Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 55

Good Grief: TV Is Getting Better at Mourning

Designated Survivor has an awkward narrative challenge built into its premise. As the show’s title, and the plot that spills from it, would suggest, ABC’s new Wednesday-night drama revolves around tragedy: A bomb has destroyed the Capitol during the president’s State of the Union address, and everyone in attendance—which is to say nearly all of the people who had composed the highest levels of the U.S. government, save for the eponymous survivor—has been killed. The challenge: How do you write the show in a way that acknowledges the immense loss at its center without succumbing to the gravity of that loss? How do you create a show about mass death that isn’t entirely depressing to watch?

One strategy that is, so far, working well: Designated Survivor has written grief directly into its storylines. It is a political drama, yes, about power and the presidency and what the American public expects of the interaction between the two; it is also, however, a mediation on mourning. And that puts the show in somewhat unlikely league with many other of its fellow recent series, many of which explore, across networks and genres, the profoundly subjective nature of grief. Amazon’s Fleabag derives its dramas, it soon becomes clear, from a pair of deaths that have left the show’s anti-heroine reeling. FXX’s You’re the Worst has recently considered, in its sardonic manner, the effects of the death of a parent. So has, in its way, Amazon’s Transparent. TVLand’s Younger has considered, with its far more chipper approach, the death of a romantic partner. Netflix’s Stranger Things has considered the death of a child. NBC’s This Is Us has considered the death of an infant. NBC’s The Good Place has considered the death of oneself. HBO’s Westworld has taken things a step further still: It has wondered whether cyborgs, too, have the capacity to mourn.

Each of these shows shares a strain of the creative challenge Designated Survivor set up for itself: to make themselves watchable while also acknowledging the series of sadnesses that spur their plots. And to balance the subjectivity of grief with television’s ultimate demand for cinematic relatability. The shows accomplish that, largely, by taking advantage of TV’s episodic nature to explore what might be the most defining element of grief: the way it stretches and shifts and surprises over time. The tendency it has to arrive, completely unexpectedly, and then to hover—a profound sadness that is invasive as it is invisible.

Designated Survivor didn’t start out doing all that. It instead focused its pathos initially on the immediate political challenges the new American president, the former HUD secretary Tom Kirkman, faced as he tried to function as essentially a one-man Executive branch. The show almost, you could legitimately argue, over-focused on that. As Kirkman is sworn in as president—a secretary has procured a Bible for his wife to hold—the scene is strangely calm: The show gives very little indication, at that moment, that the Bible-holding is happening because the entire American government has just been obliterated.

Designated Survivor’s pilot and its following episode both feature many other scenes along those lines. They include some token moments of people crying and commiserating—“I was supposed to go last night, but I couldn’t get a sitter!” one White House staffer says to another, as Kirkman passes her in a hallway—and of some others that show people seemingly in shock. “Everyone’s dead!” another staffer moans, in apparent disbelief, before the episode’s action moves on to other things.

Designated Survivor, given its hour-long running time and the fact that it stars Kiefer Sutherland, has been widely seen as a spiritual sequel to 24. And the comparison is, in that way, apt: The show, at first, presented a 24ian glibness about the deaths that drove its plot, focusing much more on action than on reaction. The show’s pilot is eager to question both who planted the catastrophic bomb, and also—the much more prosaic question—whether the Kirkman presidency can sustain the fact that it’s being helmed by a guy who is for the most part a political amateur. “We see some brief flashes of shock and grief from the characters,” TVLine’s review notes, “but mostly they just snap into action, with no time to waste mourning what just happened.” Designated Survivor, in all that, seems to aspire to the very thing that those in grief find so singularly hard to do: to move on.

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Serial Thriller

But then—and here’s where things get interesting—the show shifts. The episodes that follow the pilot introduce viewers to the dead president’s son, a young man grappling with the assassination of his parents not as a scared citizen, but as a scarred orphan. They also reveal the personal relationship that Hannah Wells, one of the FBI agents investigating the explosion, had with one of that explosion’s victims. And they find that agent engaging in a very human thing: projecting her grief, taking refuge in conspiracy theories as a way to make sense of the nonsensical.

None of these shifts, to be clear, represent high televisional literature. One way that Designated Survivor fits neatly into the 24 tradition is that it operates according to the soap operatic mandates of dudgeon and drama, complete with shocking betrayals and sweeping cliffhangers. But Designated Survivor is also singularly sensitive to the human emotions that underscore its mysteries and intrigues and actions. It takes advantage of its own episodic structure—the lengthening and fraying and tangling of its story, week after week—to offer a depiction of grief that’s as chaotic and unpredictable as the emotion itself.

And its fellow shows take similar advantage of their serial structure. Fleabag initially announces itself as a typical rom-com with a classic antiheroine as its lead; it quickly reveals itself, however, to be a subtle meditation on the nature of grief. The central character (we know her only by her eponymously insulting nickname) is essentially a widow—and yet she is coping with her loss within a culture that has not quite figured out how to accommodate people who are grieving a partner who is not technically a spouse. Fleabag is, as Meghan O’Rourke put it of the murkiness of modern grief, “at sea.”

So is Jimmy, the antic antihero of You’re the Worst, who’s unsure how to mourn the relative whom he hadn’t been close to, but whose approval he had craved. So, too, are the Pfeffermans of Transparent—all of them unsure how to grieve the father who is at once still alive and lost forever. So, too, is Stranger Things’s Jim Hopper. So, too, are This Is Us’s Rebecca and Jack. And so, too, is The Good Place’s Eleanor Shellstrop—who is not mourning the loss of a loved one so much as she’s mourning the loss of the life she led on Earth. The unlikely NBC sitcom makes space within its otherwise Epcotted answer to heaven to allow its main characters to grapple, over time, with finding themselves on the other side of loss: Here, it’s the dead who mourn the loss of the living.

Characters’ grief, in these shows, is not simply a B-plot; it is never neatly contained in a Very Special Episode.

The key for each show, though, is that the mourning plays out over time. Characters’ grief, here, is not simply a blithe B-plot; it’s never neatly contained in a Very Special Episode. It is written, instead, into the emotional logic of each series, extending episode by episode, and functioning as almost a recurring character. You never know when it’s going to show up. The rub, though, is that it always could.

In presenting grief in this nuanced way—as something that aches and arcs and is never fully overcome—these recent shows offer marked contrasts to many other series’s (often older series’s) more one-dimensional depictions of loss. 24 took the shoot-em-up, blow-em-up pathos of the big-budget action movie—in which strangers are killed with impunity—and applied it to the small screen. Game of Thrones, (in)famous for its dispatching of characters both minor and major, understands mourning only in martial terms: When it’s acknowledged at all, grief manifests as an impulse for revenge. The Walking Dead, as it has played out over time, has undergone a kind of mourning fatigue: As its deaths have piled up, the show’s ability to grieve them has decreased. A similar thing happened with Lost—a show that, like The Good Place, was both premised on death and interested in transcending it.

These new shows suggest a new approach, though. They recognize that grief cannot be neatly contained. They also recognize the opposite phenomenon: that grief is a powerful thing, for audiences as well as for characters. When Orange Is the New Black killed off one of its most beloved characters, her fellow inmates mourned her loss; so, however, did her fans beyond Litchfield. They tweeted. They hashtagged. They raged. They accepted. Which is another way of saying: they grieved.

Hamilton's America Has Its Eyes on History

About seven minutes into the PBS documentary Hamilton’s America, George W. Bush shows up to comment on Alexander Hamilton finally getting his due in the American public consciousness.

