The Paris Review's Blog, page 70

The Review’s Review: Real Housewives Edition

Season 5, episode 3 of Selling Sunset.

One of my favorite lines of reality TV dialogue belongs to the Real Housewives of Atlanta star Kenya Moore, who once told an adversary, “I’m Gone with the Wind fabulous,” snapped her fingers, twirled the tail of her peach-colored chiffon dress centrifugally like a tipsy Wonder Woman impersonator, and eventually spun out of the scene on a dime. Presumably, this was a nod to Scarlett O’Hara, the quintessential Southern belle, a prototypical Georgia peach. Ever since the episode aired in 2012, the line has been memed to death by pop culture nerds and reality TV obsessives, probably with much the same fervor that movie buffs have parroted Rhett Butler’s famous closing quip to O’Hara from the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel. (When O’Hara asks Butler what she’ll do with her life if he walks out on her, he replies, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”) I love how ridiculous the reference is, especially in the context of a petty poolside skirmish. I dig the layers of racial commentary in the comparison, whether intended or not. What does “Gone with the Wind fabulous” actually mean, on a scale of style? Does it speak to a propensity for overwrought fashion, melodramatic flair, Southern grandeur? A tendency to leave devastation in one’s wake? If that’s the case, then maybe it’s Butler, not O’Hara, to whom Moore alludes when she sashays away from her rival. Viewers of the scene are left with the image of the sway of silky fabric, and her winsome Miss USA wave—the gesture reminiscent of a done-in O’Hara, who clutches a large plantation doorframe as her man storms out.

—Niela Orr, contributing editor

Faced with the stress of releasing and promoting a book this fall, I needed a stupid new distraction for my downtime. This is how I began watching the incredible, probably unethical Bravo reality show Vanderpump Rules, the spin-off Real Housewives series best known for its low-rent setting and the gleeful promiscuity of its cast. Other writers have already rhapsodized about the timelessness of its emotional arcs, which blend the savagery of I, Claudius with the camp of, well, the Housewives franchise, but what kept me watching solidly for the last month and a half is its startling darkness: rarely has a reality show starred quite so many genuinely cracked and frightening people, with Jax Taylor, a self-described “number-one guy,” being the most cracked and frightening of all. Taylor, a steroidally buff model-turned-bartender with the cold gaze of a shark, may be the most obvious sociopath in reality TV history; a philanderer and gaslighter par excellence, he is even better at lying than he is at finding reasons to remove his shirt. (If a fan video of him overlaid with Patrick Bateman’s opening monologue from American Psycho does not currently exist, this is a grievous oversight.) It shouldn’t feel like sinking into a warm bath to watch the televisual equivalent of bear-baiting, but then maybe I’m a little bit of a dead-eyed sociopath, too. Additionally, Vanderpump Rules features some of the best dialogue ever committed to the screen. Even Shakespeare did not think to have Macbeth exclaim that seeing Banquo seated at the table was “like seeing a ghost, but like, a bitch ghost—like a ghost that’s a bitch”—but then again, Shakespeare never worked a shift at SUR. 

—Philippa Snow, author of “Dawn Kasper’s Death Scenes”

My favorite scene in reality TV is from season five of the real-estate melodrama Selling Sunset, when Chrishell bets her boss and then boyfriend, Jason, that she can fit through the doggy door in a house they are trying to sell. If she can slip through—which she does—she gets to set the price of the house: $10.495 million.

—Fiona Alison Duncan, author of Exquisite Mariposa

I loathe reality TV, but I am sometimes nostalgic for the period when the genre hadn’t yet become itself—when people were still confused about how to perform ordinariness, and about how to portray themselves attempting to appear ordinary. Obviously, they mostly failed, and it was often that failure that was the point. I’m unlikely to ever watch The Real World, The Simple Life, Laguna Beach, or America’s Next Top Model again, but in a twisted way I’m happy I did, if only because it brought me one step closer to understanding Tyra.  

—Maya Binyam, contributing editor and author of “Do You Belong to Anybody?” 

Encounters with Ghosts

Victorian spirit photograph. Preus museum, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.

One Monday evening some five years ago, I walked into my first Spiritualist service. In those days, the New York Spiritualist Church held services roughly once a month in a broad-minded white-marble Methodist structure designed to hold some thousand parishioners. But the Spiritualists only filled the first few rows. It was dim, churchy-smelling, and vast.

I’d thought about what to wear. It was, after all, a church; it was also seven in the evening in late November. In the end, I changed out of my jeans and wore a high-necked Laura Ashley dress and a tweed jacket and my least ironic glasses. My hair was severely curtailed into a topknot. I suppose, as in many such moments, I was trying to control the one thing I could.

As it turned out, I could have worn anything. There were people in jeans, there were people in gowns, there was a Guardian Angel beret—or maybe it was just a red hat. There was one person in a cape. From the moment I walked in, I was approached by other congregants: people introduced themselves and shook my hand and told me how long they’d been attending. Some made unusually intense eye contact; I’d later learn these were the mediums. We were all there to see ghosts; we were all, I suppose, future ghosts.

Am I making it sound jaunty? It wasn’t, at least not for me. I was not there out of irony or even morbid curiosity; I needed comfort. It was one of those moments when the world of the living seemed too callous and cruel and my own resources too depleted and I was not at all sure I could bear it. I had contempt for my younger self; my older self didn’t interest me at all. I had lost a pregnancy and didn’t think there would be another. People I cared for had died. Others were suffering. There were still others I couldn’t forgive, and I had not yet learned that you don’t need to forgive everything in order to love someone—that the truth is quite the opposite. In short, I was a mess.

I’d always gravitated towards ghost stories. I have a few of my favorites on my phone for tense moments: Edith Wharton’s collected ghost stories—digital copies of my high-school-era, dog-eared paperback edition and the slicker New York Review Books reissue—a pdf of a sixties Victorian collection, and a Virago compilation. I have carried them to hospital waiting rooms and read them at times I was too down to get out of bed. Some people like fantasy epics or Regency romance or Sudoku or science-fiction world-building or the gentle challenge of cozy mysteries; I like the undead.

In a sense, I come by it honestly. One branch of my family was heavily involved in Spiritualism when it was popular and progressive after the Civil War. Family lore has it that one evening, during their nightly automatic-writing session, two elderly great-great aunts received a message about their even more elderly mother upstairs: “MAWMAW IS DEAD.” (She was.)

Not long ago, a document made the rounds on the family listserv. In the wake of my great-aunt’s death at one hundred, her daughter has been dutifully scanning and disseminating several lifetimes’ worth of correspondence from a particularly communicative branch of the family tree: hand-painted Christmas cards, reams of letters, menus, programs, and emailed exchanges with distant relatives in Yorkshire. This particular document, however, was long even by the family’s prolific standards. At the top were the handwritten words “Psychic Experiences of James E. Benedict (1854–1940),” and what follows are thirty-six pages of typescript.

“In writing out the incidents which have occurred during a long life,” begins the first section (marked both “I” and “INTRODUCTION”), “I am recording in the following pages those with a possible psychic bearing, perhaps as an excuse for my long-continued interest in psychic research. I have not been an investigator in the proper sense of the word as I have always had other interests with the first call on my time. All of the happenings were real to me, as real as the other experiences that added to the knowledge of the contacts of my life to its surroundings.”

So ghosts were an established fact of my life when I was growing up, maybe the only real religious certainty we inherited. My grandmother—also a churchgoing Christian—accepted their existence with the same serene passivity with which she did everything. My mother claims to have seen a few. I have not. I used to think I’d never see a ghost because I wanted it too much, as though the spirits of dead people behaved like an underwritten man from an early season of Sex and the City. I’d even lived after college in a converted brownstone that was widely considered to be haunted—former tenants had seen apparitions and my roommate had had unsettling experiences with slamming pocket doors and rogue electronics. I never felt anything at all. But my faith is solid.

***

I had thought of going for a long time before that November night when I finally did. I didn’t tell people before I went. And after I did finally go, I did not admit how much I had loved it, how comfortable I had felt amid strangers joined only by a belief in the Golden Rule and the presence of dead people. It wasn’t a large congregation, but it was by every metric the most diverse group I’d ever encountered in New York City. I wanted to be better; I wanted to have the perspective of those on the other side who, we were told, were above all petty things; I wanted to feel and not think forever and ever.

We held hands in the dark and recited a creed that was sort of Unitarian, but with ghosts. The medium—a rather irritable gentleman in a very large marled sweater—told me (the last to receive her message) that people who “passed over” would visit me via dreams, or in those moments between sleeping and waking. I was exhilarated. I dutifully acquired a bedside notebook and even interleaved the pages with some pictures of benevolent dead relatives, but I think Ambien thwarts their messaging, and I was on a good deal of medication then. It was clear there were people there who communed with the same loved one regularly. One woman rather monopolized the medium trying to get a message to her mother, who must have been gone twenty years. A man in a velveteen jacket, meanwhile, had the air of someone who never finds what he wants, but still projects a jaunty optimism for the benefit of others. In a world where we analyze all our responses, it felt very good to respond only in terms of feeling: sympathy, sadness, irritation. I went back again, and again.

I have thought about what it is that I, and those like me, find so soothing about ghosts. There’s the usual escapist appeal—that of gritty procedurals, cozy mysteries, or romances: wishes fulfilled, things tied up neatly, and order in a chaotic world, with the added bonus of a type of immortality. Spiritualism thrived after the Civil War and again in 1918, and grief, as C. S. Lewis said, is an awful lot like fear. Maybe it’s an antidote to the ambient nihilism every generation thinks they invented, or the vestige of something ancient. Or, just maybe, a part of us wants to keep our small horrors and betrayals and fears alive, because in spite of everything, we think it is the truest, most secret part of who we are: what Edith Wharton called “those deepest depths where the inexplicable and the unforgettable sleep together.”

My primary takeaway, as a congregant, is that the bulk of supernatural dealings aren’t more interesting than any other, and require at least as much politeness. “It is, in fact, not easy to write a ghost-story,” Edith Wharton writes in her preface to Ghosts. Wharton’s interest in the form—she wrote over one hundred ghost stories in her life—came, crucially, out of phobia. Wharton’s ghost stories aren’t built around cheap thrills. They’re much scarier than that: her specters are guilt, sexuality, suppression, aging, the changing world, profound loneliness. Human things. Wharton knew there was a lot to be said for denial, and for refusing to let go, too, even at great cost. Psychological hygiene is the enemy of the good ghost story.

