Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 28

And, Scene: Weiner

Over the next two weeks, The Atlantic will delve into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy moment and unpacking what it says about 2016. Today: Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s Weiner. (The whole “And, Scene” series will appear here.)

It’s hardly hyperbole to say Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s documentary Weiner is the most significant movie of 2016, though perhaps not in the way its filmmakers intended. When it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival ahead of a May theatrical release, Weiner had a quasi-redemptive angle to it, a sort of naïve sympathy for its attention-hungry subject, undone by his own compulsions. It was a thrilling fly-on-the-wall documentary where you couldn’t understand how the fly had gotten access, let alone lingered as everything began crashing down. But to watch it now, post-November, is to be reminded of a crucial turning point in the 2016 election, and wince rather than marvel at its subject’s recklessness. In the course of less than a year, Weiner transformed from a fascinating sideshow into a horror film.

Kriegman and Steinberg’s film explores the rise, fall, attempted comeback, and dramatic collapse of former Congressman Anthony Weiner. He resigned from Congress in 2011 over a sexting scandal but mounted a quixotic New York City mayoral run in 2013 with the encouragement of his wife Huma Abedin, a prominent aide to Hillary Clinton. During that race, more of Weiner’s sexting partners emerged, saying they had interacted with him well after his resignation, which upended the redemptive timeline the candidate had sold to the press. His hobbled campaign staggered on to a massive loss, and, as Kriegman and Steinberg chronicle, the toll on his marriage was equally crippling. There’s a pivotal scene in the film that revolves around Weiner appearing on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, and having its host deal him a blunt question that had likely occurred to most viewers: “What is wrong with you?”

In the segment, Weiner deflected, unnerved at the cruel directness of O’Donnell’s line of interrogation, but the host persisted. “What is wrong with you that you cannot seem to imagine a life without elective office?” Weiner grew increasingly irritated, smirking angrily as O’Donnell repeated, “I think that there is something wrong with you.” Eventually, Weiner snapped. “Chillax, buddy!” he said. “Dude, I don’t really need your psychiatric questions!” It was hostile gotcha television, justified only from the perspective that O’Donnell was voicing the frustration many New Yorkers (and others around the country) felt with this former rising star of Congress.

But the reverse angle captured by Kriegman and Steinberg’s film was somehow even more compelling. Weiner did the interview remotely from a studio in Manhattan; in the documentary, we watch as he gesticulates wildly and yells at the man in his earpiece as if possessed, dramatically throwing his arms in the air and harrumphing after every pause. He emerges from the studio and dives into a cab. “Part of what animates me is I hate bullies,” he tells the camera. “It’s easy to beat me up ... it’s not that hard, and I don’t respect it that much.” As with so much of Weiner’s campaign, you sympathize with his overall ideas, whilst distrusting the messenger.

The next morning, Weiner loads the clip online, watching on his computer as Abedin walks up behind him, holding her hand to her temple in some mix of embarrassment and exhaustion. As the clip goes on, a slow grin creeps across Weiner’s face, hesitant, but strangely triumphant. “Who do you think looks better, me or him?” he asks. “Why are you laughing? This is crazy,” Abedin says with a sigh. “What was I supposed to do?” Weiner chuckles, before asking his wife, “How bad is it?” “It’s bad.” “For me?” She nods, sadly, then walks away, saying, “Sorry, I can’t.” Weiner keeps the MSNBC clip running with his rictus grin intact, gesturing to the screen and telling the camera, “Whatever the opposite of that is, is what Huma is.”

It’s a scene that exemplifies everything that was simultaneously arresting and horrifying in Weiner. It’s a candid look inside a marriage turning sour, a naked examination of a politician’s untempered ego, and a case study of the news media’s uselessness in delivering anything beyond superficial jousting. Weiner knows the O’Donnell appearance went badly, but he also knows how compelling it is; he knows his wife can’t stand to look at it, but doesn’t quite understand why, since she’s the one who nudged him back into the spotlight. This is a man who repeatedly, compulsively sought sexual attention from anonymous women on Twitter despite the destruction of his career, his family, and ultimately (and most inadvertently) the 2016 Clinton campaign. Of course Weiner didn’t directly change the course of the election, but it did set a bizarre chain of events in motion. As another particularly vile sexting scandal broke for Weiner after the film, the FBI opened an investigation into him and announced days before the election that it might have uncovered related evidence to Hillary Clinton’s private email server. In the end, nothing came of it, but the damage was done.

It feels perfectly appropriate that in 2016, a mortifying examination of one man’s ego played a role in the election of America’s next president. Weiner is a depressing pile-up of the year’s governing impulses: the media’s veneration of scandal, the increasing shamelessness of the country’s politicians, and Weiner’s quiet, ashamed delight in his own continued relevance. Nothing exemplified it more than that shot of him looking at his own public humiliation with a grin on his face. He knows he should look away and perhaps stay away from cameras in general for the foreseeable future. But he just can’t.

Previously: Moonlight

Next Up: Hell or High Water

Remembering Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher was the rarest kind of Hollywood icon: someone who radiated incredible onscreen presence at every moment while remaining completely self-aware. The actress, writer, and comedian was a pioneer in every respect. A lasting symbol of female heroism in cinema, Fisher was also unafraid to discuss her own fragility and struggles with addiction and mental illness. Cast, at the age of 19, as Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise, she could have been swallowed whole by a role that has endured in the public imagination like few others.

But Fisher—who died December 27 at age 60 after complications from cardiac arrest—was beloved for much more. For the brutal, hilarious honesty of her writing, much of it fictional and some of it decidedly not. For the glee she took in pulling apart Hollywood’s self-importance and the sexism she encountered, over and over, through her storied career. For her incredible gift for humor, whether she was discussing a costume fitting for Star Wars or her bipolar disorder. In recent years, she had resurrected Leia for a new series of Star Wars films without skipping a beat, while throwing herself into its publicity tour with typically acidic humor.

Fisher was born into a showbiz family, the daughter of the Singin’ in the Rain star Debbie Reynolds and the ’50s pop-music icon Eddie Fisher, who divorced when she was two. After a debut performance in Hal Ashby’s satiric comedy Shampoo, she was cast in George Lucas’s Star Wars, perceived by the industry at the time as a silly piece of genre filmmaking out of step with the gritty realism of 1970s Hollywood. It was, upon its 1977 release, the most successful film ever released; Fisher and her co-stars were catapulted to global fame, and her work as the steely, defiant, and frequently droll rebel Princess Leia belied skill and experience beyond her years. Fisher reprised the role for The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) before returning to it, many years later, in The Force Awakens (2015).