“That’s the way history works,” Bush says into the camera. “Sometimes it takes a while for people to give you credit.”

He delivers the line with a pause mid-sentence and a glint in the eye, seeming to relish that he’ll be interpreted as talking about himself as much as he’s talking about the $10 founding father. There are a lot of similar moments in Hamilton’s America, which almost concerns itself more with American history and present-day politics than it does with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash.

The PBS documentary—directed by Alex Horwitz with Miranda and Hamilton honcho Jeffrey Sellers among the executive producers—has been hyped as a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of a production that’s sold out for the foreseeable future. There are indeed passages fans will gobble up, as when Miranda’s seen workshopping lyrics in Aaron Burr’s actual bedroom. For anyone locked out of the Hamilton stage phenomenon but obsessed with the cast album, the doc’s performance snippets will be manna; I, for example, didn’t realize till now that the founding fathers actually take a shot of alcohol during “My Shot.”

But the film, primarily, is neither a behind-the-scenes reveal nor a sampler of the stage production. Instead, it’s a crash course on why Hamilton matters at all. Miranda & co. seem to be polishing their own legacy already, addressing some pervasive criticisms of the play and lending authority to some of the most glowing appraisals of it. Michelle Obama at one point calls Hamilton her favorite work of art by anyone ever. Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of The Public Theater (where the show was birthed), argues that Lin Manuel-Miranda is the best historical playwright since Shakespeare.

The naysayers against Hamilton have been comparably few, but they’ve triggered debate about the show’s politics and accuracy—especially about the notion that racism and slavery are minimized in Hamilton’s buoyant multicultural reimagining of the American Revolution and its aftermath. But the documentary mentions slavery repeatedly, with frank acknowledgements that the characters in the musical were not wholly good people. Daveed Diggs, who plays Jefferson, has the money quote on the subject: “You don’t have to separate these things with Jefferson. He can have written this incredible document and several incredible documents with things that we all believe in, and he sucks.”

“The problem was, Hamilton was the ultimate elitist,” Elizabeth Warren says at one point.

Other Hamilton detractors have complained that the show doesn’t engage more deeply with the economic debate at the heart of the conflict between Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. But the PBS special devotes a surprising amount of time to financial policy, which might have gotten more substantial treatment in the play were there not the imperative to, as Miranda puts it, “get you out before Les Mis gets out next door.” At one point, he and the actor Chris Jackson (George Washington) tour the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with the financial journalist Maria Bartiromo. Elizabeth Warren praises Hamilton but also testifies that “the problem was, Hamilton was the ultimate elitist,” while Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner show up to express their admiration.

The thread binding all of these topics and others drawn from history is less Hamilton than Miranda himself, though he makes a number of comparisons between his own life and Hamilton’s that would seem to welcome a collapsing of the two individuals in the public’s mind. Watching the documentary reminds that Hamilton’s success isn’t in transcending Broadway musicals but in being the best, giddiest version of them—here embodied in Miranda’s tendency to unapologetically quote his own work and suddenly break into rapping or singing. Some people will be turned off by that, just as some people can’t get past the inherent corniness in Hamilton to appreciate its many pleasures. But the quality of Miranda’s work and its resonance with larger issues, both well on display in Hamilton’s America, makes it hard to do anything but admire his confidence—he knows exactly what it means to have history’s eyes on him.

The Historical Fiction of The Birth of a Nation

Why is Nat Turner’s story necessary?

It’s a question that’s often subtly animated an ongoing debate about Nate Parker’s film The Birth of a Nation, which tells a version of Turner’s infamous 1831 slave revolt in Virginia. While it shouldn’t enter conversations about Parker’s acquittal of sexual assault charges and his subsequent comments about the case, the question of Turner’s importance has lingered after The Birth of a Nation’s struggles at the box office. Some of the film’s most ardent advocates have charged that its problems result from plots among black feminists to harpoon the work of a duly acquitted man. More reasonably, some reviewers and supporters have called the film necessary viewing in spite of its creator. But those who defend The Birth of a Nation share a common concern: Does the movie’s underperformance somehow damage the underlying story of Turner and his rebellion?

Most of the movie’s defenders believe that Turner’s story carries a unique, overriding weight in black culture, whether for its historical significance or as a sort of animating founding legend of black resistance, and that Parker’s film does a prima facie service in telling such a vital account. Whether The Birth of a Nation actually carries that burden, and whether it can be appreciated in spite of the besmirchment of its creator, depends on understanding the phenomenon of Nat Turner himself and what he has come to symbolize. The main problem with figuring out that phenomenon is that so much of the Turner we know is historical fiction, an impenetrable legendarium of many things that cannot be verified.

Even before Turner was hanged, the story of his rebellion had spread far and wide as propaganda, both among slavers and the enslaved. For some, Turner and a roving band of rapist ruffians attacked white women in the most bestial of ways. For others, General Nat led a glorious armed revolution that still maintained hidden legions in the Virginia woods years after his capture. These disparate visions were aided by the fact that as an enslaved person, Turner saw his history, visage, and biographical details intentionally erased, even as they were formed.

Much of modern knowledge about Turner descends from these legends and a few shaky sources. The primary source with the most information about Turner himself is a firsthand account from the lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray, called The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia. The problem with that document, which was based on purported conversations between Turner and Gray, is that those conversations may or may not have actually happened and are not mentioned in the court of record, despite Gray’s claims.

Historical fictions often carry political messages beyond the basic facts of the historical record.

The novel based on that document, William Styron’s 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner, is completely a work of historical fiction. Taking its skeleton from an already questionable source with limited scope, Styron wove a fascinating, impossibly omniscient yarn about Turner’s life and inner motivations that was promptly criticized by many black writers and intellectuals for missing too many historical marks and reinforcing negative stereotypes. Nevertheless, that novel and its source material probably form the bulk of modern popular knowledge about Nat Turner and his 1831 revolt in Virginia.

There’s nothing wrong or uncommon about the transformation of historical tidbits into legend; the legend of America’s birth is what tills fertile ground for works of art like Hamilton. But historical fictions often carry political messages beyond the basic facts of the historical record. The legend of Turner’s rebellion in many black households carries an inspirational message of agency, expressed through violence, and genius that belies the popular slavery myths of dumb, contented enslaved people who were brought civilization by white people.

The magic of oppression is that it often manages to convince oppressed people that they are at fault for their plight, for being weak and conquerable. Turner’s story is often a salve for the shame that accompanies marginalization. It’s an aspirational symbol of the potential power of a black community that can unite, and overcome internal divisions created by racism. In today’s racial climate, frustrations among black activists mount in tandem with a system that demands non-violence not as a Kingian tool for change, but as a tool for complacency and silence. As the failures of reforms like school desegregation and fair housing laws become more apparent, Turner’s message is especially seductive and relevant.

The Birth of a Nation hews most closely to this vision of Turner’s legend as a reversal of oppression, even perhaps contorting the story more to suit that narrative. Parker and his co-writer Jean Celestin—a codefendant in the rape trial at the center of meta-criticism about the film—create a story in which Turner’s violent rebellion is an inspirational act of honor and dignity. The film’s protagonist is grim, sardonic, and impossibly virtuous in the mold of most American epic heroes. His religious language as a preacher is molded to fit his linear transition from docile to revolutionary, shifting from Gospel advice to slaves to fiery liberation theology only late in the film. His major motivation as a rather privileged and extraordinary man on the plantation seems to be defending the “honor” of black women—including his wife—who are sexually assaulted in pivotal moments of the movie.

