Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 3

Scenes From the Mall of America

Nicholson Baker, the great novelist, essayist, and observer of the world’s absurdities, produces much of his work when he’s out in that world: He likes to do his writing, Baker has told interviewers, in Panera restaurants, and in Starbucks shops, and in his favorite corner booth at Friendly’s. This is one more way that Baker mocks a culture that is so eager to lionize the literary: Writing, he makes clear in the venues he chooses for it, is in practice not at all glamorous. It involves, often, stale caffeine and sad desk salads and Fribble-fueled fugues brought on in the corner booth at the Mass Pike Friendly’s. There’s a reason you don’t see Colin Firth actually doing much writing in his French isolation-cottage in Love Actually: Writing—the act of it, the labor of it—is, generally speaking, exceedingly dull.

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This is bad news for writers, but it is also bad news for the Mall of America, which this week announced that it will be offering, in the rough manner of Amtrak and Heathrow Airport before it, a Writer-in-Residence program. The program, part of the mall’s celebration its own 25th “birthday,” will select one writer to exist within the Mall of America for five days, exploring the Mall and being inspired by the Mall and, as such, writing things about the Mall. Many writers, after all, from Virginia Woolf to David Foster Wallace to Nick Baker himself, have been inspired by consumerism; perhaps another writer will gaze upon the Mall’s gleaming stretches, Abercrombie to Zumiez, and be moved to produce great literature.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Club Monaco.

Oh Taylor! Ann Taylor!

I celebrate the Mall, and sing the Mall,

And what the Mall assumes I shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to the Mall.

But while a mall may certainly inspire writers—look upon my Workshop, ye mighty, and Build-a-Bear—the Mall of America program seems designed specifically to stifle whatever bits of creativity might spring up within its fluorescent-lit greenhouse. The residency on offer here won’t just be another fellowship in the manner of the one Amtrak recently offered (or, for that matter, the one Heathrow Airport offered, or the one the Ace Hotel offered, or the ones offered by Detroit or Seattle or the National Parks Service). Instead, the Mall of America is looking for someone, specifically, to perform writing. It’s looking to turn the Mall into Colin Firth’s cottage—and for someone to sit in that house, and work, and write, and be watched as they do so.

The winner of the Mall of America contest will sit at a designated desk within the mall—for a minimum of four hours each day, the entry rules stipulate—to be gawked at by mallgoers. They “will make themselves available for Mall of America-approved media interviews.” Their work will be shared, on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and, presumably, other platforms, by the mall’s marketing team. It will be approved by the mall’s marketing team. It won’t simply be literature; it will be advertising.

The Mall of America, essentially, is making a residency of what many marketers know to be true: that associating a product with writing—giving a product the patina of Literature—is a very good way to sell that product, whether it be a train ride or an airport or a 96.4-acre temple of consumerism. In 2015, Céline did some internet-breaking by featuring Joan Didion in an ad. In 2014, Chipotle announced its “Cultivating Thought” campaign, otherwise known as its famous-writers-write-things-for-burrito-bags experiment. Writers like Toni Morrison, Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, and George Saunders—their work curated by Jonathan Safran Foer—contributed their words to the campaign. They were later joined by, among many others, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Roach, and Colson Whitehead.

The notion of a writers’ residency, as Slate pointed out, whiffs of the Federal Writers’ Project, the New Deal program that put thousands of writers—among them Studs Terkel and Zora Neale Hurston—to work. And yet, as Slate also pointed out, this particular residency is, rather than a government-funded celebration of literature, “a capitalist enterprise for just one writer.” It is an ad campaign in the form of a contest. It is a program that emphasizes the “writing” in “copywriting.” Which is to say that it’s actually a really good metaphor for a moment in which a writer can take in the world, live in it, be inspired by it, and put it all to the service of the indelible observation that two Auntie Anne’s diverged in the Mall, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

In Fire at Sea, Tragedy and Normalcy Live Side by Side

An Italian woman kisses a Virgin Mary statue after she methodically makes her bed and begins her morning. A Nigerian migrant recounts the prayer he said while traversing the Sahara, as others in a dark room chant along with him. A boy rows in the harbor under an overcast sky. The Italian coast guard rushes out to rescue drowning migrants and bring them ashore.

Stitched together, these affecting vignettes and others make up the noteworthy Oscar-nominated documentary, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare). The Italian director Gianfranco Rosi has made what sometimes feels like two separate films, whose stories come so close as to almost touch but that seem worlds apart despite unfolding on the same small, remote Mediterranean island. One story follows a pre-teen boy named Samuele and his family on Lampedusa, which lies 70 miles from the northern coast of Africa and is nearer to that continent than to its own Italian mainland. The other story follows despairing migrants leaving Tunisia or Libya for whom the island is a landing point on their journey toward Europe. Fire at Sea is a powerful, and beautifully shot, look at the migrant crisis—one that manages to subvert viewer expectations of what has become for many a familiar news subject.

Fire at Sea’s first narrative offers an intimate portrait of young Samuele’s daily activities. He plays with firecrackers and his slingshot, he reads aloud to practice his English, and he quizzes his father on the pictures that adorn his fishing boat—this is his life. But the migrants in the second narrative remain faces without names. They board rescue ships either alive or in body bags. They wear clothing soaked with a mixture of the boat’s diesel fuel and seawater that burns their skin. They cry for their loved ones lost at sea. In their spare moments, they gather to pray or play a pickup game of soccer—this is their life.  

The only point of connection between the two stories is Dr. Pietro Bartolo, who is both a physician for the islanders and an emergency medical worker for the migrants. He administers care to those pulled off the trafficking boats in states of dehydration, malnutrition, and delirium, and performs autopsies on those who perish. “It makes you think, dream about them,” Bartolo says in the film. “These are the nightmares I relive often ... often.” The unspeakable things Bartolo sees feel a world away from Samuele, a naïve, personable patient who goes to see the doctor for what he thinks is anxiety. The boy never mentions the turmoil on the island; it’s not clear he’s even aware of it, let alone the extent of it.

Fire at Sea resists the tendency of some documentaries to provide explanations or to call viewers to action. There is no narrator, and Rosi does not interview his subjects. The spare title cards at the beginning provide only the bare minimum of context. Rosi’s long, observant takes offer these disparate lives without commentary, evoking the stylistically similar work of the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. It’s an unorthodox but effective approach that cuts through the noise to provide compelling and sympathetic impressions of the film’s characters.

Fire at Sea disrupts, or at least complicates, the assumption that proximity equals knowledge, involvement, or connection. Rosi, who spent a year and a half in Lampedusa, explained to The Village Voice that the early interception of the migrants at sea sets up the bifurcated existence on the island. “The migrants are brought in from the coast guard in these little boats,” the director said. “They arrive at night, are brought into the main camp, identified, searched, given new clothes, and after two days they have to go to the mainland in Italy to wait to obtain a permit of a political refugee.” Perhaps the residents of Lampedusa are also used to this ongoing tragedy by now. As one of the title cards at the start of the film explains, 400,000 migrants have landed on the island over the past two decades. An estimated 15,000 have died on the journey across the Strait of Sicily.

Lesbos, another way-station for migrants seeking passage to Europe, is featured in the riveting short documentary 4.1 Miles, also nominated for an Oscar. The Greek island is newer to the migration crisis than Lampedusa. As the coast-guard officer in that film explains, “In 2001, 20 refugees from Afghanistan came to our island. I remember it was the biggest news story of the year, this was the biggest news story of the year.” From 2015 to 2016, the number of migrants crossing the strait between Turkey and Lesbos has surged to 600,000.

In 4.1 Miles, the rescue workers race between sinking rafts and the shore where medical help awaits. Residents and tourists near the port observe the chaos and discuss the crisis; some try to intervene and assist however they can. In contrast to the methodical, steady style of Fire at Sea, the short’s director, Daphne Matziaraki, presents a correspondingly choppy, disorienting portrait of a small island overwhelmed by the influx and without the infrastructure to handle it.

