Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 42

How to Fight With Your Relatives: A Handy, Bipartisan Guide

Thanksgiving is a holiday that celebrates those two most American of things: eating with one’s family, and arguing with them. Why simply fill pie holes when you can tell someone you love to shut theirs? But feasting-and-fighting can be a tricky thing to pull off, which is probably why this time of year tends to bring a flurry of advice on the matter, ranging from the politically objective (“How to Survive Your Family’s Thanksgiving Arguments,” “How to Talk to Your Relatives About Politics at Thanksgiving,” “How to Have Thanksgiving Dinner Without a Family Blowup”) to the politically less so (“Here’s how to talk to your Trump-supporting relatives this Thanksgiving,” “How to deal with your racist/sexist/science-denying right-wing uncle this holiday season,” “How to Talk to Your Pansy Marxist Nephew at Thanksgiving”).

With all that variation, though, it can be hard to determine the best strategy for fighting with your family while also giving thanks for their existence. So, in the spirit of holiday unity, we’ve created a multi-purpose guide—one that is, for ease of use, customizable to most any political circumstance you may find yourself in on Thursday. Simply choose your preferred filters, and you’ll be fighting with your own family, armed with your own unique point of view, in no time. Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving can be so awkward, and only partly because of [ American history / industrialized animal farming / the sound canned cranberry sauce makes as it exits its container ]. The holiday also, often, will find you spending time with members of your family who are, unfortunately, [ Republicans / Democrats / libertarians / pastafarians / socially conservative but fiscally progressive holdover Nixonians ]. But while you may, in the aftermath of the election, be feeling [ victorious / humbled / horrified / terrified / that maybe the people who volunteered for that Mars One thing knew something the rest of us didn’t ], still, during this time of [ mis / Thanks ]giving, it’s worth remembering that the communal table can offer a great opportunity for [ listening / learning / gloating / yelling / re-educating ]. If you keep your mind [ properly open / properly closed ], gathering with your loved ones around the table can be an exercise in [ empathy / condescension / WINNING ]. Even, and especially, if those loved ones do not share your [ beliefs / values / facts ].

Why simply fill pie holes when you can tell someone you love to shut theirs?

But, if you are to succeed, you need to go into the situation prepared. Ideally, you should study for Thanksgiving as if it were an [ extended debate / MMA match / exam that determines 80 percent of your final grade, even though you totally showed up to class week after week and it really seems like steady, reliable participation should count for more in the end, but anyway ]. Because, in many ways, it is. So make sure that, long before the green bean casserole goes into the oven, you’ve made yourself an expert on [ Obamacare / the repeal of Obamacare / the actual cost, in pesos, of a gold-plated wall between the U.S. and Mexico ].

Or, if you’re feeling especially [ confident / insecure ], you can also simply memorize some assorted soundbites and statistics to drop at random during the Thanksgiving meal. For example, do your relatives know that the Pope just endorsed Ivanka Trump’s new line of boldly understated careerwear, whose pieces are currently available at Macy’s, Lord & Taylor, and other fine retailers? Or that your chances of falling victim to [ Prius drivers / superstorms brought about by the irreversible effects of global climate change / Roombas that have become suddenly sentient ] have risen by 63 percent in the past decade alone? These things aren’t true, technically, but you saw them on [ Facebook / Twitter / Snapchat / Breitbart ], which means that, in another way, THEY ARE TOTALLY  TRUE.

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Another tip: As you’re engaging with your [ uneducated / overeducated / dirty / hippie / “economically resentful” ] relatives, try your best to keep your demeanor [ engaged / enraged / strategically condescending ]. Remember that, in the end, these people are your family, and while all [ happy / unhappy ] families are alike, each [ happy / unhappy ] family is [ happy / unhappy ] in its own way.

Still, despite all your best efforts and preparation, things—as we were so powerfully reminded [ this month / eight years ago / 12 years ago ]—can always go horribly wrong. If the worst befalls your Thanksgiving table, it’s always good to have a handful of non-politics-related topics at the ready to help you change the subject with grace. You could bring up, for example, [ Daenerys’s dragons in Game of Thrones / Arya’s revenge in Game of Thrones / Hodor’s sacrifice in Game of Thrones ]. Mentioning NCIS is usually a safe bet, as well. Same goes, almost always, for [ Designated Survivor / The Big Bang Theory / American Ninja Warrior / The Voice / Wheel of Fortune ], which, you can add to stoke the conversation further, is actually having a surprisingly compelling season at the moment.

This should go without saying, but: Whatever you do, do not even think of mentioning [ the new Ghostbusters / the old Ghostbusters / the new Star Wars / Keeping Up With the Kardashians / the incontrovertible fact that hot dogs are not sandwiches ]. This will only end badly, for everyone. Same goes, obviously, for The Apprentice.

Finally, if all else fails, [ empathy / condescension / WINNING ]-wise, you can always bond with your family over a shared laugh at the [ failing / lying / too-powerful / impotent / elitist / classless ] members of the American press. You and your relatives may not see eye-to-eye on much, but you can definitely all agree that [ CNN / Fox News / The New York Times / The Atlantic ] is the worst, and just laughably bad when it comes to maintaining a healthy democracy. There’s nothing more to say on that; just enjoy those lols while they last!

So there you have it: a Thanksgiving coping strategy that, we hope, will help you to [ engage with / learn from / shame ] your relatives, and to [ win / survive / possibly even eke out a tiny bit of human warmth from ] your holiday. We hope, too, that this advice helps to bring some sorely needed unity to all of our seasonal celebrations. Because if we can’t be brought together with [ turkey / mashed potatoes / yams / stuffing / turkey that is reheated on Friday, along with mashed potatoes and yams and stuffing, to form a glorious and only slightly soggy Gratitude Casserole ], then what even is the point? Of anything? That’s one final thing the citizens of this divided nation can agree on, in the end: We’re all going to need some good and tasty sustenance if we’re going to [ keep / make ] America [ great / great again ].

Lion Is Inspirational Storytelling Done Right

The bizarre, true story of Saroo Brierley’s life—an odyssey from India to Australia and back—feels totemic, like something an ancient poet might sing of. As a boy, Brierley was torn from his family through a series of unfortunate coincidences and taken into a new and loving home, only to, decades later, chart his way back to a place he’d basically forgotten. But Brierley’s story is also a distinctly modern epic: a hero’s journey where Google Earth is a magical pathfinder, a tale of family that seriously explores how adoption can muddle notions of racial identity.