Parker’s writing choices bend the historical record to create a moral play easily understood by gunslinger-lovers and Gladiator fanboys alike.

These women and their pain are largely unexplored in the film except as set-up for Parker’s Turner’s chivalrous turn to violence. It’s a well-worn trope, and once the defense of their honor has finally driven Turner to the point of violence, his conviction radiates. Those who will not collaborate are portrayed as craven betrayers. The deaths of white women and children—which certainly happened—occur mostly off-screen, a decision that makes Turner’s violence-as-chivalry quite a bit easier to digest. In the end of the movie, despite an unsuccessful raid of the armory of Jerusalem, Virginia, and the violent deaths of all collaborators, there seems to be no doubt that Turner’s rebellion was a net social good, as the film compresses time a bit to show that his doomed last assault directly inspired young black boys to take up arms for the Union in the Civil War. Or something.

The quality of The Birth of a Nation is almost auxiliary to this conversation, but for what it’s worth Parker does deliver a gorgeous film that makes no major missteps and capably carries the water of the story it intends to tell. The bigger concern is whether the film’s version of the Turner legend actually connects in this moment of decentralized black activism and a black media renaissance—both of which are anchored by black women and LGBT people. Parker’s Turner legend is a conventional American hero’s tale with clearly drawn factional lines relying on tried-and-true motivations and refusing to grapple with the morality of the righteous violence levied against oppression. His writing choices—such as the addition of sexual assault to the stories of the women in Turner’s life—bend the historical record to create a moral play easily understood by gunslinger-lovers and Gladiator fanboys alike.

There’s another way to read the legend of Turner’s Rebellion, though, and that reading is what makes it difficult to offer high praise of The Birth of a Nation’s intentions. Thomas Gray’s account paints Turner as more of a religious zealot who from an early age took the role of a “prophet” and built a loyal, dedicated following among enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia. Using an apocalyptic fire-and-brimstone message, this version of Turner exhorted his fanatics to exact bloody vengeance for the wrongs of slavery and America, a campaign that massacred white women and children with little prejudice.

The Birth of a Nation shows that perhaps the world is ready for a new version of the Nat Turner legend.

In this telling, while the doomed rebellion may have galvanized the abolition movement, it also caused so much consternation among white slave-owning classes that the entire system of slavery was changed into a much more brutally sustained act of suppression and disempowerment. The idea of whiteness was bolstered even further as fear about black uprisings shaped racial identity. Enslaved people across the country were lynched, maimed, castrated, and beaten preemptively in terror, and the myths of roving black male rapists on the hunt for white women took hold as the founding pillar of the modern carceral state.

Read this way, Nat Turner’s rebellion could be another inspirational tale of black masculinity, but also could be seen as a theological breakthrough, a tragedy, or as proof of the overwhelming power of white backlash. Regardless, the lesson here is complicated. Historically, this telling lays the foundation for the criminalization of blackness and the sexual lenses through which black men see and are seen. These concepts are germane to both the current black political and media moment, as well as in figuring out just what to think about Parker.

That Parker chooses the path of least resistance in telling the story of Turner as a western hero archetype is not surprising. But his doing so limits our ability to use the movie either as history or as a tool for understanding the effects of oppression—effects that still exist and directly link black culture in 2016 with Southampton County, Virginia in 1831. The film’s limitations, however, are fatal neither to the story of Turner nor to the spirit of rebellion that the story often engenders. The failure of The Birth of a Nation to live up to the incredible expectations many had for it should prompt exploration of the stories of thousands of other rebellions, a critical analysis of how black liberation is gendered, and an understanding of how violence is privileged as a more radical and masculine form of protest.

Where are the stories of enslaved women? What movies and books have been written about black mammies who struck fear in the heart of generations of white women whose children they reared? What of black domestic workers who infiltrated the innermost sanctums of whiteness and sabotaged as they could, all the while maintaining their own secret code languages as sophisticated as anything the CIA would use today? What about black field hands who harpooned profits with silent protests and strikes at the potential cost of their own lives?

Nat Turner’s story is still necessary, from both a cultural and historical perspective, but the limitations of The Birth of a Nation show that perhaps the world is ready for a new version of the legend, and indeed for a new way of telling the stories about the lives of enslaved men and women. While that reckoning should be subordinate to a debate over whether to support the film, given the allegations against its creators and their proximity to rape culture, perhaps the conversations aren’t all that disconnected.

Even Trump's Supporters Are Wary of 'Rigged' Rhetoric

Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump vs. the media, Donald Trump vs. Republican Party grandees—we’ve seen it all before. But this week marks the emergence of a new split: Donald Trump vs. his own closest supporters.

For about a week now, Trump has been insisting that the election is being rigged.

“The whole thing is one big fix. It's one big fix. It's one big ugly lie. It's one big fix,” he said last week. “The process is rigged. This whole election is being rigged. These lies spread by the media, without witnesses, without backup or anything else, are poisoning the minds of the electorate.”

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Republicans Have Been 'Rigging' Elections for Years

For nearly as long, Republicans have been criticizing him for saying so. Some of those are the usual suspects, like Senator Jeff Flake, one of the GOP’s most outspoken Trump critics. Ohio Governor John Kasich likened Trump’s comments to moon-landing truthers—though it turns out Trump confidant Roger Stone is apparently one of those, too. But the chorus of critics has also included some members of Trump’s inner circle.

On Wednesday, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway flatly contradicted her boss, the candidate. “No, I do not believe that,” she said on MSNBC, asked whether she thought there was widespread voter fraud. “So absent overwhelming evidence that there is, it would not be for me to say that there is.”

On Sunday, vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence partly dismissed Trump’s statement—the latest of several cases where the two men have been at odds on policy issues. “We will absolutely accept the result of the election,” Pence said on Meet the Press—though by the next day he was warning about massive fraud. (So far, the Trump campaign has offered no evidence for the widespread fraud it alleges; nor has it provided promised evidence debunking the sexual-assault allegations against Trump, which he says proves the conspiracy.)

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican who backs Trump—and who has supported laws that harm minority participation based on illusory claims of fraud—also criticized the GOP nominee.  “I can assure him, as a fellow Republican, that it is not rigged,” Husted said. “I hope Donald Trump will focus on issues people really care about and not on issues that are not based on fact and undermine confidence in our democracy.”

Governor Rick Scott of Florida, an early Trump backer, also insisted the Sunshine State would have clean elections. Speaker Paul Ryan, who remains a Trump endorser but has feuded with him recently and has criticized him in the past, also issued a statement affirming his faith in the legitimacy of the voting process. Even Newt Gingrich complained that Trump has a tendency to react “almost uncontrollably” on the trail.

What is it about Trump’s “rigged” claim that is driving even his own supporters—his own staffers—to disagree with him? Here’s one notable difference: Although Trump has campaigned as a candidate who will shake up the system and clean out a corrupt status quo, his most controversial remarks have not been broadsides at the system itself, but rather have been attacks on people: Megyn Kelly, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, Khizr and Ghazala Khan. These personal attacks have earned Trump widespread condemnation, but his inner circle has kept quiet and maintained a stiff upper lip. Even Trump’s attacks on the appearance of the women who have accused him of sexual assault—or on Hillary Clinton’s appearance—have not earned this sort of backlash within the inner ranks.

Maybe that’s not surprising; Trump can, and has, vowed to topple nearly every pillar of American bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, but how many people are really engaged enough to notice and care? But then what makes the attack on elections different?

