It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a book review. Years, in fact. The last review I posted is from December 2017 (which is coincidentally when I first discovered the author I’ll be raving about today).

Pride probably had a lot to do with it: in 2017, I was clocking 3-6 novels a month, easy. Or “easy” (in quotes). Like just about everything in my life, from film-viewing to writing to running, reading began as a pleasure and quickly tipped into performance; bars I needed to clear, a desire to “stick the landing.” (I recall frantically downloading a book on my Kindle while boarding an international flight; if I finished one en route and didn’t have a second to begin, those 12 hours would have been “wasted.”) Finally, in January 2018, I hit a snag—a project at work that started taking more of my free time, a book (I Married A Communist) with a middle-section I wasn’t thrilled to power through. Rather than slow down, I felt it easier to give up. I would keep on reading, but only in secret.

(But as long as we’re ripping off the Band-Aid: Highlights from the past couple years include the classics Ulysses and Beloved; short story collections Her Body and Other Parties and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; contemporaries marvels All The Light We Cannot See, Less, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, The Goldfinch; non-fiction works Feel Free, We Were Eight Years In Power, How To Be An Antiracist.)

There’s also something to be said about finite quantities. Time, of course, but also more abstract concerns. The more I attended film festivals, the less I could write weekly movie reviews; the more I ran, the less I could go on leisurely walks. Even if there is time—and, some 140 days into shelter-in-place, there is always time—I’ve found there is a limit to how much I can feasibly accomplish. Lengthy writing projects, exhausting weeks of work, multiple HBO shows binged in succession…sometimes there’s nothing left in me at the end of the day but to turn on Top Chef: All Stars and cease to exist.

I’d apologize for the navel-gazing preamble, but unfortunately, my review will be more of the same. I want to explain why I’m breaking my silence for The Topeka School, and it has as much to do with the act of writing as it does reading. Or rather, about the thrilling feedback loop that arises from the two.

Context: 10:04

Ben Lerner is a poet first, novelist second, and I mean that as a serious complement. Three Christmases ago, when I devoured 10:04 in a single afternoon, it wasn’t the story that I was devouring—I couldn’t recount to you the plot if I tried. It was the language, the power it carried. The subject of the novel is a poet clearly modeled after Lerner (though I knew nothing about him at the time). He was writing a novel about the act of writing a novel: think Adaptation, that old trick of self-reference. It would have struck me as cheap, if not for the ecstatic energy that coursed through it.

My favorite two sections of the novel were about how language and stories evolve over time. The first was a section about the Challenger disaster. The poet recalls watching it live (he didn’t), then watching Ronald Reagan give a speech about it (which quotes a poem by John Gillespie Magee which itself was plagiarized), then making hacky gallows-humor jokes about the explosion in class. He summarizes it in a speech:

So at the beginning of my story of origins is a false memory of a moving image. I didn’t see it live. What I saw was a televised speech that wasn’t written by anyone, but that, through its rhythmic structure, was briefly available to everyone; the next day I went to school and another powerfully unoriginal linguistic practice enveloped me, an unsanctioned ritual of call-and-response that was, however insensitively, a form of grieving. If I had to trace my origins as a poet to a specific moment, I’d locate it there, in those modes of recycling. I make no claims for ‘High Flight’ as a poem—in fact, I think it’s a terrible poem—and Ronald Reagan I consider a mass murderer. I don’t see anything formally interesting about the Challenger jokes, I can’t find anything to celebrate there; they weren’t funny even at the time. But I wonder if we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all.

The second involves a lengthy walk home in a blackout, from lower Manhattan to Flatbush, by way of the Brooklyn Bridge. As they walk, it bleeds into a Walt Whitman poem:

A steady current of people attired in the usual costumes was entering the walkway onto the bridge and there was a strange energy crackling among us; part parade, part flight, part protest. Each woman I imagined as pregnant, then I imagined all of us were dead, flowing over London Bridge. What I mean is that our faceless presences were flickering, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme. I’m quoting now, like John Gillespie Magee. When we were over the water, under the cables, we stopped and looked back. Uptown the city was brighter than ever, although as you looked north you saw the darkened projects against the light. They looked two-dimensional, like cardboard cutouts in a stagecraft foreground. Lower Manhattan was black behind us, its densities intuitive. The fireworks celebrating the completion of the bridge exploded above us in 1883, spidering out across the page. The moon is high in the sky and you can see its light on the water. I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America:

I’m indulging in lengthy quotes with the knowledge that they won’t make sense to you—can’t make sense without the novel that allows for them. But try to read them anyway, to get a sense of their flow; how this second scene so casually calls back to the first. Ronald Reagan’s speech to the schoolchildren of America, the 19th century creeping into present-day explosions, “a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all.” Or just his command of language: “its densities intuitive”, saying so much with so little; the rhythm of “our faceless presences were flickering, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme.” It’s a novel with the texture of a poem.

The Topeka School

One could fairly criticize 10:04 for being too much style, too little substance. And while his new novel, The Topeka School is very similar in tone, I think Lerner has finally found a subject that matches the urgency of his voice. Put another way: I don’t think you need to be a lit nerd to enjoy this particular book. I think you should read it today.

Adam Gordon is a high school senior living in Topeka, Kansas. Same self-referential character as his last two novels, though I don’t think that’s important (I would tell anyone interested in the “trilogy” to start here, at the end). What is very important, this time, is the relation between Gordon and Lerner. Like Michael Chabon’s Moonglow or Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, The Topeka School wears its autobiography on its sleeve: it wants you to be aware of both its confessional aspect and its intentional obscuring. It wants you to luxuriate in that tension.

Here are a few things Adam and Ben have in common. They are poets living in Brooklyn who grew up in Topeka. They were national champions in forensics and debate. They were born to a pair of esteemed psychoanalysts, who moved to Kansas to join an experimental new clinic. Their fathers were avid fans of cinema who eventually made their own short films—their first would be an adaptation of a Herman Hesse short story. Their mothers became New York Times Bestsell-ing authors who would appear on Oprah, be decried as “feminazis”, and exist as liberal icons in a city plagued by the Westboro Baptist Church. They (the mothers) both witnessed a learned sort of violence that coursed through certain white Men; they (the sons) feared becoming them, and subsequently fled. Here’s Adam’s father describing a patient:

I wasn’t interested in extracting latent content, making manifest some deeper truth motivating Jacob’s speech; my goal was to make the kid feel heard. I didn’t mind the cliché; in fact, I admired the phrase, its rightness of fit, a mixture of the somatic and semantic; maybe it explained the desire for heavy metal that registered as touch as much as sound. How much easier it would be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages; if there were a backmasked secret order, however dark, instead of rage at emptiness.

“A white guy writes a book in 2019 about the roots of white male rage.” I can hear—can easily fashion, myself—a thousand good reasons this should not be prioritized today. But what I find so brilliant about Lerner’s novel, is that he knows better than to approach these themes directly. This is no Hillbilly Elegy, no woe-is-me memoir that tries to sanctify its subjects under the guise of “understanding” them. Instead he zigzags through memories and generational myths to unpack something deeper at the heart of male violence. He proves his point by way of analogy.

Much of this revolves around the power language. One recurring example is that of competitive debate. Adam is a fiercely successful orator, and Lerner—expounding on themes he once wrote about in Harpers—sees a strong symmetry between that razor-sharp skill set and our social ills today.

The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even the adolescents knew this wasn’t true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the “fine print” one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with those thousands of words was comprehend them.

Evanson was gifted at committing the plausibly deniable outrage, then taking tactical umbrage, claiming the high ground. Adam was rarely if ever swayed by a position, certainly his mind changed little about key questions of value, but he was with every passing hour absorbing an interpersonal style it would take him decades fully to unlearn, the verbal equivalent of forearms and elbows.

Lerner’s descriptions of competitive debate heavily recall the tennis scenes in Infinite Jest—its “glossolalic ritual” tipping past meaning into instinct as it crosses “a mysterious threshold.” In fact, Adam bears quite a few similarities to Hal Incandenza (particularly in moments of dissociation). But unlike Wallace to his readers or Adam to his opponents, Lerner never even tries to overwhelm us. This is a very short novel with a rhythm that carries you—it could easily be read on a single flight. In fact, I’d argue it’s Lerner’s restraint that makes the novel so electrifying: A paragraph will pick up speed like a freight train, but just when it’s about to fall off the tracks, there is a conscious hard stop, a tug back to the present, a need to keep the narrative moving forward. My Kindle highlights are littered with examples, none of which quite capture what I mean:

The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you’d forgotten was there. Frame, crossbeams, slats, braces, joints. Revealing the softer sapwood, which is marked by candle burns. Half an hour later we were at the Greek diner on Ninety-Eighth with the gaudy dime-store box between us; I was weeping openly if quietly, Jonathan holding both of my hands under the table, one of the first times we’d really touched.

There was, there is, no rush; the interns have to set up the cameras, the actors need to adjust their period dress, angle their hats just so, fasten their pagers, apply their secrets of wash and finish. This is 1909; this is 1983; this is early spring of 1997 seen from 2019, from my daughters’ floor, dim glow of the laptop, “Clair de lune” playing in a separate window, as Bone Thugs-N-Harmony plays in the basement. From outside, because tonight is recycling, I hear the sound of people picking through glass; from inside the novel, laughter and slurred speech, the mechanisms near collapse.

I could spend hours comparing this book to others like it. His channeling of his own parents mimicking Chabon; his way of wielding an imaginary camera like Zadie Smith (“Zoom out:”); his description of mental illness (and its generational toll) like Adam Haslett; his blurring of poetry and prose, syntax and description, similar to Ocean Vuong (whom he once mentored at Brooklyn College). The massive debt he, and any poetic novelist for that matter, owes to Toni Morrison. But if I’m being honest, the real reason I am so passionate about this book is my own ego. Early into this book, I made a discovery: More than anyone I’ve read, Ben Lerner is the contemporary author who best approximates my own style and interests. He writes the way I wish I could write.

Navel-gazing warning: I am about to quote my own writing.

Lern-ing To Write

When shelter-in-place began, I embarked on an experiment: I would write and “publish” a mini, autobiographical story every single morning. I kept at it till I hit 100. And while I certainly don’t have a “body of work” in any professional sense, that experience made me keenly aware of my tics—the sentences that threaten to spiral into mayhem, the experiential lines I throw to pull them back to earth. The semicolons and em dashes—illogical; incessant. You’re liable to get tired of anybody’s “voice” after a hundred consecutive days, especially if you’re serving as author and editor and reader. I grew extremely tired of my own.

But it also made me more aware of my interests. There were certain themes I kept coming back to, morning after morning. The way memory blurs into fiction; the way we seem to choreograph our experiences for a perceived audience. I think I first stumbled onto the idea that the project could be about more than “plot” in Song 18:

I watch him from a distance, now, this boy straining every muscle to connect. The beat his heart skips after a scripted hug from Dorothy; the flutter of excitement when someone types the letter “L”; the naive optimism he carries as he pedals all across town, racing towards this FroYo trip or that mall get-together, things he has no desire to join but is somehow terrified to miss. The way he does every little thing for an imagined audience: alone at his mom’s piano repeating the same arpeggios in D, crooning about his not-yet luck to some faceless, future You.

And this is why I can identify the exact moment I fell in love with Lerner’s novel. It happened right in the opening chapter, at the end of this sentence:

But he was back in his body when they kissed goodbye and her damp hair was in his face and her tongue was in his mouth, running over his teeth, tobacco and mint, Crest toothpaste.

“Tobacco and mint, Crest toothpaste.” I fell in love because I recognized it. I immediately recalled a line from my own project, Song 70:

Sitting in my front yard for what seemed to be hours, tears running down my shoulder as the sprinklers took their cue, aware of my parents watching through the window and her own in the station wagon just around the block; salt, snot, and berry body lotion, mud and fresh cut grass

It may seem absurdly narcissistic to find so much connection in a single sentence. But once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. To his use of the word “glossolalic” as referenced above, I had my own in Song 95:

Sometimes I’d break it for a depressing song or two; sometimes for a monologue, spat out with glossolalic fervor.

What started as a tiny, if delightful surprise, soon became something deeper. Here’s his description of a character’s panic attack on an airplane, and his reliance on his wife to snap him out of it:

I was traveling furiously toward him in the dark. I was in the plane, finally cleared to land, flash of distant lightning. The metal doors shut, the landing gear unfolded, and we made our descent, first person and third, together through the clouds. Jane had talked us down.

Here’s my description of a panic attack from Song 73:

A day or two without one and they fade into an asterisk, but when they hit they subsume every aspect of my life—past and present, first and second person, all guardrails get toppled over in the fray. When I’m in the middle of one, I’m in the middle of them all: on the plane from San Diego just after family Christmas; driving to a rugby competition with my roommates in the back… I talk myself through it till the lie becomes more sturdy. I call Joanna, who softly reiterates it to me. You reiterate it to me. We reiterate, together.

Lerner is, of course, a far more accomplished author. In drawing these comparisons, I don’t mean to heighten my own voice. But it’s important, because my experience of reading became tinged with aspiration: this is how I want to write. If not exactly this, something quite a bit like it; perhaps less formal, leaving more room for vulnerability.

Reading became partially about studying, training for a marathon. I took notes on punctuation, on subtle shifts in voice. I marveled at how Lerner accomplished things I often tried and failed at, at how he confidently employed certain tricks I’d felt sheepish when I used. In “Angels In the Architecture”, I dabbled in cinematic language:

Crank up the contrast on those LEDs in the mirror, let them refract around the focal point of a half-empty glass, slap on a filter and watch the night glisten.

Cue Lerner:

I remember the next several hours of the Episode in both the first and third person, probably because I’ve depended heavily on Jane’s account. At the time it was hell, but it would come to be an endearing part of our prehistory, a comedy—Buster Keaton, black-and-white, the action at once stuttering and sped up.

I also tried playing with tense as a means of softening; to hide an event mid-sentence which I didn’t know how to approach. In my story, it was a bit of dialogue which meant more to the character than it would to any reader, which would feel anticlimactic if simply written out. I decided to dance around this by making it about the memory of anticipation: recalling how a character would feel about what was about to happen:

When the Southerner opens his mouth and the room splits wide open; when the patrons of Hot & Crazy Sugar Daddy burst into laughter as if in on the same cosmic joke; when the Quintessentially Ugly American proceeds to buy every last one of them a round of top shelf bourbon, here is what Daniel will be thinking:

In my case, the difficulty was that the moment didn’t matter, at least not by any objective measure. It mattered only to “Daniel”, i.e., to me, also sitting in a drunken stupor in the Hot & Crazy Sugar Daddy bar in Wuhan, China, 2017. In Lerner’s case, what he’s obscuring is too massive rather than too trifling. It’s a story involving a cue ball, at a party both he and “Adam” were at in Topeka, Kansas, 1997—and it haunts the entire novel. I won’t ruin it, but I’ll show how he launches into its eventual description:

Darren thinks of it, will always think of it, as already there, the cue ball, a heavy polished sphere composed of skating rink, a moon or dead star infinitely dense suspended in the basement firmament, a rotating disco ball that throws no light, only absorbs it. Darren feels that he has turned and hurled it back toward the table before he’s picked it up from the corner pocket, felt its weight, the cool and smoothness of the resin.

I could go on and on, though I’m aware the “similarities” are probably interesting to no one but myself. What I want to capture isn’t really the particulars of Lerner’s style or its overlap with my own, but the pure giddiness it instilled in me—instills in me now, as I frantically type this not-quite review an hour after finishing the novel.

It’s a truth that’s been repeated to the point of cliché: “A good writer must also be an avid reader.” I knew this in the abstract, but I’d never felt it with so much conviction. In my 100 days of writing, I hadn’t read a single work of fiction; I had been exercising daily but had forgotten to eat a single meal. If I see myself reflected in Lerner’s prose now, if I devoured this novel like no other in years, I think it’s less because he is uniquely attuned to my tastes, and more because I was starving. It feels so good to be fed.

Back To The Novel

If I had to reduce The Topeka School to a thesis, it would be this: Language is not enough; language is all we have.

Language is not enough: it breaks under the weight of actual meaning. Jane, Adam’s mother, cannot utter the trauma she’s suffered out loud:

Then something happened in that space her silence made: my speech started breaking down, fragmenting under the emotional pressure, became a litany of non sequiturs, like how some of the poets you admire sound to me, or I guess what Palin or Trump sound like, delivering nonsense as if it made sense, were argument or information, although I was speaking much faster than politicians speak; my speech was accelerating as if I were chasing after meaning as it receded; it was like I was having a stroke.

Adam, too, regresses under pressure:

He kept saying “instrumental reason,” which seemed apt to me because I thought the music of his language was overwhelming its meaning. At one point it was like he was speaking nonsense rhyme. All his vocabularies were colliding and recombining, his Topekan tough guy stuff, fast debate, language he’d lifted from depressing Germans, his experimental poets, the familiar terminology of heartbreak. And something approaching baby talk, regression.

Even peripheral characters are defined by that impossibility (and I’m not even touching the Herman Hesse story at the center):

Klaus was always joking; Klaus was never joking—what underwrote the irony was a sense of the absurdity of having survived, or the absurd suggestion that anyone survives, even if they go on breathing, or the absurdity that language could be much more than noise after the coop, after the camps.

But this doesn’t end in Hal’s permanent smile, in the perpetual grin of someone who’s had Too Much Fun. Language is not only a poor medium for meaning; it also has a terrifying way of steering meaning, molding truth into something insidious, violent, extremely modern day:

Weird to look through the window of the classroom door with the detachment of an anthropologist or ghost or psychologist making hospital rounds and see these two men, if that’s what they are, arguing in an otherwise empty room in a largely empty school eight years after history ended, snow flurries visible around the streetlights beyond the window. One, dark jeans sagging, is sipping a mysterious liquid; the other, khakis riding high, is explaining the slippery slope of so-called commonsense gun legislation a few years before Columbine. One of them will go on, when history resumes, to be a key architect of the most right-wing governorship Kansas has ever known, overseeing radical cuts to social services and education, ending all funding for the arts, privatizing Medicaid, implementing one of the most disastrous tax cuts in America’s history, an important model for the Trump administration. And one will attempt this genealogy of his speech, its theaters and extremes.

I’ve recently found myself grappling with the same limits of language, albeit with different generational touchstones at play. To Lerner, a child of the Clinton years, it is about an overwhelming influx of gibberish and noise; politics as a means of obfuscating truth. He sees the Iraq War, the rise of Tea Party, folksiness sanding down the edges of an impotent rage. Coming of age in the Bush administration, I see the farther-right rebuttal to all that gibberish: Ben Shapiro training an army of man-children to mistake the cadence of rationality for genuine reason; “well, it’s not that simple” as Pavlovian reflex against even the simplest, most overt moral wrong. Lerner’s nefarious orator no longer has a reason to “spread” the audience; listeners now obscure on the speaker’s behalf. We’ve inhabited the irony to the point of it destroying us; we nullify language the moment we receive it.

Yet language is all we have. And sometimes, in those rare, transcendent moments, language, or a form of it, rises to the challenge.

At first I was kind of laughing at the sobbing, sun and rain, laughing involuntarily at the force and unexpectedness of it, and then I gave in to it entirely. There was this incredible sense of relief when I let go: this language has ended in pure sound. This language has reached its limit, and a new one will be built, Sima and I will build it.

Lerner builds it in The Topeka School. He describes something vital, a complicated mix of grief and resentment and identification and alienation that feels nearly impossible to get at directly. I hope I can someday rise to the challenge.

Note: In addition to being a music-inspired memoir, this is also meant to function as a literal playlist! You can listen along on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

What Is This, And How Am I Supposed To Read It?

For me, music is almost entirely about memory. The songs that stick are always entangled with certain times and places. Some are great, others embarrassing—all inform who I am. So on March 19 2020, towards the beginning of shelter-in-place, I decided to embark on a challenge via this Twitter thread. Every morning, 7 days a week, I would share a song and a piece of writing about a memory it recalled. It would go “until this thing ends.” I assumed that meant two or three weeks. I had no idea what I was signing up for.