In adapting Brierley’s life for the new film Lion, the director Garth Davis wisely avoids adding dramatic embellishments to a narrative whose premise already sounds like awards-season material. But Brierley’s separation from his birth family, and his journey home, is almost too extraordinary to be fiction. Davis manages to keep hold of that authenticity throughout the movie, grounding its most absurd twists and turns with texture and detail, and never succumbing to the gauzy sentimentality that can pervade “human interest” yarns. Lion isn’t an especially innovative movie, but as a piece of inspirational storytelling, it’s a standout.

The film’s first (and best) act, which follows Brierley’s journey from India to Australia as a 5-year-old boy, is equal parts mesmerizing and terrifying. On an excursion with his brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) from his small town to a nearby rail station, Saroo (the adorable Sunny Pawar) gets separated from him and climbs onto a train car by mistake. The train, and Saroo, is then taken almost a thousand miles across the country to Kolkata, where he doesn’t speak the local language and begins to walk the streets with other lost children. When he tells authorities the name of his hometown, he receives baffled shrugs. Eventually, he’s taken to an orphanage and flown to Tasmania, Australia, where a well-meaning couple (played by David Wenham and Nicole Kidman) raises him in relative comfort.

Davis, who collaborated with Jane Campion on the wonderful BBC miniseries Top of the Lake, doesn’t frame Saroo as a statistic (India has more than 30 million orphans, a vast majority of them girls). The film repeatedly cuts back to Saroo’s memories of his mother and brother, including vague, dreamlike bird’s-eye photography of his hometown. Davis wants the viewer to understand the profundity of the images lodged in Saroo’s brain, even as he gets older and the recollections grow fuzzier. The unusual, accidental circumstances of his “abandonment” help keep his hope alive. As Saroo later tells his friends, he’s a lost boy, rather than a rejected one.

As a grown-up, Saroo (played now by Dev Patel) is handsome, if brooding, and his Indian roots have been all but erased by an adolescence with the Brierleys. He has a brother, also adopted from India, who never adjusted as well to his new home and wears that trauma openly. Saroo is much more good-natured, but the cracks in his self-image start to show; when he meets a group of Indian students in college, he can’t relate to them culturally, though when they serve him jalebi, a sweet snack he remembers from his childhood, he freezes in painful recognition.

It’s not easy to dramatize the loss of cultural identity, but Davis and Patel succeed (with the help of Luke Davies’ script) by rendering Saroo’s internal conflict with subtlety. In the slower mid-section of the film, Saroo doesn’t take his frustrations out on the people around him, nor does he actively vocalize his confusion. Overall, he’s happy with his life while knowing that there’s a giant piece of the puzzle missing.  Saroo’s girlfriend (Lucy, played by Rooney Mara, who does her best with an underwritten role) eventually encourages him to seek out his birth family, and he uses Google Earth to try and track down the town he’s from, though the name he remembers appears on no map.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Lion builds to an emotional conclusion; Brierley’s story, which he recounted in his autobiography A Long Way Home, received the Oscar-fodder treatment for a reason. It’s toward the end where Davis leans hardest on the “inspirational drama” tropes, but they’re well-earned by solid performances and the director’s attention to nuance. The film’s finale might feel a tad familiar, but Lion is ultimately an excellent example of its type—a resonant true story told, not with manipulative cliches, but with refreshing confidence.

Writing With Infinite Pity

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

Doug McLean

In his introduction to The Wes Anderson Collection, the writer Michael Chabon suggests that novels are like scale models: They’re small, self-contained dioramas that manage to convey something much larger than they are. Works of fiction, of course, can’t really contain the entire world (or even an entire country, or city, or single human life) any more than the Queens Museum’s 1:1200-scale Manhattan panorama can show us everything about New York. Still, it’s the artist’s job to convince us otherwise, to make us feel as though, within a finite span of pages, we’ve somehow seen the whole damn thing.

That is the explicit project of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph,” a story that attempts to sketch the universe in a single, luminous paragraph. When the narrator glimpses infinity in a Buenos Aires basement, his challenge is to try to report back on what he’s seen. In a conversation for this series, Chabon explained how Borges conjures a sense of cosmic scope by, paradoxically, bringing a warm-blooded human being to life in all his vividness and specificity. It’s a master class on character and description, on how to select the best details from a vast array of conceivable choices.

Chabon’s new novel, Moonglow, is the latest romance in contemporary literature’s ongoing affair with auto-fiction: The author has cast himself in a novel about his life. As a narrator named Michael Chabon recounts the story of his grandparents, two greatest-generation Jewish lives indelibly shaped by World War II, he sticks to the facts whenever possible. But he freely admits that, when real life gets in the way of the truth, he’s going to make stuff up.

Chabon is the author of seven other novels (include the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), two story collections, and two books of essays. He spoke to me by phone.

Michael Chabon: “The Aleph” is about a weird house, and a weird family with a secret, and the innocent but involved narrator who is inexorably drawn towards the horrible thing hidden in the basement. It follows the classic pattern of one of H. P. Lovecraft’s horror stories, which are themselves modeled after certain stories by Edgar Allan Poe—though this is more of a wonder story than a horror story. “The Aleph” is like what a Lovecraft story would be if Lovecraft were a truly great writer, one of the greatest of all time. I’m a lifelong lover of H. P. Lovecraft, but he’s no Borges.

In Lovecraft, the universe is a vast malign entity separated from our humdrum existence—what we’d call “reality”—by the thinnest of membranes. Very persuasively, with all the obsessive fervor of a great writer, he conveys that cosmic, carnivorous destruction is always out there looking for a way in, always feeling for the spots where that membrane is thinnest. But he doesn’t take that next step—making you believe that this experience is being undergone by a fully developed, conscious individual human being with a long past of heartache and sorrow and romantic entanglement. In “The Aleph,” Borges manages to do what Lovecraft can’t: he fully integrates an encounter with the infinite into the consciousness of what feels like a living, breathing, human being with stale breath and lint in his pockets.

As “The Aleph” begins, we learn the narrator is in love with a woman who has just died. We witness his heartbreak in the incredible first sentence, one that would definitely be in contention if I had to choose a favorite opening line:

On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes.