One possibility is that people like Conway, Pence, Scott, and Husted may support Trump and approve of his assaults on certain elements of the status quo, but they are also at heart political professionals who have spent their life in the arena. It’s one thing to break policy taboos, but it’s a different sort of threat to tear down the entire edifice. Another, related, idea is that these assaults, and the calls for “revolt” that come with them, have awakened latent conservatism in these people. They want a right-ward shift in government policy, sure. But they’d prefer there be a system. After all, regardless of what happens on November 8, there will be new elections to run and offices to run for in the future—unless the entire system is torn down.

Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of timing. Trump flirted with claims of rigging back in August with nowhere near this level of backlash. The latest flare-up is coming with just three weeks before the election, and a series of polls showing the race moving out of reach for Trump. Few forecasters view a path to victory for Trump, so there’s less benefit in stoically keeping quiet and being a team player. If Trump does lose, just as with any losing campaign, there will be a great deal of recrimination and finger-pointing. Maybe the Trump team is just getting a jump on things.

The Deadly Certainty of Leonard Cohen

Written down, the words “you want it darker” could read like a question or an accusation. From Leonard Cohen, they’re a simple statement of fact, no judgement implied. You might say he delivers the title of his album and its opening track in a mutter if Cohen’s voice were capable of a mutter—82 years of living have weathered his instrument into something wholly unique and whose low, low rumble makes every word into a pronouncement. The “you” who wants it darker is God, and Cohen’s figured out his plan.

This feeling of certainty, of total unwavering authority, makes Cohen’s You Want It Darker, out on Friday but streaming at NPR now, a riveting experience. When it comes to the weightiest issues of human existence, he’s past the point of questioning, and whether any listener is equipped to fully understand or accept the answers Cohen’s armed with is not his concern.

The bulk of pre-release publicity around Cohen’s 14th album has come from a lengthy New Yorker profile by David Remnick, who quoted Cohen as saying he’s “ready to die.” You Want It Darker does nothing to dispel the seriousness of that statement, and listening to it induces a kind of solemn awe at the fullness of his acceptance. “I’m ready, my lord,” he says in the masterful first song as a bass line seems to mirror the movement of dread in the gut. The occasional touches of a dance groove or modern-seeming synthesizers of his other recent albums are not to be found; You Want It Darker is all carefully unfolding, impeccably produced, and out-of-time gospel and folk, over which Cohen patiently explains himself.

Not for the first time, God appears to be the subject of most of Cohen’s observations, and the two entities don’t exactly seem to be on happy terms. Cohen isn’t so much having a crisis of faith as a grim reckoning with the universe’s cruelty and deceit: “I didn't know I had permission to murder and to maim,” he sings on the opener, a litany of sins by the almighty. Later, amid choral humming and a lonely violin line on “Seen the Better Way,” he confesses to a compromised but still extant spirituality: “I better hold my tongue, I better take my place / Lift this glass of blood, try to say the grace.” It’s a hallelujah, more broken than ever.

Yet, as has also frequently been the case in Cohen’s career, his holy “you” can also be read as a human one. For “Treaty,” whose melodic peaks and valleys are so poignant that the album’s final song is a string reprise of them, Cohen makes an apology of devastating frankness to a lost lover. The song is also an example of his gift for surprise; because his phrasings have you hanging on every word, he’s able to induce mood swings in the space of a verse. At some points, cheery piano chords accompany him describing celebration in the streets, but then: “I’m sorry for the ghost I made you be. Only one of us was real”—beat, beat, beat—“and that was me.”

After a life of singing about vice, Cohen now wrings drama from the ebbing of lust. Remnick’s profile delved into the years-long spiritual sabbaticals Cohen has taken; when in “On the Level” he sings, “Now I'm living in this temple / Where they tell you what to do,” he may well be describing a memory. But he also might be describing his current state of mind:

I'm old and I've had to settle

On a different point of view

I was fighting with temptation

But I didn't want to win

A man like me don't like to see

Temptation caving in

How sublime are those last four lines’ portrayal of temptation as an beloved rival? The underlying music is a classic Muscle Shoals ballad template, all warm organs and exultant backing vocals. It’s the sound of peace, begrudging and battered though it may be.

There are other such spots of brightness, though Cohen’s voice retains its crushing gravity throughout. The most disarming moment comes on “If I Didn’t Have Your Love,” which is as close to a lullaby as Cohen can come at this point in his career. He describes, with perfect vividness, what would happen to his life without a certain someone’s affection—it would be as if “a cold and bitter wind swallowed up the world without a trace” or as if “the break of day had nothing to reveal.” Whether that life-giving someone is God or human isn’t quite clear to the listener, but it’s obvious that Cohen himself has no doubt who he’s talking to.

Hayao Miyazaki and the Art of Being a Woman

“I wanted to make a movie,” the Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki told Roger Ebert in 2002, “especially for the daughters of my friends.” The renowned filmmaker was referring to Spirited Away, his masterpiece about a young girl who finds herself working in a magical Japanese bathhouse run by a witch. But he could have been talking about almost any of his movies. Perhaps more than any other living maker of animated films, Miyazaki has created a grand library of work that, among other things, shows a keen understanding of the complexities of what it might mean to be a woman.

Miyazaki’s films are bewitching and bewildering, beautiful and challenging in the best of ways. They are beloved for their strong female protagonists, their gorgeous largely hand-drawn animation, and for the way they blur conventional boundaries: between good and evil, between life and death. From his earliest film, The Castle of Cagliostro, to his last before he retired from directing, The Wind Rises, Miyazaki has created movies that embrace nuance rather than simplistic binaries. For me, the most important binary he dissolved was that of gender.

In many Western cartoons and in anime, it’s common to have well-defined heroes and villains, as well as clear demarcations between what male and female characters can achieve and how they should look. But Miyazaki softens these distinctions. Many of his characters, including the Princess Nausicaä, the wolf-girl San, and the delivery girl Kiki, were role models who defied cultural stereotypes of femininity and showed me women who could be anything they wished to be. In a way, they actually saved me.

I remember watching 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind for the first time. A young woman flies in, early in the film, on her white glider, into a vast forest of beautiful yet toxic plants and takes a sample from one into a beaker. When I hear her voice, something makes me shiver. When she takes off her brown oxygen mask under the protective molted shell of a beetle’s eye, poisonous pollen falling around her like snow, it happens again. I know she’s the girl on the cover of the movie case, yet here she is: alone, exploring, unafraid, androgynous. I’m a tween, and I don’t process my thoughts clearly at the time. But I know, suddenly, that she is different from everything else I’ve watched up to this point. She seems to wear power like a coat. She lingers in my thoughts after the movie is over.

I’m transgender. I grew up in the Commonwealth of Dominica in the Caribbean, where the idea of being openly queer was almost unthinkable to me. Our laws from the days of British colonialism made buggery a crime, and there are still no governmental protections from anti-LGBT discrimination. Growing up, I felt lost. I saw myself as a woman due not to what I liked or disliked, but because that was how I felt in my mind—as if a switch in there had simply been turned to girl instead of boy. For many years I neither had the language to fully understand what this meant nor the courage to tell anyone this secret.

On bad days, I felt like I was wearing a mask I couldn’t remove, and on my worst days I considered drinking poison to stop hearing the calls of the girl who seemed to be imprisoned inside. The environment of me was falling apart, growing toxic like the one Nausicaä inhabited. In Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, the protagonist Chihiro loses her name; I felt that in a sense I had never had a real name in the first place, having always been called by others a male name that did not accord with the person I wished to be.

