Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 35

A Bad Year for Dynasties

Three-hundred and sixty-four days ago, on December 10, 2015, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner departed the Casa Rosada. A Kirchnerite candidate seeking to succeed her had lost the presidential election, and several months later Kirchner herself would be indicted for financial chicanery. Her fall from grace kicked off what has been an awful year for some of the world’s most prominent dynasties, culminating in the impeachment on Friday of President Park Geun-hye of South Korea.

There has been no shortage of commentary on the extent to which the last year has witnessed repudiations of the establishment, from Brexit to the FARC deal to Trump to Italy. But the way that some of the most powerful families in world politics have stumbled is an interesting dynamic as well, if perhaps not one of such obviously epochal impact.

The proximate cause of Park’s impeachment is a set of revelations about her close ties with Choi Soon-sil. Park’s father was the military dictator Park Chung-hee, who ruled from 1961 to 1979. Choi’s father, the cult leader Choi Tae-min, became a mentor to the younger Park, who then became close to the younger Choi. President Park is accused of improperly allowing Choi to influence her and national policy, and Choi faces prosecution. But this scandal is only the latest in a string of embarrassments for Park. The president offered to resign last month, only to be rebuffed by lawmakers. South Korea’s constitutional court will now decide whether to remove her from office permanently.

Park’s impeachment comes a month after Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat in the U.S. presidential election. Clinton was bidding to become the first woman president in the United States, having previously spent eight years in the White House while her husband, Bill Clinton, was serving as president. Clinton’s bid was sunk in part by allegations of corruption related to her family’s charitable foundation and her use of a private email server. Kirchner also left office dogged by scandal. She, too, had been married to her predecessor, the late Nestor Kirchner.

One obvious similarity between Kirchner, Park, and Clinton is that all three are women. Misogyny makes life for women in politics far more difficult than it is for men, and one reason these politicians have risen after men in political dynasties is that name recognition helps allow women to overcome at least some of those structural challenges. But misogyny alone can’t explain the situation, since lots of other female leaders have thrived.

The other common denominator here is those corruption, or the appearance of it. Voters turned on all three women because of allegations of impropriety and scandal. And in each case, the whiff of corruption originated not simply with the leader involved, but dated back farther into the dynasty. One might point to supporters turning on those dynasties as the real current at play.

Take Park: While many of her problems are partly of her own causing, the Choi case improbably dates back to her father’s regime, when she became friends with Choi Tae-Min. Clinton, too, was hurt by her connections to the Bill Clinton administration, around which a host of scandals, real and imagined, revolved. Some of the troubles that beset her during the presidential campaign were really more connected to Bill Clinton, too—from the foundation he created after leaving the White House to NAFTA, the free-trade agreement whose implementation he oversaw and to which Donald Trump tied Clinton.

Meanwhile, other dynasts, including some who are not women, have been experiencing troubles of their won. In the United States, Jeb Bush’s bid to become the third member of that family to win the White House fell well short even of Clinton, sputtering early in the Republican Party presidential primary. In France, François Fillon’s recent victory in the Republican primary is seen as a blow to the presidential hopes of Marine Le Pen, the second-generation scion of the National Front. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country’s first president, has come under criticism for failing to control rampant corruption.

Why the struggles? The journalist Jonathan Rauch has written that American politics follows a peculiar rule: “No one gets elected president who needs longer than 14 years to get from his or her first gubernatorial or Senate victory to either the presidency or the vice presidency.” As he wrote in The Atlantic last year:

Well, there is nothing magical about the number 14. What matters about the rule is not the exact number—14 versus (say) 12 or 16—but its reflection of an underlying public preference for presidents who are battle-tested but not battle-weary, experienced enough to know their way around but fresh enough to bring new energy to the job.

To this one might add the old maxim that power corrupts. The longer one is in office, or as in Clinton’s case during her husband’s presidency, adjacent to power, the longer one has to meet and connect with people at high levels. Even if one is miraculously pure oneself, that’s likely to bring him or her into contact with some less savory, less ethical people, creating liabilities down the line. In the case of the Clinton Foundation, it didn’t matter that there was never any proof of wrongdoing; the charity necessarily dealt with questionable characters overseas. Trump’s own ethical shortcomings seem to damage him less, perhaps because the idea of him being corrupt had not had time to marinate in the public consciousness for the 24 years it did for Clinton.

Being a member of a dynasty may be the shortest path to power, but as the past year showed it also risks foreshortening one’s time in power. As Trump prepares for the presidency, he is reportedly planning to hand most power in his business over to his sons, while his daughter Ivanka, a trusted lieutenant, plans to move to Washington, where she can advise him closely. If Ivanka Trump sees that as her own springboard to political success, she might think about some of the other dynasts and reconsider whether it’s really worth leaving the commercial world.

Miss Sloane's Washington Is Rotten to Its Core

Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain), the antiheroine of John Madden’s chilly new drama Miss Sloane, is a character so archetypal, so prescriptive, that you imagine she wasn’t born in normal human fashion but rather created in a lab from leftover vials of testosterone and male tears. A pill-popping, spike-heel-wearing lobbyist, her singular quality is ambition, and her only two human traits are reading John Grisham novels and sleeping with male escorts. “I pay you,” she tells one of the latter midway through the movie, “so I can imagine the life I chose to forgo in service of my career.”

That Chastain imbues Liz with some humanity is credit to the actress, but it’s also worth noting that the lobbyist shines in comparison to her surroundings. Washington, in Miss Sloane, is rotten to its core, a town riddled with graspers and crooked politicians, and poisoned by its own greed. To be clear, the movie, written by the novice screenwriter Jonathan Perera, is totally preposterous. But it’s also often fun in a grim, burn-everything-down kind of way. It’s hard not to assume that its release was intended to coincide with the historic presidency of another “nasty” woman, but its vilification of D.C. also feels right on-trend with the national mood.