When I first read that sentence, it sounded amazing to me. I loved its language and its pacing, though I had never actually experienced the phenomenon it’s trying to capture: the sense, after somebody you love has died, of how things plod on in such a banal way. In this one sentence, Borges captures the complete indifference of the universe to the people you love. It’s definitely one that, over the years, I’ve tried to model various of my own first sentences after.

The narrator begins paying regular calls on Beatriz Viterbo’s family, every year on the anniversary of her death. As a consequence, he develops a complicated and not entirely amicable relationship with her cousin, a man named Carlos Argentino Daneri, who lives in the family home. The narrator is a literary man, and Daneri also has literary aspirations. Eventually Daneri lets on that he's working on this epic poem—one that is going to, according to him, describe everything in the world, almost like a catalog of the universe. One day, Daneri invites the narrator over to see something, a secret he’s been concealing in the house for his whole life. A “discovery,” he calls it.

He brings the narrator down into the cellar of his house, and gives him a cloth—a kind of folded sack to kneel on, to protect his knees—and tells him to look up at a certain spot, a kind of window he can look into if his head is at just the right level. There’s a deliberate invocation of that moment in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” where the narrator briefly wonders if Carlos has lost his mind, and has brought him down into the basement to kill him.

Before you’ve even seen anything, Borges discreetly lowers your expectations.

But when he opens his eyes, suddenly, he sees the Aleph.

An Aleph (which is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet) turns out to be a point from which you can see every point in the universe, from every possible point of view. Borges uses the word “universe,” but what’s revealed here is not a Carl Sagan thing, with billions of stars—it’s a more local version of the universe, what we would probably call “the world.” Yet it's still infinite, nonetheless. The narrator admits he lacks the words to describe what he saw:

In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can.

I love the way he sets this up. Because this is impossible, right? There’s no way to convey the experience of seeing the entire world from every possible point of view, all at the same time, without any of those views overlapping. You can’t do it in the space of a paragraph, or the space of a story, or of a novel, or of an entire book, or an entire library of books. So the way he handles it is by acknowledging the impossibility at the beginning—which is a really useful strategy for a writer, something I definitely learned from studying the story. Before you’ve even seen anything, Borges discreetly lowers your expectations.

Then, having lowered your expectations, he presents you with this long, miraculous paragraph, one of the most stunning passages I’ve ever read. It starts this way:

I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me…

It’s just a list, this paragraph; the listiness of it is far from being concealed. Borges goes right ahead repeating those two words, “I saw”—I saw this, I saw that, on and on. But somehow that repetition gives the passage this incredible incantatory power, managing to convey a kind of infinitude. It casts this magical spell, and it convinces you.

After a long catalog—including the insects and animals and gardens and snows of the world, a translation of Pliny, a Scottish woman with cancer in her breast—the paragraph ends this way:

I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon—the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

I love the last, dazzling item on the list: I saw your face. Borges wrote the story in 1939 or 1940, and the line would have had power then. You, the reader, become an object in the universe depicted here. But reading in 2016, it’s as if he’s reaching out to you across time. You feel so implicated. They have such power, those four simple words coming right at the end, the culmination of everything else that’s been said.

Everything in literature almost always comes down to the question of point of view.

Of course, Borges doesn’t reveal everything here, a complete universe in all its chaos and complexity. How could he? Instead, the passage is an incredible mixture of cosmic things, things the narrator has never seen and places he has never been, layered very poignantly and strategically with quite personal things. Details that reinforce the romantic, emotional predicament of a man who was hopelessly, wordlessly in love with a woman who did not love him in return. That unrequited love he's been carrying with him for all these years emerges through the details. That’s one of the fundamental things you have to do as a fiction writer: learn to produce the right details from a sea of choices—not just the ones that are plausible, but the things that convey a sense of who a character is. As a writer, you, too, have essentially infinite details to choose from, and in a way this passage both postulates and demonstrates the technique by which you have to choose.

For me, almost everything in literature almost always comes down to the question of point of view. Whose story is this, and who's telling the story of that person? Ultimately, it just boils down to word choice, the words you choose to persuade the reader that this is the point of view of a particular human being. In my own work, it comes down to finding the right voice for the story that I'm trying to tell. Trying to hit on that right narrator, on that right voice, on that correct point of view—whether it’s a limited point of view, or an omniscient point of view, or a first-person or third-person one. Once I have a sense of that, then it’s about what kind of tone to adopt, and the narrator’s relationship to the material. If it is a first-person narrator, is it retrospective, looking back with the gathered wisdom of all the time that has passed since the events that are under discussion occurred? Or is it someone who's in the thick of it, narrating?

Sometimes those questions all get settled instantly. In my second novel, Wonder Boys, the first sentence came to me as I was writing it, just as it was eventually published. It's a first-person sentence: "The first real writer I ever knew was a man who did all of his work under the name of August Van Zorn." That gave me a series of questions to answer: who's August Van Zorn and who's this narrator, and why is Van Zorn the first writer he ever knew? The seed of the novel—who would tell the story and what it would be about—was in that first sentence, and it just arrived. I just had to tease it all out, and that was how I wrote the book. That book actually did write itself fairly quickly.

Much more often, I struggle for a while to find the right point of view, the right place to stand and peer into the Aleph of the novel. Your eye lights on things that seem relevant somehow, and you grab hold of them, hoping that the details assemble themselves into what feels like a coherent narrator. Once you've found the voice, then you have to keep at it through the whole piece. That seamless uniformity of tone is probably the most satisfying experience you can have in reading, and it all comes down to those word-by-word choices.

Infinite pity is the proper attitude to have towards your characters.

In the Borges story, the narrator’s reaction to the Aleph—“I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity”—is not how I feel on a daily basis when I’m writing. But it serves as a reminder of what I ought to be feeling while I work, as I’m describing the behavior of human beings and of the world. I ought to be full of infinite wonder and infinite pity when I sit down at my desk, look into an Aleph, and see things, report them, and try to set them down. Wonder, because it’s the appropriate response to that which is new. You have a responsibility, when you’re looking into the personal Aleph of your work, to always try to see things afresh. You are seeing through the eyes of fictional characters who are not you, and they will see things in ways you have never seen them before.