Fisher’s relationship with her most famous role was complicated. She frequently wrote about the surrealism of making the films and the pressures they put on her own self-image, as well as the general mania of having stardom thrust on her at such a young age. She mocked the famed metal bikini she sported in Return of the Jedi, once calling it “what supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh ring of hell.” But she understood the power of Leia as an icon, especially as a female hero in a male-dominated genre. “I think it’s used me and I’ve used it. It’s stupid or foolhardy to not like it and resist it,” she said of the franchise to Rolling Stone. “On a certain level I don’t understand what makes it not a movie, but this experience, this family member. It’s cherished…I respect it. I respect what it is to people because it’s just mindboggling.”

As the original Star Wars trilogy wound down, Fisher appeared in films like John Landis’s The Blues Brothers, Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally, and Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, but privately wrestled with drug addiction and a brief marriage to the singer Paul Simon. In 1987, she published her first novel Postcards from the Edge, a roman a clef essaying her personal issues and her complicated relationship with her mother; three years later, she adapted it for the screen, at which point she became one of Hollywood’s most in-demand script doctors. She did uncredited punch-up work on innumerable projects through the ’90s, blessing films like Sister Act, Hook, The Wedding Singer, Last Action Hero, The River Wild, and others with her caustic, knowing wit.

She was a novelist whose work often swerved into semi-autobiographical territory. Her later memoirs Wishful Drinking and The Princess Diarist took a humorous look at her youth, her time making Star Wars, her substance abuse, and her bipolar diagnosis. She turned the former into a one-woman show that ran on Broadway and was eventually adapted for television. Fisher was staunchly candid about her mental illness in a star-driven Hollywood culture that still tried to ignore such things; she gave speeches and wrote advice columns that shed crucial light on a still-stigmatized disease. “I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital,” she told Diane Sawyer in 1995. “I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I’m still surviving it, but bring it on.”

There’s so much to celebrate in Fisher’s work and in what she brought to the world. As an older, wiser Leia in The Force Awakens, she was as indomitable as the young Princess who marveled at the foolishness of her rescuers in 1977’s Star Wars, barking “Somebody has to save our skins—into the garbage chute, flyboy!” as Han Solo and Luke Skywalker looked on incredulously. At the same time, she understood the ridiculousness of the systems around her, be they imaginary sci-fi worlds or the sexist machinery of Hollywood. Writing in Wishful Drinking, she recalled Lucas approaching her on her first day of filming as Leia and telling her she couldn’t wear a bra under her dress, because “there’s no underwear in space”:

“He says it with such conviction too! Like he had been to space and looked around and he didn’t see any bras or panties anywhere. He explained. ‘You go into space and you become weightless. Then your body expands but your bra doesn’t, so you get strangled by your own underwear.’ I think that this would make for a fantastic obituary. I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”

The Best Writing Advice of 2016

2016 was not an easy year to be a writer. Not just because of the constant, concentration-wrecking pull of our devices, their glowing screens beckoning with the promise of fresh horrors. I’ve spoken with many writers, in recent months, who seem to be facing a deeper, starker crisis of purpose since the election of Donald Trump. They’re asking themselves: Is making literature an acceptable pursuit in a world with such urgent, tangible needs? And if so, how should I use my words?

It’s a deeply personal line of questioning, and I can’t supply any answers here—I’m still working things out for myself. (I will recommend Bob Shacochis’s 2013 essay for this series, though, which articulates some of the key things to consider.) But I will say this: After interviewing 15 writers for “By Heart” in 2016, I’m more convinced than ever that their creative work is worthwhile. Even during chaotic times. Maybe especially then.

For the past three years (see 2013, 2014, and 2015), I’ve compiled the best writing advice from this series. In 2016, as in the past, authors shared some great insights—Alice Mattison explained how to structure a short story without a traditional plot, for instance, while Ethan Canin unpacked the art of the last line. But the bulk of the advice writers offered this year was not about “craft,” so much, as about the work of becoming a better person. In order to overcome their creative challenges, the authors I interviewed didn’t need to write prettier sentences: They needed to become more disciplined, more generous, braver. Literature seems to require these qualities of us, somehow, both in writing and in reading. So here’s a list for 2016: One that reminds us why we need new books, more than ever.

Lydia Millet, the author of Sweet Lamb of Heaven, used Dr. Seuss’s classic work The Lorax to make the case for fiction that is expressly political—for stories and novels that engage directly with the most pressing issues of the day. (Her piece was published in May but feels especially timely now.) She discussed how to write with moral authority without becoming preachy:

I rarely write a book where I’m not trying to approach some idea or set of ideas that I think is of interest in the cultural moment ... In approaching these ideas in a fictional vein I’ve had to wrestle, on the technical side, with the trickiness of balancing the aesthetics of contemporary writing (grounded in the subjective and averse to the didactic, committed to the personal and hostile to the general) with what might unfashionably be called a moral vision.

There are a few ways to know whether something I’ve written succeeds in achieving this balance, the tension of being properly subjective yet also conveying a more expansive sense of right and wrong. If I find myself repelled by the text, pulling away from something that’s meant to be read philosophically, that’s a good sign that someone else will feel that way, too. In fiction, philosophical, political, or religious ideas tend to be most convincing when they arise organically out of a character. And the only way I know how to make characters is by voice, the texture of personality inside a narrative. If you can establish a voice that can get away with being somewhat abstract, that’s part of the battle. And part of it is simple charisma.

My feeling is that the struggle to write well is also the struggle to write honestly, even when they seem to be at loggerheads. And that candor—elusive and sometimes rudely naked—shouldn’t be just the easy honesty of me but a more ambitious honesty of us. Not the sole purview of children’s books, but the purview of any book at all.

In the end, I think a bit of shamelessness is called for.

2016 has been filled with ugly reminders of how factional humans can be. This year’s writers suggested that their work demands something different: openness, plasticity of thinking, the ability to entertain and evaluate multiple points of view. Canin, the author of A Doubter’s Almanac, described how writing is a process of self-questioning, a method of backing away from what you’re most convinced you know. As he put it:

I’ve seen plenty of students come in and say, I want to write a novel about blah blah blah. But you just can’t do it. You can only write a novel about a character who does something wrong, and see what happens from there. Novels are compendiums of bad behavior, and literature is the gossip about it.

In other words, if you’re writing a piece of fiction, I’d urge you not to try to show anything—instead, try to discover something. There’s no way to write anything powerful unless your unconscious takes charge.

With characterization, you have to let go. You’ve got to release yourself from your grandiose intentions, your ambitions, your ideas about humanity, literature, and philosophy by focusing on the being-another-person aspect of it—which, by the way, is freeing, delightful, and one of the few real joys of writing. Stop worrying about writing a great novel—just become another human being.