Miss Sloane is structured around a Senate hearing in which Liz is grilled by a panel of politicians on charges that she bribed public officials—all in front of the fascinated eyes of the world’s press. The timeline then jumps back a few months to show Liz working at one of Washington’s top lobbying firms, deftly arranging trips to five-star resorts in Indonesia for politicians in favor of palm oil tariffs, and lecturing her troop of young acolytes about the dos and don’ts of making it in This Town. Her bravado tends to supersede her professionalism: When a potential client approaches her with an idea about marketing guns to women, Liz laughs directly in his face, infuriating her boss (Sam Waterston).

After a chance encounter at a party, Liz is approached to by a rival boutique—“hippie,” she translates—lobbying firm to jump ship and help an effort to pass a gun-control bill. And she accepts, asserting her belief that moderate checks on gun ownership make sense. But her real motivation, it soon becomes clear, is to win a fight that’s largely understood as impossible. In the movie, the gun lobby outspends the gun-control campaign by a ratio of 38:1. And though public opinion is largely in favor of control, as she points out, fanatical gun voters are much better at actually showing up at the voting booth.

From there, Miss Sloane descends into a paranoid political thriller about how the sausage is made. Liz’s lobbying team mostly jumps ship with her to work on the effort to pass Heaton-Harris, a so-called bipartisan bill that requires background checks on all gun purchases. And she begins to coach the employees at her new firm, including Esme (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), on some of her more nefarious methods. The key, she asserts pompously, is to always be one step ahead: “Making sure you surprise them, and they don’t surprise you.”

In some ways, Miss Sloane is a paint-by-numbers portrait of Washington, with its sweeping shots of the Potomac and the National Mall, its scenes of steakhouse lunches and networking galas, and its soullessness. There’s none of the humor or warmth of Madden’s strongest films (Shakespeare in Love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), and the action stays mostly in cold conference rooms, in generic luxury hotels, and on cable-news sets. Chastain, armored to the hilt in cashmere coats, silk blouses, and high-heeled boots, works admirably to make Liz seem realistic rather than the most tired cliché imaginable of an unhappy professional woman, but she has very little to work with. A lone nod to an unhappy childhood (“I grew up lying,” she says at one point) makes up the entirety of the character’s backstory. Otherwise, she’s just distilled ambition in human form.

Liz is one of the uglier portrayals of a successful career woman with a disastrous person life in need of a catastrophic fall.

The cast Madden has assembled is terrific, and generally wasted. Mbatha-Raw has a handful of solid moments as a do-gooder with a secret that Liz soon uncovers. Christine Baranski as a female senator with a sharp tongue only gets a single scene. Allison Pill has one of the movie’s most intriguing roles as Jane, Liz’s protegé-turned-rival. And Michael Stuhlbarg is almost comically evil as a lobbyist competitor greasing the wheels so the worst people in Washington can stay in power.

The movie does have flashes of sharp insight, though—particularly when it’s revealing how fiercely Liz’s drive and success enrages the men around her. Waterston, uncharacteristically malicious as George Dupont, expresses with real rancor to his team the importance of “neutralizing” her. Senator Ron Sperling (John Lithgow), who leads the hearing investigating the allegations against her, is infuriated by her poise under fire. Only Forde (Jake Lacy), a male escort with more defined morals than anyone else in the film, seems persuaded that Liz is actually human.

As a character, of course, she’s not. She’s one of the uglier portrayals of a successful career woman with a catastrophic personal life and various addictive tendencies in need of a catastrophic fall to bring her back to Earth (see also: Homeland, Scandal). That the ending of Miss Sloane (shouldn’t it be Ms. Sloane, come to think of it?) is surprising only puts into sharp focus how hackneyed its premise is. Portrayals of Washington and its most unscrupulous residents are only likely to continue over the next four years, so it would be gratifying if some of them could conjure up fresher takes than this grim portrait of a festering swamp.

Who Would Want an Office Christmas Party Like This One?

The epic party is an event that is also a fantasy. It’s a mainstay of Hollywood stories—from Cinderella to Sisters to Stranger Things, from most of the teen movies of the ’80s to many of the family sitcoms of the ’90s—in part because parties are fun, but also because parties, when they’re especially Epic, promise a kind of exceptionalism. Getting blackout drunk? Confessing your feelings to your crush? Table-dancing, lampshade-wearing, Benes-ing? Do whatever you want! the epic party offers. It won’t count! the epic party insists. The epic party is international waters, basically, only the “waters,” in this case, consist of tequila.

Now, with Office Christmas Party, the Epic Party fantasy has been taken to its logical—and inevitable—conclusion: Here is a movie that doesn’t merely involve such an event, but that fully revolves around it. The premise is this: Clay Vanstone (T.J. Miller), along with his friend and second-in-command, Josh Parker (Jason Bateman), run a branch of ZenoTek, a company that manufactures servers and other pieces of internet hardware. Things aren’t going well at the company’s Chicago branch—at least, not according to Carol (Jennifer Aniston), Clay’s sister and ZenoTek’s CEO, who is cold and tough and looking for ways to spite her caring-but-also-carefree brother. Carol will shutter the branch—and cut the jobs of the hundreds of people who work for it—unless Clay can get a big contract with a potential client, Walter Davis (Courtney B. Vance). The only way to win Walter’s business, it turns out? To show him the time of his life. Enter ZenoTek’s “bitch-ass Christmas party.”

It’s 30 Rock’s Ludacristmas and Parks and Recreation’s End of the World Party and Silicon Valley’s Bachmanity Insanity, only with fires and rubble and multiple trips to the ER.

Soon, the event that was initially meant to be a stodgy, mid-day, corporate affair—“non-alcoholic mimosas” included—becomes an Epic Party in the manner of legend and lore. The money that might have gone to holiday bonuses for ZenoTek’s employees has now, in the name of Walter-wooing, gone into the procuring of an ice luge and a photo booth and a slip-n-slide and a fake-snow-blowing machine and a replica of the Game of Thrones throne and, to ensure that these products are maximally enjoyed, water coolers full of vodka. Someone brings Jimmy Butler. Someone else brings some reindeer. Someone else invites, through some unnamed app, “all of Chicago.” Things quickly, in the proud tradition of the Epic Party, get out of hand: Soon, people aren’t just drinking and dancing and shedding their clothes and their inhibitions; they’re also sledding down stairways and setting fire to office furniture and throwing large pieces of office equipment out of the windows of ZenoTek’s downtown high-rise.

