Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 27

And, Scene: Hell or High Water

Over the last two weeks, The Atlantic has delved into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy moment and unpacking what it says about 2016. Today: David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water. (The whole “And, Scene” series will appear here.)

From its opening shot, Hell or High Water isn’t coy about its sympathies. As the camera pans across a dreary-looking town in West Texas, it catches a prominent bit of graffiti tagged on the white bricks of a local bank branch. “3 TOURS IN IRAQ BUT NO BAILOUT FOR PEOPLE LIKE US,” it reads. Watching David Mackenzie’s film is the equivalent of having a shotgun muzzle waved in your face: After all, this is a movie about unsubtle folk—bank robbers with focused, if misguided, Robin Hood complexes—living in unsubtle times. In a year when much was written trying to delve into the psyche of Middle America, Hell or High Water did the same while trying to have some fun in the process.

This is, first and foremost, a genre film, a neo-Western crossing the angry anti-heroes of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with the barren modern Texan landscapes of Friday Night Lights. After their first successful robbery of the day, brothers Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster), clad in ski masks, drive to the next town over to stick up another branch, driving past signs advertising home refinancing and debt relief. At the next bank, Toby and Tanner run into a customer depositing a box of old pennies he found in his barn. “You got a gun on you, old man?” Tanner asks him. “You’re goddamn right I got a gun on me,” he replies with a snarl.

As they exit the building with a handful of cash, the customer grabs his revolver and shoots as they flee, firing wildly at their getaway car. It’s a rollicking, telling scene that doesn’t take itself too seriously despite the intense action and high stakes. Moments like these suggest Hell or High Water is a worthy resurrection of Hollywood pulp at a time when “genre filmmaking” largely refers to expensive, inoffensive franchise blockbusters. Made on a small budget and released in August, when films like Suicide Squad dominated at the box office, it was one of the surprise successes of the year, and now seems headed for Oscar glory.

The film’s screenwriter, Taylor Sheridan, also wrote last year’s Sicario, which took a dark, granular look at the bloody worthlessness of the War on Drugs. Both films, he told Indiewire, are about the “modern-day American frontier,” the border states gripped by foreclosures, high rates of drug addiction, and the pervasive anti-immigration sentiment that helped spur Donald Trump’s swift rise in the Republican primaries. “I was exploring the death of a way of life, and the acute consequences of the mortgage crisis in East Texas,” Sheridan said. One might as well call Hell or High Water “Economic Anxiety: The Movie” for the way that it cleverly illustrates how the desolation of rural America can drive truly unforgivable behavior.

The nobler Toby and the live-wire Tanner are committing their crimes for a good reason, though it takes a while for their plot to fully come into focus—long enough that the audience is vaguely on their side without totally understanding why. But their desperation still wreaks havoc; despite Toby’s good intentions (like so many anti-heroes, he doesn’t want anyone hurt), things slide into baser violence. Chasing them around the state are Texas Rangers Marcus (Jeff Bridges) and Alberto (Gil Birmingham), a grouchy odd couple who gently, but persistently mock each other (Alberto ribs Marcus’s age, and Marcus makes casually, horribly racist jokes about Alberto’s Mexican and Native American heritage). The “wit” on display is often painful, but that’s part of Sheridan’s point—that the country’s divisions are drawn so deeply, Marcus’s insults are one of the only ways he can relate to his partner.

Hell or High Water is as jarring and uncomfortable as it is tense and fun. Yes, there are parts of America that still feel like a cowboy nation—and everyone at the bank, be they security guards or customers, might be toting a gun on their hip. It’s a depiction of a region that feels at once authentic and cartoonish, reinforcing stereotypes we might be loath to acknowledge while deepening them all the same.

Previously: Weiner

Next Up: American Honey

George Michael and Carrie Fisher: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

George Michael Mattered Beyond the Music

Wesley Morris | The New York Times

“Somehow, wagging his derrière and begging for sex—and sounding deeply soulful while he did it—didn’t make him a novelty act. It made him extremely famous. It was a pose he kept for about a year. By the time you saw him in 1988, swiveling through the video for ‘Monkey,’ in suspenders and a bolero hat, he’d de-butched. Striking a pose is one thing. Holding it is something else.”

More Than Princess Leia: Carrie Fisher’s Beautifully Tumultuous, Accomplished, Hilarious Life

Kevin Fallon | The Daily Beast

“There was something not only self-healing about the self-deprecation with which Fisher discussed her own life, but healing for others, too. It was immeasurably useful in her work, both overtly and in her mere candid existence, as an activist for those with addiction and mental illness. They are two topics rarely discussed in Hollywood, and certainly not by people of Fisher's stature. But because of her crusading and her honesty and especially because of her humor, they were normalized, made relatable, and taken seriously.”

Future Shock

Abraham Riesman | Vulture

“Children of Men imagines a fallen world, yes, but it also imagines a once-cynical person being reborn with purpose and clarity. It’s a story about how people like me, those who have the luxury of tuning out, need to awaken. This has been a brutal year, but we were already suffering from a kind of spiritual infertility: The old ideologies long ago stopped working.”

In Hollywood’s Golden Age, No Dancer Rivaled Debbie Reynolds’s High-Stepping Joy

Sarah L. Kaufman | The Washington Post

“Joy was so prized in Hollywood musicals. There were dancers who were cool and mysterious (Cyd Charisse), openhearted and sensuous (Ginger Rogers), whip-fast and strong (Eleanor Powell). But silvery joy was Reynolds’s own quality. It’s sad and ironic that her death comes just as the transporting magic of movie musicals has been rediscovered by La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s superb new film set in contemporary Los Angeles but inspired by Singin’ in the Rain and other films of that era.”

Twenty Years After Diablo, Every Game Is Diablo

Matt Gerardi | A.V. Club

“While its individual parts were not unique or exciting, it was the confluence of those underpinnings that turned out to be revolutionary. The randomness, the slight sheen of RPG conventions, the slow drip of desirable goodies among a constant deluge of junk, the instant gratification of its effortlessly repeatable action—when combined into one, it formed a new method for hooking players and keeping them playing.”

How Big Screen Sci-Fi and Horror Captured 2016’s Political Paranoia

Emily Yoshida | SPIN

“When the filmmaking of dissent arms itself with a genre, the films become leaner, the objectives more primal. Escape the house. Kill the Nazis. Defeat the body snatchers. Put on the glasses. The threat is other people. They’re just people.”

Dressing the Women in Blue

Sydney Parker | Racked

“Women in blue dedicate their lives to protecting the public. They efficiently deescalate conflict, respond to domestic violence calls, and are the best advocates for victims of sexual assault. Shouldn’t the quality of their uniforms live up to the quality of their service?”

Queens of the Space Age

K. Austin Collins | The Ringer

“It’s strange to think that the space race and the civil rights movement were direct contemporaries; it certainly never feels that way. One propelled humankind into the future; the other exposed racial attitudes’ anchorage in the past ... One of the useful discoveries of Hidden Figures is that this lapse isn’t merely a matter of how we recount history. It’s a question of how history, and which parts of it, becomes solidified in movies.”

How 2016’s Movies and TV Reflected Americans’ Changing Relationship With Religion

Alissa Wilkinson | Vox

“A white Southerner’s Christianity looks different from that of a Catholic comedian living in New York City or a black marketing executive in Southern California. Not all Muslims look like they do on Homeland. Religious people look, sound, and act differently from one another. Their political and social views may differ. Even if they belong to an organized religion, the way they express and live that faith is unique.”