But back on Lampedusa, which has faced the increasing flow for decades, viewers are left to wonder: Could the islanders’ everyday lives really be divorced from this trauma? As Rosi stressed, “There’s no interaction [between migrants and residents]. Zero. So I wanted to use this as a metaphor for Europe. They’re aliens to each other.” It’s a striking, and uncomfortable, diptych that he presents. Compared to the other feature-documentary Oscar nominees, Fire at Sea is a somewhat muted, meditative work, full of extended periods without dialogue. In the end, viewers won’t come away with clear answers, but they’ll likely feel awe for Rosi’s absorbing depiction of both the routine of the rescue and the magnitude of the emergency.

Kenneth Lonergan, the Apolitical Bard of Service Workers

Over two centuries, many a novel or film has investigated the various corners of oppression in a capitalist world, issuing powerful protest on behalf of slaves, farmers, and factory workers. In the 19th century, Western literature saw the publication of the great slave narratives, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the works of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. In the 20th century, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and movies like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Chaplin’s Modern Times brought the artist’s critique of capitalism up to modern speed.

Today, Americans live in an economy dominated by business and commercial services, but they still doesn’t have a great protest novel or movie (or any other cultural work) about service workers. Sure, there are Wall Street and The Big Short on bankers, real-estate protest art like the right-leaning Death Wish or the right-wing conspiracies in the left-leaning Chinatown. But these works were all challenging, in some way, the dominance of business services. There are great books, movies, and television shows about consumer services, but Grand Hotel, Mildred Pierce, Alice, Cheers, and Waitress never advocated for immediate socioeconomic reform, let alone revolution.

Kenneth Lonergan is perhaps America’s greatest artist of service work, and yet he likely won’t deliver that protest movie. In Manchester by the Sea, nominated for six awards at the Oscars on February 26, as in many of his past projects, the playwright and director goes out of his way to avoid the economic roots of problems his service-sector protagonists face. Viewers see troubled people at work, but not how these characters’ conditions of work shape their problems, or how they might make work better with collective action.

Among the millions of America’s service workers are law enforcement officers, healthcare aides,  maintainers of buildings and grounds, and providers of personal care and service. There’s plenty of love in popular culture for cops and fire fighters, doctors and nurses. But the lack of protest art about other kinds of service workers, their clustering at the bottom of the national range of incomes, and the emotional force of Lonergan’s portraits of them make his apolitical stance all the more notable. He doesn’t seem interested in social change for the doormen, janitors, waiters and masseuses at the center of his stories.

In Manchester by the Sea, a Boston janitor named Lee Chandler (played by the Oscar nominee Casey Affleck) returns to his hometown on the North Shore to face his past. The intensity of later scenes overshadows the early jewel-like portraits of him at work in Boston. He overhears phone calls and confronts an angry and underdressed tenant in a bathroom. He gets bawled out by his supervisor in a cramped office overflowing with files. He shovels snow.

These scenes say so much about the conditions of labor under service capitalism: the varied and unpredictable interactions with customers, the intense emotional toll of keeping one’s temper and holding one’s tongue, the claustrophobia of some tasks, the one-way privacy of service work in which a janitor can learn so much about his tenants and they can know so little of him, the relief of solitary physical labor. Next to Lee Chandler, the shallowness of Good Times’ Nathan “Buffalo Butt” Bookman and other TV janitors becomes more apparent. Viewers also see the sexual tension in customer service that Lonergan charted in his earlier plays and movies—a celebrity country western singer and a hotel masseuse in last year’s Hold On to Me Darling, the flirtation between bus driver and pedestrian in the 2011 film Margaret, the nurse-patient relationship of 2009’s The Starry Messenger. But despite the difficulty of these characters’ work-related circumstances, audiences see nothing resembling a critique of capitalism.

Lonergan’s turn to service workers began with his 2001 play Lobby Hero. Though it’s not quite F. W. Murnau’s classic silent film Der letzte Mann or Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” (a story published in his lifetime that was included in the posthumous publication of The Trial as the parable of the doorkeeper), Lobby Hero might still be the best American art ever made about a doorman. The protagonist, Jeff, learns a secret and his loyalties spin back and forth, buffeted by friendship, desire, a sexist police force, and a racist judicial system. There’s plenty of politics, but no political message.

Lonergan’s service workplaces are way stations or refuges for damaged loners.

There is even an extremely subtle undercurrent of anti-union hostility in Lonergan’s work. Sometimes this is explicit, as when Jeff tries to flirt with a female cop, making conversation about the inconvenience an upcoming sanitation strike will cause. Sometimes it is by omission. As Jeff tells the officer, “Hey lady, I am not a doorman, I’m a security guard. I told you three fuckin’ times already—In fact, I’m a security specialist!” The distinction—between a security guard and a doorman—is subtle, but important. While most playgoers probably didn’t know the difference, Lonergan likely does. He grew up on Central Park West, near the top of 37 almost unbroken blocks of unionized doormen. Because of that union—Local 32BJ, Service Employees International Union—most Manhattan doormen get better wages, better conditions, and more power and respect than security guards who do the same job elsewhere in Manhattan and the outer boroughs.

Union jobs mean job security and lower labor turnover. Management companies come and go at the whim of co-op boards, but doormen stay in their positions for decades, nodes of community and institutional knowledge, friends to children, trusted and good judges of whom to trust. During rare strikes and pickets for better contracts, tenants bring coffee to picketing doormen and support their demands to the management companies, the consumer siding with the worker against the boss. In Lobby Hero, Jeff doesn’t seem to know any of this.

Lonergan’s apparent skepticism of unions appears elsewhere in his work. In Margaret, the movie Lonergan made before Manchester by the Sea and his most explicit investigation of law and government, the Transit Workers Union is a sinister force in contract negotiations with the Metropolitan Transit Association, demanding reinstatement of a bus driver whose negligence killed a pedestrian. Though the movie wasn’t released until 2011 because of conflicts between Lonergan and his producers over a final cut, it was first scheduled to appear in 2007, just a couple of years after a big, inconvenient, and successful MTA strike. As a careful viewer, it’s hard not to wonder: What does Lonergan think about the unions of the costume and set designers, carpenters, electricians, actors, and others he hires to make his movies? During the 32BJ apartment house strike of 1976, when Lonergan was 13, did he help man the elevator and sort the mail?

Aside from all this, Lonergan’s psychological bent sometimes foreshortens sociological and political interpretations of his work. Lobby Hero and Lonergan’s other plays and movies identify service workers’ marginality within the traumas of their pasts, not the socioeconomic facts of their labor. Kicked out of the Navy for smoking pot and living with his brother’s family, Jeff works the nightshift to get his own place, pay off his debts, and emerge to do something else. His supervisor William urges him to stay in the industry but move into management. Manchester by the Sea’s Lee Chandler escapes society through his janitorial work, and a weirdo waiter from Lynn, Massachusetts, in Lonergan’s early play The Waverly Gallery thinks he’s finally broken into the art world and can leave service behind. Lonergan’s service workplaces are way stations or refuges for damaged loners—not the vibrant communities that often coalesce among the staff at hotels, restaurants, barbershops, and the like.

Lonergan prefers characters who try to transcend individual psychological traumas, but who cannot ask for enough help and do not succeed.

The central tension in each case is whether the protagonist will overcome the trauma enough to leave the service job. Perhaps this is a metaphor for succeeding as an artist. Glenn Fitzgerald, who played Jeff in Lobby Hero, waited tables earlier in his career, and Lonergan worked a stint delivering liquor, which is how he got to know the man who inspired the character William. Lots of artists work service jobs as they try to establish their careers, and see the transition to full-time artist as a triumph over personal challenges. Maybe this makes them less likely to create characters who deliver liquor, wait tables, or man a lobby with no casting calls the next day, no screenplay on the laptop at home, no plans for another career, content not to move into management, and not because of some past trauma that left them too broken for other occupations.