Miyazaki’s characters seemed real because they were shown even in their most ordinary moments.

When I watched Miyazaki, something changed. For the first time, I saw representations of girls and women that seemed real and attainable, yet mythic all the same. Here were female characters who were vulnerable and independent, who defied gender norms in the way they looked and behaved. Partly because our detractors often reduce trans women to caricatures of femininity, rigid depictions of female beauty in Western animation and some Japanese anime can seem even more inaccessible to us than they already do for many cisgender girls. But Miyazaki’s films reinforced for me what many women come to learn eventually: that being female is not about fitting one superficial ideal or another. It is ultimately not about how you look or how you act, but who you are.

Miyazaki’s characters seemed real, too, because they were shown even in their least triumphant, most ordinary moments. In all of his films, the director includes the quiet scenes and mundane daily acts that many other movies, animated ones in particular, eschew. Characters gaze at streams or brush their hair, not to advance the film’s plot, but to add a sense of realism—the kind that makes fictional people feel less like tropes and more like human beings. This sense of humanity is so often missing from other animated portrayals of characters, female characters in particular, which made Miyazaki’s films even more meaningful to me.

Sometimes, being trans can feel like coming of age a second time.

These scenes, Miyazaki explained in his interview with Roger Ebert, are moments of ma, or emptiness. The filmmaker illustrated the concept to Ebert by clapping. “The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension.” He told Ebert that American movies with frantic paces are often afraid of that silence, that ma, causing boredom. Yet life is filled with those empty spaces—and this technique, however subtle, helped bring Miyazaki’s female characters to life for me in a way that few other movies could.

But Miyazaki’s movies, while often rooted in Japanese history and iconography, still managed to be utterly universal in the stories they told. His films offered non-exaggerated representations of womanhood I could imagine myself embodying if I were to ever tell people the truth about myself. As I watched, I found deeper meanings in the films that helped guide me until I came out at 27.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which came out in 1984, was my first film of Miyazaki’s, and its heroine was the film character I admired most growing up. Princess Nausicaä lives in a world in which the human population has been greatly reduced by global warfare. In the aftermath of this conflict, a giant, toxic forest, filled with equally enormous insects, has taken root, forcing humans to set up communities in small areas far from the dangerous spores of the plants—one of these being Princess Nausicaä’s seaside town, the Valley of the Wind, and another being the distant city of Tolmekia.

Princess Nausicaä. Studio Ghibli

From the start of the film, Nausicaä doesn’t abide by gendered expectations. An independent spirit, she works as a scientist in a secret underground laboratory and singlehandedly learns how to remove the toxins from the plants she has cultivated. She also defeats four Tolmekian soldiers in a moment of fury after they kill her father (though she saves their queen’s life later on). She even fulfills a prophecy that the wise woman of the village claims will be carried out by a man in a blue robe; Nausicaä does so at the end of the film, but wearing a blue dress. Her appearance itself calls to mind early panels of the artist Moebius’s famous 1975 Arzach comics, which feature a masked male protagonist riding a white creature that resembles Nausicaä’s glider.

And the Tolmekian queen Kushana, too, is complex: She is the closest to a villain in the film, yet is not entirely villainous. Despite her takeover of the Valley of the Wind and her desires to burn down the great forest and eradicate the giant insects, Kushana has an understandable grievance: she, like Melville's Captain Ahab, has lost a limb to one of the giant creatures, and, she implies, possibly more. As much as I want to dislike her, Miyazaki imbues her with a kind of stoic sadness that renders her a little more empathetic.

Nausicaä may have seemed a bit too radical for some audiences at the time, if Roger Corman’s 1985 English dub of the film, titled Warriors of the Wind, is any indication. The film was heavily edited to suggest a simple good-versus-evil narrative, and its American VHS cover bizarrely placed gun-toting male soldiers, rather than Nausicaä (renamed Zandra), at its center. (After this revealing incident, Studio Ghibli, the animation film studio cofounded by Miyazaki, instituted a no-edits policy.) If princesses are meant to represent ideals for young girls, Nausicaä outshines every Disney heroine. With her appearance and actions, she showed me a womanhood that was complex and liberating.

Kiki’s Delivery Service, which features another indelible heroine, was the next Miyazaki film I saw. A lovely coming-of-age tale of girlhood adapted from a novel by the same name, it follows a young, initially inept witch who flies on her broom away from her home to try to find herself in a completely unfamiliar city for a year—as all witches must at the age of 13. The 1989’s film’s simple-but-powerful message of believing in oneself resonated with me in particular. “I’ve decided not to leave this town,” Kiki says on her first night in the new land she has flown to, where she has found a kind baker, Osono, willing to take her in. “Maybe I can stay and find some other nice people like Osono, who will accept me for who I am.” Kiki’s Delivery Service is a tale of trying to fit into a new world as an outsider, as well as a story of self-acceptance rather than a search for inauthentic popularity. It’s about learning what it means to find yourself when a part of you—in this case, Kiki’s magic—has disappeared.

The heroine of Kiki’s Delivery Service. Studio Ghibli

Sometimes, being trans can feel like coming of age a second time, flying off to find yourself in an unfamiliar place, like Kiki, and hoping you will land without crashing. You learn the contours of the new world you’ve landed in—the catcalls, the fear of walking in certain places when you are alone, the people who will talk down to you out of the old assumption that prettiness and intelligence do not coexist, and the other subtle things that come to casually define your life. Sometimes, I do crash. Sometimes, I cry when I think about the child I can never give birth to, an element of motherhood I wish so much I could share. Yet, as Kiki’s Delivery Service reminds viewers, if we can conquer the things that make us cry, we can find other ways to smile.

The final film of Miyazaki’s that stood out to me in terms of gender and identity was Princess Mononoke, which is set in an alternative version of Muromachi-era Japan. Mononoke, whose actual name is San, is a liminal figure who came to represent for me the conflict between selfhood and expression even more than Nausicaä. San is human who was raised by wolves. She knows she is not a wolf in the same sense that her adoptive siblings are, yet they accept her as one of their own. Like them, she lives in hatred of humankind, albeit with greater irony. She is mockingly called Mononoke-hime, or “princess of the spirits,” by her human enemies in the gun-producing town on the edge of the forest. Though she has no kingdom to rule over, she moves with a kind of wild regality through the film’s scenes.

Princess Mononoke’s San. Studio Ghibli

Like Miyazaki’s other films, Princess Mononoke refuses to fit its characters into neat categories. Lady Eboshi, San’s enemy and ruler of the nearby town, wants to clear the forest, but she is also kind. She takes in lepers whom others have rejected and invites women from brothels to do work around the factory—a job the women jokingly say is too tough for their male neighbors. In Mononoke’s world, women can achieve anything men can, if not more. Eboshi resists the stereotype of the heartless technology-obsessed human out to destroy the natural world and earns the viewer’s empathy—even more so than Nausicaä’s Kushana.

These contraries that Miyazaki’s characters embody—good and bad, ruthless and caring, male and female—remind me a bit of something the Japanese writer Junichirō Tanizaki once described. In his well-known 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, Tanizaki defined what he believed to be a particularly Japanese quality: finding beauty in things that contained both light and darkness. For Tanizaki, the West continuously, obsessively strove toward all things being bright, sterile, loud, and new. On the other hand, Japan saw the value in imperfections, taking a pleasure in the loveliness of aged things, of things partially lit, of understatement. While this idea, of course, is a huge essentialist generalization, it intriguingly mirrors the sense of nuance in Miyazaki’s work. His films appreciate flaws, find wonder in unusual places, and understand the importance of balancing contrasts.