The assorted antics are roughly familiar: Think 30 Rock’s Ludacristmas and Parks and Recreation’s End of the World Party and Silicon Valley’s Bachmanity Insanity and The Office’s Moroccan Christmas, only with way more people ending up in the ER. (Vance’s character, in particular—the man all the fuss is being made for—comes in for some particularly rough treatment.) Cue, also, the Farrelly-esque jokes about the party’s phallic ice luge (the liquid sent down its shoot? eggnog). Cue ZenoTek’s overzealous HR manager (Kate McKinnon) saying, “I’m so sorry—I hate tension, and I farted.” Cue drunken revelers photocopying various body parts on the office copier—and, then, cue the guy copying a single body part on the office’s 3-D printer.

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It’s not that Office Christmas Party isn’t funny: There are lots of great moments in it, from the subtle satires (DISCLAIMER: COFFEE HOT, reads a sign at a pre-Epic version of the party) to the clever lines (“I’m gonna Gone Girl you so hard,” a worker (Vanessa Bayer) seethes to her cheating husband) to the many pleasures of vicarious party-going (Josh and his colleague shimmying, awkwardly and delightfully, in snowmen-style sumo suits). And there is something, in the end, almost soothing about the predictability of the film’s plot points. (Think the ZenoTek coder who, after lying to his colleagues about having a model girlfriend, will hire a prostitute to fill the role? Think she might bring some cocaine to the party? Think there might be a wacky mishap involving the cocaine and the party’s fake-snow-blasting machine? You are correct.)

The problem, though, is that Office Christmas Party isn’t content with simply throwing a party: It insists instead, in the manner of Hollywood tradition, on throwing an Epic Party, with all the repercussional latitude that such an event will tend to involve. It is attempting, in its way, to make an argument about the oppressive nature of rules, whether they concern corporatism or “P.C. culture”; it does that mostly by mocking the people who try to enforce those rules.

The movie makes fun of Mary, McKinnon’s HR maven, who initially insists that the party in question be a “non-denominational holiday mixer” and who takes it upon herself to post signs warning office workers that they should PARTY LIKE THERE IS TOMORROW. It features an office worker, Jeremy (Rob Corddry), announcing that “if I wanna dick-tap Alan, I’m gonna dick-tap Alan!” It features another, Tracy (Olivia Munn), proving her worthiness as the film’s cool-girl romantic lead by mentioning that she skipped ZenoTek’s “sexual harassment seminar.” Office Christmas Party suggests that a good deal of life’s problems might be solved if people would stop being so uptight about everything and just let loose. It is not titled, after all, Office Holiday Party.

Office Christmas Party manages, somehow, to be funny but fails, somehow, to be fun.

But then, just as the movie is having its laughs at the expense of rules/cultural inclusivity/soulless corporatism, it finds Mary extolling the solid engineering of her minivan, declaring, “It’s a Kia! It’s what God would drive.” It shows partygoers making decisions that they will surely come to regret. Its camera surveys the aftermath of the party—broken windows; destroyed furniture; dirtied, hungover bodies flung over the wreckage and eerie in their sleep—and suggests that Mary, in her reminder to “PARTY LIKE THERE IS TOMORROW,” might have had a point.

So Office Christmas Party is, in the end, extremely ambivalent about the party its story revolves around. As that event begins, a married couple shows up with their young son: They couldn’t get a sitter, they explain, apologetically. They send the kid off, with an iPad to keep him busy, to an empty office (and they do it quickly, the better to rid themselves of their burden, they announce, “before the edibles kick in”). At the end of the movie, we see the kid once again, wandering alone around the war-zone-like scene of the post-party ZenoTek, the dead iPad at his side, apparently looking for the parents who have forgotten him in the name of consequence-free fun. Lol?

Office Christmas Party centers around characters who are, generally, old enough to question the promise of the epic party itself: people who know that, whatever the party might have to say about it, consequences have a way of showing up for the fun, too. That might help to explain why the movie manages, so often, to be funny but fails, so often, to be fully fun. There’s a certain sadness lurking behind all the insistent whimsy. Office Christmas Party belies, in the end, its own premise: It recognizes, reluctantly, that there is a distinction between “escapism” and true “escape.” It recognizes, even more reluctantly, that actions will have their reactions, whether they’re done while the doer is stone-cold sober or drunk on office-water-cooler vodka. It has its laughs, and its assorted delights; it also knows, though, that parties—even, and especially, the epic ones—will, sooner or later, have to end.

Trump Picks Multi-Millionaire Fast-Food Executive for Labor Secretary

Updated on December 9, 2016

President-Elect Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he picked Andrew Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants, which owns fast-food chains Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, to lead the U.S. Department of Labor. Puzder—like several of Trump’s other nominees—is a multi-millionaire and Washington outsider who served as an adviser and fundraiser during the presidential campaign. While there’s no political record to indicate how Puzder thinks about the labor market, his remarks as a business executive give some indication of the stances he’ll take on several important labor issues.

If confirmed, Puzder will likely take a pro-business, anti-labor, approach to steering the federal agency tasked with protecting American workers and their jobs, which clashes with Trump’s populist campaign message of fighting for blue-collar workers. Puzder has been a vocal defender of Trump’s economic policies, including lowering the corporate-tax rate, and has opposed Obamacare and certain business regulations, such as a higher minimum wage. Puzder has argued against raising the minimum wage and offering paid leave and health insurance to employees. Efforts to increase the minimum wage, he writes, will hurt everyone, especially low-skilled workers, because “businesses will have to figure out the best way to deal with the high labor costs.” Those changes, he says, will lead to price increases, more efficient labor management, and automation.

Puzder is also a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform and providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, which puts him at odds with Republicans in Congress. On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to deport everyone who entered the country illegally, though he has recently made comments that seem to indicate a softening stance on the issue.