Milo Yiannopoulos’s Cynical Book Deal

Alexandra Schwartz | The New Yorker

“As expressions of protest against Yiannopoulos and his opportunistic hate-mongering, I readily sympathize with these reactions. But the Yiannopoulos controversy is made harder to parse by a slippery characteristic of contemporary book publishing: the sheer size of publishing conglomerates, and the vast, often ideologically contradictory, array of books that they peddle.”

The New Reality TV

“Reality seems tired. It seems derivative,” a former network executive told Vulture in 2015. “There hasn’t been a really loud, innovative reality show in a while.”

The executive was correct, unless you consider television’s fictions—which, in 2016, became more realistic than ever. Atlanta, on FX, directly tackled one of the formerly taboo issues in television: money. Speechless, on ABC, found humor and heart in the details of living—and having a family member who is living—with cerebral palsy. This Is Us, on NBC, portrayed its central family with sentimentalism, but also with a clear-eyed look examination of the tensions that can bedevil even the closest of families. Insecure, on HBO, portrayed the ins and outs of friendship and romance in a way that was designed to hit, the show’s creator, Issa Rae, has put it, “a regular person nerve.”

Television has long had a fraught relationship with the “regular” person. Many of its shows, from Leave It to Beaver on down, have relied on the power of aspiration—the ideal family, the ideal group of friends, impossibly beautiful people inhabiting impossibly beautiful places—to amplify the appeal of the “normal” worlds they’ve served up to their viewers. Dallas, with its showy wealth and early McMansions, doubled as an advertisement for all that might be obtained by way of the money-hunger of the American ‘80s. Friends, the next decade, may have paid lip service to everyday concerns like rent costs and health insurance; it was set, however, in an apartment that no one with real money troubles could have ever afforded. Those shows and their many, many counterparts claimed to embrace averageness; they also, however, scene after scene, treated averageness as something to be overcome.

Many of the new shows of 2016, though, took that approach—the everyday, gilded with the shiny stuff of fantasy—and stripped it of its varnish. The concerns that were so often, in the past, relegated to the plot lines of individual episodes (a job-loss here, an illness there) were put center-stage as series overtly emphasized what used to be matters of taboo: money, infidelity, weight, special needs. In a year in which so many things beyond politics themselves were political, many TV shows continued a trend that had been brewing with the rise of social media and Peak TV. Perhaps realizing television’s power to change the way people see the world, show creators rejected easy aspiration and blithe escapism—they instead got insistently, and compellingly, real.

Television, in its long tenure, has both embraced averageness and treated it as something to be overcome.

And so: HBO’s Divorce attempted to portray the ending of a marriage with unvarnished—and often unbearable—honesty. ABC’s American Housewife forthrightly (if clunkily) made its main character’s weight a central fact of its show. Amazon’s Fleabag was in many ways a tonal follow-up to the streaming service’s 2015 show, Catastrophe—which offered an unflinching look at both friendship and, more significantly, grief. Netflix’s The Crown was an only lightly fictionalized representation of the early days of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. FX’s American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson recreated, with for the most part remarkable fealty, the “trial of the century.”

2016 was also a year that found true-crime documentaries continuing their cultural ascendence. In the footsteps of 2015’s Making a Murderer and The Jinx, there was Amanda Knox on Netflix, and The Witness, and Team Foxcatcher, and ESPN’s magisterial 30 for 30 documentary O.J.: Made in America. There was Ava DuVernay’s 13th. There was Weiner, which, after its run in theaters, aired on Showtime.

This all came at a moment that found American culture at large celebrating—reveling in—the real. The world of Facebook updates and “It Happened to Me”-style essays and #confessyourunpopularopinion is also a world that, when asked how it’s doing, might give a more honest answer than the traditional “Fine, and you?” The age of social media, allowing people such unprecedented access to the details of each others’ lives, also encourages them to shed the polite niceties that can so often can double as light lies. Why bother with “I’m fine” when a status update knows otherwise?

Related Story

The Golden Age of the TV Bathroom

And TV’s creators, increasingly, are reflecting that impulse in their output, rejecting the old, aspiration-tinted juggernauts that sold fantasy in the guise of normalcy. Instead, TV is offering, more and more, shows like Atlanta, which depicts the lives of its characters—and in particular the crushing weight that comes from never having enough money—with unvarnished honesty. Or like Fleabag, which strategically blurs the line between empathy and awkwardness. Or like Designated Survivor, which is premised on an extraordinary event—the destruction of Congress during the State of the Union—but which goes out of its way to emphasize the human-level consequences of that massive act of terror. Those shows are responding to “how are you?” with the real answer—which is sometimes more uncomfortable than the bland alternative, but which is often much more relatable.

It’s an approach that isn’t, of course, a universal trend. One of the consequences of the age of Peak TV is that there will be many, many types of shows on air at any point, and many, many genres to contain them. Shows like Atlanta and Insecure, with their admirable detail-orientation, are airing at the same time as shows like Game of Thrones and MacGyver and Timeless and Stranger Things, which take the fictional affordances of TV—dragons! time travel! communicative Christmas lights!—to many of their logical extremes. And many new-in-2016 series—like Son of Zorn, which finds an muscle-bound (and animated) action hero attempting to win back his (live-action) ex-wife and son, and like The Good Place, which is set in a Disneyesque heaven—are experimenting with whimsy that borders on magical realism.

But even some of the most fantastical new shows of 2016—Stranger Things, Westworld, The Get Down—are tinged with, and in their way premised on, reality. They are simply, in their execution, more intentional, and more precise, about what is real and what is … not. And the other shows, the more realistic ones, are unapologetic about reflecting the world as it is, rather than as it might be. This fall, discussing some of the more experimental comedies that NBC and Fox put out, The New York Times mentioned “a new programming strategy for old-school prime time”—one responding to Peak TV by getting kookier, and more experimental, and in many ways more interesting. “Broadcasters are not quite throwing in the ratings towel,” Brooks Barnes noted,

but they are trying to worry less about an immediate mass audience and more about finding, at the very least, a group of core fans attracted to a strong comedic point of view—what Jennifer Salke, NBC’s president of entertainment, calls “not a broad and soft, trying-to-please-the-whole-world kind of show.”

One way to find that core of fans may be—in the manner of Bojack Horseman, and Arrested Development, and The Good Place—to surprise and delight them with televised whimsy. Another, though, may be simply to echo fans’ real lives, as they’re lived every day: to win people over not with fantasy, but with relatability. It’s a powerful thing, after all, to see your self reflected back to you on a screen. TV’s creators are realizing that, and—artistically and commercially—capitalizing on it. In 2016, reality as a genre may still have been derivative and, as a consequence, dull. Reality as an artistic approach, however, was more powerful, and more popular, than ever—and more realistic, for that matter, than “reality” itself could ever hope to be.

Will the Alabama Crimson Tide Keep Rolling?

Minutes into an early-October game against Texas A&M, the University of Alabama defensive end Jonathan Allen danced around his blocker and set his sights on the quarterback Trevor Knight. A running back stepped up to try to slow Allen. It was a common enough sequence, but what came next was a rarer sight. The back crouched to deliver a blow, and Allen—a 6’3”, 291-pound native Alabaman—simply leaped, went horizontal, and in one motion cleared the block and brought Knight to the ground. It was like watching an armored truck sprout wings and lift off the road. By the time the play reached YouTube, someone had set it to the Superman score.