One day someone will write a great protest novel or make a great protest movie about service capitalism. The pieces are everywhere. There’s love of spectacle at the heart of service entrepreneurship in Steven Millhauser’s 1996 novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. Sexism and women’s liberation are charted in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and its TV spin-off Alice, in Miwa Yanagi’s Elevator Girl photo series, and in Stephanie Danler’s recent novel Sweetbitter. Roseanne offered a depiction of a late-20th-century career arc from manufacturing to services. A lively but incomplete debate on the ethics of tipping crops up in such works as the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Reservoir Dogs. Big Night shows the family drama in the lives of service entrepreneurs, and indie sitcoms Whites and Party Down offer promiscuity and backstage goofiness. Cheers and Barbershop show audiences service firms that build communities away from home, cultivate intense loyalty from customers, and give equal or higher social status to those who serve.

Whoever puts all these pieces together, it probably won’t be Lonergan—though, given his broader sensibility, that isn’t exactly a bad thing. Lonergan’s favorite outcome is failure: He prefers characters who try to transcend individual psychological traumas (whether a sibling’s murder or a grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease), but who cannot ask for enough help and do not succeed.

Still, the characters’ failures are never a total loss. At the end of The Waverly Gallery, Lonergan’s protagonist says, “It’s not true that if you try hard enough you’ll prevail in the end. Because so many people try so hard, and they don’t prevail. But they keep trying. They keep struggling. And they love each other so much; it makes you think it must be worth a lot to be alive.” Lonergan loves his characters, and because of his artistic genius, so do people who see his plays and watch his movies. It’s enough to try and to love. But how much better to try, to love, to organize, to improve the world, and maybe to learn.

The Maddening Media Obsession With Female Feuds, Katy Perry Edition

Katy Perry’s new video for “Chained to the Rhythm” throws shade at fossil fuels and predatory home lending, nuclear weapons and nuclear families, lines at amusement parks and space helmets worn on Earth. But in some corners of the Internet, Perry’s recently been portrayed mostly as throwing shade at something that’s gone unmentioned in her work: Taylor Swift.

Perry and Swift’s rivalry is, as per a recent post by the comedian Josh Gad, becoming as iconic as the one between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Its origins are foggy, possibly having to do with the hiring of backup dancers or with the dating of John Mayer. Swift’s song and video “Bad Blood” may have been about Perry; more concretely, the musician Calvin Harris, after breaking up with Swift, confirmed that she tried to “bury” Perry. For her part, Perry has made some social media posts that certainly haven’t countered the impression of acrimony.

To follow all of this is to participate in the schadenfreude and voyeurism and mythmaking that make celebrity gossip fun. But what’s going on when the first frame of reference for an artist’s every action is how it reflects on a personal beef? “Chained to the Rhythm” says nothing that can be interpreted as a dig on Swift, and yet articles are being written connecting the song to Swift. Presumably this is to collect clicks despite the fact that it reinforces stereotypes about female cattiness and minimizes these women’s actual work.

Hollywood Life, for example, has a Swift-heavy post that jumps off Perry saying she “worked out some of [her] shit” in the writing of her new music. The site’s spin: “We can’t help but wonder if the ‘sh*t’ she’s talking about includes her ongoing feud with ex-bestie Taylor Swift.” And: “Does that mean she’s totally over her drama with Taylor Swift? You be the judge!” And, most tellingly: “Nothing in Katy’s new song ‘Chained to the Rhythm’ seemed to be about Taylor, but maybe another song on the highly-anticipated new album has some more answers for us. We’re definitely waiting on the edge of our seats to find out!”

When tweeting out photos of fans who’d posed with a prop promoting “Chained to the Rhythm,” Perry surfaced a girl wearing a “Bad Blood” T-shirt. Maybe this was an intentional Swift dig, or maybe it was coincidence. Either way, Inquisitr wrote up the incident under the headline “Katy Perry Refuels Taylor Swift Feud With New Song ‘Chained to the Rhythm,” asserting that Perry “took shading to a whole new level as the shirt’s ‘Bad Blood’ logo appears to be in the shade.” (I don’t even see the shade in the picture?) It had another post speculating that a discount sale on Swift’s recent single with Zayn Malik was meant to sabotage the chart performance for “Chained to the Rhythm.”

There’s even been a ginned-up who-wore-it-better moment. At the Grammys, Perry debuted a new bleach blonde look, explaining that as someone who has cycled through hair styles over the years, “It’s the last color in the spectrum that I can do.” (Her next comment—“the only thing left to do is shave my head, which I’m really saving for a public breakdown”—sparked the gossip press and fan armies to claim she’d grievously insulted another female diva, Britney Spears.) Tabloid sites referenced the ‘do change as though it were a strategic escalation against Swift, who went blonde last year. Elite Daily: “It is yet unclear whether Katy Perry had her hair cut and dyed in a similar fashion, or personally scalped her red carpet enemy and wore her actual hair to the ceremony.”

This is all, of course, pretty standard content farming and snark. It is also a sign of the media reflecting public fascination. The TV creator Ryan Murphy has said that Taylor vs. Katy is the most requested subject of the next season of his show “Feud,” whose first iteration focuses on Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. “I would never do another Hollywood woman vs. woman story," Murphy told Us Weekly, touching on the sexist, trope-y nature of this particular rivalry obsession.

But what’s particularly noteworthy—and again, sexist, and again, trope-y—here is the implication that Perry’s or Swift’s expressions as artists, citizens, and businesswomen can only serve the rivalry. During the presidential campaign, Perry’s stumping on Hillary Clinton’s behalf was frequently interpreted as a chess move against Swift, who stayed conspicuously quiet on her political views. “Katy Perry was the first pop star on the Hillary train, and if Clinton gets elected, she’ll have the most powerful woman in the world in her corner,” said the subhead on an October 2016 Daily Beast piece. “Looks like it’s gonna be a looong four years for her nemesis.” (Was October so long ago?)

Since the election, Perry has signaled that she’s entering a new era of “purposeful pop.” To that end, the lyrics and video of “Chained to the Rhythm” encourage conscientiousness, and she showed up to the Grammys with a “persist” armband and a Planned Parenthood pin. Few pundits are taking any of this to be a particularly bold transformation, though, as The AV Club put it, “it’s probably better than whatever Taylor Swift is doing.” According to some, that’s the only worthwhile thing Perry can hope to achieve.

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Why Netflix Will Release Martin Scorsese’s Next Film

Martin Scorsese’s next project, The Irishman, is as close as you can get to a box-office guarantee for the famed director. It’s a gangster film based on a best-selling book about a mob hitman who claimed to have a part in the legendary disappearance of the union boss Jimmy Hoffa. Robert De Niro is attached to play the hitman, Al Pacino will star as Hoffa, and Scorsese favorites Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel are also on board. After Scorsese branched into more esoteric territory this year with Silence, a meditative exploration of faith and Catholicism, The Irishman sounds like a highly bankable project—the kind studios love. And yet, the film is going to Netflix, which will bankroll its $100 million budget and distribute it around the world on the company’s streaming service.

Netflix’s ascension in the world of film distribution has largely been on the margins. Its insistence on releasing movies online the same day they come out in theaters has thus far stopped its projects from being shown in most major cinema chains. The fact that a Scorsese movie—and one this expensive, with a cast this stacked—is opting to go to Netflix rather than one of the major studios is an indication of something seismic. Until now, big directors have avoided the company, afraid it would doom their films to only be seen in people’s homes. But with Scorsese aboard, that could begin to change.

Anne Thompson of Indiewire, who broke the news of the Netflix deal, noted that The Irishman had long been planned as a Paramount Pictures production. Paramount distributed Scorsese’s last four movies, three of which were huge hits: Shutter Island ($294 million worldwide), Hugo ($185 million worldwide), and The Wolf of Wall Street ($392 million worldwide). Though all had big budgets, Scorsese’s brand recognition is peerless. His name, and the A-list movie stars who work with him, are usually enough to attract audiences, even if the film is a baroque, profane, sexually explicit 3-hour comedy about a sociopathic Wall Street broker.