Still, a commitment is a commitment. So for 100 consecutive days, I followed a very particular routine. I would wake up before 7am, no exceptions, and write. Sometimes I’d have a draft or two saved up from the previous evening, and the morning would be an opportunity to polish. Others, I’d wake up with absolutely nothing. Regardless, the conclusion was the same: By the start of the workday, I would have some song paired with some memory, condensed into 2-4 iPhone-sized notes screenshots, and hit “Post.” There was no ability to edit, and it shows. The longer the project went on, the more complicated these stories became, and the more difficult it became to keep writing. Every week or two I contemplated quitting, certain I had run out of ideas. Those weeks, in hindsight, produced some of my favorite pieces.

The result is rather difficult to pin down. Is it a playlist, a creative writing experiment, a short story collection, a 50,000 word memoir? I can’t say; I’m still too close to it. I do know that it covers every year of my life from age 10 and up. I also know that it is, by virtue of memory, prone to wild inaccuracies—the errata alone could fill another 20,000 words. I also feel (though, again, I’m too close to it) that it gets substantially better as it goes along: While there are early entries I’m immensely fond of, I feel it wasn’t until Day 60 or so that I really settled on the style. You can be the judge. What follows is a lightly edited reproduction of the original thread.

A note on reading. These are mostly meant to be taken as independent stories, and shouldn’t require any prior knowledge (about the music or myself). Much like a playlist, there’s a certain emotional ordering to it: Almost every entry is somehow connected to the one that precedes it. Sometimes the connection is musical: a muffled preacher tying Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Static” to Julien Baker’s “Go Home”, the ending whirl of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Communist Daughter” becoming the opening guitar riff of Death Cab For Cutie’s “Blacking Out The Friction.” Sometimes it’s thematic: a series of wedding-related entries (Song 33–39), two Valentine’s Days multiple years apart (Song 64 to Song 65), a week devoted to overthinking / authenticity amid the protests of the murder of George Floyd (Song 72–80, more or less). Many choose to shuffle their playlists, and this should mostly hold up to that. However, there are some sections where chronology is quite important: Songs 13–14, 22–23, 28–29, 69–70, 96–98.

My humble opinion is that you should read them in order, with one exception: I think to get a bit of context, you may want to start with Song 100 (which functions more as a summary / epilogue) and then loop back to the beginning. Ideally you’d have the playlist on in the background and your finger on the “Skip” button…but that is, admittedly, a lot to ask of a stranger on the internet!

Speaking of context, there’s no easy way to transpose a Twitter thread (with its ramshackle immediacy / sense of iterative building) into a blog post. I’ve tried to find a solution that is more readable than a series of screenshots, but still captures the real-time aspect. You’ll see call-outs:

To indicate my introduction to, or additional thoughts on, a piece at the time of writing. You’ll also see images, videos, and misc links that were posted with the text on the day of writing.

Finally, since 100 entries are quite a bit for a browser to load in one go, I’ve split this into multiple pages, 20 entries per page. You’ll find this pagination widget at the bottom of every page; or you can hit “All” to view a collated version (this is my personal reading preference).

Thanks, and happy reading!

Tiny tech detail: Every song can be indexed with an anchor link of the form “#SongXXX”. Song 65, for instance, lives in the “#Song065” anchor of both Page 4 and of the collated page.)

Song #1: Lost Verses

Artist: Sun Kil Moon
Date: March 19, 2020
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In 2007, I moved from San Diego to attend college at Berkeley. For the next few years, there was always a background hum of loneliness — some sense of impermanence, that “home” was forever 500 miles south. I found myself romanticizing freeways. I loved the idea that one contiguous stretch of asphalt separated me from my family and friends; that on any given night, I could hop on that conveyor belt and be surrounded by morning. 5 or 10 weekends a year, I would make up an excuse to do just that: wait till 10pm on a Thursday or Friday night for traffic to die down, fill up a pair of disgustingly large 7-11 travel mugs, spend 7 or 8 solitary hours on I-5, get home just before sunrise. Sunday always came too soon, and at 10pm I’d follow the same ritual in reverse.

Music meant a lot to me on those all-night drives. It made it feel like a spiritual journey, a sacred ritual, with a self-seriousness only college could allow for. And no slot in my playlist was holier than this: It’s for the moment on the return trip, after some 4.5 hours of Nothing But Cows, when the 580 snakes down a hill and all the lights of the Bay come bursting into view. That slot was for the happysad, the melancholy, the you’re-lonely-now-but-that-loneliness-is-good. And it was almost exclusively reserved for “Lost Verses” by Sun Kil Moon.

I came up from under the ocean
Evaporated sea salt water
A mist above the skyline
I haunt the streets of San Francisco
Watch over loved ones and old friends
I see them through their living room windows
Shaken by fear and worries
I want them to know how I love them so

Song #2: Dead Man’s Will

Artist: Iron & Wine
Date: March 20, 2020
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It was fall of 2005, and I’d only recently gotten my driver’s license. The freedom felt amazing, and music was the perfect expression of it. First, because I could finally blare it. Second, because I could drive myself to a record store and (with my vast Dairy Queen riches) buy whatever album I wanted. I had a Sony CD player with a tape-deck adapter, a giant binder of CDs under the seat, and a smaller CD holder attached to my sun visor…for reasons I can’t even fathom, given the way San Diego sunshine & polycarbonate interact.

This is one of the earliest purchases I remember from those days: a collaboration between Iron & Wine and Calexico. I bought it the day it came out. This song, in particular, gutted me with its heart-on-sleeve simplicity. I remember driving to some secluded part of town that evening, cranking up the volume to some ungodly level, and setting it to repeat.

May my love reach you all
I’d lost it in myself and buried it too long.

Song #3: All My Friends

Artist: LCD Soundsystem
Date: March 21, 2020
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Scrolling through the 80 or so candidates I jotted down for this list, I realized the vast majority of memories I associate with songs take place at night. Not just night, but very late at night—the freeway just before sunrise, a 2am trudge home in Tokyo, an all-nighter in a coffee shop in Singapore Airport after abysmally failing at some grand romantic connection. I’ll get to those.

Today’s memory is about all-nighters. Namely, the all-nighters I would do at least 3 times a week in the robotics lab at UC Berkeley in my junior and senior years of undergrad. Chalk it up to poor time management or sheer ambition, but I loved all nighters. I loved the way time seemed to dilate: I could end classes at 4pm, finish homework, grab a bite, show up to the lab at 7pm, and know that I had 14 hours of solid work time available to me before real life would set in again. Hard-to-reproduce bug in the laundry folding code? Experiment needed to be rerun? A conference paper was due tomorrow and I still didn’t have any tables filled in? No problem! I had infinite time at my disposal. The fancy espresso machine I’d guilted various professors into buying for our floor didn’t hurt, either.

Sometimes, around 4am, I would step away from the computer, make a cappuccino, and sit on the 7th floor balcony overlooking the Bay. This is the song I would listen to on repeat.

And if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up
And I still don’t wanna stagger home
Then it’s the memory of our betters
That are keeping us on our feet

Song #4: Leave A Trace

Artist: CHVRCHES
Date: March 22, 2020
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It was September of 2016, and I’d found myself in London with a few coworkers (total coincidence, separate trips). It was Thursday night, and we all needed to be back in the San Francisco office by Monday. I was staring at maps and ferry routes, trying to square the circle on one obsession: I needed to get to Islay.

For the uninitiated, Islay is a tiny island off the west coast of Scotland. You may recognize it as the place Ron Swanson goes for his birthday on Parks and Rec. With its neighbor Jura, it’s known as the mecca of peaty whisky—”peat” being that distinctive smokey note you get when you dip into, e.g., an Ardbeg or Laphroaig or Lagavulin. All of those distilleries are centuries old, and all are on a single 2 mile stretch of road on the perimeter of Islay.

Coworkers were skeptical, but I hatched a plan. Three of us would fly to Aberdeen early on Friday morning. We’d rent a car and drive through Speyside and the Highlands, tasting along the way. One would get dropped off at Glasgow Airport on Saturday around 2pm for an early flight out, and the two remaining would continue westward to the port in Kennacraig, catching the last ferry of the day. We’d make it to Islay just in time for dinner, have a few good drams, pass out, and spend Sunday morning doing as many distillery tastings as possible before the 3pm ferry out. (I know that sounds crazy, and potentially reckless given the driving…but I’m telling you, there’s something in the air out there.)

Against all logic and reason, the plan worked flawlessly. I remember driving back to Glasgow that drizzly Sunday afternoon, rolling through idyllic little lakeside towns as we alternated stereo duty. This song by CHVRCHES is the one that sticks with me the most. The sun was setting in the most gloriously muted way, and I was filled with that preemptive nostalgia you get whenever you know a trip is coming to a close.

There is grey between the lines

Song #5: Good For Me

Artist: Amy Grant
Date: March 23, 2020
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By starting this list with a few Pitchfork-friendly tunes, it might seem like I’m trying to cultivate some image of myself as having been remotely cool or ahead of the curve. Let me assure you, I was not. Picture a bowl cut, a lisp, and a T shirt that goes almost to the knees. The face you just conjured was my own.

This memory comes courtesy of the first album I really sank my teeth into: “Heart In Motion” by Amy Grant. Age unknown, though to save face I’m going to guess I was about 6 (honestly might have been 10). My mom had recently gotten a new Sony Walkman, and wherever we found ourselves — grocery store, YMCA for swimming or Tae Kwon Do lessons, an assortment of beige office buildings about which I only cared enough to retain the word “Errand” — I would be glued to a pair of comically large Sennheisers, blasting Amy’s controversial crossover sensation.

Others may have gone with the wildly more popular “Baby, Baby,” or perhaps the end-credits-in-a-90’s-romcom-worthy “That’s What Love Is For.” But I was no chump. I knew a real banger when I heard one. “Good For Me” was, and continues to be, one such banger.

Song #6: On Our Way to Fall

Artist: Yo La Tengo
Date: March 24, 2020
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I’ve tried to limit myself to one song per artist in this list, but I’m gonna level with you: Unless this lockdown ends recklessly soon, Yo La Tengo is showing up more than once. They’re a band that I can’t seem to shake, lurking in the periphery for months or years at a time only to strike at precisely the right moment. “You know that particular mood you’re feeling? We’ve got an entire album dedicated to it.”

I discovered YLT in my Freshman year of undergrad. Like any musical discovery worth its salt, this one came on the heels of a breakup. It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon, and I’d just ended things with my highschool sweetheart. You know the story. You move away to college, learn a tiny bit about yourself, and realize you don’t have to be tethered to who you were at fifteen. Realize that maybe, just maybe, being vaguely content with a tinge of annoyance—making some teenage Archie Bunker face whenever teenage Edith speaks—isn’t the height of romantic possibility. You brush the thought aside, but it keeps creeping back, until eventually it all pours out in an extended argument about something wholly unrelated. A few tearful hours in the dorm parking lot, earnest promises to stay best friends (“just like Jerry and Elaine”), one last sight of her little red Honda, and you’re entirely on your own.

I didn’t want my new roommates to see me cry. So rather than head inside, I walked a few blocks to Amoeba Records, where I could aimlessly peruse the Used section while I gathered my thoughts. After a while, I noticed the music coming from the loudspeaker—hushed vocals, gently bobbing bass, tender and mournful and light all at once. It was a hopeful sort of melancholy I hadn’t experienced before, the sort where love sounds just a little bit sad and tragedy a little bit joyful. I asked the clerk what he was playing, and he handed me my first of many Yo La Tengo albums. I wore the metaphorical grooves out of this one that night.

So we’ll try and try, even if it lasts an hour
With all our might, we’ll try and make it ours
Because we’re on our way
We’re on our way to fall in love

Song #7: Woman (In Mirror)

Artist: La Dispute
Date: March 25, 2020
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So many great songs are about the beginning or end of a relationship, those times when everything feels so stark, so hugely consequential. Uncharted territories. An ongoing relationship, however wonderful, lacks that sense of hyperbole. So songs that deal with it often compensate by upping the stakes: I am the luckiest, the happiest, the most undeserving of the absolute perfection that is your beauty.

There’s a time and place for the cheesy stuff. But to me, love is rarely about superlatives or grand romantic arcs. It’s about a thousand quiet vulnerabilities, incidental intimacies; those conscious, continual decisions to open yourself and receive the other likewise, in (to crib from David Foster Wallace) “myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” That everyday-ness is where “Woman (In Mirror)” resides.

This song has come in and out of my life, but the starkest memory I associate with it is from a couple years ago. My twin brother was getting married, and Joanna and I were down in San Diego for the wedding. We’d been dating a little over a year at this point, and we were staying in a tiny AirBnB. It was a retrofit pool house on one of those enormous properties that are surprisingly common in Southern California, and always euphemized as “upper middle class.” I had finished getting ready and was lounging around in a button-down and tie; Joanna was standing in front of a small circular mirror in a flower print dress, putting the final touches on her makeup.

In truth, I have no idea if I actually listened to this song while she did that, or if the two have simply intertwined over time.

There are moments here only yours and mine
Tiny dots on an endless timeline
Go on and on and on
All the motions of ordinary love

Song #8: Unwell

Artist: Matchbox Twenty
Date: March 26, 2020
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I don’t remember much about the first time I couldn’t breathe. I must have been 12 when I woke my mom up with the news. I don’t recall how it happened, but filling in the blanks from a lifetime of experience, I’m certain it was terrifying. Breathing is a bit like juggling: When you’re lost in the flow of it, it’s damn near effortless. Tweak a parameter just a smidge, though, or fixate on any constituent part, and that delicate equilibrium topples. Seems impossible from the start.

To this day, it’s scary when an asthma attack hits…if it even does hit, that is. The condition is so intermingled with the fear of the condition, I can’t truthfully tell you where one ends and the other begins: shortness of breath begets anxiety begets shortness of breath. At best it’s a darkly funny cycle; at worst it can be debilitating. It’s taken decades of medication (daily inhaler, albuterol for emergencies), lifestyle changes (cardio, intermittent therapy), and placebos (a constant supply of honey lemon Halls) to tilt the latter into the former—to truncate those 2-4 weekly asthmapanicwhoknows attacks into mild annoyances that are dead on arrival. Even still, some nights are worse than others, and the spectre of an acute respiratory pandemic hasn’t exactly helped. So I can only imagine how scary it felt that first time, back when it was all so new, so uncertain. That sudden loss of invincibility.

What I do remember, all too vividly, is the Urgent Care waiting room. It was a dramatic arc I would repeat at least a half dozen times: the rising tension of a sprint to the hospital culminating in bored, anticlimactic triage. Your vitals are fine; you aren’t wheezing too badly; sit down, kid, we’ll get to you when you can. There would be treatment (15 minutes with a nebulizer, a rote prescription for prednisone) but first came a solid 90 minutes of nothing.

It’s a strange thing to be simultaneously terrified and embarrassed, your id fighting for survival while your ego smiles apologetically. The longer I waited in that sterile, tiled Purgatory, the more it dawned on me that I was going to be fine. No one survives 90 minutes of “not breathing.” But it wasn’t a relief to be fine; it was a burden. Fine meant I’d wasted everyone’s time, made me the boy who cried “respiratory failure.” A flatlining medical device or sudden loss of consciousness might have given a doctor something to go on. Absent any drama, I could only feel crazy.

A TV hung in the corner of the waiting room, blaring what I assume was VH1. Would you believe me if I told you that, just as my fear-shame spiral was reaching its nadir, I heard Matchbox Twenty’s early-aughts anthem for the very first time? Truth be told, I’m not sure I’d believe me either. Sometimes memory, like shortness of breath, can be conjured from scratch. But it’s real to me now, and is there really any difference?

I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell
I know right now you can’t tell
but stay a while and maybe then you’ll see
A different side of me

Song #9: Winter Winds

Artist: Mumford & Sons
Date: March 27, 2020
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Continuing the trend of Things That Scare Me: I am mortified of public speaking. People are often surprised by this, because A) I do it all the time, and B) my primary crutch is to cultivate an easygoing demeanor. Don’t buy the facade. If you ever see me on stage, know that I am genuinely terrified of you. That terror never goes away, you just learn to mute it. Years of false alarms, paired with no shortage of coping mechanisms, have taught me to quarantine my panic, put the fight-or-flight instinct in a box.

In May of 2011, I had no boxes. I had spent all four years at Berkeley running from the monster. I only took classes which didn’t have a participation score; I did 80% of the work in any group project so the rest of my team would present to “make it fair;” on multiple occasions, I dropped a course solely because the word “presentation” appeared on the syllabus. Yet here I was in the final week of my senior year, pulling an all-nighter to re-re-re-rehearse the first public speech I would give since highschool graduation—not for a small class project or a buddy’s wedding, but for an audience of some hundred academics at an international robotics conference in Shanghai.

The breakfast buffet in the 54th floor lobby was in full swing, and I couldn’t dilate time any longer. It was about 7:45; my session started at 8:30. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my entire body was shaking, from nerves and lack of sleep and empty-stomach coffee. But I had to get moving. In less than one hour, I would be on stage. The notion wasn’t just scary, it was literally unimaginable: There in that windowed lobby I couldn’t string 5 words together without quivering. How would I make it through a single slide, much less 40? I imagined breaking down at that podium on the other side of the world, as all the top professors who’d seen “promise” in my application a few months prior suddenly recognized the fraud I’d always been.

It was hot on that walk to the convention center, and overexposed in a way that made the whole scene feel surreal—the city’s signature haze compounded with my anxious, swirling fog. As I levitated through the bustling city, pulled toward my inexorable death, I fumbled for the only thing I could control: the soundtrack. I don’t know why this song is the one I chose. Was it the motivational swell of the horns and banjo? The battle between two parts of oneself? The singalong vocals as a mini- support group? All I know is I had it on repeat all day: walking through the city, entering That Room, leaving hours later in a triumphant, slack-jawed daze.

Song #10: Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night

Artist: The Hold Steady
Date: March 28, 2020
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This entry isn’t meant to funny per se, but neither is it meant to be a cautionary tale. It just is what it is: the story of my first blackout. Or, for you glass-half-full types, the story of my second-to-last blackout. (The last would come a year and a half later, involving a chipped phone, an empty wallet, and a surprise bill for an extended international call placed from Tokyo to San Diego. We’ll get there.)

The setting is St. Paul, Minnesota, May 2012. Same conference as yesterday’s entry, one year later. This time around, I wasn’t on the hook for a single presentation: My only directive was to learn and connect—”connect” being the euphemism professionals use to make drinking sound productive. I was in my early twenties and productivity was booming.

I don’t miss too much about academia, but I do miss the Conference Buddy phenomenon. The Conference Buddy is a hybrid between Old Friend and Acquaintance, someone you’ve spent time with on 3 or 4 continents who you would never so much as text back home. These particular Conference Buddies had closed out a bar with me. We compared notes on our schedules the following morning, said our goodbyes, and dispersed. I walked back alone, keeping the blurry Crowne Plaza logo continuously in sight, and I was nearly there when—well, I have no idea what happened next.

When I came to, I was a dozen blocks east and I was mid-conversation, hurriedly walking with Michael. Michael was an affable guy, maybe 35 or 40, who was guiding me to the nearest 24-hour ATM. He really appreciated my generosity: He’d lost his house after the disability checks stopped coming through, and my offer to buy him a hotel room was exceedingly kind. Yeah, no, we’re almost to the 7-11, anyway what was he saying? Robots. They sound so cool; he used to work in construction himself, and can only imagine how robots will change that.

If this sounds like it’s heading for disaster, don’t worry. Nothing happened. I pretended to know what the hell we were talking about; we made it to the 7-11 and Michael waited outside; I took out $120 (a small fortune in grad student currency) and handed it to him; we hugged and he pointed me back in the direction of the Plaza. I walked back alone, probably 3:30am at this point, trying to piece together what exactly had happened. I put in my headphones to temper the confusion, playing the band I’d been repeating the whole trip—The Hold Steady, because it was the Twin Cities and I am obvious. The streets were flooded with a dim, orange light, and it all felt perversely spiritual in a way I can’t explain. Like recklessness and guilt and excitement and love.