The first of her ghost stories I came across, 1910’s “The Eyes,” was in Virago’s terrific compendium “Modern Ghost Stories.” I originally read it during what seemed like a bad time, when I was twenty, and have since reread it in what really were bad times, and its power has only grown. Like many of Wharton’s ghost stories, it’s written from the point of view of a male narrator, deals in questions of sexuality, and concerns an American trying to outrun demons by escaping to the Old World. But, as any reader of her work knows, the banal is not a barrier to the horrific any more than the Gothic is a guarantor—indeed, Wharton seems to take special pleasure in subverting these conventions. In “The Eyes,” her meticulous detailing of interiors isn’t only a decorator’s enthusiasm (although it’s also surely that). It’s also a deft way of making comfort unnerving. I ran across one online reviewer who calls its narrator “the worst ghost-story teller ever.” I can only assume this reader is young, or has been very lucky in life.

But then, other people’s ghost stories are generally boring—or they would be if we knew them. After all, it’s small, personal things that torment us, the things we’re supposed to have forgotten, or maybe even have forgotten in our waking lives. And I do think that’s part of their comfort: sometimes a life trauma can give one a level of laser focus, of avoidance, that a more cheerfully occupied brain won’t allow. That’s the periphery where the specters slip in, I guess.

My great-great-grandfather’s account is a case in point. No one can question his thoroughness (it includes exhaustive descriptions of the proper preservation of fish for display in paraffin jelly) nor his belief in his own honesty (although a suspicious number of the “psychic” experiences seem to be an excuse to brag about being a great checkers player). But the document, so detailed, so conscientious, is anticlimactic. What’s strange is that we do not hear about the time he spent as an eleven-year-old orderly in a Union war hospital, the deaths, illnesses, and tragedies that color any life. It ends: “The bushes were more like the alder than the thorny bushes of Africa or eastern countries. A man could make pan cakes in the wood sure enough, but I am sure I never saw one do it.”

There was one section, though, which I felt compelled to copy into that unused notebook I had bought and kept by my bedside: “In common with many others I have, when slowly awakening from a sound sleep early in the morning, had pictures of many faces come before me in succession … sometimes the scenic is dispelled for sound and voices are heard saying sounds or perhaps whole sentences which have no connection with any of my activities and are promptly forgotten as too worthless with which to burden the memory.”

 

Sadie Stein is a New York–based writer and critic. She interviewed Jane Gardam for the Spring 2022 issue of The Paris Review.

Why Do Women Want?: Edith Wharton’s Present Tense

Edith Wharton. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Undine Spragg—how can you?” her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid “bell-boy” had just brought in.

It strikes me as odd that the opening of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country, rarely appears on those “best first lines in literature” lists that go around every so often. The sentence has everything that makes the novel, and Wharton’s work in general, so great: vigor, voice, irony, detail. Through it, Wharton sketches a tense and dissonant world in which the colloquial and the bejeweled come into uncomfortable relation with each other. Dramatic and dynamic, this world nevertheless feels intensely claustrophobic. From the first five words of the novel, the reader is tied to a repetitive present tense that feels inescapable—no future, no past, just a boxed-in present (“how can you?” rather than the usual “how could you?”).

Each time we read the novel, it seems, the continuous present of the deliciously named Undine Spragg happens to us all over again. The Custom of the Country, many recent commentators have noted, feels uncannily up to the minute. Its heroine, the beautiful, social-climbing, rapacious, and empty-souled Undine Spragg, reminds us of a tabloid fixture or a reality television star; her currency as a figure who exemplifies the ideas about white womanhood in every era has remained constant. If the morality of divorce—the main “problem” in this 1913 “problem novel”—is perhaps no longer the most pressing social phenomenon to imaginatively explore, Undine’s grasping, financially speculative approach to personal identity and relationships still is.

Custom tracks Undine’s destructive rise from her life as the middle-class daughter of an upwardly-mobile businessman and his fluttering, matronly wife in the fictional Midwestern town of Apex City to the highest echelons of New York and French society. She chews through husbands and children in search of ever more money and ever better social position, marrying and divorcing like Goldilocks trying various bowls of porridge. In her treatment of each of Undine Spragg’s husbands (and their families), Wharton explores the textures of turn-of-the-century wealth: the prim Old New York dinner table (“the high dark dining-room with mahogany doors and dim portraits”); the musty Louis Quinze traditions of the stuffy French aristocracy; and the vulgar electric light illuminating the capitalist acquisitiveness of the American nouveau riche. As Undine moves through these various worlds of wealth, the novel highlights her comparative freshness within the contexts of their enervating gildedness, extending a sort of deep compass onto this substantially superficial character. The combination of compassion and sharply observed frankness is typical of Wharton’s fiction, which tends to love its characters without letting any of them off the hook.

As Undine’s mother raises that wrinkly hand to “defend” against what turns out to be the social invitation that sets her on her path, Undine swoops in and grabs the proffered note with her “quick young fingers.” Undine’s hand, as Hermione Lee has pointed out, is deeply symbolic—always grabbing and twisting and darting. It is, as her first husband Ralph Marvell describes it, a “miserly hand,” desiring and insistent but also cheap: she refuses to pay to get what she wants. The Custom of the Country documents and dramatizes Undine’s wants and desires, from the expected—“Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!” and “I want to look perfectly lovely!”—to the comically resistant: she has “a fierce desire to spend [her time] in upsetting … immemorial customs.” In the end, it is the frankness of Undine’s wants—the quick, open willingness of her grasp—that draws a reader in and cultivates our complex emotional attachment to her. It feels a little bit thrilling to see a woman ride the wave of her desires, uncut by ambivalence or ambiguity.

Is, then, The Custom of the Country a feminist text? This is a question that has accompanied the novel since its publication, even as the term “feminist” as a descriptor for imaginative expression remained latent in the era. Initial reviews were split. In the New York Times, one critic called Undine the “most repellant heroine we have encountered in many a long day.” Others acknowledged the draw of her villainousness, and still others placed the character in the argument that white women’s domestic and marital work is work. An anonymous 1913 reviewer in The Nation draws a long, complicated, suggestive comparison between Undine’s violent ascent and the work undertaken by “pioneer women,” arguing that “the rigors of pioneer life fall more painfully upon the woman than upon the man.”

In 1986, Janet Malcolm came out with guns blazing in a New York Times review of a new Library of America volume of Wharton’s novels. Titled “The Woman Who Hated Women,” the review’s central piece of evidence is The Custom of the Country. In Custom, Malcolm asserts, Wharton “takes her cold dislike of women to a height of venomousness previously unknown in American letters.” Malcolm’s essay is a fun, provocative read, but as a polemic it fails to convince. After all, must one like women to be a feminist, or even to evade the “misogyny” Malcolm accuses Wharton of harboring? The literary critic Arielle Zibrak, in “The Woman Who Hated Sex,” a 2016 essay whose title plays cheekily on Malcolm’s, reframes both Malcolm’s argument and the longer history of the “Is it feminist?” question about Custom. For Zibrak, the question is a nonstarter. Wharton was not personally a feminist, and The Custom of the Country’s portrayal of Undine reveals an undeniable anger at the figure of the young woman. Yet, as Zibrak points out, in the text’s forward-thinking critique of “consumerism supplanting sexual desire,” Wharton extends a prescient political analysis of the experience of white womanhood that is especially relevant to the twenty-first century’s “lean-in” and girlboss fame economies. The rollicking fun of The Custom of the Country may lie in a reader’s chance both to judge and cheer on Undine’s avaricious pursuit of what she wants. But the book’s deeper and lasting commentary seems to lie in its exploration of how and why, and under the pressure of what social and psychological forces, Undine has come to want what she wants at all.

Wharton’s prescience is tied to what was happening in her life: during the years in which she composed Custom, everything was collapsing around her. Her (by all accounts sexless) marriage to her husband, Teddy, had been disintegrating since the day the match was made, but it finally crumbled in the years between 1910 and their divorce in 1913. Her tumultuous affair with the bisexual writer Morton Fullerton came to a painful end in 1909, though they continued to correspond as intimate friends. As so much change unfolded, Wharton was trying to figure out not only what she wanted going forward—Who would she spend her time with? What would “home” look and feel like? What would her work be?—but also, tracing backward, how in the world she had ever come to want (or resign herself to) so many things that had turned out to be wrong.

The Custom of the Country puts a spin on a question that’s been asked by men from Sigmund Freud to Mel Gibson: What do women want? Wharton is less interested in unpacking what women want than which desires are even available to them. She was devoted to imagining the relationships between individual feeling and behavior and the social norms, conventions, and values that shape them. Undine Spragg is, perversely, a near-perfect character for this question, not because she is powerfully individual (like Lily Bart, Ellen Olenska, or Wharton herself) but because she has nearly no recognizable sense of authentic selfhood at all. As the critic Stephanie Foote has observed, Wharton achieves this effect by limiting her use of free indirect discourse to represent Undine’s consciousness on the page. Readers are treated to Undine’s speech, and a lot of omniscient narration about what Undine wants from the social world that she marauds through, but throughout the novel we encounter very little language from Undine’s complex consciousness. The result, in Foote’s description, is a sense that Undine has “no secret self” that exists apart from the conventions of the various social worlds she is devoted to imitating and echoing.

The novel’s representation of imitation is provocative, and not only as a critique. Undine is frequently shown watching, learning, and performing. In Undine’s own formulation, “one of the guiding principles of her career” is that “it’s better to watch than to ask questions.” At a momentous dinner party with the Old New York Marvell-Dagonet family, we discover that Undine’s “quickness in noting external differences had already taught her to modulate and lower her voice, and to replace ‘The i-dea!’ and ‘I wouldn’t wonder’ by more polished locutions.” Late in the novel, we encounter Undine’s thoughts on the “superiority” that her marriage into the French aristocracy had given her over the American nouveau riche: “She had learned things they did not guess: shades of conduct, turns of speech, tricks of attitude—and easy and free and enviable as she thought them, she would not for the world have been back among them at the cost of knowing no more than they.”