While Nausicaä, Kiki, and San meant the most to me, Miyazaki’s other works also offered moving portrayals of female characters: Chihiro in Spirited Away, Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle, Naoko in The Wind Rises, Sheeta in Laputa. Japanese literature owes much to women who depicted multidimensional female figures, like Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon, and the early feminist Akiko Yosano; in his own way, Miyazaki has contributed to this history. His work enriches and unsettles. This is what great art does: It blows out the candles in our room until all is dark, then relights a few. Yet, somehow, we can see ourselves, the nakedness of the self, more clearly by these new lights.

In the way we turn to our favorite songs and art when the blue moods descend, I turned to these wonderful women. More than any other characters I’d seen, they gave me a sense of hope through their extraordinary, yet ordinary, power. They were symbols to remember, lighthouses of the soul on a night filled with shipwrecks. When I finally came out, I thought of them again. That is the beauty of Miyazaki’s films: how even someone like me, who does not explicitly exist in them, can find herself in, and through, his characters. How his fantasy princesses and metropolitan witches and wolf girls can be as human as anyone else.

Why Stephen Colbert Isn't Connecting

Almost 10 years ago, Stephen Colbert appeared on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor in character as the Colbert Report host—a pugnacious, egotistical super-pundit who tolerates no criticism. Colbert has frequently acknowledged that O’Reilly was the chief inspiration for his on-screen persona, and it was hilarious to see the imitation go up against the real thing. “What I do, Bill, is I catch the world in the headlights of my justice,” Colbert bragged to a smirking O’Reilly. “I’m not afraid of anything. Well, I might be afraid of you.” The same day, O’Reilly went on Colbert’s show; the combative tension between the two remains genuinely thrilling to watch.

On Monday night O’Reilly went on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to talk about the state of the Republican Party and Fox News. The conversation was civil, at times energetic, but mostly bland. O’Reilly, clearly far more at ease, pontificated on the state of the Trump campaign while dodging any discussion of some of its biggest controversies. Ultimately, it was a notable reminder of just how much things have changed for Colbert since he cast off his late-night character and joined CBS. To stand out in a crowded landscape, Colbert has pursued even-handedness and empathy, a drastic swerve away from his former public persona. It’s an approach both noble and misguided, but a year into his Late Show run, it’s kept him firmly out of the zeitgeist.

Colbert kicked off his Monday night episode by discussing Trump’s frequent assertions that the upcoming election is “rigged,” an alarming undermining of the country’s democratic norms that has many pundits worried. “It’s not rigged ... but everybody’s angry in the country, everybody’s mad,” O’Reilly said, a catch-all argument that many of his Fox News associates have trotted out to explain Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries. Colbert, to his credit, challenged that assertion, the only real moment of tension in a more than 10-minute conversation.

“Not everybody’s angry,” Colbert said. “Some people are angry, some people are scared, some people are …” “Disenchanted?” O’Reilly offered. “Well, or disgusted,” Colbert replied. “Honest to God, it’s not all the same emotion.” In that moment, Colbert offered a glimpse of the new persona he’s tried to carve out over a year at The Late Show—a sort of arch conscience for America, less sarcastic than his predecessor David Letterman, and less cynical than his former partner Jon Stewart at The Daily Show. But unfortunately it was only a moment of incisiveness that Colbert failed to follow through on.

It’s difficult to define Colbert’s current style as a political comedian. His peers, meanwhile, have found their lanes: Seth Meyers is analytical and precise at Late Night, Samantha Bee is righteously furious on Full Frontal, John Oliver is an impassioned activist at Last Week Tonight. All of those approaches owe a debt to The Daily Show, where Colbert’s character first debuted, and arguably to Colbert himself. It’s undeniable that The Colbert Report is one of the most influential comedy programs of all time. It should have been a short-lived high-concept lark—instead it became a 10-year parody of talking-head cable news that often made its points more skillfully, and dug deeper with guests, than many of the shows it mocked. Colbert’s appearance on The O’Reilly Factor came a few months after his legendary performance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 2006. Both were merciless performances, holding a funhouse mirror up to mainstream conservatism with “Colbert” and delighting in the puzzled response.

It’s perhaps telling that the idea of Colbert on cable seems more comfortable for him.

On The Late Show, Colbert has lacked that kind of single-mindedness. As a result, he’s been stranded in a middle ground, wanting for the viral presence of rivals like Jimmy Fallon or James Corden, while also being not nearly as hard-hitting on politics as Bee, Meyers, or Oliver. In his early weeks, he had some dazzling interviews, including an emotional conversation with Vice President Biden after Biden’s son Beau had just died of cancer. At other times Colbert’s interview style has been strangely flat—his awkward interrogation of Trump saw him try to go the empathetic route, giving the candidate a chance to apologize, and then floundering when Trump refused. The show has undergone changes behind the scenes, with a new showrunner coming in to try and hone a stronger personality for the show, but it hasn’t quite worked: Standout moments have included Colbert bringing his old persona back, or calling Stewart in for a guest spot.

It was announced this week that Colbert is hosting an election-night special on CBS’s premium-cable affiliate Showtime on November 8. It promises to be a looser affair, partly because it’s live, and might offer a glimpse of the comedian who often seems absent from The Late Show. But it’s perhaps telling that the idea of Colbert on cable seems more comfortable for him. After a year on network TV, the mere visual of him as the face of The Late Show, not to mention his hosting style, has yet to really resonate with audiences, resulting in poor ratings.

“Have you ever been in a locker room with Trump? Does Fox News have a locker room?” Colbert asked at one point, trying to get O’Reilly to bite on Trump’s shocking Access Hollywood tape. “No, we have a foyer,” O’Reilly demurred, prompting 30 seconds of ribbing from Colbert about his use of a French word. After that, the topic was dropped; outside of noting that many voters were “disgusted” with the election, Colbert didn’t press his former rival on some of the hardest issues of recent weeks. It sums up the strange mix Colbert has struck between being a softball interviewer and a sharp political comedian: There are moments when you wish he’d ask the questions so many viewers at home must have. But too often, The Late Show pulls back.

Will Democrats Lash Congressional Republicans to a Sinking Trump?

The path has been vertiginous, nauseating, and scary, and the side effects may last for years to come, but it looks increasingly likely that Democrats will control the White House on January 21. But that prize will mean a lot less if a President Hillary Clinton can’t get her policies, and appointees, through Congress. Look no further than Senator John McCain’s promise on Tuesday that a Republican Senate would block any Clinton Supreme Court nominee. McCain later withdrew the remark, but his comments make clear how much difference control of Capitol Hill could make to Clinton’s success.

Figuring out how to best use the Trump campaign’s chaotic, divisive approach as a lever to win a Democratic Congress remains a quandary for Democrats. Earlier in the campaign, many top figures seemed to view tying Trump to the Republican Party as a winning move, suggesting that he was simply a blunter, less refined version of the same old Republican Party of the Obama years.

In April, for example, Clinton said, “It’s not just Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. What they are saying is what most of the Republican elected officials believe.” But as BuzzFeed points out, the Democratic nominee has seldom made any comment like that since. One reason for that was that Trump became more and more strident—insinuating that President Obama was a traitor, attacking a federal judge for his heritage, accusing Ted Cruz’s father of conspiring to assassinate JFK—it became harder to portray Trump as simply another Republican.