We gather our gospels from gossip and bar talk
And then we declare them the truth
We salvage our sermons from message boards and scene reports
And we sic them on the youth

Song #11: I Found A Reason

Artist: Cat Power (a cover of The Velvet Underground)
Date: March 29, 2020
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It was summer of 2007 and our road trip was coming to a close. Over the last two weeks we’d driven thousands of miles. Our first stop had been Vegas to link up with the girls’ trip. Then, armed with printed MapQuest routes and $15 per diems, we five teenage nomads pressed on. It was a straight shot through Utah to Boulder, CO, followed by a camping stay in Garden of the Gods. Detour up Pike’s Peak and on to Santa Fe, feat. what many agreed was the best pizza of our lives. Hours wasted in Albuquerque in search of a record store; an evening in Flagstaff perusing used books; a hike around Grand Canyon, South Rim, sunrise; an eerie night in Phoenix, whose downtown could best be described as “post apocalyptic.” It was a season of inside jokes and faux disagreements, urine-filled bottles and sun-baked bacon cheeseburgers, dusty tents and cramped Best Westerns and long swaths of asphalt overflowing with nothing. It was coming to a close.

We woke up before sunrise in a suburb of Phoenix and loaded the van for the very last time. It was a 5-hour sprint to Escondido if you stuck with the interstate, but that hardly seemed like a fitting end. We opted instead for the scenic route: the one that dips south around Blythe, sweeps by the sand dunes just east of Brawley, and winds its way through the Anza-Borrego Desert before eventually hitting home. I don’t know how we agreed on it, but I know it was unanimous. College would be starting in about a month, and try as we might, the group would never be the same.

The whole trip had been a goldmine of transcendent music moments, but none more beautiful than this: listening to The Covers Record in virtual silence, rolling through the desert as sun peeked above the hills, the five of us left with nothing to say as we staved off adulthood for a few hours more.

Oh I do believe
In all the things you see
What comes is better than what came before

Song #12: Woke Up New

Artist: The Mountain Goats
Date: March 30, 2020
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In Song 6 I wrote about my first breakup. And while the description was technically true, it only gave partial information. It detailed a more or less mutual decision, a clean separation, with evergreen promises to stay Jerry and Elaine. It didn’t mention that I would change my mind a week later, after the loneliness had time to really sink in. Nor did it include the months I’d spend clumsily putting back together the pieces of her trust, with half-felt reassurances and desperate escalations, only to inflict far more pain when it inevitably collapsed. The first had lent itself to catharsis, certainty. The second time around it was an uglier sort of grief, tinged with a sadness that felt murky and wrong. She had a right to mourn, not me. I was the selfish one, the perpetrator of a preventable hurt.

The least I could do, I decided, was give her space. So I withdrew from our group of friends almost entirely: They were her support system now, not mine. I spent a lot of time alone that first summer home from school, and what little social life remained was focused on the college group at church. I loved that there were new people there, ones who knew me solely as a Me rather than half of an Us. They gave me space to carve out a new identity, some hybrid between the persona I’d cultivated growing up in the church (the Extremely Earnest Guy, the perennial Good Friend) and the one I was awkwardly trying on up north (the Brooding Intellectual, the One With Good Taste). Looking back, I can trace a clear line from that patchwork of identities to the adult I eventually became. Glimmers of my authentic self started to peek through.

It took a few months. But eventually the guilt and tension dissipated, and the old cleansing feeling—that distilled brand of sadness that was allowed to feel good—took its place. She was okay and I was okay, and I re-entered my friend group just a little bit changed. The Mountain Goats had been a favorite of mine for years at this point, but one album, Get Lonely, had always been too devastating to touch. Now I couldn’t get enough of it. This song in particular became my rallying cry:

The wind began to blow, and all the trees began to pant
And the world, in its cold way, started coming alive
And I stood there like a businessman waiting for the train
And I got ready for the future to arrive

Song #13: Dents

Artist: The Acorn
Date: March 31, 2020
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The hardest part of grad school is also a perk: There is zero separation between life and work. Usually this is emotionally draining, lulling you into a cycle of 14 hour workdays and 7 day weeks. But it cuts both ways, if you let it. You learn to cobble together a life out of the things you do “for work,” and if you play your cards right, life can be pretty fantastic—spending days honing personal skills, hosting visiting professors over Michelin Star meals, taking advantage of near-infinite excuses to travel. It’s the only time I’ve ever had truly guilt-free vacations. I was never on or off the clock; there was no clock.

In July of 2012, my labmate and I attended a conference in Sydney. As with all good conference trips, we’d left a few free days at the tail end to sightsee. After considering the Barrier Reef (“too obvious”) and the Blue Mountains (“too many Drop Bears” the locals insisted with a straight face), we settled on New Zealand. So we flew into Christchurch, ditched our camper van near Nelson, took a water taxi 40 km north, and embarked on a three day hike down the Abel Tasman trail.

The backpack was heavy and I was very out of shape, but it was worth it. I recall waterfalls and jutting cliffs and large flightless birds; deep blues and greens fading into impossibly dark nights; glorious sunsets and freeze-dried “fish pies” and Pinot by the fire with an orchardist named Bruce (whose “papples,” a cross between apple and pear, we’d find waiting for us in a goodie bag the following morning). I’d been carrying so much anger for the better part of a year, but it all felt so petty amid a world that was good. I had to let it go.

In a tent on the beach, I wrote a note to myself, describing a sense of “chocolate tranquility.” I don’t know what it means, but I know how it felt, and I remember the song that was stuck in my head.

One by one the seasons change you
Maybe once but not for all.

Song #14: I Never Wanted You

Artist: David Bazan
Date: April 1, 2020
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When I sketched out a plan for this series, this entry wasn’t on the list. If I’m honest with myself, it’s a bit painful to dwell on. Not because of the song (which is still the best sort of heartbreaking) or the events it conjures (which were completely unremarkable), but because of who I remember being at the time I listened. Or, to be generous, who I’d let myself temporarily become. This song transports me to a particularly ugly headspace. It isn’t a flattering look. Then again, this project wasn’t meant to be flattering.

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned the anger I was carrying as I hiked around New Zealand. As with so many emotions that feel insurmountable till the moment you clear them, this one had sprung from a breakup. The details don’t matter: She was a person, I was a person, what usually happens happened, and now I was a wreck. Blame it on the denial that comes after wishful thinking—on the toxic conviction of young men everywhere that love is awarded based on merit, a commodity they are owed, some moral contract bound by duty or by guilt. How dare she leave me, after all the things we shared! All the promises we’d made; all the hope that I’d invested. Songs I claimed to understand couldn’t have spelled it out more clearly: “You wanna fight for this love, but honey you cannot wrestle a dove”— The Shins; “Why do we keep shrieking when we mean soft things?” — Magnetic Fields. Yet there I was, fighting for a future that was never mine to own. Shrieking about injustice, the “betrayal” of soft things. The answers I “needed.” The closure I was “due.” Those phony, feral howls of the self-appointed Nice Guy, when romantic gestures fail and he feels the limits of his cage.

All that contempt, which hindsight has turned inward, was at this point in time trained exclusively on her. I ranted my version of events to anyone who would listen; I spent hours drafting e-mails I would (thank god) never send. I treated my heartbreak like a puzzle to be solved or a case to be litigated: replaying every moment in excruciating detail, trawling social media for exhibits or for clues. Imaginary shouting matches with grand rhetorical conclusions, repeated like prayers. As if love could be persuaded by an ironclad syllogism; as if shouting could be anything but proof that she was right; as if a heart needed proof. I experienced something which had never happened to me before, and which I’ve refused to let happen since: I fell asleep angry and woke up angrier. My bitterness was all-consuming, hateful, and deeply, deeply wrong.

Music was a means of exorcism in those days, and mine was a full-body anger an acoustic guitar couldn’t channel. I bought a 76-key Yamaha and tried to revive what little technique I’d learned as a kid. I spent hours scrutinizing David Bazan’s live piano rendition of “I Never Wanted You,” fumbling through an arrangement till it was close enough to draw blood. Over countless nights to come, I would follow this routine: Plug in headphones, max out the volume, and bear down on my misery while singing in a whispery-wail—silent to any neighbor, full blast in my mind.

You know we never connected
You only thought we did
But baby I was faking the whole time

Song #15: Secret of the Easy Yoke

Artist: Pedro The Lion
Date: April 2, 2020
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When I wrote about Yo La Tengo, I mentioned that some bands seem to weave in and out of my life. With David Bazan, there’s no weaving necessary. Line up the arc of his music against the arc of my life and, give or take a few years’ offset, it’s a nearly perfect match. In Junior High it was all about Pedro The Lion, the Christian indie darlings who sang earnestly about doubt without losing their sense of hope (Whole, Hard To Find A Friend, The Only Reason I Feel Secure). In High School they’d morphed into an edgier, concept-driven group, musing about life’s darker aspects and the hypocrisy of the church (Winners Never Quit, Control, Achilles Heel, Headphones). College began with Bazan dismantling the band; I and his solo EP were now decidedly more ambiguous, filled with a complicated mournfulness that was better felt than explained. At the tail end of undergrad came Curse Your Branches, Bazan’s searing rejection of the faith of his youth—a fiery “breakup with God” that I told myself at the time was a cautionary tale rather than precisely where I was headed. Denial is a drug, but it doesn’t last for long. My wrestling with the theological soon gave way to the political, followed by a time of contemplation, punctuated by sadness, culminating in an acceptance that made all that wrestling feel absurd. Strange Negotiations, Blanco, Care, his final re-emergence as Pedro The Lion. There’s a reason I’ve followed him through two decades of monikers, from packed concert venues to intimate living room shows. It runs too deep to be objective: We became finite together.

Back in Junior High, I had no sense of what the future held. I only knew that there was a gnawing gap between the person I aspired to be and the person I knew deep down. Outside: Bible studies, mission trips, fierce arguments about Calvinism; a hardcore Church Kid in every respect. Inside: struggles of passion, thoughts I “knew” to be sins, and the occasional flare-up of one terrifying thought. That nothing was certain. That the scaffolding around which I’d constructed my eternity might not bear all this weight. That I might lose everything. Don’t misunderstand me. I fully believed, and have mortifying receipts all over the Internet Archive to prove it. I just couldn’t reconcile my heart with what I thought my mind knew. Couldn’t explain why this thing of which I was so certain felt so…cheesy?…spoken aloud.

I used to bawl my eyes out to this particular tune. “Secret of the Easy Yoke.” At the time, what overwhelmed me was that unthinkable confession, the thing we felt but dare not say:

I still have never seen You
And some days
I don’t love You at all

Today I smile at the release of it all, our prophetic letting go:

Peace be still

Song #16: Jesus Walk With Me

Artist: Club 8
Date: April 3, 2020
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In spring of 2017, I found myself in Wuhan on a last minute work trip. Or I should say I found myself in the Hubei Province: as with many major Chinese corporations, the HQ I was stationed at was pretty far removed from any metropolitan center. You get the distinct sense, when visiting these places, that a branch of a large company creates a city unto itself, an isolated cluster of hotels and residential buildings that exist solely to prop up visitors and staff. This sort of phenomenon can be found just about anywhere (as any visit to the Rust Belt can attest). But the sheer scale of infrastructure in China, paired with my total lack of Mandarin, served to heighten my sense of isolation.

The first few days were an emergency, hence the frantic redeye out. But once a plan was settled and teams were set in motion, there wasn’t much left for me to do but wait—for their devs, for mine, for any new fire that might crop up. I couldn’t really leave, but neither could I help; that awkward, urgent impotence shared by managers around the world. Twiddling my thumbs in the client’s office felt intrusive, so I started passing days in the hotel room alone.

Like many business hotels in East or South Central Asia, the one I’d holed myself up in was almost impossibly nice. Immaculate suites, labyrinthian buffets, a Bellagio-esque foyer (fountain very much included). It was in a recently developed area, and off-season to boot, which cast the entire experience in a Truman Show light: The place was comically enormous, and I had it almost entirely to myself. If I wandered the hallways, I would only see staff; if I went to the gym, one employee would check me in, another would hand me water and a towel, and a third would offer to help me stretch. The feeling extended to the surrounding area. Lovely, maintained garden paths with nobody walking them. Luxury homes in all directions and not a single car.

This memory is of Hubei, but it’s a stand-in for a phenomenon I’ve experienced many, many times. It goes like this: You race to finish the [project, presentation, paper, deal], and for a brief period you tell yourself the whole world hangs in the balance. You say it first as a mental trick, but eventually you start believing it. The goal subsumes everything; it blots out the sun. Then, just as you really feel you’re hitting your stride, it’s done. You’re transported back to a mundane everyday-ness you’d spent manic weeks forgetting. It’s a funny sort of relief, that whiplash, and it carries with it the tiniest ache. A hint that it was always mundane, your racing included. That the cycle never ends and it’s likely for the best.

I remember those days fondly, when everything suddenly slammed against nothing. I would sleep in till noon, zone out to Netflix, and pace the gardens of my bespoke sanctuary while listening to this song.

Fool me into believing
I don’t care if you’re deceiving me

Song #17: Denton, TX

Artist: Damien Jurado
Date: April 4, 2020
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There’s something I associate with my early 20’s, which to this day I don’t quite know how to explain. It’s the unique blend of emotions I’d feel when driving at night with a girl sleeping beside me. Put in words it sounds chauvinistic or obliquely romantic, and in truth that may have played a part—some bone-deep urge to feel protective or needed after years of being taught that my role was to lead. Have at it, Freud. But significant others, good friends, acquaintances—it really didn’t matter, and I never interrogated it. All I know is that it made me feel special every single time, like some small measure of vulnerability was being entrusted to me. There’s no other way to say it, it was tenderness that I felt. Platonic (to my knowledge!) but tender just the same. Maybe with male friends I felt I didn’t have permission to recognize it as intimacy, to call those gestures acts of love: their easy breathing, slumped against the passenger-side door; my quiet sips of coffee, eyes glued to the road.

There’s a reason so many movies take place on road trips. Long drives bind us together, even if only briefly. They evolve like tiny, self-contained relationships: from clumsy silence to small talk to genuine conversation to a second, deeper silence that comes from knowing it’s allowed. From “What do I say?” to “Why say anything?”; similar in outcome, worlds apart in meaning. You don’t always get there, in the real or highway variant. But if you do, it’s more memorable than volumes of intended heart-to-hearts.

Some drivers use loud music to keep them awake. I preferred music that fit the occasion. If it was a long, overnight drive (as it so often was), the playlist had to sound like a darkened interstate feels: a soothing sort of melancholy, wistful, open-ended. Damien Jurado fit like a glove. When conversation petered out and only one of us remained, I would throw this album on, set the volume even lower, and take solace in everything I knew or imagined the silence to imply.

She walked in with sadness in her eyes
I could tell she’d been sleeping with the stars
Well hello, I am Dawn

Song #18: The Luckiest

Artist: Ben Folds
Date: April 5, 2020
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One exchange from Magnolia has always stuck with me. It occurs near the end of the film, when Donnie (William H. Macy) finally unburdens himself to Jim (John C. Reilly). The child-prodigy-turned-emotionally-stunted-adult has just taken a nasty fall, a botched step in a scheme meant to make him incrementally more attractive. Bloodied and humiliated, he exclaims to the officer: “I really do have love to give! I just don’t know where to put it.”

When I reflect on my adolescence, that’s exactly what I see: A shy, awkward whiz kid struggling to find footing, bursting at the seams with too much hypothetical love. In Junior High I had no clue what it was I was searching for—I’d never so much as held a girl’s hand. But I felt, at my core, that I was missing something vital. Everything I did, from music theater to church group to hours spent online, was suddenly a vehicle for longing. I was no longer the Tin Man learning his lines, I was the guy who might make Dorothy notice him. If I stood up during worship, I did so in an attempt to appear “deep” to onlookers. Late night chats on AIM, which had opened me to countless co-ed friendships, suddenly involved a scoreboard. How many laughs had I gotten in group chat? Was there any inside joke from which I risked being excluded? Had she signed off with a heart emoji or simply said “goodbye”—or better, had she deployed one of the Holy Trinity of acronyms, sought by “Best Friend”s far and wide? ILY (I love you). LYM (Love ya much). LYLAB (Love you like a brother). Usually it was the last one, and it would take years of unreciprocated crushes to teach me to take the “LAB” at face value. Back then, I was blinded by the letter at the start.

It’s tempting to draw a straight line from this love-hungry adolescent to Song 14’s spiteful ex. Hope as a sort of contrapositive resentment: if I put in more of myself she might love me –> by not loving me she therefore negates who I am.

Those early habits may have curdled somewhere, but today I’m choosing to cut the kid some slack. I don’t think this bowl-cutted, pre-teen Casanova was really after romantic love at all. He put his longing in that box because it’s the only kind he knew; it’s what every song was selling, what his newly coupled friends were giving constant, rave reviews. I watch him from a distance, now, this boy straining every muscle to connect. The beat his heart skips after a scripted hug from Dorothy; the flutter of excitement when someone types the letter “L”; the naive optimism he carries as he pedals all across town, racing towards this FroYo trip or that mall get-together, things he has no desire to join but is somehow terrified to miss. The way he does every little thing for an imagined audience: alone at his mom’s piano repeating the same arpeggios in D, crooning about his not-yet luck to some faceless, future You. What he’s aching for in that moment has nothing to do with romance. It’s to be validated, understood, seen.

And in a white sea of eyes
I see one pair that I recognize

Song #19: I Won’t Be Found

Artist: The Tallest Man On Earth
Date: April 6, 2020
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I had a different post lined up for this morning. Then I woke up to an “11 Years Ago Today” memory on Facebook, and decided I had to switch gears. It’s a video of me at 19 years old, playing an acoustic guitar and singing. Somehow I’d found the strength of will to post it, unedited, to a social network that included some 300 friends, exes, crushes, classmates, teachers, pastors, my mother, my grandparents—even my roommates, who at the moment of recording were certainly away at class, and near whom I would never have been caught dead singing face to face.

I watch that video now, from this world before Likes and encouraging reactions, from back when every post began with an adjective to follow an implicit “Stephen Miller is…,” and I try to remember: What prompted me to do this? I didn’t like performing. This was during that stretch of time when I refused to take any course with a participation grade for fear of speaking up. It surely wasn’t meant to impress anyone. Honestly, I think I did it simply for the love of the song, a joy of discovery I’m not sure I still possess.

On April 5, 2009, I was driving with my roommates around midnight, when one of them put on an artist I’d never heard before. It was Swedish singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson, who goes by the stage name The Tallest Man On Earth. It was love at first listen. I adored his voice, laden with gravelly yelps like some tortured, Appalachian Dylan. I admired his guitar-work, a breakneck fingerpick that did the work of three instruments at once: gliding melodies at the fingers, pulsing bass at the thumb, audible creaks and scratches that formed a sort of accidental percussion. And the lyrics—they had this feral, overgrown quality to them. Americana as a sort of gnarled found art, broken and reassembled by someone an ocean away.

That next day, I returned from class and got to work. No complete tab yet existed of this song, but someone had at least worked out the tuning and a few essential fingerings: a crucial step, given his unorthodox playing style. I remember listening to the song’s first few bars over and over and over, playing at a snail’s pace till muscle memory eventually started to kick in. It’s the sort of twisty rhythm which sounds effortless sped up but feels impossible in slow motion; a precarious machine always on the verge of toppling over. I never came close to mastering it: it’d be more accurate to say I sprinted behind it. Wound it up, unleashed it, and hoped my singing voice could keep pace.

On April 6, 2009, I posted the video. It’s a one-and-done performance, shot from the neck down by a point-and-shoot Canon propped on a pile of textbooks, of “I Won’t Be Found by The Tallest Man In the World [sic].” In a sense, it’s as embarrassing to watch now as it must’ve felt moments after sharing: the twangy, scraping bass string of my beat-up Baby Martin, my quivering voice lagging as I fumble for the words. But it also makes me feel so good, to be reminded of the me that made it: the focus, the energy, the insistence on making my mark.