On December 31, Alabama will play the University of Washington Huskies in the semifinal of the College Football Playoff. The Crimson Tide, college football’s lone remaining undefeated team and a 14-point betting favorite, has held the top spot in the Associated Press poll every week of the season. Allen’s airborne sack is just a pebble in the mountain of highlights the team has produced this year, but it’s also an apt summary. The Tide is bigger, faster, stronger, and better than every opponent at nearly every position. Other teams can do everything correctly and nevertheless be overwhelmed. Go to the right spot, and the Tide will still roll over you.

The story of college football over the last decade has been variations on the theme of Alabama triumph. Last year’s championship victory over Clemson University gave the head coach Nick Saban four titles in his nine years in Tuscaloosa. Under Saban, Alabama uses a conservative but highly effective approach predicated on running the ball and playing stout defense. That style, coupled with the results it’s brought about, has not always endeared the team to casual football fans, many of whom participate in an early-winter ritual of rooting for a postseason Alabama loss. Those fans will almost certainly be disappointed this New Year’s Eve, but they’ll just as surely be watching, because the Crimson Tide has given college football something every sport can use: a dominant force and entrenched favorite, a presence that makes each season historic, in one way or another.

Where other programs might reach the upper echelons by way of a generational talent—see, for example, the prodigious quarterback Deshaun Watson, who took Clemson to the title game last season and has the team in the Playoff again this year—Alabama simply keeps to its template. This year’s team looks like last year’s, last year’s looked like the one that came before it, and so on. The Tide’s defensive line is a fearsome, mauling presence; its offensive line is impenetrable; its cornerbacks make receivers disappear; its running backs move like rolling boulders. This season, the sturdy and strong-armed freshman quarterback Jalen Hurts has introduced a new element to the usual run-first Alabama attack, but the slight breach of one tradition has fit nicely into another: The Tide has accrued yards, and wins, as easily as ever.

Saban has termed this year-to-year strategy, wherein repetition breeds excellence, “The Process.” A short, pinched man who paces the sideline and whose smoothed hair turns into a sort of indignant halo when he yanks off his headset in a rage, Saban speaks of consistency the way clergymen speak of saints. “It’s about committing yourself to being the best you can be on that particular day,” is one in a ream of similar quotes. “Improvement is a steady march and you have to be committed to it.”

A juggernaut of a certain caliber not only thrills its own fans but raises the stakes of entire seasons.

Coupled with Saban’s gift for recruiting—Alabama’s five-star freshmen usually spend a year or two sitting behind its five-star juniors and seniors—The Process leads to teams that both astonish with the caliber of their play and make for perfectly-scripted upset targets. The most memorable college football games of recent vintage all feature the Tide. In last year’s championship, the Alabama system withstood a furious effort from Watson; watching the game was like seeing a building shudder but remain standing through an earthquake. The year before, in the national semifinal, a fourth-seeded Ohio State team beat first-ranked Alabama behind third-string quarterback Cardale Jones. It was this game, not the actual title-winner against Oregon a week later, that secured Jones’s folk-heroic status. Perhaps most famously, the 2013 Iron Bowl—the annual rivalry game between Alabama and the cross-state Auburn Tigers—ended when Auburn cornerback Chris Davis returned a missed Alabama field goal 100 yards for a game-winning touchdown. The shock and strangeness of the play made it extraordinary, but the fact that it came against dynastic Alabama—number one at that moment, too—made it unforgettable.

This is the two-fold gift that some teams can give their sports. A juggernaut of a certain caliber not only thrills its own fans but raises the stakes of entire seasons. When LeBron James joined the Miami Heat in 2010, the whole NBA took on a new urgency. When the New York Yankees rattled off four World Series victories in five years at the tail end of the 1990s, they won the disdain, and viewership, of a generation of fans that hadn’t been around to hate them two decades prior. During the heyday of Tiger Woods, golf reached a larger audience than ever with a narrative previously unimaginable. From time to time, teams and players come along who are good enough to make every game a story.

Such is the case with Alabama. If Saturday’s game goes as expected, it will be a football master class. Hurts will veer out of the way of Washington rushers and loose 25-yard darts, and the Tide defense will handcuff an overmatched Huskies offense. Saban will stand with his arms crossed and his brow furrowed—a posture that, for him, passes as a celebration. But if Saturday’s game ends up differently, it will be a miracle. The Washington quarterback Jake Browning, a deep-ball artist whose hopeful heaves contrast nicely with Alabama’s rigidity, would join Ohio State’s Jones as a college football tall tale, and the coach Chris Petersen, as optimistic as Saban is strict, would earn himself heroic status and, likely, a hefty raise.

Despite the grumbling that will ensue if the Crimson Tide wins, it is for unaffiliated fans a no-lose proposition. The likely outcome is a demonstration of pure athletic excellence, an astonishing run continued; the unlikely one would be one of the year’s best sports stories. January 9’s title game, should the Tide reach it, would have similar resonance. When a team as good as Alabama takes the field, there is no room for the underwhelming—only degrees of the incredible.

The U.S. Retaliation Against Russian Hackers

President Obama announced sanctions Thursday on Russian intelligence officials and organizations he said were involved in efforts to undermine the U.S. elections. In a statement, he said 35 Russian intelligence officials in the U.S. were being expelled and two Russian compounds, one in Maryland and the other in New York, were being closed. The measures are the first public steps the Obama administration has taken against what the U.S. intelligence community believes is Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other organizations in the run-up to the election in November.  

“These actions are not the sum total of our response to Russia’s aggressive activities,” Obama said. “We will continue to take a variety of actions at a time and place of our choosing, some of which will not be publicized.”

In an executive order, Obama imposed sanctions on Igor Orobov, the head of GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency; and three of his deputies: Vladimir Alexseyev, Sergey Gizunov, and Igor Kostyukov. Sanctions were also imposed against Aleksey Belan and Evgeniy Bogachev, two hackers who already were on the FBI’s list of ten most-wanted cyber criminals. The entities sanctioned include the GRU, the FSB, which is Russia’s internal security service, and three entities that are believed to be fronts for Russian intelligence: the Moscow-based Autonomous Noncommercial Organization Professional Association of Designers of Data Processing Systems (ANO PO KSI) and Zorsecurity, and St. Petersburg-based Special Technology Center.

The sanctions on the intelligence agencies and officials are largely symbolic—and it’s not immediately clear if these steps will have any real impact. Relations between Washington and Moscow have been frosty despite attempts to reset them. Their one common diplomatic achievement was the Iranian nuclear deal, but Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 and the Syrian civil war, in which Russia is supporting President Bashar al-Assad, have complicated ties. Indeed, in response to the expulsion of the 35 diplomats, the Russian Embassy in London tweeted:

President Obama expels 35

What We Know About the Syrian Ceasefire Announced by Putin

Updated at 10:05 a.m. ET

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday the Syrian government and rebels opposed to President Bashar al-Assad have reached a ceasefire to end the fighting in the more-than-five-year civil war.

Here’s what we know so far about the agreement—and its potential implications:

Who is involved?

The Syrian government and, according to Russia’s defense minister, seven armed groups who command about 60,000 fighters. The Defense Ministry named the groups as Feilak al-Sham (4,000 fighters), Ahrar al-Sham (16,000), Jaysh al-Islam (12,000), Thuwar al-Sham (2,500), Jaysh al-Mujahideen (8,000), Jaysh Idlib (6,000), Jabhat al-Shamiyah (3,000). Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam are both Islamist groups that Russia has previously labeled as terrorists.

When will it go into effect?

December 30 at midnight, according to Turkey’s Foreign Ministry.

Who will ensure the truce isn’t broken?

