Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 440

Stale-ish

No part of Showtime’s new comedy Happyish feels remotely original, but there’s a moment in its pilot episode that's one of the most unforgivably stale tropes in Hollywood: a lame bit of dramatic shorthand used to convey the pressures of encroaching middle age. Grumpy advertising executive Thom (Steve Coogan) is in bed with his wife, Lee (Kathryn Hahn), trying to clear the mental space to have sex, when his kid calls from the other room, baying for his mother, and stopping any coitus before it even had a chance to be interruptus.

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Television-viewing audiences must reject this ossified bit of symbolism. Yes, it's hard juggling a six-year-old kid and an extremely charming, beautiful wife, but that struggle isn't enough to serve as the narrative engine of a whole TV show. And yet that's basically what Happyish has going for it—it’s a bleak comedy of aging, about a man in his 40s who should be content with his life, but who nonetheless finds himself struggling with depression and work-related anxiety. Despite its assembled talent, and occasionally sharp or surreal moments, it never manages to be the deeply insightful dark comedy it thinks it is.

Happyish has had an extremely rocky road to the screen. Created by the author and essayist Shalom Auslander (who wrote the memoir Foreskin’s Lament), a pilot was initially filmed starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and ordered to series by Showtime, but those plans were stalled after the actor's death in 2014. Coogan was eventually hired as a replacement and the show was retooled around him. A fine actor and a brilliant comedian, Coogan has a biting, sarcastic energy that feels restrained most of the time; Thom seems much too smart to believe half the things he’s supposedly thinking.

The internal drama of Happyish is a little too facile to provoke any real pathos. Thom lives in a cute house in Woodstock, New York, with a wife who's by all accounts a terrific lady (Hahn is one of Hollywood’s funniest and most consistently wonderful actresses). He's on Prozac, which has dulled his libido, and he commutes to the city with tiresome finance bros who natter on vapidly about Steve Jobs’ genius on the train platform. He works at an ad agency where he’s beginning to feel hopelessly old and is derided for having an AOL account rather than a Facebook page—another overdone trope.

For premium cable audiences, Happyish's brand of cynicism will hardly feel revolutionary.

Thom's boss is played by Bradley Whitford, a pathetic 50-something who desperately strives to stay “with it” to satisfy clients and his own deflated self-worth. With him, the overall message appears to be that working in advertising is a soulless rat race with no hope of fulfillment. No kidding. Isn’t that something Mad Men has been telling viewers for the last seven years? Thom even makes it explicit, telling the audience, “Fuck Mad Men, there’s nothing cool about advertising.” Happyish does that a lot—tears into something perceived to be a sacred idol (the pilot begins with a screed about Thomas Jefferson). But for premium-cable audiences, such cynicism will hardly feel revolutionary.

There’s a little more substance in the Woodstock segments, mostly because Coogan and Hahn are two great actors who find some decent chemistry with each other, despite the underwhelming material. The show swerves from obvious attempts to shock (Thom imagines a conversation with the Keebler Elf that ends in suicide and a sex scene with a cartoon Ma Keebler) to fairly placid observations about the low levels of depression people must accept even as they accumulate the classic markers of success. Thom will never be happy, he decides in the pilot (his voice-over is far too prevalent and often too obvious), but maybe he can live with happy-ish.

It’s a fine sentiment, but just a bit too trite and faux-pithy, in a show that seems a little too pleased with its imagined profundity. That, perhaps, is the Showtime-comedy brand, one that's never really taken root despite the network's great success with its dramas, namely the Emmy-winning Homeland. Happyish gives off the same vibe as Californication, which starred David Duchovny as a sex-crazed novelist with a bleak, clichéd view of society; or Episodes, a damp satire of the TV industry that made Entourage look witty and incisive. Happyish is probably better than either of those shows, but it suffers from the same self-satisfied vibe, and that’s enough to keep it from ever feeling really meaningful.

What Good Is a Video You Can't See?

Soon, thousand of police officers across the country will don body-worn cameras when they go out among the public. Those cameras will generate millions of hours of footage—intimate views of commuters receiving speeding tickets, teens getting arrested for marijuana possession, and assault victims at some of the worst moments of their lives.

As the Washington Post and the Associated Press have reported, lawmakers in at least 15 states have proposed exempting body-cam footage from local open records laws. But the flurry of lawmaking speaks to a larger crisis: Once those millions of hours of footage have been captured, no one is sure what to do with them.

I talked to several representatives from privacy, civil rights, and progressive advocacy groups working on body cameras. Even among these often allied groups, there’s little consensus about the kind of policies that should exist around releasing footage.

Body cameras were introduced as a tool of public accountability, but making their videos available to the public might be too fraught, too complex, and too expensive to actually put into practice.

* * *

Much of the ambiguity around body cameras comes down to this: Despite their general popularity, despite being the only policy change called for by the family of Michael Brown, body cameras are a little weird. They are both a way for the public to see what police officers are doing and a way for people to be surveilled. If a body-cam program, scaled across an entire department, were to release its footage willy-nilly, it would be a privacy catastrophe for untold people. Police-worn cameras don't just capture footage from city streets or other public places. Officers enter people's homes, often when those people are at their most vulnerable.

So while body-cam footage is “very clearly a public interest record,” says Emily Shaw, the national policy manager at the Sunlight Foundation, it is also “just full of private information.”

What’s more, there’s no easy way to fix this. Normally, private information would be redacted out of public records. (The Sunlight Foundation recommends certain easy ways to do this for other kinds of records, such as putting all personal information-containing columns off to one side of a spreadsheet.) But there’s no simple way to compartmentalize the sensitive aspects of video footage. Video isn’t text: It’s dozens of frames per second, each its own potentially private visual. Redacting personal information out of the frame remains both expensive and unreliable, and it might not be possible with algorithms.