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

There are some fantastic writers out there who are relatively pitiless, whose work demolishes not only the foibles of its characters but the foibles of all of humanity in a merciless, remorseless way. Some of those writers are important and wonderful. But I think the greatest writers are like, say, Tolstoy, who's celebrated for that quality of extending, if not forgiveness, then profound understanding and sympathy to even his most weak, vacillating, or blinkered characters. Not only saying, Aren't we all this way? But fundamentally saying, This is how I am. And since I am this way, too, I can't judge. I can only present with sympathy the way all of us are. This is not something that I manage to accomplish every time I look into the Aleph. But I think it is a useful, valuable codification of what to try for.

A Deleted Tweet Won't Hurt Rogue One

George Lucas wasn’t trying to be subtle when he decided to call the villainous soldiers of his Star Wars series “stormtroopers.” Borrowing the name of the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing was one of the many ways Lucas drew clear parallels between that regime and his fictional Imperial Empire (though the Empire could stand in for any totalitarian power, Lucas has noted that its militaristic uniforms were directly inspired by those in Nazi Germany). To reflect the World War II movies of the 1970s, he stocked the Empire with white British actors who curtly barked orders and committed atrocities with stiff upper lips. That symbolism carried over to last year’s Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens, where the Empire’s successor, The First Order, was introduced conducting a rally that looked straight out of Nuremberg.

Chris Weitz, the writer of the upcoming Star Wars spinoff Rogue One, was drawing on these long-established parallels when he tweeted a few days after the election, “Please note that the Empire is a white supremacist (human) organization.” It’s one that’s opposed in Rogue One “by a multicultural group led by brave women,” chimed in Weitz’s co-writer Gary Whitta. Weitz had strongly criticized President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign on Twitter (and has continued to challenge the transition), but he later deleted that particular comment and apologized for its overt politicization of “innocent” escapism. The move prompted industry speculation that backlash from Trump supporters could hurt the film’s box-office results. But though Weitz’s comments may be stoking controversy in the immediate aftermath of a divisive election season, it’s unlikely that they’ll do lasting damage to Rogue One’s ticket sales. Hollywood creators have long inserted ideological slants into their movies, and even when “politicization” of movies does hurt box office, there are usually other factors at play.

By way of example, The Hollywood Reporter pointed to the lackluster gross of the Ghostbusters summer reboot, which failed to recoup its budget after months of online warfare over its all-female starring cast. Months before its release, Ghostbusters became the target of online outcry that seemed motivated by sexism, both explicit and subtle. Though the film got generally positive reviews and grossed $229 million worldwide, it wasn’t the colossal, franchise-starting hit that its studio, Sony, was hoping for. The easy conclusion, then, is that making anything “political” is bad for business—and that Ghostbusters made the mistake of shutting out a large enough chunk of the ideological spectrum.

Except there was nothing political about Ghostbusters at all. It was a silly, fun sci-fi comedy about a group of paranormal scientists bustin’ ghosts, a broad tale of empowerment that never went remotely out of its way to offend. If you squinted hard enough at its villain, you might see a cartoonish parody of an internet troll, an angry man in his basement ranting about the apocalypse, but it wasn’t much of a condemnation. Sure, Ghostbusters wasn’t helped by the months of online agitation surrounding it—all publicity is not always good publicity, despite the maxim insisting otherwise. But it also suffered from being one of the season’s several franchise reboots, and from a deflated movie-going audience tired of lazy sequels. The Ghostbusters “politicization” was external, and the campaign against it was always hyperbolic; it echoed the charged nastiness of the 2016 presidential campaign rather than trying to comment on it.

It’s possible Rogue One could fall victim to the same online outrage. Weitz, like many artists in Hollywood, is vocal about his political opinions, and his Twitter avatar remains the logo of Star Wars’s Rebel Alliance wearing a safety pin, which has become a symbol of solidarity for persecuted groups. An organized campaign against Rogue One could certainly hurt the film, at least in some marginal way. But the box-office brand of Star Wars is second-to-none, and even with diminished ticket sales, it will likely dwarf all of its competition this Christmas (the film is due for release on December 16).

After all, in 2015, there was talk of a boycott of The Force Awakens from white supremacist groups (because of the film’s black lead actor, John Boyega) and men’s rights activists (because of the film’s female lead, Daisy Ridley). But the film grossed $2 billion worldwide and is the most successful domestic release in history. The release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them also came with a hint of controversy, as its writer J.K. Rowling has spoken about drawing on the present-day “rise of populism” for her story, which is set in the 1920s and features a Hitler-esque figure as its villain. But Fantastic Beasts opened to $218 million worldwide last weekend and seems primed to begin a long-running franchise of films for its studio Warner Bros.

Rogue One, as a spinoff, will be the first Star Wars film with a centered around a woman (Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones). Since the film is set directly before 1977’s A New Hope, her enemy will be the Empire, led by Darth Vader, whose black death’s-head helmet was directly inspired by Nazi soldiers. Having fantasy “bad guys” who serve as a stand-in for America’s World War II enemies is as formulaic as it gets in Hollywood; it’s a trope that’s been revived for every generation, from Star Wars to Indiana Jones to Marvel’s Captain America series. Pointing out the Star Wars Empire’s allegorical ties to white supremacy still shouldn’t be enough to hurt the film’s sales. In the unlikely instance that it does, that outcome should be seen as a reflection on the current political climate, as not proof that artists should keep their more partisan opinions to themselves.

Saturday Night Live Punctures the Liberal Bubble

“It’s been a terrible 18 months,” P.J. O’Rourke said in October, speaking of the marathon presidential campaign. He explained: “I am a political humorist, and it’s been impossible to be funnier than Hillary’s pantsuits; and I’m a political commentator, and I simply can’t get a word in edgewise with Donald Trump around.”

This—the difficulty of satiziring campaigns that so often satirized themselves—was a common complaint as comedians and other commentators tried to apply humor-as-usual to a situation that was neither terribly funny nor terribly usual. And as the reality TV-driven logic that animated the election has settled into the soft grooves of reality itself, the conundrum has only expanded and amplified for O’Rourke and his fellow comedians: How do you make jokes about the new administration in a way that moves beyond simple parody? How do you convert humor into satire? How do you make jokes about a politician whose defining feature is the fact that he is avowedly not political?

One way: You satirize not (just) the person, but the politics themselves. You satirize not (just) the candidates, but the people who supported and/or spurned them. The most remarkable sketch to come out of this weekend’s Saturday Night Live was, to that end, not the show’s cold open—which featured, predictably, “Trump” (Alec Baldwin) coming to terms with his own unpreparedness for the presidency (“Siri, how do I kill ISIS?”)—but rather one of the show’s classic fake ads, pre-produced for the occasion. It was a commercial for a community called “The Bubble.”