The Turkish Foreign Ministry says Turkey and Russia will jointly monitor the ceasefire; Russian President Vladimir Putin included Iran on that list. Russia and Iran support Assad; Turkey supports some rebel groups.

Who is excluded?

The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said Jabhat al-Nusra (the group now known as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), ISIS, and affiliated groups are excluded.

What’s next?

The agreement that is reached will be submitted to the UN Security Council later Thursday, the Russian foreign minister said. Both Turkey and Russia said representatives of the Syrian government and the rebels will meet soon in Astana, the Kazakh capital. Turkey added that they will be accompanied by the guarantor countries.

What else do we know?

Putin said the agreement was detailed in three documents. He said the first was signed by the Syrian government and the opposition to stop hostilities; the second to control the ceasefire; and the third “a declaration of intention for Syrian settlement.” No other details of the content of those documents have been released.

What is unclear?

No rebel commanders have yet publicly commented on the ceasefire. But Ahmad Ramadan, a spokesman for the Syrian National Coalition, a major opposition group, told the AP that the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a coalition of rebel groups, will abide by the truce, but will retaliate to violations by Syrian forces and their allies. Separately, Al Jazeera reported that on Wednesday the negotiating arm of the largest group of rebels fighting under the banner of the FSA “said they had yet to be in contact with anyone and had not been invited to participate in talks.”

Why now?

The Syrian civil war has dragged on for more than five years. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed and millions more displaced. In the early days of the fighting, it appeared as if Assad would go the way of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, but Russia became involved in November 2015. Since that time, Assad, backed by Russian airstrikes and Iranian fighters, as well as members of Shiite Lebanese militia Hezbollah, made steady gains. Earlier this month, government forces captured all of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city that was divided since 2012. The recapture of the city means Assad now controls the overwhelming majority of Syria’s population centers. Rebels still control territory, including Idlib province, but are on the defensive. Assad is likely to stay in power for now and Russia can scale back its military involvement in Syria—as Putin himself acknowledged Thursday. Assad and his allies can also turn their attention to ISIS, al-Nusra, which was previously linked to al-Qaeda, and other groups it deems as terrorists.

Will the truce last?

Short answer: It’s anyone’s guess, but past attempts at a ceasefire have failed, and Putin himself acknowledged that conditions are “fragile.” It’s unclear if Assad has the incentive not to target other rebel groups, though he is believed to be weak without Russian support. It’s also unclear if all the rebel groups will abide by a truce—or whether the guarantors of the ceasefire—Russia, Turkey, and Iran—agree on which of the rebels are terrorist organizations, and, consequently, can be targeted. Indeed, commentators pointed out Russia had labeled two of the groups included in the ceasefire list—Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam—as terrorists last month.

Understanding the Women of Pedro Almodóvar’s Movies

In Julieta, the latest from Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish director has created his most restrained film to date. This, he admits, was by design. In order for him to properly adapt three of Alice Munro’s stories from her 2004 collection Runaway, he had to strip away what had become his recognizable moves. And so, Julieta features no singing, no hard-to-follow plotlines, and, no outrageous characters to offer comic relief. What remains, and what makes it an unmistakably Almodóvarian drama, though, is its commitment to exploring women’s stories—or rather, women’s suffering.

From his breakout screwball comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) to his late-career melodramas of strong-willed protagonists, Almodóvar’s films find humor and beauty in female hardship. With Julieta, he’s centered an entire movie on a woman’s loss: The eponymous character is first unable to move on after her husband dies in a boating accident and later has to cope by herself when her only daughter leaves their shared home unexpectedly. Spanning several decades, the film marries Munro’s keen attention to the quiet lives certain women lead with Almodóvar’s flamboyant style. Moments of still reflection in Munro’s words become beautifully art-directed scenes that look like stylish tableaux vivants.

Writing for the feminist online magazine Píkara, the Spanish critic and author María Castejón Leorza negatively reviewed Julieta, arguing that in its stylized depiction of suffering, it contributed to what has become Almodóvar’s signature sensibility: the glamorization of pathos and victimhood. To her, this is an element that merely repurposes the latent misogyny of Spain’s patriarchal society. Castejón Leorza’s complaint against Almodóvar is not a new one. Already in 1992, for example, the film critic Caryn James had written a scathing appraisal of the director in The New York Times. Arguing that his films can leave a bitter aftertaste, James posited that while he creates strong women characters, he “then takes away their strength; there is a definite trace of misogyny lurking beneath his apparently fond creations of women.”

As Castejón Leorza’s critique of Julieta suggests, the intervening 24 years have only given those looking at his films from a decidedly feminist perspective more reason to be suspicious of the director’s otherwise lauded work. What’s often missing in these discussions is an engagement with the Spanish director’s sexuality, a factor Almodóvar has been reticent to discuss but that is nevertheless central to his artistic sensibility.

To talk about Almodóvar’s gay sensibility, or what the queer critic and University of Michigan professor David Halperin describes in his book How to Be Gay as “gay male culture’s exuberant portrayals of extravagant, flamboyant, hysterical, suffering, debased, or abject femininity,” is to confront head-on two complementary cultural anxieties: sexism and homophobia. Both of these crucially intersect when gay men respond to and celebrate a defiant femininity, one they see as their own.

The intersection between gay male culture and melodramatic femininity is at the heart of Almodóvar’s 1999 film All About My Mother. It earned the director some of the best reviews of his career—as Armond White wrote in his New York Press review of the film, the director’s “gay male identification with women frees him to do his best work.” The Oscar-winning movie is centered on a young queer artist, Esteban, whose death sets the plot in motion. It is Esteban’s fascination with cinema that opens the film (he’s watching the Bette Davis classic All About Eve with his mother) and his diva adoration that leads to his untimely death (he’s struck by a car while trying to get an autograph from the actress playing Blanche DuBois in a Spanish theatre production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire). The film may not have been as explicitly autobiographical as Almodóvar’s later Bad Education (2004), but it nonetheless corralled many of his most famous themes and images—he even borrowed an organ-donor conversation at a hospital following Esteban’s death from his earlier film The Flower of My Secret (1995).

In referencing Williams’s famous play, Almodóvar showed himself to be keenly aware of the pushback gay artists face when romanticizing women’s suffering. Williams’s treatment of Blanche has as often been critiqued for its sexism against her as praised for its sympathetic treatment of her struggles. Depending on how you read the play’s ending, where the former Southern belle is whisked off to an insane asylum after her sister Stella refuses to believe the rape allegations against her own husband, Blanche can emerge as a tragic figure that lays bare a culture’s misogyny.

Almodóvar’s campy melodramas and his histrionic leading ladies seemingly efface the female experience even as they exalt it.

Here, after all, is yet another woman punished by a man who takes it upon himself to teach her a lesson. Or, she can stand as another instantiation of that misogyny; as a character, she’s still subject to a man’s whims, in this case Williams’s. Thus, Blanche can, in the literary critic Kathleen Margaret Lant’s words, be an example of the way Williams “draws on the most heinous and trivializing myths about woman and about rape that inform our culture.” But the relationship between a gay male playwright and his victimized female protagonist is further complicated by its porousness: As Williams playfully, if earnestly, asserted on more than one occasion, “I am Blanche DuBois.”