“If you just put a swirl blur on somebody’s face, it’s not very difficult to unswirl that blur, and then all of a sudden it’s un-redacted,” Shaw said.

The only effective redaction process might be for technicians to go through a video frame by frame—an exceptionally costly process. Even that might not be enough. “If you have additional data, then you can re-identify people who’ve been anonymized or intentionally anonymized,” Shaw said.

That technique is so prohibitive that some cities have declared the whole situation impossible and blanket-exempted footage from open-records requests. Others are attempting technical solutions: Seattle’s police department is trying to “auto-redact” videos, muting a video’s sound, blurring the picture, and posting it to a YouTube channel.

But some experts say that, if departments can’t deal with the high cost of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, then officers shouldn’t get body cameras.

“If the police cannot handle FOIA requests for body-cam footage, they should not use them,” said Jeramie Scott, a national security counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “There should be no blanket FOIA exemptions for police body cameras.”

Scott thinks existing exemptions, which cover privacy and reducing potential harm to private citizens, work just fine for body cameras.

* * *

If there’s any consensus among experts considering body camera policy, it’s about this: Most groups, including the ACLU, agree that individuals recorded by body cameras should have access to that footage.

Yet implementing even that provision is tricky, says Shaw.

“If there are several people in the video and some of them don’t want it to be public but one of them really does, what happens in that circumstance?,” she told me. “Even if you redact the person who doesn’t want to be seen there, everybody knows this person is an associate of this person who is visible.”

Alex Rosenblat, a researcher at Data and Society, said a policy could have particularly “shady consequences for the victims of domestic violence or sexual assault.”

“What happens when the perpetrator (who may not be prosecuted, particularly if that's not in the best interests of the involved parties) is an additional subject of footage that involves a victim?” said Rosenblat in an email.

Rosenblat added that most conversations about police body cameras concluded that subjects of police recordings who would later regret such a recording need to ask officers to turn their cameras off. But, she said, “that puts the onus of anticipating the downstream effects of police-collected recordings and access issues onto an individual who might not be savvy to them.”

What’s more, police officers themselves are often the subjects of videos too. If a law gives all subjects of recordings unfettered access to them—like Michigan’s proposed body-cam law—does that mean that officers have access to the videos, too? “This would run contrary to the positions of many civil rights advocates, who would support policies that restrict who has access to video internally,” said Rosenblat. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, for example, believes that officers should not have access to footage before they write an incident report.

And while most experts seemed to think that some if not all of the questions about granting subject access to footage will be resolved, it only stands to get more complicated. If police work at a school or hospital, how should that footage be considered? “In the case of schools, it would probably hinge on privacy protections offered to minors, and on whether police body-camera footage in schools are considered student data,” said Rosenblat.

* * *

In this case, laws related to the mass-implementation of body cameras may be outpacing the experts. In the District of Columbia, Mayor Muriel Bowser has moved to exempt all body-camera footage from the city’s open-records law, weeks after promising a new era of accountability and transparency.

Other city leaders have disagreed.

“They are the people’s records. The people bought them,” Delroy Burton, chairman of the city’s police union, told me. Burton said he believes existing open-records limitations are appropriate for body-camera footage. He blamed the mayor’s exemption proposal on her acceleration of the city’s pilot body-camera program.

“I think she was trying to make brownie points, or to score political points—to take what was a three-year plan initially when it was announced” and speed it up, said Burton. (Bowser’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Friday.)

But that may be exactly the problem. It is politically trendy to support body cameras. They have triumphed because cameras sound great in theory. Supported both by officers and reformists, they promise to keep both citizens and cops accountable. But they’re no longer theoretical: Cameras are working tools, riddled with complexities, subject to power. Everyone might support body cameras in theory. No one might support them when they need to implemented in the real world of technology.

Devastation in Nepal

This post will be updated as news develops.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.9 struck western Nepal on Saturday, leveling buildings throughout the country and triggering deadly avalanches on Mount Everest. A spokesperson from Nepal's Health Ministry placed the preliminary death toll of the quake at 888, but the final number is expected to climb much higher. The earthquake is the largest to strike South Asia since 2005, when a tremor in Pakistan-administered Kashmir killed over 80,000.

Saturday's earthquake caused extensive damage in and around Kathmandu, Nepal's densely populated capital, and destroyed numerous historic structures. The Dhararara Tower, a famous 19th century tower in Kathmandu popular with visitors, completely collapsed, trapping several hundred visitors inside. The quake also destroyed much of Vasanthapura, a Kathmandu neighborhood noted for its 11th century architecture, and reduced Patan Durbar Square, a UNESCO Heritage site, to rubble.

This is what we feared for decades -- that a massive earthquake is coming and we would be helpless. Devastated to hear about #Nepal.

— Anup Kaphle (@AnupKaphle) April 25, 2015

On Mount Everest, the earthquake destroyed several base camps at the foot of the peak and unleashed a massive avalanche, reportedly killing 18. Media reports indicate that teams of hikers and guides remain missing on the mountain.

It looks like the worst devastation and most deaths in Nepal came from brick buildings, as usual, and tragically predictable--and predicted.

— Kathryn Schulz (@kathrynschulz) April 25, 2015

A small Himalayan country wedged between China and India, Nepal's natural beauty has long made it a popular destination for tourists. But the country, plagued by poor infrastructure, is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes. According to the Wall Street Journal, Saturday's earthquake was the fourth measuring over 6.0 on the Richter scale to strike Nepal since 1980.