These insights into Undine’s character are underpinned by Wharton’s formal use of repetition. Over and over, the reader encounters a word, idea, or phrase in one chapter only to find it popping up soon after. Without a “secret self” it seems Undine has nothing but empty space into which she can fit an endless amount of knowledge and information about the world. Yet this knowledge never changes her, never causes her to pause and rethink; it never, really, knocks her off course. We learn that as a girl in Apex City, she had flirted with a dentist, thinking him high-status. At the Marvell-Dagonets’ dinner party, she listens closely to casual talk and quickly absorbs, through their offhandedly hierarchical assessments of social status, that not only is a dentist a middling sort but so is a Wall Street broker. Two chapters later, Undine scoffs to herself about her father’s desires for her. “Did he want to … have her marry a dentist and live in a West Side flat?” The Custom of the Country is full of repetitions and echoes like these: a shocking new idea gets introduced to Undine in one chapter only to show up later fully integrated into her worldview and sense of self. There is both nothing Undine can’t learn and nothing, having been learned by her, that can change her.

The intense stagnation of Undine’s character is always balanced against her climb of social ascent. She rides a “train of thought” that transports her from one place to another but never changes her in substance or appearance. Her beauty persists—her rose-gold hair continues to shine; her complexion glows whether under the soft firelight of her French country home or the blazing electric glare of hotel lighting; her cycle of desire, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, desire repeats. The critic Jennifer Fleissner has  commented that many naturalist plots from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries featuring young women are “marked by neither the steep arc of decline nor that of triumph, but rather by an ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion—back and forth, around and around, on and on—that has the distinctive effect of seeming also like a stuckness in place.” These women, like Undine, tend to “oscillate” and “drift” through life rather than achieve or self-actualize as they might in a traditional bildungsroman. Yet of these women, Fleissner floats a provocative claim: their stuckness and resistance to change represents “a serious form of seeking, to which an older ideal of feminine fulfillment can no longer offer an adequate response.”

What does Undine want? The answer is a lot, and also very little. Her most obvious wants are so conventional (to make a good marriage, to be rich, to be famous, to be admired) that it’s easy to miss some of her more unexpected desires. These more perverse cravings often crop up in her relations with the indelible Elmer Moffatt, a loutish man with whom Undine has a secret and complex history. In a scene that takes place early in the novel, Undine nervously agrees to meet Moffatt at a public park, a risky move that she undertakes while wearing a veil so as to remain unseen on the streets. “All I want,” she tells him during this emotional assignation, “is that nothing shall be known.” What is the relationship between Undine’s more expected desires—the spectacular, superficial ones that are easy to mock or judge—and this stranger one, which I do believe she seriously seeks: the request for an aspect of her life to remain unknown? After the meeting, she returns to her fiancé, the Old New York moneyed Ralph Marvell. He comes close, feeling romantic, and demands of her, “Take off your veil.” As pliable and willing to debase herself as Undine tends to be, this request sets her unusually on edge: “A quiver of resistance ran through her: he felt it and dropped her hands.” But Ralph peels her veil back anyway, and what Undine doesn’t say here to the man she will marry and then destroy is that no matter how many veils he peels back, he’ll never be able to know her, because relationships are impossible when one party is as cool, slippery, and ungraspable as water.

Like many novels, The Custom of the Country’s spine is its heroine’s relationships with a series of men. The narrative cycles through multiple marriage plots, from courtship to marriage to courtship to marriage to courtship to marriage. That’s the story the reader loops through, alongside Undine. But the plot of the book is really about what happens between women. A moment toward the end of the novel helps illuminate this tricky aspect of Wharton’s narration. Now serially married, Undine proposes to one of her many men that they become lovers. Balking at the suggestion of infidelity (and desirous to publicly, not illicitly, acquire her), he refuses to cheat with her, declaring that “There are things a man doesn’t do.” It’s a dramatic and unexpected moment, not least because implied by his remark is an insight that can sometimes be difficult to see through the fog of patriarchy, which is that if there are some things a man doesn’t do, there is almost nothing a woman won’t.

Maybe this is the aspect of The Custom of the Country that most felt like misogyny to Janet Malcolm: Wharton’s insistence in the novel—also present, though with a softer touch, in The House of Mirth—that under a scarcity of options for fulfillment, women often behave very badly, and in particular very badly to one another. Undine’s marriages are generally made not only because she wants money and status but because she desires—maybe above all?—to dominate over other women, and to demonstrate her dominance in public. The novel’s complexity reveals something deeper than the surface-level conflicts between the individual and family, and even between conventions and their violation. Rather, what Wharton captures is the misery of the feminine continuous present, which sets women inside social systems that allow for no synthesis, no way to make something new out of the insipid materials the world provides them, no light around which to gather.

The Custom of the Country is arch, gossipy, shrewd, and weirdly fun, and it’s also a rigorous and challenging book that captures much about our current moment’s reevaluation of damage done to and by white women. “Poor Undine!” Ralph Marvell thinks to himself, condescendingly. “She was what the gods had made her—a creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure. He had no desire to ‘preach down’ such heart as she had—he felt only a stronger wish to reach it, teach it, move it to something of the pity that filled his own.” By putting the feminized language of sentiment and sympathy—heart, pity, instruction, spirituality—in the mind of one of her male characters, Wharton pulls off an interesting trick. Exploring his own feelings of sympathy toward Undine, Ralph goes on to describe their marriage as a form of drowning for them both. Here, somewhat benightedly, Ralph begins to articulate a political critique of marriage and of the idiocies of American gender roles under which he and Undine both suffer; yet it is so easily sublimated back into the very elements he rebukes when he sinks into the easy language of passive and idle sympathy. Poor Undine!

The question occurs anew for readers of this book: What will you make of Wharton’s complicated representation of a white woman behaving very badly to friends and loved ones, inside a social world that has belittled, berated, and narrowed her from the start? The theorist Lauren Berlant has written about the dilemmas posed by stories about feminized suffering, which expose yet also pleasurably dwell in the indignities of life experienced as a woman. Presenting themselves as mere reflections of the truth of what Berlant terms the “female complaint,” these stories “about” white women have come to identify white womanhood with a state of disappointment, particularly in love. Undine Spragg—constantly disappointed, never satisfied—represents both the conventional white woman and the category’s self-embedded critique. Such complex duality extends into the readerly experience, which finds many readers eager to both critique and inhabit the character (Undine Spragg’s initials are, after all, US).

There’s something fascinating about reading Undine Spragg today. Trained ever more precisely by contemporary popular and social media cultures on how to find and appreciate deeper meaning in feminine superficiality, readers today are probably more sympathetic to Undine than ever. Finding myself rooting for Undine—loving her blank voraciousness and how capacious her unsatisfiable desires come to seem—can be a quick step to feeling agential and empowered by my creative reparative reading. These days, we stan a woman who DGAF. Yet I wonder about this self-soothing reading practice. As Berlant has argued, when personal feeling becomes a way to communicate with one another about the structural effects of patriarchy, practices that might more aptly be understood as survival too easily become “recoded as freedom” while never quite serving as freedom.

The Custom of the Country is nothing if not a book about one white woman’s survival. Yet in it Wharton remains committed to representing how wretched survival can be, even when that survival features the most luxurious of fabrics, goods, and surroundings. The book ends without resolution, lacking in synthesis. The continuous present in which it started remains. Undine’s mother’s exclamation echoes: “Undine Spragg, how can you?” Readers are left only with a set of unanswered questions about marriage, gender, white womanhood, and social convention that remain important to consider today. Isn’t it true that Undine’s frank wanting is both freely felt and thrilling to encounter and also meager in kind? Is it possible to both appreciate Undine’s talent for survival while also refusing to mistake it for freedom? In The Custom of the Country, Wharton illustrated something about American white womanhood that has taken too long to name. In search of status, love, and money, white women are a force, not always for the good, to be reckoned with.

 

 

Sarah Blackwood is an associate professor of English at Pace University and the author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Her criticism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

From The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, to be published by Penguin Classics in November.

Dawn Kasper’s Death Scenes

DAWN KASPER, “MICHELLE FRANCO” (2003), ANNA HELWING GALLERY, CHICAGO ART FAIR. Photo courtesy of David Lewis Gallery.

Around the turn of the millennium, when she was twenty-three, the artist Dawn Kasper began picturing herself dead. Then a first-year graduate student at UCLA Arts, she was spending a great deal of time in isolation in her studio, and the rest of her time consuming material that revolved in some way around violence: video nasties, death-scene photographs by Weegee, Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster silk screens, etc. Eventually, a nagging thought set in: However many entries she slotted into her ever-expanding mental Rolodex of female death scenes—Janet Leigh bleeding out in a motel bathtub, or Sherilyn Fenn having her pretty head cracked open in a car crash; Teri McMinn’s slender shoulders being sickeningly thumped onto a meat hook, or the sister in Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl being slashed through with an axe—she would never have the opportunity to see her own death as a cinematic image. “I wanted to see what I looked like dead,” Kasper recalls in an email. “I began to feel afraid—not of my own mortality, but of never knowing how I might die.” It is not unusual for a first-year student, and a first-year art school student in particular, to be morbid. What was unusual about Kasper’s burgeoning obsession with death was her conviction that it might be possible to influence the circumstances of her own demise. She began to believe that if she could fake being killed in every possible scenario, she could cheat fate, as if anticipating all of death’s potential moves might neutralize them. “As a woman, I felt so out of control,” Kasper says of herself at that age. “I began to worry that I was crazy.”

I first heard about Dawn Kasper’s series Death Scenes via a fleeting mention on a podcast by the brilliant Irish critic Sean McTiernan. Curiously, I could find little in the way of documentation of the work online, save for a brief summary of the project on the artist’s Wikipedia page under the heading “Early work”: “For this series Kasper assumed a performative rigor mortis with a mise-en-scène reminiscent of B horror films and Weegee-eqsue crime scene photography.” The entry quotes art critic Rachel Mason: “For years, Dawn could be spotted, dead, at art events all over Los Angeles, in the tradition of Harold and Maude, sprawled out in an elaborate shrine to some horrific accident.” Kasper researched real accidents both as a means to ensure the visual and physical accuracy of her performances, and to exorcise her terror more completely. “I didn’t care so much about the audience,” she admits. “I wanted to feel; I wanted help. I guess looking back I was very selfish, because I just dumped all over them, and didn’t even look back or ask questions.”

Dawn Kasper, “The Motorcycle Accident” (2003), Anna Helwing Gallery. Photo courtesy of David Lewis Gallery.

