Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 25

Intel Agencies: Russia Sought to Hurt Clinton, Help Trump

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its most detailed report on alleged Russian hacking aimed at interfering with the presidential election on Friday.

The 25-page report states that the CIA, FBI, and NSA have concluded that Russia was behind a series of attacks, as well as disinformation disseminated via various media, with the goal of undermining faith in U.S. elections and harming Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects and her prospective administration. They have concluded, however, that there was no meddling in vote tallying.

Although the unclassified report, which is based on a longer, classified report, uses the strongest language and offers the most detailed assessment yet, it does not or cannot provide evidence for its assertions. That virtually guarantees that it will not change many minds in the debate, which has become heavily partisan. The intelligence community is in effect telling readers, “trust us”—something the president-elect, among others, has been unwilling to do.

Donald Trump has repeatedly refused to accept the conclusion that Russia was behind the hacks, and has questioned the judgment of the intelligence community. The president-elect was briefed on ODNI’s findings Friday, and based on a bland statement he released after the meeting, Trump apparently has not gotten any closer to crediting them. He appears to continue to view the debate as essentially a partisan one between Republicans and Democrats, and sniped at the Democratic National Committee’s cyberdefenses in his statement.

“I have tremendous respect for the work and service done by the men and women of this community to our great nation,” Trump said, but added:

While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines. There were attempts to hack the Republican National Committee, but the RNC had strong hacking defenses and the hackers were unsuccessful.

While Trump stopped short of directly disputing the content of the report, his conclusions are sharply at odds with theirs. ODNI is blunt about Russia’s role.

The report states with “high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin not only sought to undermine U.S. democracy and Clinton, but that Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” ODNI says that “when it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency.” Trump’s victory on November 8 came as a surprise to nearly everyone, including the Trump team.

According to ODNI, Russian pursued these goals through a blended strategy, including targeted hacks against political targets but also a propaganda rush employing “state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls.’”

The report notes that while some hacks also aimed at Republican targets, there was no comparable disclosure of documents. ODNI concludes that Russia’s government, having obtained emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and others, then distributed them through a website called DCLeaks as well as through WikiLeaks. (WikiLeaks has denied that Russia was its source for the documents.)

Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been much more willing to accept the intelligence committee’s conclusions that Trump has. (As Politico’s Gabriel Debenedetti noted, the ODNI conclusion closely mirrors what Hillary Clinton told donors in December.) Immediately following the report, Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, issued a statement that disagreed with Trump’s suggestion of unclear responsibility while still asserting the legitimacy of Trump’s election:

Russia has a track record of working against our interests, and they clearly tried to meddle in our political system. I strongly condemn any outside interference in our elections, which we must work to prevent moving forward.

We must also be clear that there is no evidence that there was any interference in the voting or balloting process. We cannot allow partisans to exploit this report in an attempt to delegitimize the president-elect’s victory. Donald Trump won this election fair and square because he heard the voices of Americans who felt forgotten.

But for those less willing to take the intelligence assessment on faith, it’s hard to imagine the report will convince them. A unusual coalition—ranging from Trump and his closest allies to the liberal journalist Glenn Greenwald, a longtime skeptic of U.S. intelligence agencies—have refused to accept the evidence without a smoking gun. The ODNI report does not, and for reasons of classification perhaps cannot, offer anything more than repeatedly, sternly worded judgment from the intelligence agencies. (Trump presumably received a classified version that may have offered more detail.)

ODNI goes to great pains to establish its credibility. The report states that “The tradecraft standards for analytic products have been refined over the past ten years,” a timeline that picks up after the build-up to the Iraq War. It also offers an appendix explaining the jargon used to describe levels of certainty.

Peculiarly, the longest single section of the report is a lengthy appendix focusing on RT, the Russian state-owned television network, which was originally published by the CIA’s Open Source Center in 2012. While the purpose of the appendix appears to be to demonstrate the way that Russia uses RT (previously known as Russia Today) to spread disinformation and the Russian government line, its length and its rather obvious conclusion—a Russian state-owned channel is a medium for Russian messaging—sit somewhat awkwardly beside the blunt but unspecified accusations in the short body of the report.

As the release of the ODNI report approached, there was an air of hope that it might put to rest the ongoing debate over who conducted the hacks and why. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s tight-lipped answers about its contents during a Senate hearing on Thursday telegraphed that it might set the issue to rest. And who knows? Perhaps the classified version is full of specific, detailed, irrefutable evidence connecting the hacks to the Kremlin.

But as of now, the situation seems identical to what it was Friday morning: The president-elect rejects the intelligence community’s assessment, Congress accepts it, and the spies cannot or will not publicly produce the evidence it would take to persuade the skeptics.

Bright Lights Captures the Magic of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds

Toward the end of Bright Lights: Starring Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, Reynolds rests on a couch, frail but sparkling after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild. “There’s no business like show business,” she says. Fisher, resting her head on her mother’s shoulder, senses an opportunity. “You know what, I have to say something,” she says, perfectly deadpan. “Everything about it is appealing.” Reynolds frowns intently, and joins in. “Nowhere can you get that special feeling.” The pair work through the impromptu skit, perfectly serious, and perfectly in sync.

There are moments like this peppered throughout Bright Lights, a documentary by Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens airing Saturday on HBO that captures the forceful personalities and extraordinary charisma of both women, and their fierce but complex love for one another. The film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and was originally scheduled to air in March, but was moved up after Fisher and Reynolds died at the end of 2016, just a day apart. Given the context, it functions as an adoring tribute to the two performers, but it’s also a snapshot of the kind of relationship documentarians dream about: two eccentric, outgoing personalities, living in almost too-close proximity, recalling their glory days. Part- Grey Gardens, part-Baby Jane without the malice, Bright Lights is endlessly charming and sometimes deeply moving.

It helps that Reynolds and Fisher are such perfect representatives of their respective Hollywood generations, the first a disciplined, controlled product of the studio system, and the second a messier, unfiltered, unflinchingly honest star, whose candor about her mental-health and addiction issues made her achievements more tangible. Bright Lights gets most of its scenes from Fisher, following her to London, to a Star Wars convention, and around her house, with its quirky decor and errant artifacts (a Princess Leia sex doll, a suitcase named Robert). Reynold’s moments are more discreet, more choreographed. But her wit is razor-sharp, and her harmony with Fisher completely in tune. “I share everything with my daughter, especially the check,” she remarks in one scene.