Don Draper and Horror Films: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Could the Planets in Star Wars Actually Support Life?
John Wenz | Wired
"Is a planet without much water capable of sustaining indigenous life like Jawas, Tusken Raiders, and wamp rats?"

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Anchorman: The Legend of Don Lemon
Taffy Brodesser-Akner | GQ
"As far as I can tell, the great Don Lemon gaffe-spotting fest that has become such an Internet phenomenon and journalistic pastime began on July 27, 2013, and it began not with a gaffe but with an unexpected rant about racial mores."

It's Not Done
Leslie Jamison | Slate
"We might all die but at least we don’t have some ghoulish perpetual-motion machine bending our legs forward till we’re face-to-face with our own feet."

An Oral History of Mad Men
Clickhole
"Jon Hamm: I am Hamm. Mad Men is about being the secret man who drinks at work. It is about watching a man explode and then saying, 'I am that man who just exploded. Give me his trophies.'"

Here's Earl
Rembert Browne | Grantland
"I offer a sentence here, an example there, but Earl does most of the talking. It’s this ever-changing convergence of age, perspective, hardship, and life experiences, all crashing into one another. What’s emerging from the rubble is Earl the adult."

Bruce Jenner, Transgender American

After more than a year of rumors and speculation, Bruce Jenner publicly came out as transgender with four simple words: “I am a woman.”

“My brain is much more female than male,” he explained to Diane Sawyer, who conducted a prime-time interview with Jenner on ABC Friday night. (Jenner indicated he prefers to be addressed with male pronouns at this time.) During the two-hour program, Jenner discussed his personal struggle with gender dysphoria and personal identity, how they shaped his past and current relationships and marriages, and how he finally told his family about his gender identity.

During the interview, Sawyer made a conspicuous point of discussing broadly unfamiliar ideas about gender and sexuality to its audience. It didn't always go smoothly; her questions occasionally came off as awkward and tone-deaf. But she showed no lack of empathy.

While transgender people may still be relatively low-profile in the U.S., Jenner himself isn’t. At the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, he won the gold medal in the decathlon for the United States, setting a world record and becoming a national icon overnight. A new generation of Americans knows Jenner from his presence in the Kardashian reality-television empire, thanks to his 1991 marriage to Kris Jenner, the mother of Kim Kardashian, and her sisters Khloe and Kourtney (Bruce and Kris Jenner announced they were divorcing last year). The irony of Jenner’s highly public life and deeply private struggle wasn’t lost on him. “The one real, true story in the family was the one I was hiding that nobody knew about,” he told Sawyer. “The one thing that could really make a difference in people’s lives was right here in my soul, and I could not tell that story.”

Perhaps the show’s most emotional charged moment came when Jenner discussed his struggle hiding his true gender identity from his family and the public. During the interview, Jenner said that his lowest point came during a visit to a doctor’s office last year while he sought a tracheal shave, a form of cosmetic surgery in male-to-female transitions. The paparazzi had been alerted to his visit and ambushed him outside the facility. After the invasion of his privacy and subsequent media speculation, Jenner told Sawyer that he considered committing suicide.

Jenner's announcement comes at a time of increasing visibility for transgender people. Laverne Cox, a black transgender actress who has depicted the struggles of trans inmates on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black, made the cover of Time last May. The caption read, “America’s next civil-rights frontier.” As Sawyer noted, many U.S. states lack anti-discrimination laws to protect trans rights; and anti-transgender legislation, including a proposed bill in California that would fine trans people for using the “wrong” bathroom, is not uncommon.

In many ways, Jenner’s experience as a transgender person is atypical. He told Sawyer that he didn't begin to transition until after the family’s TV success allowed him the money to afford it. In addition to financial security, Jenner has a loving family and a supportive social circle. Some of his children joined him during the interview, while the rest gave statements or tweets in support of him.

Many others are not so fortunate. Transgender men and women often report facing the risk of ostracism, harassment, and worse for simply existing. Many lack legal protections in the workplace and elsewhere. Although transgender people represent a small fraction of the population, some estimates suggest there is at least one trans homicide a week in America. Transgender people who are non-white or from disadvantaged backgrounds are especially at risk. A 2014 survey found that nearly 40 percent of transgender people have attempted suicide at least once. In December, Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old girl whose parents tried to convince her to reject her gender identity, killed herself by walking into traffic. In response, President Obama invoked transgender rights during his State of the Union address in January and called for a national ban on conversion therapy last month.

A two-hour special with Diane Sawyer may only be able do so much to change a national conversation. But now Bruce Jenner, already an object of pop-culture fascination, is the most famous openly transgender person in America. That alone could mean a cultural turning point.

The Day AIDS Hit the Fashion Industry

In the 1960s and 70s, the fashion designer Chester Weinberg was a household name, usually mentioned in the same breath as Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene, and Oscar de la Renta. With his daring yet elegant clothes and outsize personality, Weinberg was the undisputed darling of the fashion press, and he was equally beloved by the industry, winning a Coty Award in 1970—the fashion equivalent of an Oscar. He worked with a who’s-who of models, photographers, and editors, and dressed socialites and celebrities including Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, and Nancy Reagan. As an instructor at Parsons School of Design, he mentored the likes of Donna Karan, Isaac Mizrahi, and Marc Jacobs.