If self-injury is in some way the ultimate use of the body as material, a rejection of personal safety and good sense in service of a higher and more significant goal, the act of dying (or “dying”) in public might be the most perfect and most crystalline expression of that impulse. Other artists have come close. The famous poet and performer Bob Flanagan—who suffered from cystic fibrosis, and who claimed that his passionate love of S&M was what allowed him to outlive his terminal prognosis by two decades—gestured to his imminent death again and again in his work, with coffins and obituaries and hospital beds recurring as motifs. In his ideal artwork, he informs the audience in the 1997 documentary Sick, “I’d be buried with a video camera … in a tomb,” with a connection from the camera to a video monitor. The piece would be called The Viewing, “and every so often someone [could] walk into the room and turn on a switch, and see how I’m progressing.” Doctors had told Flanagan that he would die at twenty-five, right around the age Dawn Kasper was when she first became obsessed with recreating her own hypothetical expiry. If her youthful mania was about prevention, Flanagan’s felt more like goading, a seduction. “I keep thinking I’m dying, I’m dying,” he wrote in his diaristic book of sickness, The Pain Journal. “But I’m not, I’m not—not yet.” Both artists have channeled a sense of terrible helplessness into a form of personal and creative empowerment, the results provocative precisely because they beckon something we are naturally inclined to avoid.

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Dawn Kasper, “The Boating Accident” (2003), Highways. Photo courtesy of David Lewis Gallery.

When Kasper sent me photographs of the Death Scenes performances, I found myself thinking of Susan Sontag’s assertion, in 2003’s Regarding the Pain of Others, that “the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.” Kasper’s tableaux are startlingly visceral, but the resulting images are also as cinematic and visually seductive as the kind of horror-themed high-fashion shoots photographers Steven Klein and Steven Meisel were producing in the naughts. Sontag also said that pornography was in fact not about sex but about death, and the meticulous way Kasper styles her setups suggests a similar blurring of these themes, each coolly fetishized scene functioning as a commentary on the commodification of dead women and the sometimes titillating way they are presented on the news or in the movies. “I have a difficult time with how women are treated and depicted in this country,” she says. “They are so often put down; abused; used and then discarded.” The Death Scenes are abreactive; the trauma they relive and thus expunge is not that of the actual experience being depicted but that of women in toto: a sensation of being constantly at risk, on show, moments from a crash.

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Dawn Kasper, “The Car Crash” (2003), Track 16; Bergamont Station. Photo courtesy of David Lewis Gallery.

“I always thought it was so funny when I lay there in a pool of fake blood for hours and hours while people talked, laughed, and got drunk at art openings,” Kasper recalls. “Then, when the openings were over, I’d get up, and people would thank me for the work, or tell me that they enjoyed the performance. It always felt so surreal. I felt like a phony, a fake, a liar; I felt like the court fool or jester, like the monkey that dances for coins. I realized that I was doing it all to myself, and it was all my fault. I was making myself feel this way, and for what? For art?” Like Flanagan’s work, Kasper’s performances are not just riotously punk but also very funny. Both practitioners make it easy to see why Plato once characterized the act of laughing as the physical expression of the “mixture of pleasure and pain that lies in the malice of amusement.” Are the Death Scenes malicious? Yes and no—they are pointed and satirical, but their execution is undignified and uncomfortable enough to suggest an element of masochism, and that muddling of righteous anger and amusing self-debasement is the key to their success. “Cheating death, or faking it to make a living,” Kasper writes, with what I imagine is a shrug, in the last line of our correspondence. “It’s so silly to think about it all this way now. I guess I thought I was making a point.”

Dawn Kasper, “Michelle Franco” (2003), Anna Helwing Gallery, Chicago Art Fair. Photo courtesy of David Lewis Gallery.

 

Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, The White Review, Vogue, The Nation, The New Statesman, and The New Republic. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence, is out now with Repeater.

Staff Picks: Scary Stories

Halloween decorations, Black Bull, Wetherby, West Yorkshire. Mtaylor848, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

While every story in Meng Jin’s Self-Portrait with Ghost is eerie—as the collection’s title might suggest—the eeriest is the one about three babysitters. “Three women,” the narrator remembers, then corrects herself: “three girls,” though all older than she was. As a child she thought of them as the pretty one and the wicked one, both of whom she loved, and the boring one, whom she disdained. When she grew up and went to college, she found she couldn’t really see her own body except when she compared herself to other girls—whether “ugly or pretty, beautiful or gorgeous, if she was plain but sweet, if I wanted to look like her or not.” Boys, too, she evaluated by proxy: if his girlfriend was pretty, he was desirable. What she didn’t know was that, at the same stage of girlhood, her three original models were already vanishing into women—defined no longer by their own prettiness, wickedness, or dullness, but by the common objectification of their bodies, the varieties of violence done to them, and their differing abilities to stand it. 

—Jane Breakell, development director

I don’t scare easily, but the Latvian artist Julia Soboleva’s I have found the light in the darkness terrified me. In her monograph, which features paintings and collages made of old photographs, Soboleva conjures up an eerie underworld inhabited by birdlike creatures. In one image, a group of weeping doctors with bird heads gather around a surgical table and use pliers to operate on a bleeding human leg. In another, two creatures carry a dead body on a stretcher while a third one watches, smiling. But what’s most disturbing about the book is how, at times, these hybrid animals seem ordinary, even human. They give birth, dance in the park, make out, and meditate; they pose for pictures with their loved ones, and they seem happy. Soboleva’s rendering of this ghostly world in images is so clear that it’s as if these strange creatures have always lived right beneath our feet, and she is finally allowing us to see them.

—Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro, intern

Here is something you can do if you’re feeling bad and you want to feel not exactly worse but are not quite ready to feel better: watch all three Godfather movies back-to-back in a forty-eight-hour window. Then you can watch some other movies, more or less in descending order of quality—The Departed, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Mystic River, and, if you can get it on DVD, State of Grace, starring Sean Penn. People often ask me why I won’t watch anything but mob movies and I have never had a good answer beyond my basic, mostly uninterrogated preference. But part of what I like, I think, is watching the magnification of everything horrible about being in a family or any kind of network of loyalty, beyond the point of the absurd, beyond the point of the grotesque, far beyond the pale.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

I am always searching for terrifying but artful films without too much body horror. I have never been able to finish David Cronenberg’s Videodrome or Crimes of the Future (too gory), but I had my eyes glued to the screen during his lesser-known, less gross Dead Ringers (1988). In this psychological thriller, Cronenberg offers a chilling contribution to the long line of art about twins and doppelgängers, like Dostoevsky’s The Double and David Swift’s The Parent Trap. Based on the real lives of Stewart and Cyril Marcus, Dead Ringers follows Beverly and Elliot, identical twins who share a gynecological practice, an apartment, and sometimes even lovers. Beverly, who is awkward, warm, and introverted, does the medical work at the practice; Elliot, suave, cold, and social, charms his female colleagues and strangers. Jeremy Irons plays them both, calibrating their tortured personalities so brilliantly that with no other clues you can tell from just his posture and gaze which brother is which. They frequently trade places with each other, a calculated deception which works perfectly until they both become addicted to prescription pills and lose control over their performances. As their dissolution accelerates, Cronenberg oscillates between the two settings in which each brother is most in his element—a bleak Reagan-era workspace and lush bourgeois parties—with increasing frequency. The first time I watched the film, I cried in front of all my friends and was unable to articulate why. The second time I watched it, I realized, to my horror, that I identified with both of the brothers. The brilliance of the film is that the twins have split themselves into the public and private identities of a single person. They are caught in a dance, performing until the point of collapse.

—Campbell Campbell, intern

Genres for War: Writers in Ukraine on Literature

Olga Kryazhich’s destroyed apartment. Photograph courtesy of Kryazhich.

I was almost done with a draft of my novel when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Amid the destruction and devastation that followed, continuing with my novel felt impossible; I turned toward journalism, which had always been a part-time job for me. For seven months, I have been working as a war correspondent in Ukraine. I have found that I can only read war reports: I am constantly turning to On the Front Line by Marie Colvin. I have wondered about the role of literature, especially in wartime: Are we simply supposed to let documentaries and daily news take over? Or do we find—and provide—an escape from the unbearable?

I began to ask other writers these questions and was surprised by the variability of their answers. Five Ukrainian writers from the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv regions—the areas devastated by the war—spoke to me about the genres they have been reading and writing during the war. In Kharkiv, a literature professor told me about his rare books being burned in the stove by the Russian military. He also told me about a Ukrainian officer seeking reading recommendations the day before being killed at the front. “I think that an epic work of literature will not come until after the war is over,” writes Serhiy Zhadan. On the other hand, says Lyuba Yakimchuk, “The task of poets is to put the unspeakable feelings in words.” Olga Kryaziach, whose apartment and books were also burned by the Russians, reads and writes on her iPad, taking notes for a different future.

Iya Kiva

I have started to become spatially disoriented because of the war. Once, as I was getting back to a rented apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I was or how I got there for hours. I lived in a Soviet project-style block of flats called khrushchyovka surrounded by identical buildings, and I couldn’t understand which one of those khrushchyovkaswas my home these days; I was shaking and I couldn’t breathe. In another one of my rented apartments, I was always hitting my head while entering. At home, I needed to turn left after entering, but in this new space I had to turn right.

Can I write? Yes and no. On the one hand, I prefer that my story and the stories of my loved ones are not told by others, like the Russian authors who started writing poems during the first weeks of the invasion. But I have been forcing myself to write rather than feeling an inner need; even short diary notes are incredibly tiring. I have also noticed that all my poems are about the inability to speak. This is true both on the thematic and architectonic levels, including pauses and a rather restricted range of ideas. The way I write now feels like a score of silence.

During the first months of the full-scale invasion, reading was similar to learning a new language. Not Ukrainian, Polish, or English, but language as is—as the ability to understand the meaning of particular words, to combine them, make phrases and sentences, to correlate what you’ve just read with your experience. Sometime in March I realized, with surprise, that if merely one word from a page of text aroused associations in my mind, then that was good. It meant I hadn’t unlearned how to think yet.

The only book that I have managed to read from the beginning to the end since February 24 is I Blame Auschwitz by Mikołaj Grynberg. Importantly, I read it in the original Polish. I have noticed that reading comes more easily in foreign languages now. It’s like I am tuning the radio of war to other frequencies.

 

Serhiy Zhadan

I think that an epic work of literature will not come until after the war is over. For now, there is only enough space and time for direct reflections. Everything else—novels and poems—everything that requires continuity in time—will emerge later. But humor is a completely different matter. It seems to me that even under the circumstances, Ukrainians have no problems with their sense of humor or irony. I think it is evidence of the power of faith, and I am saying this as an agnostic.

