December 1, 2024

Last Week's New Yorker Review: December 2

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of November 18

“The only stable currency was human insecurity, and those who trafficked in it did very well for themselves.”

Must-Read:

“Now You See Me” - Jackson Arn raises a Cosmopolitan to John Singer Sargent. A wonderful first section sneaks a thesis up on us; it emerges through the sensory detail like the dog’s tongue through blackness: Ironies depend on ambiguity, and Sargent’s work has plenty of both. Arn spins it out in various directions, but returns to the theme. “Aren’t the most interesting people the ones who can’t make up their minds about their world, who sometimes sneer and sometimes grovel?” Later, regarding antisemitism: “he was innocent in some ways and guilty in others.” His paintings in one word: “instability”, which is not only thematic but spatial: One portrait “does indeed get slantily stranger the longer you spend with it.” The central irony of his Gilded-age portraits: “...you are not your stuff, and the fancier it is the more likely it is to outlive you, remorselessly. It honors your achievements and mocks your mortality.” Because Arn has such a solid central point, his usual cocksure claim-making is harnessed productively – he turns all that kinetic energy into electricity. Even the eerie final image reframes the point. Compare Ruth Franklin covering the same book in Harper’s; she follows the received format more closely, and her final paragraphs only begin to reach Arn’s starting point: the “disconcerting” carnal ambiguity of Asher’s lips and the dog’s “‘wet pink tongue’”. Blood libel is thicker than watercolor.

Window-Shop:

“Baddie Issues” - Justin Chang is a Wadiator of energy. Movie critics everywhere have thrilled at the hot new excuse to write a double review with no thematic linkage – it’s a meme, don’t you know?! After Chang dispenses with that market-tested idiocy, then laboriously blows off the twenty-something years of I.P. cobwebs coating each franchise, he just barely finds time for two funny, dynamic, only properly cynical appraisals. On an excellent Grande: “Beneath every exaggerated hair toss, she unleashes a poignant frisson of panic.” On my nemesis John M. Chu’s signature look: “...there is little in this movie’s muted palette and washed-out backlighting to make you muse, even for a second, ‘What a world, what a world.’” (At its best, he suggests, the film is Vegas; to me, it’s giving Henderson.) Chang is maybe the only critic who likes Paul Mescal in Gladiator’s lead role: “...he tears into Lucius’s red-meat physicality with voracious fury, as if it were his first and possibly last meal…” He also finds a silly-funny button, which I won’t spoil by quoting. I’m pink with envy!

“The Texas Exodus” - Stephania Taladrid takes a pregnant pause with the ob-gyns whose profession has been functionally criminalized. Sets you up for something truly grueling with an opening anecdote that promises disaster… but ultimately everything there turns out fine, and Taladrid is more interested in slow-moving institutional disaster than in its direct human cost. My weak constitution is grateful. This piece is very brief – no sooner does Ogburn’s residency program move in than it starts getting forced out. But it’s a pretty simple story; as it turns out, when you make it nearly impossible for people to do their job, they’ll mostly get the hell out of Dodge – or Edinburg, as the case may be. That there’s nothing uniquely striking about this particular story only makes it more ominous – this playbook will soon be everywhere. As ever, the cruelty is the point.

“Getting a Grip” - James Somers finds robots’ grasp is catching up with their reach. Alright, you get one. You get one moderately credulous, somewhat starry-eyed piece about the advances in such-and-such a field. When, as with generative A.I, every piece starts assuming that tone… then I’ll judge more harshly. But these advances in the famously stagnant field of robot shoelace tying were news to me, and if Somers wants to rhapsodize about how amazing his baby is in service of a broader point about, I guess, how cool and weird it’ll be when robots can successfully take care of his amazing baby… I’ll wince a bit (one must remember that every gadget, no matter how nifty, exists due to and in service of capitalism; care robots can only make the care economy more fucked up) but I’ll soldier on. It is, regardless of its eventual depressing or horrifying uses, extremely cool that we can teach a robot how to hang a shirt just by successfully and unsuccessfully hanging a shirt a few hundred times. No analysis of a technological advance can afford to ignore its awesomesauce quotient. Once we admit we’re awed, we can scold more effectively. This piece helps with the first half.