The film’s structure is loose, almost nonexistent, and its main arc seems to be Fisher’s concern for her mother’s health, which comes across now as sharply poignant. Reynolds continues to book performances, which wear her out, so Fisher accompanies her to a cavernous hall in Connecticut and to a shopworn casino in Vegas, where Reynolds zips across the floor on a motor scooter, almost unrecognizable. “You’ve heard of a tsunami, see, she’s tsu-mommy,” Fisher quips early in the movie. The pair live in separate houses within the same Beverly Hills estate, but they’re a constant presence in each other’s lives. “I usually come to her,” Fisher explains, walking across the lawn clutching a cheese soufflé she’s baked for her mother. “I always come to her.” (“That is a beautiful puff,” Reynolds exclaims when she tastes the wares.)

Bloom and Stevens feature a treasure trove of snapshots, home-movie footage, film scenes, and previously documented family moments, thanks largely to Reynold’s passion for amassing Hollywood memorabilia. (One of the documentary’s subplots features her longtime attempts to found a museum along with her son, Todd, a supporting player in Bright Lights who tends to shrink next to the wattage of his mother and sister.) There are scenes of baby Carrie, perfectly groomed for stardom even as an infant, and even 15-year-old Carrie, compelled by her mother to guest in her cabaret act, singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” with the power and sass of a teenage Janis Joplin. “My mother wanted to be able to groom me for show business,” Fisher says. “The biggest thing I did that broke [her] heart was not do a nightclub act.”

Fisher allows the filmmakers virtually everywhere. In one scene, she works out with a trainer sent over by Lucasfilm, who tries to throw out her Coca-Cola cans and cigarettes, to no avail. In another, she chats with her friend Griffin Dunne while the pair sits on her bed, recalling how he generously helped her out with the loss of her virginity. The cameras are rolling, too, when she has a manic episode sparked by her distress at Debbie’s frailty in the run-up to the SAG Awards. She huddles on the floor in tears, then later launches into impassioned Hamlet quotes and songs while she’s having her nails done. Her concern for her mother is matched by Reynolds, who frequently tears up when talking to the camera about Fisher’s many battles.

But the overarching sense of the film is that the pair have found an easy peace together, and that Reynolds is battling through each day mostly to be able to spend this time with her daughter. While Fisher insists Reynolds continues to perform because it “feeds her in a way that family cannot,” the impression in watching the pair interact is that their closeness means something more. In some moments, the two almost morph into each other by way of shared duets and one-liners. If Bright Lights is, at times, a sharp reminder of what’s been lost, it’s also convincing evidence that wherever Fisher and Reynolds are now, they’re almost certainly together.

Run the Jewels’ Gloriously Obscene Rebellion

“Welcome to fuckyoupalooze,” El-P offers on Run the Jewels 3, and it might as well be the album’s alternate title. Since the initial 2013 team-up of the rappers Killer Mike and El-P, Run the Jewels have built a rep as fierce protest musicians, but their work is best understood as an omnidirectional middle finger. Over the course of their latest release, they threaten nuns, bunny rabbits, “moms from jazzercise,” and general politeness: “I don’t know how to not spit like a lout,” El-P says, adding, “I’ll spill a pound of my kids on your couch.”

It would seem like a good moment for loutish spitting, given the tenor of online discourse and given the locker-room-talker headed to the Oval Office. Not long ago, Run the Jewels came across as total outsiders, with the smart sorrowful conscience of Atlanta’s Killer Mike and the sci-fi agitation of Brooklyn’s El-P combining for a vibe out of step with the rap mainstream and much of American popular culture. But lately their finely detailed, burn-it-down bombast seems strangely on-trend: In style if not in substance, they indulge the rush of giddy, combative pessimism on the rise for both sides of the ideological spectrum.

To be clear, they stand firmly on the left side of that spectrum. El-P stopped wearing red hats because of Donald Trump; Killer Mike worked as a Bernie Sanders surrogate. But Mike also opposed Hillary Clinton throughout the general election, saying she was “the same” as her opponent and alternately issuing “stay the fuck home” and “vote locally” messages to black people in the campaign’s final days. He’s possibly the leading cultural champion of the anti-status-quo mindset that took such a hold on portions of the traditional Democratic base that it may have swung the election, and he’s not softening now. “Choose the lesser of the evil people, and the devil still gon’ win,” he raps. “It could all be over tomorrow, kill our masters and start again.”

The fantasy of erasing the powerful and starting society again, of justice achieved through total rupture, has always been essential to the thrill of Run the Jewels’ music. It’s in the mechanized warfare of El-P’s production, where gunmetal-grey textures click and clack over propulsion recalling The Prodigy’s angry breakbeats. It’s in the us-vs.-everyone verbal teamwork creating rhyme patterns and line-lengths that are complementary, often-changing, and out of step with what you’re hearing elsewhere. And it’s in the free-questing lyrics that swirl raunch and introspection and agitprop.

Run the Jewels 3 is the longest of their releases—14 songs, 51 minutes—and it must be said their shtick at this scale does become a bit repetitive. Still, the highlights are enormous. “Down” makes a poignant start, putting the entire Run the Jewels project into perspective by establishing how a desperate past can color someone’s successful present. Over downbeat washes of sound, Mike talks about his fear of having to return to drug dealing and summarizes the Bill of Rights as it most urgently pertains to those like him: “One time for the freedom of speeches / Two time for the right to hold heaters / Just skip to the fifth, with the cops in the house, close your mouth and pray to your Jesus.”

From there, the duo vaults through a series of brag jams that double as furniture-kicking sessions, the musical geography defined less by verses and choruses than by clusters of epic moments. One comes when a deadpan female voice interrupts El-P’s claim about what’s between his legs: “I got a unicorn horn for a—‘stop.’” Another comes as the beat switches between the songs “Legend Has It” and “Call Ticketron,” the latter a high-energy rave spiked with snippets of old commercials for Madison Square Garden seats. While the swagger often betrays a political sensibility—Mike: “Domain eminent, we the preeminent”—eventually they shift back into more serious, solemn modes.

“You talk clean and bomb hospitals / So I speak with the foulest mouth possible.”