I am rereading Bruno Schulz, strange as it may seem. I am reading him despite the fact that he didn’t write about war—but maybe that’s exactly why. I want to continue translating Paul Celan, and I think I will get to it after our victory. But I am not reading him now. For me, Celan’s poems always had an “afterwar” feeling to them. It is unlikely that they could be written in the thirties. During war, there are no poets or non-poets; there are those who are ready to fight and those who are not.

 

Olga Kryaziach

On February 25, I threw my documents into my backpack, grabbed my cat, and went to the house of my close friends. For almost three weeks, we spent time with our soldiers at the front—we cooked food and baked bread for Ukrainian warriors. We defended our city to the best of our ability. I never got back home after that. I left behind old icons and photographs and things. I wish I could have taken them, but instead I took my cat.

I can’t live without books either. I had a lot of books, my own library. But the Russians burned it down, along with the apartment. So now I have e-books on my old iPad. And that’s where I also keep the notes for my own books, for the future.

 

Lyuba Yakimchuk

During the war, the short forms are best because we live on the run and in fragments. There is no time for the reading of novels. There is no relief in literature; the relief is in news: the Russian arsenals are being destroyed, and weapons are supplied to Ukraine. But memes, songs, and poems—all of these still work. These texts form a collective narrative.

So many people have lost their words because of the war. They say exactly this: there are no words to speak about this grief we have experienced. So the task of poets is to put the unspeakable feelings into words. Besides the words, poets also find form and rhythm, which help to insert a complex, powerful emotion into the text. And in this way, perhaps people start to gain the capacity to speak about their trauma, adopting the words and texts of others as their own. This helps them to process trauma. At least I hope that is the way it goes.

 

Olena Stenova

Any genre is suitable during the war. I’ve written poetry, satire, and fairy tales. Poetry: whether rhymed or not, you can say more than in prose. Satire: oh, it’s the best weapon for the war. And fairy tales are very healing. In them, you can describe the enemy, the time of occupation and war, but in a way that doesn’t hurt. My collection of fairy tales, Kazki pani Mishі, is a study of my personal military traumas. I write them online, on Facebook, and will publish them after the war. Both children and adults like them. People need to believe that someone strong will come to protect them and that it will be “just as the witch said.” I have seen stuff during the war that would be considered fantasy if I wrote about it. So let there be aliens.

I am writing a fantasy telling the story of the key keeper Malusha—in the city of Roden, which once was the capital of Ukraine—about the keys to the world that open everything: hell, heaven, souls, worlds. I don’t want to write about the war. About war—there should be only documentaries.

 

Zarina Zabrisky is an American journalist and novelist currently reporting on the war in Ukraine. Zabrisky is the author of three short-story collections and a novel, We, Monsters. Testimonies translated from the Russian and Ukrainian by Zarina Zabrisky and Marina Slobodianik. 

Serhiy Zhadan is a Ukrainian poet, novelist, essayist, literary translator and a rock musician, the author of seven novels, including Voroshilovgrad, The Orphanage, and Big Mac. Iya Kiva is a poet, translator and journalist. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Father from Heaven, and The First Page of Winter. Olga Kryazhich is a Ukrainian writer and a scholar. Olena Stepova is a Ukrainian writer, blogger and journalist. Lyuba Yakimchuk is a Ukrainian poet, playwright and screenwriter, author of a poetry book Apricots of Donbas.

Everything But Money: On Katherine Dunn

Katherine Dunn. Photograph courtesy of Eli Dapolonia.

Katherine Dunn didn’t really make a living from her fiction until 1987, when, at forty-two, she sold Geek Love, her third published novel, to Sonny Mehta at Knopf for twenty-five thousand dollars—a windfall that briefly swept away her persistent financial concerns. Dunn had relied on all sorts of ways to make ends meet while she was coming up as a writer. At eighteen years old, in 1963, she sold fake magazine subscriptions door-to-door in the Midwest until she was arrested in Missouri for trying to cash a client’s fraudulent check. As a college student, first at Portland State and later at Reed, she worked as a topless dancer, a nude model for art students, and a writer of fellow students’ term papers. She also hustled pool.

After her first novel, Attic, was published in 1970, Dunn got a gig in Manhattan writing scripts for Warner Brothers. She returned to Portland in 1976, after years of travel. There she tended bar at the Earth Tavern, a dive-bar-slash-rock venue frequented by hippies, bikers, and merchant marines. She wrote a question-and-answer column for Willamette Week, the local Portland alt-weekly, and covered local boxing.

But, mostly, as she struggled to make it as a fiction writer, Dunn waited tables, most notably at the Stepping Stone Cafe, a terrific Northwest Portland diner. When I stopped there last summer on a trip doing research for a biography about Dunn, it felt like it probably hadn’t changed much since she worked there in the seventies and eighties. Back then, the only day care she could afford for her young son, Eli Dapolonia, was a seat at the counter while she poured coffee and charmed customers.

***

Around the time Dunn wrote and was trying to sell “The Education of Mrs. R.,” her story featured in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review, it was 1975 and she was living in rural Vermont with Eli, who was then five, and her long-term boyfriend, Dante Peter Dapolonia Jr., and working as a secretary for the Physical Education Department at Middlebury College for two dollars and ten cents an hour. She described her employment in a letter to an old high school friend that fall:

No trouble as a job but the money makes me ache with chagrin—it’s not even the sort of job an illiterate could do. Nonetheless, it’s a wee dock o’ something—we’d be fine if the unemployment came through—Dan stays with Eli—works in the garden—preparing for spring—building compost—cutting weeds—digging—and drives me to work and picks me up as well as doing the housework … So, as usual, we have everything but money. Long walks, a library across the street, and a good time is had by all except for a faint nag that surfaces between waking and sleeping to fret the nerves over what may come.

Dunn was around thirty when she wrote “The Education of Mrs. R.,” and it was a time of great uncertainty on the heels of some itinerancy. Since she had met Dapolonia in the Haight in early 1968, the two had been traveling, from Belize to Nova Scotia to Europe, where they’d lived on the outskirts of Dublin for several years after Dunn gave birth there to Eli. Now that they had returned to the States, the young family was trying to carve out a more stable life in Vermont. The Dunn-Dapolonias were radicals of a fashion; they lived abroad and without any regular source of income for almost a decade. True to the era, they were serious about health food, progressive education, and not working for the man for any length of time—though some of their aspects separated their attitude from the milieu. “Neither of us were hippies,” Dunn wrote in a family album that Dapolonia Jr.’s uncle assembled. “We resembled them with our longish hair and casual attitudes toward sex and drugs and careers. But we were skeptical, analytical, critical, and struggling to find some rational and pragmatic view of the turmoil around us. And we were fundamentally selfish—convinced that the world couldn’t be ‘saved’ and even if it could be, we had enough to do to keep our heads above water, and weren’t the ones to do it. I, of course, had a fantasy that I could write sanity into existence.”

Dunn published two loosely autobiographical novels about her teenage years—Attic and Truck—in 1970 and 1971, but her third book, Toad, which will be published this fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was turned down again and again in the seventies. As she grappled with the demands of parenting and work, and the sting of rejection, she carved out time to work on a series of stories—all of them in the realistic vein and to some degree autobiographical—that explored what it means to be a mother. Reading them now, one can see Dunn exploring notions of family, power, and feminism, all while sorting through what kind of person she wanted to be.

***

Dunn’s own brand of feminism was complicated: “I wasn’t aware or interested in the women’s movement,” she wrote. “I was a loner and it never occurred to me that I couldn’t do whatever I wanted to. Being female I could get away with more than a guy could. It was an advantage not a liability.”

She believed that contemporary feminists depicted men as inherently aggressive and women as naturally helpless, and that this false dichotomy deepened gender inequality. “Defining men as the perpetrators of all violence is a viciously immoral judgment of an entire gender,” she wrote in “Just as Fierce,” a 1994 essay for Mother Jones. “And defining women as inherently nonviolent condemns us to the equally restrictive role of sweet, meek, and weak.”

Dunn refined this idea over the years. In “Call of the Wild,” a 1995 essay for Vogue, she declared the nineties to be the era of the bad girl. “There’s a Jungian notion that people cannot mature fully until they recognize and control their own dark side,” she wrote. “Perhaps a whole gender can go through the same maturation process.”

“The Education of Mrs. R.” is a dramatic exploration of Dunn’s belief that women need to recognize their inherent capacity for violence. It’s an origin story: after accidentally purchasing fifty roosters instead of egg-laying hens, Mrs. Rossich takes matters into her own hands and slaughters them, one by one, to provide food for her family. The story’s protagonist is a version of Dunn’s own mother, Velma Rossich née Golly, and the piece is reportedly based on a true story: Dunn’s younger brother, Nick, told me that their mom once slaughtered about twenty Cornish hens before realizing it was too much work.

***

Velma Rossich was a complicated figure in Dunn’s life. She was famously abusive and violent, and she was thought to be mentally ill. In her writing, Dunn valorizes fictional versions of her mother in one story, then emphasizes her nastiness in another. Undoubtedly, though, Velma lived up to Dunn’s idealized feminism. “My mother, still a witty and gifted artist in her hale 80s, got a rifle a few years ago,” Dunn wrote in “Just as Fierce.” “I pity the burglar who gives her a chance to use it.”

Of the several stories Dunn wrote and submitted to magazines in the mid-seventies, only one was published: “The Novitiate,” about a young mother protecting her two-year-old son in a squalid apartment building after being abandoned by the boy’s father. Redbook included the piece in their 1974 fiction issue. The story is harrowing and hones in on the details of squalor in typical Dunn fashion, but it presents a view of motherhood that was perhaps more palatable to readers of women’s magazines in the seventies—the protagonist is vulnerable, afraid, and sensitive. She cries after hearing a neighbor refer to her as a “sow.” She has a waking vision that her future vagina will “heal over for lack of use.” Redbook’s fiction editor wrote to Dunn’s agent to express interest in the story: “We admire the way this story explores feminine issues and desires, perhaps vanities as well.” And the magazine’s copy introducing the story hints at erotic overtones: “She was running on instinct—and fear of the men who hear her, almost smell her, through the walls.”

“The Education of Mrs. R.,” on the other hand, had never seen the light of day until The Paris Review published it this fall. It’s possible readers in the seventies weren’t ready for Dunn’s vision of a woman so enraptured by the act of murdering chickens that she doesn’t have time to tend to her young daughter. “You’re killing them!” Abby cries when she finds her mother covered in blood. “Yah!” Mrs. Rossich screams in return. In Dunn’s archives at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, I only found one rejection letter for the story, from an editor at McCall’s in 1975. “Katherine Dunn’s ‘The Education of Mrs. R.’ is a strong story,” she wrote, “but not really on track for our audience.”

