One Organizational Challenge After Another
In which I write about the real hero of One Battle After Another and I also recommend one of the best novels of the year so far.
Hi!
Thanks so much to all the folks who wrote back with opinions about the cadence of this newsletter. Two of you wrote to say you prefer one big edition at the end of the month, the vast majority of you said you would be happy with two editions per month, and a couple of absolute sickos said they’d read as many newsletters as I could send every month.
So I’m going to listen to the majority and try emailing two shorter (still free!) editions of this newsletter per month—one on the 15th and one on the last day of the month. I hope I don’t drive the two of you crazy with the extra email, and I reserve the right to switch back if the workload gets too heavy or it feels like the new cadence isn’t working.
In this issue, I want to talk about a movie that has been lodged in my brain since I first watched it a couple of weeks back: One Battle After Another. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to be spoiled, feel free to skip over the next section—I’ve got some great book recommendations at the end of this email. But first, let me say that you definitely should see this movie—preferably in the theater if you can. It’s a movie that took two decades to be made, but it somehow feels as raw and as real as today’s news headlines.
As far as I know, there’s no word in the English language for a very common occurrence that many of us have experienced: An organization founded to solve a specific problem enjoys a certain amount of success and expands to the point where the organization more or less unofficially abandons its stated goal and instead becomes entirely devoted to the complex struggle of making sure that organization continues to thrive.
For instance, when I worked as a journalist I watched firsthand as the Occupy Seattle protests gradually transformed from a campaign to increase the visibility of America’s growing income inequality into a nonstop self-referential debate about the enforcement of urban camping laws. Many huge non-profits have seen their management structure bloat and detach from the people the non-profit is supposed to help, in favor of instead developing a series of more and more ornate fundraising exercises.
Elsewhere, corporations become so obsessed with unlimited growth that they hire expensive marketing firms to erase the thing that they’re most famous for from the brand entirely. Because there’s only so much money that can be made from the sale of chicken, Kentucky Fried Chicken becomes KFC, for example, and because health-conscious consumers are shying away from sugary fried bread products, Dunkin’ Donuts becomes, simply, Dunkin’—a name that means absolutely nothing.
We humans are easily distracted animals, and so rules are necessary in order to make cooperation possible. Unfortunately, humans are also obsessed with rules and organizations, and that meta-obsession can consume the whole endeavor if we’re not careful. I’ve asked anthropologists and political science majors, and nobody is aware of a term for this process. “Mission creep” isn’t quite right—it doesn’t capture the snake-eating-its-own-tail of it all. And “bureaucracy” doesn’t recognize the ouroboros of idiocy behind the organizational brain-death.
In any case, my favorite sequence in One Battle After Another is a perfect example of this nameless kind of crushing meta-organizational weight. When Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is trying to call the revolutionary organization that he was a part of a couple of decades ago, he’s greeted by a pedantic know-nothing on the phone who’s more interested in nagging Bob for not knowing the secret pass phrase than he is in overturning the state.
The revolutionary group has even become so institutionalized that its phone line plays Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as its hold music—a decision that is directionally correct but obviously symptomatic of bigger problems behind the scenes. If the revolution ever does come, I’m pretty sure it won’t have hold music.
But the best part of the scene is that while Ferguson is trapped in organizational hell, and while anti-immigrant troops are circling, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) is calmly walking around, making sure that his underground network of immigrants are emotionally and physically cared for on a personal level. St. Carlos introduces Ferguson to everyone he encounters, acknowledging their personhood in ways that the pencil-necked gatekeeper quibbling on the phone with Bob has likely never considered.
In other words, while Ferguson is quite literally struggling to talk the talk, St. Carlos is walking the walk.
Without ego or pretense he’s getting the job done, and he’s making it look easy. This happens all the time in the real world—the thankless care work that millions of women perform every day, the mutual aid organizations feeding and protecting people from the real-life anti-immigrant forces that are much scarier than One Battle After Another ever could have anticipated. The opening of the film is full of bombs and guns and car chases, but quiet, caring competence is the true revolutionary act.
Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson says that del Toro basically came up with the character of St. Carlos and his underground immigrant railroad on his own, and I’d argue that means del Toro deserves, at the very least, a credit as co-writer of the screenplay. St. Carlos is easily the most memorable character in a movie crammed full of memorable characters.
I could go on for thousands of words about this movie. Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw is what happens when you shove the entirety of the Trump Administration into a leathery human-sized sack. Chase Infiniti’s Willa Ferguson doesn’t make herself fully known until the movie is two-thirds of the way through but she never loses the conviction that the movie is entirely her story. And on and on and on. But for me, my thoughts always go back to that one scene depicting a kind of heroism that you rarely see in the movies: Kind, unassuming, brilliant, and competent.
I’ve Been Writing
I wrote about the most intriguing (and scariest) paperback releases of October for the Seattle Times.
I’ve Been Reading
I will always buy any book written by Patricia Lockwood as soon as it’s released. I loved her memoir Priestdaddy and her poetry collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. This month’s Will There Ever Be Another You, a fictionalized account of her experiences in the depth of the Coronavirus pandemic, is a continuation of Lockwood’s previous book, the semiautobiographical novel No One Is Talking About This and it’s full of the same surprising images and latticework of carefully constructed sentences. I’ll probably re-read both of these novels together back-to-back because they feel of a piece—but I’ll probably wait to re-read both books until after Lockwood reads with David Sedaris at Benaroya Hall on Sunday, November 16th, so that her reading voice is fresh in my mind. I can’t think of any other writer who is so perfectly distilling the internet’s informal and absurd language into something so personal and profound. It almost makes all the doomscrolling worth it.
I was sideswiped by an amazing novel earlier this month. Anna North’s Bog Queen is the story of a forensic anthropologist who, in the process of investigating a murder, uncovers a 2000-year-old corpse. The novel intertwines the modern-day story of the discovery and its aftermath with flashbacks to the young druid’s life in Iron Age Europe, in the weeks leading up to her death. It’s one of the most engaging and interesting novels I’ve read all year.
I liked the form of Catherine Lacy’s The Möbius Book more than the content. It’s a flipbook with two front covers that can be read from either side, and the narratives—one told in first person, the other in third person—braid together in different ways, depending on which one you read first. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel as though the narrative earned the interesting format of the book. If you’re going to play with form like this, your story needs to make that form absolutely essential. I didn’t feel like this one met the challenge.
Vulture, by Phoebe Greenwood, is a novel about war correspondents. It’s a deeply cynical story of the kind of people who charge into war zones for the sake of their bylines. I enjoyed the insiders’ view into the world of war reporting, but it was a little too dark for my already-dark state of mind.
The Bus on Thursday is a novel about a woman who is diagnosed with breast cancer and promptly loses her mind. The novel follows her as her world unravels, putting her teaching job on the line and potentially throwing her into the middle of a murder investigation. It’s a manic, bizarre story with a fascinating off-kilter narrator—you never know where Shirley Barrett’s protagonist is going to take you on the next page.
That’s All, Folks
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back in your inboxes at the end of this month.
Take care,
Paul