Yet, Scorsese’s most recent effort, Silence, was a bomb. It cost some $40 million to produce and has grossed only $7 million, receiving just one Oscar nomination (Best Cinematography) after its late-December release failed to draw audiences. Paramount arguably botched its roll-out, though the studio was hampered by the crowded slate of awards films (including Arrival and Fences) and by being unsure until late in the season that Silence would even be ready for awards contention. The film itself is an undoubtedly punishing watch and probably would have benefitted from opening ahead of the usual glut of prestige Christmas films.

Though Silence’s failure was very specific, it seems to have scared Paramount off. According to Thompson, an industry source put it this way: “Paramount is not in the position to take risks. This way, he can make the project he wants.” There’s no better indicator of how much the film industry is changing than the fact that a Scorsese gangster film starring De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci seems risky, and Netflix is the safe haven to make the big-budget picture of your dreams. Some of Paramount’s upcoming projects might seem, on paper, riskier, such as a sequel to Daddy’s Home featuring Mel Gibson; certainly, the chances at awards contention are miniscule. But that is the calculation executives made.

In the world of streaming media, Amazon has so far proven itself far more attractive to big-name directors, because it gives films a proper theatrical release and waits for months before moving them onto its online Prime service for viewers at home. That approach is how Amazon acquired Manchester by the Sea at last year’s Sundance film festival and got it a Best Picture nomination, and turned Love & Friendship into one of the surprise indie successes of the year. Netflix, on the other hand, only puts its films in a handful of theaters to qualify them for awards eligibility. It mostly expects viewers to watch movies at home (an approach that has, so far, gotten the company ignored by Oscar voters and beaten to big acquisitions at Sundance and other festivals).

Making The Irishman is on a whole other scale than the small indie films Netflix has worked on so far. Though Thompson reported that the deal will include a “limited Oscar-qualifying release” in theaters, this is an expensive film that will be made for television screens first and foremost. There is a chance that the appeal of Scorsese would be enough to break the embargo big theater chains have imposed on Netflix’s releases, but it’s unclear if that’s something Netflix even wants. After all, the primary purpose of these investments is to draw subscribers, not to make money in cinemas.

Scorsese is not the only big-budget director working with the company. This year, Netflix will release Bright, a $90 million sci-fi cop drama starring Will Smith and Joel Edgerton, set in a world where humans and Orcs co-exist. Directed by David Ayer (Suicide Squad), it also sounds like the kind of film best served on a big screen. The same goes for Bong Joon-ho’s Okja; the Korean director’s follow-up to the acclaimed Snowpiercer is a “multi-lingual monster movie” that features Tilda Swinton, Steven Yeun, and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Still, it makes sense that these filmmakers would be drawn to Netflix. Ayer’s experience on Suicide Squad was one that saw Warner Bros. tinkering with different cuts up to the last minute. Bong fought with The Weinstein Company over the length of Snowpiercer, as the famously intrusive producer Harvey Weinstein tried to make it shorter and more accessible to a wider audience. Scorsese has wrestled with such intrusion for most of his career; Netflix is essentially offering him a blank check, and is the rare studio that couldn’t care less about running time. The appeal is obvious, and if other artists follow suit and migrate to streaming companies, the impact on theatergoing culture could be profound.

Kiki Revisits the Power of New York’s Ball Culture

It can be easy for certain kinds of films to feel overly voyeuristic. Any work that offers a peek into a world that’s completely unfamiliar to much of its audience risks keeping viewers at arm’s length, or turning its subjects into a mere curiosity. But the new film Kiki avoids this mistake as it revisits a subject first explored in the landmark 1990 documentary Paris is Burning: the New York’s underground ballroom scene. Directed by Sara Jordenö and co-written by Twiggy Pucci Garcon, Kiki feels like it’s entirely in the hands of its eponymous heroes, the Kiki community—a newer subset of the original ballroom scene made up of LGBTQ youths of color.

Ballroom culture itself—whose participants compete in organized dance-offs, flamboyantly posing for a cheering crowd while wearing elaborate costumes—has thrived in New York for generations as a space for LGBTQ people of color. As Jordenö tries to illustrate, it’s a minority within a minority, a safe haven for gender expression and stylized femininity that might be rejected or even met with threats of violence elsewhere. And yet, Kiki includes surprisingly little footage of the competitions, or “balls,” themselves. Instead, the documentary concentrates on seven participants, allowing them to narrate their own stories. At a moment when trans rights, which had experienced tentative progress in recent years, are increasingly under threat, Kiki (in select theaters and available on demand on Friday), feels both relevant and hopeful. The film is a beautiful celebration of a subculture that’s still struggling to win the full respect it deserves.

When Paris Is Burning was released 27 years ago, it shed light on a world largely unknown even to art-house film audiences. Jennie Livingston’s documentary looked at what’s now regarded as the “Golden Age” for the ballroom scene, laying out the elaborate rules of these competitive quasi-fashion shows, in which participants “walk” (often posing in exaggerated ways, called “vogueing”) a runway and are judged on their outfits, attitude, and dance skills. Livingston looked at the wide range of competitors, which included gay men, drag queens, and transgender men and women, and dug into what made them distinct while not shying away from the racism and homophobia they faced in their daily lives, along with the ever-present threat of AIDS.

Underground drag balls had existed in New York since at least the 1960s, when organized events were first held in Harlem. But it was a world that eventually leapfrogged into the wider public consciousness, popularized by Madonna and the video for her 1990 single “Vogue,” directed by David Fincher. Pop-culture icons like Beyoncé have expressed their admiration for the movement, saying it helped inspire their onstage presence when performing.

But Kiki is so powerful in part because of how many issues remain nearly three decades after Paris Is Burning. The film reveals that more than half of the New York ballroom scene are HIV positive; many of its subjects talk to Jordenö about the emotional agony of being tested. Beyond that, even though the public’s general awareness of trans rights has grown, the mere act of going outside can be harrowing. Early in the film, the audience watches as one of its stars, Gia Marie Love, gets verbally abused on the streets of Harlem; it’s a distressing moment in which you watch as a familiar panic quickly builds on her face. Had Jordenö confined Kiki’s action to the balls—joyous events filled with eager young people—their value might seem more ephemeral.

But by concentrating on the lives being lived outside of the celebrations, and the personal narratives that led seven very different kids into the scene, Kiki keeps the focus on the value of a safe space, of a community that provides structure and purpose for youths battling homelessness, illness, and prejudice. As a result, Kiki avoids feeling touristic. Rather than inviting viewers to gawk at the incredible spectacle of the balls themselves, Jordenö consistently returns to the stories of those who have been cut off from their families, or forced to suppress their personalities to avoid abuse.

One striking scene in Kiki, which was filmed over three years before its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016, sees some of its subjects attend a conference on LGBTQ rights held by the Obama administration, honoring the former president’s vocal support of trans rights. Viewed today, the moment feels as though it took place in a more distant past. Kiki is an undoubtedly inspirational film at times, but it refuses to give its audience an easy pass. It’s an honest examination of the powers, and limits, of subcultures and small communities—and how quickly things can change for better or worse within them.

Simon & Schuster's Completely Avoidable Milo Yiannopoulos Disaster

On Monday, when videos reemerged on social media in which the Breitbart News senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos seemed to condone sexual relationships between adult men and teenagers below the age of consent, the overwhelming response was one of outrage. The CNN host Jake Tapper posted several tweets excoriating Yiannopoulos and his followers, quoting a horrified friend who was a survivor of sex trafficking. The former Breitbart writer Michelle Fields described the tapes as “disgusting.” There were mounting calls for the Conservative Political Action Conference, which had announced Yiannopoulos as its keynote speaker last week, to cancel his appearance, which it subsequently did.

According to Washingtonian, even employees at Breitbart, which has elevated and supported Yiannopoulos in his rise to prominence as an outspoken supporter of the alt-right, threatened to walk out unless he was fired. And on Tuesday afternoon, Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart, stating that he didn’t want his “poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting.”