As labor secretary, it’s likely that Puzder will try to undo many of the rules and executive orders introduced during Obama’s tenure. For example, Obama raised the minimum wage for employees hired by federal contractors, and granted them paid sick days. And Tom Perez, the current labor secretary, recently enacted a rule that says that financial advisors have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients. That means that starting in April, advisors would  be legally required to invest money in their clients’ best interest, instead of investing in ways that could give them the highest commission. Many financial advisers have argued that this requirement will make it harder for them to provide services to lower-income clients, since they will have less income. Though neither Trump nor Puzder has explicitly addressed the rule, Republicans in Congress have vowed to block its implementation, and the new labor secretary could eventually remove it.

The Department of Labor’s overtime rule will almost definitely become a casualty of the new administration. In May, Perez announced the expansion of the eligibility for overtime pay to anyone making less than $47,476, up from its previous threshold $23,660 a year—a move that was opposed by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The rule was supposed to go into effect on December 1, but a federal judge in Texas delayed the rollout by issuing a preliminary injunction. The Department of Labor can appeal the ruling in hopes of enacting the new overtime threshold, but it’s doubtful that he would pursue it since it will ultimately cost employers more money.  

Though these rollbacks might take years, the two presidents—and their picks for labor secretary—have vastly different views on what the federal government’s role is when it comes to the relationship between businesses and their employees. In the end, it’s unlikely that many of Obama’s changes to labor laws will survive the Trump administration.

Is O.J. Simpson: Made in America a TV Show or a Movie?

Ezra Edelman’s epic documentary O.J. Simpson: Made in America premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year before screening at the Tribeca Film Festival and then playing in theaters in New York and Los Angeles in May. One of the most critically praised works of the year, it made the Oscar documentary shortlist and is hotly tipped to win an Academy Award come 2017. Echoing the general acclaim, Made in America is cropping up on many end-of-year film lists, including at the New York Times.

Yet, there are many critics who insist that it shouldn’t be called a movie, for understandable reasons. Made in America was created for ESPN’s long-running 30 for 30 TV series, an anthology of sports documentaries, and its eight-hour running time is certainly more easily ingested in five parts, as it was broadcast on television in June. It may well collect some Emmys to go with its potential Oscar, prompting some heated discussion online.

So, which is it: a television show, or a movie? The most accurate answer, of course, is that it’s both—and Made in America is the latest evidence for an increasingly blurred line between the two mediums. (In the American Film Institute’s “Best of 2016” selections, it was, tellingly, given a “special award” rather than being included on the film or TV lists.) Which leads to other pressing questions: In a media landscape in which most films can be quickly enjoyed on the small screen at home, what even defines a cinematic experience, and should Oscar voters care about these distinctions?

The vast majority of people who watched Made in America saw it on TV or streamed it online (it was available on ESPN.com to cable subscribers after its broadcast). Its box-office results were so negligible that it didn’t even register on movie charts, while its TV ratings were very healthy for a documentary, debuting at 3.4 million viewers on a slow Saturday night for ABC. But that alone isn’t enough to categorize Edelman’s work as television: Making a limited run in theaters and then quickly debuting on-demand for at-home viewers is the distribution model for most independent films at this point. Some of Netflix’s original films, like Beasts of No Nation, are given brief theatrical runs just to qualify them for the Academy Awards, but the only audience the network cares about is at home.

Still, it might seem unfair that Made in America can count as movie, because its length allows it to dive expansively into the fascinating details of O.J. Simpson’s life. Unlike the other acclaimed documentaries that made the Oscar shortlist, like I Am Not Your Negro or Weiner, it doesn’t have to worry about compressing its running time to keep the audience’s attention. And, despite Made in America’s often gruesome subject matter, its five parts are undeniably watchable, and easily consumed in a single day.

In the end, why penalize the film for being so long when it actually justifies its length? Made in America is dazzling in how it zooms out beyond the murder trial that defined its subject. It takes in Simpson’s starry history as a young athlete and his bizarre behavior after being acquitted, grounding his life story in the country’s halting progress on civil rights and the shifting cultural perceptions of black men through the decades. Made in America does feel like a special achievement, unique enough to deserve discussion alongside the year’s best movies and television.

Concerns about crumbling divisions between the two mediums aren’t unreasonable. Could a miniseries like The Night Of, made with cinematic crackle and grace, count as a movie? After all, acclaimed works like True Detective’s first season tell a complete story, broken up into episodic chunks. But they also adhere more firmly to a storytelling style that’s been laid out over decades and perfected in television. Made in America is a somewhat special case, as many documentaries are, blending an episodic structure with the more epic scope of filmmaking.   

There’s no point in resisting Made in America’s well-deserved ascendency, whatever the wider implications.

It’s easy to understand the notion that Made in America is making an “end run,” as it were, by using that brief theatrical release to qualify for the Oscars. The rules for Academy eligibility can be obscure and are often taken on a case-by-case basis. The Oscars have shut out great films that deserved nominations in the past, like Mike Hodges’ neo-noir Croupier, disqualified in 1999 because it had aired on Dutch TV. After winning the Palme D’Or, Michael Moore’s memorable piece of agit-prop, Fahrenheit 9/11, was ineligible for an Oscar in 2004, because Moore made it available on pay-per-view ahead of that year’s presidential elections.

It’s easy to detect a hint of snobbery in the idea that Made in America is “merely” television, as if that designation somehow makes it more inferior. The writer Mark Harris noted the “implicit disdain” of some film critics for the TV medium permeating the debate, saying on Twitter, “It’s exposed some odd, dated, condescending nonsense about what people who write about (or make) movies think calling something TV means.” As “prestige” television has surged in relevance, these critical divisions have begun to melt away, but some resentment still lingers. Or, as the New York Times’s James Poniewozik suggested, perhaps it’s simply defensiveness over the recent rise of television, which has paralleled a slow decline in cinema ticket sales.

Whatever the reason, there’s no point in resisting Made in America’s well-deserved ascendency, whatever the wider implications for the entertainment industry. People are watching TV shows in cinemas now, and great films on their televisions. The medium is, in many ways, becoming less important than the art, and in the case of Made in America, the art is transcendent.

