Last Week's New Yorker Review: November 13, 2023
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of November 13
Must-Read:
“Man Down” - Anthony Lane croons for two “unlikely” flicks. Nothing revolutionary, just Lane at his best and most balanced. The key is potent and specific formal analysis: In the Priscilla review, “an agglomeration of things” are represented by closeups: “…bare toes, at the start, sinking deep into the nap of a carpet; false eyelashes and china knickknacks, a single pill (the first of many) that Elvis lays on Priscilla’s palm, as if it were a Communion wafer; and a mini-sphinx, gilded and ridiculous, that we glimpse as she eventually flees from Graceland.” The film’s “all the more potent for being so still and small,” a verdict rendered clearer by all the still, small things in Lane’s sensitive tally. Regarding Dream Scenario, Lane lays out how director Kristoffer “Borgli switches from reality to reverie with clean, matter-of-fact cuts, affording us precious little opportunity to brace ourselves for the untoward.” Lane also has a thesis regarding Nicolas Cage: he’s “otheracting… restoring to movie acting the kind of dice-rolling risk that we associate with the theatre… If Dream Scenario… is one of Cage’s most fulfilling ventures, it’s because it allows him to trade so richly in the unforseen.” I’m convinced!
Special:
Normally I only cover Talk of the Towns when they’re exceptional, but this was a week in which each deserves highlighting. So why not have a special section?
“Against Despair” (Comment) - David Remnick tries to see what’s to be done. I’m not entirely sure what to make of Remnick’s focus on the early ‘90s as “a time of promise”; in many ways I think the seeds of the present were planted and even sprouting by that point. But I’m compelled, certainly, and his prose is incisive and engaged.
“De-Extincting” - Zach Helfand perms a mammoth. Hilarious: “‘I’m pretty sure we’ve bought hair from them before, for some sort of prehistoric gorilla,’ she said.”
“Solo” - Eric Lach wanders with a new arrival. I’d love the section to take a lesson from this piece: There’s no need to strain to find everything an often similar shade of droll — sad stories can work too. (Or angry stories, or dismayed stories.) Deeper, more melancholy textures still function in short-form.
“Dig It” - Andrew Marantz likes jazz. A funky character portrait. Letting Zev Feldman’s quotes breathe is a wise choice; stuff like “‘Saw her trio at Smalls. Cookin’.’” doesn’t need overelaboration.
“Surrealist Lunch” - Carol Kino sups from a duck-shaped tureen. The granddaughter has great stories, and they’re parceled out perfectly — and yes, slightly surreal. “‘…the silver platter was a plate that she stole from Hitler’s apartment. It’s got his initials on it.’”
Window-Shop:
“Make Me” - Nikhil Krishnan gets the milk for free will. A solid entry in a classic genre: The extremely patient dismemberment of a rather stupid popular-nonfiction book. Krishnan has a preternatural knack for making philosophical thought understandable to the fabled “general audience,” and he smuggles lots of interesting history-of-thought into this SmackDown (Nikhil the Giant vs. The Underthinker.) There’s still a lot of Sapolsky’s ideas and writing to wade through — the piece is perhaps too patient — but, assuming you believe it’s philosophically possible to choose to read this piece, you certainly should.
“Desert Captives” - Ed Caesar looks for a way out with the trafficked migrants of Eritrea. The first half is a complex piece of reporting, weaved together from various migrants’ terrible tales, that tells a story that will still feel familiar from other, similar migration narratives — plans fall apart, people end up captive in horrific conditions. Caesar’s sourcing and storytelling is impeccable, though there are no surprises. In the second half, the story flips from crime to punishment, as kingpin Kidane escapes and is caught, escapes and is caught. Here, the story lost me a bit — too much detail-density around the gears of various countries’ criminal justice systems grinding together. Kidane feels, in many respects, less like a mastermind and more like someone filling a role — the story even points this out; the arrests are “unlikely to do much to prevent the trafficking of African migrants.” So why should we care about his case in particular?
“The Mail” - The first letter perfects the form: At once incredibly pedantic and devastatingly precise.