It’s especially solemn, and memorable, when the two give their own individual spins on grief for “Thursday in the Danger Room.” As is typical, El-P focuses more on self and Mike more on community, but both deliver potent testimony. Earlier, the spacey “2100” contemplates pending civilizational catastrophes, with the title hinting either at the date of total disaster or of long-overdue repair—though in Run the Jewels’ worldview, of course, these can be the same thing. The talk of inevitable holocaust and war hits hard after, say, recent famous tweets about nukes, but the song was written before the election and the sentiment has been the same all along for the band. “I’ve felt this dread pretty much my entire life,” El-P told Vulture. “I think we live in a bit of a bubble here. And that bubble’s popping. Everybody’s like, ‘Holy shit, things might not be fine if we turn the TV off.’”

Throughout, the rappers display South Park-ian disregard for decorum, most especially on the religious defilement anthem “Panther Like a Panther.” This obscenity isn’t simple hijinks; to hear them tell it, it’s a side effect of political bravery.  “I’m a pervert with purpose that make you question your purpose,” Killer Mike raps. El-P’s take: “You talk clean and bomb hospitals / So I speak with the foulest mouth possible.” Is this stuff actually going to shock people out of complacency? Maybe a few. But Run the Jewels raps first for its super-devoted fanbase, and the people who shell out for remix albums made entirely of cat meows are presumably already converted. The spectacle of over-the-top, destroy-it-all rhetoric works best to cinch performer and listener, a dynamic that’s well-familiar these days—even outside of music.

Obama's Anger Translator Takes a Final Bow

There’s perhaps been no better satire of the Obama presidency than the figure of Luther, Obama’s anger translator. Key & Peele’s serialized sketch, in which the title character says all the things Obama won’t and can’t say as president, was multifaceted in its insights: about the performative demands of the office, about Obama’s own cool demeanor, about the collision of all those things in the person of the country’s first black president. Key & Peele’s Luther sketches—including, and perhaps especially, the one performed with the actual President Obama, at the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner—were, in all that, as profound as they were wacky, and as much about the country Obama governed as they were about the president himself.

Since that country elected a new president in November, Key & Peele fans have been clamoring for a return of the character—to “translate” the calm, hopeful messages Obama has been sending about the transition into some angry (and, in that, cathartic) real-talk. On Thursday evening, during Keegan-Michael Key’s appearance on The Daily Show, they got their wish: After a brief conversation with Trevor Noah, Key introduced the sketch he had made with Jordan Peele—one in which Peele’s “Obama” gives his final address to the nation as its president. One in which Luther, as always, is there to translate.

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It’s everything you’d expect of such a sketch, expertly executed. Obama informs Luther to keep calm; Luther is completely unable to do so. “Don’t you understand?” Luther asks. “This is how The Hunger Games starts!” To Obama’s exhortations that now someone else will be calling the shots, Luther screams, “Yeah! Vladimir Putin!” To the president’s reminder that “it was a close election, but the people have spoken,” Luther replies, “Yeah! They voted for Hillary Clinton, but then this outdated electoral college mumbo-jumbo voodoo bull[bleep]!” and walks out of the room in uncontainable exasperation. To Obama’s note that “it’s more imperative than ever that we move on as a country united,” Luther replies “united in the fact that we can’t [bleep] stand each other!”

So the post-election Luther sketch is made mostly the stuff of the pre-election versions: “No drama Obama,” next to the losing-his-mind-with-outrage Luther. But as the sketch wraps up—as “Obama” concludes his farewell address to the nation—the whole thing pivots. It’s Obama who gets angry. It’s Obama who, more significantly, no longer feels the need to disguise that anger.

When Luther excoriates the new president’s immigration policy—“the only good immigrant is a smoking-hot white one!”—Obama ads, “who plagiarizes speeches.” Luther stands in a moment of stunned silence as he realizes that the president has left nothing for him to translate. Later, Obama mentions the tradition of the outgoing president leaving the incoming one a note, in the desk of the Oval Office, offering advice. The contents of that note have been confidential, Obama says, “until now.” Luther grabs the note out of the president’s hand and reveals that the message Obama has left to President Trump reads, “Go [bleep] yourself.”

It was, for a series of sketches that has always operated on several dimensions, a fitting conclusion: In Luther’s (ostensibly) final appearance, he cedes his outrage to the president himself—who, soon to be freed of the many constraints of his office, seems to be out of patience with the requirement that he keep his cool. After eight years of partisan gamesmanship, and eight years of stoicism, Key & Peele’s version of Obama has had it with all the cool-keeping. He no longer needs someone to translate his anger. “In summation,” the outgoing president tells the nation, “it’s been real. It’s been good. But it hasn’t been real good.”

Silence Is Easier to Admire Than to Love

Silence, the new film by Martin Scorsese, opens with almost as literal a vision of Hell as one could imagine. The year is 1633; the place, a craggy, volcanic expanse near Nagasaki called Unzen. Through the sulphur fumes and scalding vapor, we see European men, their hands tied, being led by Japanese soldiers to the boiling springs that dot the landscape. Their robes are parted and searing water poured on their skin. In voiceover, it is explained that the ladles used are perforated such that each individual drop may strike the skin “like a burning coal.” The springs themselves are called, aptly enough, jogoku, or “hells.”

The man narrating this excruciating torture is Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), a Jesuit missionary. The victims, who number in the dozens, are his fellow Catholic priests. Christianity has been outlawed as a threat to Japanese culture and it is being burned out of the country in the most direct manner available.

Father Ferreira’s observations are committed to a letter, and it is in that context that we hear them again. It is now 1640, seven years after the horrors he recounted, and a senior Jesuit (Ciarán Hinds) is reading the letter to two young priests who were once Ferreira’s pupils, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver). The elder priest also informs them that Ferreira subsequently disappeared and is rumored to have “apostatized”—that is, renounced God.

Rodrigues and Garupe refuse to believe this of their beloved mentor, and they vow to find him and dispel the slander. Their superior accedes to their mission, though he reminds them of the extraordinary danger they will face from the moment they set foot in Japan: “You will be the last two priests ever sent.”

Silence is based on the celebrated 1966 novel of the same name by Shūsaku Endō, and Scorsese has been vowing to bring it to the big screen ever since he first read the book in 1989. At the time, he was dealing with the blowback to his controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, and in Endō’s story of faith and doubt, he felt echoes of both his recent experience and his longtime relationship with the Church, of which he had once intended to become a priest.

Nearly 30 years in the making, Silence is a heartfelt and serious work. But through length and redundancy—both, no doubt, the product of Scorsese’s deep admiration for Endō—as well as an underwhelming central performance by Garfield, it ultimately falls short of its powerful ambitions.