Deep in the dust forgotten, gathered
I grow a diamond in my chest

Song #20: The War Criminal Rises and Speaks

Artist: Okkervil River
Date: April 7, 2020
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Last Spring, Joanna and I found ourselves on the road in South Carolina, en route to a family wedding. The plan had been to take a redeye to Charleston, spend a day exploring her old stomping grounds, and drive a rental out to Myrtle Beach in the morning to arrive hours before the rehearsal dinner. Since there’s no way to make a day’s worth of rerouted flights sound interesting, you can simply take my word that things did not go as planned.

We were racing down the highway somewhere between Charleston and Myrtle Beach, having driven far more miles (and slept far fewer hours) than we’d originally intended. I was at the wheel with coffee; Joanna was in the passenger seat, drifting in and out. The Lowcountry, she’s told me, is prone to sudden, heavy storms. If my bare foot on the pedal (soaked shoes drying in the back) wasn’t proof positive, the fresh torrential downpours that came with each new mile marker served to hammer the geography lesson home.

It was the one of those highways that cut through the center of small towns, provoking a meditative cycle of fast and slow, freeway and stoplight. The sort that gives you the tiniest glimpse of a hundred scattered places, decelerating for a moment to parse out stray details, then hurtling to the next one to remind you of the scale. Living in a major city with an entire life in walking distance, it’s easy to forget just how spread out the US is.

On drives like this, I’m reminded that every town is a hometown, every street sign a neighborhood, every highway-side Waffle House someone’s vital social hub. I remember Escondido, and the small strip of freeway it grazes in contrast to the mental space it holds. How massive the distance from two consecutive exits had once felt; all the emotional mile-markers scattered on the side streets in between.

Okkervil River was coming to the Bay in about a month. Given the hallowed status they once held as my Favorite Band™ (in that five year stretch of time when such labels truly mattered), I had taken it upon myself to organize a large group of friends to go. I’d even made a playlist to convert those friends, filled with songs that used to mean so much to me which I hadn’t thought about in years. I floated in those memories as we barreled through the flood, whizzing past the grey outlines of other peoples’ lives.

The heart wants to feel, the heart wants to hold
The heart takes “past Subway, past Shop and Stop, past Beal’s”
And calls it “Coming home”

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As Chris Matthews and Mike Godwin have both aptly demonstrated, Americans are obsessed with World War 2. It’s as evident in our political analogies as in our prestige films: For every acclaimed World War 1 drama you give me, I’ll name at least a dozen about its successor. This despite the case many historians would argue, that the former was both more profound in its impact and more layered in detail; that those shots fired in Sarajevo began a wave of toppling dominos which would ripple not only to late 1930’s Germany, but to nearly every major conflict of the last century, as ad hoc allegiances frayed and arbitrarily drawn borders inevitably cracked. An opening salvo which gives way to chaos, whose hasty resolution foreshadows dozens of future stories from all across the globe! What could be more cinematic than that?

I think we gravitate towards World War 2 because it’s easier to fit into a great American myth, the Unconstrained Power of the Individual. The lone, maniacal Villain whose wickedness arrives fully formed, capable of bending brainwashed armies towards his singular will. The Heroes who will thwart him by any means necessary, whose flaws only clarify the innate goodness within. We prefer these stories because they’re easy to root for and easy to resolve. Take down Voldemort, cut off the monster’s head, and watch the world restore itself. But that historian’s version about the system of dominos…who do you root for there? How do you fix that?

This may seem an odd way to start talking about The Assistant, Kitty Green’s claustrophobic drama about sexual harassment. But I think media around the MeToo movement often falls prey to a similar myth, choosing to fixate on individual monsters. And there are, to be sure, monsters worth fighting! One took his life in a bunker in 1945; another is presently en route to Rikers Island, convicted on (too few) charges of rape and sexual assault in a conclusion to a saga that began two and a half years prior when heroic women fired a shot heard around the world. That is a profound cause for celebration. We do ourselves a disservice, though, if we let it be the primary narrative; if, in the process of foregrounding the monsters, we obscure the systems that enabled them, kept them in power, will continue to fester long after they’re gone. The truth is that the dominos are still falling, and there’s nothing supernatural about what makes them tip. They’re driven by people. Permitted by us.

What I admire most about Kitty Green’s film is the ingenious way it foregrounds the background. Jane (Julia Garner) is an entry-level assistant at a prestigious film production company, led by an abrasive, egomaniacal boss. The real-life inspiration is, of course, abundantly clear. But rather than throw John Lithgow in a fat suit and shine a spotlight on the monster, Green only lets us experience him indirectly. We never see his face. We never learn his or his company’s name. Even in those rare moments that we hear him, heaping torrents of abuse at Jane on the phone or growling baritone advances in his neighboring office, it’s extremely muffled. Barely audible. None of this is an accident. Teasing apart the dim power dynamics at play means turning up the gain on different frequencies. Means tuning out the roaring beast so we can hear the dominos fall.

The Assistant is primarily about power. About how an incentive structure that rewards extreme devotion can combine with an opaque, distributed decision-making process to enable a terrifying cult of personality. It doesn’t ask “How could one man do something so vile?” It asks “How could this have been tolerated for so long?” As we follow a single day in Jane’s working life, we are given small windows into her boss’s behavior. But the moments that stick with me most are only obliquely about him. It’s Jane drafting a servile apology e-mail while two male coworkers loom just behind her, dictating every word. Jane cleaning up after a breakfast meeting and granting herself just one bite of a leftover muffin; how even this tiny act of self love is made to feel like stealing; the look the execs who shuffle in give her (lodged somewhere between apathy and pity) which only reinforces her guilt. The hellish meeting with HR that acts as the centerpiece of the film, where Jane is made to feel histrionic for daring to state the obvious; the way Matthew Mcfadyen’s dead-eyed representative uses silence as a cudgel; the emotional journey we witness in Garner’s eyes as hope yields to desperation yields to shame and retreat. Power may corrupt, but it doesn’t start there. First it numbs you. Hollows you. Asks for one tiny favor. We don’t need to wait for a damning Ronan Farrow exposé to see how this will be one day be abused or exploited. Listen closely and you’ll hear it already: the perpetual hum of daily exploitation, the abuse in its very design.

This is not an easy movie to sit through, and that is absolutely the point: to communicate complex feelings by immersing us in them. And in that fearless commitment to truth, that insistence on forwarding discomfort to the audience, it succeeds at a task its contemporaries either only scratch the surface of (The Morning Show) or avoid altogether (Bombshell). The direction is marvelously understated, the production design (dim, disorienting, almost Gilliam-esque) is subtly haunting, and Julia Garner gives what is presently my favorite performance of the year. Chris and I discuss it in Episode 589 of The Spoiler Warning Podcast.

Blame this on a post-Dixie-Chicks-and-Freedom Fries definition of American elitism, or on years of chuckling at Seinfeld’s “Rochelle, Rochelle”: Whenever I try to write about Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma’s gorgeous queer romance set in 18th century France, I feel like a snob. A sneering, head-up-his-ass “cinephile”. Like someone who hates blockbusters and has strong opinions about tannins. So rather than fight it, I might as well double down and open this review with a quote from Keats:

“Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”

I’ve been thinking about that famous AP English selection for a few days now in relation to Sciamma’s film. Like Portrait, Keats’ ode is a work of art named after a different work of art, a static figure that evokes something about the ephemeral nature of beauty and truth, and how the two intertwine. An idyllic present jut up against a world that won’t allow it to persist. But where Keats is concerned with the past subjunctive—with the longing for, or hope of some fleeting eventuality—Sciamma resides in the future perfect. In the preemptive nostalgia for a thing that has not yet happened but is certain to vanish; in the memory that will remain after the fleeting has fled.

A slow-turning cheek, the arch of a neck line, the way anxious hands fidget and clench. Synecdochical beauty. Héloïse is the cloistered daughter of a French noblewomen; Marianne is a portrait artist, hired to render her image for a yet-unseen suitor. Because Héloïse refuses to pose for a painting, Marianne is forced to commit her to memory—to accompany her on long walks, pry open her shell, mine for her essential qualities. And so we watch her study her subject and, in turn, we watch her subject realize she’s being studied. Through their unspoken rally of furtive glances, we know they’ll eventually fall in love. But theirs isn’t the usual foreplay-to-climax formula of the tawdry romance, of an Act 1 tension that will release in Act 2. It’s melancholy, subdued, almost haunted by clarity. As if to fully see another would virtually necessitate love, a conclusion so foregone it already has one foot out the door.

There’s a conversation that happens in the middle of this film, involving the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The Greek poet had been given one simple instruction as he led his lover out of Hades: don’t look back at her or she will disappear. Chekov’s Pillar of Salt invariably applies. He does look back, she does disappear. What our leads are debating is…why? Why would Orpheus turn around, knowing full well the consequence? Are we really meant to believe that this “love” is so naive, so profoundly impatient, that it would literally destroy its subject for want of a glance? No, Marianne suggests, the “lover’s choice” would be to preserve her in reality, to resist that impulse and keep moving forward. By turning around, Orpheus makes instead the “poet’s choice”; he chooses the memory of a perfect ending over an uncertain future. Héloïse takes this a step further: maybe he didn’t choose her fate at all. Maybe Eurydice demanded it. “Turn around.”

It functions as a sort of thesis, of course: Marianne finding beauty in artistic preservation, Héloïse finding agency in controlling her image, in chosen immolation over unchosen contentment. The helpless observer and the willingly observed, both feeling the destructive pull of love. But I also think it describes something about the movie itself, about the way Sciamma has precisely engineered her story.

Because in the 9 month gap between its Cannes premiere and its wider release, here’s what I remembered about Portrait: it was extraordinarily, almost hedonistically romantic. Too intense for this world. Call Me By Your Name, but even more lush. Blue is the Warmest Color without the objectifying gaze. Passionate, stirring, unabashedly sexy. A potent tale of love as a form of escape, of two women momentarily embracing their wants. A church library bodice ripper for the arthouse cinema crowd. A young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Misk. (Ok, that last one was Seinfeld.)

Rewatching Portrait of a Lady on Fire this week, what struck me most was how little of the above was explicitly on screen; how unconcerned Sciamma is with any overt sensuality. For some 70% of its runtime, there isn’t so much as a touch or a kiss! So why the disconnect? I think it’s because what Sciamma is really doing, is fashioning us a sort of preemptive memory. She’s teeing us up for the feeling of after-love, for the massive emotional space Héloïse will trace in Marianne’s rearview. How those fragmentary sketches will eventually start to snowball, long after their week is over and their lives have disconnected. How the fragments she’s given us will snowball, too, long after the curtain has closed and the festival is over and, for months, all there is left to go on is the distillation of memory, is the essence of the thing. Every detail, every “truth” lesser than beauty fades, and what’s left is only what it ultimately means — more intimate than Guadagnino, more potent than Kechiche. Love, in a Platonic sense. Or, at least, the heat love leaves behind.

At the time of its premiere, this was my favorite of the festival (to be eclipsed only by Parasite a few days later). And I only love it more on second viewing. Seek out this one in theatres if you can, and if it feels chilly at first, just give it room to breathe. Get out in front of it, keep your distance. In time, you might hear her calling you: “Turn around.”

Christopher and I unpack it on Episode 588 of The Spoiler Warning Podcast

With the Oscars happening this evening, I thought it’d be fun to put some predictions and wishlists on the record. After all, what could be more evergreen than content that is guaranteed to go stale roughly an hour after it’s posted? I’m confident in my life choices.

As usual, I’m going to have three selections per category: Will Win, Should Win, and Should Have Been Nominated. Will Win is exactly as it sounds; my prediction (tinged only slightly by wishful thinking) of what the actual outcome will be tonight. Should Win represents my ideal outcome for the evening, and is restricted to actual nominees. Should Have Been Nominated is, in essence, a “Snub”: ignoring logistics or shortlists or general feasibility, what ought to have been nominated?

Best Picture

• Nominees: Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Little Women, Marriage Story, 1917, Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood, Parasite
• Will Win: Entirely up for grabs, but I’ll wager 1917 continues its long, single-take march to the finish line.
• Should Win: My heart says Marriage Story, as it was highest on my personal list. But awards ought to recognize achievements beyond making Stephen cry, and no film has achieved more than Parasite.
• Should Have Been Nominated: I am the bizarre outlier who likes every single film nominated this year. But, of course, I preferred many more which weren’t nominated. Every year needs at least one lighter pick, so we can keep Jojo (critics be damned). But lose Ford v Ferrari, 1917, and Joker to make room for Honey Boy, Uncut Gems, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Director

• Nominees: Martin Scorsese, Todd Philips, Sam Mendes, Quentin Tarantino, Bong Joon Ho
• Will Win: Here, I think my dreams will intersect with reality. Bong Joon Ho takes it.
• Should Win: I want to see Tarantino get this as much as the next guy. But the best-directed film to premiere at Cannes that day belonged to Bong Joon Ho.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Lose Philips, Mendes, and (I’ll say it) Scorsese, to make room for Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), Josh & Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems), and Greta Gerwig (Little Women).

Lead Actress

• Nominees: Cynthia Erivo, Scarlett Johansson, Saoirse Ronan, Charlize Theron, Renée Zellweger
• Will Win: All accounts say Renée has it in the bag, despite the fact that no one saw Judy. All accounts said Glenn Close had it in the bag too, and look where that got us. I say the Academy will surprise us and give it to Scarlett Johansson, who will then, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, make an impromptu speech about diversity in casting.
• Should Win: If this surprise happens, the Academy will have been right. Scarlett deserves it from this lineup.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Having not seen Judy, I can’t in good conscience say to lose Renée. Charlize was outright cringey in Bombshell (playing a sort of Megyn Kelly by way of Kermit the Frog by way of Elizabeth Holmes), and while Erivo is always great, her film felt too restrained to do her justice. Saoirse would earn her spot most years, but not one as rich as 2019: Replace them with Lupita Nyong’o (Us), Elisabeth Moss (Her Smell), and Awkwafina (The Farewell) and you have a hell of a fight.

Lead Actor

• Nominees: Antonia Banderas, Leonardo DiCaprio, Adam Driver, Joaquin Phoenix, Jonathan Pryce
• Will Win: Joaquin will win, and give a speech that is either socially poignant or profoundly uncomfortable. Neither we nor he will know which till it happens.
• Should Win: This is one of the better lineups in recent memory, and Banderas was particularly brilliant this year. But I still think Joaquin deserves it; both for the way he singlehandedly carries Joker, and for the lifetime of phenomenal work that precedes it.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Jonathan Pryce is great, but not great enough. Lose him for Adam Sandler (Uncut Gems).

Supporting Actress

• Nominees: Kathy Bates, Laura Dern, Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, Margot Robbie
• Will Win: Laura Dern has it in the bag.
• Should Win: Dern is great, but Florence Pugh did more heavy lifting with a far more complicated character.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Despite being the best thing about an outright bad movie, Margot Robbie shouldn’t be on this list. And while I haven’t seen Richard Jewell, I can’t imagine Kathy Bates’ “upset mother” role is nearly as poignant as some others this year. Sub in Zhao Shuzhen (The Farewell) and Jennifer Lopez (Hustlers).

Supporting Actor

• Nominees: Tom Hanks, Anthony Hopkins, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Brad Pitt.
• Will Win: Brad Pitt will win, and charm the hell out of all of us.
• Should Win: Pitt deserves it.
• Should Have Been Nominated: To me, this is one of the weakest lineups of the bunch. Pitt and Pesci are the only ones who I feel absolutely deserve to be here. Pacino and Hopkins are both doing way too much; replace them with Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse) and Jonathan Majors (The Last Black Man In San Francisco), who do “too much” far, far better. And while Hanks is moving as Fred Rogers, let’s forego sentiment and reward the man who imbued a real-life father figure with actual depth: Shia LaBeouf (Honey Boy). In any just world, he would be a shoo-in for the win.

Screenplay (Adapted)

• Nominees: The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Little Women, The Two Popes
• Will Win: I’ll go with the flow and say Jojo Rabbit wins this one as a consolation prize for not winning the bigger awards.
• Should Win: As an act of adaptation, nothing beats Greta’s work on Little Women.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Joker has its strengths, but the screenplay is not one of them. The Two Popes also is nowhere near as probing as its subject matter should have allowed. Swap those for Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (adapted from a This American Life piece) and Christian Petzold’s Transit (which stretches the very idea of adaptation to the breaking point).

Screenplay (Original)

• Nominees: Knives Out, Marriage Story, 1917, Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood, Parasite
• Will Win: This is where Once Upon A Time In…Hollywood gets the perennial “Sorry, Quentin” consolation prize.
• Should Win: While Knives Out and Parasite tie for cleverness, nothing moved me quite like Marriage Story and its pitch-perfect balance of humor and melancholy. Let Baumbach and Gerwig take this year by storm.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Four out of five of these picks are, in my mind, unmovable. But one is a no-brainer: lose 1917 to make room for Shia LaBeouf’s Honey Boy, which navigates an emotional minefield more deftly than any physical one Mendes dreamt up. Honorable mention to Joanna Hogg for The Souvenir and Lena Waithe for Queen and Slim. Why can’t the Screenplay category be doubled in size?

International Feature Film

• Nominees: Corpus Christi, Honeyland, Les Miserables, Pain and Glory, Parasite
• Will Win: Parasite wins or I eat 10 times my weight in peaches.
• Should Win: While I would love to see Almodovar pull off a win here, I would only love it if Bong won Best Picture. As it stands, I can’t hedge bets: Parasite deserves this, and more.
• Should Have Been Nominated: I can’t kill Corpus Christi without seeing it. Les Miserables was great and socially resonant, but the wrong French film was nominated; give its spot to Portrait of a Lady on Fire. And while I loved Honeyland, I don’t think it transcends the Documentary label (for which it’s also nominated) enough to justify such a Euro-centric list. Sub it for Mati Diop’s gorgeous Atlantics.

Documentary Feature

• Nominees: American Factory, The Cave, The Edge of Democracy, For Sama, Honeyland
• Will Win: By all accounts, For Sama has this in the bag.
• Should Win: I’ve only seen American Factory and Honeyland, so I can’t really judge. But if hype (or the number of crying people I met at Cannes) is any indication, For Sama will have deserved its win.
• Should Have Been Nominated: With so many blindspots, I don’t know what I can reasonably kick out. But Apollo 11 was one of the most breathtaking features, period, I’ve seen all year, and 5B will quietly break your heart.

Animated Feature

• Nominees: How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, I Lost My Body, Klaus, Missing Link, Toy Story 4
• Will Win: I’ll go with conventional wisdom and say Klaus takes this home.
• Should Win: Again, I’ve only seen two of these (Dragon and Toy Story). But judging by the premise and critical acclaim, I Lost My Body sounds like the most inventive of the bunch.
• Should Have Been Nominated: This begins a run of categories about which I’m totally unfit to judge.

Animated Short

• Nominees: Daughter, Hair Love, Kitbull, Memorable, Sister
• Will Win: The Academy loves animals, and it loves sentimentality; I think Kitbull has this in the bag.
• Should Win: Sister and Hair Love were both powerful in their own ways, and Memorable was the sort of brilliant concept only an animated short could pull off. But Daughter transcends all of that. It taps into something visceral, evocative, and haunting.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Not fit to judge.

Live Action Short

• Nominees: Brotherhood, Nefta Football Club, The Neighbors’ Window, Saria, A Sister.
• Will Win: If the Academy likes its animated shorts on the sappy side, it seems to like its live action shorts dark and Very Obviously About Something Real. For telling a heartbreaking true story, I think Saria wins this one.
• Should Win: Heaviness is overrated; my two favorites were generally lighter. The Neighbors’ Window nearly won me over with its music montage, but I found its “twists” just a hair too obvious. Nefta Football Club is my pick, and I won’t tell you why.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Not fit to judge.

