Last Week's New Yorker Review: January 13
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of January 13
“‘What’s a baby got pockets for? What’s it gonna keep in its pocket, a knife?’”
Must-Read:
“Mean Time” - Justin Chang works Hard Truths, plays Hard Truths. The best thing Chang’s written for the magazine, and a pretty perfect summation of the strengths of his style, which centers a review around a movie’s place in its director’s bigger project – in this case, Leigh’s “great subject… the elusive nature and uneven allocation of happiness”. (It helps when the director has a project as distinctive as Leigh’s.) Here, the new film is a kind of sister project to Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, a connection pretty much every review of the film has gestured toward, but only Chang bothers actually articulating. (For instance: “Another cemetery scene looms at the midpoint.”) Chang’s approach might be dryly auteurist if he wasn’t so humanist, concerned less with form than with feeling – how Leigh finds moments of sly humor in Pansy’s acidity, and the “integrity” with which Leigh and Jean-Baptiste “believe, and respect, the character’s dearth of self-knowledge.” That line alone rearranged the film in front of my eyes – it was a sort of rejoinder to the trauma-informed, therapy-inflected character study: “psychology and exposition have their dramatic limits” – not every woman is Promising and Young. (Or, to name a movie I actually like – a Lady Bird.) I appreciate, too, that Chang finds time to praise some of the film’s stranger and more distinctive scenes, like the dramatically unnecessary workplace moments – though neither he nor anyone I can find has asked what to me might be the film’s subtlest mystery: Who the hell is feeding the pigeons?!
Window-Shop:
“The TikTok Trail” - Jordan Salama waves a Liberian flag for the migrants of Ecuador. I’m skeptical of the hook here – sure, immigrants on social media are making their lives look easier than they really are, but there’s an assumption of media illiteracy that I’m not sure really holds up – I think it’s likely that most Ecuadorians are making the trip out of raw desperation, not merely because they think the streets are paved with gold in America because they saw a couple TikToks. (To the extent this is true, I think it’s always been true – in other words, it’s only the technologically deterministic component of the argument I call B.S. on.) Luckily, Salama doesn’t spend that much time forcing this point, and the piece is largely a heart-wrenching human story of separation – of a family-oriented culture torn to pieces by a cruel capitalist world. Pretty much everyone in America knows that the much-lauded Dream is more of a nightmare; nothing about the tentativeness and struggle of the on-the-ground conditions will come as a surprise. (María’s wages at the cookie factory are wildly exploitative; still, I have friends who make less per hour.) What Salama conveys so well is the pain of systemic oppression – Kichwa values, kept barely burning through Spanish colonial rule, are now being extinguished by a globalized economy that dismisses the unquantifiable. The Andes feel “like a place that mostly lived vicariously through the experiences of those who were elsewhere” because there’s no more profit to be wrung from people like Manuela’s grandfather, who memorably proclaims: “We’re fucked here. I’m just by myself.”
“Enlighten Me” - Jackson Arn says The Met’s show is mandala that and a bag of charnel grounds. I had to rush to see this before it closed – surely Arn could have gotten to this show, which opened in September, sooner than its last week. He’s found a killer first line, and generally, as art, he’s nailed it: “a sense of a complexity that has been captured without being tamed”, where “peace is made to feel like a state of faint, cheerful vibration.” His analysis of the works’ religious significance is necessarily less self-assured, which is assuredly not Arn’s style; it’s also unsurprising that he doesn’t like the contemporary piece at the center of the show, since Arn seemingly dislikes anything and everything made after the turn of the millennium. (Is the work “pat”, or does the present just seem pat because it’s not foreign to us?) It’s fun to look through Arn’s eyes at these upward patterns; call it ascending a stare-case.