“The Bubble is a planned community of like-minded free thinkers—and no one else,” one of the community’s announcers says, as the camera pans across a scale model of a gleaming, white cityscape. Her fellow announcer—a guy who is frank of expression, Warby Parkered of glasses, and safety-pinned of lapel—adds: “So if you’re an open-minded person, come here, and close yourself in it.”

The Bubble is Under the Dome, basically, only with fair-trade coffee, a fondness for McSweeney’s, and copious amounts of self-congratulation. And “The Bubble,” the fake ad, is a parody of a parody of a parody. “The Bubble,” SNL’s announcer explains, “will be a fully-functioning city-state—with things everybody loves! Like hybrid cars! Used bookstores!” (Cut to a woman engrossed in Between the World and Me.) “And small farms with the rawest milk you’ve ever tasted!”

The ad concludes: “It’s their America now. We’ll be fine—right here in The Bubble.”

It’s a powerful segment—and not only because it’s intimately informed by things SNL’s writers likely know very well: the cultural and commercial habits of a very particular, and very stereotypical, cross-section of young progressives. “The Bubble” is Brooklyn, essentially, presented at once as geography and as a very precise set of political assumptions. SNL, with “The Bubble,” is making fun of that, and of itself—of its own generally progressive viewers, of its own generally progressive writers. It is having fun with, but also giving credence to, one of the criticisms most commonly lobbed against progressives: that they are smug. And that they are, in their way, just as narrow-minded as the people they condemn for their provincialism.

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That wasn’t the only thing that made the sketch so powerful, though. “The Bubble” was also poking fun at—and, in the best way, exploring—some of the broader ideas that have informed aftermath of a divisive election: ideas about filter bubbles and homophily and destructive partisanship. SNL’s ad for The Bubble talked about “things everybody loves,” listing things that … really only some bodies love. The ad, in a pointed rebuke to Barack Obama’s united version, talked about “their America.” And then it talked about “we.” It took the transcendent anxieties of the current political moment—the fear that this vitriolic campaign might have fundamentally altered the “we” of the Declaration and the Constitution, the “we” whose realization has been the most crucial purpose of the American experiment—and satirized them.

In all that, “The Bubble” may have hinted at what SNL might continue to offer as President-Elect Trump becomes President Trump, and as the United States continues to consider what the “united” in its own name might continue to mean. “The Bubble” was akin, after all, to the parody of CNN it aired during the Saturday’s show, which compared members of the American news media to Westworld’s robots. It was also akin to the show’s most recent Black Jeopardy sketch, which highlighted the commonalities between African-American voters and the voters who supported Trump, and above all considered people’s ability to talk with—rather than at or over—each other. It was another silly sketch that was also doing something profound: questioning whether the nation can, still, come together to have a conversation with itself.

Saturday Night Live has been at its best through the years when it’s been able to take small observations—and small ironies—and amplify them into satire. Ronald Reagan, secret genius. “Bitch is the new black.” “I can see Russia from my house!” Here, now, is that signature observational power applied not just to politicians, but to the people who give them their power. “The Bubble” suggested an answer to P.J. O’Rourke’s comedy conundrum: to satirize not just campaigns, but cultures. This week’s CNN sketch mocked the network for its rhythmic predictability. If SNL wants to avoid that same pitfall—if it wants to avoid a cycle of “mock Trump, then anger Trump, then promise to mock him some more”—it’s good strategy, and good comedy, to focus on “we, the people.”

The Feedback Loop of Doom for Democratic Norms

Shortly before the election, an old letter from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton was widely circulated. The note was written on January 20, 1993, as Bush—whom Clinton had defeated in a sometimes tense presidential campaign—was preparing to leave the White House for the final time as president. It is, by any estimation, a model of grace, dignity, and civility, even for the man who had beaten him in a tough race.

That letter has continued to resurface in the days since the election, as many Americans wonder how a Trump presidency will change the nation, and about the relationship between Trump and the outgoing president. In recent memory, former presidents have worked to avoid criticizing their successors. This was true of Bush and Clinton, of Clinton and Bush’s son George W. Bush, and true of the younger Bush and Obama. (George W. Bush’s political toxicity in the years immediately following his departure made his sabbatical easier.) But Trump rose to political prominence with a racist campaign questioning Barack Obama’s legitimacy as a president and a citizen; Obama campaigned hard against Trump, flatly calling him unfit for the presidency. Such a letter from Obama to Trump seemed inconceivable.

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That’s made the transition period particularly interesting to watch. Things started off with an outwardly cordial meeting between the two men. According to unnamed sources who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, however, Obama was concerned by Trump’s lack of preparation. “After meeting with Mr. Trump, the only person to be elected president without having held a government or military position, Mr. Obama realized the Republican needs more guidance,” the paper reported. “He plans to spend more time with his successor than presidents typically do, people familiar with the matter said.”

The anonymous sniping aside, that’s a sign of cooperation. But in a press conference Sunday in Peru, Obama was asked whether he would follow the tradition of not publicly criticizing his successor. He gave a typically Obamian answer—careful, lawyerly, and premised on parsing divisions not necessarily apparent to others.

“I want to be respectful of the office and give the president-elect an opportunity to put forward his platform and his arguments without somebody popping off in every instance,” he said.

Obama added: “As an American citizen who cares deeply about our country, if there are issues that have less to do with the specifics of some legislative proposal or battle, but go to core questions about our values and our ideals, and if I think that it's necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, then I'll examine it when it comes.”

His comments confirm press reports in recent days that Obama might seek to take a more active role in politics than his predecessors. Some of this is political exigency: The Democratic Party finds itself largely without leaders. With Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the Clinton dynasty is fading into the mists of history, and there’s no obvious successor. Without Obama on the stage, his party is bereft of a figurehead.

The line that Obama draws, between partisan politics on one hand and “core questions about our values and our ideals,” is a fine one, and it’s one that not everyone may recognize, or locate in the same place. As the Washington Free Beacon tartly points out, Obama has repeatedly used the phrase “not who we are” when assailing political concepts. To choose a specific example, the president has said that Trump’s plans to deport millions of immigrants are “not who we are as Americans.” Is that a question of politics, or of core values? Perhaps this is an obvious example of politics, a legislative push. But what about, say, ghosting on NATO? Where would that fall? Obama may know the line when he sees it, but there’s no guarantee that most other Americans will see it in the same place. Some people may see no difference between the two at all.