In his discussion of Borges’s great short story “The Aleph,” Michael Chabon, the author of Moonglow, spoke at length about detail and description—the process by which he chooses the right words from a sea of possible choices. Writing a convincing character, he said, is an act that requires a kind of radical empathy:

Infinite pity, I think, is the proper attitude to have towards your characters. Not pity in the way we mostly tend to understand it—which is the condescension of a superior looking down at an inferior and feeling sorry for them ... It’s a much more self-implicating pity, where you see and understand the tragic and routine flaws people have, the ways in which your characters fall short of the marks they set for themselves—just as you fall short of the marks you set for yourself.

Maybe the key word is “self-implicating.” In an essay, Tony Tulathimutte, the author of Private Citizens, explained that he was only able to complete his first novel when he became more honest about his own worst qualities:

Once I let go of any pretense of knowing other people and any interest in concealing my flaws, I saw at once how my less desirable qualities could be leveraged—that, for instance, being the most judgmental prick on Earth suited me to satire, or that my self-centeredness offered material for farce I could never touch before, because nothing dulls comedy like respectability. I set out to write with as much love, empathy, hope, and imagination as hate, spite, pessimism, and self-indulgence. And so the book got written.

I’m not saying unsavory characters automatically make for good writing; it’s just as easy to go the other way and make Bret Easton Ellis/Chuck Palahniuk shadow puppets (dark, flat, silly). The same usually goes for attempts to look intellectual, radical, manly, “brave” (in the sense of confessional), self-deprecating, hip; in each case, the project is branding, not art. I’m saying that to try to write your characters in such a way as to avoid or shape any comparisons to you, and worse, to call this empathy, is to forfeit the honesty that readers deserve in lieu of truth.

Jonathan Lethem, the author of A Gambler’s Anatomy, made a similar point: In fiction, you can’t deny the worst parts of yourself. Nothing is sacred. Don’t safeguard and shrink from your discomfort and embarrassment and shame; pay attention to those emotions, because they are probably telling you something important:  

The impulse to make the ritual safe, to put characters in play who are ultimately admirable and can be redeemed, is extremely boring and also suspect. There’s something that you’re protecting yourself from—and why bother? Damage is in the mix, and it should be...Your damage and your dismay are the best things you’ve got going, and you've got to open yourself to it.

For many, I think, a painful realization of 2016 has been how much work lies ahead, work that will often feel frustrating and pointless. In that way, it’s a little bit like writing a book. Mark Haddon, the author of The Pier Falls, demonstrated what novelists can teach us about dwelling in discomfort:

I’ve come to accept that I’m going to be bored and frustrated for long periods. I’ve come to accept that I’ll be regularly dissatisfied and that I’ll have to throw a lot of stuff away. I have to be patient and slog onward and trust that something better will come along. It’s not a kind of moral strength, I don’t think. It’s a necessary balance between grandiose self-confidence and withering self-criticism. I spend a lot of time pacing up and down getting absolutely nothing done, but it seems to pay off in the end.

I often say to people when I’m teaching, if you’re having fun it’s probably not working. And for me, the job of writing is pretty uphill most of the time. It’s like climbing a mountain—you get some fantastic views when you pause or when you get to the top, but the actual process can be tough. I’m sure there are people out there who enjoy writing, and I wish them all the best, but I’m not like that. I wish I could enjoy the process more, but I think I’ve come to accept that for it to work, I have to be uncomfortable.

But it can’t all be heavy toil. We’re better people—better citizens—when we make room for pleasure in our lives, and when we take a little time for the things that restore us. Charles Bock, the author of Alice & Oliver, revealed his personal favorite technique: When the going gets tough, take a short nap.

It’s what I still do, even now, after any failure or bad thing—when my teeth hurt, or I’m trying to figure something out, or I’m at an impasse in my work, one of the things I do is take a nap. I consider myself one of the world’s great nappers. I’ll set my alarm for ten minutes, and I’m not sure if I fall asleep or not, but I sit there thinking and relax.

Alexander Chee, the author of The Queen of the Night, made a similar point about following what gives you pleasure. A famous writing teacher warned him never to write about parties in fiction; he found himself wanting to do the opposite. In our interview, he made a case for using party scenes in fiction, even if they seem frivolous on the surface, and are challenging to write:

The qualities that make parties such a nightmare for people—and also so pleasurable—make them incredibly important inside of fiction. There’s a chaos agent quality to them: You just don’t know who’s going to be there, or why. You could run into an old enemy, an old friend, an old friend who’s become an enemy. You could run into an ex-lover, or your next lover. The stakes are all there, and that’s why they’re so fascinating.

There’s a lesson for 2016 in there, too: Question conventional wisdom, and don’t take the advice of authority figures at face value.

In 2017, so much will deserve our generosity, our money, our attention, our time. And we’ll have to learn to deal with the voices in our head, the ones that are saying that we can’t give enough—that our contributions are too small to matter. Kathryn Harrison, the author of True Crimes, had some advice about how to make progress when it feels like the perfect may become an enemy of the good:

In the early stages of a book, I deal with potential self-consciousness by literally hushing the critical voices in my head. The voices that tell you: “Oh, those aren’t the words you want,” or “you shouldn’t be working on this part now,” or “why not use the present tense?”—on and on. Anyone who’s ever written anything is familiar with that chorus.

Writing a first draft, you can become paralyzed by these thoughts. So I literally tell the voices to quiet down. I praise them for their perspicacity, and I tell them how much I need them—that I will want them later. But I cannot listen to them right now, because I am confused by them.

And I don’t sit there waiting for that perfect, beautiful sentence, because I know I’m going to sit there forever. So, as I tell students—start out by tripping, why don’t you? Then get up and fall over again. Just as long as you go.

These are words to live by, as we move forward into 2017:  You’re going to fall. Expect to. But when you do, get up, and keep going.

What’s a Star Wars Film Without John Williams?

Star Wars was already deeply embedded in American pop culture by the time I was a kid. There were numerous video games, toys, comics, spin-offs, and an entire new trilogy of films by my twelfth birthday, and characters like Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo had long been cultural icons. The villains of my youth were imitating shadows of the Dark Side, clad in capes and cybernetics, and the heroes were paler imitations of the didactic duos of Obi-Wan and Luke.

In the 39 years the franchise has been in existence, creator George Lucas has had a lot of help in its success and integration into popular culture. Of course, there are the actors themselves, and the legions of mimics in science fiction and fantasy. But for me, perhaps the most singular contribution has come from the legendary composer John Williams, of Jaws, Indiana Jones, and Jurassic Park fame. Williams’s music has been as vital to my love of Star Wars as have light sabers and giant weapons with rather conspicuous weaknesses. So when I found out that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story would be the franchise’s first live-action film without Williams at its center, I was apprehensive.