But at Simon & Schuster, the publishing house that awarded Yiannopoulos a $250,000 book contract late last year, it’s possible to imagine executives exhaling with something akin to relief. For the company, which seemed somewhat blindsided by the initial reaction to Yiannopoulos’s book, the news offered an incontrovertible out—an opportunity to save face with authors and booksellers appalled by the deal, without provoking charges of suppressing free speech or unleashing the rage of his millions of followers. And on Monday afternoon, Simon & Schuster issued an extremely brief statement, saying, “After careful consideration, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled publication of Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos.”

At this point, the publisher presumably hopes, everyone can move on, without the shadow of author boycotts or review boycotts or even large-scale protests against not just Threshold Editions, the conservative imprint that purchased Dangerous, but Simon & Schuster itself. It’s hard, however, to imagine the controversy going away altogether. Yiannopoulos’s book, which reached the #1 spot on Amazon while available for presale, seemed a transparently cynical moneymaking effort that appeared to be paying off—at substantial cost to the publisher’s brand. Now, Simon & Schuster has no bestseller, while its asserted reasons for publishing Yiannopoulos in the first place have been substantially undermined. As the author Roxane Gay wrote on Tumblr, “My protest stands. Simon & Schuster should have never enabled Milo in the first place.”

Dangerous, announced in December by Threshold Editions—which has previously published books by Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, and Michelle Malkin—provoked a hefty outcry from authors and readers. Gay pulled her upcoming book, How to Be Heard, from the S&S imprint TED Books, while several authors and critics expressed their dismay that the company would reward Yiannopoulos, who was banned from Twitter last summer after igniting a torrent of racist and sexist abuse against the Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. The furor seemed to take Simon & Schuster by surprise, possibly because many of Threshold’s authors are controversial figures. Rush Limbaugh, for example, once labeled a law student a “prostitute,” while Malkin has referred to President Obama in racially coded language as the “thug-in-chief.”

But Yiannopoulos was different, in part because he himself touted his book deal as “the moment Milo goes mainstream.” Calling feminists “fat dykes,” transgender people “terribly broken,” and Anita Sarkeesian a “cunt” is one thing at Breitbart, a publication known for its far-right views. But it’s another at one of the Big Five publishing houses. Giving a writer who’s called for women to be banned from the internet and the legal hunting of obese Americans for sport a larger platform under the guise of free speech struck many commentators as ill-conceived. “In identifying Yiannopoulos as a possible future of conservative thought, Threshold Editions is caught in a cycle,” wrote Constance Grady at Vox. “Because by giving him a book deal, they’re ... looking at a figure who is reviled in some corners of the culture and adored in others—a kind of threshold figure—and they are saying that they consider him to be legitimate. They are not just describing; they are prescribing.”

At the height of the controversy, Simon & Schuster’s CEO, Carolyn Reidy, issued a statement to authors assuring them that Yiannopoulos’s book would contain no hate speech. “I must reiterate that neither Threshold Editions nor any other of our imprints will publish books that we think will incite hatred, discrimination, or bullying,” she wrote. But she also framed the decision to publish Dangerous as a free-speech issue, stating that when Threshold met with Yiannopoulos, he expressed interest “in writing a book that would be a substantive examination of the issues of political correctness and free speech, issues that are already much-discussed and argued and fought over in both mainstream and alternative media and on campuses and in schools across the country.” In other words, to decry his platform is to suppress his right to be heard.

Yiannopoulos’s literary agent, Thomas Flannery Jr., made similar arguments in an op-ed for Publisher’s Weekly. “I’ve been continually shocked by the willingness of many in the publishing industry to stifle Milo’s opinions,” he wrote. “The right to speak freely, even if your opinions are unpopular, should be the bedrock of our industry.” But not giving someone a book deal isn’t suppressing their right to free speech—while publishing their work means elevating their voice above countless others. As Gay wrote in a statement when she pulled her book in January, “Milo has every right to say what he wants to say, however distasteful I and many others find it to be. He doesn’t have a right to have a book published by a major publisher, but he has, in some bizarre twist of fate, been afforded that privilege.”

Yiannopoulos’s resurfaced comments indeed show how flimsy the free-speech argument was in the first place. For CPAC and Simon & Schuster, declining to associate with him in the wake of his arguments that many 13-year-olds are capable of sexual consent simply demonstrates where they’re willing to draw the line. Stating that “relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable sort of rock,” is indisputably egregious and unacceptable. But so are Yiannopoulos’s comments about Muslims, transgender Americans, and women. As he himself has written, “I am a heartless, sadistic, cruel, bitchy, monstrously uncaring gay bastard.”

Before this weekend, that wasn’t enough to deter Simon & Schuster from doing business with him. Conservative imprints represent far more than diversity of viewpoints for publishers: They offer a substantial payday. Giving a deal to Yiannopoulos was a gamble that sales of his book would override any costs from independent bookstores boycotting books, and that the publisher would eventually recover from any superficial damage to its brand. But now that he’s alienated himself so efficiently from even his conservative defenders, Simon & Schuster is left with no hit book, no goodwill for cancelling Yiannopoulos’s contract, and no valid argument for offering him one in the first place.

Escaped Alone Finds Comfort at the End of the World

The cosiness of the setup of Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone is entirely disarming. Mrs. Jarrett (Linda Bassett), walking down the street, sees an open door leading into a garden, sitting in which are three women she’s seen before. They invite her to join them, and the four begin amiably conversing about topics big and small: family members, lost keys, personal maladies. The only thing missing from this gentle English scene is tea, which sits on the ground on a tray but is never touched. Perhaps because there’s something unspeakably nasty in the water.

Escaped Alone, running through February 26 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a production first staged by London’s Royal Court Theatre, is built on sudden, jarring oscillations between the serene garden the women sit in and a world Mrs. Jarrett describes in frequent asides to the audience. In those moments, the stage goes black and she steps into a nightmarish netherworld inside a stark red frame made of flashing LED lights, recounting an apocalypse (or apocalypses?) featuring floods, evacuations, mass starvation, and entire countries transformed into blackened wastelands. Is Mrs. Jarrett a hardy survivor? A delusional lunatic? A gifted sci-fi storyteller? Or just a woman expressing acute anxiety about modern afflictions, heightened all the way into absurdity?

Like much of Churchill’s work, Escaped Alone eschews easy answers. At 78, she’s inarguably one of Britain’s greatest living playwrights, and this particular work, her newest, is funny, charming, and alarming, encapsulating an impossible amount into its brisk 55-minute running time. The fractured, occasionally abstract conversation of the four women, and the contrast of their casually mundane garden party with the horrors Mrs. Jarrett recounts, points to Samuel Beckett; the repeated references to birds bring to mind Churchill’s dark 1994 eco-fairytale, The Skriker. But Escaped Alone also feels indubitably of its moment, with references to mindless masses numbed by iPhones and TV cooking contests. There’s some discussion of a “trigger” word; by finding solace and safety in their communal space, the four women are, whether or not they know it, indulging in a kind of post-apocalyptic self-care. Not to mention the nightmarish visions Mrs. Jarrett spells out, some of which are a degree too close to reality for comfort.

The production, directed by James McDonald and exquisitely acted, unfolds within a square box onstage, dressed to resemble a serene but unfussy garden. A shed sits off to the right, ivy climbs over the back wall, a yellow hose rests on the lawn. Periodically, as the women converse, there are familiar sounds in the background: traffic passing by, children playing. Sally (Deborah Findlay) is good-natured and eager, Lena (Kika Markham) is more reserved, Vi (June Watson) cheerfully outgoing. They interrupt and finish each other’s thoughts. Their easy harmony is best represented in one moment where, spontaneously, they launch into a perfect rendition of a 1963 hit by The Crystals, “Da Doo Ron Ron.”

Mrs. Jarrett’s stories, which recur with comic frequency, thrust the audience into an uncertain liminal space, and offer their own barbed humor. In one story, rocks crash down onto a country and survivors move into communities underground; in other, flooding forces cities onto rooftops, where people catch pigeons with fishing nets. In a third, Churchill skewers modern culture, with Mrs. Jarrett detailing how “the hunger began when eighty percent of food was diverted to TV programs. Commuters watched breakfast on iPlayer on their way to work. Smartphones were distributed by charities when rice ran out, so the dying could watch cooking.” The obese, she explains, “sold slices of themselves,” and mushrooms were “traded for urine.” The absurd anecdotes offer caustic humor, but also a bleak vision of a society placated into mass starvation and degradation by lowbrow entertainment and lulz.

