way both directors and audiences think about small-town American life. The unassuming setting of suburbia and the atmosphere of film noir, once worlds apart, became inextricable after the movie’s release. The synthesis has influenced the work of the Coen Brothers (most notably Fargo, which later spawned an acclaimed anthology TV series), cerebral crime films like Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, and even shows like Mad Men, The Fall, and Bates Motel. In its own way, Blue Velvet rewrote the American mythos, pointing to the depravity that lurks behind idyllic picket fences.

Blue Velvet changed the way both directors and audiences think about small-town American life.

This “interactive” subtext, in which Lynch’s work entices viewers to question their own desires and moral compasses, is part of what makes the possibilities for the upcoming Twin Peaks so exciting. With television arguably serving as today’s dominant medium for carving America’s self-image, Lynch is returning to a platform more well-suited than ever to his penchant for toying with the zeitgeist.

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In 2001, 15 years after Blue Velvet and a decade after Twin Peaks, Lynch made what many consider to be his masterpiece. Mulholland Drive was originally conceived as a TV series for ABC in 1999 and was intended to be the director’s triumphant reappearance on television. But after fighting over creative control with network executives, Lynch finally decided to wrench Mulholland Drive back into his own hands and turn it into a film. The result is a celluloid sphinx of a movie—a Hollywood noir that’s exquisite and menacing and that does away with the dualism of light and dark Lynch explored in Blue Velvet and Eraserhead in favor of a more sophisticated dynamic. The morbid tone and moral ambiguity of the film lives on today in shows like True Detective, The Knick, and The Leftovers, all of which draw from the same well of existential confusion and disturbed protagonists.

Capturing Lynch’s puzzle-box structure is a feat most filmmakers have wisely chosen to stay away from. Instead, Mulholland Drive has been most significant as a psychological thriller that put an intricate, tortured female character at its core, while reinventing the old hierarchies of noir stories. Because the entire story is organized as layers of Selwyn’s memory and personality, Mulholland Drive expanded the possibilities for how psychologically complex women on screen could be. It also demolished trite conventions for female characters: Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, initially cast as a Hollywood naïf and a damsel in distress, thoroughly dismantle those archetypes by the film’s end. Watts’ Selwyn set the stage for characters like Nina in Black Swan, Justine in Melancholia, and even Jessica Jones of Netflix’s TV series.

Mulholland Drive was one of the first R-rated rabbit holes, a genre that’s gained significant purchase in the age of Netflix binge-watching. As James Poniewozik observed in a recent piece for The New York Times, Netflix and Amazon shows that drop full seasons at once and cater to immersive viewing are actually contributing to a different medium of visual storytelling. Longer than movies, denser than typical TV shows, series like Sense8 demands that viewers surrender completely to the show’s world and logic. Poniewozik’s description of this emerging form—hypnotic, enveloping, novelistic—sounds a lot like a Lynch film, but not so much like the movie industry anymore, which makes it easier perhaps to track Lynch’s influence in modern television.

At a time when theaters are primarily filled with remakes or sequels (or prequels), it’s no wonder television has emerged as a viable challenge to film’s aesthetic dominance. Even if some still maintain that TV isn’t “better” than film, the small screen’s fare in recent years has convinced many that cinema isn’t where most experimentation, risk-taking, and efforts to stay culturally relevant are happening. If Lynch had tried to Mulholland Drive as a TV show today, most likely he would have succeeded. It’s hard to think of a better time, then, for a Twin Peaks revival, and for the master of audacious and strange storytelling to return.

What’s the Name of the 2016 Blizzard?

The first thing you notice from the satellite is that it’s a monster, a single storm that stretches from Alabama to Pennsylvania, promising low pressure and high winds and moisture galore. If the forecasts come close to the reality, it will dump snow on every mid-Atlantic city along Interstate 95. It’s supposed to be the worst snowstorm that Washington, D.C., has seen in nearly 100 years.

And what will this goliath of a winter storm be called?