What’s a Star Wars film without John Williams? It’s a hard question to answer when you consider the careful, virtuoso work he’s done to flesh out and develop a universe of figures and knotted allegiances. Williams’s composing hand and the London Symphony Orchestra’s strings, for instance, turn a wordless moment in the original Star Wars film into a profound contemplation of power and self-realization. The leitmotif has come to symbolize Luke and the Force, and is arguably one of the most recognizable seven-note sequences in American music. Luke’s father Darth Vader and the Empire he represents, on the other hand, are driven by timpani, staccato strings, and boisterous brass, in a theme that has become so associated with power that sports antiheroes and would-be villains use it.

A big part of what makes Williams’s music so resonant is his consistent, masterful use of shifting themes—across all of the films—to carry ideas and represent characters. In that way, the franchise has more in common with Wagnerian epic opera than with your standard action movie, where sound is so often used to trigger a quick emotion. Listening to Star Wars soundtracks, which are as cherished as the films themselves in my home, it’s possible to reconstruct precise plot details; I often recall events simply by whistling their themes. “Anakin’s Theme” from Episode I: The Phantom Menace is studded with soft references to “The Imperial March” (Vader’s theme); it’s a musical foreshadowing of Vader’s rise that’s in some ways more effective than the visual cues of the film itself, which wasn’t very good. It’s this use of music as an active vehicle for storytelling that has made it as much a part of the films’ internal mythology as ancient Sith Lords and Jedi temples.

The layered richness of Williams’s work is perhaps best showcased in 2014’s Episode VII: The Force Awakens. The film itself is an almost dizzying exercise in Star Wars meta-nostalgia, down to the villain Kylo Ren’s fanboying over his grandfather Darth Vader. The score brilliantly encapsulates this quality. The end-credits music, in particular, manages to intertwine Luke Skywalker’s theme with the excellent new theme for Daisy Ridley’s Rey, following it all with a succession of other musical motifs representing the plot of the film. Close your eyes and listen to this mini-symphony and you’re, essentially, watching the film again.

Given all this, following in the footsteps of the 84-year-old Williams isn’t an enviable job—even for a spin-off like Rogue One that is freed of some of the nostalgia and accreted mythology the flagship series carries. Michael Giacchino (The Incredibles, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Jurassic World) wrote the Rogue One score in just a month, after the original composer Alexandre Desplat dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. It wasn’t a lot of time considering what he had to do: score a film that’s a rather significant thematic departure from its predecessors, and figure out the right balance between homage and creation.

Luckily, this isn’t Giacchino’s first time following in Williams’s footsteps. (It should be noted that Williams will return for Episode VIII.) The success of Jurassic World and the warm reviews for its soundtrack showed that Giacchino could take the reigns without either becoming a John Williams cover band or papering over the history embedded in the franchise’s music. Giacchino is even more deft in his tightrope act in Rogue One, weaving strands of Williams’s sprawling mythology into a more traditional action-film sound. He’s tacked the challenge with humor and respect, providing plenty of fake-outs and winks while breathing some new life into the music.

Giacchino’s sound works well for a film that strives to differentiate itself, while still announcing itself as a Star Wars movie.

From its opening flute solo, Rogue One’s music announces the film as a full member of the canon—one that shares its sense of nostalgia with The Force Awakens. But there are differences. Deviating occasionally from the slow buildup and royal fanfares of previous Star Wars scores, Giacchino uses thriller violins and thumping percussion in the film’s more action-oriented scenes. The overall effect is lofty meets earthly, Star Wars meets Saving Private Ryan (also by Williams).

Still, ideas from the “Imperial March” and the “Force Theme” make their way into these rousing arrangements. By my count, only a handful of them actually complete the nine and seven-note arcs from the original films. The title motif, especially, features some great call-backs to the “Force Theme” that are then immediately swept away into something new. Vader’s full theme is reserved for some powerful cameos by the Sith Lord himself, a choice that rewards the anticipation built up through fragmented musical homages leading up to those moments.

Most of the songs from the soundtrack—released on December 16—give listeners something old and something new. “When Has Become Now,” resembles the stuttering swagger of the marches of the previous films, including the march of the Resistance in The Force Awakens. “Scrambling the Rebel Fleet” resembles Williams’s score from famed Star Wars dogfight scenes. “Star-Dust” is a departure from Williams—but a good one—in its confident use of a single piano melody.

Though he doesn’t recycle or repurpose them as much as Williams, Giacchino does show skill in creating new leitmotifs, even as he riffs on his predecessor’s more established ones. The theme for the heroine Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is a bundle of dueling triumph and sorrow that soars almost as high as Williams’s “Rey’s Theme,” which I consider among his best work. Less upbeat, Jyn’s theme nonetheless matches the tone of Rogue One itself, which is much more pensive and gray than anything yet from the trilogies.

In all, though Giacchino doesn’t quite nail the aspirations of Williams’s best work on the franchise, and doesn’t give me the chills I had as a kid listening to “Duel of the Fates” or “Binary Sunset,” his sound works really well for a film that strives to differentiate itself while still announcing itself as a Star Wars movie. Like the Jedi and Sith in the film, the most recognizable pieces of Star Wars lore are present in the Rogue One score, but they wisely don’t overpower a film that’s more about the universe’s proletariat than about its mystical knights and evil emperors. Giacchino’s work sounds like Star Wars, but it also sounds somewhat like other thriller films, espionage films, and war films. And that makes sense: Rogue One is, in the end, am effective blend of these, showing a way forward for a franchise that has always struggled to balance nostalgia with fresh ideas. Giacchino’s work is indispensable to that effort. My apprehension was for naught.

And, Scene: Moonlight

Over the next two weeks, The Atlantic will delve into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy moment. Today: Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. (The whole “And, Scene” series will appear here.)

In 2013, talking to me about her Tony-winning production of Metamorphoses, the director Mary Zimmerman explained why water played such a pivotal role in the staging of the show. “Water has everything to do with change—in virtually every culture it’s a symbol of change,” she said. “In Shakespeare … water is symbolic in terms of crossing a rubicon, and of transformation. In a lot of cultures it’s where you go to meet the gods, because they come out of water.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about this after watching Moonlight, a film in which water is a recurring and potent symbol of rebirth, transformation, and release. Directed by Barry Jenkins, who also adapted it from a work by the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, the movie is the most acclaimed release of the year, theatrical in its structure but impossibly cinematic, turning Miami into a muted but luminous landscape. Water engulfs the characters and the viewers in the film’s most powerful scene, in which Juan (Mahershala Ali) teaches Little (Alex Hibbert) to swim. Water precipitates teenage Chiron’s (Ashton Sanders) sea change before he viciously beats his bully. And it surrounds his growing closeness with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), in the form of the ocean.