After getting paid $1,750 for “The Novitiate,” in 1974, Dunn didn’t make another penny from her fiction writing until she sold Geek Love about fifteen years later. That money, combined with a sizable advance for her follow-up novel, Cut Man, plus proceeds from Geek film options, allowed her to buy a large Victorian in Northwest Portland, where her boyfriend, her little brother, her son, and a couple of his friends were able to move in. A period of prosperity lasted a decade or so before Dunn’s newfound wealth dried up, and she was back to having everything but money.

 

Eric Rosenblum is a couples and family therapist working in Brooklyn and an adjunct associate professor of writing at Pratt Institute. He is currently at work on a book-length biography of Katherine Dunn. 

Acte Gratuit

Illustration by Na Kim.

18/04/2022, 14:28, CT Angiogram renal & abdominal

No vascular calcification.

No renal calculi.

The kidneys are symmetrical in size (right = 11.1 cm; left = 11.0 cm) and normal in morphology.

Single left renal artery; no early branches. Single preaortic left renal vein.

Single right renal artery, branching laterally to the cava. Single right renal vein.

No extrarenal abnormality.

The plan is for a left nephrectomy.

 

***

 

My family likes to joke about the time I threw my brother to the alligators. We were in our early twenties, and on our wayto the Everglades in Florida. The taxi driver taking us there from our hotel on a nearby island stopped at a swampy clearing off the freeway. “They only feed at night,” he said, not particularly reassuringly.  (This was also a man who swore on his children’s lives that he had seen the Florida “bigfoot” twice.) “In the daytime they’re as harmless as dogs.”

He encouraged us to take a look, but I itched for five minutes of silence. My brother tried to persuade me, but I declined, claiming that I could see them just fine through the window. He came back in under five minutes, the whole episode passing without incident, the sun-drunk gators barely twitching from their sleep. My brother’s telling—and my mother’s and my father’s—has the creatures lurching from the water, ready to snatch him in their jaws, while I lock the car doors from the inside with a defensive click. I always laugh. It’s a better story his way.

***

In July 2020, my brother, at thirty-one years old, was diagnosed with an extremely rare, chronic and degenerative kidney disease. Two weeks before, he had asked his long-term partner to marry him, and was several hours late to his engagement party because he’d spent the day being tested at Guys Hospital, near London Bridge. Once he arrived, fatigued and swollen in the legs and ankles, a symptom of his still-undetermined illness, a guest handed him a glass of champagne and the party, in his partner’s beach-front garden, resumed. Only my mother betrayed any hint of consternation. “It’s never a good sign when they request a biopsy straight away,” she mused, nervously chewing on her hair before I flicked her hand away.

The following week, I was walking home from yoga class when my mother called me to explain that my brother had been diagnosed with “IgA nephropathy,” also known as Berger’s disease.  Berger’s disease is a condition that occurs when an antibody called immunoglobulin A (IgA) builds up in the kidneys, causing damage and inflammation. Back then, my knowledge of the kidneys—their essential function to filter, drain, and rinse the blood of toxins— was unworthy of the most entry-level school biology. A friend innocently asked me over dinner why exactly human beings had two kidneys in the first place and I found myself totally unable to respond.

***

Last fall, I was teaching a seminar in Paris, renting a university flat with malfunctioning electricity, heating, and a highly erratic shower. I had come to the city because I wanted to cut off most Anglophone communications. In any case, I spent so much time in the bistrot on the corner that the waiters said that I should start giving them English lessons for free.

One Sunday morning in November, my brother called me while I sat at my preferred table to tell me that he was approaching what his doctors had called “renal endgame” and would very likely need, in the next year, either full-time dialysis or a kidney transplant. “I’ll do it,” I said, with the spontaneous ease that is often called gut instinct. Unlike almost every major or inconsequential decision I have ever made—whether to eat eggs for breakfast or to apply for a job in California or to get a bike or to leave a city where I lived in for a decade or to switch my dating-app preference to all genders—I did not overthink it.

***

The health and function of a kidney is assessed numerically, via what is called Glomerular Filtration Rate (eGFR). An eGFR of 60 or higher is in the normal range. When I reported to the renal clinic at Guy’s Hospital at the end of January, my brother’s rate was just above 20—still above the threshold for a donation, at around 15. Still, his nephrologist began us on the series of procedures, known as a “work-up,” that would determine if I was a match for him.

The first thing was to visit a designated bathroom, produce a urine sample, and deposit the vial via a small hatch at the rear of the toilet cistern. (“Please put your name and D.O.B. on the bottle before urinating, please,” a laminated sign advised). Then my weight and blood-pressure was taken. In the waiting room, I picked up an informational brochure which told of Hattie’s Transplant “Journey” and Bruno’s Donor “Story.” This literature impressed on me that recipients often wait decades on dialysis, and that thousands of people die on the waiting list each year due to inadequate supply. The title of the brochure was “Living Kidney Donations: the Gift of Life.”

In a study of the history of non-dependent forms of intimacy, the social anthropologist Julienne Obadia questions why the “rhetoric of both living and deceased organ donation is steeped in the notion of “the gift”—particularly “the gift of life.” She suggests that it is both because of the scarcity of living organs, and because such donations often are uncompensated. Yet, since the publication of Marcel Mauss’s 1925 The Gift, which argued that gifts and the practice of gift-giving are the origin of civilized, relational, and respectfully reciprocal societies, thinkers have debated whether there can ever be a “free” gift unencumbered by self-interest or social debts.  Jacques Derrida argues that the concept of a “kinship gift” is particularly paradoxical, since a gift, in his view, can only count as such if it is given without expectation of return, a degree of weightlessness difficult to achieve between relatives. “Can there be any gift within the family?” he asks. “But, at the same time, has the gift ever been thought without the family?” Growing up, when it was my birthday or my brother’s, our parents made sure that the other sibling also got a hefty present, to avoid feeling overlooked or left out. My brother took this idea of fairness even further, counting the number of presents that the birthday-sibling had received, to ensure that the other did not receive less when their day came. 

***

The second round of tests required a nurse to draw my blood at one-hour intervals for a duration of five hours. “Your veins are not playing ball. They’re not budging. Are you dehydrated?” she asked me within minutes, side-eyeing my cup of takeaway hospital coffee. I did not flag that I was hungover, after having indicated on the General Health Questionnaire that I drank “very rarely”—one to two units socially a week. It was not exactly a lie, but it was increasingly less true.

“If on the off-chance that these samples prove that you are somehow not related to your sibling,” asked one form, “would you want to be made aware of this?” I ticked the box that read “I would wish to be informed.”

***

In The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille defines an experience of psychological “sovereignty”’ as an extraordinary moment of transgression, a singular instant of uncommon behavior in which human beings can become independent or liberated by refusing any “economics of necessity.” Wasting time and energy, squandering resources, and putting life somehow at risk all qualify. The singular instant is attached to nothing and preserves nothing, he writes. It is a “spare part,” or an “accursed share,” destined to be expelled, expended, frittered away. For Bataille, “the gift has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives but, in exchange for the given object, the subject appropriates the surpassing.” The giver, in other words, becomes the giving, in both a pleasurable and disorienting loss of personal identity.

In the YouTube clip “Larry Doesn’t Want to Give a Kidney,” taken from an episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, the protagonist goes to extreme measures to avoid donating his kidney to his friend Richard Lewis. In the episode, Larry and the hapless Jeff, another friend of Richard’s, test positive as matches, and, with neither coming forward of their own volition, submit to a game of “eeny, meeny, miney, mo” to determine whom should be the donor. The final syllable and pointer finger lands on Larry, and both men whoop, equally relieved. Jeff is confused. “You’re the loser.” “No, you’re the loser,” Larry replies, indignant.

Somebody has sent the clip to me as a distraction, comic relief from the endless medical case studies that I scroll through late at night. But when I get to this moment, I have to click pause. What does it mean to be the loser in this situation? Is the outcome I desire to be deemed ineligible for the procedure, or would I feel, having committed to the “work-up,” cheated out of something, some exceptional event, if it all fell through? Would my brother subsequently have to enter onto the extensive waiting list for other donors? In between another round of blood tests, a different nurse offered her opinion on the situation.  “From his point of view, there’s an obvious benefit,” she said, knotting a tight tube around my upper arm. “Whereas you’re coming into this already at a loss.”

***

I once had a mentor who taught me that if someone asked me to do something and it was not an “absolute yes,” then I should file it as a “hell no.” For a while, this gave rise to a new, hermetic and irresponsible way of living; I refused a lot of basic administrative requests and met almost no new people, but also saved a lot of time I would otherwise have squandered on the hell of other people’s book launches or bachelorette parties. The decision to donate a kidney to my brother was different, in that it did not count as a response to a demand. He did not ask me to consider it during that phone call in November. In speaking first and saying “I’ll do it,” I volunteered my body of my own free will. But this is not exactly true, and it risks entanglement in a dull, Hollywood narrative, one of innate generosity and uncomplicated heroism. Another thing the mentor often said: Tell the harder truth.

***

In the fortnight that I waited for results from the nephrology department, I devoted more time to the gym than the library and spent my evenings drinking wine in restless agitation. In a class I was teaching on the work of the French writer Hervé Guibert, I found myself confessing to a group of undergraduates that I had been late getting their work back to them because I was preparing to donate an organ to a family member. They blinked at me. I returned briskly to the excerpt, which I’d picked at the beginning of the year and debated aloud how best to translate the line, “Mon père et ma mère s’étaient réparti mon corps, selon des limites bien définies.” One student ventured, “My father and my mother divided up my body, splitting me according to clear limits.” Another proposed, “My mother and father had divided my body between themselves.”