Documentary Short

• Nominees: In The Absence, Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl), Life Overtakes Me, St. Louis Superman, Walk Run Cha-Cha
• Will Win: Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to catch any of these. I’ll go with the flow and say Learning To Skate In A War Zone.
• Should Win: Not fit to judge
• Should Have Been Nominated: Not fit to judge

Cinematography

• Nominees: The Irishman, Joker, The Lighthouse, 1917, Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood
• Will Win: Deakins will win the only award 1917 unequivocally deserves.
• Should Win: While I admire The Lighthouse a great deal, you heard me say “unequivocally”, right? 1917 is a stunning feat of cinematography.
• Should Have Been Nominated: I truly don’t know what The Irishman or Joker are doing in this category. Kick them out to make room for two of the most meticulously composed films of the year: The Last Black Man In San Francisco and It Must Be Heaven.

Film Editing

• Nominees: Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Parasite
• Will Win: This is one instance where I have no clue of the conventional wisdom. I’ll say the Academy likes fast cuts, and nothing was faster than Ford v Ferrari.
• Should Win: So much of Parasite’s success is due to its ensemble, and editing is what really lets those pieces work in sync. The thunderstorm alone would earn this win, to say nothing of the stairway, the peach fuzz, the living room, the birthday party…trying not to spoil things, here, but you get the point. What a perfectly orchestrated work.
• Should Have Been Nominated: I’ll admit that my sense of editing isn’t perfect, but I see no reason why Jojo or Joker are on this list. Give it to Little Women and Once Upon A Time In…Hollywood instead, both of which are tightly edited down to the punctuation mark. And while Ford v Ferrari is indeed propulsive, it can’t hold a candle to the nonstop heart attack that is Uncut Gems.

Sound Editing

• Nominees: Ford v Ferrari, Joker, 1917, Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
• Will Win: While I know the Academy loves a good war movie, I still think the dads will rise up to nominate Ford v Ferrari.
• Should Win: This is one of those technical awards I have very few opinions about. But the final stretch of Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood owes so much to its use of sound; to say nothing of the infectious blend of musical and visual style that courses through the film.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Joker builds plenty of dread, but I’m not convinced sound is a part of that; whereas in Her Smell, it’s absolutely vital. And while I like a good lightsaber woosh as much as anybody, Ad Astra does so much more than Star Wars to cut the silence of space.

Sound Mixing

• Nominees: Ad Astra, Ford v Ferrari, Joker, 1917, Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood
• Will Win: Continuing the trend and saying Ford v Ferrari
• Should Win: I proposed Ad Astra for the last sound category without realizing it was nominated here; consistency demands that I vote for it.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Again swapping out Joker for Her Smell, because in truth I don’t know the difference between mixing and editing.

Production Design

• Nominees: The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, 1917, Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood, Parasite
• Will Win: I’ll say this one goes to 1917, for its vast recreation of WWI Germany.
• Should Win: 1917 is indeed impressive, especially given how little its long-take premise allows you to hide of its set. But the house alone makes Parasite my pick.
• Should Have Been Nominated: I’m a fan of Jojo, but for my money, Transit does a much better job of putting us in vaguely-sort-of-WWII. And I’m not convinced The Irishman is that driven by production design. Give me Ad Astra instead.

Makeup and Hairstyling

• Nominees: Bombshell, Joker, Judy, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, 1917
• Will Win: Bombshell will win for most makeup.
• Should Win: Who honestly knows, with this award. I guess Bombshell does what it can with its game of dress-up?
• Should Have Been Nominated: I sound like a broken record, but I really have no idea what Joker is or 1917 are doing in this category. Give me Us and Little Women for the creepy and the period piece aesthetics, respectively.

Costume Design

• Nominees: The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Little Women, Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood
• Will Win: The Academy loves a period piece. I’m giving the edge to Little Women here.
• Should Win: Of these, Little Women seems like the right call.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Lose Joker and The Irishman for Ad Astra and Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Visual Effects

• Nominees: Avengers: Endgame, The Irishman, The Lion King, 1917, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
• Will Win: In the battle for Disney properties, I think The Lion King will (infuriatingly) take this home.
• Should Win: In the battle for Disney properties, I think Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker should win.
• Should Have Been Nominated: Two of these films (The Irishman, The Lion King) were made worse by virtue of their visual effects, in my opinion. Swap them out for Ad Astra and Spider-Man: Far from Home, the latter of which at least steered into its cheesiness.

Original Score

• Nominees: Joker, Little Women, Marriage Story, 1917, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
• Will Win: Hildur has it in the bag for Joker
• Should Win: Joker truly does deserve this particular accolade.
• Should Have Been Nominated: 1917 and Star Wars did little for me on the score front this year. Sub in Alex Somers and Emile Mosseri, who gave us two of the most perfectly delicate scores this year in Honey Boy and The Last Black Man In San Francisco.

Original Song

• Nominees: “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away”, “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again”, “I’m Standing With You”, “Into The Unknown”, “Stand Up”
• Will Win: I’ll give the edge to “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again”, if for no other reason than that the Academy wants to see Elton and Bernie on stage.
• Should Win: “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again”, because I also want to see Elton and Bernie on stage (and all five of these songs are lackluster).
• Should Have Been Nominated: The Randy Newman song sounds like a parody of Randy Newman songs; swap it for “Glasgow (No Place Like Home)” from Wild Rose, which would be 1000x better than any of these nominees even if you didn’t know Mary Steenburgen wrote it. And if you want to feel good, you don’t need to watch schlock like Breakthrough; listen to Jackson Browne and Leslie Mendelson’s heartbreaking “A Human Touch” from 5B. While we’re at it, let’s lose the “Original” adjective so we can make room for Elisabeth Moss’ piano cover of “Heaven” and Adam Driver’s booming rendition of “Being Alive”.

More ramblings: I’ve been doing this a long time! Check out my 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014 lists.

Podcast: you can listen to my flat Top 10 list on The Spoiler Warning.

Introduction

Each year I vow to make my Best Of list simpler than the last, and each year I completely fail. I can’t find any reason for this continuing arms race, beyond good old-fashioned self torture. What started in the podcast-only days as a humble Top 5 became a written Top 10 with a growing number of honorable mentions. When it eventually became impossible to extricate winners from runners-up, I sidestepped the problem with a hybrid list of singletons and pairs. By the next year all singletons were gone, and my list was comprised of 10 thematic pairs. Last year, after escalating yet again to 12 thematic pairs framed around one central conceit, I decided I’d had enough. Writeups that I used to publish in early January were now lingering past Valentine’s day. The dam would have to break in 2020. I would learn to keep things simple.

And in some ways, I’ve held to that simplicity constraint. There will be no grand central theme this year, no lone narrative throughline; though, in truth, that’s less about conviction and more about 2019. Because if there was one recurring theme last year, for me, it was something about the fundamental uselessness of epiphanies: the realization that things that matter rarely adhere to one consistent philosophy. I found it in personal and professional arenas: character traits I’d been proud of started to show their uglier sides, while others I’d seen as shortcomings morphed into incidental strengths. If ever I felt I had something pegged (“X is The Real Problem™”, “If only everyone would be more like Y”), a glaring counterexample was surely right around the corner, waiting to make an ass of me. Was I empathetic or manipulative, friendly or phony, witty or insufferable, loyal or cowardly, determined or short-sighted? Often, I’d find, I was both simultaneously. I could see both perspectives. I could be made better by them.

I felt it, too, in the country writ large: the failure-prone predictions, flaccid hyperboles, inscrutable see-saws between anti- and climax. So many strange bedfellows were made and dissolved this year. That desperate desire to crown anyone a “hero”: a Bush-era FBI Director, a skeevy LA lawyer, even Michael damn Cohen for a sad fifteen minutes. That unpleasant feeling when the story ended in failure; or, more often, ended in some limp middle ground between failure and success. But, then, the equal-or-greater failures of that “moderate” counter-impulse: “he won’t be so bad”, “nothing will come from this”, “he’s a veteran statesman, not a political hack!” Time and time again, those things of which I felt most certain were proven false, including my bias against certainties. There will be an impeachment. There will be no impeachment. There will be one, but it will be detrimental to our discourse; there will be none, and that will be detrimental to our discourse. So many opinions, persuasively argued by people I admired, and depending on the time of day I could internalize any. Was it a year of hope, of gears slowly whirring after endless gridlock? Or was it a year of growing callousness, of a spiritual divide so calcified it renders the very notion of “hope” quaint?

I was angry, often, in 2019—glued to a screen when I should have been sleeping, seething with hypothetical arguments and blistering rebuttals. I was also extraordinarily happy in 2019, both in the Instgrammable sense and the more important, lived-in variety. I learned, somehow, to be both more and less certain of things. Or maybe it was to never pit one type of certainty against another, deeper type; to find more stable footing amid the not-knowing. I know that’s vague, and maybe unintelligible. It wasn’t a year that lent itself to clarity, either.

About the year in film, however, I’m totally clear: 2019 was a goldmine. I saw more contemporary releases than usual over the calendar year (121 by my present tally), and loved a high percentage.¹ Judging by critical year-end roundups, I’m not alone in feeling that this was an unusually strong roster. Seasoned auteurs presented late-career-high works to a mainstream audience, and first-time directors took festivals by storm. There were formalist dramas and rip-roaring genre flicks, brutal documentaries and biting comedies, abrasive character studies and heart-melting melodramas and a whole lot of something wistfully in-between. The Palme d’Or winner was somehow also a financial success, Netflix releases were routinely wonderful (and widely seen!), and even the superhero movies proved critically…well, if not beloved, at least worthy of conversation. There was an abundance of period pieces—nearly half of my list, if you’re lenient about definitions—but somehow, at the same time, I’m not sure I’ve seen a year so rooted in hyper-modern sentiment: economic anxieties, social malaise, that feeling of collective unclenching. Whatever your itch, there was at least one masterpiece to scratch it.

So while this list is simpler than last year’s, it’s also quite a bit longer: at the time of my writing this intro it’s comprised of 32 films, grouped into 10 Key Ideas I found personally moving. Many of these ideas, fittingly, are about the interconnectedness of people and societies; also fitting is the degree to which they seem to rebut each other. And as usual, the grouped ranking process proved infuriatingly fuzzy. The more I liked an entry the more it elevated its group (with my favorite entry being named first in the group). That said, a group full of solid A’s would often beat one with a lone A+. Sometimes the very act of synthesis elevated my view of a group’s composite members, which I’d argue is the point of this silly exercise. If you desperately need a flat ranking you can listen to the podcast for a direct Top 10 (documentaries excluded). But really, the order hardly matters: all movies listed here are very very good, and the vast majority I’d deem “excellent.” It was a hell of a year.²

With that, here are my 10 Key Ideas of 2019:

10: Society is people and people are messy: American Factory, Honeyland, Monos ↯
9: …yet fanaticism feeds on isolation: Jojo Rabbit, Young Ahmed, Joker ↯
8: We can honor a legacy without glamorizing its shortcomings: Pain and Glory, Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, The Irishman ↯
7: …but there’s something intoxicating about self-destruction: Uncut Gems, Her Smell, The Souvenir ↯
6: To mourn death is to embrace some fundamental connectedness: Paddleton, Blackbird, The Farewell, Midsommar ↯
5: That connection is unimaginably vital: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Little Women, Queen & Slim, 5B ↯
4: …but a broken connection disorients: Marriage Story, Transit, The Lighthouse ↯
3: Capitalism numbs the soul: Parasite, Us, Sorry We Missed You ↯
2: Longing is its own type of beauty: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Apollo 11, It Must Be Heaven ↯
1: There is transformative power in confronting the past: Honey Boy, Ad Astra, Leaving Neverland ↯

10. Society is people and people are messy: American Factory, Honeyland, Monos

Like most worthwhile ideas, this first one sounds exceedingly obvious: beyond all layers of theory or numb abstraction, when we talk about socioeconomic issues what we’re really talking about is the behavior of people—individuals with irrational feelings, desires, egos. So it stands to reason that small groups of people, brought in close proximity, might embody the same polarizing characteristics we see in our politics.

In American Factory, documentary filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert spend three years following the evolution of the newly-opened Fuyao Glass America, an Ohio-based automotive manufacturing plant owned by a Chinese mega-corporation. What follows is a bit like watching the past few decades unfold in a Petri dish: shared optimism buckling under capitalistic pressure to frantic whip-cracking and discontentment; the earnest desire to unionize becoming muddied by a protect-our-own brand of xenophobia; the daily tug-of-war between globalist ideals and local realities. There’s a certain magic to this work, and it lies in the camera’s near-omnipresent access. Whether in a backyard BBQ or a union-busting board room, it coaxes its subjects into saying the quiet bits out loud.

Access is also a superpower of Honeyland, though it may not look it at the start. Following a year in the life of beekeeper Hatidze Muratova, the documentary—by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov—appears, at first blush, to be a slice-of-life character study, set in a quiet Macedonian village. Collecting honey by day and tending to her ailing mother by night, Hatidze has settled into a comfortable (if admittedly lonely) groove. When a raucous family moves in next door, though, that routine is threatened. As try their own hand at beekeeping, and tensions start to mount, we’re confronted with more universal concerns: can we find a way to live harmoniously with each other and with nature? And if not, is there still value in making the attempt? With its laser-sharp focus and stunning color palette, it’s a journey that’s better felt than described.

Speaking of color palettes, can any work of fiction this year top the oranges and blues of Alejandro Landes’ Monos? A sort of modern retelling of Lord of the Flies, the film centers around a small militia in the mountains of Colombia, where eight teenagers, armed to the teeth, are tasked with guarding a single hostage (presumably foreign, presumably rich). Tensions develop in isolation, and factions begin to form: the ruthless vs the empathetic, the loyal vs the disloyal. As we watch once-innocent bystanders fall under the spell of an erratic demagogue, signing on to horrific acts in the name of “unity” and “strength”, it’s temping to wonder how much of this credulity towards violence is hard-wired…and whether it’s even possible to reverse.³

9. …yet fanaticism feeds on isolation: Jojo Rabbit, Young Ahmed, Joker

While a small group of people can reflect society at large, they don’t always reflect it accurately. Particularly when they’re buffered from the outside world. Three films this year used very different tacts to show the way isolation begets a sort of funhouse mirror, creating a dangerously warped image of reality. Empathetically depicting that distortion field without excusing those who act on it is an inherently risky endeavor. So it shouldn’t be surprising that each of these was met with polarized reactions—often outright controversy—on initial release.

Jojo Rabbit is, by far, the broadest of the bunch, which also makes it the easiest target for ridicule. Taika Waititi’s self-proclaimed “anti-hate satire” about a young boy, his imaginary Hitler, and the Jewish girl that haunts his attic, has been alternately called toothless and tasteless, too light to be damning and too heavy to be sweet. Personally, I found it an absolute joy, and precisely the sort of satire 2019 demanded; a funhouse mirror held up to a funhouse mirror, it acts as a sort of reductio ad absurdum against the foundations of hate—not the genuine motives of hateful people, that is, but the self-aggrandizing ideologies they invent to cloak their bile in “facts”. In an era where anyone can opt into their own bespoke echo chamber, Waititi reminds us that one-sided conversations are for overgrown children. Like imaginary heroes and monsters in the closet, the strongest antidote might just be sunlight.

While Young Ahmed carries a similar message, its execution is arguably the polar opposite, replacing broad satire with a near-claustrophobic realism. In other words, it’s everything the Dardenne brothers (L’enfant; Two Days, One Night; The Kid with a Bike) do best. The film follows Ahmed, a Belgian teen of Arabic descent who, despite the interventions of his loving Muslim family, finds himself becoming increasingly radicalized. As we watch Ahmed grapple with his contradictory impulses—the violent “logical conclusions” his mentor has convinced him he believes, the stern inner voice that resists them nonetheless—we’re forced to walk a tightrope between horror and hope. It’s an exhilarating crash course in empathy.

Joker opts to severs that tightrope with a pair of bloody scissors. Critics may debate the degree to which the film sympathizes with Phoenix’s troubled antihero, and they’re well within their rights to do so. For my money, though, there is no ambiguity. From the unsettling opening to the hellish conclusion, I felt nothing but dread watching Phillips’ take on the iconic clown prince. Behind its early Scorsese trappings lies an eerily modern nightmare: a deluded individual grows increasingly unhinged, and the world not only ignores his red flags, it embraces them as some skewed statement of post-post-post-ironic rebellion. It’s Pepe memes taken to their terrifying extreme, a cynical detachment so total it mistakes the random actions of a madman for political bravery. When Arthur Fleck has all but vanished and the Joker greets his rabid fans, it isn’t him I’m horrified of. It’s the world that we share.

8. We can honor a legacy without glamorizing its shortcomings: Pain and Glory, Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, The Irishman

If art is in constant conversation with society, and society is influenced by the art it consumes, a prolific artist might live long enough to be on both sides of the conversation. In 2019, we saw that phenomenon play out onscreen. Three iconic (and heavily-imitated) directors not only released their best films in years, they grappled with their own creative legacies in the process.

Pain and Glory is, admittedly, the gentlest of the bunch. Imbued with Almodovar’s signature brand of lush romanticism, the film is less grappling with his legacy than it is dancing with it. Still, there’s a weariness that belies its loveliness. Antonio Banderas, playing a thinly-veiled Almodovar, carries it most obviously in the present-tense, as pain leads to heroin addiction leads to total abdication of duty. But it’s hiding in the past as well: in the lovers he’s let go for the sake of art, in the messy realities he’s swept under the rug of fantasy. It’s as if he’s saying, “Here is the world I invented for you, in all of its decadent splendor. And here is why the other world—the truth I’d meant to escape from—is no less sublime.”

To Tarantino the past is the fantasy, and he’s tearing down the set. While Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood is set long before the Weinstein-adopted wunderkind was making movies, it’s hard not to read it as a dark self-reflection. Consider Cliff Booth, the stuntman whose loyalty and wit can’t quite restrain a propensity for violent provocation; or Rick Dalton, the one-time Hollywood hotshot who finds himself in a brave new world that has less and less use for him. Manic and swaggering, impossibly cool and woefully out of touch, suave on the surface but with fury underfoot, they’re dinosaurs who are coming to terms with extinction. They even know, on some level, that it’s the way it should be. Sometimes the old has to die so the new can have a go at it. Still, who can resist one final joyride?

When the cast of The Irishman was first announced, it appeared Scorsese had caved to a similar temptation, and was reuniting the band for one last hurrah. By the end of its 180-minute runtime, though, it’s clear that Marty didn’t set out to make a remix so much as a funeral dirge. A somber takedown of the gangster lifestyle his own films helped (perhaps inadvertently) glamorize, the historical epic is less Goodfellas than it is late-season Sopranos: a brooding, often gleefully uncool character study that seems tailor-made to frustrate its more bloodthirsty fans. Not Henry Hill waxing nostalgia for the glory days, but Uncle Junior sitting by the window, admiring birds. Where I felt Wolf of Wallstreet indulged too much in the high points, this one feels like a hangover from the opening frame. It’s less about crime than it is about a very American brand of emptiness—about the things you might lose in your quest for success, and the impossibility of later retrieving them.

7. …but there’s something intoxicating about self-destruction: Uncut Gems, Her Smell, The Souvenir

Still, there’s a reason we glamorize bad behavior: it’s riveting. Whether television celebrity or problematic friend, there’s a certain charisma or allure that comes with damaging behavior. In small doses, that allure can be a vehicle for empathy. Give it too much power, though, and it might pull you down with it.

The Safdies know a thing or two about destructive personalities; from Daddy Longlegs on, it’s arguably been their raison d’être. But none of the guerilla duo’s antiheroes have been quite like Sandler’s Howard Ratner, and nothing before Uncut Gems has made imploding this mesmeric. Jeweler by day and gambler by night, Ratner’s life is like a Greatest Hits collection of ill-advised decisions—when he finds himself dug in a hole, he triples, quadruples down. With its pitch-perfect tone and meticulous attention to detail, though, the film never lets me hate Howard even as the rational part of me begs for it. Instead, it gives me permission to inhabit him. To feel the anguish of his losses, the thrill of the chase, and an unceasing anxiety that blots out the sun.