The two priests, Rodrigues and Garupe, are smuggled into Japan by Kichijiro (Yōsuke Kubozuka), a fickle and intemperate drunk. (There is a noticeable echo of the legendary Toshiro Mifune in the performance.) There, they encounter a town populated by secret Christians, and their mission begins to shift, from finding and rescuing Ferreira to ministering to these devout peasants, who live in terror of discovery by the authorities. The Japan of these early scenes—conjured by the cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto—is a misery of rock and rain, in which mud-bound villages can hope for little more than not to be swept entirely out to sea.

Eventually, official “inquisitors” do come to the town in which the priests are hiding, and the two men are forced to split up. For the remainder of the film, we follow the journey of Rodrigues as he witnesses atrocities against his fellow Christians—crucifixions, drownings, a beheading—grapples with his own faith, and is himself captured. Most of all, he suffers from the apparent “silence” with which God answers his prayers.

The tradeoff repeatedly extended by the authorities to those suspected of Christian belief would seem a simple one. Just place one’s foot on a fumi-e, a small plaque bearing a likeness of Christ or the Virgin, and one will escape punishment and perhaps be freed. Refuse, and one will face torture or worse.

Silence is not an easy film to watch, its 160-minute running time awash in images of pain and cruelty.

Many of the peasants questioned refuse to step on the fumi-e and suffer accordingly. But many are willing to make that concession—and are, in fact encouraged by Rodrigues to do so—in order to keep their lives. Among the latter is the priests’ initial guide, Kichijiro, whose continued vacillation between apostasy and confession makes him one of the film’s more infuriating and provocatively human figures.

As is no doubt apparent, Silence is not an easy film to watch, its 160-minute running time awash in images of pain and cruelty. But neither is it a mere cinematic exercise in physical endurance or the punishments of the flesh, such as Unbroken or even The Revenant. Scorsese is attempting something far more interesting: a portrait of the endurance of the soul.

It is not, after all, Rodrigues’s body that is being tormented, but those of the people around him. And it is made abundantly clear that it is within his power to make it stop if only he will himself apostatize. As the chief inquisitor, Inoue, cunningly played by Issey Ogata, explains: “We learned from our mistakes. Killing priests only makes them stronger.” Another interrogator puts it still more directly when Rodrigues insists that the victims around him “didn’t die for nothing.” “No,” he replies. “They died for you.”

But for all the torments they inflict, the Japanese inquisitors are no generic movie villains. They truly believe that Christianity is incompatible with the Japanese spirit, an alien pathogen imported by arrogant and incurious Europeans. And the film gives this case its due. It is notable, for instance, that none of the Jesuits we encounter speaks more than a tiny smattering of Japanese, but peasants and inquisitors alike manage to make themselves understood in Portuguese (rendered in the film as English). One of Rodrigues’s captors—played superbly by Tadanobu Asano—is fluent enough to function as a full-time translator.

Indeed, one of the chief weaknesses of Silence is that so many of the characters in orbit around Rodrigues convey more narrative gravity than he does himself: Asano’s translator, Ogata’s inquisitor, Kubozuka’s fickle Kichijiro, Driver’s Father Garupe, a village elder played by Yoshi Oida. Andrew Garfield is a fine actor, but his calling card has always been a kind of boyish ingenuousness, and here it is tested beyond its limits.

Let there be no misunderstanding: Silence is an indisputably worthy film from one of our greatest living directors.

Garfield’s previous major role of the year, Hacksaw Ridge, is illustrative. In it, as in Silence, he plays a devout Christian—one who served as an Army medic in World War II and, despite his refusal to carry a firearm, rescued 75 of his gravely injured comrades from the battlefield. But in Hacksaw Ridge, this Christian spirit was emphatic, uplifting, a source of near-limitless strength. It was the solution to the problem at hand. In Silence, by contrast, Garfield faces the far heavier challenge of grappling with the possibility that it might be the problem. Far from saving lives, Rodrigues’s faith is costing them.

Scorsese does Garfield no favors by extending his protagonist’s torments to such extreme lengths. The film is full of moments that, for all their elegance and power, feel repetitive: yet another scene of peasants being commanded to step on the fumi-e; another brutal torture; another confrontation between Rodrigues and the inquisitors in which each side talks past the other—universal truth versus cultural difference—without success.

These philosophical disputes, too, rarely achieve the depth or richness for which one hopes. Late in the film it is suggested, intriguingly, that perhaps the Christian faith of the Japanese peasants isn’t really Christian at all, that due to a long-ago error of translation, they worship not the “Son,” but the “Sun.” Alas, Scorsese’s film is more interested in cataloguing Rodrigues’s ongoing spiritual anguishes than in pulling further on such theological threads.

It all comes to an end—though I should warn, there’s still a half-hour left—when Rodrigues finally completes his mission and learns the fate of his mentor, Father Ferreira. I will not reveal what he discovers, but I will say that it feels like a moment that could easily have taken place far earlier in the film.

Let there be no misunderstanding: Silence is an indisputably worthy film from one of our greatest living directors, one that searchingly tackles questions of faith and doubt and duty. The visuals supplied by Prieto are themselves worth the price of admission—the desperate peasants crawling up over the side of a boat, like pirates or mermen; a town abandoned to a community of feral cats; a sea cave that functions like a portal from one world to the next. Scorsese’s abiding passion and respect for his source material is everywhere in evidence. For once, perhaps, it is a little too great.

The Desire to Live-Stream Violence

Two men and two women in Chicago were arrested and charged Thursday with kidnapping and torturing a man, slicing off a piece of his hair, down to his scalp, with a knife. Many people were witness to the assault, because it was streamed on Facebook Live.

Jordan Hill, Tesfaye Cooper, Brittany Covington, all 18, and Tanishia Covington, who is 24 (police had earlier said she was 18, as well), have each been charged with felony aggravated kidnapping, unlawful restraint, and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. And because the suspects are all black, the victim white, and because video of the assault shows the suspects yelling, “fuck Donald Trump,” and “fuck white people,” the four have also been charged with a hate crime. Police said one of the suspects knew the victim, who is 18, from high school. The victim had been reported missing Monday by his family, and is said to have mental-health problems. He was taken in a stolen van from where his family had dropped him off to meet a friend; how he ended up with the suspects is still being investigated. In the video, the man sits in the corner of the room, bound, and with tape over his mouth. The suspects cut the sleeves of his sweatshirt, kick and hit him, and threaten his life. It’s a crime Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson called “sickening.” He said it displayed the “brazenness of the offenders who assaulted the victim and then broadcast it for the entire world to see.” Which raises the question: Why would someone live-stream a crime?