***

The nephrologist—a slick, pony-tailed woman in a navy trouser suit—and I met five days later, in an airless consultation room. She asked me if I did a lot of exercise. She observed that I “almost” had the resting heart rate of an athlete, and cycled exhaustively through my plotless medical history before telling me that I was indeed a blood-type compatible transplant: with a tissue-typing mismatch of 1-1-1. The term “mismatch” was misleading, as the results demonstrated that I shared three antigen numbers in common with my brother: not a “full-house match,” in transplant parlance, but strong enough. The doctor listed some obligatory statistics outlining the risks of donorship: 1 in 3,000 chance of death; risk of pre-eclampsia in pregnancy up to eleven percent; 8 in 10,000 chance of developing end-stage kidney disease myself over my lifetime; possible accidental damage to other organs in surgery (punctures to the lungs most common); post-operation blood clots and infections (a likelihood of 1 in 10). “Rejection” was another possibility. “It’s important to be mentally prepared for the fact that even after going through the whole procedure and the surgery, your brother’s system could reject your kidney, either immediately, or in a year, or in a month.” She asked me to imagine how I might feel, waking up from surgery, to be told that the operation hadn’t worked, that my organ hadn’t “taken.” Later, I read about a case in which a woman lived successfully with a kidney she had received from her younger brother for six years before her body rejected it and she had to go on full-time dialysis. “I had a good run with it,” she told a newspaper reporter.

***

A copy of the results was mailed to the address of my doctor in the city where I did my PhD, but got bounced back to the hospital, as I was no longer registered at the practice. As the letter required approval by a medical professional, I enrolled at a new clinic just to have an address to which it could be sent. It didn’t arrive; two weeks later, it landed in my mailbox at the university where I was teaching. “On examination, Alice looked well,” I read on the NHS-crested paper. “Her abdomen was soft and non-tender with no obvious masses or organomegaly. I could feel her femoral and pedal pulses. She is not on any medication and has no known allergies.”

***

In 2020–21, there were 2,167 adult kidney transplants performed in the UK, a decrease of 32 percent compared with 2019-20, owing to the impact of the COVID–19 pandemic. Of these, 1,791 kidneys were donated after death. Current research indicates that most living donations are sourced predominantly from family members who prove eligible and compatible. Still, legal changes in the U.K. and advances in immunosuppressive medication and matching schemes have led to a significant rise in non-kin transfers, or “altruistic donors” since the late nineties. Also known as “Good Samaritan” donors, such individuals are particularly celebrated in the transplant advocacy world, and constitute about 3 percent of donations. In the U.K. there was a 60 percent rise in people who received a kidney from an altruistic donorbetween 2018 and 2019, and in the same period, the number of altruistic kidney donors surpassed one hundred for the first time in five years. Robert Wilkins, 61, whom I read about on the sporadically updated “News” page of the renal clinic’s website, had his kidney removed at Guy’s Hospital in 2013. He said he heard about the process of altruistic donations and decided to “look into it.” “I soon realized that I was walking around with an organ I didn’t require that I could instead use to help another human being in desperate need. When I considered the inconvenience and risk to myself balanced against the chance to save a person’s life, I felt compelled to become a donor,” he said.

Donors who withstand the tests, the uncompensated time off work, and the countless jars of urine for the benefit of a faceless other person make my own decision feel a little ordinary. They also leave me with a host of questions that the informational leaflets don’t quash. Why is altruistic donorship seen as so exceptional, and familial donation considered a “no-brainer?” What does this mean in terms of who is deemed most worthy of a kidney transplant? “That’s what we like to see,” said various hospital workers, clucking approvingly, every time I said I was hoping to donate as a sister to a brother. Their responses suggested that despite medical advancements, kin donations are still preferable, or less alien-seeming, than altruistic ones, which are also sometimes known within the industry as “non-directed.” The term is odd, and even bluntly problematic. Does a kidney transplant matter more if it is directed towards the safe harbor of a family member, rather than toward a stranger who is equally deserving and equally in need of medical attention and care?

***

Having passed through “final stages” of the qualifying process for donation—a euphemism for a series of forensic screenings with a renal psychiatrist to verify that I was not being coerced or financially remunerated for my “extraordinary gift”—I was put in touch with a woman, a friend of a friend close to my age, who had donated altruistically a few years before. She subsequently reinvented herself as a sort of transplant activist on social media. I read several of her posts describing her experience and watched an Instagram Live she had filmed on the topic before we spoke on the phone. One of the main things she wished to impress on me during our conversation was that I could ask the surgeon, as she did, to perform the keyhole surgery via a sideways incision instead of cutting straight across the stomach. The latter method, she told me, creates an unsightly pouch of skin that remains visible above the bikini line, whereas the sideways approach results in a less conspicuous scar. The next day, my vanity led me to make an inquiry. My request would be considered, my consultant told me. Later, when I raised the matter with a different doctor, he told me, “That isn’t how we do things here.”

***

In July 2022, my donor coordinator—a woman assigned to look after “my end” of the transplant—called to tell me that, in medical terms at least, my brother and I were ready for surgery. The doctors had given the go-ahead, and it was now down to us to settle on potential dates. Though my brother’s situation was acute, the timing of the operation needed to be viable for me as well, she said. Aware of the ad hoc nature of my work—I was hopping from one short-term contract to another, constantly changing cities, flats, and institutional affiliations—she did not want me to be “out of pocket,” or without sick leave, in the three months following the surgery when I would not work, and when donors might expect to be saddled with debilitating nausea, fatigue, digestive complications, heavy scarring, and even post-operation depression. She wondered whether it might be better to hold out until I secured a more permanent job. Meanwhile, a rotating cast of panicked relatives counselled me to “get it done,” as if my left kidney were a kind of festering and unresolved bureaucratic policy. Then I could “put it behind me” and move forward with my life. I could see the logic of both approaches: the impulse to delay until I could donate from a place of more stability; or the urge to do it since the ground beneath me was already so uneven. In the days of this oscillating, my brother was growing more and more unwell. He was thinner by the day, increasingly immobile. In the middle of a lunch of low-phosphates foods he could still eat that we were sharing in Borough Market after a long morning at the hospital, he received a phone call informing him that he could no longer forgo dialysis, his eGFR having plummeted to below 6 percent. “Sure,” he kept saying in response to this deluge of information, as the restaurant swam around us.

***

Mary Oliver has a poem about alligators, set in Florida, which frames its speaker kneeling “at the edge of a body of water” before a sizable gator comes “crashing toward her,” its tail “flaming like a bundle of swords,” its mouth “rimmed with teeth.” The persona recounts: “And that’s how I almost died of foolishness in beautiful Florida / But I didn’t.”

***

The easy story is that my decision to donate was pre-cognitive and totally instinctual: “not a shred of doubt,” it just felt right,” etc. It’s true that I did not feel hesitation, or second-guess myself in the instant when I volunteered for testing. I have always been susceptible to making myself useful, to fulfilling other people’s needs, and to giving even what I do not have. Still, donating as a sibling carries very different weight than donating as a parent. The urge to sacrifice one’s body for offspring is much stronger, or at least more culturally legible. Would it have been different if my parents hadn’t been immediately deemed ineligible to donate? In that case, might I have encountered my decision as more of an expansive choice, as opposed to something that I simply “had” to do, because I loved my younger brother?

The truth is more conflicted than a “gut decision,” and much of my internal motivation is opaque. The definition of acte gratuit is “a gratuitous or motiveless action performed on impulse.” Yet there is more to it than this. It’s possible I had some self-motivated desire to become a protagonist in this story. Or maybe I just wanted to live this alongside him, as a means of managing the pain.

***

At the time of writing this, there is every chance that the procedure might not happen. Though there is a team of people choreographing the transplant, I obsess over it not taking place due to my own possible withdrawal, the potential that I might “back out.” This is not a test that I can pass or fail, I remind myself. Still, when the fears seize me—What if I choke at the final moment? What if I retract my yes at the very instant that the anesthetic floods my veins?—I like to think myself into the future. I’ll be having a phone conversation or a coffee with someone in my position, I tell myself, on the other side. “It almost didn’t work out and I almost didn’t do it,” I’ll say. But it did, and I did.

 

Alice Blackhurst is a writer, academic and the author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image.

New York Film Festival Dispatch: Cold War Movies

“We are a nation whose fate is to shoot at the enemy with diamonds.” From Diane Severin Nguyen’s If Revolution Is a Sickness (2021).

When I show up for New York Film Festival’s 9:30 P.M. opening-night screening of White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, the lobby is already swarming with television executives, publicists, and Lincoln Center benefactors. No one seems to have known how to dress for either the event or the weather. (Puffer coat and sheer tights? Sandals and spaghetti straps? Sensible backpack or Prada bag?) “They told me the vibe was black-tie,” a woman in a sequined gown says to her husband guiltily. He has very clearly been forced to wear a tuxedo. I watch some groups trying and failing to cut the line by flashing the branded wristband we have all been given. I find my seat and settle in for a Q&A with Noah Baumbach and members of the cast, including Greta Gerwig, Adam Driver, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Don Cheadle. They crack self-deprecating off-the-cuff jokes, as if there had not been two previous screenings earlier this evening. (At one point Baumbach says the “nine o’clock crowd” is his favorite yet. People cheer.) 

Finally the movie starts, and I take in Adam Driver as Jack Gladney, the chairman of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, complete with gaudy button-down, receding hairline, and prosthetic paunch. The film is divided into three sections punctuated by the climactic “airborne toxic event,” which, as in the book, is also the most exciting and easiest bit to follow (a car crashes into a train carrying noxious chemicals; deadly smoke shrouds the sky). As the movie’s abrupt cuts and ecstatic colors make me mildly seasick, I notice some cast members appearing and disappearing into an opera box to glance at themselves on the screen. Perhaps taking their cue from the cast, several audience members trickle toward the exits around the time Babette, played by Gerwig, tells Jack she is afraid to die. (They miss the best part of the movie, which is the extended credits-and-dance sequence in the supermarket, set to LCD Soundsystem’s “new body rhumba,” written for the film.) The lights come back on and the actors again appear in the opera box, applauding and waving to the crowd.

A little after midnight, a group of white-haired men in newsboy caps wander down 66th Street toward Central Park, in the general direction of the after-party. “That Adam Driver,” one of them says. “Poorly cast. He just isn’t what you’d call an everyman.” A few women walk beside me, discussing the odds of getting in without a wristband. “What if Noah Baumbach tells us to leave?” A long line leaks out of Tavern on the Green: women in pearls and staticky shawls, men in sport coats over T-shirts and loafers without socks. Someone ushers me toward the front and soon enough I’m holding a miniature cheeseburger, a tiny tiramisu, and a free negroni. A famous DJ plays and red strobe lights flash across walls lined with rows of Campari bottles. I watch a group of women attempt to order spicy margaritas from the bartender, who throws his hands up in exasperation—he can’t serve anything except Campari-based cocktails. The liquor brand is proudly sponsoring the event. 