Moonlight, which presents its primary character in three different chapters of his life, is by its nature a film about metamorphosis—the evolution of Chiron from child to man. In the first act, Little is a neglected and lonely kid who’s discovered by Juan hiding from neighborhood bullies in a derelict house. He’s befriended by Juan and his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monae), and one afternoon, Juan takes Little to the beach and teaches him how to swim. The scene is like nothing so much as a baptism: a moment of communion and spiritual connection between the two. Juan shows Little how to move through the water, and then compels him to lay back and float while he supports him, cradling his head like a priest would a baby. The camera bobs through the water alongside the two bodies, occasionally dipping beneath the water, submerging the audience in the scene.

The moment seems to be revelatory for Little, and its significance is echoed in other moments that use water throughout the film. Later, he boils water in a large saucepan to fill a bath, using dish soap as shampoo, the bubbles covering his head. In the second act, Chiron meets his friend Kevin at the beach, where the two smoke a blunt by the ocean, and the waves crash onto the shore as Chiron has his first sexual encounter. Here, the duality of water feels clear: It represents both freedom and danger. Chiron is discovering who he is, while realizing also what that means; this is rendered most clearly in the final shot of the movie, which flashes back to Little staring out at the ocean, simultaneously drawn to it and afraid of its power.

After Terrel (Patrick Decile) forces Kevin to beat Chiron, Chiron goes home and immerses his wounded face in a sink filled with ice water. Then he stares directly into the mirror, with blood pouring down his nose, as if willing himself to change states. In the very next scene, he walks into school, enters a classroom, and breaks a chair over Terrel. The scene signifies the end of the second act, as Chiron is handcuffed and thrown into a police car, but it also signifies the end of his innocence, sparking a deliberate hardness that both protects and isolates him. A similar scene occurs in the third act, when an adult Chiron, now nicknamed Black (Trevante Rhodes), splashes water on his face and stares at himself in the mirror.

Both Jenkins and McCraney are from the same area of Miami, Liberty Square, that the film is set in, and Jenkins has spoken about his awareness growing up of water always being present. Water is a theme that recurs throughout McCraney’s writing, as well—particularly his Brother/Sister plays, a triptych set in southern Louisiana. Marcus, the hero of the last play Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet, a character struggling with his sexuality much like Chiron, has recurring dreams about water, and he says at one point,

You ever wish it would all just wash away?

Never heard

A black boy say that I bet. Not out loud.

But I do. I do. I wish wish them waters would

Rise up like that water in my dreams

And take it all me too, out and away. You

Wish that sometimes? I do. I do.

For Marcus, water is a liberator but a dangerous one—a force that can free him by taking his life. It’s the same understanding of water that pervades Shakespeare: storms wreck ships and kill sailors, a river drowns Ophelia. But water also forces change and renewal, throwing Viola into the path of Orsino, and drawing Chiron closer to Kevin. Throughout Moonlight, it’s a presence that symbolizes Chiron’s profound emotional transformation, from trust to fear to, maybe, self-acceptance.

Previously: The Lobster

Next Up: Weiner

Why Walt Whitman Called America the 'Greatest Poem'

Shocked at the election of their next president, many Americans at the end of 2016 turned to social media, petitions, polls, and the streets in protest. A century and a half ago, shocked at the assassination of the sitting president who oversaw the reunification of a divided nation, Walt Whitman turned to poetry. In “O Captain! My Captain!”, Whitman famously eulogized Abraham Lincoln as the fallen leader of the great ship of America, which he called a “vessel grim and daring.”

But for Whitman, poetry wasn’t just a vehicle for expressing political lament; it was also a political force in itself. In his preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman claimed of the United States, “Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall,” echoing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous dictum in 1840’s Defence of Poetry: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Shelley was referring to the role that art and culture play in shaping the desires and will of people, which eventually come to be reflected in the law. But Whitman went even further in his preface. “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature,” he wrote. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Whitman’s claim stemmed from a belief that both poetry and democracy derive their power from their ability to create a unified whole out of disparate parts—a notion that is especially relevant at a time when America feels bitterly divided.

Notably, Whitman’s grammar (“the United States are”) signals his understanding of the country as a plural noun—not one uniform body, but a union of disparate parts. Whitman was centrally concerned with the American experiment in democracy and its power to produce “out of many, one,” even at as great a cost as the Civil War and the faltering Reconstruction. Whitman thus celebrates in his work the many kinds of individuals that make up a society as well as the tensions that bring individuals together in a variegated community. In “I Sing of America,” he writes,

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deck-hand singing on the steamboat deck ...

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else …

Whitman is perhaps America’s first democratic poet. The free verse he adopts in his work reflects a newly naturalized and accessible poetic language. His overarching themes—the individual, the nation, the body, the soul, and everyday life and work—mirror the primary values of America’s founding. Then and now, his poetry is for everyone. As Whitman asserts later in the preface to Leaves of Grass:

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors … but always most in the common people.

In his self-published first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman included a drawing of himself, the poet. He is wearing the loose, casual garb of the laborer. He is neither the ruffled courtly bard of a previous age, nor the tweedy and erudite Oxford author of a later age. (Successive editions depict Whitman as more urbane.) He asserts himself, at least initially, as a poet of the modern world: rude, raw, and representative of the common man.

Whitman links the essence of poetry, which is unity-within-diversity, to the essence of democracy.

Former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s prescient words about Whitman, published five years ago in The Atlantic, could easily have come from this year’s post-election analysis:

Today’s politicians and pundits seem to have forgotten the unemployed in their endless debates about wealth creation, capital gain reduction, and high corporate taxes. How rarely we hear about the factory worker, the contractor, the construction worker whose lives have been upended by the prolonged economic disaster … Mostly they’re forgotten and ignored.

But Whitman wouldn’t have forgotten them… He knew that the fate of each one of us is inextricably linked to the fate of all.

The notion that the fate of each one of is tied to the fate of all is the essence of democracy, and of Whitman’s poetry.

Even while staking out his place as a common man, Whitman saw for the poet a special role within democracy. In “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” (first published in 1856 but revised many times until its final version in 1867), Whitman asserts, “Of these States the poet is the equable man.” The equable person is one who both sees and acts justly. The poet does this better than the politician because, Whitman says:

[The poet] bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither

more nor less,

He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,

He is the equalizer of his age and land,

He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking,



In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty,

building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts,

commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health,

immortality, government ….

He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a

helpless thing,

As he sees the farthest he has the most faith …

He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and

women as dreams or dots.