The Novelty and Nostalgia of La La Land

“That’s the window,” struggling actress Mia delightedly tells struggling jazz pianist Sebastian in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, “that Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman looked out in Casablanca.” The two are on the Warner Brothers lot, where Mia works as a barista in the studio coffee shop. And the window in question is, in reality, the one featured in Casabalanca. Writer-director Chazelle discovered it after choosing the Warner lot for his shoot and he wrote the corresponding line into his screenplay.

It’s one of many joyous nods to movie history tossed off by La La Land, Chazelle’s lush and giddily musical love letter to Hollywood. But tucked within this overt reference is another, both more subtle and more apt. Look carefully, and you’ll notice that beneath the window is a shop door, and on it is stenciled a single word: “Parapluies.”

Of the many inspirations for La La Land—Chazelle clearly knows his An American in Paris and his Annie Hall, too—none echo so loudly as Jacques Demy’s 1964 masterpiece, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), as well as its lesser sibling, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. Demy memorably described Umbrellas as “a film in color and song,” and one would be hard pressed to find a phrase better suited to La La Land.

Song and color are evident from the very first scene, which opens with a traffic jam on the L.A. freeway. Cars are crammed motionless, bumper to bumper, with each occupant listening to his or her own music. Intentionally or not, it’s a perfect dramatization of the much-derided opening line of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero: “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.”

Yet merge they do, thanks to Chazelle’s cinematic magic. A woman in a battered Chevy begins singing to herself and steps out of her vehicle. She is followed by another driver, and another. The musical number continues expanding until dozens of commuters are on the roofs and hoods of their cars, singing, dancing, performing flips and skateboard tricks, and celebrating, en masse, “Another Day of Sun.”

And then it’s over, as quickly as it began. The music stops, the spontaneous revelers return to their cars, and traffic begins to move. Or at least most of it does. A distracted Mia (Emma Stone) is still stopped in her Prius, practicing lines for an audition. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), stuck behind her in his Buick convertible—this being Los Angeles, cars define character—honks angrily. As he pulls around her, she gives him the finger. Ah, love.

Nor is this the last time the duo will meet-uncute. Following a soulless party in “one of those big glass houses” in the hills (though one enlivened by another spontaneous musical number), Mia stumbles upon Sebastian playing piano in a restaurant and is entranced. But Sebastian—who has just been fired for straying from the approved holiday song list—brusquely shoulders past her on his way out the door.

It’s not until their third chance encounter that affection begins to bloom. And even this meeting is bookended by Mia making fun of Sebastian’s participation in an ’80s cover band—moral: never ask a self-described “serious musician” to play A Flock of Seagulls—and by the two soft-shoeing their way through a song expressing their mutual lack of romantic interest: We’ve stumbled on a view that’s tailor-made for two. What a shame the two are you and me. (With apologies to Roger and Hammerstein’s Cinderella—Mia even takes off her party shoes—the song is titled “A Lovely Night.”)

La La Land is suffused with a love of moviemaking so profound it tingles.

But the seeds have been sown. Soon Mia is showing Sebastian the Casablanca window and he is taking her to Rebel Without a Cause at the Rialto—and, afterward, to the Griffith Observatory itself, where the two will literally dance their way up into the stars. Los Angeles is rarely portrayed as a prime venue for romance. But in Chazelle’s hands it quickly earns its standing as the subject of another Mia-Sebastian duet, “City of Stars.”

The two lovers will, of course, face compromise and conflict: between love and their respective showbiz dreams, and even over the precise nature of those dreams. Sebastian, especially, grapples with questions of commercial success versus remaining true to the classic jazz of which he is an ardent apostle. Happy endings can be hard to achieve, even in the movies.

La La Land is Chazelle’s third film, following Whiplash and his little-seen musical debut, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench—the latter’s protagonists named after two characters in Umbrellas of Cherbourg—and to describe it as a breath of fresh air is both accurate and insufficient. Just 31 years old, Chazelle has reinvigorated the big-screen musical by embracing the present while paying tribute to the past, by balancing irony and innocence, novelty and nostalgia. At one point in the film, Sebastian is asked, “How are you going to be a revolutionary if you’re such a traditionalist?” La La Land itself provides an answer.

There are knowing winks scattered throughout the film: the clone-like actresses who show up for every audition; the studio gasbag envisioning a franchise based on Goldilocks (“There’s a lot we don’t know. There could have been a fourth bear”); the out-of-towner explaining the superiority of his state-of-the-art home cinema setup (“You know theaters these days. They’re so dirty…. And there are always people talking”). But such gentle tweaks aside, La La Land is suffused with a love of moviemaking so profound it tingles.

This is the third time Stone and Gosling have appeared onscreen as lovers, following Crazy, Stupid, Love and the best-forgotten Gangster Squad, and their chemistry has never been more palpable. Stone, in particular, with her huge eyes and expressive mouth, finds moments of intimate connection with the camera amid the otherwise delirious hubbub.

Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren shot the film in extra-wide CinemaScope, allowing the camera to pan and twirl as if perpetually curious to discover what delights might lurk just outside the frame. The songs and score, by customary Chazelle collaborator Justin Hurwitz, are not quite indelible but they are nonetheless lovely. And while neither Stone nor Gosling is a professional-level singer or dancer, Chazelle does not pretend that they are. Their voices are unmodified and their dance sequences—like all the musical numbers—are shot in long takes rather than chopped and edited into fine shards of perfection. It’s an unusual choice but one that pays dividends, adding a layer of reality to the cinematic fantasy.

Indeed, it’s a strange thing to say about a movie that opens with a massive dance number on the L.A. freeway, but at its best, La La Land sneaks up on you: the moment, after a party, when Sebastian surreptitiously turns back to get his car after walking Mia to hers; a sunset stroll on a pier jutting into the Pacific; that immeasurably important moment when two people hold hands in a movie theater for the first time. “It’s love,” Mia sings in “City of Stars,” “yes, all we’re looking for is love from someone else.” Indeed it is. La La Land is a reminder of why they make movies. And why, despite dirty theaters and people always talking, we go to see them.