The only film this year that might have been more anxiety-inducing was Her Smell. Like Sandler, Elisabeth Moss imbues her calamitous protagonist with a magnetic ferocity. In fact, her punk icon Becky Something shares a number of Howard’s traits. Undeniably charismatic and infuriatingly unpredictable, she’s an addict willing to sacrifice anything (and anyone) for the barest hint of a fix. In a brief window that gave us no shortage of destructive musician stories (Vox Lux, Teen Spirit, Wild Rose, Rocketman), Alex Ross Perry’s vision stands absolutely peerless. No one else brings us remotely as low, and no one else strikes such an earned catharsis.

As The Souvenir shows us, though, addiction is not always about highs and lows. Eventually it becomes a matter of stasis. Inspired by writer/director Joanna Hogg’s own experiences in film school, it tells the story of a young aspiring filmmaker, Julie, who falls for an enigmatic older man, Anthony. While addiction takes many forms in this film, perhaps the most striking is the relationship itself: it’s toxic and unsettling, and Julie can’t seem to quit it. Even as Anthony grows increasingly cruel. He mocks her intelligence, berates her ideas, leaves her alone for days only to return in silence. His is a chilly sort of gaslighting I’d never seen put to screen, and the film carries a similarly chilly aesthetic. Yet, through Julie/Joanna’s eyes, we understand on some level why she returns to that well. And it renders her eventual liberation all the more cathartic.

6. To mourn death is to embrace some fundamental connectedness: Paddleton, The Farewell, Blackbird, Midsommar

You could make a case that art always hangs around the periphery of death, a subject so universal it’s become a cliché. This year, though, a much more specific idea about mortality was percolating. It has something to with coming to terms with ending one’s life: with rendering it, on some level, a positive choice. And sharing that happysad burden.

Paddleton is the least “cinematic” treatment of death on this list, but I’d posit it’s also the truest. A gentle two-hander between Ray Romano and Mark Duplass, the film (directed by frequent Duplass collaborator Alex Lehmann) follows the Brothers’ usual aesthetic: low-key, heavily improvised, centered around a few emotional turning points in a character’s life. But while their films tend to focus on life’s smallest moments, Paddleton sets its sights on one larger than life. Which is to say, death. When Michael (Duplass) learns he is dying of stomach cancer, he decides to end his life on his terms. He and his best friend Andy (Romano) embark on a roadtrip, to the one pharmacy still offering suicide medication. At times hilariously uncomfortable and heartbreakingly earnest, their journey unfolds more or less exactly as you’d expect. Yet I cried more in the process than at anything else this year.

A close second in the waterworks department is Roger Michell’s Blackbird, whose plot echoes Paddleton in so many ways you’d think they were separated at birth. An aging mother (Susan Sarandon) is dying of ALS, and she’s gathered her adult children for one last celebration. In tone, though, the two couldn’t be more different: if the Duplass dictum is “less is more”, Michell (of Notting Hill fame) says “subtlety be damned, more is always more”. The result—a star-studded ensemble piece with twice as many impassioned monologues as it has characters to give them—could easily have veered into melodrama. Hell, maybe it did. I was too busy getting the dust out of my eyes to notice. Sometimes understatement is overrated; sometimes you need a good cry and a big family hug.

Skim the synopsis of Lulu Wang’s The Farewell and you might think you’re in for another matriarchal hug: a family learns their Nai Nai is dying of cancer, and must travel to China to say goodbye. The difference? Unlike Sarandon, Zhao Shuzhen’s Nai Nai doesn’t know that she’s dying—and the family has no intention of telling her. The result is something almost impossible to pin down to a single genre: too somber for comedy, too uncomfortable for melodrama, too overflowing with love for a formalist exercise. What it is, instead, is a miniature miracle; a film that manages to be both a deeply personal meditation on family and loss, and a glimpse of Chinese culture through a completely novel lens. Always hovering in some space between access and remove, insider and outsider—echoing, in other words, the immigrant experience. That duality extends to its emotional conclusion, as it argues that everything—even loss, even chosen isolation—might be shared and spread translucent.

No film this year visualized that act of sharing quite like Midsommar. After three realistic takes on mortality, Ari Aster’s psychedelic follow-up to Hereditary might seem a strange companion piece. But I’d argue it’s the perfect coda; a jaunt through the inner-contradictions of grief, as seen through a folk horror kaleidoscope. From its dread-infused opening to its crescendo of a conclusion, death is a constant for Florence Pugh’s Dani. What eventually changes is how she experiences it: celebrated in blinding bright, purposeful, surrounded.

5. That connection is unimaginably vital: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Little Women, Queen & Slim, 5B

Human connection can’t slow death. Nor can it fix a broken world, cheery slogans notwithstanding. Love has never been an antidote for pain. At its best, though, it can sometimes be a means of sanctifying pain, of rendering shared hardship into a sort of testimony. Four films this year explore the way love can act as a bulwark of warmth against an uncaring world.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma’s exquisite romance set in 18th century France, might be the purest distillation of that concept. Here, love doesn’t only warm, it burns; a pull so irresistable it verges on hypnotic. An unlikely love story between a soon-to-be-wed young woman and the artist hired to secretly paint her, it has this rich ephemerality that feels trite when put in words⁴. Like Call Me By Your Name, it’s less about the particulars of love than what love does to you, what it catalyzes inside. To Mariann and Héloïse, it’s a means of self-determination, a permission to truly want—in a world where desire is only permitted to flow in the opposite direction.

In Little Women, that “wanting” part of romance takes many forms. Meg wants to settle with a loving man in poverty, despite her grandmother’s insistence that wealth is all that counts. Jo wants to settle with no one, to pursue her dreams in the unthinkable singular. And Amy, perhaps most interestingly, wants almost precisely what the world tells her to want; and she struggles to keep the banality of the latter from diluting the power of the former. Beth…well, if you’ve read the books, you already know her story. For all of them, though, the romantic connection comes second to a stronger, familial bind. What strikes me about Greta Gerwig’s lovely adaptation is its infectious vibrancy; how effortlessly it seems to mine every ounce of life for joy. There’s a warmth to the March family that elevates everything they touch, that stands as a rebuke to the winter outside.

Queen & Slim also finds warmth in defiance, but its subject matter is painfully, tragically current. A self-described subversion of the Bonnie & Clyde myth, Melina Matsoukas’s film follows two black lovers (Queen and Slim) who, after shooting a police officer in an act of self defense, find themselves on the run from the law. Like just about every variant of the myth they inhabit, our lovers seem to exist on two planes at once: there’s the real couple, desperately fleeing a brutalizing police state, and their media doppelgängers, a swaggering invention of public imagination. Both sets of couples evolve in surprising ways—in one of my favorite scenes in the film, they’re shown in stark juxtaposition. While the public couple challenges us more overtly, the private one tees up difficult questions of its own: is their love a biproduct of their trauma, or an inevitable conclusion that trauma only helped tease out? But at a certain point, the causal arrow ceases to matter. In the present there is pain, and they’ve found a way to carry it.

Even if, like the subjects of 5B, they know it to be fleeting. Dan Krauss and Paul Haggis’ stirring documentary is centered around an AIDS ward in San Francisco General, opened just as the crisis was revealing itself to be an epidemic. The ward was rooted in a core philosophy: to never forget a person’s humanity in the name of “containment.” At a time when public panic had reached a fever pitch, and even the medical community was divided on risk, the caregivers of Ward 5B bravely chose love. Speaking to their patients without buffer of glass, administering medicine without chilly HAZMAT suits, holding the hands of the dying glove-free. It was a powerful statement, and one which had virtually nothing to do curing the disease. Rather, it was about instilling a togetherness that made suffering bearable. Jackson Browne and Leslie Mendelson sum it up best in the criminally overlooked song they penned for the picture: “Sometimes all anybody needs is a human touch.”

4. …but a broken connection disorients: Marriage Story, Transit, The Lighthouse

Companionship is a powerful drug. When it’s working, a relationship can ground us, orient us, like nothing in the world. But when it’s misaligned, that same force can prove extremely destabilizing.

Sometimes love can do both simultaneously. At first glance, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story might seem perversely misnamed: opening in a dour mediator’s office, it appears much less concerned with Charlie and Nicole’s marriage than it is with its grisly undoing. After all, the plot is almost entirely about discord: courtroom battles a la Kramer vs. Kramer, Bergman-esque shouting matches that leave holes in the drywall. It is, in many ways, a truly depressing story; a cautionary tale of losing one’s center and finding every relational instinct flipped on its head. But while there’s sadness in the arc of it, there’s a real, human joy in its specific details—often charming, absurd, even uproariously silly. That joy is what made me fall head over heels for this picture. Never a stranger to caustic romance, Baumbach has now proved himself equally adept at mining acrimony for sweetness. It helps that his leads give two of the best performances of the year. Even at their worst, we see glimmers of the same love that held them together.

In Transit, those glimmers are murky from the start. A romance of sorts between émigrés-in-waiting, Christian Petzold’s adaptation is as beguiling as it is beautiful. As with the 1944 novel before it, Petzold sets his characters in a port city in France, awaiting permission to flee a Fascist German occupation. Unlike the novel, though, his film isn’t set in the 40’s; it’s set in present day. Or vaguely present, at any rate: like everything else about our protagonist’s world (names, faces, concrete plans), a definable era seems hopelessly out of reach. Like Certified Copy and its fluid sense of identity, Transit never quite offers you sturdy footing. It means to do to the viewer what war does to those who escape it: untether, disorient, displace.

But no meditation on fluid identity could be quite as disorienting as The Lighthouse. Robert Eggers’ psychological horror, set in old-timey New England, is the sort of film that makes you wonder “How the hell did this get greenlit?” And I mean that in the most adoring possible way. A claustrophobic two-hander between an aging lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) and his short-term recruit (Robert Pattinson), the film cycles through every conceivable relationship the two men might have. Whether working in silence, heaping curses over lobster, harboring paranoid delusions, or guzzling kerosene by the jug, they can’t seem to escape each other’s withering stare—a stare framed, always, in picturesque black and white. At its best, companionship can give safe harbor from a storm. At its worst, it can wring a wickie wode.

3. Capitalism numbs the soul: Parasite, Us, Sorry We Missed You

Filmmaking, like macroeconomics, has a certain built-in time delay—with so many variables between concept and execution, it’s hard to trace any neat causal links. So I don’t know when this particular sentiment started; I only know that it hit 2019 like a third act flash flood. It goes like this: unconstrained capitalism is a soul-numbing force. Many, many, many films orbited this idea. Three of them, premiering in a single 2 month period, examined the human toll that soul-numbing takes.

What can be said about Parasite that hasn’t already been said? Bong Joon Ho’s masterwork of structural engineering has it all, deftly juggling its statuses as festival darling, crowdpleasing thriller, and awards season heavy-hitter—all while maintaining its twisty (and seemingly unspoilable) mystique and a gloriously defiant weird streak. And did I mention that one inch barrier? Despite its near universal appeal, this is a genuinely challenging movie, a parable about the cruel forces that pit have against have-not, scapegoat against scapegoat, in a futile race up a ladder to nowhere. It suggests that by building our successes on the ruin of others, we all become a little bit monstrous.

Us may have taken “monstrous” in a more literal direction, but it shares eerie similarities in the telling. When Jordan Peele’s long-awaited sophomore effort was finally released, I’m not sure audiences knew what to make of it. Unlike Get Out, its plot mechanics don’t lend itself to easy, this-is-a-metaphor-for-that social mappings. Instead, it does what horror does best: it visually conveys an emotional truth which words alone couldn’t cover. Not the why of it all, but the simmering what. Above and below. The dancer and her shadow. The Other, banished to a parasitic half-life, dreaming of the day she can step into the light.

Ken Loach’s characters have dreams, too, though there’s no time for lofty abstraction. In Sorry We Missed You, even your dreams have to cut to the chase. To pay the bills. To pencil in intimacy once a week or two. To take a piss without falling behind schedule. To see the kids, just for a few stress-free minutes, before it’s back to the stale daily grind. With his signature brand of bone-deep social realism, Loach follows the lives of a delivery truck driver and his caregiver wife as they struggle to make ends meet. As stress begets sleeplessness begets missed hours begets a cycle, our protagonists eventually hit a breaking point. “I’m trying my best” one eventually cries, but it never seems to be quite enough. It should be, though. It must be. We ought to demand it.

2. Longing is its own type of beauty: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Apollo 11, It Must Be Heaven

In a list with no shortage of tenuous connections, this one is the hardest to pinpoint. I’m struggling to put it in words. It isn’t an idea so much as a sensation; a very particular angle of approach. And it has something to do with longing. How certain spaces, when properly framed, seem to call to you even as they push you away. How they carve some entrancing middle ground between attainable and not, instill in you an irrational, pre-emptive nostalgia. It’s no surprise that these films are among the most visually sumptuous of the year. Every still could be a painting. Every painting makes you want.

“You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.” The Last Black Man In San Francisco, Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails’ meticulously composed love-hate letter to the city I live in, is complicated to write about. On the one hand, I can’t really see it without inserting myself in it: how it gives voice to the wistfulness that blooms on my commute, how it captures some ineffable, uncanny beauty. On the other, my need to insert myself is very much the problem. A rhapsodic mood-piece about gentrification, the black experience in an increasingly white-washed town, and the unique pain of losing the place you call home, the film is achingly specific and decidedly not mine. But there’s something about its specificity that generalizes, envelops everything; the way it dances so deftly between hate and love, exile and connectedness. The way it seems so uninterested in answering its own questions. Like it would rather pause, for a moment, to let us take in the view.

In Apollo 11, what a striking view it is. Our first trip to the moon brought with it no shortage of moral contradictions in its own right. Was it a monument to reckless excess from a nation on the verge of self-destruction, or a glorious sign of unity to a hope-hungry world? Maybe neither, maybe both. The only thing I’m clear on is that it was indescribably, almost painfully beautiful. As a symbol, yes, but also in the literal sense: from the red, fiery thrusters to the chilly dark of space, every moment in Todd Douglas Miller’s found documentary—a triumph of narrative-free editing which deserves an Academy Award in color correction, if not a Nobel Prize—seems flawless, Platonic, pristine.

While some were gazing upwards, a deeper expanse was growing around us. In Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven, terrestrial living is imbued with its own alien wonder: inherently unknowable and impossibly removed. A marvel of wordless situational humor, the Palestinian/Israeli director’s film bears more resemblance to Jacques Tati than anything I’ve seen this century. Flawlessly shot on location in Palestine, Paris, and New York City, it stands as yet another love-hate letter; this time to a world divided. It reminds us that even in our dividedness, we are fundamentally alike. That even inaccessibility might be a thing that we share.

1. There is transformative power in confronting the past: Honey Boy, Ad Astra, Leaving Neverland

In last year’s list, I saw cinema as a response to trauma—whether an escape, a confession, or an act of defiance. Maybe that was still rattling around in my skull when I sat down in theatres this year. Because for me, in a year jam-packed with fantastic films, the ones that moved me most felt less like storytelling than therapy sessions, working out the damage done by deeply flawed men. Each carried with them a collective exhale; a recognition that, by confronting the past head-on, we might eventually move beyond it.

Was there any act of testimony more powerful than Dan Reed’s haunting Leaving Neverland? Not only in its profound emotional impact—the heart-wrenching details of sexual abuse, the almost unbearable clarity in Robson and Safechuck’s account—but in the ways it rippled through our collective conscience. If you’d asked about Michael Jackson’s “unsavory” behavior a few years ago, I would have conceded it was likely. So how damning is it that I didn’t feel a thing? Like most everyone in my generation, I’d let jokes and euphemisms diminish the reality of it: the complicated pain, the unresolved guilt, the way rape tears at the seams of a person. By reliving an unimaginably painful past, these survivors gave us new tools for unpacking power and the cult of personality. They’ve changed the way I see the world.

It might seem bizarre to follow a harrowing documentary with a sci-fi epic starring Brad Pitt. But from the moment Ad Astra begins, it’s clear that director James Gray is aiming at much more than a CG spectacle. Instead, he’s interested in unpacking something deep in the psyche. Much like Terence Malick and his sweeping shots of nature, Gray uses the vastness of space to amplify the infinitely refracting whispers of our own inner monologue. The urge to be entirely, hyperbolically alone with one’s thoughts; that insistent need to salvage the past, to find a deeper meaning, that could drive a man to madness or to Neptune’s lifeless rings. It’s a meditation on the extraordinary lengths the male ego will go to avoid taking one small emotional step: to release, to dethaw, to be open to your own pain.

Because real life pain, met with attention and vulnerability, can be mined for something precious. You may have noticed I’m writing this last group out of order. It’s because I can’t think of any better way to end this than with Honey Boy, my favorite film of 2019. I love everything about this movie. I love its audacity: a work of metafictional group therapy, penned by Shia LaBeouf, in which he plays his own abusive father—and doesn’t just play him, but humanizes him, understands him, resists every whiff of self pity. I love its pitch-perfect execution: LaBeouf gives a career-best performance which, in a just world, would win every award (let alone nomination), but the other two Shias (Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges, here renamed “Otis”) are also uncannily good. I love its tenderness: Alex Somers’ sparse, delicate score; Natasha Braier’s gorgeous use of light and shadow; Alma Har’el’s empathetic direction—so tactile and free-flowing and unabashedly intimate, it recalls another LaBeouf-starring “Honey” film which topped an earlier list. And I love, above all, its commitment to truth: armed with a premise that would have made even the treacliest indulgence feel earned, the film consistently avoids easy or feel-good answers. It encourages us to mourn abuse, yes, absolutely. But it also makes us recognize ourselves in it, inhabit its motive, even laugh at the particular shape that it takes. “The only thing my father gave me that was worth anything,” laments Otis, “was pain. And you’re trying to take it away from me.” No one has any right to take that terrible gift away. But through a fearless commitment to honesty in art, Shia proves that pain is like the fishes and loaves: it can be expounded on, shared, without losing a thing.

Here’s to more miracles in 2020.

Closing Bits, Shameless Plugs

Even at this excessive length, there were a number of equally fantastic films that (largely thanks to the “group-around-a-theme” imperative) I failed to squeeze in: Mati Diop’s hypnotic Atlantics, Ladj Ly’s firecracker Les Miserables, and Rachel Lear’s first-pumping Knock Down The House are among the casualties I regret the most. And though this roundup is marginally more diverse than some in years past, that’s a pathetically low bar to clear. I particularly wish I’d invested more in Chinese cinema, with Shadow, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and Ash Is Purest White all remaining as blindspots, despite their rave critical reception and relatively easy access. I’ll be honest: when I’m at home or stressed, I find myself resisting Bong’s “one-inch barrier” more often than I’m proud of. In 2020, I plan to be more intentional in overcoming it.

And hey, if you’re still here, the avalanche of content is just beginning! In addition to written reviews here on this site (which I tried to link inline, when appropriate), you can find untold hours of me yammering into a microphone, courtesy of The Spoiler Warning! Podcast episodes for mentioned films include:

• Honey Boy
• The Last Black Man in San Francisco
• Ad Astra
• Parasite
• Us
• Marriage Story
• The Lighthouse
• Queen & Slim
• Paddleton
• The Farewell
• Blackbird
• Midsommar
• Uncut Gems
• Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood
• The Irishman
• Jojo Rabbit
• Joker
• Bonus: Cannes 2019 First Half Recap (For Pain & Glory, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sorry We Missed You)

I wrote the first few sentences of this piece two or three years ago; the rest was completed on a whim during a two week cruise (which, for the record, I’m still on). Way back when I started the intro, I called it my “bad Pynchon imitation.” Now, after a few days of cycling through “Zadie imitation,” “Roth imitation,” and “DFW imitation,” I figure I’ve imitated enough disparate authors to just call it “done.” Self-deprecation aside, I’ve never attempted a piece of fiction this long before; I tend to be much more comfortable in dense, quippy, 4-5 minute bursts. But this story has nagged at me for quite some time, and to be honest, I’m quite proud of the result. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I’ve enjoyed writing!

I’ve copied the story in plain text below. If you hate reading lengthy web pages as much as I do, you can also grab the PDF here instead. This is a fictional story, though it is inspired by a number of real places, people, and situations. (And, of course, that song.)