Despite all this, his name today is familiar only to a handful of museum curators and vintage fashion aficionados. This is largely because, on April 24, 1985, Weinberg became the first fashion designer to succumb to AIDS. The tragedy of his premature demise—he was 54—was compounded by its terrible timing. Although he'd been working steadily, Weinberg was no longer famous, and his passing went unremarked by the public. Within the industry, his death was willfully ignored. In the spring of 1985, the actor Rock Hudson was still alive; President Reagan hadn't yet uttered the word “AIDS,” and on Seventh Avenue the disease was still known as the “weird pneumonia” or “gay cancer”—if it was mentioned at all. “I saw what was happening two years ago,” the late designer Bill Haire confessed to the Philadelphia Inquirer in the summer of 1986. “Everybody did. But nobody wanted to talk about it.”

Weinberg’s death came as a shock to the close-knit community, already terrified by this mysterious plague. “One season he was there, showing his collection on Seventh Avenue and attending the couture collections and buying fabric in Europe,” remembered the late fashion editor James Brady. “The next season he was dead.” While the industry had already lost dozens of young, male showroom assistants, makeup artists, and shipping clerks to AIDS, Weinberg was the first star to fall: a veteran designer who had worked his way up through the ranks from Parsons to launch his own acclaimed label in 1966, before going out of business and making a comeback as the director of Calvin Klein Jeans, one of the hottest brands in retail in the early 80s.

A letter to Weinberg from an employee of Women's Wear Daily. (Parsons School of Design Alumni Association Records)

In the wake of his death, Weinberg was virtually written out of the history books; he merits just a few short paragraphs in Richard Martin’s encyclopedic book Contemporary Fashion (1995), which remains the major scholarly source on his life. The AIDS quilt didn't yet exist; years later, Weinberg would be included in a panel memorializing Calvin Klein employees. Klein also took out a stark, full-page ad in Women’s Wear Daily paying tribute to Weinberg, and endowed the Chester A. Weinberg Memorial Scholarship Fund at Parsons.

These were brave gestures at a time when AIDS deaths were widely considered an embarrassment to the industry, given that the stigma of the disease was inseparable from the longstanding stigma of homosexuality. In a post-Queer Eye culture, it might be hard to believe that gay designers ever felt they had to remain in the closet. But homophobia was rampant in the 80s, even within fashion circles. “The word ‘fag’ is being flung around the jealous jungle of Seventh Avenue as irresponsibly as ‘pink’ was in the McCarthy era,” Women’s Wear Daily complained.

As the publicist Karen Fortier explained to the New York Times in 1986: “For an industry that has worked hard to be a serious industry and to overcome the stereotypes, it might be difficult to then stand up and say we’re very concerned about this disease when everyone knows that the majority of people currently being affected are gay. It’s in a way admitting that there’s some validity to a stereotype that was not very positive.”

An ID card from Weinberg's early days as a designer (Parsons School of Design Alumni Association Records)

As late as 1990, the openly gay designer Rudi Gernreich told The Advocate that though “everybody” in the fashion industry was gay—“all the good ones, I mean the men”—they stayed closeted “to protect their jobs.” Weinberg had spent many years and many hours in therapy denying his homosexuality, even to himself, before coming out in the mid-1970s, shortly after his label folded. At that low point in his career, he may have felt he had nothing left to lose. If the abundance of gay designers was an open secret on Seventh Avenue, it was news to Main Street, U.S.A. As the fashion historian Valerie Steele noted in Women of Fashion (1991), “Most people outside New York City are apparently unaware that the fashion industry is heavily gay”—so widespread homophobia had little impact on retail sales.

But AIDS made homosexuality impossible to ignore. In the early 80s, Reaganomics hadn't yet worked its magic on the American economy; AIDS threatened to push the fashion industry’s bottom line from bad to worse. “It’s the fear that nobody would want to buy a blouse or underwear because it came from a designer who, in the mind of mass America, probably stitched each of those garments with his own diseased hand,” the publicist Barry Van Lenten told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1986.  

The fashion industry was in many ways a victim of its own success. New York’s theater and interior design communities—hit equally hard by the disease—had less to lose by acknowledging it; many in their ranks were openly gay, but they weren't household names outside of Manhattan or figureheads for multinational companies with multiple licensees. “If a major fashion designer were to come down with AIDS, it would ruin the brand name,” Larry Pond, the chairman of the Design and Interior Furnishing Foundation for AIDS, told the New York Times. “When you’re selling to Mom and Pops outside the metropolitan centers, you’re affecting business, and that’s billions of dollars.” (Pond would die of AIDS in 1992.) For designers heavily involved in licensing—like Halston, whose name was used to sell everything from cologne to cars—the ramifications went far beyond Seventh Avenue.  

Magazine advertisements for Saks Fifth Avenue featuring Weinberg and his designs (Chester Weinberg Publicity Scrapbook and Sketch)

Weinberg may have been fashion’s first high-profile AIDS death, but he was, of course, not the last. Perry Ellis would follow on May 30, 1986 (age 46); Willi Smith on April 17, 1987 (age 39); and menswear designer Lee Wright on October 20, 1988 (age 39). All were Coty Award winners. The year 1989 was an especially punishing one for the industry. In the space of six months, AIDS claimed Isaia Rankin (age 35), Angel Estrada (age 31), and Patrick Kelly (who never revealed his age, but was thought to be just under 40). Only Estrada’s death was publicly acknowledged as being AIDS-related; initially, Rankin’s staff wouldn't even admit that he had died. Though rumors had swirled about Kelly’s health for months, he and his assistants made excuses as he cancelled appearance after appearance. It wasn't until years later that Kelly’s business partner and lover Bjorn Amelan set the record straight, explaining to the New York Times: “We didn’t want people to know at the time because there was obviously a stigma attached to the disease that would have spelled the end of his professional future.”