Such pronouncements reveal the way vivid, female characters like Blanche (see also: Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly and Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles) could function as a way for gay artists to express themselves. Without, that is, explicitly impressing their homosexuality on their work—which, given the censorship of mid-20th century mainstream American art, was sometimes necessary. As the film critic Molly Haskell put it in her seminal 1974 book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, there’s the sense that these women worked to exorcise something that wasn’t about “real” women to begin with. Williams’s women, she wrote, “are as unmistakably a product of the fifties as they are of his own baroquely transvestised homosexual fantasies.” Her language rankles in 2016 for the implicit homophobia it signals if not outright endorses. Haskell did help, however, to point out the outdated elements of the cross-gender identification that Williams came to define—incompatible not only with the awareness of women’s cultural representations in the late-20th century, but also with the increasingly visible fight for LGBT rights that followed the Stonewall riots of 1969.

This is why Almodóvar, who came of age in what Haskell herself called “the Age of Ambivalence,” can still find himself the subject of critiques like those of Casterjón Loerza. His campy melodramas and his histrionic leading ladies, following in Williams’s template, seemingly efface the female experience even as they exalt it.

While some critics would like to see this gay vision of femininity trail off into history, it is very much alive today. Take Ryan Murphy: The successful television writer and director has elicited decidedly strong (and often well-deserved) negative reactions to his treatment of women in his shows, including American Horror Story and Scream Queens, and his upcoming project looks to be a provocative entry in this long tradition. Feud may well be the perfect distillation of the fine line between exposé and exploitation that characterize many gay men’s interest in divas: The anthology show’s central premise (based on the book Best Actress by Jaffe Cohen and Michael Zam) is the feud between larger-than-life icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford on the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Here is, as Lant might argue, another example of a male creator drawing on toxic myths about female rivalry. With Feud, and to borrow a Crawford line, these women—already in some ways best recalled via snappy catchphrases like “Fasten your seat belts! It’s gonna be a bumpy ride!”—would seem to risk being solely remembered as the type of name not used in high society outside of a kennel.

For Almodóvar, to be a woman is to be an actress. This is a definition at once unfashionable and radical.

Still, writers like Manuel Puig and John Rechy saw in such starlets an unrealistic performance of femininity they could tap into as a way to fight back against society’s contemptuous ideas of effeminacy and homosexuality. Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman and The Buenos Aires Affair are paeans to the power gay men drew from female stars, while Rechy’s Marilyn’s Daughter was a celebration of Monroe, the epitome of the outlaw sensibility the Chicano writer has always championed. Those oft-shamed moments of gay boys lovingly devoted to outsized divas, their work argues, have a power of their own, shattering as they do contemporary ideas of gender and orientation.

Almodóvar’s filmography rests on this same conviction. Even when creating his own female protagonists he alludes to those divas that have come before, deploying the strength they exuded onscreen. In 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, for example, Carmen Maura’s character Pepa, who spends the film unsuccessfully trying to drown her sorrows in a sleeping pill-spiked gazpacho, is a voiceover actress tasked with dubbing Joan Crawford’s lines in Johnny Guitar. Penelope Cruz’s prostitute-turned-actress Lena in 2009’s Broken Embraces uses the same pseudonym as Catherine Deneuve does in the film Belle de Jour when visiting her clients. As if to further make his point, Almodóvar has Lena wear a red blazer reminiscent of Pepa’s signature look during the climactic moment when she finally leaves her wealthy and controlling husband for good.

With these cinematic references, Almodóvar’s films repeatedly return to the liberating power of performing femininity, an argument best epitomized by characters like Bad Education’s glamorous drag queen Zahara (played by Gael García Bernal) who gleefully upend gender and sexual norms. Like many of Almodóvar’s protagonists, Zahara is marked by a tempestuous past, one she’s escaped by embracing her seductiveness, directing its power against the men in power who once wronged her.

As female filmmakers continue to wrestle their narratives and representations away from the male imaginary, the efforts of gay male artists interested in women’s stories might feel, to some, like yet another example of men framing female-driven storytelling. But Almodóvar’s stories, focused as they are on mothers, sinners, sex-crazed maniacs, vengeful domestic abuse survivors, drag queens, sex workers, grieving daughters, pregnant nuns, drug-addicted actresses, and everything in between, ultimately emerge as an iconoclastic and deeply empathetic celebration of womanhood rooted in the Spanish director’s own sexuality.

Even, or especially, when creating long-suffering women like Julieta, Almodóvar is putting himself in her place. There’s a clear attempt to evoke and model the empathy he feels for his characters, even when he lets viewers know that it’s all too perfectly art-directed to be taken as reality. At the end of All About My Mother, a red curtain comes down. The screen is filled with a dedication: “To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider ... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.” Almodóvar, with his work, both leans into the critical conversation around his portrayal of women, and subtly subverts it. For him, to be a woman is to be an actress, a definition that is at once unfashionable and radical.

Beyoncé's Year of Peace and Misunderstanding

In February, after Beyoncé gave a politically charged performance in the middle of Coldplay’s Super Bowl halftime show, someone set up a page online announcing than an anti-Beyoncé protest would be held outside of NFL headquarters in New York City. The media showed up; Beyoncé fans showed up; actual protestors, for the most part, did not show up. “Anti-Beyoncé rally is the worst-attended protest ever,” the New York Post wrote, reporting only five haters were on hand.

The no-shows seemed to suggest, at least to those cackling online about it, that a much-publicized Beyoncé backlash was just hype. But maybe the incident simply indicated that the people most likely to object to Beyoncé don’t live in New York City.

Conservative-leaning criticism followed the singer throughout the year. Police unions demonstrated outside of some of her concerts. When she played the Country Music Awards, some viewers complained on social media that the show had elevated a “cop hater” who “supports thugs.” The right-wing web-video star Tomi Lahren made a routine of attacking the singer. And stumping in swing states, Donald Trump criticized Beyoncé and her husband, Jay Z, for using coarse language (the irony did not go un-noted). Trump may have been right to calculate a political benefit to targeting her: A survey of likely general-election voters in Ohio measuring the impact of celebrity endorsements found that Beyoncé’s support for a candidate tended to negatively affect goodwill toward that candidate—to a greater extent than with any other famous person the pollsters asked about.

Which might be a surprising thing to hear if you live a life where Beyoncé is seen as the height of celebrity power, as the prime example of someone for whom “famous” and “beloved” is interchangeable. She is referred to as “queen,” as a “goddess,” as a musician for whom criticism is—jokingly—considered forbidden. Her signature adjective is “flawless,” less meant as an expression of vanity than of American-Dream faith in the power of hard work to transform one’s life—a fact that sometimes miffs critics on the left but that has fed the kind of broad appeal that results in 17.2 million albums sold.

Yet this year served as one long reminder that paragons in one segment of the country are villains in another, and that political fault lines are also cultural ones. Data shows that the people inclined toward Trump and the people inclined toward Hillary Clinton significantly differ in the TV shows they watch, the books they read, and the music they listen to. And it’s now a truism that the internet and fragmented media ecosystem make it easy to tune out what people who are unlike you are consuming and talking about.

Every so often, though, the entire nation is made to pay attention to the same things at the same time. Like with the Super Bowl. Or like with a presidential election. Beyoncé’s bold 2016 efforts intersected with both of those rare moments of monoculture—and ended up demonstrating just how divided the nation is and how maddening attempts at outreach can be. If the culture war is real, she was on its front lines.

Even before 2016, Beyoncé was among the entertainers most closely associated with the cultural-political cohort considered ascendant in the Obama era. She performed at the president’s 2008 inauguration; she filmed PSAs with Michelle Obama. In turn, she became a partisan flashpoint. She and Jay Z were accused of receiving favors from the State Department; Mike Huckabee called her music “mental poison”; a social-media meme arose when a Fox News commentator attributed the president’s success to “Beyoncé Voters.”