Hairspray Live! Was Big, Bland, and Beautiful

If Hamilton is the musical America needs, Hairspray is the musical it’s (barely) earned: a mostly well-intentioned, awkward, goofy, and sometimes glorious celebration of nebulous inclusivity told primarily from the perspective of white people. That’s not to say its message can’t resonate, especially approaching the end of a year that’s been widely compared to a flaming receptacle filled with garbage. NBC’s Hairspray Live!, which aired Wednesday night and marked the network’s fourth year of staging a fiendishly ambitious live musical event, offered a sense of exuberance and self-acceptance that felt welcome, aided by spectacular performances from Jennifer Hudson as Motormouth Maybelle and the Hamilton alum Ephraim Sykes as her son, Seaweed.

Hairspray the musical was born in 2002, adapted by Marc Shaiman from the 1988 John Waters movie about an overweight teenager (Ricki Lake) in ’60s Baltimore who pursues her dual dreams of dancing on a TV show and ending segregation. The show’s inaugural Broadway production became a surprise hit, winning eight Tony Awards and spawning a movie version in 2007 that took more than $200 million at the box office. In 2016, the musical feels both of its time and out of it: Its broad message of unity and tolerance seems newly relevant, but its blandly optimistic treatment of racism comes across as anachronistic. To contemporary audiences, some of the script’s quips (“This is America, darling, where everyone deserves a separate but equal chance to fail”) might provoke more winces than smiles.

Hairspray Live!’s answer to any tonal issues was to amp up the exuberance, smothering any potential naysayers with a barrage of high kicks, high bouffants, and high Cs. Surprisingly, it worked. The newcomer Maddie Baillio, pulled from open auditions to play the show’s heroine Tracy Turnblad, opened the show with an unfailingly cheery “Good Morning Baltimore,” grinning and sashaying her way to school past the neighborhood flasher, some stray vermin, and a fleet of dancing teens. Sound issues couldn’t lessen Baillio’s committed joy, nor could a segue into Derek Hough’s pitch-perfect intro as the eponymous presenter of The Corny Collins Show.

From the beginning, Hairspray Live! preached a message of nonconformity while doggedly following precedent. In the opening Baltimore street set, the production nodded to the glorious weirdness of John Waters, adorning a storefront called Divine’s Pet Food with neon pink flamingoes. The show also cast Harvey Fierstein as Edna Turnblad, Tracy’s mother, the role the drag queen Divine played in 1988. Fierstein, who played Edna on Broadway and wrote the script for Hairspray Live!, played Edna as enchanting and a tad grotesque, with a voice that fell somewhere between a purr and a growl. He was well-met by Martin Short as Wilbur Turnblad, offering a cheerful, toned-down foil to Fierstein’s extravagantly physical performance.

TV musical tradition dictates that a popular musician has to be featured, putting their talents in unflattering perspective next to a cast of Broadway professionals who can sing, dance, and act. This time it was Ariana Grande—following in the footsteps of Carrie Underwood, Ne-Yo, and Carly Rae Jepsen—playing Penny Pingleton, Tracy’s best friend, a dim bulb whose defining moment is falling in love with Seaweed (Sykes). Although Grande has a background in live theater, the role wasn’t the best showcase for her skills. Many of her one-liners disappeared into the ether, and her singing was mostly limited to a standout number shared with Hudson at the end of the show, “Come So Far (Got So Far to Go).”

As the production shimmied its way through a series of shiny happy songs (Corny’s “Ladies’ Choice,” Tracy’s puppy-eyed “I Can Hear the Bells”), it had enthusiasm in spades but mostly lacked soul. Seaweed’s “Run and Tell That,” though, performed in the high-school gym as an ode to pride and a takedown of marginalization, woke the show up. Sykes’s dancing was sensuous rather than sprightly, and his stage presence amped up the energy. It led into Hudson’s “Big, Blonde, and Beautiful,” an extraordinary display of vocal power and charisma that put the show’s previously earnest messages of unity to shame.

Hairspray Live! cribbed broadly from the model Fox set with Grease: Live back in January, which reanimated the televised musical event by filming it on a vast soundstage in front of crowds of amped-up fans. Hairspray even took Grease’s director, Alex Rudzinski, pairing the live-TV veteran with Kenny Leon, the Tony-winning director of A Raisin in the Sun and NBC’s acclaimed 2015 show The Wiz Live!. The result was a musical that, minus a few production flubs, allowed the cast to feed off audience zeal while using the televised format to its advantage, allowing extra intimacy and realism in some of the more moving spoken scenes. The only obvious fail involved inexplicable ad-break cuts to Darren Criss, the evening’s “host,” who spouted inanities to pad out scene transitions while serving as a hype man for the already over-hyped audience.

With Hairspray Live!, NBC seems largely to have figured out the format for its new holiday tradition. If The Sound of Music Live! was unconscionably awkward, and Peter Pan Live! felt bad by design, the soundstage/live audience hybrid approach gave Hairspray a sense of theatricality and dazzle that patched over some of its weaker moments. And although the show’s tackling of racial prejudice felt clumsy at times, its strongest performers were more than capable of compensating. Hudson, her hair almost as big as her voice, resplendent in a gold lamé jumpsuit, made “I Know Where I’ve Been” truly awe-inspiring. “There’s a dream in the future,” she sang, “there’s a struggle, that we have yet to win.” That remains true, and no one’s saying TV musicals are the answer. But in staying relentlessly upbeat and allowing its stars to shine, Hairspray Live! offered a reminder that onstage, love always triumphs in one way or another.

The Secret to Westworld’s Success Is in Its Music

The official Westworld score has been released, and it’s worth a listen for anyone curious about exactly how an ambitious but deeply flawed sci-fi philosophy riff became such a big hit for HBO. Ramin Djawadi’s blend of classical orchestration and electronica in darkly dramatic recurring themes and instrumental pop-music covers deserves a lot of credit for the show’s appeal. Heard as an album, it does a nice job—better than many scores—of both holding the listener’s attention and sending them back to specific moments they remember from the source material.