But not all AIDS deaths were hushed up; indeed, there was a backlash against the conspiracy of silence. Before Way Bandy—one of the industry’s top makeup artists—died on August 13, 1986, he directed his executors to announce his death as AIDS-related. And Halston acknowledged the cause of his own death on March 26, 1990, in the classiest possible way, leaving instructions for his prized Rolls-Royce to be auctioned off and the proceeds donated to AIDS research.

In Halston, fashion found its Rock Hudson: a superstar who could put a familiar face to the dreaded disease. Both Time and People addressed AIDS and fashion in their next issues; People put a smiling Halston on its cover, flanked by Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor. “He put American fashion on the map,” the cover line read. “He died last week of AIDS, a broken man.” Halston’s death finally galvanized the industry to take real action against the disease; later that year, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) staged its first Seventh on Sale fundraiser, inspiring similar events in Paris and Milan. But no one fooled themselves into thinking that it couldn’t get any worse. As CFDA president Carolyne Roehm told People: “I shudder to think how many more we may lose.”

Weinberg with a prize-winning dress he designed as a student (Parsons School of Design Alumni Association Records)

If AIDS birthed a legacy of fashion industry activism and philanthropy, it also started a more troubling trend. As the American economy bounced back, cash-flush Japanese investors were eager to align themselves with the glamour and visibility of fashion. Because AIDS was still perceived as a disease that affected gay men exclusively (despite the 1986 death of supermodel Gia Carangi), female designers—long spurned by investors—suddenly found it easier to get backing, while funding for male designers dried up overnight.

Industry analyst Alan Millstein predicted in the New York Times: “The 90s could be the decade of the woman designer.” A few days after Chester Weinberg died, his Parsons protegée Donna Karan presented her first DKNY collection, to rapturous reviews. The collection wasn't just a critical triumph but a fashion revolution, offering chic, interchangeable basics like bodysuits, wrap skirts, and menswear-inspired jackets for the modern professional woman. As one star died, another was born. Karan’s company—backed by the Japanese conglomerate Takiyho Inc—was headquartered in Halston’s old offices.

But as Karan's influence proliferated, Weinberg's died with him. “Along with Geoffrey Beene, Donald Brooks, Oscar de la Renta, and Bill Blass, Mr. Weinberg made distinguished clothes that gave American labels the cachet that was, until then, linked exclusively to French clothes,” his New York Times obituary read. The paper gave the cause of death as encephalitis.

All images were made available by The New School Archives and Special Collections, The New School, New York, NY.

The Return of Tyler Durden

In 1996, Chuck Palahniuk spun a seven-page short story into his first full-length novel. Three years later, the director David Fincher immortalized Fight Club’s manic protagonists on film with the help of Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter. Surpassing cult status with its anti-consumerism message, the story captured the frustrations of the worker bees getting through the day's soulless pursuits. And it struck a chord: Real fight clubs sprung up around the world. “Tyler Durden Lives” became familiar graffiti. A new, widely quoted lexicon was born. Today, everyone knows the first rule of fight club.

At turns deeply poignant and very funny, Palahniuk’s freakish fables capture a twisted zeitgeist and add an oddly inspirational and subversive voice to the contemporary canon. For those shackled to tired routines and coping mechanisms, his Fight Club characters offer the DIY rules for rebirth. This month, the story gets its own resurrection in the form of a 10-issue comic-book series titled Fight Club 2, out May 27. Penned by Palahniuk and illustrated by Cameron Stewart (Catwoman, The Other Side) the first installment picks up the narrative 10 years later, on the ninth wedding anniversary of the narrator and his partner Marla. In the post-9/11 present, a hyperactive, Internet-obsessed, war- and recession-weary America apparently needs Tyler again.

Dark Horse Comics

Palahniuk’s always been masterful at forcing readers to face their own ugliest aspects, eclipsing irreverence with outright offensiveness. What’s comedy without morbidity? Palahniuk’s as much an undertaker as he is an author. The 1996 book concluded with the narrator shooting himself in the face in the hope of killing his alter ego, Tyler Durden. He was left in what he called heaven, actually a mental hospital, with Marla writing him from earth and orderlies still secretly worshipping him. Exerting artistic license and eerie prescience, Fight Club the film instead left the narrator and Marla holding hands atop a building as the skyline around them rumbled with the nearby demolitions of major skyscrapers—an attempt to usher in a dark age where commerce is crippled. (Dark Horse Comics will drop a rare adaptation of content from the Fight Club novel’s end as a primer, for Free Comic Book Day on May 2.)

Issue #1’s 25 pages serve mostly to set the stage for a new round of delusional delight. Addressing the somewhat-eternal nature of Tyler Durden’s catalyst ethos, Palahniuk has indicated that this fantastical element will live on in Fight Club 2. In it, the narrator is finally given a name: Sebastian. Marla fakes her way through the support groups where she and Sebastian first kindled their broken bond to now lament their non-existent sex life. With prolific consumption of medications, Sebastian’s libido has been suppressed alongside his alter-ego Tyler. At home, Sebastian has become a failure of a father, even worse than his own, feuding with a neighbor over an annoying dog while his son attempts to make gunpowder using a mix that contains the animal’s excrement.

And a dark romance deepens. Once again, it’s Marla who acts as the instigator, when she replaces Sebastian’s pills with placebos to unleash the libidinous Tyler, who shares a full-page sex scene with her, intercut with images of a head-on train collision and the flaming Hindenburg. Marla offers the comic cliché, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Palahniuk soon treads familiar territory with the aid of arson, and readers learn that Tyler’s been emerging at regular intervals weekly all along, via hypnosis, “to run the world.”