She was not always so eager to be politically identified. With Destiny’s Child, she performed at George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration; five years later, still sometimes pegged as right-leaning for having done so, she announced that she in fact was not a Republican. “Maybe one day I will speak of my political beliefs,” she added, ‘but only when I know what I’m talking about.” That “one day” came around Obama’s election, an event that also mobilized an array of celebrities previously mum on politics. Coincidentally or not, her work over his two terms has become more and more daring—both musically experimental and socially conscious.

The culmination of this evolution came with 2016’s Lemonade, an album and hour-long HBO film that connected a story of surviving infidelity to generations of black female struggle. The February single “Formation” announced Beyoncé’s most overtly political era with a spectacular dance track in which she bragged about her “negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils,” dissed the naysaying of “albino alligators,” and called on women to “get in formation.” Its music video touched on Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans and on many black peoples’ fear of being killed by police: “Stop shooting us,” graffiti scrawled in one frame said. At the Super Bowl, she arrived with the song in the middle of Coldplay’s set, herself dressed like Michael Jackson at the same occasion in 1993 and her female dancers styled as Black Panthers.

For anyone plugged in to recent protests and writings about the country’s history of white supremacy and black resilience, the spectacle crystallized what was already in the air. Jenna Wortham wrote in The New York Times, “‘Formation’ isn’t just about police brutality—it’s about the entirety of the black experience in America in 2016, which includes standards of beauty, (dis)empowerment, culture and the shared parts of our history ... One could also read this as an existential call to action to her listeners and viewers: ‘Black women, join me and make your own formation, a power structure that doesn’t rely on traditional institutions.’”

But Beyoncé wasn’t simply speaking to people prepared to understand the message or to be sympathetic to it if they did understand. She had come to the Super Bowl, the most-watched event in American television, with 111 million viewers from both red states and blue states. Afterward, vast portions of the audience would not be reading essays by people who saw something poignant in her performance. They’d be listening to talk radio, watching Fox News, and scrolling through Facebook feeds dominated by people like themselves, people for whom the moment seemed a bit freaky.

On Fox and Friends the morning after the Super Bowl, the reaction to Beyoncé’s performance mostly consisted of loudly performed confusion. “I couldn’t really make out what Beyoncé was saying,” the host Brian Kilmeade announced. Anna Kooiman: “I’ve got to be honest with you, I had no idea when this was going on.” Rudy Giuliani: “I don’t know what the heck it was. A bunch of people bouncing around and all strange things. It was terrible.”

These comments were, on their face, an aesthetic critique, implying Beyoncé had failed as a performer—an arena-sized contrast to reviews elsewhere offering pity toward Coldplay for being shown up by a far more interesting artist. But the Fox commentators were also echoing previous generations of adult white gatekeepers who’d been confronted with developments in black and youth music: Like jazz and rock and hip-hop at various points in history, Beyoncé was being written off as “just noise.” It’s rhetoric that signals, more than anything else, a denial of legitimacy, a disinterest in engaging in good faith. It’s rhetoric that guarantees the most perfunctory analysis will be the only analysis.

And it wasn’t hard to guess at what the perfunctory analysis from these particular pundits would be. Kilmeade: “The song, the lyrics, which I couldn’t make out a syllable, were basically telling cops to stop shooting blacks.” Giuliani: “I thought it was really outrageous that she used it as a platform to attack police officers who are the people who protect her and protect us, and keep us alive.”

The song’s lyrics make no mention of cops. Its video touches on police violence, but as Wortham had pointed out in the Times, it touches on many other realities of black identity too. Dressing in Black Panther outfits may be provocative, but largely to the extent that one ignores much of the group’s history in favor of incoherently filing it as “the black KKK.” The same idea goes for the dancers joining into an “X” formation, presumably in tribute to Malcolm X.

Later in Elle, Beyoncé would further clarify her intentions: “Anyone who perceives my message as anti-police is completely mistaken. I have so much admiration and respect for officers and the families of officers who sacrifice themselves to keep us safe. But let’s be clear: I am against police brutality and injustice. Those are two separate things.” This explanation represents a lot of Black Lives Matters’ supporters’ completely comprehensible stance on police as well. But for Beyoncé and for that movement, another message was being relayed, over time, about what they wanted. A plea for peace was being taken as anything but.

One of the post-election conversations that has unfolded among Donald Trump’s opponents has focused on how best to influence voters who seem unable to hear or understand their side. Do you persuade, or do you confront? Do you work with, or fight against? Do you reach out, or do you re-entrench?

It would be underestimating Beyoncé to say she didn’t expect to be provocative. She flipped off the camera in her “Formation” video, and the vibe of her Super Bowl performance was militaristic. When white pop and rock stars use similar maneuvers, they’re often assumed to be simply flaunting a rebellious attitude or sense of control. Beyoncé, rightly, was perceived to be saying more. She had a grievance with the country—that black people, especially black women, haven’t been afforded their due—and she had a solution of sorts in her art. Judging from the ecstatic and grateful response from many of her fans, the offering of psychic support and solidarity was largely received as intended.

But from white people, “Formation” asked for little more more than understanding. Indeed, an honest look at Beyoncé’s 2016 would suggest that she had cross-racial and cross-cultural connection in mind. The Super Bowl show, watched in its entirety, called for unity across difference: There were the white rockers Coldplay, the multi-racial and winkingly macho Bruno Mars contingent, and Beyoncé’s black female army, all of whom formed up into a super group in the final moments of the performance. This isn’t a deep reading, it’s the explicit message: Chris Martin shouted “we’re all in this together,” and signs in the bleachers at the very end spelled out “believe in love.”

As music alone, Lemonade works as portable pop about relationships, including hard rock and country and throwback soul songs that most anyone should be able to relate to. The accompanying film is more political, but even it culminated in a vision of inclusivity, with “All Night” soundtracking white and black and brown couples in lovey-dovey embrace. Beyoncé’s later appearance at the Country Music Awards with the Dixie Chicks, for all its controversy, came across as one more overture to the parts of the nation that seemed frightened by her.

But in all of her monoculture moments, a good portion of the audience missed the intended context of her message and processed it through the same mindset that asks why there’s no White History Month or sees the BET Awards as racist. No one pop star can hope to change so blinkered a reading of the country’s past and present. As Beyoncé put it to Elle, “If celebrating my roots and culture during Black History Month made anyone uncomfortable, those feelings were there long before a video and long before me.”

None of the outreach was allowed to be legible across the blue/red divide.

A lot of people would give “those feelings” a straightforward name: racism. As with so much else about the divides revealed this year, other factors tangle in too: sexism, rural/urban disconnects, the segmented media, and the great catchall, partisanship. Beyoncé had fundraised for Hillary Clinton, and she spent election eve performing at a large Democratic rally with Jay Z and others. After that, Trump began including Beyoncé in his stump speeches.

Beyoncé has been mum about the election since November 9 save for a report on Hollywood Life, a gossip website that claimed that “she cried and held Blue Ivy so tightly after realizing Trump had won. All she could do was comfort Blue, kiss her forehead and remind her how intelligent, strong and beautiful she is and told her to never forget it.” Which, in a way, is another small gesture in line with Beyoncé’s larger intentions this year—regardless of how they were portrayed to much of America.

Sneakers Have Always Been Political Shoes

Though it’s been touring the U.S. since it opened in Toronto in 2013, the exhibition Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture generated frantic curatorial discussions ahead of its opening at the Oakland Museum of California last week. The show features two pairs of New Balance sneakers, newly politicized in the wake of the brand’s public support in November of Donald Trump’s protectionist trade policies, which led a neo-Nazi blog to declare New Balance “the official shoes of white people.” Outraged customers responded by taking to social media to share photos and videos of New Balance sneakers in trash cans and toilets, or set aflame. The company quickly issued a statement saying that it “does not tolerate bigotry or hate in any form,” while also touting the brand’s made-in-the-USA credentials.