“Trysts Tropiques” - James Wood gets trapped in The House of Doors. Exorbitant amounts of scene-setting and pre-review plot synopsis — we get a lengthy recounting of the works of the writer who inspired the book at hand before we even get started with the book at hand. It’s not badly done, though I don’t totally get what Virginia Woolf and P.G. Woodhouse have to do with anything — it feels like Wood is bored and wants to bring in some writers he loves to put on a show. Once we finally get to the review, in the last section, it’s reliably excellent; Wood is a master of the representative quote, and he beautifully diagnoses the book’s main issue: “The potential for a vertiginous examination of the instabilities and deceits of storytelling collapses too easily into novelized biography.” I’ve remarked before on this magazine’s frequent habit of reviewing a new, lesser book by a writer whose prior book was excellent; this belongs to that somewhat unfortunate category. Wood still makes it work, once he’s finally done with the info spew. Gorgeous spot art by Julie Benbassat.
“The Organizer” - Adam Gopnik speaks truth to power with the detail-oriented Bayard Rustin. Complicated. Gopnik’s voice is peppy as ever, without any egregiously distracting asides, but his fairly rigid focus on the details of political organizing means a lot of the material is stuff like: “It’s true that Rustin’s hopes for a New Deal-style working-class coalition within the Democratic Party were thwarted by changing cultural norms that were more powerful than shared class interests were.” Only the brief section on Rustin’s Quakerism has much that made me reassess his figure. Gopnik’s attempt to claim Rustin as a member of his favored band of realpolitik-obsessed coalition-building minutiae-lovers is basically convincing, and while I don’t salivate over those figures nearly as much as Gopnik does, I admit their necessity to most kinds of political maneuvering. This isn’t the most stirring entry in his broader project, but it’s focused and precise.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Napoleon Complex” - Michael Schulman assesses the unrelenting Ridley Scott. Never quite settles on a view of Scott, who comes across as a fairly petty and unpleasant figure, but not always in ways Schulman feels in control of. Schulman is insistent, despite the director’s objections, that he has much in common with his newest hero, Napoleon. He emphasizes tyrannical moments in service of this take. But a metaphor isn’t the same as a perspective, and it’s not clear what it means about Scott that he’s an example of the hard-charging jerk who’s still seen as the “benevolent dictator” necessary to get shit done. If that character type was ever compelling without elaboration, well, not so much anymore. Schulman ought to at least present a more cohesive view of Scott’s films; he waits till the next-to-last section before running through them chronologically, giving one-word verdicts like “plodding,” but mainly focusing on their financial success, which, to be fair, seems like a large part of the way Scott assesses his own hits and misses. (“Is Ridley a fine artist? …is he a commercial hack?” Schulman asks early on. But his artsy side, if it exists, is hardly seen here — there’s no formal engagement with the medium, just color schemes and storyboards.) The final section hard-pivots to his brother’s suicide and his own depression, but this feels disconnected from the piece it follows — we’re suddenly watching a different movie.
“Reinventing the Dinosaur” - Rivka Galchen restores T. rexes for a new Netflix show. Feature pieces pegged to new T.V. shows are a somewhat impossible assignment — cling too closely, and you end up with rehearsed anecdotes from showrunners (believe it or not, these ones used Post-it notes to organize information and we get to learn their entire color coordination system) but stray too far and you end up rehashing the broad topic from first principles (the sections on paleontology-in-general, here, are almost insultingly impersonal.) The next-to-last section finally gets the balance right, with some charming anecdotes about dino redesigns — but it’s hardly the length of a Talk of the Town, and not really worth the trouble.
“Coping Mechanisms” - Vinson Cunningham sees old men gone wild. This feels like something went wrong. Cunningham is bizarrely disengaged with both shows, even as he claims to like the first and tolerate the second, contra to the mega-pans in the Times and New York. The second review slams shut so abruptly it seems like a mistake, the prior wastes lots of time with pointless block quotes and indicates nothing fun before abruptly calling the show a “fun adaptation.” If nothing else, Zack Rosebrugh’s illustration nails John Turturro.
Letters:
Nothing in the mailbag!
What did you think of this week’s issue?