What’s comedy without morbidity? Palahniuk’s as much an undertaker as he is an author.

Fight Club 2’s restrained text and smart segues show an intimate collaboration between Stewart and Palahniuk. More than a dozen novels later, it’s thrilling to experience the 53-year-old writer in the playful new format. (His latest book, Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread, comes out May 26.) Palahniuk has said that the choice of comic-book form stems from his desire not to sully either the book or film’s legacy and from a belief that a new medium was the only wise option. Already, he’s relishing the format’s expansive boundaries: In addition to the primary cover by David Mack (Kabuki), several variant covers are planned, and Palahniuk has designed scratch-and-sniff bookmarks with a different smell per issue—not all of them agreeable. An opening letters-style page invites readers to “guerrilla market the shit out of Fight Club 2” by placing the phrases “Tyler Lives” or “Rize or Die” in creative places for a chance to win swag.

As the visual artist, Stewart hasn't drawn any of the characters to resemble the major Hollywood actors, so the pages feel fresh and slightly unfamiliar. Surreal and visceral elements that Fincher employed to further his adaptation—the narrator’s imagined mid-air plane collision, or ruptured bags of liposuction fat—are mirrored here by a gore-spattered dream sequence that the cartoonish style fits perfectly. Palahniuk also appears to fancy the challenge of inserting his symbolism and stylistic refrains into the comic-book form. The color red—Marla’s car, roses, half a pill, fire, bruises, select speech balloons— interrupts the otherwise blue-gray palette. In one panel, a bible-verse tattoo alludes to God telling Noah about his plan to destroy the corrupt earth.

Fight Club 2 promises to flesh out its back-stories and characters, and with nine issues to follow, much remains open to speculation. But Tyler’s return here and now feels aproppriate. America’s certainly no less materialistic two decades later, and a generally frenzied sense of day-to-day stress and survivalism allows ample room for apathy and little time for mindful ways to make oneself and the world better. Even reduced to a periodic reminder, Tyler’s antagonism forces introspection. At best, it offers the hope of resurrection.

The Many Faces of Rosie the Riveter

Mary Doyle Keefe has died. The 92-year-old was, the AP reports, the model for "Rosie the Riveter," the Norman Rockwell painting that served as the cover for the Saturday Evening Post in May of 1943, then as an iconic symbol for wartime solidarity and the power of labor, and then later as a token for civil rights, feminism, and institutionalized spunk.

You would be forgiven, though, for thinking that the real-life Rosie the Riveter had already passed away. Rose Will Monroe, said to have been the model for the "We Can Do It!" image commonly associated with Rosie, died in 1997. And Geraldine Doyle, who has also claimed to have been the inspiration for the We Can Do It! image, via a UPI photo taken of her at work in a factory in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1942, died in 2010.

So who, actually, was the original Rosie? And why do so many different women claim her as their own?

The answer is in part, certainly, that Rosie belongs to all of us—and that we are all, on some level, Rosie. The images of female strength and empowerment that the images of a well-muscled female arm represent were meant at the time, and continue, to transcend the individual. They are propaganda, and as such convey their cause in the guise of a person. As an image, Rosie, in various forms, has been a first-class postage stamp. And a magazine cover model many times over. She has been displayed at the National Museum of American History. She has been refigured as tattoos. She has been used on posters supporting the election of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, and supporting the influence of Michelle Obama. She has been used for marketing purposes more broadly (Clorox has used her to advertise its cleaning products). She has been made into a bobble-head doll and an action figure. She has been recreated out of jelly beans. She has been slapped onto so many different pieces of merchandise—coffee mugs, t-shirts, magnets, stationery—that the Washington Post once dubbed her the "most over-exposed" souvenir item available in the nation's capital.

A photo posted by Beyoncé (@beyonce) on Jul 22, 2014 at 6:41am PDT

So, in part, the mysterious origins of Rosie come from that fact that everyone, in some ways, lays claim to her. (It's fitting, in that sense, that before Rosie was an image, she was a song: "Rosie the Riveter," popular on the radio in 1943, is said to have been the basis for Rockwell's painting. Even before she had a face, she had a name.)

The other reason so many different people call themselves "Rosie," though, has to do with more basic realities—of labor, of communication, of intellectual property. There are two iconic images of Rosie the Riveter. One of them is, indeed, Rockwell's—created in 1943, printed on the cover of a popular national magazine, and based on the modeling Mary Doyle Keefe provided for the sum of $10. This is the one that actually features a factory-working woman named Rosie.

Normal Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter" painting, published in May of 1943 (The Saturday Evening Post)

The other image is the "We Can Do It" poster. Which initially had little to do with Rosie—and, for that matter, with women at all.

This poster, the one most of us today associate with Rosie the Riveter, was created not so much to encourage women in the workforce as to encourage productivity in general. World War II coincided with the rise of labor unions in the 1930s; across the country, as factory production became war production, managers sought to build morale and minimize the frictions of the past. They did that, in part, by way of posters they displayed on factory floors, many of them bearing team-building slogans like "Keep 'Em Firing!" and "Together We Can Do It!." For optimum morale-building, the posters were rotated into and out of use.  

In the early 1940s, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation commissioned the graphic artist J. Howard Miller to create a series of these inspirational posters for the company. One of these was of a woman, defiant but proud, with her work-shirt's sleeves rolled up. (There are conflicting accounts about the woman on whom Miller based his rendering: Some say it was Rose Will Monroe, who was working as a riveter at Michigan’s Willow Run Bomber Plant when she was asked to star in a video series promoting war bonds; others say it was Geraldine Doyle and the UPI photo of her at work.)