To the National Weather Service, it doesn’t need to be anything other than a “major winter storm.” Unlike hurricanes or tropical cyclones, which are well-organized and have a discrete center of circulation, nor’easters are just an especially strong version of normal weather patterns. As the winter-weather expert Paul Kocin, who literally wrote the book on huge northeast snowstorms, told me on Wednesday, they’re “just a very big manifestation of what we see all the time.”

That is, meteorologists can track hurricanes, and they can point to where they start and stop. Often they have to track more than one at a time, which makes names especially handy. But as a friend of mine put it on Twitter on Friday: Big snowstorms are just … the weather.

That doesn’t keep people from trying to name them, though. In October of last year, the Weather Channel announced its list of winter-storm names for the 2015-2016 season. The names tended to be more esoteric than those usually bestowed upon cyclones: winter storms Quo, Zandor, and Yolo. (By contrast, the National Hurricane Center has posted

What's the Name of the 2016 Blizzard?

The first thing you notice from the satellite is that it’s a monster, a single storm that stretches from Alabama to Pennsylvania, promising low pressure and high winds and moisture galore. If the forecasts come close to the reality, it will dump snow on every mid-Atlantic city along Interstate 95. It’s supposed to be the worst snowstorm that Washington, D.C., has seen in nearly 100 years.

And what will this goliath of a winter storm be called?

To the National Weather Service, it doesn’t need to be anything other than a “major winter storm.” Unlike hurricanes or tropical cyclones, which are well-organized and have a discrete center of circulation, nor’easters are just an especially strong version of normal weather patterns. As the winter-weather expert Paul Kocin, who literally wrote the book on huge northeast snowstorms, told me on Wednesday, they’re “just a very big manifestation of what we see all the time.”

That is, meteorologists can track hurricanes, and they can point to where they start and stop. Often they have to track more than one at a time, which makes names especially handy. But as a friend of mine put it on Twitter on Friday: Big snowstorms are just … the weather.

That doesn’t keep people from trying to name them, though. In October of last year, the Weather Channel announced its list of winter-storm names for the 2015-2016 season. The names tended to be more esoteric than those usually bestowed upon cyclones: winter storms Quo, Zandor, and Yolo. (By contrast, the National Hurricane Center has posted

The Oscars Change Course

Earlier this week, a few high-profile black celebrities, including Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith, and her husband Will, announced a boycott of 2016 Academy Awards in response to a second consecutive year in which only white actors were nominated for top awards.

Their efforts stirred a number of reactions. Other actors such as George Clooney and Lupita Nyong’o echoed their criticism while Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs promised reform. Social media revived its #OscarsSoWhite campaign from last year and at least one member of Congress lent the movement his support.

Perhaps less helpfully, actors Charlotte Rampling, who is nominated for an acting award this year, and Michael Caine, pushed back against the protest, implying that the campaign itself was racist. The New York Post did what the New York Post does best.

Today's cover: Brace yourself, NYC https://t.co/4dmX365jTM pic.twitter.com/d8eYlLDkk3

— New York Post (@nypost) January 21, 2016

On Friday, the Academy finally acted. In the throes of a diversity crisis, it promised to double the ranks of its female and minority members by the year 2020.

“The Academy is going to lead and not wait for the industry to catch up,” Isaacs said in a statement that seemed to imply that the issue had more to do with Hollywood than the body that honors it.

But as my colleague David Sims noted earlier this week, “The Oscars are a more than 6,000-member organization, and even after admitting a larger, diverse group of new members last year, its voters remain 93 percent white and 76 percent male.”

To enact the changes, the Academy will now require an evaluation of the voting status of its members once a decade, which may allow a purging of inactive industry members from the voting ranks. But don’t expect Old Hollywood to skulk away down Wilshire Boulevard without a fight. After all, Academy membership is for life.

As one director (anonymously) told The New York Times, “The notion of having my academy vote taken away from me because of age, and inactivity in the industry, is outrageous.”

How Son of Saul Captures the Reality of the Holocaust

When the 2016 Oscar nominees were announced last week, few who have followed Son of Saul’s prize-winning trajectory would have been surprised that the Hungarian drama secured a Best Foreign Language Film nod. The movie’s unusual camera work, its haunting story, and Géza Röhrig’s remarkable lead performance as a prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1944 have earned it international accolades. It recently won a Golden Globe—Hungary’s first—after claiming the Grand Jury Prize at its Cannes debut last May.