Thus the paradox: In his quest to defend the small-d democratic norms of the United States, Obama is suggesting that he will contravene a different, if more minor, norm. This is probably defensible. If Obama truly sees something that Trump is doing as perilous to the integrity of the American project, why should he keep quiet? But if the only way to protect norms is to destroy norms, the effect is a feedback doom-loop for norms in general.

The political scientist Brendan Nyhan has been sounding an alarm about the contours of the Trump transition so far, arguing that his actions—from refusing to set up the customary press pool to the blatant conflicts of interest posed by his business to his attempts to circumvent federal anti-nepotism laws—risk eroding the bedrock of democracy, and pushing the United States toward illiberalism and autocracy. Perhaps these warnings seem overwrought; perhaps Trump poses no serious threat to American democracy as such. But the way that Obama is already being tempted to abandon the detachment customary for former presidents shows the ways that norms are already fading. Even the establishment-minded president cannot avoid the centripetal force pulling him into the gyre.

Of course, some people just don’t like norms. It illuminates the challenge facing those who are deeply concerned about the preservation of these norms to realize that it is not just that Trump’s supporters tend to be unconcerned about preserving them. Tearing down the establishment was a major rallying cry for the Trump campaign. In one of the more intriguing, and concerning findings, some voters who felt that Trump was unqualified or temperamentally unfit to be president voted for him anyway, in part out of fury at a system they believed had failed. For these anti-establishment Trump backers, tearing down norms isn’t simply collateral damage of his ideological agenda. It is the ideological agenda. And if defenders of those norms like Barack Obama can be unwittingly or unwillingly enlisted, all the better.

Jazz Painting and Boxing Movies: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Why Are There So Many Boxing Movies?

Sam Schube | The Ringer

“The boxing movie is perfectly engineered to straddle the line between prestige and populism. Add it all up: If a boxing movie isn’t about the triumph of the human spirit (and it usually is), it’s about the agony of defeat. No matter the supporting cast, it is ultimately the story of one man (or woman) literally fighting the enemy. Sometimes that enemy is an opponent; just as often, it’s the fighter’s own demons.”

Martha Stewart, Comedy Genius?

Ian Crouch | The New Yorker

“When the real Martha Stewart has been funny over the years, the humor has mostly seemed to be an unintentional byproduct of her seriousness. There is, for instance, a kind of demented hilarity in the monthly calendar that leads each issue of Stewart’s magazine, in which she publicly plots out her plans to make holiday wreaths, harvest her pumpkins, or oil the saddles for her horses.”

Michael Chabon Is an Underdog on Top of the World

Doree Shafrir | Buzzfeed

“Still, Chabon’s surprise and wonder at going viral in 2016 seemed in no small way to be the appropriate culmination of a lifetime of feeling like the outsider. Having a bestselling novel has, of course, its own potency, but there is a rush to going viral that he had never experienced before. More than 40 years after the failure of the Columbia Comic Book Club, Chabon has found communities and clubs where he wasn’t even looking for them.”

How the First Online Game Consoles Changed Everything

Keza MacDonald | Glixel

“A recent resurgence of colorful, riotous indie multiplayer games like Overcooked, Nidhogg, and Towerfall: Ascension, however, shows that video game creatives have not forgotten the irreproducible joy of living-room play. Nintendo, meanwhile, ever mindful of the power of games to either connect or isolate us, has finally embraced the best of what connected gaming has enabled, but remains stubbornly committed to the idea of playing Mario Kart with other real people.”

Stuart Davis, Jazz Artist

Philip Kennicott | The Washington Post

“Davis wanted to be seen as a deeply American painter, and there is nothing more American than jazz. He also wanted to find a middle ground between formalism and art that was about something in the world. Jazz, as subject matter, seemed to ground his paintings in a fresh new Americana; it connected them not to the airy ratiocination of European art but to the yawping prosody of Walt Whitman and the grittiness of popular culture.”

Remembering Leonard Cohen

Sasha Frere-Jones | Billboard

“Cohen’s work as a songwriter followed the same ­painstaking methods of his poetry; he constantly rewrote and generated multiple drafts. The result put him at a distance from Dylan, his twin tower. Where the American generated tension with spirals of words that had no end and no single meaning, the Canadian worked toward brevity and easily ­understood couplets.”



Criticism in the Twilight

Nicholas Dames | The Nation

“The seductiveness of criticism is that this doesn’t necessarily matter. If critics are exceptional, and exceptionally lucky, their manner will endure as a personal style, a way of describing and feeling a historical situation, that is available to others for imitation. With criticism, it’s best to reverse D.H. Lawrence’s famous motto: Trust the teller, not the tale.”

Making and Unmaking the Asian American Movement

Michelle Chen | The Asian American Writers’ Workshop

“Before the movement emerged, Asians in the United States lived largely within insular cultural enclaves like the early Chinatowns, where merchants and laborers squeezed into crowded corners of New York, San Francisco, and other cities with burgeoning Asian migrant populations. These neighborhoods were products of legal exclusion and racial persecution, walled off from the outside yet strafed internally by ethnic divides and machine politics.”

How the Art World Can Change for the Better During Trump

Caroline Woolard | Hyperallergic

“What group can build something that they have not yet imagined, drawn, debated, revised, or desired? To communicate dreams—to create discursive spaces for dreaming and discussion—the arts are essential.”

Leonard Cohen, Judaism's Bard

Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, Allen Konigsberg became Woody Allen, but Leonard Cohen stayed Leonard Cohen. Coming of age at a time when showbusiness demanded Jews not make their background too obvious, Cohen was happy to be named less like a folk icon than a senior partner in an accountancy firm. It seems an obvious point, but it nods to a larger one that was either overlooked or underplayed in the extensive obituaries that followed Cohen's death last week. Put simply, Cohen was an intensely Jewish artist—along with Philip Roth, perhaps the most deeply Jewish artist of the last century.

Of course, there’s been no shortage of writers or performers with a Jewish sensibility. Allen's earliest films were steeped in Brooklyn shrugs and Manhattan angst, with plenty of Jewish neurotic shtick. Dylan's “Neighbourhood Bully,” telling of a besieged, encircled state of Israel, might be the most AIPAC-friendly song in the rock canon. But the Jewishness of Cohen's work is on an entirely different level.