Which is similar to how music—as meta as anything else in Westworld—functioned within the show. On a plot level, songs mattered because they influenced the hosts of the titular theme park; in particular, Debussy’s “Reverie,” heard throughout the season, was revealed to be hard-coded into the robots’ memory to act as a tranquilizer. The music’s effect on viewers, too, was primal and linked to memory. Whenever the melody of a popular song played, it sent audience members back to their own recollections of that song while also serving as a reminder of the trippy time-crossing nature of the show’s setting: Remember, it’s not really the Wild West if people are listening to The Animals.

The music also boosted the show’s appeal as a puzzle, which is to say as a vessel for a-ha moments. The viewer gets an a-ha when they realize what song is being reinterpreted by the score. They get another one when they figure out—or read about online—the thematic parallels between song and scene. Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black works well for a brothel of amnesiacs: “I died a hundred times / You go back to her / I go back to black.” And Radiohead’s catalogue of songs about repression, awakening, and revolution was so fitting that four songs of theirs made the cut (“No Surprises” also shows up in two versions on the soundtrack). On a broader level, the image of the player piano—programmed to spit out emotionally affecting material—was a particularly rich symbol in a show full of rich symbols.

What are people looking for when they tune into a show week after week? One great shiver of emotion.

But more than anything, the score’s pop covers did the simple, essential work of boosting the show’s entertainment value. Westworld’s popularity rose in spite of obvious flaws, flaws that critics seemed to point out ever-more-loudly as more people tuned in: “The show is so ambitious, so audacious, conceptually so much richer than almost everything else on TV, that its inability to satisfy at the level of drama is often infuriating,” Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in his finale review. Some of the complaints: over-reliance on monologue, hazy motivations for the people within the show, characters whose personalities were either blank (most of the hosts) or overdetermined (the ridiculous writer character Lee Sizemore), and story twists that relied more on trickery by the filmmakers than on believable plot development. I have affection for Westworld but can’t deny that its problems often brought the viewing experience to the edge of turn-off-the-TV boredom.

But what are people looking for when they tune into a show week after week? A single moment of grand drama, one great shiver of emotion, is probably more than enough. Westworld provided those moments through its songs. Thinking back, the first season’s highlights were less its reveals than its reveries: Maeve touring the Delos facility to “Motion Picture Soundtrack”; the first battle for the saloon set to a Bonanza-fied “Paint It Black”; Dr. Ford delivering his final address over “Exit Music (To a Film).” Reliving those scenes today thanks to the tie-in album, it almost seems as though Westworld’s chief insight was nothing more heady than the idea that everyone loves a good music video.

The Lead Contenders for This Year’s Oscars

This year’s Oscars will air at a particularly tense moment for both the country at large and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. The Trump presidency will be well into its first 100 days after a year defined by toxic politics and a revived culture war, while Academy voters will take care to avoid the controversy of recent years over the glaring lack of diversity in its nominees. The ceremony, which will be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, could go one of two ways: It could try to lean into the political maelstrom, or it could embrace more traditional fare, celebrating cinema that distracts from the world around us.

The emerging pool of favorites features some contradictory choices. The throwback musical La La Land would be a vote for escapism, though to that film’s credit, it is partly a fable about the dangers of nostalgia. Awarding the indie hit Moonlight, a rave-reviewed coming-of-age drama about complicated intersections of identity and race, would be a push for more searing relevance. The other contender, Kenneth Lonergan’s weighty tragedy Manchester by the Sea, is the kind of small-scale picture the Oscars have loved since their inception—a movie driven by great performances rather than visual snap. These are the early favorites in a year lacking for major commercial hits; for the Academy, cultural impact is less and less defined by box-office success.

Moonlight, for example, has collected only $9.9 million since its October release—a phenomenal amount for a film of its size, and word-of-mouth is only continuing to grow as it builds awards buzz. Barry Jenkins’s artful film isn’t the easiest to grapple with—the tale of a gay black man growing up in Miami, it’s a specific and brilliant work that comments more broadly on the dangers of making assumptions and the difficulty of self-acceptance. Though Moonlight may fall shy of sweeping the Oscars, after collecting the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for Best Picture, its status as a frontrunner seems assured. Its best hopes for a trophy lie with its screenplay and the supporting actor Mahershala Ali.

Manchester by the Sea has also done well with critic awards so far, and its lead actor Casey Affleck remains in pole position for that award. But he has been dogged by resurfacing allegations of his on-set harassment of women when making his 2010 mockumentary I’m Still Here (the lawsuits in question were later settled privately). After the Birth of a Nation writer/director/star Nate Parker’s awards chances were undone by his own horrifying past, a pass for Affleck might seem like hypocrisy. Still, he is not the creative voice behind Manchester by the Sea, as Parker was to his film.

The other big challenger for Lead Actor appears to be Denzel Washington, who directed and starred in an adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences, reprising his own Tony-winning performance. Washington’s work in the film is so powerful that it belies his restrained, if stagey direction; the only thing working against him is that he has two Oscars already. Meanwhile, his Fences co-star Viola Davis, campaigning as a supporting actress with a quasi-leading role, already has that award locked up according to most prognosticators, with Manchester’s Michelle Williams (in a much smaller, but similarly incendiary performance) her closest challenger.

None of these films has been a big box-office winner, and a look at 2016’s big grossers underlines why this year’s Oscars will be mostly lacking for blockbuster hits. Almost all of the top 20 films this year were sequels, franchise entries, or children’s animated films, with one exception: Clint Eastwood’s Sully, a quiet paean to competence anchored by a reliably steady Tom Hanks performance. Both the film and Hanks will likely get nominations simply because it’s harder and harder for a movie targeted at grown-ups to stand out with audiences. Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s masterful sci-fi fable that has proven a surprise hit, should muscle its way into the Best Picture race for the same reason, despite the Academy’s usual resistance to genre pictures. The same goes for Hell or High Water, a muscular crime film from the summer that showed surprising staying power with viewers.

Swoony musicals with gauzy visuals tend to be exempt from the genre rule—based on look and subject matter alone, La La Land has seemed an obvious choice for Oscar voters since it was announced. The director Damien Chazelle’s previous film Whiplash collected three Oscars in 2015, and his follow-up has far more broad appeal, assaying the wishes and dreams of a wannabe actress (Emma Stone) and jazz musician (Ryan Gosling) navigating a dreamworld Los Angeles and falling in love in the process. Critics have been kind to the film—it was named the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Picture award in a slight upset over Moonlight. If audiences follow suit, then La La Land will surely look appealing to voters; at this point, financial failure might be the only thing in its way.