Now, Son of Saul is poised to join the long list of Holocaust-related dramas the Academy has feted, including The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), The Shop on Main Street (1966), The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), Sophie’s Choice (1982), Schindler’s List (1993), The Pianist (2002), The Reader (2008), and Ida (2014).

But it would be a mistake to simply categorize Son of Saul (originally titled Saul fia) as yet another award-worthy Holocaust film in a critical but some might say fatigued genre. “I didn’t want to make a film with a distant, detached point of view,” says its director, László Nemes. To avoid that, he sought to “place the audience in the shoes of one person in the middle of the killing machine. Otherwise the Holocaust becomes an abstract concept and the audience can back away.” In this way, Son of Saul sets itself apart from its predecessors—revitalizing a subject at risk of losing resonance so many years later.

The project’s place in the canon of Holocaust movies begins with its backstory. Nemes, himself the descendant of Shoah victims, discovered a French publication of actual testimonies buried at Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Sonderkommando—primarily Jewish prisoners whom the Nazis conscripted to usher their brethren into the gas chambers and crematoria. Disappointed with existing methods and angry about what he considered Europe’s unsatisfying response to the Holocaust, Nemes created a film within narrow parameters focused on the portrayal of one man’s surreal reality in Auschwitz.

As part of the Sonderkommando, Saul (Röhrig) is forced to lead prisoners into the fictitious showers of the gas chambers. With an over-the-shoulder view of Saul’s seemingly endless assignments, extended shots of his often silent face, largely blurred backgrounds, and an immersive wall of sound, Nemes creates a claustrophobic hell. Unlike countless other Holocaust films, there is no savior here, no hero who comes to the rescue. There are only victims trapped in the killing zone.

Saul’s moral dilemma—to participate in the murder machine or join its victims—is a foregone conclusion. Because the Sonderkommando were summarily executed to remove evidence of Nazi atrocities, his own demise is simply a matter of time. But when Saul finds a boy he believes is his own son, and insists on giving him a proper burial, his humanity awakens.

Unlike countless other Holocaust films, there is no savior in Son of Saul.

By focusing on one person’s experience, Son of Saul conveys the infinite sense of loss through the finite. Instead of an incomprehensible six million fatalities beyond human understanding, Saul is relatable—even in this madness. And because his fate is doomed, his actions speak for the two of every three European Jews who were murdered. (The lost include my grandparents, two of their children, and countless relatives whose identities I have struggled to identify through decades of genealogical research.)

With its realism, Son of Saul provides insight into the plight of survivors, including my recently deceased father—whom the Nazis forced to dig mass graves as an orphaned teenager. After consuming endless books and movies, conducting interviews with him, and completing a graduate program at Hebrew University, the film still helped me more deeply understand the weight of what my father carried through almost seven post-war decades. As Röhrig, another descendant of victims, says, “First you must survive. Then you must survive survival.” Son of Saul depicts Jews forced into what the Nazis described at Nuremberg as an unparalleled form of torture—forced participation in the annihilation of your own people.

When it comes to exploring the dark side of humanity, there’s no taking for granted that any one picture will offer the last word. “Every few years there is a film that comes out that ... inspires people to look at the Holocaust again with fresh eyes,” says Rick Trank, the Oscar-winning writer and director, whose 15 feature documentaries include 10 relating to the Holocaust. But it took a while for filmmakers to see the artistic potential in the tragedy: It wasn’t until 14 years after liberation, that the Academy put a Holocaust-era feature into the spotlight when it named Shelley Winters Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Diary of Anne Frank.

As Hollywood’s track record shows, those who lived through the Holocaust and critics don’t always agree on what constitutes a noteworthy project. Many survivors consider fictional material, including comedy-dramas such as Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning 1997 film Life is Beautiful, a farce. In contrast, the 2008 action movie Defiance scored no prominent awards for its factual portrayal of the Bielski brothers’ triumph as partisans. But the film earned high praise from survivors and their families for its realistic adaptation of Nechama Tec’s historical account, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans. In the middle of a theater screening, my father, whom American troops liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, turned to me in the dark saying, “This is how it was.” As I watched Son of Saul, I could practically hear him whisper those words again.