Sure, he could adopt the requisite shrug of self-deprecation. “I'm the little Jew who wrote the bible,” he sang in “The Future.” And he was finely attuned to the epic forces of 20th-century Jewish history. “Dance Me to the End of Love” was prompted by the knowledge that a string quartet played at the Nazi death camps: “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,” Cohen sings. In 1973, he volunteered to fight for Israel during the Yom Kippur war, saying, “I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people.” Told he was more use wielding his voice than a gun, he entertained IDF troops in back-to-back performances. During a 2009 concert in Ramat Gan, he blessed his audiences with the ancient benediction of the Cohanim—the priesthood from which his name is derived.

But none of this is what sets Leonard Cohen apart as a singularly Jewish artist. Rather it's his deep and serious engagement with not only Jewish culture and history, but with Judaism itself.

His new and last album, You Want It Darker, for example, begins with the choir of the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue he grew up in. The chazan, or cantor, of that synagogue sings on the title track, incanting the single word Hineni, a word of tremendous significance for religious Jews. Here I am. It is the answer Abraham, the first Jew, gave when God called out to him, asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac. (The same episode is recalled by Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited.) It’s the reply Moses gives when God speaks to him through the burning bush. It stands as a declaration of submission to divine authority (submission being a frequent Cohen motif). In the song, Cohen follows Hineni with the unambiguous statement, “I'm ready, my Lord”, as if offering himself up for death.

These threads, spun from Judaism's holiest texts, run throughout the Cohen songbook. Hallelujah's invocation of the young King David, playing a “secret chord” on his lyre, is surely his most famous lyric, but for anyone familiar with the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur liturgy, it’s “Who By Fire” that strikes the more poignant nerve. Cohen adapts the central Unetanneh Tokef prayer, which imagines God as a judge, determining who shall live and who shall die in the coming year. “Who by fire, who by water,” sings Cohen, “Who in the sunshine, who in the nighttime, who by high ordeal, who by common trial ...” I’ve sat in more than one synagogue during the High Holydays, hearing those verses read out. The claim that the song has become part of contemporary Jewish liturgy is not spurious.

But Cohen also mined less familiar seams of Jewish teaching. One of his most enduring lyrics comes in “Anthem.” It is a verse to alleviate the gloom, urging human beings to see the beauty in their own flaws, to believe that even sadness can lead to joy. “Forget your perfect offering,” he sings, “There is a crack in everything. It's how the light gets in.”

It's a humane, tender idea, but few might realize that it’s drawn from the deepest well of kabbalah. According to the 16th century rabbi and mystic, Isaac Luria, God created vessels into which he poured his holy light. These vessels weren’t strong enough to contain such a powerful force and they shattered: the sparks of divine light were carried down to earth along with the broken shards. Put another way: There is a crack in everything, it's how the light gets in.

The message was universal—but the voice was always Jewish.

This relatively obscure idea—known as Shevirat HaKelim—would be unlikely to have crossed the radar of most artists. But Cohen was a serious student of Jewish mysticism. The 1974 documentary Bird on a Wire shows him onstage in Jerusalem and, when he finds himself unable to perform, he offers a kabbalistic epigram to his audience by way of explanation. In his magnificent New Yorker profile published last month, David Remnick records that Cohen was a close reader of a multivolume edition of the Zohar, the key kabbalistic text, and that he regularly studied mysticism with the rabbi of Ohr HaTorah synagogue, on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles.

That same piece was peppered with Cohen's references to Jewish psalms and religious teaching. He speaks of the prohibition on pronouncing God's name and, in his last quoted remark, sums up like this: “What I mean to say is that you hear the Bat Kol.” The divine voice.

Of course, Cohen was catholic in his religious influences. His songs are replete with Christian as well as Jewish imagery, from the bleeding cross to the Sisters of Mercy to “my sacred heart.” And everybody knows that he was a restless seeker after spiritual truth, spending many years as a monk in the Buddhist retreat on Mount Baldy, California.

But he was always at pains to stress that none of this meant he ever broke from Judaism. He told the BBC in 2007 that his “investigations into other spiritual systems have certainly illuminated and enriched my understanding of my own tradition,” but that “I very much feel part of that tradition—and I practice that and my children practice that. So that was never in question.”

In accordance with his wishes, Cohen's body was buried in the cemetery of that same Shaar Hashomayim orthodox synagogue in Montreal, alongside his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. The ceremony was in keeping with Jewish religious tradition, save for one addition: the lyrics to “You Want it Darker” were read out, including the words, “Hineni, Hineni, I'm ready my Lord.” It was a final reminder that, in a body of great work produced by an outstanding artist, the message was universal—but the voice was always Jewish.

Nocturnal Animals: The Art Without the Heart

When Tom Ford, already an iconic figure in the world of fashion, made his cinematic debut in 2009 with A Single Man, it was easy to be skeptical: The universe is rarely kind to those who excel in one field and then try to conquer another. (Just ask Michael Jordan about his baseball career.) But A Single Man was—of course—a fascinating exercise in style. Moreover, it was elevated into something greater by an extraordinary central performance by Colin Firth, who should have won an Oscar then and there instead of having to wait another year for The King’s Speech.

Nocturnal Animals shares the exceptional style of A Single Man. But it lacks a profoundly humanizing performance on a par with Firth’s. It offers, in a phrase, the art without the heart.

How appropriate, then, that the film’s protagonist, Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), owns an art gallery, and one for which she has largely lost her enthusiasm. Nor is this ennui limited to her professional life. She lives in an immaculately modern L.A. mansion locked tight behind a polished metal gate. (Entering the premises is a bit like climbing into a piece of high-end kitchen equipment.) Her successful husband (Armie Hammer) is increasingly neither: his failing business serves as an excuse for the “late nights” that keep him from her bed and the “work trip” that interferes with her hoped-for beach getaway. It’s clear that Adams has achieved the life that she always wanted, and that it’s hardly a life at all.

But then Susan receives a package in the mail, a book manuscript from the lover, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), to whom she was briefly married in her early twenties. The book is dedicated to her and titled, after the nickname Edward had bestowed upon her due to her insomnia, Nocturnal Animals. Susan begins reading.