“There’s an easy answer,” N.G. Berrill, executive director of the the New York Center for Neuropsychology & Forensic Behavioral Science, told me, “which is that they’re stupid.”

Most of the approximately 30-minute video focuses on a woman who is apparently holding a cellphone and filming the assault. She blows smoke into the camera, flashes a few bottles of alcohol, even checks her hair. The three others in the live-stream pop in and out and talk to the camera. At one point, dissatisfied with how few people have tuned in to watch the group assault the man, the woman with the cellphone says to her internet following, “You all ain’t even commenting on my shit. Ain’t nobody watching my shit.”

A bit later, presumably after someone commented on her live-stream, she says, “What up, Devin?”During all this, the bound victim can be heard pleading off-camera. Stupidity may be one answer for the suspects’ actions. But the group also seems oblivious of their actions and callous to the victim’s suffering. Berrill said part of the reason they might have live-streamed the assault can be chalked up to teen impulsiveness. “Obviously, there’s not a lot of clear-minded thought here,” he said. The more difficult answer, however, cuts close to a recent internet phenomenon that includes cases like Marina Lonina, the Ohio woman who filmed her underage friend being raped last year on Periscope, another live-streaming application.

Lonina and her friend, who was 17, went home with 29-year-old Raymond Boyd Gates, who was convicted last October of rape. Lonina told police later she intended to recorded the assault so Gates would stop, but, in the words of the prosecutor, “she got caught up in it by the number of likes that her live-stream was getting, so she continued to do it."

Violence will always attract attention. And in the Chicago video clip, the four teenagers boast about their intentions to harm the man, almost feeding and building upon each other’s claims, until one man tells viewers they plan to stick the victim in the trunk of a car, put a brick on the gas pedal, then let it, “errrrrrrr … .”

“It speaks to a kind of scary place in the culture where people are willing to expose their misled ideas, their sadism, their sexual perversion, their felonious behavior, for the accolades they’ll receive through social media,” Berrill said.

Police would later find the victim disoriented, wandering the streets on Chicago’s West Side, an area that experienced heavy violence this past year, as has much of the city. This context is also important in understanding what happened: Last year the city had 762 homicides, a nearly 60 percent increase from the previous year. In certain neighborhoods, violence is normal. Young kids, especially teenagers, can become desensitized to what may seem to the rest of the country as merely one horrific moment.

“It is a perfect example of chaos,” Desmond Patton, an assistant professor of social work at Columbia University, and who studied at the University of Chicago, told me. “Number one they are young people, and young people have forever made dumb decisions and mistakes. But when this is embedded in an environment of violence, where violence is unaddressed, and in deprived communities, then these are the types of things that can happen.”

The world in which some of the young men and women live can be horrifying, Patton said, and the live-stream is partly a reflection of that. What may seem appalling and evil to the wider world, may not be too far beyond normal for some of these people—it’s just not typically broadcast for everyone to see.

Many of the people Berrill studies in cases like this are under-socialized or attention-starved, and, like a child repeatedly dropping a toy on the ground, they have trouble differentiating good and bad attention. This will probably get worse, Berrill said. Facebook’s live-stream application is relatively new. It has been used to record the mundane, the exceptionally heroic, the horrific, and in this case the sadistic. In that way, it is a reflection of society. But what’s new, Berrill said, is he wonders if this attack would have even happened if the assailants could not have broadcast it. “It’s an element in these cases that encourages this behavior, because they know immediately there’s a built in audience for it,” he said.

As people develop online communities and audiences, there will always be a desire to attract more attention—whether that’s through Twitter, or live-streaming. And a shortcut to attract attention will always be to say or do something absurd, contentious, even violent.

The Astonishing Transformation of Julian Assange

It’s not that unusual for a public figure to go from hero to villain. But going from villainy to heroism? That’s a tougher road to traverse.

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and central figure, has managed to do both over the last few months, culminating in a remarkable embrace by the president-elect two longtime critics on the American right, Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin. Over the same time, some of Assange’s erstwhile champions on the American left have drifted away, disillusioned by the way WikiLeaks attacked Hillary Clinton during the presidential election. Has Assange changed, or is his rehabilitation on the right, and his loss of esteem on the left, simply a factor of political exigencies within the United States? The answer is a little bit of both.

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Six years ago, when WikiLeaks burst on the scene with its massive release of American documents, Donald Trump was livid. “I think it's disgraceful, I think there should be like death penalty or something,” the then-entertainer said in an exchange recently dug up by CNN’s KFile.

Fox News host Sean Hannity was also furious, demanding he be arrested: “Why can't Obama do something about the WikiLeaks?” Sarah Palin compared WikiLeaks to the al-Qaeda magazine Inspire and called Assange “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.”

But Assange won some admirers on the American left, people who applauded his willingness to speak truth to power—for example, by exposing the brutality of the Iraq War, which they saw as a needless conflict launched by the Bush administration. Libertarians viewed his revelation of the inner workings of government as a valuable injection of transparency. Assange’s swashbuckling demeanor made him all the more alluring to all involved. Writing in The Atlantic, David Samuels argued that “not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan ... has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and [Chelsea] Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama administration.”

Liberals fell out of love with Assange, as Hemingway probably never said, slowly and then all at once. Of course, many Democratic officeholders had never been fond of him—they viewed his actions, as their Republican colleagues did, as an act of piracy, a dangerous exposure of U.S. secrets and systems that struck at a Democratic president, Barack Obama, and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. (In retrospect, it seems Assange saw it that way, too.)

But Assange gradually managed to alienate many of his erstwhile allies. The rape allegations leveled against him in Sweden played a major role, and are the reason he remains holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, for fear of arrest and extradition if he leaves. Assange’s general demeanor did a lot of work, too—a riveting essay by Andrew O’Hagan about his experience trying and failing to ghostwrite Assange’s book offers a useful portrait of a waspish, difficult man, wholly apart from his political convictions. The Associated Press reported in summer of 2016 that WikiLeaks had released, as part of larger dumps, “the personal information of hundreds of people—including sick children, rape victims and mental health patients.” Some of Assange’s old fans redirected their affections to Edward Snowden, who himself criticized Assange for refusing to curate the documents he released, incurring a stinging response from Wikileaks.