Many survivors prefer films that reflect stark reality as a way to both educate the uninformed and counter Holocaust deniers. Sentimentalizing narratives is an affront to their suffering. “You do a ‘dis-justice,’ if I can say such a thing, to what happened to the six million Jews,” Jack Adler, an 86-year-old survivor of Auschwitz, told me. “You should either show facts or don’t show anything.” Adler’s son, the cinematographer Eli Adler, details his survival in a new documentary titled Surviving Skokie. The story of the Shoah, and its witnessing, is still unfolding. And as fewer witnesses remain, works depicting authentic historical events take on greater significance.

By focusing on one person’s plight, Son of Saul conveys the infinite sense of loss through the finite.

Experts who have no personal connection to the tragedy agree the gap between all other films and Son of Saul is so great that the movie essentially ushers in a new era of Holocaust cinema. “It is the most personal, intimate, and believable account of what it must have been like for those who interned in the camps and annihilated,” says Tom Nunan, the Oscar-winning producer of Crash and a lecturer at UCLA’s Graduate Film and Television School who calls Son of Saul the most important Holocaust motion picture ever made. “It even brought to life the monsters who ran the camp more effectively than any other Holocaust film.”

The only other picture that comes close to achieving what Son of Saul does debuted 57 years ago. The Diary of Anne Frank remains a classic in print and on screen. It is also an effective teaching tool because it’s so relatable. As it depicts a young girl’s constant struggles and tiny joys—her first love, food shortages, and continued conflicts with unlikely roommates under the endless threat of discovery and deportation—the reality of her tiny, nocturnal existence becomes all the more real to viewers.

With a similar combination of factual material and thoughtful artistry, Son of Saul provides a window into the evil of conscripting human beings into the machinery of extermination. By celebrating one man’s determination to express his free will, the picture reveals the redemptive beauty of connecting to the transcendent—if only for a fleeting moment. This generates the project’s only smile near its dreaded conclusion. In a sea of award-winning films, Son of Saul offers an alternative so powerful, that, by example, it makes room for more. This may be its greatest triumph of all.

Sympathy for the Macklemore

The third verse of Macklemore’s new song, “White Privilege II,” is from the perspective of a fan complimenting the 32-year-old Seattle rapper for hits like “Thrift Shop” and “Same Love.” Everything is copacetic and nice until the speaker—it’s Macklemore using a filter and multi-tracking to make it clear that this isn’t his voice—disses the rest of hip-hop:

That’s so cool, look what you’re accomplishing
Even an old mom like me likes it cause it’s positive
You’re the only hip-hop that I let my kids listen to
Cause you get it, all that negative stuff isn’t cool
Yeah, like all the guns and the drugs
The bitches and the hoes and the gangs and the thugs
Even the protest outside—so sad and so dumb
If a cop pulls you over, it’s your fault if you run

Awkward silence. Clanging of silverware. Macklemore’s natural voice: “Huh?”

It’s good to keep that image of the middle-aged, rap-hating parent in mind when evaluating a song like this, which triggered a wave of groans on certain parts of the Internet when it was released last night. The irony is that Macklemore has clearly internalized, and sympathizes with, the groaners. But this song isn’t explicitly addressing them. It’s addressing the audience that turned him from an indie-rap stalwart to a pop star. And the message he sends them is, theoretically, in line with the worldview of a lot of people who believe that racial inequality is responsible for a lot of America’s most pressing problems. Black Lives Matter’s DeRay Mckesson has even endorsed it.

You can recognize all of these things and still hate the song.

I’d start unpacking what Macklemore says, but the thing is that there isn’t much unpacking to be done. He isn’t a rapper who hides his meaning. Just go and read the lyrics. The first verse has him realizing the surface-level contradictions of being a white supporter at a Black Lives Matter protest. The second has him comparing himself to Miley Cyrus, Iggy Azalea, and Elvis—all musicians who have profited by repackaging musical styles born of black experiences with a white face and a white point of view—and wondering whether he’s done enough to fight racism. The third is the awkward exchange with that unwittingly racist mom-fan. And the fourth starts “Damn, a lot of opinions” and says he needs to read more articles and have more conversations to make the world better. At one point in the song, you hear soundbites from folks who don’t get why Black Lives Matters exists. Later, you hear soundbites explaining why it does. It all ends with the vocalist Jamila Woods singing, “Your silence is a luxury, hip-hop is not a luxury.”