On February 15, 1943, a Westinghouse factory in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania displayed a new poster—which was small, just 17 inches wide and 22 inches high, and one of only 1,800 or so printed for the purpose. Its caption read, "We Can Do It!"

The now-iconic image has, through the avenue of cultural appropriation, taken on the mantle of progress.

Though it depicted a woman, feminism was likely not the poster's intended message; it was concerned much more with the outcome of labor than with the laborers themselves. Two weeks later, the poster was removed from the factory floor. And it was, for the most part, forgotten.

Then, in 1982, the Washington Post Magazine ran an article about propaganda posters stored in the collection of the National Archives. One of the posters it printed in its story was the "We Can Do It!" image. From there—and during a time when it would have more valence with ideas of feminism that had become widespread in the culture—the image enjoyed a renaissance, to the extent that, today, you can "Rosiefy yourself." You can buy a "Rosie the Riveter" bandana. You can make a cocktail called "Rosé the Riveter." The now-iconic image—initially nameless, initially standing for no cause beyond work—has, through the typical avenues of cultural adoption and appropriation, taken on the mantle of progress and strength and feminism. It has taken on the name of "Rosie."

As for the other Rosie, the one painted by Rockwell and actually intended to be the face of the female war effort? Rockwell copyrighted that image, as he did with other works; after his death, his family protected that copyright. Which meant that, by law, the painting could not be modified or appropriated. So, while it gained in financial value—in 2002, it sold for nearly $5 million—it lost in cultural. The woman who announces, both to herself and to the world, that We Can Do It! may not have started life as "Rosie the Riveter," although she has, in fact, effectively become inseparable from the name.

Ageless Beauty

Early on in The Age of Adaline, Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) is asked by the teenager tasked with making her fake driver’s license why she opted to be 29. “If I were you, I’d shave a couple of years off,” the young man says, somewhat cheekily. “You could definitely get away with it.” The interaction is funny, because Adaline suffers no anxiety whatsoever about getting older. Her entire life, in fact, is a manifestation of every actress’ fantasy, taken to an illogical extreme—to be 29 forever, without ever getting so much as a minute older.

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The irony of the movie’s premise—that Adaline has, in fact, somehow been blessed with an affliction that a number of women and men would presumably give their eye teeth to attain—is largely ignored by the film, which focuses instead on the tragedy of a life spent in exile. Adaline Marie Bowman, the film’s heavy-handed narration discloses, was born on January 1, 1908. She got married, had a daughter, lost her husband to an accident while he was working on the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, and then, in 1937, sped off the road and drove her car into an icy river.

Wiser films might perhaps skate over the mysterious science that puts an abrupt end to the aging process, but the insistent narrator instead goes into comically absurd detail: A reflex causes her heart to slow, and her breathing to stop, before a bolt of lightning hits her car, prompting a compression of electrons in her DNA that will be discovered in the year 2035, and named the Bowman Principle. Thanks to this unusual occurrence, the story goes, Adaline “will never age another day.”

It’s so bold an approach that it deserves some credit, and perhaps the junky science is a deliberate move that contributes to the film’s determinedly vintage filter, just like Lively’s Katharine Hepburnish affect and her 1940s updos. The central conceit might be ridiculous, but it’s hard not to be swayed by the earnest nature of the storytelling, or by the lush, romantic visuals conjured by director Lee Toland Krieger. The movie wouldn’t be out of place among the more creatively whimsical magical-realism films of the 80s and early 90s; fables like Edward Scissorhands, or The Goonies, or Field of Dreams. But by trying to ground its fantastical elements in science—bandying around terms like “anoxic” and “deoxyribonucleic acid”—it loses some fairy dust, and sets itself up for the cruel scrutiny of the Internet age. Adaline might be a gentle soul who belongs in a more innocent time, but most cinemagoers, sadly, are not.

The film meanders slowly through its first hour, unveiling Adaline’s backstory with meditative somberness, and introducing her to the obligatory handsome stranger, Ellis (Michiel Huisman), who developed an algorithm in college to analyze climate data that ended up being a handy financial forecasting tool, making him a gazillionaire in the process. It also reveals how, at the age of 45, Adaline’s youthful appearance made her a target for the FBI, who attempted to take her away for “some tests.” The prospect of being “a curiosity” leads her to abandon her now-grown daughter and start a new life on the run, making friends only for as long as she can keep them from becoming suspicious, and—after one significant mistake—avoiding love affairs altogether.

By trying to ground its fantastical elements in science, the movie loses some of its fairy dust.

Lively doesn’t really show her potential as a leading lady until the second half, up until which her clipped delivery and coy restraint feel a little like Turner Classic Movies interpreted by Saturday Night Live. But as the emotional intensity ramps up, she proves herself to be a capable performer. The most moving scene in the film comes when she goes through a box of old things and opens a photograph album filled with mementos of all the souls she’s loved and lost—only instead of humans, they’re identical King Charles spaniels. (Eighty years staying the same age amounts to something like 560 dog years.) And her chemistry with Huisman is stirring, although her chemistry with his father (Harrison Ford) makes them perhaps the more intriguing onscreen pair.

The Age of Adaline hints at, but never fully explores, a wealth of potentially mind-blowing and comical setups. Adaline’s daughter, for example, is played by Ellen Burstyn, and the pair engage in a number of role-reversed arguments about assisted living and sodium and romantic relationships that prove fascinating thanks to their odd dynamics (to both actresses’ credit, the relationship is somehow a believable one). Her one enduring friend is a blind woman who assumes they’re the same age and tells mystified suitors to ignore the two old crones at the table while Adaline looks on, shrugging. “That’s the last photograph I have of you,” says Burstyn’s character, Flemming, of a snapshot taken many decades ago. “Well, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” replies Adaline, drily.