---

Angels in the Architecture

These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry
— Paul Simon

*

Light fills the room that is all window, blinding, but it isn’t a metaphor for clarity. It’s just the sunrise wriggling through a yellowgray fog, 30 stories high above the Yangtze River, illuminating statues and schooners and surgical-masked joggers before striking the corner suite at its eponymous point. It nudges him awake as it sweeps the floor diagonal, flooding his spirit with a feeling he’d purchased. The room is ostentatious and virtually empty, housing a sky-blue suitcase under a crumpled up coat, upside-down shoes and a (hopefully) passport; but there’s nothing signified by all that negative space, calendar notwithstanding. A king-size bed with half the pillows kicked off, laptop resting where a head’s supposed to be, is no more poetic than it was on the 13th. And there’s nothing profound about the skyline jutting from the opposite bank, its sharp angles smoothed sinusoidal by haze; neither the fact of its bigness nor the admission that he’d, truthfully, expected bigger.

Daniel’s head is throbbing and his still-on bluejeans smell the way his throat tastes: blood salt and woodchips. He pieces together what he can as it comes. He remembers a cowboy hat hawking ill-advised shots; a woman whose Nikon hung from a strap. Untranslated monuments. Hours packed in an establishment so tiny it could tile the present suite four times over. A prelude, first, of beef stew and Tsingtao, under a canopy the color of old headlights: a thick, smudgy clear that looks melted. Tentative smalltalk, forced laughs on cue. Saying yes to questions he didn’t actually hear. Waxing bullshit philosophy while pretending to inhale, all unwritten contracts of the Male Heart-to-Heart. Eventually forgetting to pretend—hence, woodchips. Stumbling back to the hotel, heart racing, alive with something he’d insisted was more than romanticized nonsense. Head spinning with future conversations about said epiphany; head barreling into the polished, triple-paned glass of the Marco Polo Wuhan; head landing just short of the open lobby door.

None of this matters, and he’s resisting the urge to let it. It always happens this way when traveling alone: Everything gets amplified, distorted by a put-upon significance no sober morning can withstand. The sunrise, the hangover, the piecing-together of such and such lost evening. It’s exactly the type of banal story that, back home, would have him scrambling for an excuse to leave the conversation. You drank with a stranger and walked home, poorly, but because you’re in China it’s suddenly meaningful? One hemisphere’s pathetic is another’s spiritual, he supposes; a sort of currency exchange for fleeting sensations. It’s shallow. It’s appropriating. It’s exactly what he paid for. And yet: Granting no metaphor to light or poetry to bedsize or profundity to an upsold Travelocity skyline—aware that loneliness diffuses details into splotchy abstractions, like so much canopy or yellowgray fog—with each hamfisted symbol put firmly in its place, there still remains the issue of that voice. How it sounded, unexpected. How it broke him, in earnest. That moment when a bearded mouth undrawled itself and angels issued forth, that doesn’t get to be nothing like all of the others. It shattered some context, some triple-paned certainty. It couldn’t be willed back in place.

**

There are some things he feels and some things he knows, and they’re often in stark competition. For instance: Some small part of him feels he can tell when he’s about to get a phone call. Even when the ringer’s off (which, Daniel being a chronic people-pleaser whose tendency towards unobtrusiveness borders on obsessive, it always, always is). As if the inbound transmission literally rippled through the fabric of his left front pocket, like some cellular tingle or digital itch. Taken at face value it’s ludicrous, and hand-wavey explanations about “electromagnetic waves” only make it worse—mile markers on a highway to tin foil and crystals. He knows it would never bear out in a double blind study, that it’s a textbook example of confirmation bias at play. But when he’s staring down the barrel of a silent Incoming Call, a textbook’s not always top of mind.

He feels she can save him and he knows that she won’t. About his age, 30 or 35, too old to be here on a post-college backpacking trip but too visibly undead to be here for work. Gun to his head, German, though he couldn’t be sure. She’s walking through the Esplanade just after sundown, wisps of blonde hair spilling out the hood of her puffy green vest. Expensive-looking DSLR swaying like a pendulum from her neck. Her pace is slow, given the now-fading light: plodding around various historical monuments, snapping pictures whenever something catches her eye. They’ve already done a full lap around the interesting bits of the park, and now it’s devolved into an awkward, Brownian dance—criss-crossing glances, feigned interest in plaques. Neither wanting to actually meet the other, neither quite ready to pack up and leave.

They’ll stay in that limbo all evening, he’s certain, and upon sober consideration it’s all for the best. Things rarely work out like a Linklater drama; in real life, you’d probably come off as a creep. A stranger in a park observes your neutral behavior, projects onto it layers of hidden intent (“wanting,” “feigned,” “dance”), and decides to start a conversation—what would you call it, Sherlock? Still he finds an irrational camaraderie in these wordless exchanges. Like she’s asking “No, you first: What are you doing here?”

In the ten days since he was rushed to Wuhan on business, he hadn’t seen a single foreigner until now: not on his flight, or the client’s HQ, or the luxury hotel in which he’s been dutifully stowed. Even at the tourist traps on his rare evenings off, not a soul brushing past him who wasn’t Chinese. And it shouldn’t matter—it doesn’t, he knows it. He has no more in common with this woman than anyone else in the park. But after ten days of silence, what you know starts to slip. You begin observing yourself in the passive third person, your life a collection of verbal clichés. “Alone in a crowd.” “A boat against the current.” “Not all those who wander are lost.” Fodder for a brooding Tumblr page. Mundane activities, like throwing on a coat and scrounging for dinner, take on a certain elevated, literary hue. A wrong turn at a stoplight becomes a meditative journey. A fumbled transaction at the cash register opens up some gaping ravine, between outside and inside, between you and the space you inhabit. Your fundamental loneliness becomes blown up, permanent. Like you’ve always been drifting, just like this evening. Like you aren’t 18 hours away from boarding a $4k flight home on some international corporation’s dime. Like you aren’t walking the exact route suggested to you, in impeccable English, by the hotel concierge while drawing an oval with a Sharpie on a foldable map.

No, tonight Daniel’s a martyr, a protagonist, a metonym; a spiritual nomad barreling through the unknowable dark. And he wants to think she’s sharing it, that pilgrimatic ache. To see her Nikon as a talisman that heals invisibility; her expression as a curled half-smile and not a vacant stare. To find in these awkward glances not the random intersection of two rotating rays, but an intentional, sacred communion. This is my body. This is my blood.

Except: textbooks. White bread and grape juice.

***

This trip, like most, has had a bleary quality to it. He was sitting in the office one afternoon when he got the same call he’d gotten too many times before: “The client is furious; how soon can you be here?” In the past, there would have been frantic arrangements, canceled dinner plans, apologetic I.O.U’s to factor in; not this time. He’d finally achieved what the armchair philosopher in him always dreamed of: He was completely, hyperbolically untethered. No one to ask for permission. Not a single reschedulable plan. Nothing to do but trudge home to an empty apartment, dump half a drawer into a beat-up blue roller bag, and hail a Lyft to the airport. Four hours all in, from phone call to boarding, and that was including two Old Fashioneds in the business class lounge, sipped with practiced cinematic intensity. And the requisite social media post to go with it, of course. What a crazy adventure. What a badge of worldly honor draped in translucent humility. See you all in two weeks! (As opposed to when, exactly?)

As he sits in the courtyard of some nondescript eatery, he can’t help but feel that the romance has waned. After a decade or so of jet-setting, that adolescent thrill is still (shockingly) present, but its half-life has grown notably shorter. The same excitement that once propelled him through weeks of post-travel slideshows and re-rehearsed stories, now struggles to survive the length of a flight. Reality always had a way of setting in: the infuriating taxi stand, the sleep-deprived lunch meeting, the fluorescent conference room with its halfassed motivational posters (“Dedication,” “Foresight,” “Brillian [sic]”). Even the location-appropriate beer ordered just after touchdown, regardless of jet lag or hour of the day: It was all part and parcel of one weary routine. He used to go miles out of his way to find the perfect hole-in-the-wall, the Bourdain-sanctioned Authentic Experience about which he could wax poetic for months on end. Now he’s plopped down at the first spot with an English menu he could find, three blocks at most from the Sharpied Esplanade. Debating between two options, “Chicken” or “Beef,” based on two near-identical photographs. Nursing an unwanted Tsingtao (see: weary routine).

Another element that belies the Instagram narrative: his perennial headphones. Through every one of these brooding walks, dim-lit flights, solo dinners—even that imagined interaction with the puffy green vest—he was listening to something. Music, occasionally, but more often podcasts: Ira Glass, celebrity interviews, political debates dialed to chipmunk speed. Always hovering somewhere half-between comprehending and not; parsing the words’ rhythm and cadence but rarely absorbing their content. It’s a strange habit for a self-fashioned “spiritual nomad,” this near-religious rejection of silence. But to him, on this trip, it doesn’t subtract from the illusion so much as underline it. That lush inner ecosystem of film reviews and field reports, jut up against the vast, inaccessible Out There.

Safely at rest in his assumed final stop, and cushioned by voices chirping yesterday’s news, he takes stock of his surroundings. The metal table with its thick film of dust. The laminated menu card with red and yellow stripes. Only three other patrons, here for booze and cigars—not a great omen for the food. The sun he’d long since perceived to be fading is still holding strong; or weakly, at any rate, clung to a perma-gray twilight. Green plastic chopsticks in a green plastic cup. Foot traffic now pared down to a trickle. The waiter/cashier/owner smiling from a respectful remove, an if-you-need-me-I’m-here-but-if-you-don’t-that’s-fine-too. Everything in its proper place, unhurried and fine. The courtyard is shielded by a clear, plastic tarp, though it doesn’t look like it will rain. His neighbors have taken out playing cards. “Michael Flynn has resigned today as National Security Advisor, following controversy over his alleged contact with Russian…” The tarp is splotched with an iodine yellow. The cup isn’t the same shade of green as the chopsticks. From here it’s a straight shot back to the hotel; he should be in bed by 10 at the latest. Do they have different card games in China? He should know that. Even the beer bottle looks dusty.

He wipes the rim with a napkin, nods his head upwards in the direction of the waiter, and removes a single earbud.

****

Here’s the frustrating thing about pivotal moments: There’s no way to discern when you’re in the middle of one. Take the Flynn bit, for example. At this point it’s just one of a thousand details the chipmunks have run through. Trivia for the diehard NPR fan. Daniel has no inkling that a year or two later, this flash-in-a-pan advisor will have become a near-household name. Nor does he imagine the aforementioned “Russians” will tie in to a story so scrutinized, so loudly debated, that it will seem hackneyed and overwritten to even bring up; some Forrest Gumpian demarcation of era akin to the Watergate break-in or Challenger launch. That this story will evolve, like all things, from curiosity to scandal to nail-biting drama, before reverting back to soundbite and calloused retort. Tonight it’s just a tossed-off fact among many, no more remarkable than the Tsingtao he’s idly sipping or the holiday he’s pretending not to remember or the subpar stew he’s letting get chilly as the gray “perma-” twilight announces its end.

Daniel has no sense his certainties are about to split open. If anything, he’s ashamed of how obvious his journey has been. Ten days in a new city and nothing to show for it but three blurry selfies and a burgeoning cough. Years ago this trip would have been a goddamned story, or at least a goldmine of photo ops. Now it’s the third of its kind in as many months, and it’s barely warranted a footnote. Daniel still doesn’t know a thing about Wuhan, beyond the floorplan of various office buildings and the cocktail menu at the Marco Polo. In truth, his thoughts have never really left New York. He’s no longer resentful (that subsided in January), but he isn’t particularly excitable either. What he is, is stuck. Calcified. Certain of the predictability of places and things. He knows he’ll leave this lukewarm farewell dinner, walk home in silence (modulo headphones), have a few more beers delivered to his suite, bathe in a glass box surrounded by skyline, eventually remember why he doesn’t like baths, and swipe through headlines he’s powerless to change till he drunkenly dozes off. It’s the same story every time. It’s already been written.

Outwardly this evening will be presented as fresh and invigorating; yet another rung on the ladder to Progressive Citizen Of The World—a status which, like any mileage program, demands constant effort to maintain. There is always more to do, more to see to stay current. But the more of the world he sees, the less he’s able to differentiate from that which he’s already seen. His hotel this evening has already merged with others in Shanghai, in Shenzhen, in Hong Kong, in Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Taipei. Different languages, sometimes, and different cuisines, usually, but always the same focus-group-approved whiff of world-weariness; the same all-expenses-paid, feel-it-deeply-or-your-money-back sense of toothless wanderlust. Same clichéd cocktails ordered at the dim lobby bar, same sultry-voiced lounge singer with her affected lilt. Every suit-and-tie warrior in the place feeling the same lonely hum for two or three measures, before settling out tabs on their black corporate credit cards and heading up to masturbate atop identical sheets.

The whole travel thing was a farce, and how could it not be? What could you honestly expect from any one place, devoid of human connection? Eat and drink, drink and eat. Walk through the city from Point A to Point B, modulate slightly on the return if you dare. Try the X, it’s a delicacy here. Remember to Y before tipping your glass. Look at this museum, this tower, this skyline. Ponder your relative smallness therein. Let this body of water instill a preternatural calm as you stroll along its banks with the metropolis to your right. Yangtze, Liffey, Danube, Seine, the Bund, the Bosphorus, the Circular Quay. All beautiful places, make no mistake, and if he walked by the water he could still feel that promised tranquility. He could just no longer unsee the machinery at play. It was all too easy, and easy was cheap. Tweak the script, rotate the scenery, and watch as the epiphanies start tumbling out.

*****

“Yes, you!” the Uzbek repeats as Daniel pulls out his AirPods. “My boss wants to invite you inside for a drink.”

He’s standing in front of a cramped little dive bar, just off the main thoroughfare leading back to the hotel. It’s the sort of place you might find in any major city in Asia: bar-seating only, some dozen patrons wide, space for maybe twice that to stand if they pack like sardines. Fronted by a cascade of sliding glass doors, with multicolored LEDs strewn from every conceivable anchor. Resting above the whole thing—and this, he admits, is new—is an illuminated sign running the full width of the venue, black stenciled lettering on mustard yellow: “HOT & CRAZY SUGAR DADDY.”¹ And dangling above the entrance, scrawled onto a circular piece of cardboard: “Welcome to New York.”

He remembers the man as “the Uzbek” not because he’s some accent savant (in truth, he’s not sure he’s met anyone from Uzbekistan before), but because that’s how everyone in H.&.C.S.D refers to each other. Or at least, it’s how everyone is first introduced. The bartender’s from Hong Kong, the barback’s Turkmeni, and the Uzbek—well, it’s not clear what his job is, exactly, beyond corralling stray passersby in off the street. If they ever give out names, they certainly don’t repeat them. Except, that is, for the owner. His particular name will be repeated all night, so crucial it’s written in all caps out front: the titular Sugar Daddy.²

He was born in China, but that isn’t his home. His home, he specifies, is wherever he wishes: Texas, San Francisco, Spain, Australia, Brazil. You name it and Sugar Daddy has not only lived there, but fallen in love there and started a business. He explains this over their first (second?) shot of Jameson, though the precise nature of these businesses grows fuzzier by the glass. Textiles? Shoe repair? A thrift store chain? All might explain his peculiar getup: alligator boots, black leather pants, bright violet button-down and maroon leather jacket, Ozzy Osbourne sunglasses, gray cowboy hat. Pack of American Spirits protruding from his pocket, wispy mustache covering his full upper lip. At any rate, Daniel, friend, the past is the past. His new calling is to bring all this adventure—he motions grandly around the bar, twinkling, half empty, adorned with knick knacks and blown-up stills from 70’s auteur cinema—back home. To give locals a taste of a world they’ve never seen.

After five drinks and half a pack of cigarettes, it’s still not clear why Sugar Daddy summoned him inside. Not that Daniel would ever explicitly ask, of course. At this point, he assumes it’s part of an elaborate hustle—the implied-to-be-free shots, the manufactured familiarity of “Daniel, friend.” Peeling open lonely American wallets one tall tale at a time. And, in truth, he doesn’t really care what this night will run him. The cab is prepaid, breakfast will be charged to the room, and it’s not like he was about to exchange his remaining Yuan anyway. Better to throw a little currency at a Hunter S. Thompson-lite fever dream than live to see it quarantined in some bloated Ziplock bag, high above the coat hangers, scattered among the Euros and Rupees and Yen, stockpiled for a “next time” he’ll inevitably forget to make good on. At least this way he gets a bona-fide story from the deal. A liquor-soaked evening with a larger-than-life stranger, scam or no, is still the most photogenic thing to have happened on this trip. Crank up the contrast on those LEDs in the mirror, let them refract around the focal point of a half-empty glass, slap on a filter and watch the night glisten.

******

Note the arm’s-length remove of it all: the assumption of bad faith, the choice to play along, the cynical posturing for a future viewing public. If you talked to Daniel in person, you’d never dream he saw it this way. Watch his eyes widen as he recounts to his new “friend” the details of his journey, with meteorological grandeur: “It’s been a whirlwind trip,” “a flurry of activity,” “the storm has passed and I’m finally settling in.” As if he were truly feeling things with a first-person passion. As if it weren’t precisely tuned to elicit an emotional response; a response which itself he has already heard and grown bored of. As if it weren’t all one symphony of pulleys and weights.

Which isn’t to imply that he’s acting as he confides in Sugar Daddy (though the long pause-and-sips feel a bit overblown.) Like the river and tranquility or those pre-takeoff jitters, he truly does feel lucky to be here. He’s proud to have fashioned this life for himself; proud to live a night worthy of editing in post. It’d be cynical if he were merely going through the motions, but what if the motions reflect who he earnestly wishes to be? Dress for the job you want, “Dedication” and so on. It isn’t his fault he’s become a cliché. It isn’t his fault he sees every twist coming.

It sounds pat to say that things weren’t always this way, but it’s true. There was a time, not that long ago, when this moment would have sparked in him some fundamental aliveness, a blinding aura of romantic possibility wholly immune to self critique. Shimmering skylines, chance encounters. Perched atop the Marina Bay Sands, arms out in supplication to the world and its wonders, whispering to her without a hint of conscious irony: “I never thought I’d find myself somewhere like this.” Dragging that same sky-blue suitcase through a tropical rainstorm, ducking in and out of hotel lobbies, searching. The playlist he crafted in the cab to the airport, after finally accepting his mission had failed. The way it filled him with a sort of preemptive nostalgia, that neon-soaked soundtrack to what could have been. The conviction that heartbreak was somehow the most fitting end.

Three doomed relationships and untold playlists later, he still chases those emotional highs and storybook conclusions. But there’s a pattern to it, a formula, that he knows he can’t escape. The bar decor fits it. Sugar Daddy too. Even if the specifics couldn’t have been called in advance, he knows on some level that he’s been here before. It’s the Londoner at the rooftop bar studying hotel management, asking if he’d join her for a drink. The veteran journalist stationed in Berlin with extremely strong opinions about Benghazi. The trio of Aussies huddled in an Istanbul tavern, swapping stories so raucous they’d eventually be chased out by a red-faced owner (and Daniel, too, by association, almost forgetting his passport in the process). The boisterous Southerner who now stumbles in behind him, he too is cut from the same cloth. “Unpredictable character” has become just another archetype to him, catalyzing a mood he’s already penciled in. He and Sugar Daddy will banter until the conversation grows hoarse, debating politics and communism and the fundamental similarity of disparate things, and oh it will feel so wild and rejuvenating. Hot & Crazy, exactly as advertised! In truth, though, neither will leave any better than they came. It’s the same exact bar in every corner of the world. And that doesn’t make it pointless, per se. He’s not sure what it makes it.