This role Whitman assigns the literary imagination in shaping the standards of judgment essential to democracy is a “startling claim,” says the American philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum. In Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Nussbaum argues that “the ability to imagine vividly, and then to assess judicially, another person’s pain, to participate in it and then to ask about its significance is a powerful way of learning what the human facts are and of acquiring a motivation to alter them.” In other words, poetry constitutes the practice of what robust pluralism requires.

A literary imagination, Nussbaum writes, “promotes habits of mind that lead toward social equality in that they contribute to the dismantling of the stereotypes that support group hatred.”  Thus, although Whitman’s racist views of blacks, shaped in part by the bad science of the day, were contradictory and at times ambivalent, his poetic vision forged a way past his own hidebound limitations toward greater justice.  In “To Foreign Lands,” Whitman claims his poems offer the world the very definition of America: “I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World / And to define America, her athletic Democracy, / Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.” An “athletic democracy” is made so not by politicians, Whitman claims, but by poetry. For the poetic mind is a mind attuned to justice.

In her work On Beauty and Being Just, the Harvard professor of aesthetics Elaine Scarry describes the importance of multiple viewpoints, arguments, and counterarguments to “political assembly,” wondering how “will one hear the nuances of even this debate unless one also makes oneself available to the songs of birds or poets?” The basis of poetry is precisely those connections forged between different elements, different voices, and different perspectives. In envisioning the United States as “the greatest poem,” Whitman links the essence of poetry, which is unity-within-diversity, to the essence of democracy. Within the epic poem that is America, a president is but one figure.

Why Walt Whitman Called America the “Greatest Poem”

Shocked at the election of their next president, many Americans at the end of 2016 turned to social media, petitions, polls, and the streets in protest. A century and a half ago, shocked at the assassination of the sitting president who oversaw the reunification of a divided nation, Walt Whitman turned to poetry. In “O Captain! My Captain!”, Whitman famously eulogized Abraham Lincoln as the fallen leader of the great ship of America, which he called a “vessel grim and daring.”

But for Whitman, poetry wasn’t just a vehicle for expressing political lament; it was also a political force in itself. In his preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman claimed of the United States, “Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall,” echoing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous dictum in 1840’s Defence of Poetry: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Shelley was referring to the role that art and culture play in shaping the desires and will of people, which eventually come to be reflected in the law. But Whitman went even further in his preface. “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature,” he wrote. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Whitman’s claim stemmed from a belief that both poetry and democracy derive their power from their ability to create a unified whole out of disparate parts—a notion that is especially relevant at a time when America feels bitterly divided.

Notably, Whitman’s grammar (“the United States are”) signals his understanding of the country as a plural noun—not one uniform body, but a union of disparate parts. Whitman was centrally concerned with the American experiment in democracy and its power to produce “out of many, one,” even at as great a cost as the Civil War and the faltering Reconstruction. Whitman thus celebrates in his work the many kinds of individuals that make up a society as well as the tensions that bring individuals together in a variegated community. In “I Sing of America,” he writes,

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deck-hand singing on the steamboat deck ...

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else …

Whitman is perhaps America’s first democratic poet. The free verse he adopts in his work reflects a newly naturalized and accessible poetic language. His overarching themes—the individual, the nation, the body, the soul, and everyday life and work—mirror the primary values of America’s founding. Then and now, his poetry is for everyone. As Whitman asserts later in the preface to Leaves of Grass:

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors … but always most in the common people.

In his self-published first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman included a drawing of himself, the poet. He is wearing the loose, casual garb of the laborer. He is neither the ruffled courtly bard of a previous age, nor the tweedy and erudite Oxford author of a later age. (Successive editions depict Whitman as more urbane.) He asserts himself, at least initially, as a poet of the modern world: rude, raw, and representative of the common man.

Whitman links the essence of poetry, which is unity-within-diversity, to the essence of democracy.

Former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s prescient words about Whitman, published five years ago in The Atlantic, could easily have come from this year’s post-election analysis:

Today’s politicians and pundits seem to have forgotten the unemployed in their endless debates about wealth creation, capital gain reduction, and high corporate taxes. How rarely we hear about the factory worker, the contractor, the construction worker whose lives have been upended by the prolonged economic disaster … Mostly they’re forgotten and ignored.

But Whitman wouldn’t have forgotten them… He knew that the fate of each one of us is inextricably linked to the fate of all.

The notion that the fate of each one of is tied to the fate of all is the essence of democracy, and of Whitman’s poetry.

Even while staking out his place as a common man, Whitman saw for the poet a special role within democracy. In “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” (first published in 1856 but revised many times until its final version in 1867), Whitman asserts, “Of these States the poet is the equable man.” The equable person is one who both sees and acts justly. The poet does this better than the politician because, Whitman says:

[The poet] bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither

more nor less,

He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,

He is the equalizer of his age and land,

He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking,



In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty,

building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts,

commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health,

immortality, government ….

He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a

helpless thing,

As he sees the farthest he has the most faith …

He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and

women as dreams or dots.

This role Whitman assigns the literary imagination in shaping the standards of judgment essential to democracy is a “startling claim,” says the American philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum. In Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Nussbaum argues that “the ability to imagine vividly, and then to assess judicially, another person’s pain, to participate in it and then to ask about its significance is a powerful way of learning what the human facts are and of acquiring a motivation to alter them.” In other words, poetry constitutes the practice of what robust pluralism requires.

A literary imagination, Nussbaum writes, “promotes habits of mind that lead toward social equality in that they contribute to the dismantling of the stereotypes that support group hatred.”  Thus, although Whitman’s racist views of blacks, shaped in part by the bad science of the day, were contradictory and at times ambivalent, his poetic vision forged a way past his own hidebound limitations toward greater justice.  In “To Foreign Lands,” Whitman claims his poems offer the world the very definition of America: “I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World / And to define America, her athletic Democracy, / Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.” An “athletic democracy” is made so not by politicians, Whitman claims, but by poetry. For the poetic mind is a mind attuned to justice.

In her work On Beauty and Being Just, the Harvard professor of aesthetics Elaine Scarry describes the importance of multiple viewpoints, arguments, and counterarguments to “political assembly,” wondering how “will one hear the nuances of even this debate unless one also makes oneself available to the songs of birds or poets?” The basis of poetry is precisely those connections forged between different elements, different voices, and different perspectives. In envisioning the United States as “the greatest poem,” Whitman links the essence of poetry, which is unity-within-diversity, to the essence of democracy. Within the epic poem that is America, a president is but one figure.

Donald Trump's Hot-and-Cold Bromance With Vladimir Putin

What’s the appropriate, slightly unhip portmanteau to describe the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin these days? Is it a bromance? Are are the two men frenemies?