The dump of documents related to the Democratic National Committee in the summer of 2016 finished off the job for many observers, especially as the consensus grew that the cache of emails had probably been obtained by Russian state hackers and then passed to WikiLeaks. Even if that was not the case, it was very clear that Assange saw them as a way to hurt Clinton. She had been furious about the 2010 leaks, and he held her partly responsible for his current predicament. Clinton backers like Michael Moore and Bill Maher began to view Assange as an abettor, intentionally or not, of Trump.

The Trumpist swoon for Assange was more abrupt, corresponding to WikiLeaks dumping the Democratic documents during the summer of 2016. Hannity started having Assange on his show in the fall. “Part of me, in the beginning, was conflicted about you,” he told Assange in September, in what Matt Wilstein noted was an understatement. He was back on Hannity’s radio show in December. By the time he appeared this week on Hannity’s TV show, the host was gushing, “I believe every word he says, to be perfectly honest.” Hannity claims his change of heart came because WikiLeaks had gotten nothing wrong and gotten no one killed.

But the abrupt volte-face corresponds too neatly with Assange’s shift to aiding Trump, as well as his vocal insistence that WikiLeaks did not obtain its documents from Russia, which undermines any claims that the hacks were conducted by the Kremlin to hurt Clinton and help Trump—which would, of course, be damaging to Trump. If it seems too harsh to ascribe nakedly partisan motives to Hannity, keep in mind that he has happily declared himself “not a journalist.”

Over the weekend, the president-elect promised a revelation about the hacks on Tuesday or Wednesday, and that time came and went without any news—though on Hannity’s program, Assange repeated what he has said before, which is that Russia was not WikiLeaks’ source. Nonetheless, Trump tweeted in praise of the interview, only to complain the next day that “The dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange - wrong. I simply state what he states, it is for the people to make up their own minds as to the truth”— as though he were a simple news aggregator, rather than the president-elect of the United States approvingly quoting Assange.

Many elected Republicans, as well as conservative pundits, however, remain just as negative on Assange as ever. On Thursday, Senator Ted Cruz said, “I think Assange has done enormous damage to our national security. I would not be praising him under any circumstances.”

One other peculiar political realignment that has emerged from the controversy over WikiLeaks is the sudden affection of Democrats for the intelligence community. The intelligence community has chafed at attempts at oversight, and when the Senate Intelligence Committee attempted to produce a report on torture committed by the CIA, the agency repeatedly tried to stymie its efforts. The CIA snooped on Senate staffers and attempted to get them criminally prosecuted, and Director John Brennan was eventually forced to apologize. During the Bush administration, Democrats assailed the intelligence community for suggestions that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Yet on Thursday, a succession of Democratic senators lined up to voice their support and praise for intelligence agents being attacked by Trump. Nor is this a phenomenon limited to elected officials—an NBC News poll finds that the CIA’s net favorability among Democrats has risen from -4 percent two years to 32 percent today.

Assange, in the midst of this maelstrom, has not been as unchanging as he might like to imagine himself. Critics have accused him of coziness with the Kremlin, even aside from the question of where WikiLeaks obtained the DNC emails. To state that Assange is pro-Putin might be to overstate the evidence, but he has appeared to pull some of his punches with regards to Russia.

In a December interview, Assange told La Repubblica that WikiLeaks had not focused on Russia for two reasons. First, he said there was a vibrant press in Russia—though the idea that Russia’s press is more free than the American press might trigger guffaws. He also said WikiLeaks was a predominantly English-language organization, making it much more focused on the Anglophone world. “No WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player,” Assange said. (WikiLeaks has published documents in other languages, including the cache from the Saudi Foreign Ministry.)

But a television show Assange produced appeared for a time on RT, a government-owned cable channel in Russia. Huffington Post reported that although WikiLeaks promised a major Russia dump in 2010, that never materialized. And despite his spat with Snowden, in which Assange espoused total transparency, WikiLeaks criticized the release of the Panama Papers as a U.S. government ploy to undermine Putin.

In other words, Assange was arguing that it was the motivations for a leak, rather than the material, that mattered. This is ironic, since many of those observing Assange, both his critics-turned-fans and his fans-turned-critics, seem to have become fixated on his motivations at the expense of the information he releases, which has tended to be of high quality and interest, regardless of the targets. If that irony was lost on Assange, it’s a sign that he is no more immune to politics than any of the rest of them.

NBC’s Emerald City Takes Dorothy to a Darker Oz

The minute that Dorothy Gale (Adria Arjona) first enters the Land of Oz in Emerald City—by way of a tornado, yes, but also an abandoned cop car and a couple of bloodied corpses—you might wonder whether the show’s primary influence is L. Frank Baum or Game of Thrones. With its sweeping shots of otherworldly landscapes, the giant effigies of warriors looming over coastal cities, and the fur-clad tribesman and ethereal but steely women, Emerald City clearly had the HBO show in mind when conjuring up its dark alternative universe. Call it the Wizard of Westeroz, if you will.

Emerald City, whose first two episodes air on NBC Friday night, has long been in development by the network, which canceled it in 2014 before production started, then revived the project the following year. Pitched as a sinister, adult-oriented update of Baum’s Oz novels, it joins a wealth of fantastical dramas on the small screen, from Thrones to Westworld to Once Upon a Time. Emerald City is a sometimes chaotic cocktail of familiar characters, fairytale elements, sex and drugs, and a hero’s journey that doesn’t ever feel totally cohesive. But its visuals, crafted by the director Tarsem Singh, are endlessly creative, and the weaker primary cast members are buffeted by an array of gifted supporting actors. It’s a strange trip, but not a tedious one.

In the first episode, a baby with a cryptic tattoo on its hand is brought to a trailer in the middle of a terrible storm. Twenty years later, that baby is Dorothy, a nurse living in a tiny town in modern-day Kansas who’s contacted by the mother who gave her up. Dorothy goes to find her but seeks shelter from a tornado in a nearby police car and, along with a friendly K-9 German Shepherd, is swept into Oz, where she accidentally hits a woman with her car.

There are counterintuitive twists right from the start: The first people Dorothy encounters in this unfamiliar land capture and torture her for her actions, the woman she hit isn’t really dead, the flying monkeys are actually drones. The show veers between scenes showing Dorothy’s trip down the yellow brick road (occasionally a literal one, since the yellow color comes from poppy pollen) and those presenting the primary characters of Oz, including the Wizard (Vincent D’Onofrio), the Wicked Witch of the West (Ana Ularu), the Wicked Witch of the East (Florence Kasumba), Glinda of the North (Joely Richardson), and Tip (Jordan Loughran), an orphan kept prisoner by a witch (Fiona Shaw). Mysteries abound regarding a great beast whose return is predicted in prophesies, and the witches’ magic, which has been forbidden in a peace agreement with the wizard, but which resurfaces in the second episode in a breathtaking scene set in a temple. It’s all too much to grasp most of the time, but the show’s striking landscapes and details compensate for some of the foggier plotting.