As the show progresses, the three other women on the lawn have their own monologues, delivered in a kind of limbo state where the light onstage dims, and the other characters appear to nod off. Sally voices a profound, distressing phobia of cats, while Vi is profoundly depressed and agoraphobic. Vi, who murdered her husband when she “accidentally” found a knife in her hand, is now uncomfortable in kitchens, and estranged from her son after six years in prison. That these honest, offhand expressions of anxiety appear to go unheard by the others seems to be the point of the monologues. Mrs. Jarrett “escaped alone” into the garden. The comfort of community can’t entirely assuage the characters’ darkest fears.

Escaped Alone in some moments feels like a metaphor for the anxiety that accompanies technology—the flashing black “screen” that Mrs. Jarrett steps into for her monologues communicates the broad sense of disaster that emanates from TV screens and computers on a 24-hour basis. But it’s also deliberately ambiguous and surreal. Churchill declines to explain which world is “real,” or how any of these women have survived, putting the emphasis instead on the solace they find in their easy companionship—incomplete though it may be. It’s worth noting that simply writing a play featuring four women in their seventies without making it about their age is a reasonably subversive political act. Escaped Alone lacks the explicit feminism of Top Girls, or the topical satire of Serious Money, but its sense of female endurance resonates.

In 1962, when Brenda Bruce was rehearsing for the London premiere of Beckett’s Happy Days—a play in which a woman, Winnie, is buried up to her neck, plagued by insects, and scorched by the sun—Bruce asked Beckett where the show came from. He replied that the experiences Winnie endures struck him as the worst thing that could happen to anyone, adding, “And I thought who would cope with that and go down singing, only a woman.” The characters of Escaped Alone seem to have made it through the end of the world by similar means: simple resilience.

The South African Building That Came to Symbolize the Apocalypse

It was 10 a.m. on a bright spring morning in Johannesburg, and just outside my apartment, the zombie horde was growing restless. They shrieked and wailed, clawing at their tattered gray clothes and surging toward the walls around them. As they thrashed against concrete and barbed wire, I heard shots ring out. There was a guttural yell and then, abruptly, silence.

Finally. For three days, the undead had been interrupting my workdays to fight pitched, cacophonous battles with their human nemeses on the movie set of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter 30 floors below my kitchen window.

A post shared by Ryan (@ryanlenora) on Sep 21, 2015 at 2:20am PDT

When I had moved into Africa’s tallest apartment building a year earlier, I hadn’t counted on my work as a journalist being interrupted by a zombie apocalypse. But in many regards, I had to admit, it made sense. For more than four decades, after all, the Ponte City tower, which juts out over downtown Johannesburg like a 54-story toilet-paper tube, has been a vertical warehouse for South Africans’ greatest hopes and worst fears about their cities and themselves.

Built at the center of a buzzy, international neighborhood, Ponte began life as a posh address for white residents in the 1970s. The building’s unusual architecture—its flats all face a gaping open core—lent it a distinct, if eerie, appeal from the outset. But as the fall of apartheid transformed the city center, the building was dragged along with it, morphing into an outsized symbol of the violence and decay that gripped parts of Johannesburg during South Africa’s messy transition to democracy in the 1990s.

By the time I arrived there, Ponte was shorthand in local media and the public imagination for a city transformed—or, depending on who you asked, destroyed—by the warp of history. Now, it seemed that Hollywood had figured out the logical end point of that metaphor. Over the past few years, the building has appeared in several international films (its credits include District 9, Chappie, and a Drake music video, among others), always as a place both desolate and dangerous. But Resident Evil, which opened in late January in the U.S., took it a step further. It picked Ponte up out of downtown Johannesburg, and dropped it down in the middle of a gutted metropolis at the end of human history. The symbolism was hard to miss.

In September 2015, a couple of days before Ponte transformed into Resident Evil’s zombie wasteland, a notice from the management appeared posted on walls around the building.

“DEAR TENANTS OF PONTE CITY,” it read. “THERE ARE PEOPLE SHOOTING A MOVIE IN THE BUILDING SO THERE WILL BE GUN SHOTS THAT YOU WILL HEAR, SO PLEASE JUST KEEP CALM DO NOT PANIC.”

This wasn’t much of a surprise. It was hardly the first time that downtown Johannesburg had caught the attention of filmmakers searching for a city whose landscape could quickly telegraph violence and disarray. This was the same city that The Hulk smashed to pieces in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the same “dystopic irradiated wasteland” that Judge Dredd and his crew chased bad guys through in the comic book cum 2012 action movie Dredd. (That film even centers on a 200-story slum tower with a gaping open center—a clear Ponte remake.)

And Ponte itself has had many a sordid film cameo. Alien space ships hovered above it in District 9, gangsters staged dogfights in its haunting circular “core” in Chappie, and Navy Seals stormed through the building in search of a team of Congolese warlords in Seal Team 8: Behind Enemy Lines (that film, whose urban scenes are shot in South Africa, ostensibly takes place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Drake filmed the climactic gangster-showdown scenes in his surreal 20-minute extended music video “Please Forgive Me” there. And in between, the building has been used to sell everything from beer to McDonalds. With a few exceptions, there are some common motifs among all these takes on Ponte: fire, garbage, garbage on fire, and of course, lots and lots of gunshots.

Ponte City (center) as an alien ship looms in District 9. TriStar Pictures

While some of the fictional stories Ponte appears in are set in downtown Johannesburg, many are not. But to South Africans, the tower’s oddball architecture means it is recognizable even if it is supposedly somewhere else. And wherever Ponte is dropped down in the world, what the tower represents tends to be the same—a desolate, lawless place where society’s rules have little meaning.

For filmmakers, the building’s appeal lies at the intersection of its weird history and weirder aesthetics, says Genevieve Hofmeyr. Her production company, Moonlighting Films, worked on the South African segments of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, the sixth installment in the video-game-turned-action-movie series about a woman attempting to save humanity after a deadly virus turns most of the species into zombies. “From the minute the director [Paul W.S. Anderson] saw Ponte while scouting in Johannesburg, he recognized its unique architecture and immediately visualized a sequence there,” she says. “The look and character of Ponte personifies urban grit. Its character has morphed over time to fit perfectly into a post-apocalyptic world.”

By “character” Hofmeyr likely means Ponte’s longstanding and fearsome reputation as a “tower of babel,” a “den of iniquity run by drug dealers and thugs,” a “dirty, dangerous place” and a building that “wouldn’t be lost in a sci-fi horror.” For decades, indeed, rumors about the building have taken on a caricatured and almost cinematic quality that makes its recent leap into film in some ways unsurprising. For instance, one particularly tenacious—though unproven—piece of local lore holds that during the early 1990s, the building’s core was filled with garbage 10 stories high, chucked by residents from their windows because the city never came to collect.

But the story of how Ponte came to “fit perfectly” into anyone’s post-apocalyptic world is worthy of a blockbuster in its own right. When it was built in the 1970s, the otherworldly concrete cylinder wasn’t meant to represent the end of days, but rather an ambitious new beginning. An ode to the gods of brutalism on par with anything Europe or America might produce, Ponte was a projection of white South Africa’s desire to be seen as Western and sophisticated—even as its parochial racial politics said otherwise.

A group of tourists visits the 54-story Ponte Tower building in Johannesburg in January 2015. The distinctive circular tower was once a symbol of this city's modernism, then its decay and now its struggle for regeneration. AP

“I lined the walls of the penthouses with shaggy dog orange carpet—it was all very posh,” said Rodney Grosskopff, then a young partner in the architectural firm of Manfred Hermer, which designed Ponte, when I interviewed him about the building in 2014. “Everyone wanted to say they’d stayed in the tallest apartment building in Africa.” Even as the final touches were being put on Ponte’s top floors, however, the city it was built to represent was falling apart. In 1976, the year the building officially opened, residents with flats facing southwest could see smoke rising from behind the yellow mine dumps that marked the edge of the city. Just beyond it, the black townships of Soweto were on fire.