The hot-and-cold humors of adolescence, as well as its fluid network of grudges and shifting alliances, have been on display this week between the U.S. president-elect and the Russian president, culminating in a bizarre Friday evening Twitter missive from Trump:

Vladimir Putin said today about Hillary and Dems: "In my opinion, it is humiliating. One must be able to lose with dignity." So true!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2016

Here we have the president-elect quoting an oppressive foreign leader’s snark in the service of spiking the football on an opponent Trump vanquished nearly two months ago— with the Trumpian flourish of “So true!” perfectly tying it all together.

The tweet capped off a Putin swoon that also included Trump’s release Friday of an apparent letter from the Russian.

“Please accept my warmest Christmas and New Year greetings,” Putin wrote, according to an “unofficial translation” released by the Trump team. Trump did not release the original letter. “I hope that after you assume the position of the President of the United States of America we will be able—by acting in a constructive and pragmatic manner—to take real steps to restore the framework of bilateral cooperation in different areas as well as bring our level of collaboration on the international scene to a qualitatively new level.”

But this type of friendship is fickle and flickering. Trump might release a fawning letter from Putin, and he might be perfectly happy to quote Putin dissing Hillary Clinton—the enemy of my enemy is at the very least my frenemy, and possibly my friend, after all—but that doesn’t mean they won’t have their differences.

On Thursday, Putin said in a speech that he intended to strengthen Russian nuclear-weapons capabilities. Trump responded, as he does, on Twitter, writing, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” That set off a mad spin effort, as Trump spokesman Jason Miller insisted that what the president-elect really meant, contra a plain reading of the words he used, was to warn about “the threat of nuclear proliferation and the critical need to prevent it—particularly to and among terrorist organizations and unstable and rogue regimes.”

Lest anyone be tempted to believe this up-is-down spin, Trump made sure they didn’t, telling MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”

Trump seems to be making policy on the fly again. Is it just a machismo contest with his pal Putin? Is he intentionally spiting President Obama, who has tried to effect nuclear-weapons reductions? (Is Trump paying close enough attention to know about Obama’s efforts?) Is he just trying to keep everyone, including apparently his aides, guessing?

Putin made his comments about losing with dignity in a year-end press conference, in which he had plenty of punditry to offer on U.S. politics. Although the consensus that Russian hackers were behind attacks on the Democratic National Committee and Democratic politicians during the campaign, and although many U.S. intelligence agencies have come to the conclusion that those hacks were intended to hurt Clinton and aid Trump, Trump and Putin have both insisted Russia was not the culprit.

“The president-elect was absolutely right to note that nobody knows who these hackers are,” said Putin, a cynical sneer underpinning his Cheshire Cat grin. “Maybe they were in a different country, and not in Russia. Maybe it was just someone sitting on their sofa or bed. It’s very easy now to show one origin country, when you’re actually in a different place.” Putin criticized the Democratic Party for “trying to chalk their own failures up to outside factors,” which he said “is not very dignified.” As for Trump, Putin said, “Nobody believed he’d win. Except us, of course. We always believed.” Of course, if the intelligence assessments are correct, Putin knows very well where the hacks came from, and while there are many culprits in Clinton’s loss, the leaked information does appear to have been one more thumb on the scale weighing against her.

Russia’s ever-bolder online espionage, and its expansionist saber-rattling in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, have led some to wonder whether the world is witnessing a return to the Cold War. (Back in those days, Putin was a KGB official and Trump was, among other things, a prospective Moscow investor.)

But the on-again, off-again flirtation between Trump and Putin raises the scary prospect that the world might face many of the worst, most dangerous tendencies of the Cold War, without any of the best. On the bad side of the ledger, Trump is offering to return the world to apocalyptic nuclear arms races and seeking to borrow the old Soviet technique of building massive walls. Yet given Trump’s tendency to accommodate Putin’s oppression and territory-grabbing impulses, as well as his own authoritarian leanings, the president-elect seems unlikely to be a muscular, outspoken defender of democracy around the globe or of dissidents within Russia. Trump’s bizarre tweet might be entertaining if it didn’t seem like a harbinger of a world that is more violent and less free. So true!

Scorsese's Silence and Batman: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Martin Scorsese’s Strained Silence

Anthony Lane | The New Yorker

“Is Scorsese the man for the interior? Is Silence fit to stand beside Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, or Bergman’s Winter Light? It remains to be seen whether moviegoers who thrilled to the kinetic flourishes of GoodFellas and Casino will tolerate, or even recognize, a Scorsese hero who refuses to strike back. The agon of the central character, self-besieged or plagued by circumstance, runs through the history of the director’s films, as does the suspicion that man’s brutality to man may have a penitential purpose.”

Being Annette Bening

Dana Stevens | Slate

“Bening has long been one of the rare performers who can alchemize base metals into precious ones. Some of her finest performances come in movies that couldn’t entirely be said to deserve them, and if her presence can elevate mediocre material, it can lift good scripts into the stratosphere. 20th Century Women has its flaws—as with Mills’ last film, Beginners, the characters’ criss-crossing emotional journeys can seem too swiftly and too neatly resolved to make for engaging drama. But Bening, playing an eccentric ’70s-era feminist closely based on the writer-director’s own mother, provides the story with an emotional core dense enough to exert its own gravity.”

What Separates Casey Affleck From Nate Parker

Anne Helen Petersen | Buzzfeed

“Nate Parker wasn’t just his film’s male star: He was its auteur. Hollywood loves auteurs, yet it has a dearth of black ones. Parker was a godsend, as he wanted to tell the story of Nat Turner so much that he’d halted his acting career to make it at all costs. His face was on the poster. He was Birth of a Nation; Birth of a Nation was him. When it became essential to decry Parker, it also became essential to decry—and even boycott—his film. Affleck is the star of Manchester by the Sea, and the recipient of much of its praise, but certainly not all of it.”

How Batman Helps Me Survive My Mental Illness

Abraham Riesman | Vulture

“Herein lies the unique conceptual framework that Batman tales offer. Bipolar II-induced depression is chronic. I've been ill for as long as I can remember, and probably always will be. I have plenty of good days, when life seems delicious and my tasks seem surmountable, but over and over again, I have the bad days, ones where the voices in my head—my own supervillains—tell me to give in to chaos. They’re recurring characters. Sometimes, I’m fighting one; other times, a few of them team up. I push back as much as I can: I go to therapy, I meditate, I medicate. The antagonists go away for a while. But they never permanently disappear.”