The simple fact is, the Oscars reward films about creativity and the Hollywood process—even when they’re out of sync with the world around them. In early 2011, in the middle of the Great Recession and the wake of the Tea Party revolution, voters picked The Artist, a trapped-in-amber silent film that celebrated cinema’s earliest epoch. The next year, Ben Affleck’s thriller Argo, an Iranian hostage drama that doubled as a celebration of movie mythmaking, defeated more prestige works like Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty. Two years ago, Birdman, a dizzying look at the creative process inside the mind of a faded movie star, leapfrogged Selma, Boyhood, and American Sniper.

Much like Birdman or Argo, there is a lick of cynicism to La La Land, which is as much about the sacrifices people make on their way to the top as it is a celebration of Old Hollywood at its finest. But after two years of controversy led the Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs to radically rework the Academy’s membership process in an effort to attract a diverse body of voters, a slew of trophies for La La Land might not really signal meaningful progress. This year’s institutional changes might be enough to radically push the Oscar race away from the conventional choices; as it stands now, another year of escapism will be on deck come February.

All the President-Elect's Generals

Donald Trump didn’t always speak highly of military brass. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” he said in fall 2016. “Believe me.” In September, he added, “I think under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble. They have been reduced to a point where it’s embarrassing for our country…. And I can just see the great—as an example—General George Patton spinning in his grave as ISIS we can’t beat.”

But Trump’s disdain had a caveat: “I have great faith in the military. I have great faith in certain of the commanders, certainly.”

These days, he’s leaning toward the second pole. Already, Trump has selected three retired generals for Cabinet-level jobs. On Tuesday, he formally announced that he’s nominating retired Marine General James Mattis as defense secretary. On Wednesday, multiple outlets reported that he has selected John Kelly, another retired Marine general, as secretary of homeland security. Former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn got the nod as national security adviser on November 17.

That may not be the last of it. Trump has met with General David Petraeus, the former head of the CIA, apparently about the secretary of state position. Stanley McChrystal, a former Army general, said this summer he’d decline a job with Trump if offered, but his name remains in circulation. So is that of Admiral Mike Rogers, the head of the NSA. Retired Army General Jack Keane says he declined an offer to lead the Pentagon.

It’s hard, if not impossible to remember such a brass-heavy Cabinet. Ulysses S. Grant, a former general, once had four former generals serving in his Cabinet in the same year—but that was in an era just after a disproportionate share of politically involved white men had served in high-ranking positions in the Civil War.

The predominance of generals is already raising some conflicts. Mattis’s appointment specifically contravenes a law, intended to help preserve “civilian control” of the armed forces, that says that no one who has served on active duty within the last 10 years can lead the Pentagon. A candidate can, however, obtain a waiver from Congress to circumvent that, and it appears Mattis will get one without too much trouble. Democrats (like Leon Panetta) seem to either think he should receive the waiver, or not to care enough to put up a huge fight.

There’s a debate between policy experts about the wisdom of appointing so many generals, and whether it poses a risk to the nation. Too many military leaders, critics say, warp national priorities at best and slouch toward a junta at worse.

“Appointing too many generals would throw off the balance of a system that for good reason favors civilian leadership,” writes The New York Times’ Carol Giacomo. “The concern is not so much that military leaders might drag the country into more wars. It is that the Pentagon, with its nearly $600 billion budget, already exercises vast sway in national security policymaking and dwarfs the State Department in resources.” In The Washington Post, Phillip Carter and Loren DeJonge Schulman warn that “great generals don’t always make great Cabinet officials” and add that “relying on the brass, however individually talented, to run so much of the government could also jeopardize civil-military relations.” Rosa Brooks, meanwhile, suggests this isn’t much to worry about, saying that the old, formalized notions of civilian control are obsolete.

There’s some concern within the military, too. During the presidential campaign, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff criticized Flynn and retired Marine General John Allen, who backed Hillary Clinton, for intervening in politics, worrying about what effect their campaigning might have on civilian-military relations. One can imagine that leaders in the Navy and Air Force, thinking of the longstanding rivalries between branches, might be getting nervous seeing former Army and Marine generals gaining so much influence at the White House.

But setting aside the good or bad of the appointments, what might account for Trump’s disproportionate reliance on brass? It’s tempting to offer a psychoanalytic explanation. Trump seems somewhat star-struck by generals; this is a man who attended military school, but repeatedly obtained draft deferrals on somewhat questionable bases, and may glamorize generals in a vicarious way. Trump, the consummate entertainer, also seems enthralled by dramatic figures like Patton and MacArthur, as my colleague James Fallows has noted, either in real life or through on-screen depictions.

Some of the reasons may be more pragmatic, though. First, Trump has no national-security experience, and has shown very little interest in gaining it. It’s important for both his administration and his credibility to have people who know what they’re talking about around him, and the military imprimatur provides that. Second, Trump alienated so many civilian Republican figures—especially those in the national-security and defense realms—that he has little choice but to look outside the proven class of civil servants.

There’s also a political valence to it, however. Trump has spent the last few months promising to “drain the swamp,” and railing at the establishment and the Republican Party. That rules out almost anyone traditionally qualified for top jobs, even ones willing to serve in a Trump administration. The military is one of the few institutions that remains widely trusted by American society. In a Gallup poll this summer, it was the most highly ranked option, exceeding even small businesses and churches. At 73 percent, the number of people saying they trusted the military at least “quite a lot” was more than double those who said the same about the presidency.

Choosing ex-generals for top spots, then, checks a lot of boxes for Trump: He can appoint proven leaders who are willing to serve and will start out with a baseline level of trust with the American public. Of course, this explanation only goes so far: Trump’s other picks have included billionaire business leaders and former bankers including Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, and Betsy DeVos. In the Gallup poll, banks and big business, fared much worse, at 27 and 18 percent, respectively.