About a month later, Nike released a new Twitter ad that appeared to declare sharing “opinions about politics” to be a distraction from what their shoes are ostensibly designed for: going running. Whether a bipartisan appeal to the election-weary or an attempt to forestall a New Balance-style scandal, Nike’s apolitical stance rings hollow given the history of the footwear they sell: Sneakers have always been canvases for political commentary and projection, whether or not brands want them to be.

What Nike and New Balance fail to grasp, the Out of the Box exhibition curator Elizabeth Semmelhack told me, is that “the cultural meaning behind sneakers is a constantly evolving dialogue between the people who produce the sneakers and the people who wear them.” Fittingly, she said that although the New Balance shoes remain on display for the moment, that could change depending on visitor response. “I can understand the ownership that brands want to have over their own message, but the discursive nature of branding is clearly open to manipulation,” Semmelhack added. As the exhibition shows, over the last 200 years, sneakers have signified everything from national identity, race, and class to masculinity and criminality; put simply, they are magnets for social and political meaning, intended or otherwise, in a way that sets them apart from other types of footwear.

Performance-enhancing, rubber-soled athletic shoes date back to the early 19th century, when they were primarily worn for tennis. From the beginning, however, these so-called “sneakers”—named for their noiseless footfall—were tainted by connotations of delinquency, being the proverbial choice of pranksters, muggers, and burglars. This reputation would prove difficult to shake: an incendiary 1979 New York Times article was headlined: “For Joggers and Muggers, the Trendy Sneaker.”

Pre-vulcanized rubber overshoes made by an unknown manufacturer. Ron Wood / American Federation of Arts / Bata Shoe Museum.

It was not until the 1920s that industrialization made sneakers widely available and affordable. Once an emblem of privileged leisure on the tennis court, the canvas-and-rubber high-top adapted to the new, egalitarian team sport of basketball. The Converse Rubber Shoe Company—founded in 1908 as a producer of galoshes—introduced its first basketball shoe, the All Star, in 1917. In a stroke of marketing genius, Converse enlisted basketball coaches and players as brand ambassadors, including Chuck Taylor, the first athlete to have a sneaker named after him.

Politics, however, fueled the rise of sneakers as much as athletics. As Semmelhack explained, “the fragile peace of World War I increased interest in physical culture, which became linked to rising nationalism and eugenics. Countries encouraged their citizens to exercise not just for physical perfection but to prepare for the next war. It’s ironic that the sneaker became one of the most democratized forms of footwear at the height of fascism.” Mass exercise rallies were features of fascist life in Germany, Japan, and Italy. But sneakers could also represent resistance. Jesse Owens’ dominance at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games stung the event’s Nazi hosts even more because he trained in German-made Dassler running shoes. (The company was later split between the two Dassler brothers, who renamed their shares Puma and Adidas).

When the U.S. government rationed rubber during World War II, sneakers were exempted following widespread protests. The practical, inexpensive, and casual shoe had become central to American identity, on and off the playing field. The growing influence of television in the 1950s created two new cultural archetypes: the celebrity athlete and the teenager. James Dean effectively rebranded Chuck Taylors as the footwear of choice for young rebels without a cause.

The Converse Rubber Shoe Company’s non-skid All Star sneakers, from 1923. American Federation of Arts.

Sneakers became footnotes in the history of the Civil Rights movement. In 1965, I Spy was the first weekly TV drama to feature a black actor—Bill Cosby—in a lead role. His character, a fun-loving CIA agent going undercover as a tennis coach, habitually wore white Adidas sneakers, easily identifiable by their prominent trio of stripes. This updated gumshoe alluded to the “sneaky” origins of sneakers, while also serving as shorthand for new-school cool. Sneakers played a more explicit part at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, where American gold medalist sprinter Tommie Smith and his bronze medal-winning teammate, John Carlos, removed their Puma Suedes and mounted the medal podium in their stocking feet, to symbolize African-American poverty, their heads lowered and black-gloved fists raised in a Black Power salute. The ensuing controversy didn’t hurt the success of the Suede, still in production today.

Around the same time, the jogging craze necessitated low-rise, high-tech footwear that bore little resemblance to the familiar canvas-and-rubber basketball high-top. But these state-of-the-art shoes weren’t made for running alone; they were colorful, covetable fashion statements. In 1977, Vogue declared that “real runner’s sneakers” had become status symbols, worn by famous non-athletes like Farrah Fawcett and Mick Jagger. Instead of one pair of sneakers, people needed a whole wardrobe of them, custom-made for different activities—or genders. Sneaker companies embraced women’s liberation as a promotional ploy, advertising shoes specifically designed for female bodies and lifestyles.

Vans Checkerboard slip-ons from 2014 designed in the 1980s retro style. Ron Wood / American Federation of Arts / Bata Shoe Museum.

As the suburbs became overrun with joggers, America’s cities saw a rise in basketball players, particularly New York, where a bold new style of play transformed the game into a spectacle of masculine swagger. Like break dancing, schoolyard basketball ritualized a competitive physicality, which bled into mainstream (white) culture. “In the 1970s, New Yorkers in the basketball and hip-hop community changed the perception of sneakers from sports equipment to tools for cultural expression,” the sneaker historian Bobbito Garcia explains in the Out of the Box catalogue. “The progenitors of sneaker culture were predominantly ... kids of color who grew up in a depressed economic era.” The 2015 documentary Fresh Dressed highlighted the prominent role of sneakers in the history of black urban culture—and its appropriation by whites.

The humble canvas sneaker, since the ’60s supplanted in the sports world by more ergonomic designs in futuristic materials, found new life as an everyday shoe. Over the next few decades, canvas sneakers came to embody youthful rebellion as much as athleticism. Beatniks, rockers, and skateboarders adopted them because they were cheap, anonymous, and authentic—not necessarily because they were comfortable or cool. Converse, Keds, and Vans got their street cred not from sports stars, but from the Ramones, Sid Vicious, and Kurt Cobain. (In 2008, Converse angered Nirvana fans by issuing special-edition high-tops tastelessly covered with sketches and scribbles from the late frontman’s diary.) The All Star, formerly available only in black or white, suddenly appeared in a rainbow of fashion colors.

The ascent of aerobics in the early ’80s left Nike, known for its jogging shoes, struggling to adjust. In February 1984, the company reported its first-ever quarterly loss, but that same year Nike signed basketball rookie Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal—arguably the birth of modern sneaker culture. Jordan wore his signature Air Jordans in NBA games, in defiance of league rules. Nike happily paid his $5,000-per-game fine, while airing ads declaring: “The NBA can’t keep you from wearing them.” And so when the first Air Jordans hit stores in 1985, the sneakers carried with them a distinct whiff of sticking it to The Man, despite their $65 price tag. But not everyone wanted to be like Mike. As Jordan grew rich off of his Nike partnership, he was accused of staying silent on political issues affecting the African American community. “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” he allegedly responded.

The Nike Air Jordan I from 1985. American Federation of Arts.

The growing popularity of sneakers on both sides of the political divide set the stage for a raging culture war over the shoes’ ties to criminality, or lack thereof. In “My Adidas” (1986)—one of many hip-hop sneaker shout-outs—Run-DMC defended their laceless Adidas Superstars against sneakers’ thuggish image as “felon shoes,” rapping: “I wore my sneakers, but I’m not a sneak.” (The band was rewarded with an Adidas endorsement deal, a first for a musical group.)