“The Best of Them” - Anthony Gottlieb tells Gottfried Leibniz to smile: He’s on Candide camera. Just a compelling little introduction to a figure who’s essentially the human Zero Hour! – remembered only for the work of media that mocked him. There’s probably no reason why one has to know Liebniz; he’s the sort of thrill-chasing polymath who hit on a few important concepts – something about “institutions for the exchange of scientific information” apparently “did eventually bear fruit” – but is mostly the sort of figure who wrote so much stuff down that some of it appears to have predicted the future. (Not always for the better, here; as Gottlieb notes, his proposed techno-utopian state sounds a bit like our grim present.) Perhaps Gottleib could have addressed the figure of the polymathic Renaissance Man more broadly; Leibniz is usually considered the last one, and while I’m thankful there’s no digression into Elon Musk’s whole deal, it’s true that the idea of the well-rounded, successful-at-everything, future-oriented man continues to haunt our public life in strange ways. We may not have listened to Leibniz, but we’re still taking a great Leibniz forward.
“Love and Theft” - Katy Waldman can’t stop thinking about the Romantasy empire. Slightly deceptive, only in the sense that Waldman sets the reader up for a real who-knows-what’s-true ethical conundrum, then gradually unspools a tale that’s more “I am so Krunchy the Clown!” It’s entirely obvious that Emily Sylvan Kim took Freeman’s ideas and, when Freeman was less than willing to turn her book into saleable slop, incorporated them into her favored writer’s newest project. Whether Wolff was in on it or taken for a ride, I feel less sure; the fact that she hasn’t disavowed Kim, though, suggests to me it’s probably the former. Waldman doesn’t need to keep things so veiled and mysterious; if she’s going to land in a place that’s basically “yeah, they definitely did it”, why not tell us that that’s the story? It’s easy enough to have a legally admissible amount of doubt in there and still frame it as more of a scandal and less of an open question. I suppose that would reduce the bloodless true-crime kick, and thus, ironically, the saleability of the story. I wish I’d had more fun with this; mostly I found it sour and depressing, but that may be less Waldman’s fault and more a matter of my mood… and the national mood. There’s no illicit thrill in a heist when the whole bank is burning down.
Skip Without Guilt:
“A Tale of Two Districts” - Peter Hessler thinks a Boebert in the hand is worth two races in the mountains. Does it matter that, unlike most of the amoral MAGA-rity, Boebert comes by her bloodthirsty fascism honestly? That she’s not a Marcello Clerici type, unlike nine in ten of the dead-eyed goons? I’m not sure it matters one bit. She’s a regular aggrieved white-working-class alcoholic – which is to say, part of the base – and she doesn’t do a weird Trump impression (her whole schtick is pretty indebted to Sarah Palin, but “soused brunette girlboss filled with inarticulate malice” is a character type that America specializes in). But at the end of the day, Hessler can’t show that the difference is anything other than optical; as with Trump, the danger is that the opposition sets the stakes so low (watch out, she’s a loud fascist) that the populace decides the emergency is manufactured, and fascism might lower their taxes. Hessler is usually a good stylist but his prose is weirdly inert here. I do appreciate, though, that he invests the story with personal stakes – he wasn’t drawn to Boebert because she was burpin’ at Beetlejuice, just because he lives in Ridgway; she was local news! It’s a simple story: She switched districts in a transparently political move, and both the old and new districts were won by the Republicans, even though the Democrat knocked on a whole lot of doors. Well, it was one of those years; the race, despite what Hessler implies, was never going to be that close. (The eighth district is a different story; there, a Clerici won by the slimmest of margins.) She may live in Hessler’s backyard, but Boebert’s national profile is her profile. Ticket splitting is dead; Boebert is just one MAGA Hydra head – cutting her down is a pointless exercise.