So the song is both a statement—don’t just be aware of racism, speak up about it—and a demonstration. Macklemore is practicing what he preaches, as he preaches it. He also spotlights the voices of actual black activists. Who could attack him for that? I can’t. This is a brave song. For anyone who suspects that this airing of guilt is just a belated, performative way for him to feel okay with his success—like the useless public apology he once sent to Kendrick Lamar after beating him at the Grammys—the song title points out that all the way back in 2005, Macklemore released a song called “White Privilege.” That track provided a more detailed rebuke to those who elevate him over “negative” hip-hop: “Now I don’t rap about guns, so they label me conscious / But I don’t rap about guns cause I wasn't forced into the projects.”

But. One of music’s virtues as an art form is that it always, on some level, communicates things that mere language cannot. Macklemore has never seemed super in-control of this idea. The fact that his lyrics are so basic, forgoing metaphor or ambiguity or impressionism, certainly accounts for a big part of his wide appeal. But it also accounts for why many other listeners (ahem) feel pandered to, exhausted by, and/or vaguely embarrassed by his songs. Even for those who don’t have a negative response, there’s the question of how effective his blunt-force approach really is. Aren’t narratives whose meaning takes some interpretation more likely to stick in the head than an op-ed that tells you exactly what to think?

The main appeal of this song isn’t politics. It’s pathos.

The music itself is sending a mixed message, too. Macklemore’s verses here are all about his internal conflict, but the choruses and final refrain, sung by other vocalists, scan as pretty straightforward protest-chant material. The chords are going for goosebumps at all times. You could see this as an admirable attempt to reconcile Macklemore’s intractable soulsearch with the desire to still take action—to not be paralyzed by guilt but rather turn it into a tool. Or you can see it as compromising the uncomfortable truth of the song. A lot of commentators immediately picked up on the fact that the song’s instrumentation—jazzy, spooky—resembles the material on Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly; Macklemore lecturing himself is also a less-artful version of what Lamar does on that album. But Lamar would never let anyone come away thinking the solution was as exciting as Macklemore makes it sound here. He probably wouldn’t tack on the uplifting coda at the end of this song.

Again, the politics of “White Privilege II” are admirable, and it would be churlish or worse to root for it to go ignored by the public. But in various ways—the straining nature of Macklemore’s voice, the lyrical focus on his inner self, the instrumentation—the main appeal of this song isn’t politics. It’s pathos. Macklemore never explicitly asks you to feel sorry for him, the rich white rapper bedeviled by his own conscience, but you still walk away feeling as though he has. The song, fundamentally, is a nine-minute version of the pop trope Sia once helpfully termed “victim to victory.” Macklemore as victim? Yes, it’s okay to groan.

What the U.S. East Coast's Massive Snow Storm Looks Like

Updated January 22 at 2:10 p.m. EST

That swirling cover of white up there is the first blizzard of 2016, captured by satellite on Friday as it barrels across the central United States, toward the East Coast.

The “potentially crippling” storm is expected to bring powerful winds and up to two feet of snow to parts of the Mid-Atlantic this weekend, which could result in flooding in coastal regions, the U.S. National Weather Service warned. The storm has the makings of the “Big One” and so far appears “textbook,” according to the winter-weather expert who literally wrote the textbook on northeast snowstorms.

As of Friday morning, more than 85 million people—or more than one in every four Americans—were covered by some kind of blizzard or winter-storm advisory, according to weather.com. Local, state, and federal officials have been scrambling to organize their responses to the blizzard as residents swarm grocery stores to stock up on food and water. As of Friday afternoon, there were already five storm-related deaths reported.

We’ll be tracking the snowstorm here throughout the weekend at various levels: NASA/NOAA GOES Project