The show’s biggest weakness is Arjona as Dorothy, who rarely proves she has the range to work opposite a Shakespearean actor like Shaw, and whose one-note performance fails to communicate any wonder or confusion at the bizarre and terrifying world she finds herself in. D’Onofrio is also strangely muted as the wizard, hiding beneath a deliberately fake wig, and radiating none of the menace that made him such a memorable villain on Netflix’s Daredevil. But Ularu, as the wicked, opium-addled bad witch to Richardson’s icy Glinda, is mesmerizing, toying with dark magic in a wanton and self-destructive fashion. And the show’s subplot about Tip, taken straight from Baum’s stories, is surprisingly nuanced on the subject of gender and identity. Emerald City finds intriguing ways to introduce Dorothy’s companions, including Lucas (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a “scarecrow” whom she rescues from a makeshift crucifixion, and who suffers from amnesia.

If the show sometimes feels like it’s trying too hard to amp up the edginess, it’s counterbalanced by the strictures of network television, which help keep most of the episodes reasonably tight. And, while Emerald City is set in a sprawling and overcomplicated universe, it also feels, for the most part, fully conceived, presumably thanks to the source material. It’s worth remembering that there’s plenty of darkness in Baum’s original stories, realized onscreen in the cult 1985 children’s movie Return to Oz, which terrified oldlennials with nightmarish steampunk clowns with wheels for feet, a deadly desert, and a princess who kills beautiful young women to steal their heads for herself. Emerald City’s horror tends more toward the familiar—stolen children, addiction, suicide—but it’s a fascinating world to enter, if not always a totally absorbing one.

Why the Allegations Against Casey Affleck Should Stand Alone

In recent weeks, Casey Affleck’s performance in Manchester by the Sea has gone from acclaimed awards contender to near-Oscar lock. The soft-spoken, scraggly-bearded actor has taken the stage at a number of ceremonies already—the Critics’ Choice Awards, the Gotham Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle—ahead of what’s looking like an increasingly likely victory at the Academy Awards. The surge of publicity has brought renewed attention to two sexual harassment lawsuits filed against him in 2010 that alleged he had manhandled women, was verbally abusive, and generally behaved outrageously on the set of his film I’m Still Here, which he directed. Both cases were mediated and eventually settled out of court for undisclosed sums.

The situation has spurred conversations that Hollywood still desperately needs to have about the consequence-free behavior and abuses of authority that can happen on movie sets, as well as the age-old argument over separating art from artist. Is an endorsement of Affleck’s (rapturously received) performance in Manchester by the Sea an endorsement of any alleged abusive behavior off-screen? Film insiders should weigh these tricky questions, but it’s also a dialogue that can be had without bringing up Nate Parker, the writer, director, and star of the 2016 drama The Birth of a Nation. And yet Parker’s name keeps coming up in every discussion about Affleck—and it’s a contrast that ends up diminishing and muddling, rather than clarifying, the larger issues at hand.

Parker’s film was hotly tipped for Oscar success when it won the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize a year ago, and it was acquired by Fox Searchlight for a record $17.5 million. Upon its release in October, however, it was overshadowed by the revelations that Parker and the film’s co-writer Jean Celestin were accused of raping a student in 1999; Parker was acquitted, but Celestin was not. He eventually appealed and the case was dismissed when the student refused to testify again in court; Variety then learned last year that she had killed herself in 2012. It was an undeniably ghastly story that Parker struggled to address, not helped by the fact that sexual assault was a crucial plot point in The Birth of a Nation. The film was released to much more mixed reviews than it had received at Sundance and subsequently vanished from the awards conversation.

“Why do Parker and Affleck find themselves in such different circumstances?” It’s a question that’s been repeatedly asked, most recently Thursday by Brooks Barnes in The New York Times, but previously by Mic, ThinkProgress, BuzzFeed, and others. I myself differentiated between the two cases (in passing) when analyzing the Oscar race last year. It’s become a depressingly buzzy question for this year’s Academy Awards season—why Affleck seems on the road to triumph when Parker has quickly become persona non grata, and whether the fact that Parker is black has something to do with that. But asking it is both reductive and unhelpful: It detracts from the seriousness of the accusations against Affleck by pitting them against a different set of charges.

After all, the question of “what is the difference between Affleck’s case and Parker’s” has already been answered, perhaps most concisely and thoroughly by  BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen. Parker’s case was tried in criminal court, and hours of testimony and evidence (including a damning phone transcript) about the case are publicly available. He and Celestin both admitted to having sex with the alleged victim while denying that they raped her; the two then worked together, years later, to make The Birth of a Nation, of which Parker (who wrote, directed, and starred in the film) was the primary creative voice. Affleck is merely an actor in Manchester by the Sea, which was written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (also tipped for deserved Oscar success this year). There’s far less publicly available evidence in Affleck’s case (filed in civil court), which makes it easier for him to pursue a publicity strategy of largely ignoring the allegations. His consistent response has been to note that the case was “settled to the satisfaction of all” and that he’s “over it.”

“People carelessly conflate rape with the entire range of sexual misconduct that can occur,” the Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen told the Times. “It’s all repulsive. But both morally and legally there are distinctions—degrees of behavior. Parker was accused of something far more serious.” That doesn’t mean that Affleck’s alleged harassment shouldn’t be discussed, or that Hollywood shouldn’t have more wide-ranging conversations about a star’s off-camera behavior. It also doesn’t dismiss the layers of privilege and systemic racism at work in the film industry; treating Parker’s history with the gravity it deserved is just not a perfect example of said racism.

By stacking the two cases up against each other, the allegations against Affleck are made to seem less “serious,” as ridiculous and facile as that might sound. The comparison might have been an interesting one to draw in November, when a widely shared Daily Beast article addressed the lawsuits against Affleck, but it’s no longer a productive one to make: The contrast only directs attention away from larger industry problems with sexual misconduct and racism. Whether or not the Academy Awards should separate art from artist is a whole other debate—but invoking Parker’s name is no way to resolve it.