The Rise of Science Fiction From Pulp Mags to Cyberpunk

Jeff VanderMeer | Electric Literature

“We hesitate to invoke the slippery and preternatural word influence, because influence appears and disappears and reappears, sidles in and has many mysterious ways. It can be as simple yet profound as reading a text as a child and forgetting it, only to have it well up from the subconscious years later, or it can be a clear and all-consuming passion. At best we can only say that someone cannot be influenced by something not yet written or, in some cases, not yet translated.”

Does Westworld Tell a Truer Story Than a Novel Can?

Stuart Kelly | The Guardian

“Literature is one of our first attempts at simulating reality, and its characters offer necessarily simplified versions of the messy business of being a human. Philosophers, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists have all called into question these notions that we cherish—will, self, choice, desire, recollection—but the novel has failed to keep up with these insights. I know myself that I do not know myself, that what I want is not what I choose to want, that the ‘me’ that was 11 is barely recognizable as the ‘me’ that is 44.”

The Accidental Social-Media Artist Who Can’t Stop Falling

Philippa Snow | Hyperallergic

“My favorite of her videos is one where she falls amid absolute carnage in In-N-Out Burger. I don’t know if it’s the spooky tint of fast-food restaurant lighting, but her hair looks acid yellow. That her T-shirt’s tomato red can’t be an accident (being English, I was forced to use Google in order to ascertain that, yes, the colors of In-N-Out’s logo are yellow and red, the same as McDonald’s—and like ketchup and mustard, the fact of which only just hit me). I appreciate that she chose a fast-food chain with no clown, if only because some gestures are simply too obvious to be symbolic: goofier, even, than pratfalls.”

Why Can’t They Make a Good Video-Game Movie?

Jason Concepcion | The Ringer

“The difficulty stems from the interactivity of games. A video game’s story is created, in large part, by the player, not the writer or level designer. Left 4 and Dead 1 and 2 are among my favorite games ever. The plot amounts to little more than a series of setups — four player-controlled characters must cooperate to travel through various urban and suburban environments infested with zombies. And yet, I have had experiences in that game — running for the transport chopper as a teammate was attacked by a boss zombie, hearing him scream ‘DON’T LEAVE ME!’ with real desperation in his voice — that felt like peering into a person’s soul. By translating that experience to the screen, you necessarily lose that interactive fourth dimension.”

Donald Trump Makes War on Celebrities

The Celebrity Apprentice president’s latest PR problem is celebrities. For weeks, reports have indicated that his inauguration team has had trouble booking any star performers: “They are willing to pay anything,” one talent representative reportedly told TheWrap after being approached by Trump’s people. The president-elect’s camp have denied that’s the case, but Elton John, Celine Dion, and KISS are among those who’ve publicly rejected rumors that they’d play the swearing-in celebrations; right now, the confirmed lineup of recognizable performers is the 16-year-old America’s Got Talent contestant Jackie Evancho, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and the Rockettes.  

Last night, Trump seemed to confirm Hollywood and he weren’t making nice, tweeting, “The so-called ‘A’ list celebrities are all wanting tixs to the inauguration, but look what they did for Hillary, NOTHING. I want the PEOPLE!” It was a remark that flipped the publicized dynamic (Trump’s team approaching A-listers got swiveled the other way around) for a mix of self-congratulation and insults—a familiar maneuver by now. But the tweet also, tellingly, attempted to draw a dividing line between “the PEOPLE” and the entertainment world, making for his latest divide-and-conquer attempt against American popular culture.

“The PEOPLE” that Trump speaks of are, of course, also the reason any given famous person is famous; celebrities reflect their culture. And when it comes to widely beloved musicians of the sort that typically headlines an inaugural event, career success is especially a sign of public affection. Yet the celebrity class by and large has presented obstacles for Trump—and Trump seems to be trying to weaken its sway over “the people,” as he has tried to do for the media, as he has tried to do for his political opponents.

One way to go about the task is by simple debasement. When Trump says that Hamilton is overrated, or that SNL is unwatchable, or that Lena Dunham has “no mojo,” he’s technically not talking politics—he’s making a direct attack on the things that make any of these entities worth paying attention to, their entertainment value. He’s doing something similar in conjuring the image of celebrities begging for inaugural tickets and in mocking their inability to get Hillary Clinton elected. The access, the glamour, the power, the dignity associated with celebrities? All hoaxes, he says.

He’s also attempting to elide the notion of entertainment as a mirror to America by suggesting that in fact popular culture is alienated from the populace. It’s an easy and old argument. Celebrities do live different lives from average Americans. And the fact that Hollywood aligned with the losing presidential candidate, on its face, does not speak for it being in-touch. But in this arena as in others, the nagging problem with his claim to a mandate remains: It’s difficult to say “the People” are wholly on his side when entertainers did in fact speak for a majority of voters, to the tune of 3 million ballots.

Even Middle America’s megastars have not mobilized for Trump.

He’s also trying to escalate the culture wars, attacking a group of influencers who, it’s clear, doesn’t hold as much sway in the places that elected him—places where the term “Hollyweird” is thrown around and where boycotting Beyonce isn’t a joke. But the vexing fact for him is that so far, most Middle America megastars have not mobilized for Trump. Where is, say, the country-music establishment on the inauguration lineups? Though Big & Rich will take the stage in D.C. at a Recording Industry Association of America fundraiser on Jan. 20—member John Rich won a season of Celebrity Apprentice—the genre’s top tier so far has been mostly silent, with Garth Brooks apparently declining to play. The reason for that might be that such musicians are in fact politically separated from many of their listeners, or it may simply be a calculation to avoid controversy.

Because even the most seemingly apolitical performers are running into controversy by showing up for Trump, more than they would for most any previous president-elect. On Thursday, Madison Square Garden Company chairman James Dolan announced that The Rockettes—a New York City fixture with wide appeal, steeped in mid-century nostalgia and catering to visitors from outside the city—would perform for Trump. Immediately, individual dancers began to dissent. “The women I work with are intelligent and are full of love and the decision of performing for a man that stands for everything we’re against is appalling,” one wrote on Instagram.

An email from the Rockettes’ union to the performers admonished that they are required to do the job: “You are all employees, and as a company, Mr. Dolan obviously wants the Rockettes to be represented at our country’s Presidential inauguration, as they were in 2001 & 2005.” The email added, “The ranting of the public is just that, ranting.” On Facebook, the writer-performer Amanda Duarte shot back, “It’s perfect, actually. What could be more fitting for this inauguration than forcing a group of women to do something with their bodies against their will?”*

The conflict shines a different light on Trump’s rhetoric pitting entertainers vs. “the PEOPLE.” In the Rockettes’ case, a famous business interest has decided to align itself with the president-elect, while the rank and file—the people—squirm.

This article originally identified Duarte as a dancer, implying she was a Rockette. We regret the error.