Clinton decided to run with that. In a hacked message revealed by WikiLeaks, DNC staffers discussed how the Clinton campaign had made a strategic decision to try to decouple Trump from the rest of the GOP, calculating that the risks of normalizing Trump by making him seem like just another Republican outweighed the benefits of collateral damage Trump might to do other Republicans. Clinton dialed back her rhetoric. She began courting Republican endorsements. Former GOP officials who had decided to back her got prominent billing at the Democratic National Convention in July, which struck a patriotic, perhaps jingoistic pose that seemed custom-made to appeal to wavering conservatives.

That worked, to a degree. Dozens of Republicans, including former senators, congressmen, and cabinet members, announced they would back Clinton. A host of staunchly Republican newspapers endorsed her, in some cases making it their first Democratic endorsement in decades—or ever. But while Clinton has built her formidable lead, that hasn’t translated into a predicted Democratic landslide in the House and Senate.

On the Senate side, FiveThirtyEight gives a nearly three-in-four chance of Democratic control. The Upshot offers a more sober 60 percent chance. But there are peculiar results on the board. Clinton holds a solid lead in New Hampshire, but Democrat Maggie Hassan has been unable to break away from Senator Kelly Ayotte. Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey was thought to be one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the chamber, but he’s keeping the race close, too. (If Democrats had recruited stronger candidates, they might be doing better in the Ohio Senate race and winning in the North Carolina contest.)

The House side offers less hope for progressives. Although Democrats now hold a sizable lead on the generic ballot (i.e., “Would you vote for a Democrat or a Republican for U.S. House?”), their odds of actually winning the chamber remain slim, for reasons that include the big Republican edge now, gerrymandering, and Democrats being disadvantageously packed into urban districts.

So what are Democrats to do? Clinton’s overtures to Trump-hating Republicans have largely disappeared, and it’s reasonable to assume that they already achieved their maximum impact. But they haven’t been replaced by a coherent new strategy. That’s visible in a pair of stories Tuesday. Ruby Cramer and Nathaniel Meyersohn report on how Clinton seems determined to hold back on the GOP. Alex Seitz-Wald, meanwhile, reports that Clinton aides are plotting a more aggressive message. Any friction between these two storylines seems to indicate continued lack of agreement, not inaccurate reporting.

The man to watch here is Obama, because even as Clinton holds back the president is speaking more aggressively. But while some reports have portrayed this as a full return to the approach from spring, a close look at what Obama’s saying demonstrates that he’s attempting a sort of hybrid approach, both tying Republicans to Trump but also creating a certain amount of distance.

In Greensboro, North Carolina, last week, for example, Obama said he does not believe that every Republican elected official thinks the way Donald Trump does .… The overwhelming majority of Republicans, they love their families, they love this country.  They’re good and decent people doing all kinds of good things.” Yet he also held them partly accountable for Trump, and he prodded them to publicly break with the Republican nominee:

Over the last eight, 10, depending on however long you want to say, if you’ve been only about obstruction, if in order to score political points, you tell your voter base crazy stuff—like I wasn’t born here, or that I’m a Muslim, or that—well, it’s just a long list—and you just repeat it over and over again, and so that your only agenda is negative, and you just make up facts—so if 99 percent of scientists say the planet is getting warmer and this is something you should worry about, and then you bring a snowball into the Senate chambers and say it was snowing outside so you must be wrong—using that as evidence to dispute scientists, that over time what happens is that you produce a nominee who is all about obstruction and insults, and makes up his own facts.  Now, I don’t think that’s how the majority of Republicans think, but this is the habits that you get into that create this kind of nominee.  

There are some reasons to think that going full-bore on connecting Trump with Republicans could be risky. As much as Democrats would like to convince voters who can’t vote for Trump that they shouldn’t vote for Republican candidates downballot either, Clinton’s chances at having a Democratic Senate depend partly on ticket-splitters, too. The chances of Clinton winning, say, Missouri or Indiana are vanishingly remote, but Democratic Senate candidates Jason Kander and Evan Bayh both have a decent shot at victory. On Monday, the Clinton campaign announced that it’s investing in both of those states, as part of a push to expand the map. There’s a risk of backfire there.

Meanwhile, the widening feud between high-profile Republicans and the Trump campaign makes it harder to argue that they’re all peas in the same pod. Much has been made of Paul Ryan’s dilemma. The speaker of the House announced last week that in the wake of the tape in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women, he would no longer defend Trump, and would concentrate on helping preserve the House. Ryan is in a bind: He doesn’t want to be seen as condoning Trump, but a total split with him could alienate Trump voters and imperil the House. (Obama mocked Ryan, though not by name, in Greensboro. “Now you’ve got people saying, well, we strongly disapprove, we really disagree, we find those comments disgusting, but we’re still endorsing him, we still think he should be president—that doesn’t make sense to me,” he said.)

Monday night, Trump renewed his periodic attacks on Ryan ahead of an interview in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Trump suggested Ryan doesn’t want him to win. “Maybe he wants to run in four years or maybe he doesn’t know how to win … Maybe he just doesn’t know how to win. I mean, who can really know. But I know I’m in his territory and they are all screaming for Trump," Trump told ABC’s Tom Llamas. “I don’t want to be knocking Paul Ryan. I think he could be more supportive to the Republican nominee.”

But maybe there’s a silver lining for the speaker in all of this. Trump’s continued feud with him helps to create a separation between himself and the nominee even without Ryan having to withdraw his endorsement. He can have his cake and eat it too. While some Trump fans love his brawl with the GOP establishment, his more strategically minded supporters wring their hands nervously, concerned that he can’t win while fighting with Republican leaders.

If you proceed from the assumption that Trump isn’t going to win anyway, however, the feud starts to look more like a blessing in disguise, granting downballot Republicans some distance from their toxic nominee. That, in turn, makes Democrats’ decision on whether to connect them to Trump, and how best to do it, even harder.

Will Democrats Try to Tie the GOP to Trump? Would It Work?

The path has been vertiginous, nauseating, and scary, and the side effects may last for years to come, but it looks increasingly likely that Democrats will control the White House on January 21. But that prize will mean a lot less if a President Hillary Clinton can’t get her policies, and appointees, through Congress. Look no further than Senator John McCain’s promise on Tuesday that a Republican Senate would block any Clinton Supreme Court nominee. McCain later withdrew the remark, but his comments make clear how much difference control of Capitol Hill could make to Clinton’s success.

Figuring out how to best use the Trump campaign’s chaotic, divisive approach as a lever to win a Democratic Congress remains a quandary for Democrats. Earlier in the campaign, many top figures seemed to view tying Trump to the Republican Party as a winning move, suggesting that he was simply a blunter, less refined version of the same old Republican Party of the Obama years.

In April, for example, Clinton said, “It’s not just Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. What they are saying is what most of the Republican elected officials believe.” But as BuzzFeed points out, the Democratic nominee has seldom made any comment like that since. One reason for that was that Trump became more and more strident—insinuating that President Obama was a traitor, attacking a federal judge for his heritage, accusing Ted Cruz’s father of conspiring to assassinate JFK—it became harder to portray Trump as simply another Republican.

Clinton decided to run with that. In a hacked message revealed by WikiLeaks, DNC staffers discussed how the Clinton campaign had made a strategic decision to try to decouple Trump from the rest of the GOP, calculating that the risks of normalizing Trump by making him seem like just another Republican outweighed the benefits of collateral damage Trump might to do other Republicans. Clinton dialed back her rhetoric. She began courting Republican endorsements. Former GOP officials who had decided to back her got prominent billing at the Democratic National Convention in July, which struck a patriotic, perhaps jingoistic pose that seemed custom-made to appeal to wavering conservatives.