“Death Cult” - Ian Buruma says Mishima with that bullshit. It’s obviously important to consider the circumstances of Mishima’s death when discussing his work. I think it’s very questionable, though, to use his work as a lens through which to view the circumstances of his death, especially when, in doing so, you minimize the very real fascist principles (or, sure, aesthetics) he was willing to die for. If you’re more interested in Mishima’s life than his death, there won’t be much here to hold you; there’s zero formal consideration of Mishima’s work, everything is psychological. At least the reading isn’t totally flat, as it could be; Buruma finds a good deal of nuance and strangeness behind Mishima’s fixations, and even grounds those fixations in interesting historical context. The issues here are to do with premise, not execution; in the newsletter that dropped this piece, Buruma says it’s “a pity” that “the manner of his death… may now be better known to most people than his novels or plays”, so it’s odd that Buruma’s written a piece where his death is so central – and it’s disturbing that the view he provides of Mishima’s politics is missing so much.
“Still Processing” - Dhruv Khullar eats food, not too much, mostly this one particular brand of ravioli. Far from the worst piece I’ve read for this newsletter, but potentially the most frustrating. That’s because, until the last two sections, this is a rather interesting, science-forward dissection of whether or not “ultra-processed” can be a meaningful label, scientifically, and if so, whether it tells us anything at all about how foods contribute to the so-called obesity epidemic. It doesn’t endorse a side – Khullar is properly skeptical of the oft-bizarre convolutions necessary to test ultra-processed-ness; still, some early results look like they might be pointing to something crucial. (Though, again, testing this stuff without accidentally building rat ghettos – metaphorically – is incredibly difficult.) And then, with a dawning sense of dread, one begins the next-to-last section, which opens with Khullar negotiating with his children to stop eating fries – now he is become Almond Mom – and segues into an interview with a nutritionist who dismisses any flaws as “frayed edges”, and endorses the mental structure of ultra-processed-ness as an “‘organizing principle’” by which people should make choices about what to eat. Frankly, in a culture where disordered eating is pervasive, giving people a fundamentally arbitrary and easily misinterpreted stricture by which to govern, in what’s essentially a moral fashion, which foods are holy and which are hellish, is blinkered and irresponsible. It’s the usual problem with standards, but in this case you aren’t charging your computer, you’re charging your body. Adding guilt to the equation is no way to live.
And then! As if that wasn’t bad enough – there’s the jaw-dropping ending, in which Khullar tours a ravioli factory (??) and basically does an ad read for them – they’re, apparently, the only-kinda-processed food we should be eating more of, part of a solution that, “within the practical and economic realities of modern society, could keep people fed without making them sick.” Did he just do nutrition centrism?! Yes – surely the solution for a nation plagued by unhealthy eating habits is for every individual to choose the brand of frozen pasta with no modified corn starch. The people are starving? Don’t let them eat maltodextrin!
Letters:
John wrote a lengthy and fascinating dissection of the way Rachel Aviv treats Munro’s confession of her own assault in her piece about Munro’s daughter’s sexual abuse. You should read the whole thing, but he says, in part, “I read the passage as subtly casting a sinister light on that knowledge — an early example of her capacity to dismiss violence out of hand, of her deficient empathy. …Charlotte Shane and Vanessa Veselka [each wrote] critiques of how victims of sexual violence are expected to adopt specific affects and presentations, in order to be supported constructively by others. Deviation from the archetypes gets you pathologized as delusional / in denial, or worse, a traitor and bad influence of one kind or another. I think what Aviv does with the early life anecdote is cavalier and needlessly pathologizing.”
M. likes Rachel Syme’s writing and Adam Scott but still found him “too mundane an actor for this treatment… The profile I found myself actually wanting to read was on the apparently very difficult Ben Stiller.” They point us to Tad Friend’s profile of Stiller from 2012, which seems mostly to linger on his ill-begotten Walter Mitty movie, an early sign that the man knows how to go over budget – has 90 million dollars ever gone less far?
I think I’m gonna shuttle Michael’s top 5 articles of the year to a future end-of-year wrap-up column that will come whenever I have spare time (e.g. not soon) but you should certainly click through and read it yourself now.
Tomorrow I attempt to write a week’s worth of newsletter in one day. Send prayers.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?