Pop Culture Is Having a Metaphysical Moment

Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? That’s the prompt that opened HBO’s Westworld, but it’s also the implied question behind shows like The OA, Stranger Things, The Good Place, and Falling Water, as well as movies like Arrival and Doctor Strange. Across popular entertainment lately, science fiction, theoretical physics, and spirituality have blended to offer not escapism but wait-there’s-more-ism, offering a tantalizing hint that our perception of reality is too narrow—and that with a little bit of effort, we can see extraordinary things.

The OA is the latest and clearest example of the phenomenon, the work most likely to trigger feelings of recognition in viewers as it pulls at ideas explored elsewhere in pop culture recently. The hokey-fun Netflix series imagines a young woman—alternately known as Nina, Prairie, and The OA—returning from a seven-year disappearance during which she somehow went from blind to not-blind. What happened? Spoiler: As she tells to a group of boys and their teacher in late-night storytelling sessions, she discovered the power of near-death experiences. Other dimensions, surreal landscapes populated by angels, can be accessed—but you have to die first, at least for a moment. Yet her encounters with the afterlife, forced upon her by an evil scientist using her as a test subject, supposedly also taught her how to open portals to other worlds in life by using a series of choreographed body movements in tune with other people.

The OA’s heady eight-episode first season has rightly drawn a lot of comparisons to one of Netflix’s other breakout original series: Stranger Things. In both works, an enigmatic and strangely named girl prone to nose bleeds breaks from scientific captivity carrying information about other realities than our own. Stranger Things gives the other reality a neat name—“the Upside Down”—and says that getting there is a matter of knowing your quantum physics and activating a very powerful energy source. At one point, the aforementioned girl, Eleven, illustrates the Upside Down by turning over a Dungeons and Dragons board. The moment echoes in The OA scene where Prairie explains after-death dimensions by taking a rolling ball off a maze board—a sign of the need for metaphor when discussing the metaphysical.

Westworld, by contrast, considers the metaphysical entirely as a metaphor: It’s a show not about multiple universes but about the feeling of there being multiple universes, a feeling that arises, lo and behold, from being trapped inside a vast game. Within the show, humans have constructed their own alternate reality in the form of a western theme park populated by robots nearly indistinguishable from real people. But the show itself has the viewer identify with the robots, and the overarching story is of conscious beings probing their previous inaccessible memories to realize that they are living a programmed life. At a certain point, key characters awaken to a world that looks very different from the dusty saloon-scape they knew.

All of these shows feel in kinship with Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s recent hit movie about making contact with alien visitors. The OA posits metaphysical awakening comes by knowing certain body movements; Westworld says it comes from access to one’s own memories; Arrival offers it through Rosetta Stone lessons. Midway through the movie—this is a spoiler—Amy Adams’s linguist character comes to master aliens’ way of communication and finds that doing so has completely rewired the way she sees time. Suddenly, she can “remember” the future as well as she can remember the past. It’s not quite an alternate reality, but it’s not quite time-travel either—more than anything, it’s a fantasy of our world being not what it seems, and of its not-what-it-seemsness becoming accessible through the simple act of gaining knowledge.

There are other recent works along these themes: Dr. Strange, the Marvel movie that introduces a superhero who, through study, accesses other dimensions; Falling Water, USA’s puzzling drama about a shadow world accessible through lucid dreaming; The Good Place, NBC’s quirkily philosophical sitcom positing the afterlife as a series of specially designed neighborhoods.

Fiction can briefly offer the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

All of these come with the trappings of sci-fi, featuring rulebook-like alternate logic systems explicated by scientists and architects. The OA pulls from real (though disputed) research on near-death experiences; Stranger Things was clearly informed by some physicists’ TED Talks. But these stories also leap into hallucinatory fantasy less out of Philip K. Dick than Salvador Dali: the preposterous angel worlds of The OA, the dank ruins of the Upside Down in Stranger Things, the fro-yo shops and monster shrimp of The Good Place. It’s like viewers want to be shown the unimaginable—but also be told it squares with the scientific world they already know.

It’s always a tricky thing to propose the existence of a storytelling trend when that trend is abstract and eternally relevant, but it does seem fair to say that certain sci-fi obsessions ebb and flow: In some recent years, apocalypse and/or zombies have seemed the relevant preoccupation, and in others, it’s been aliens. Zipping through dimensions or waking up to perceive a new reality are by no means new ideas—see Sliders, The Matrix, or even Alice in Wonderland. But the recent multiverse musings, taken together, start to feel like a boomlet.

Which means it’s tempting to offer theories for why now. The tenuous but seductive current-events explanation is easy enough. 2016 was a rough ride for a lot of people, and so just as certain portions of the entertainment world may have become ever-more-realistic, other portions have started to indulge the hope that this existence we’re all living in is not the only one. What’s more, thanks to this political moment, there are lots of mini-examples of simultaneous realities. Just today, The Washington Post is running two news stories telling competing versions of the same event in Congress, perhaps out of an attempt to pander to separate reader groups. It’s like the Upside Down for clickbait.

But the sturdier read may be to point to these stories’ evergreen appeal: All of the aforementioned works grapple, in one way or another, with death. The OA and Stranger Things spring from the culturally familiar trauma that occurs when a child goes missing, proposing that such a story can have an ending more fantastical than the grim one we’re used to. Falling Water touches on a similar theme with one of its main characters searching for her baby; Arrival also copes with paternal grief; Westworld zooms out to toy with the idea of reincarnation, resurrection, and immortality; The Good Place is all about death.

Perhaps, more than anything, these are all a secular take on the promise of the divine. Could not the Bible or most other religious texts be slotted into the same metaphysical storytelling tradition? The OA engages with this notion directly: Throughout, Prairie’s tales of afterlife and mystical enlightenment seem to waver in credibility; by the end of the season—mild spoiler—it’s not yet clear whether she’s really seen the other side or is just a false prophet. But the people listening to her story have faith. In a way, the people who care enough to keep watching the show need to have faith too.

They also, though, need to have a degree of skepticism, puzzling through clues to try and find the truth in a manner recognizable to TV viewers ever since Lost. The zing of The OA and other such works comes from the marriage of intellectual process and mystical escape; the appealing implication is not only that there is another place, but that we can understand what it is and how to get there. It makes sense: At a time of falling church attendance and talk of widespread spiritual crisis, fiction may be stepping in to offer some of the imaginative comfort that religion has long provided. Yet the new visions of things hoped for and not seen, as fits the era, presume to be rooted in knowledge rather than in faith.