That worked, to a degree. Dozens of Republicans, including former senators, congressmen, and cabinet members, announced they would back Clinton. A host of staunchly Republican newspapers endorsed her, in some cases making it their first Democratic endorsement in decades—or ever. But while Clinton has built her formidable lead, that hasn’t translated into a predicted Democratic landslide in the House and Senate.

On the Senate side, FiveThirtyEight gives a nearly three-in-four chance of Democratic control. The Upshot offers a more sober 60 percent chance. But there are peculiar results on the board. Clinton holds a solid lead in New Hampshire, but Democrat Maggie Hassan has been unable to break away from Senator Kelly Ayotte. Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey was thought to be one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the chamber, but he’s keeping the race close, too. (If Democrats had recruited stronger candidates, they might be doing better in the Ohio Senate race and winning in the North Carolina contest.)

The House side offers less hope for progressives. Although Democrats now hold a sizable lead on the generic ballot (i.e., “Would you vote for a Democrat or a Republican for U.S. House?”), their odds of actually winning the chamber remain slim, for reasons that include the big Republican edge now, gerrymandering, and Democrats being disadvantageously packed into urban districts.

So what are Democrats to do? Clinton’s overtures to Trump-hating Republicans have largely disappeared, and it’s reasonable to assume that they already achieved their maximum impact. But they haven’t been replaced by a coherent new strategy. That’s visible in a pair of stories Tuesday. Ruby Cramer and Nathaniel Meyersohn report on how Clinton seems determined to hold back on the GOP. Alex Seitz-Wald, meanwhile, reports that Clinton aides are plotting a more aggressive message. Any friction between these two storylines seems to indicate continued lack of agreement, not inaccurate reporting.

The man to watch here is Obama, because even as Clinton holds back the president is speaking more aggressively. But while some reports have portrayed this as a full return to the approach from spring, a close look at what Obama’s saying demonstrates that he’s attempting a sort of hybrid approach, both tying Republicans to Trump but also creating a certain amount of distance.

In Greensboro, North Carolina, last week, for example, Obama said he does not believe that every Republican elected official thinks the way Donald Trump does .… The overwhelming majority of Republicans, they love their families, they love this country.  They’re good and decent people doing all kinds of good things.” Yet he also held them partly accountable for Trump, and he prodded them to publicly break with the Republican nominee:

Over the last eight, 10, depending on however long you want to say, if you’ve been only about obstruction, if in order to score political points, you tell your voter base crazy stuff—like I wasn’t born here, or that I’m a Muslim, or that—well, it’s just a long list—and you just repeat it over and over again, and so that your only agenda is negative, and you just make up facts—so if 99 percent of scientists say the planet is getting warmer and this is something you should worry about, and then you bring a snowball into the Senate chambers and say it was snowing outside so you must be wrong—using that as evidence to dispute scientists, that over time what happens is that you produce a nominee who is all about obstruction and insults, and makes up his own facts.  Now, I don’t think that’s how the majority of Republicans think, but this is the habits that you get into that create this kind of nominee.  

There are some reasons to think that going full-bore on connecting Trump with Republicans could be risky. As much as Democrats would like to convince voters who can’t vote for Trump that they shouldn’t vote for Republican candidates downballot either, Clinton’s chances at having a Democratic Senate depend partly on ticket-splitters, too. The chances of Clinton winning, say, Missouri or Indiana are vanishingly remote, but Democratic Senate candidates Jason Kander and Evan Bayh both have a decent shot at victory. On Monday, the Clinton campaign announced that it’s investing in both of those states, as part of a push to expand the map. There’s a risk of backfire there.

Meanwhile, the widening feud between high-profile Republicans and the Trump campaign makes it harder to argue that they’re all peas in the same pod. Much has been made of Paul Ryan’s dilemma. The speaker of the House announced last week that in the wake of the tape in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women, he would no longer defend Trump, and would concentrate on helping preserve the House. Ryan is in a bind: He doesn’t want to be seen as condoning Trump, but a total split with him could alienate Trump voters and imperil the House. (Obama mocked Ryan, though not by name, in Greensboro. “Now you’ve got people saying, well, we strongly disapprove, we really disagree, we find those comments disgusting, but we’re still endorsing him, we still think he should be president—that doesn’t make sense to me,” he said.)

Monday night, Trump renewed his periodic attacks on Ryan ahead of an interview in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Trump suggested Ryan doesn’t want him to win. “Maybe he wants to run in four years or maybe he doesn’t know how to win … Maybe he just doesn’t know how to win. I mean, who can really know. But I know I’m in his territory and they are all screaming for Trump," Trump told ABC’s Tom Llamas. “I don’t want to be knocking Paul Ryan. I think he could be more supportive to the Republican nominee.”

But maybe there’s a silver lining for the speaker in all of this. Trump’s continued feud with him helps to create a separation between himself and the nominee even without Ryan having to withdraw his endorsement. He can have his cake and eat it too. While some Trump fans love his brawl with the GOP establishment, his more strategically minded supporters wring their hands nervously, concerned that he can’t win while fighting with Republican leaders.

If you proceed from the assumption that Trump isn’t going to win anyway, however, the feud starts to look more like a blessing in disguise, granting downballot Republicans some distance from their toxic nominee. That, in turn, makes Democrats’ decision on whether to connect them to Trump, and how best to do it, even harder.

Tupac, Pearl Jam, Depeche Mode Among the Rock Hall of Fame Nominees

The ’90s continue their slide from recent memory into settled historical record with today’s nominations for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which see Pearl Jam and Tupac up for induction in their first year of their eligibility—a quarter-century since their respective debuts in 1991.

Here’s the full list of artists up for honors in Cleveland:

Bad Brains

The Cars

Chaka Khan

Chic

Depeche Mode

Electric Light Orchestra

J. Geils Band

Jane’s Addiction

Janet Jackson

Joan Baez

Joe Tex

Journey

Kraftwerk

MC5

Pearl Jam

Steppenwolf

Tupac Shakur

Yes

The Zombies

In addition to Pearl Jam and Tupac, the other first-time nominees in that list are Bad Brains, Depeche Mode, Electric Light Orchestra, Jane’s Addiction, and Joan Baez. The Smiths and Nine Inch Nails were previously nominated but are not in the running this year. The five winning acts will be announced in December, and the public can help determine the class by voting online.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominations, winners announcement, and induction ceremony offer thrice-yearly opportunities for music fans to battle about what “rock” means, what a hall of fame means, and how this particular hall of fame operates. Last year’s events saw NWA declining to perform and using their speech to push back against those who’d said hip-hop doesn’t belong there, and Steve Miller unleashing a negative publicity barrage against the hall for trying to make money off of its honorees and for perceived sexism in its nominations.

This year’s batch should carry with it a few talking-points. Moving Kraftwerk out of the “nominated” to “inducted” category would mean the hall of fame is finally embracing the full influence of electronic music, as would recognition for Depeche Mode. Longtime bridesmaids like Joe Tex (nominated 5 times) and Chic (nominated 11 times!) will be evaluated yet again. And Tupac’s treatment will signal how the committee regards the ’90s age of hip-hop. He’s also likely to yet again kick up debates about whether rappers should be recognized as rockers, but with five hip-hop acts now in the hall it would seem like the question has been settled—that’s just the way it is.