As mass protests against apartheid built in intensity and violence on the city’s fringes, many black South Africans who could afford to began illegally migrating into the inner city.  There, they found landlords all too willing to look the other way on the legality of the arrangement—as long as the new tenants didn’t complain about details like massive rent hikes. To make up for the high prices, residents packed in, sometimes two or three families to a single flat. Meanwhile, without care from management, their buildings decayed briskly. Within a decade, most white residents had fled. By the 1990s, as Nelson Mandela walked free from prison and millions of black South Africans lined up to vote for the first time, Ponte hovered above a neighborhood gently described as “transitioning.”

There was always another side to Ponte, however. Even in its darkest days, the place was mostly prosaic, a large apartment building that was home to a decidedly undramatic cast of families, students, and migrants toiling on the edges of South Africa’s middle class. Although that might have been the dominant experience of residents, it’s a side of Ponte’s history that rarely made it into newspapers—and it certainly didn’t touch the kind of popular imagination that would soon turn Ponte into an international film set.

The worlds we invent always convey something about the world we know.

There’s a simple reason for that, says Zahira Asmal, a South African researcher who writes frequently about the country’s cities. “Throughout Johannesburg’s history, it’s been as if the inner city doesn’t exist when white people—specifically white men—aren’t looking at it, as though its life and legitimacy depend on people in power paying attention,” she says. What outsiders saw when they did turn to look at Ponte and the inner city—now mostly black and increasingly international—was their own fears about what Johannesburg had become, she says.

That has held for filmmakers too, says Alexandra Parker, the author of Urban Film and Everyday Practice: Bridging Divisions in Johannesburg. “Most filmmakers in South Africa are still white, so films do often track white perception of the inner city, not necessarily the personal experiences of people living there,” she says. And international filmmakers have largely picked up on that same imagery to cast the city as a seedy underworld. In recent years, meanwhile, Johannesburg’s actual inner city has changed rapidly, a combination of intensive efforts at gentrification, old-fashioned clean-ups, and better policing. But “the city changes faster than its films,” Parker says.

Still, the long half-life of perception—and the way film seems to freeze in amber a version of the city many are trying hard to forget—means that Johannesburg still struggles to recast its image. “Every time I start a tour I ask people what they know about the inner city, and every time, the answer is the same—this place is full of crime, drugs, prostitution,” says Franck Leya, who runs tours of Ponte and the inner city with a company called Dlala Nje. “And when I ask how people know that, they tell me it’s what they’ve seen [in movies and television].” Ponte in particular seems to be a mythological site for many of his visitors. And when they recount what they know of the building’s history to him, Leya says their choppy horror stories often seem to blur together real-life details with cinematic fictions.  

“We spend years of our lives trying to change the way people see this place, but it can’t match up to the millions of dollars spent on one movie that shows the opposite,” he says. Of course, for a zombie movie or a comic-book action flick, having only a glancing affinity to reality is precisely the point. The hollowed out Raccoon City of Resident Evil isn’t inner-city Johannesburg, exactly—it’s not meant to be. But Ponte didn’t become the site of the film’s apocalypse by accident. The worlds we invent always convey something about the world we know.

Or in this case, worlds we don’t. “The problem here,” says Leya, “is that people are still telling scary stories about a place they actually know nothing about.”

The Case for Shyness

The Heimlich maneuver, in the nearly 50 years since Dr. Henry Heimlich established its protocol, has been credited with saving many lives. But not, perhaps, as many as it might have. The maneuver, otherwise so wonderfully simple to execute, has a marked flaw: It requires that choking victims, before anything can be done to help them, first alert other people to the fact that they are choking. And some people, it turns out, are extremely reluctant to do so. “Sometimes,” Dr. Heimlich noted, bemoaning how easily human nature can become a threat to human life, “a victim of choking becomes embarrassed by his predicament and succeeds in getting up and leaving the area unnoticed.” If no one happens upon him, “he will die or suffer permanent brain damage within seconds.”

Something bad is happening; don’t let other people see it; you will embarrass yourself, and them: It’s an impulse that is thoroughly counterproductive and also incredibly easy to understand. Self-consciousness is a powerful thing. And there are, after all, even in the most frantic and fearful of moments, so many things that will seem preferable to making a scene.

Shyness, that single emotion that encompasses so many different things—embarrassment, timidity, a fear of rejection, a reluctance to be inconvenient—is, despite its extreme commonality, also extremely mysterious. Is it a mere feeling? A personality-defining condition? A form of anxiety? While shyness is for some a constant companion, its flushes and flashes managed in the rough manner of a chronic disease, it can also alight, without the courtesy of a warning, on even the most social, and socially graceful, of people. It can manifest as the mute smile that appears, unbidden, when you’re alone with a stranger in an elevator. Or as, right before the curtain goes up, the leaden stomach and the clammy hands and the desperate desire to escape to someplace—any place—that is not the stage. Or it can come when the bite of chicken didn’t go down quite right, and your throat is closing, and the world is spinning, and everyone is watching, and all you want to do is get away from it all.

Shyness, basically, is an inconsiderate monster. Or, as the cultural historian Joe Moran argues in his wonderful new book, Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness, it is an inconsiderate monster that has been a constant, if largely invisible, companion to human history. Today, in the United States, shyness is often associated with a broad jumble of related and overlapping conditions, from occasional timidness to general awkwardness, from stage fright to the DSM-recognized social anxiety disorder. This imprecision is, it turns out, fitting: Shyness isn’t a single situation or character, Moran suggests, but, instead, a regular but also irregular interloper in human affairs, affecting people across ages and countries and cultures. Shyness can be, sometimes, a curse. It can be, as Dr. Heimlich acknowledged, occasionally a deadly one.

Shyness isn’t a single situation or character, but rather an irregular interloper in human affairs.

But shyness can also be, Moran argues, a great gift, its impulse toward introversion allowing for the inventive thinking and creative genius that might elude the more talkatively inclined. Shrinking Violets is a sweeping work of history and anthropology and sociology, summoning Simmel and Seneca and Sontag in its exploration of diffidence; it is also, more simply, a series of short biographies of shyness and those who have lived, to varying degrees, under its influence. Alan Turing, Moran notes, was bashful as often as he was brash. Agatha Christie, so bold on the page, was painfully shy in person. So was, when he was not performing leadership, Charles de Gaulle. And so was, when he was not performing music, Morrissey. Lucius Licinius Crassus, consul of Rome and mentor of Cicero, confessed to “fainting with fear” before delivering a speech. Primo Levi told Philip Roth about “this shyness of mine.” Oliver Sacks’s first book went unpublished because he lent its only manuscript to a colleague who committed suicide shortly thereafter—and Sacks was too shy to ask the man’s widow for the book’s return.

Shyness—at its core, perhaps, an uneasy acknowledgement of the vast distance that separates one human mind from another—has long been a companion to people and their endeavors.  It is silent, and it is constant. We might not all define ourselves to be among les grandes timides, as the French psychiatrist Ludovic Dugas preferred to call them; for some of us, timidity will be an only occasional visitor. But shyness, Moran suggests, however it chooses to manifest itself—and the thing about shyness is that the person who experiences it will have practically no say in the matter—can be a benefit as well as a curse. The shy are frequently thoughtful and occasionally brilliant. They are often sensitive to the needs, and the gaze, of others. The problem is that they live in a world that, despite the commonality of shyness, has extremely little patience for it.

Moran, who is British, counts himself among the timides; because of that he is aware of how difficult it is to be a shy in a swaggering world. He also knows what a quietly radical proposition it is to celebrate shyness. The far more fashionable thing—particularly in Britain, where Shrinking Violets was initially published, and even more so in the United States—has been to treat shyness as a problem to be treated and then, if at all possible, never mentioned again. Shyness, so emotionally adjacent to shame, is, too often, regarded as a cause for it. Within a culture that so deeply values self-confidence—and that takes for granted that social skills are external evidence of one’s internal self-regard—shyness is seen with suspicion. Quietness, in a world that is loud, can make for an easy enemy.

