Shaking off the dust
Hello! I’m back. I planned on returning to this newsletter last Sunday, but the week before I had a challenging feature to file and I didn’t feel like writing more after that. So here we are, almost at the end of January already (!). To get back in the swing of things, here are four pieces of culture I enjoyed since my last issue.
Zama
I had been meaning to see this film for years, and the languid evenings of winter break finally gave me the chance. Zama tells the story of a mid-level Spanish colonial officer stuck in a remote outpost somewhere on the southeastern coast of South America. Diego de Zama is desperate for a transfer to somewhere, anywhere, else, which he never gets. (This is barely a spoiler—that Zama’s life is one dead end after another is obvious to everyone but him.) What little plot there is goes in circles. A fearsome frontier outlaw is killed, or he isn’t. New people come to town, and they leave. Zama urgently needs to a send a letter, which literally goes nowhere. Eventually there’s a mission into the “wilderness” that is just as grueling and pointless as anything I imagined when thinking about the priests who wandered around for years looking for Sac Balam.
Some critics have called Zama a satire of colonialism, bordering on the surreal. I think it’s the first and only accurate representation of frontier colonial life I’ve seen. It’s undoubtably an absurdist film, but that’s because the society it depicts was a ridiculous farce (that happened to propped up by unimaginable violence and brutality, which the movie never lets you forget without being too graphic about it). No one has more than one set of clothes, so their 17th-century styles—which we are so used to seeing as elegant—are ragged and filthy. Colonial officers and ladies wear wigs straight out of Versailles, except they don’t fit and are nearly rotting off their heads in the tropical humidity. Llamas wander in and out of ramshackle buildings where important government business is taking place. The enslaved African man responsible for delivering official messages and mail wears a fancy coat, a powdered wig, and a loincloth. Nothing happens, and no one can escape. It’s funny, tragic, and unforgettable.
Parasite
You don’t need me to tell you that Parasite is great. If you haven’t seen it, run-don’t-walk to the nearest movie theater. It has all the exciting, twisty plot that Zama lacks, and it’s a razor sharp critique of another ridiculous farce of a society—ours.
I don’t have much to add to the critical discourse around Parasite, but I do want to talk for a second about its language. Personally, it was the first non-English-language movie I saw in a theater with Spanish subtitles in a long time. When I was studying abroad in Mexico City and still far from fluent, I made the mistake of going to see a French movie about a lighthouse with Spanish subtitles, an experience so difficult and alienating it scared me off Spanish subtitles for years. Anyway, seeing Parasite this way was fine, I actually do speak Spanish now. But I was primed to notice all the language slippage. There is so much English in this movie that I felt like someone had secretly observed the Spanglish my husband and I speak together and translated it to Korean culture at large. The fact that a character who had likely never been far from Seoul could convincingly pretend to be a Korean-American who grew up in Illinois left me absolutely reeling with delight. I grew up with a lot of Koreans and Korean-Americans in California, and while I wouldn’t claim to have ever known much about Korean culture, I thought and wondered about it a lot in a way I haven’t since leaving for college and then Mexico. I was thrilled to get a glimpse of Korea’s nuances again, including its unique connection to the United States, in a movie that felt so specific and so universal. If you’ve read anything smart about “Jessica from Illinois” please send me the link right away!
A terrible secret about me is that I don’t read much science journalism anymore. It used to be my favorite genre of nonfiction, hence my career choice. But once I started writing it, reading even the best stuff began to feel too much like work. So trust me when I say that this article in The Atlantic about invasive earthworms by my friend Julia Rosen is spectacular and super entertaining. Usually scientists have a certain affection for the critters they study, even the creepiest, crawliest ones, but these researchers mince no words about jumping worms. “They are the stuff of nightmares,” one says. Finding them in her area was “the day that ruined many of our lives,” according to another. In case you’re not convinced, here’s a video.
Invisible Cities
I re-read this lovely little book about journeys, empire, memory, and cities over the break. Here’s the story of one I particularly liked.
My writing
I published one piece since my last dispatch, about the discovery of a 7,000-year-old seawall in an ancient Mediterranean village, meant to protect the settlement as the glaciers of the last ice age melted and the sea level rose. Spoiler alert: the whole village, including the wall, is now underwater. Paging Italo Calvino.