“Fellow-Travellers” - Thomas Meany catches some Capri sun with the Frankfurt School. Apparently there’s a trend in Europe of… well, essentially those American popular-nonfiction books that vastly overstate the significance of their thesis, except written for an audience of reasonably educated people – that is, Europeans. Here, for example, everything about the Frankfurt School is explained by this one weird vacation they took to Naples! The claim is clearly somewhat overstated (the writer “privileges poetic license at the expense of trying to grasp how the mind might actually digest physical experience”), but Meany seems to find it basically plausible, and I have no choice but to agree, since I only vaguely know what he’s talking about (and my undergrad experience consisted primarily of reading Adorno, so I have no clue how the mythical ‘general audience’ is supposed to follow this one). The most visceral section is the second, which concerns Benjamin’s dalliance with a fascinating Latvian he met on Capri, who “came to represent for him the possibility of building a new culture out of next to nothing.” Trying to decoct the steamy romance from the revelation of “‘porosity’ – the style of dialectically attuned analysis that resists resolution” is no less a task than Katherine and Alex face in Journey to Italy, but if they can do it, so can we. Tell me that you love me!

“Deadline Extension” - Daniel Immerwahr says all that ages is not Golden Girls. Charming but never as pertinent as it wants to be. Immerwahr’s examination is kept to a very particular kind of white, wealthy, American old age – as exemplified by The Golden Girls. Oddly, the forty years separating their conception of aging from ours is mostly brushed aside – that they’re a predecessor to the current way of thinking, I’ll buy; that nothing has changed from then to now, I reject. “It’s worth asking” where age liberation “leads”, Immerwahr says – which is true, but you can guess just by hearing the question the point Immerwahr will make (Boomers are in denial! Especially politicians!), and by delaying that answer until the last half of the last section, he robs the middle of the piece of momentum. The piece isn’t really written for fans of Blanche and the gang – I’ve seen two episodes and I knew most of what was referenced. Still, I’m not asking for de Senectute; this piece is brief and light, and you won’t feel your time’s been wasted. Which is good – you might have less than you think. Tick, tock…

Skip Without Guilt:

“Let’s Make a Deal” - Helen Shaw is running just as fast as she can. Not Shaw at her sharpest – the “camp-o-meter”, “‘Looney Tunes’-level damage”, a long explanation of body doubles and… the concept of suspension of disbelief? No sparkle. And for the second review in a row, she gives away the ending. Enough with that! At least the Golden Girls reference is a fun tie-in to the Immerwahr feature. Burnout Paradise, meanwhile, is all premise – it’s a nice little capper.

“Wild Side” - Paige Williams bears down in Lake Tahoe. Williams simplifies a complex fight down to two sides: There are the tendervironmentalists who’ll go to any length to prevent a bear from being harmed, and there are the more realistic, usually cop-aligned individuals who put public safety first. Williams tilts the scales a bit toward the latter group, I’d say. That’s subtle, though; mainly this piece doesn’t work because it lacks surprise. I already knew about Hank the Tank and one bear-gone-wild story is the same as the next: They get into a house and cause chaos. Williams includes a lot of these repetitive stories. Only in the last two sections does a much darker tale take precedence; its details are gothic but it doesn’t reframe any of what came before – even when they’re rooting through our trash with a dumb expression, the danger of a black bear is pretty hard to miss. Williams is partly debunking a conspiracy theory (that officials conspired to keep the bare facts from the public), but she waits to tell us the truth before letting us know about that theory, which drains any tension. Black bear, black bear, what do you see? I see a journalist looking askance at me.

“Anti Heroes” - Inkoo Kang can’t block that buster. Last week’s Kang verdict: “clunky prose styling – not too bad here; lack of thesis – really bad here.” This week: Reverse it. Cynical, “distain”-tinged laughs gain “tragicomic” toxic-workplace resonance as characters develop – that’s about what I’d expect from the logline – the Bojack model, just less zany and more swear-y – but if that’s the show, so be it. But this feels like a direct compilation of Kang’s notes on the show, shoved into a document. “...it takes a while before the characters get fleshed out into something beyond archetypes”, she writes, then repeats four jokes from the show that in no way prove her point. I truly don’t know if they’re meant to be evidence of cheap, archetype-based comedy, or evidence of the fleshing-out that eventually occurs. There’s also a blurring between developing characters and turning away from the “unremittingly pessimistic” that’s truly annoying – surely Succession has shown that one move doesn’t require the other. 

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