In 1997, at a meeting of academics in Cardiff, Wales, that doubled as the first international conference on shyness, Philip Zimbardo, the eminent psychologist, made an argument that was at once provocative and unsurprising: Shyness, he contended, was becoming an epidemic. Under the influence of digital technology and its attendant affordances—internet, email, ATMs—the “social glue” that had bound earlier generations into networks of enforced community and cooperation was dissolving. The insights Zimbardo had gleaned from his Stanford Prison Experiment had taken a new turn: Channeling the work of Sherry Turkle and Robert Putnam, he had begun to worry that technology, all the ways humans had invented to avoid each other, would ultimately exacerbate shyness. By the year 2000, Zimbardo figured, it would be possible to go for a day without talking to another living person. We were entering, he warned, “the new ice age.”

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Saving the Lost Art of Conversation

It remains to be seen whether the gossamer outgrowths of the World Wide Web will liberate or ensnare us. But “the new ice age,” as a concept, Moran suggests, tapped neatly into long-standing ideas about the nature of shyness: that it is not just an emotional response to others, but, more specifically, an emotional response to the conditions of modern life. In this reading of human history, shyness is an emotion that was also, to some extent, an invention.

The scholar Ormonde Maddock Dalton, an archaeologist and a curator at the British Museum in the early 20th century, believed shyness, along these lines, to be a byproduct of civilization. Beasts and barbarians, Dalton pointed out, do not have the luxury of timidity if they are to survive in their respective wilds; people who are concerned merely with the most basic of needs—food, shelter, reproduction—will have little practical use for the self-consciousness required of shyness. (Charles Darwin, who nurtured throughout his career an interest in the emotions of animals, remained perplexed about the evolution of shyness—“this odd state of mind,” he called it—in humans. How had evolution, Darwin wondered, bequeathed humanity with a condition that had so little obvious use in nature? Darwin was led to such wonderings, in part, because he, too, found himself occasionally plagued with shyness.)

For Dalton, shyness was the result not just of civilization itself, but of one of its byproducts: life lived as a kind of never-ending performance. It was an idea inspired not by Erving Goffman (or, for that matter, by his fellow sociologist Norbert Elias, who would offer a similar shyness-is-modern argument around the same time); instead, for his inspiration, Dalton looked to the large group of people he considered partially responsible for the rise of all artifice: women. Their tendency to turn life into a series of staged scenes, Dalton believed, would—it was only logical—create conditions within which those shows could fail. Thus, shyness, which is among so much else the self-conscious awareness of the many, many ways that human interaction can go wrong.

Dr. Zimbardo warned that shyness, given all the ways humans have invented to avoid each other, was becoming an epidemic.

Dalton’s ideas live on, today, in the broad recognition, within anthropology and far beyond, that shyness will have cultural components as well as physiological. They also live on, however, in the notion that shyness is best understood not just as the complicated interplay between the human brain and the social world, but also, more simply, as a deviation. Sociability is normal; shyness, it must follow, is abnormal. After all, we humans are—it is a cliché because it is so deeply true—social animals. We define ourselves as a species through our shared garrulousness as much as our shared DNA, through the fact that we put our opposable thumbs to work not just building shelter and creating art, but also writing letters and grasping phones and punctuating the making of evening plans with some enthusiastic dancing-lady emojis. We are human, in some small but profound part, because we are human together.

It is on those social-evolutionary grounds, though, that shyness is sometimes suspected, and sometimes pathologized. Shy people, the sociologist Susie Scott argued, are not merely choosing solitude over companionship, or small groups over larger ones; they are conducting, each time they beg off or turn away, an “unintentional breaching experiment.” They are, in their very shyness, deviating from the broader social order.

And so, they—and the diffidence they exhibit—are suspected. Thomas Browne, the English philosopher, referencing shyness’s common association with embarrassment, referred to it as pudor rusticus, or “rustic shame.” Plutarch preferred to think of shyness as a “loss of countenance.” Henrik Ibsen, who drank heavily in part to cure his own timidity, condemned the coldness of his fellow Norwegians by remarking that they suffered from “shyness of the soul.” Jane Austen, in a typically sardonic letter to her sister, placed shyness within the broader scope of the “Moral as well as natural Diseases.” And Sigmund Freud, for this part, so trustful of talk as a therapy and a social good, mistrusted timidity: He considered it to be evidence of displaced narcissism.

And so. To be shy, because of all that, is not merely to walk into the party and head directly for the refuge of the wall, or to rehearse a greeting a dozen times before finally picking up the phone, or to look out onto the audience and feel that familiar clutch of dread, even after its members have been dutifully imagined to be free of their clothing. To be shy is also to be misunderstood. The shy are commonly mistaken as cold, or aloof, or arrogant, or muted by Browneian shame. They are sometimes mistaken as worse. The American psychologist Josiah Morse, in the early 20th century, was convinced of the mental connection between shyness and stupidity. The writer Tom Wolfe, blessed as he was with the good fortune of extroversion, took delight in mocking William Shawn, the brilliant and beloved editor of the New Yorker, for his extreme social diffidence.

This, Moran suggests, is where Dr. Zimbardo may have been wrong—or at least extremely premature—in his pronouncement that the new century will have brought with it “the new ice age.” Yes, we have automated checkout now. Yes, we have Seamless. Yes, we can definitely get through a day, should we choose to, without the warm frictions of human contact. But we also have so many more ways of talking, and connecting, and being social, and being human. The world of the current moment, overlaid though it may be by the cool cords of the internet, is just as hot and busy and noisy as it ever was—more so, really. And it remains, at least in the United States, generally biased toward those who are willing to match it in heat and zeal and volume.

That is the paradox that animates Shrinking Violets. Shyness, that feeling that is so common, is uncommonly—and indeed willfully—misunderstood. It is an extremely normal condition that has yet, despite it all, to be normalized. Moran, in his book, has summoned insights from the ancients to their successors to prove what he, as a shy person, has already lived and known, all too well: that the world, for all the strides it has made when it comes to progress and acceptance, still does not look kindly on timidity.

Freud considered shyness to be evidence of displaced narcissism.

In that sense, Shrinking Violets—in its portrayal of the world’s insistence that the violets in question would be so much better if they would just exert themselves a little more, and stand a little taller—is reminiscent of Susan Cain’s 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Shrinking Violets considers a common emotional condition, but it is more insistently, if more obliquely, a condemnation of a world that treats that condition with ambivalence, suspicion, and confusion. Just as schools and businesses, as Cain argued, are generally built for extroverts—because, indeed, they are so often built by extroverts—so, too, Moran suggests, are the world’s social structures generally most accommodating of the lusty and the loud.

Squeaky wheels, as it were, get the cultural primacy. And that may be especially so now, as American culture not only offers more ways to talk than ever before, but also as it tends to emphasize talking as a panaceatic requirement of modern life. Good and constant communication, many assume (or hope), will help to ensure successful business ventures, and successful romantic partnerships, and successful educational performance. Extroversion will save us. Those corporate posters helpfully reminding their viewers that teamwork is good, and that there is no “i” in “team,” and that rowing crew is a really great metaphor for life in general? They make the point efficiently. Suck it up. Join in. Get in the boat.

Perhaps we would all do a little better, though, were we in general just a little more accommodating of those who prefer, at least occasionally, to do their rowing alone. Perhaps we would do better if we were more open-minded about what constitutes charisma, and creativity, and social success. Perhaps we should all heed Moran’s advice, offered as it is with the compelling confidence of the timid. “Humans are social animals by instinct and by default setting,” Moran writes; “shyness simply makes us social in peculiar and circuitous ways.” It deserves to be celebrated for that—and maybe even to be given, in that boatful of straining, smiling rowers, just a small space of its own.