But Nike’s all-white Air Force 1 sneaker, released in the same year as “My Adidas,” may have merited the name of “felon shoes.” Having enough money to step out in “fresh”—i.e., pristine and unscuffed—Air Force 1s became a point of pride among street drug dealers. “Like the complicated icon of the cowboy, the drug dealer was also a symbol of rugged individualism whose fashion was hypermasculine and easily marketed … in ways that capitalized on both its American-ness and its exoticism simultaneously,” Semmelhack writes in the exhibition catalogue. The AF1, far from a public-relations disaster, became an instant classic. The rise in sneakers’ price and social cachet led to a wave of sneaker theft; a frenzied media blamed Nike’s Spike Lee-directed Air Jordan ads for a string of “sneaker killings” in 1990. Bill Cosby—then a beloved and respected former TV dad—made an example of pricey sneakers in his 2004 “Pound Cake” speech to the NAACP, chastising African-American parents for wasting money on such frivolous purchases.

But mounting customization and collectability (driven by eBay) only increased the cost of sneakers; artists and elite fashion designers like Prada and Gucci began releasing their own designs or limited-edition collaborations with athletic brands. In this rarefied market, sneakers evolved from symbolic consumer objects into small-batch vehicles for unambiguous social commentary. In one notable example, the artist Judi Werthein designed the 2005 Brinco cross-trainer to assist with illegal border crossings from Mexico. Werthein distributed Brincos to migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border for free, while also selling them to sneakerheads for $215 per pair at a San Diego boutique. A few years later, “Obama Force One,” the custom AF1 designed by the artist Jimm Lasser in 2008, had profile portraits of President Obama etched on each sole. And, long before the Colin Kaepernick debate, the NBA star Dwayne Wade released a pair of Black Lives Matter sneakers.

Dwyane Wade's "Black Lives Matter" Edition Li-Nings. pic.twitter.com/G3NoRS8Tfi

— Joseph Goodman (@JoeGoodmanJr) February 22, 2015

Inevitably, some of these statement sneakers were accused of going too far, or not far enough. The line Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer designed for Converse in 2013 contained hidden human rights slogans and symbols. “It should be welcomed that Niemeyer is using this opportunity to raise political awareness,” The Guardian’s architecture and design blog noted. “But I wonder what he would make of accusations that dozens of factory workers making Converse sneakers in Indonesia have been routinely abused on the job?”

Such is one of the problems that can arise with socially conscious sneakers: The intent, the message, and the realities of production don’t always comfortably line up. Consider how many of today’s politicized kicks are too expensive for most people to buy. And even for those who can afford the shoes, there’s little incentive to take them out of their packaging and risk scuffing them out on the streets. While their designers may see them as works of activism, to their owners, these costlier sneakers are more likely to be investment pieces—the hard-won fruits of waitlists, raffles, and overnight lines outside specialty shops. The Out of the Box exhibition catalogue even includes an essay on how to care for your “personal sneaker museum,” which prompts the question: If a sneaker makes a statement in a box, does anyone hear it?

The Freedoms of George Michael

George Michael was already a big star by the time I was developing musical tastes. I knew I liked his music; my sister had introduced me to “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and the many hit singles from Faith had already entered that rarefied sphere of cultural ubiquity that ensures their longevity in the karaoke songbook.

But he was an unusually self-referential star, and that made becoming a George Michael fan into something of a project. He had the habit of titling his songs and albums with numbers, as though he were Wagner composing the Ring Cycle, making some sort of never-ending symphony. Even a danceable bauble like “I Want Your Sex” unfolded in three parts. The title of Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1, one of the first albums I owned, cruelly teased my appetite for a sequel that never came. And then there was the puzzle that was “Freedom! ’90."

The video for “Freedom! ’90,” directed by David Fincher, was inescapable during my tween years. Famously, Michael himself was barely in it; instead, a parade of supermodels—and a random, shapely, half-naked man hanging from his gravity boots—lip-synch the lyrics to the song as icons of his earlier stardom (a leather jacket, a jukebox, a guitar) spontaneously combust.

It wasn’t hard to infer from the song that Michael was making some sort of layered statement about his celebrity, but as a kid in the days before Google, it was difficult to parse the meaning of that statement. The year suggested in the song’s title felt like a clue to the song’s deeper meaning, to Michael himself, and perhaps to larger mysteries I could only guess at.

Older fans of George Michael already knew the fact I discovered as I was unraveling this mystery as a kid, that “Freedom ’90” was Michael’s second song called “Freedom.” The first—recorded with Andrew Ridgeley while he was a member of Wham!—is now fairly described as a deep cut, unmentioned in every karaoke songbook I’ve seen. It’s not hard to tell, though, why it was once a modest hit, with its simple, buoyant melody, ’80s-friendly “doo-doo-doos,” and its teen-candy message of eternal devotion in the face of heartbreak. The refrain:

I don't want your freedom

I don't want to play around

I don't want nobody baby

Part-time love just brings me down

I don't need your freedom

Girl, all I want right now is you

“Freedom” exerted an unusual pull over Michael’s later work. He revisited the song again and again in the first decade of his solo career. Each time, he tears apart a different piece of the song’s message, exposing it as a lie. The chorus of “Freedom” is what you hear on the church organ that introduces “Faith.” For fans of Wham!, the reference probably felt like a wink: This may be the new me, but don’t worry, I’m still making toe-tapping tunes about love. But the meaning of the two songs couldn’t be more different: While “Freedom” is about a kid swearing his undying fealty to an unfaithful lover, “Faith” is the story of a grown-ass man kicking his ex to the curb despite the ex’s pleas to stay.

Then, of course, there’s “Freedom ’90,” the funkiest song on an album filled with plaintive ballads about war and pain. No more coded messages about lovers and exes. In the song, Michael is himself, an artist speaking directly to his fans about the lie of fame, promising to no longer play by its rules. It sounds almost like a coming-out anthem: “I think there’s something you should know / I think it’s time I told you so / There’s something deep inside of me / There’s someone else I’ve got to be.”

When he did come out in public, shortly after having been arrested for lewd behavior in a public restroom, eight years after “Freedom ’90,” Michael said his sexuality was an enigma, even to him, but his music was always honest. “The songs that I wrote when I was with women were really about women, and the songs that I’ve written since have been fairly obviously about men,” he said. “So I think in terms of my work, I’ve never been reticent in terms of defining my sexuality.”

That was the year I graduated from high school, and I remember two conflicting emotions: vicarious pride that a sex symbol like George Michael could be out and public about being gay, and fear that his coming out would mean the end of his career, a warning shot to men like me.

Instead, six months after he came out, he released “Outside,” the brazen, cheeky lead single on his greatest-hits compilation, coyly titled Ladies & Gentlemen: The Best of George Michael. It was neither his best song nor an enduring chart-topper, but it got plenty of radio play, and the album sold well. In one stroke, he reminded the world of his immense musical talent, and proved that his brilliance and sex appeal could still move records even after he discarded his teen idol image, and even after the world knew he was gay. Three years later, I started coming out myself.

George Michael may have died too young, but he also managed to live, true to himself as an artist and as a gay man. His example helped inspire me and others to claim a piece of that freedom for ourselves. Now, he’s experiencing a posthumous coming-out as a secret philanthropist. “I won’t let you down, so please don’t give me up,” he pleaded in “Freedom ’90.” Oh, George. Then or now, you never needed to worry about that.