The text of the novel provides a film-within-the-film: Tony Hastings (also played by Gyllenhaal) is taking a road trip with his wife and daughter that entails a late-night drive across the barren scrub of West Texas. (In a cunning bit of casting, the wife is played by Isla Fisher, who thus fulfills her manifest destiny of serving as Amy Adams’s understudy.) Their car is forced off the road by a trio of rural thugs, who abduct Tony’s wife and daughter. I will leave their fate to the imagination, though the film itself is not so kind.

Suffice to say that the remainder of the novel concerns Tony’s quest for justice and/or vengeance, a quest in which he is aided by one Detective Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon). Tony’s “fictional” story is interspersed with Susan’s “real” one—though to be fair, hers mostly consists of reading the novel, taking baths, lying awake in bed, and having flashbacks to her long ago love affair with the book’s author, Edward.

At the center of it all, Adams remains something of a cypher.

The two stories are artfully intertwined—at times a bit too artfully. When Tony bathes, in order to scrape off the dust and sweat of West Texas, Susan bathes, because—well, that what you apparently do if you’re a wealthy Los Angelean who’s lost interest in her career and her marriage.

Gradually, deeper parallels emerge. Susan wounded her ex-love Edward grievously when she left him over his writerly dreaminess and lack of ambition. (Laura Linney has a marvelous cameo in flashback as Susan’s socialite mother, warning that she would eventually do exactly this: “Just wait,” she purrs. “We all eventually turn into our mothers.”) Meanwhile Tony, Edward’s literary stand-in, suffers wounds decidedly more vivid in nature. But despite the distance between them, both of the film’s locales—gleaming, spotless Los Angeles; arid, sun-scorched Texas—remain relatively sterile and lifeless.

Gyllenhaal continues his recent run of strong performances as Edward/Tony, although his character is by nature secondary. And while Shannon is exemplary as the ever-so-shady lawman, he doesn’t show us anything we haven’t seen from him before. At the center of it all, Adams remains something of a cypher. Hers was the performance that needed to break free of Ford’s immaculate frame, as Firth’s did in A Single Man, and it doesn’t quite succeed. Although she is playing a form of acute and lingering sadness, it never registers as deeply as it did in her marvelous turn in last week’s Arrival.

Nocturnal Animals is an intriguing, well-wrought film that explores penetrating questions: choice versus indecision, commitment—to art, to love, to revenge—versus cowardice. But for all its strengths it never quite breaks below the surface.

The Edge of Seventeen Is an Instant Teen Classic

Teenagers, you might have heard, can be a bit of a handful. Feed them into the Hollywood-movie machine, though, and their problems usually get solved—broken friendships are healed, potential romances are consummated, important life lessons are learned. But the director Kelly Fremon Craig’s debut film The Edge of Seventeen feints away from every adolescent cliché to create something far more wholly realized. The result is a story of young adulthood that isn’t afraid to be abrasive and emotionally confusing, while also making space for rare instances of vulnerability and tenderness.

The Edge of Seventeen is a sharp portrait of a 17-year-old roiled by hormones and emotions. Craig is candid about what a nightmare her protagonist Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) can be. Nadine is prone to moments of cruelty or gracelessness, and proves at times to be incapable of self-awareness, despite her obvious intelligence. She’s frustrating, but she also feels like an authentic person, which makes it easy to be invested in her many misadventures throughout the school year. As an R-rated, small-budget dramedy, the movie might get buried in cinemas by a slew of Thanksgiving blockbusters, but it seems destined for a long shelf life as a young-adult classic.

Craig’s first stroke of genius is in not defining Nadine as any particular type of outcast. She’s just a little too acerbic to fit in, but she’s also clearly uninterested in modulating her personality to blend into the background. Nadine has a bit of a dark edge, partly because her father (Eric Keenleyside) died a few years earlier, but, she notes, that trauma seemingly drove her jock brother Darian (Blake Jenner) to become even more popular. Nadine’s best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), a more “normal” classmate, helps keep her afloat, but that uneasy peace implodes when Krista and Darian begin dating at the start of the film.

From there on, The Edge of Seventeen is a delightful mix of foul-mouthed and grumpy comedy, small-scale self-destructiveness, and tentative romance. Nadine cuts off her relationship with Krista, and the psychic scars begin to show, as she forges a new friendship with Erwin (Hayden Szeto), a rich Asian boy at her school who has his own credible disaffections. The film doesn’t have any wild dramatic twists or moments of terrible danger. Instead, it tries to put the viewer firmly into Nadine’s discombobulated headspace and have them sympathize every time she lashes out—not because she’s in the right, but because most people felt the same at some point in their youth.

Steinfeld helps Craig’s wonderful script along by giving a superb lead performance, one that finally delivers on the tremendous promise she showed in her Oscar-nominated turn in the Coen Brothers’ True Grit (2010). Where that movie’s vengeful Mattie Ross was stoic and single-minded, Nadine is passionate and misdirected. Steinfeld manages to powerfully convey Nadine’s emotions, even if the character herself isn’t always in touch with how she feels. Since the film is relatively light on plot, Steinfeld has to bear the burden of keeping The Edge of Seventeen compelling. She does so perfectly.

The supporting cast certainly helps—Jenner (who played a more charming doofus in Everybody Wants Some!! this year) is perfectly inscrutable as Nadine’s older brother, who’s frustrated with his sister’s mood swings. Woody Harrelson, handed the supreme cliché role of cliché roles (as the wise teacher Mr. Bruner), is a hilariously mean foil for Nadine as an educator whose compassion has been chipped away at by years of experience in the public-school system. As the straight-arrow Erwin, who’s clearly interested in Nadine but has no idea how to snap her out of her various reveries, Szeto is a delight, as well as a refreshing choice for a romantic lead in a genre that usually relegates Asian performers to sidekick roles.

But The Edge of Seventeen begins and ends with Nadine, the kind of character you might wish you could pull off the screen just to shake some sense into her. Craig builds out her emotional arc slowly but surely, contextualizing Nadine’s depression and her cynicism through flashbacks in a way that never feels patronizing. She’s unpredictable—and can be rude and insightful within the same sentence. But more than anything, she’s someone to root for, because she’s portrayed as a complex person, not as a representative for a whole demographic. This is a movie about a teen, first and foremost, rather than a “teen movie,” and that’s exactly what makes it feel like a peerless example for the genre.