The movie’s conclusion is necessarily predictable, and makes little attempt at a larger message, preferring to wrap itself in an old-fashioned, sepia-toned attitude, and find pleasure in the (admittedly) timeless pursuits of love and happiness. Age of Adaline looks ravishing, and if it drags a little toward its inevitable resolution, it’s at least crafted with genuine visual flair. Also rewarding is the fact that it appears to be a truly original effort—the screenplay by J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz isn’t based on a bestselling book, nor is it part of a smash-and-grab franchise. Perhaps that’s why it feels like such a throwback to an earlier era. Like Adaline, the film gives the sense of being somewhat uncomfortable in 2015, but while the movie makes a case for romanticizing the past, Adaline's story shows the limitations of detaching yourself from the present.

Embracing the Myth of Kurt Cobain

One of the most shocking parts of watching Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is finding out that that the god of grunge was once a really cute kid. Director Brett Morgen peppers his documentary with Super 8 clips in which the future Nirvana singer can be seen as an infant, toddler, and grade-schooler, blowing out birthday candles, carrying around a stuffed panda, and sending kisses to the camera. Towheaded and cheery-eyed, wearing tiny suit jackets and cardigans, lil Cobain could have been in a Normal Rockwell painting. That he was the iconic all-America boy helps explain his later rebellion, making him an avatar for how traditional domestic life begat counterculture, and …

... oh, wait. I’m mythologizing, aren’t I? Assuming causes and effects that can’t ever be known, turning a human being into an abstraction: Montage of Heck, in some theaters now and airing on HBO on May 4, was created specifically to ward against this sort of thing. In 2007, Courtney Love gave Morgen access to a trove of previously unexamined recordings, notes, and artwork relating to her late husband, with one bit of instruction that would take the director eight years to carry out. “It was time to examine this person and humanize him and decanonize these values that he allegedly stood for—the lack of ambition and these ridiculous myths that had been built up around him,” Love told The New York Times.

Cobain’s life has been chronicled in scores of books and documentaries, but Montage of Heck feels fresh in the scope of material it includes, the way it's presented, and the things it emphasizes. Spanning the period from when his parents met through a month before his suicide, it is, true to its name, a montage: childhood drawings paired with choral interpretations of Nirvana songs segue into interviews with family members, into Cobain’s disturbing art videos, into voiceovers from Cobain himself, into concerts, into shopping lists, into lyrics sheets, into home movies, into news clips. Viewers come to know him as a private person more than as a public figure, with lots of time spent on his adolescence, his romances, and his interactions with Love and their daughter Frances Bean.

As an effort to "decanonize," it succeeds at slaying some canards. The idea of Cobain as the consummate slacker, for example, seems nuts given the voracious work ethic and ambition on display. He was unemployed while living with girlfriend Tracy Marander, but she describes regularly returning from a day of work to find Cobain had made and hung a painting, or drawn a comic strip, or written a song. Montage of Heck also undermines some fans' belief that Cobain was manipulated to his doom by Love; in home videos, their rapport appears warm and sensitive, and he seems of sound mind and sure about exactly who he's in love with. “You’re already the most hated woman in America," he taunts as he shaves his face in their apartment bathroom while she flashes the camera. "You and Rosanne are tied."

But it’s not quite right to say that Montage of Heck is anti-mythologizing. It’s almost impossible to imagine how it could be. The movie, for the most part, reinforces the common Cobain narrative: genius misfit clashes with parents and society, starts a band, conquers the world, gets hooked on heroin, hates fame, kills himself. At every turn, we’re reminded that this was Cobain’s own narrative; in journals, in lyrics, and in interactions with friends, he talked about not only the desire for suicide but the reasons for it, including feeling like a phony regarding his acclaim, and feeling guilty that he didn't enjoy his success. He vehemently rejected the “voice of a generation” tag placed on him, but the film also makes clear that the popular understanding of the messages in his music—rage at conservative social mores, expressions of self-loathing, odes to screwed-up intimacy—is correct.

The fact that his concerns were so ordinary just makes his trajectory all the more extraordinary.

In some ways, Montage of Heck does cut Cobain down to human size. The defining traumas of his early life, we see, were his parents’ divorce, his father's frostiness, and his peers' taunts—all vivid and scarring for him, but banal as far as legend-making material goes. At one point, Cobain talks about loving the movie Over the Edge, and Morgen treats viewers to an excerpt of the film in which kids lock their parents in school and start a riot. The message is the same as the one that famously opens In Utero: On some level, Cobain was caught up in nothing more than classic, teenage angst.

But the fact that his concerns were so ordinary just makes his trajectory, his talents, and his wild, magnetic personality, all the more extraordinary. In the opening moments of the film, his sister says she’s grateful that she didn’t get that “genius brain” of his. She’s right to call him a genius—Montage of Heck, in addition to everything else, reminds of how electrifying Nirvana's music was—and she’s also right to see his psychic makeup as a burden. Even after getting such an in-depth portrait of his life and character, the depths of Cobain's mounting despair and disaffection feels, toward the end of the film, inexplicable, awful, and unrelatable. Cobain and the world knew he was hurtling toward destruction—“I feel like people want me to die because it would be the classic rock and roll story,” he mutters at one point—and either he chose to embrace that fate or he had no choice at all. It's the kind of outcome that can't fully be understood, which is to say it's the kind of outcome that people have always needed myths to help explain.