—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor

Adam Curtis’s new BBC series Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone is taglined “What it felt like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy.” I got stuck on episode three, but it would seem that living through the collapse of communism felt boring, and that absolutely nothing happened that wasn’t depressing and gray. If the film proposes a narrative at all, it’s an anemic, antifictional one: that events—and images—just occur, without human agency. In a departure from Curtis’s past work, the series has no music and no narrational voiceover, no cool, quick cuts; he lets each clip of footage roll impersonally and inevitably. 

Diane Severin Nguyen’s haunting nineteen-minute short If Revolution Is a Sickness reminded me of Curtis’s earlier documentaries, particularly Can’t Get You Out of My Head; in what feels like a fictional reenactment of Curtis’s signature stylistic and thematic gestures, Nguyen forces associations between surreal, evocative images, asking us to consider whether they mean anything at all. Nguyen’s film, which was shown most recently earlier this month at New York Film Festival, is the kind of post-end-of-History fairytale Curtis might have loved to discover in the archives: a Vietnamese girl washes ashore on an unknown beach and grows up in an enchanted desolate landscape reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Zone. Later, as a Hot Topic–clad teenager, she wanders into a city—also barely inhabited—where she joins a dance troupe of Polish youths similarly costumed in once-subcultural styles. “Their bodies were perfectly aligned,” a voice intones sweetly. “Their hearts were all the same shape, translucent yet impenetrable.” By the film’s end, the protagonist has abandoned her childhood play for a militant regimen of choreographic exercises that culminates in a K-pop–inspired song-and-dance sequence performed in and around abandoned factories, sparkling streams, and Soviet monuments.

The actors’ movements are punctuated by hyperreal bursts of red, enigmatic images that have the symbolic force of propaganda art and the aesthetic emptiness of music-video montages: a ripe strawberry being cut open with a piece of glass, a face being smashed into a heart-shaped jelly cake. In a particularly Curtis-like moment, metallic balloons spell out “1989!” The film manages to perfectly mimic a range of forms and to evacuate their meanings—much like the genre of K-pop itself, an uncanny Eastern hybrid of Western styles whose starlets always seem to be lip-syncing something in a foreign language, even when they’re actually singing in Korean. It also helped me figure out how to finish TraumaZone—I’ll just play Blackpink in the background.

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

In Happening, Annie Ernaux writes: “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.” Audrey Diwan’s recent film adaptation of Ernaux’s autobiographical novel, which centers her unwanted pregnancy at the age of twenty-three, manages to do something like this. The musical score is comprised of unsettling string phrases, such that a scene in which she desperately considers her options has the air of a horror movie; the camera hovers on her body, alone, stressing the separation between Annie and any social collective that could help her. This is a film that captures physical precarity in its very grammar.

—Campbell Campbell, intern

The Campari bar at New York Film Festival’s opening of White Noise.

Notes from Iran

Iranian protesters on Keshavarz Boulevard in Tehran. Licensed under CC0 4.0.

Before this September, I hadn’t heard from Yara in months. They’re an Iranian journalist who has reported for the country’s most prominent newspapers and publications. We first met in New York in 2018 and bonded over the difficulties that come with reporting on Iran: they were rightly afraid of being arrested for their work, and I’ve been afraid that I will no longer be able to return to the country where I was born due to writing about it from abroad. As the Islamic Republic began to escalate the crackdowns on journalists, activists, and civil society, Yara—a pseudonym I’m using to protect their identity—was forced to leave Iran. But when their father was diagnosed with cancer, they had to return. They messaged me to say they were going back and let me know I likely wouldn’t hear from them. If the authorities knew that Yara was communicating with me, an Iranian dual national who works for the New York Times, they could accuse them of conspiracy, spying, and a whole host of other nonsensical charges. I worried about Yara, but I knew their silence meant they were safe. 

In September, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini died after being detained in Tehran by the so-called Morality Police for breaking the “hijab rule.” On Twitter, a photographer named Niloofar Hamedi posted a photo of Amini unconscious in a hospital bed, with tubes coming out of her mouth, a swollen face, and dried blood on her ears. Her image enraged Iranians and sparked mass demonstrations. The protests are now in their fifth week and have spread to more than eighty cities and towns. It’s both the largest and most widespread uprising that the Islamic Republic has seen in its forty-three-year history. Many of us, familiar with the state’s history of lethal crackdowns, were waiting nervously for them to begin. Arrests have already started, as have periodic internet shutoffs. Hamedi is now in solitary confinement in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison.   

On September 26, during the third week of the protests, I finally heard from Yara. They had just been arrested and interrogated at the Ministry of Intelligence. “They will take me to jail for about two years due to my reports,” Yara wrote. “But I am not scared, something like hope is rising among us, hope for changes, for women, life, freedom, for visiting you in Tehran soon.” They said it may be a month or two until they have a court date and are sent to prison. In the meantime, they wanted to collaborate on another story. They sent me their notes and wrote, “Keep our fingers crossed that the internet will work tomorrow.” 

 

Yara:

In the days after her death, the state television network broadcasts a short, interrupted video of Mahsa Amini fainting in the detention center, trying to argue that she died of natural causes. Mahsa’s father declares this news to be completely false; those who were with her in the Morality Police van testify that she was beaten while being transported to the Morality Police headquarters. Mahsa’s brother says that the officer who arrested his sister had a camera, so videos from inside the Guidance Patrol van should be reviewed.

The day after Mahsa’s burial, people from other cities in Kurdistan come out in the streets to protest. On the very first day, three people, including a child, are killed as a result of direct fire from the repression forces. The cities of Kurdistan go on strike.

At various universities, from the North to the South, students have launched massive demonstrations. They chant: “We neither want a king, nor a rahbar (the supreme leader); down with every oppressor.”

Female activists call for a rally on Keshavarz Boulevard. The second day of the demonstration is a scene of confrontations between several thousand people and the riot police. The first line of protesters are women and men, hand in hand in front of the special guards. Girls are burning their hijabs amid cheering protesters. Shortly after, the guards drive the protesters to the streets around the boulevard with tear gas, batons, and stun guns. The cats of Laleh Park on Keshavarz Boulevard have been attacked by so much tear gas that their eyes won’t open. The old woman who comes every week to feed them has unknowingly shown up and can’t find her cats.

***

Protests enter their second week. I’m waiting on the street for the taxi to arrive when I see an old religious man coming towards me. At first, I’m afraid he wants to mention I’m not wearing a hijab. All of a sudden, he brings his phone in front of me and shows me Mahsa Amini’s photo, saying, “Can you believe it, ma’am? They killed someone’s daughter. I myself have a daughter. I swear to God, I haven’t slept for a week.”

They say this is the women’s revolution. Maryam, who is on the street every day and has been attacked by so much tear gas that her eyes are swollen, says, No matter what, let’s see each other at Café Haft. We hear that Abbas is missing. Two days later, we find out that he has been arrested. They have arrested Roghiyeh’s and Maryam’s friends too. I have no way of communicating with the world outside of Iran. The internet is down and no VPN is working.

Maryam comes to the café one hour late. She says they are arresting journalists one by one. Fatemeh Rajabi has been taken into custody. Elaheh Mohammadi’s house has been raided and her belongings taken away. Elaheh, who went to Saqqez to cover Mahsa’s funeral, has also been arrested. 

There is a full military curfew in Kermanshah and Mashhad, and Qasem Soleimani’s banners have been set on fire in his hometown. My friends tell me about the scenes in the streets: the young girls who try to block the officers by dragging a trash can into the middle of the street, the women who neutralize the effects of tear gas by setting their headscarves on fire with alcohol, the drivers who create traffic to block the officers and frustrate them by continuously beeping their horns. Where have they learned these things? Courage is contagious. An old woman says to one of the guards, “I’m your mother; don’t hit me.”

Elham says that on the first day, she and her friends were stuck in the boulevard and the officers were attacking them with stun guns. On the second day, four of them were hit with paintballs and still went back to the street with their bruised bodies. They have gone to the street every day since last Thursday, and now it’s Friday; every day with bruised bodies, painful feet, and empty hands, protesting against the mandatory hijab, against their lost rights. She says, “They don’t want us and we don’t want them either.” She says she is waiting for the day when she can dance in the streets. Honestly, me too.

***

It’s Saturday night. The ninth day of protests. Right now, as I’m writing this, I can hear shouts of “death to the dictator” from outside. The slogans have also changed—from “Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid! We’re all in this together!” to “Be afraid! Be afraid! We’re all in this together.” They pour burned oil on the streets so the police will slip and fall. In response, the police have torn up and taken license plates from the cars of many protesters.

There are more and more arrests. The names of five arrested lawyers are announced. One of them is the lawyer of three arrested youths who were sentenced to death during protests in January. Yalda Moaiery, the photographer who took a famous photo of the Bloody Aban protests, is also arrested. Those protests began in late 2017 and lasted until January 2018—initially they were focused on economic grievances like the plummeting value of the Iranian Rial, overall unemployment, and lack of job prospects for Iranians, but they later expanded to call for a downfall of the entire system. Moaiery is in Qarchak Prison. She has said that they are forcibly giving tranquilizers to the prisoners. One hundred women are kept in a shed.

Last night, driving home, we saw that the repression forces were eating. At the red light, us three angry women with no hijabs were staring at them. They refused to look into our eyes. It is the tenth day of the presence of people in the streets. There is now nearly a full military curfew in Tehran.

We have come a long way: from December 2018, when Vida Movahed, a young woman from Tehran, sparked the Girls of Enghelab protests against the mandatory hijab, to today, when girls burn headscarves and dance in the streets. We have come a long way: to realizing that whether the country is sanctioned or not, the amount of food on our dinner tables is getting smaller. We have come a long way: from the day when we were participating in elections with hope, shouting Where is my vote?, to seeing that it doesn’t matter if the government is fundamentalist or moderate, because democracy and laws have lost all meaning in this country. We have come a long way: from all the arrests and detentions, and from mourning Sahar Khodayari, the “Blue Girl,” who lost her life to watch football in 2019, to the day that stadiums were conditionally opened to women due to pressure from activists and FIFA. The truth is that we have seen the fate of our Afghan sisters following the country’s takeover by the Taliban, and we know we shouldn’t expect the West and America to save us; we are our own saviors. Whether this is a women’s revolution or a revolution for women, we won’t go back.

 

Nilo Tabrizy is a video journalist for the New York Times covering Iran-related stories, news and investigations.