*******

It’s been a few minutes since Sugar Daddy ducked out on business and the Southerner heaved down on the newly vacant seat. Even under that special, inebriated stupor that tilts “insufferable” into “interesting,” Daniel knows he wants absolutely nothing to do with this man. He is, to put it uncharitably, the stereotype of Ugly American purely distilled: overlarge camo jacket over a t-shirt with words, scraggly beard matted down the length of his neck, sweat pooling over a visible beer belly which jiggles as he yells (which he frequently does). Already drunk off his ass by the looks of it, coughing up smoke and dense wads of phlegm, slurring in a thick drawl even he must know the bartender can’t understand. At the moment, what he’s slurring is a torrent of folksy misogyny regarding the bar’s drink selection:

“Honey, beautiful, you must’ve misheard me. If I wanted piss water, I would’ve asked for piss water. What I asked was, was if you had any whiskey in this establishment. I’m not talking Crown Royal, Johnny Walker, that cat urine bullshit some traveling ad man sold you fifty years ago. I’m talking single malt scotch. Fine Kentucky bourbon. The sort of stuff that burns a hole through your esophagus and on down to your soul. A rye—you know that word, sugar pie? Bulleit, I bet even you’ve got that somewhere on the shelf. Say fella, you don’t exactly look Chinese if you catch my drift. You in for a shot of straight Bulleit rye?”

At this point, our protagonist could point out that this order is at least as obvious as any piss water exemplar the Southerner just rattled off. He could mention, pointedly, that he and Sugar Daddy have been dipping into top shelf liquor all night, that there was no shortage of “good stuff” to try if you had the mental fortitude to shut up for the love of God and act like a decent fucking human for once in your miserable life. He could close out his tab and end the trip on a high note, confident the evening would have only gone downhill. He could do all of those things, and probably would if he were sober or had even the faint outline of a spine (see: unobtrusive). Instead he says “sure,” lifts two fingers to the bartender, and accepts the cigarette being dutifully proffered him.

Thirty minutes, maybe an hour goes by in that spot, and you’d be hard pressed to call what they had a “conversation.” Unlike everyone else he’s encountered tonight, the Southerner has absolutely no desire to talk about where he came from. He doesn’t seem interested in communicating anything, really, though he expends an awful lot of words in the process.

“Thing you gotta know about this place” he spits, pointing at China, Bulleit spilling on his shirtsleeve with his gesture’s wide arc, “is there’re a fuck ton of people. None of that please and thank you horseshit you do back home. You want their attention, you gotta shout.”

“I can hear that, thank you. You’ve been here long, then?”

“Don’t matter! I’ve been here since I’ve been here, same as anybody else.”

“Great. And what brings you to this particular bar?”

“International man of mystery. Wanted a drink.”

“Here on business, then? Visiting the university?”

“A man’s business is a man’s business, and that’s the best lesson I can,” hiccup, “give ya, mister bargain bin peacoat.”

And on and on and on and on, until at last Sugar Daddy appears and grinds the blabbering to a halt. He looms there between them for a few seconds, wordless. Then the Southerner (who, Daniel presumes, given the relative quality of his outer monologue, possesses an inner one of such unimaginable hellishness that to be left alone with it for even a moment must feel to him an interminable torment; that he must, if for no other reason than to distract from the weeping of objectifying, liquor-glazed eyes and the gnashing of coffee-stained teeth, open his mouth and unburden) breaks the silence.

“Say there cowboy, you look like the kinda freaky motherfucker who could use himself a drink. Hope you like piss water, that’s mostly all they got. Sweetie, over here now, hey honey butt, what’re you deaf? One more—no, three more’a’the, the, this one right here. Pronto! Arrive-fuckin-dirche, or did I stutter?”

For the first time all night, Sugar Daddy has abandoned his sunglasses and cordial smile. He’s visibly livid, and Daniel thinks he understands. If there’s one thing a man with his pseudo-Bohemian inclinations can’t tolerate, it’s seeing his passion project—his labor of love—cheapened by this American, customer-is-always-right brand of entitlement. “Please leave my establishment,” he growls through gritted teeth.

“Well excuse me, your highness. And what exactly am I being charged with, then? Can’t a fella buy some liquid clever in a shithole like this?”

“I said,” his volume rising, “please leave my establishment. You’re a rude, drunken bastard, and you aren’t welcome any longer. Please settle your bill and leave.”

At this point there are twenty or so patrons crammed in the place, chattering, and it’s doubtful any but Daniel have noticed this exchange. But watching them face off, The Beerbelly and the Sugar Daddy, he can almost hear the cartoon record scratch—sees in split-screen that moment in a Western when the Sheriff steps into the saloon and invites the outlaw to meet him outside. (The cowboy hat might have something to do with it.) He thinks he can feel the whole room clenching, as merriment melts into violence. Feels himself implicated too, in a sense, suddenly caught in a third person plural: two drooling Americans seated shoulder to shoulder, bulldozing the Hot & Crazy’s every peculiarity as they swig from identical drinks. It’s the flipside, now, of “alone in a crowd.” He’s half of “two peas in a pod”: the recipient of a perceived communion, no more intended than the German in the park. He wishes he could spit it out, revert back to nomad. Wishes he could leave the evening in the same state he came.

The Southerner rises with unlikely bravura, his sweaty beard level with the pinch of the hat. He removes it from Sugar Daddy’s head with one hand and clutches him by shoulder with the other. “You know, we’ve got a saying about situations like this…”

********

It’s nearly impossible, in hindsight, to describe what is so life-changing about the incident we’re approaching. On paper it probably looks vapid, ethnocentric, trite. Like yet another bit of travel-tinted quirkery Daniel would doubtless embellish before hitting “Post”—the crowd suddenly expanded to three or so dozen, the meaty hand on leather shoulder pad sharpened to a menacing clutch. Everything meticulously choreographed, composed; the contrast slider pulled all the way to the right, until the gap between After and Before appears wider than possible, more stark than the truth of the story allows.

Because none of this should be particularly surprising, even with embellishment. Within those four walls alone, Daniel had already heard Cantonese, Russian, even Turkish (not that he’d recognize it; the barback had told him) spoken amid the din. And that’s to say nothing of the perfect English with which nearly every soul had greeted him on this “nomadic” escape; from the concierge to the tour guide to the waiter to the Uzbek to the gator-booted Daddy under the Southerner’s paw. Is it really so outlandish that the tables might turn? Is Daniel’s own Americanness so Platonic, so impenetrable, that the mere hint of reciprocity—the possibility that a Chinese man with a Texan accent and cowboy hat might find his dual in a neck-bearded Alabaman who speaks fluent Mandarin—seems totally unfathomable? Seems about as likely as the man sprouting halo and wings?

Former military. Operations manager for a microchip plant. Expat college dropout “teaching English” to pay rent. Mildly successful video game developer whose lazy objectification of East Asian women, combined with the flexibility of his job, has brought him to this university town, studying the language by day and terrorizing bartenders by night. There are a thousand possible histories that could explain the Southerner’s next few words—a thunderous punchline in sing-song Mandarin, whose meaning remains undeciphered—but when it finally happens, Daniel won’t be considering them. To him this will be a Pentecostal revelation, a movement of the Spirit, a tongue of holy fire set upon each and every head. When the Southerner opens his mouth and the room splits wide open; when the patrons of Hot & Crazy Sugar Daddy burst into laughter as if in on the same cosmic joke; when the Quintessentially Ugly American proceeds to buy every last one of them a round of top shelf bourbon, here is what Daniel will be thinking:

I am far from finished. I am not played out. My solitude is not hackneyed, my conclusions not inevitable. I am here in this bar, bearing witness to miracles, stammering and gobsmacked and awestruck and alive, surrounded by the sound of new things unfurling. I am 31 years old and my life is not over, my reserves of revelation nowhere near close to tapped. On any city block in any country in the world there is a dive bar like this one, just like this, with Christmas lights and stairwells or sliding glass doors hiding secrets no caption could capture or eye-roll subvert. I don’t need to chase her. I won’t will it back. I will love and abandon and long for and ache, and it will be new every time because I’ll choose it to be. I am here in this dive bar at the end of the earth, and the past’s dour echo has no bearing here. The future is uncertain. It’s mine to explore, to refashion, reword, repackage, embellish, discard, put on pedestals, undercut, overstate. It’s mine to deem interesting or bland or banal. I am here, not alone, filled with incident meaning, and I never thought I’d find myself somewhere like this.

Amen. Hallelujah. Ganbei.

*********

So he does it, the Southerner. In an operatic timbre, octaves high above his register, relishing in the rising and falling of elongated vowels. He slices the air with the brim of the hat as he belts his heartfelt aria. The room grows smudgy, lights dim and refract, around their intimate slow-motion dance—the Southerner’s eyes now sharpened with clarity, Sugar Daddy’s grimace curled into a smile as he yields to the lead hand (no longer a clutch) and they waltz and waltz and waltz away what little certainty Daniel has left.

The crowd truly has grown silent this time, just for a beat but it feels like forever. Then a collective inhale, some scattered applause, and an eruption of ear-splitting laughter.

Hugs are exchanged. A tray of overfull shot glasses is passed around and a chorus of cheers reverberates through the bar. Background chatter resumes as if on cue—peas and carrots, peas and carrots. The Southerner and Sugar Daddy light their respective smokes and converse with the rugged familiarity of old war buddies. Sharing jabs and exclamations in rapid-fire Mandarin, settling in for a long night of—what, exactly, would it be? Small talk with a moderate acquaintance? Reminiscences with a dearly loved friend? Juvenile insults traded with a stranger just sloshed enough to mistake jackassery for wit? In truth, it hardly matters whether they’ve done this vaudeville act a thousand nights before or whether they’re genuinely meeting for the very first time. Their backs are turned to Daniel at this point, and it’s all just as well. He knows now, more than ever, that the story’s run its course.

He empties whatever remains of his wallet, waves vaguely at new friends he knows won’t wave back, takes one last mental note of the scenery (a vintage Taxi Driver poster, the stools’ faint wear and tear), and glides out the glass doors and on through the dark. Glides, headphone-free, over the courtyard, down the main thoroughfare with the river to his left, and into the Marco Polo lobby—quite literally into, as he’ll learn when he wakes.

He sleeps soundly that night, the sort of sleep so deep it makes you realize you haven’t had a proper one in months. Free, finally, from the gnawing sensation of having been there before. He dreams about gators and sweat-beaded cherubs. About ladies in parks with puffy vests, dancing, and dusty Tsingtaos lit by an iodine glare. He’s leaving that morning in a prepaid cab, but tonight there can only be entrances. Impossible cities, unparsable tongues, wheels down on still-unworn runway.

When the light does finally nudge him awake, it takes a few minutes to piece it all together. The whisky-stained peacoat, the woodchips in his breath, the lump on his forehead from the triple-paned wall. He resists the urge to let it mean something, but it soon gets the better of him. Then he digs into his pocket and answers the phone.

**********

If there was one day that fully encompassed the highs and lows of Cannes, it was May 21. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was premiering late that afternoon, and Tarantino-mania was in full swing. Movie star sightings had begun around breakfast; the paparazzi that typically waited till 4pm were out in hordes by lunch. Large sons of media execs, armed with sternum-buttoned tux shirts and dangled D&G shades and baby blue tickets and women paid not to hate them, galavanted from hotel bar to hotel bar in preparation for The Hottest Movie Event Of The Year, Brah. Sometimes, in their galavanting, they’d make accidental eye-contact with me. It’d take a second to process it all — the Cinephile badge, sun-broiled suit, sign with “(All I Want For My 30th Birthday Is) UN INVITATION S.V.P! TARANTINO — Once Upon A Time…” scrawled in dry-erase marker. But eventually they’d get it. I wanted one of those blue things, didn’t I (flashing one suggestively). Ha. How much? Thousand euro? Two? Didn’t think so.

Not that my groveling was particularly noble, either. Even if you fudged the birthday (May 23rd) and accepted me as some Quentin acolyte (I’m not), what gave me the right to expect this over the thousands of other clamorers who took to the streets? The invite-only model is a terrible system, and it doesn’t lend itself to rational thought. Yet when a young woman planted next to me and nabbed one of those blue tickets 30 minutes before showtime, I felt a very real resentment towards her — for breaking my winning streak, for taking what I was owed. Much like the middle-aged cinephiles I’d been passing all week (who left most red carpets empty-handed) probably resented my ageist “luck” and faux starving-20something routine, perfunctory congrats notwithstanding. And so, after hating a few dozen people for no good reason, I went back to my corner to do what I always did: erase and replace with the same phoned-in urgency, this time for the second red carpet premiere of the evening. “INVITATION S.V.P! GISAENGCHUNG (PARASITE).”

I’ve been telling everyone to avoid trailers for Parasite. This is why: I have a fundamental lack of imagination. I can’t conceive of a viewing experience different from my own. Because when I scrawled that message, I knew precisely two things about the screening I was begging for. I knew it was directed by Bong Joon-Ho, and I knew it was called “Parasite.” No synopsis. No genre. Not even whether a single person had liked or disliked it. It’s a unique aspect of the festival experience, that ability to walk into a theatre knowing virtually nothing. In the case of Parasite, I assumed I was in for a straightforward monster movie — potentially a direct sequel to The Host, given the name. I hadn’t assumed I was about to be handed a ticket to my favorite film of the fest.

Most films I love, I can attribute to a single craft: the gorgeous cinematography, the lush score, the harrowing emotional tether, the standout performance. With Parasite, I’m pretty sure that craft is structural engineering. Bong has designed a complex arrangement of genres and counter-genres which push and pull in ways that don’t make sense — horror, black comedy, socioeconomic drama, even a whiff of Sci Fi, all working in impossible concert. It’s lowbrow and arthouse, slow-ish and pulsing, riotously silly and deadly serious. It’s the filmic equivalent of a game of Jenga: a gravity-defying tower of narrative threads, designed to hold sturdy until the exact moment the conductor shouts “Topple!” Gathering my thoughts during the standing ovation, I had no clue how to articulate what I’d just seen or why it was so damn special. What I felt was pure whiplash, having been jerked around from scene to unpredictable scene by a director in control of a tonal arc only he could anticipate. I wanted everyone to feel that same dizziness: to go in blind and leave gobsmacked.

Revisiting Bong’s masterpiece in a post-trailer world, I can safely say I was wrong. I’d underestimated the extent of his magic. It turns out that Jenga tower has yet another impossible quality: it is seemingly immune to overhype. You can know there will be genre-bending twists, come in paradoxically expecting to see something unexpected, and still have it work. The construction — that grand orchestral swell of disparate parts coming together — it speaks for itself. This is why scenes from the trailer (which I maintain reveals too much) still manage to elicit shock and awe. Why even on second-viewing, knowing every single trick Bong had up his sleeve, I still felt my heart racing with something like uncertainty. I knew everything that would happen, but the how of it all? That has nothing to do with a synopsis. It’s guttural. Visceral.

If the “how” is what propels the movie, the “why” is what lodges it in memory for weeks on end. Because if you peek behind those dazzling mechanics, you’ll find the single best treatment of class politics this year — and 2019 has been chock full of them. Parasite somehow manages to be more heart-rending than a treacly biopic, more damning than any revenge fantasy, more empathetic than Ken Loach, more unnerving than Us, more brutal than Joker. With crowd-pleasing flare and palpable anger, Bong exposes the ugly underbelly of capitalism in a way that transcends language and place. He’s fixated less on systems than on people, here: how the “have-nots” are forced to feel morally dirty, compromised, while the “haves” are afforded the luxury of naivety. The cyclical tragedy of it all, as those trapped in the lower end of the system strain to appease, impress, become tenuous allies with those above — only to learn that the ladder they’re climbing is just a different name for the same cage.

In a sense, my original prediction wasn’t far off: spiritually speaking, this is very much a sequel to The Host. Or maybe it’s The Host turned inside-out. If the former was a literal monster movie about the insatiable greed of capitalism — all teeth and no soul, a creature that feeds on the poor of the city until there’s nothing left but bone — Parasite is a literal story about capitalism with the abstract schema of a monster movie. It’s about what living in the shadow of that beast does to people, whether above or below. The way they’re forced to orient their lives around it and its fragile sense of dignity, claw at each other to maintain some tiny bit of real-estate out of fangs’ reach. The way it turns scapegoat against scapegoat, victim against victim, in a futile race to a nonexistent top. By attaching ourselves to this monstrous inequity, this hellish train, this house built on suffering, this insatiable host — we all start to embody the ugliness at the system’s root. You are what you symbiote.

There’s really nothing I can say about Parasite that hasn’t already been said. It’s brilliant, urgent, and bone-deep storytelling; and it doesn’t resemble any Palme d’Or winner in recent memory (which is very much a good thing). See it blind or have it spoiled — it’s gonna work its magic either way. I had a blast discussing it in last week’s episode of The Spoiler Warning:

Chris and I caught the last four days of the Toronto International Film Festival and saw a whirlwind 14 movies, recording 15-30 minute reviews for each which will be rolled out over time. Every day, I’ll try to post a summary in this abbreviated format, along with the episode link.

TIFF Update #14: Knives Out

Rating: 4/5

Synopsis: Rian Johnson directs a star-studded whodunnit about a crack detective (Daniel Craig), a dead millionaire (Christopher Plummer), and the half-dozen members of family and staff who may have had a hand in killing him.

My take: From Brick to Looper to (fanboys, sharpen your pitchforks!) Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson is nothing if not a genre connoisseur. He loves to take a subject matter charged with expectations, throw in a wrench that makes them lopsided, and then somehow twist things back to the thrill you thought he was depriving you of. Sci-Fi can’t also be fantasy. A crack detective can’t also be in high school. A kickass Jedi needs a grand, mythic origin story. A whodunnit needs to delay its reveal.

The most shocking thing about Knives Out is that it works at all. Because 10 minutes into this movie, every question the trailer lobbed at you has already been answered. You know the precise nature of the stand-in Mr. Body’s demise. You not only are shown whodunnit it, but you’re shown why they dunnit and how they gottawaywithit. The only question that remains is “What on earth am I going to spend the next 2 hours watching?”

To get the answer, you’ll need to wait and see for yourself. But this I can promise you: nothing will be deflated. By answering the central question up front, Johnson is only leaving room for juicier twists and turns. As we watch our southern fried Hercule Perot investigate a mystery we’ve already solved, the joy becomes about everything else. How will he solve it? What are the systems of rules and locations that govern this story like an old-school logic puzzle? And why are all these innocent people acting so…peculiar?

If I’m being honest, though, all those plot mechanics are just icing on the cake. The ensemble cast is the clear draw of Knives Out, and they more than deliver the goods. Daniel Craig is deliciously silly. Chris Evans is hammy as hell. Toni Collette is scenery-chewing zany, and Michael Shannon is the most Michael Shannon thing I’ve seen since the last Michael Shannon movie I saw. Everyone from Lakeith Stanfield to Jamie Lee Curtis to Jaeden Martell (i.e. “that one kid from IT”) plays their role with the enthusiasm of a kid playing dress-up. And Ana de Armas, the film’s low-key lead, brings an anchor of humanity to the hyperbolic affair. She’s so, so good — and you’d know if I were lying.

Knives Out is exactly what it promises to be: a splashy, throwback blast at the movies. Catch it in the most packed house you can, and avoid spoilers like the plague. Rian will give you plenty of spoilers up front, and trust me, it’s a lot more fun when he does it.

Pairs with: Ready Or Not, Clue

Episode link: TIFF 2019: Knives Out

Chris and I spent the last four days at the Toronto International Film Festival and caught a whirlwind 14 movies, recording 15-30 minute reviews for each which will be rolled out over time. Every day, I’ll try to post a summary in this abbreviated format, along with the episode link.

TIFF Update #13: Waves

Rating: 3/5

Synopsis: Tyler (Kevin Harrison Jr.) is a high school senior living in Florida. We follow a few months in his life, as well as his family’s (particularly his sister played by Taylor Russell, and father played by Sterling K. Brown), as they work through a few extremely difficult situations.

My take: Waves is a hard movie to criticize — hard because its heart is very clearly in the right place, and hard because my criticism hinges on specific plot details, the emotional impact of which would dampen if I spoiled them. I’ll start with the good stuff. Trey Edward Shults is clearly a gifted filmmaker. Having never seen Krisha or It Comes At Night, I can honestly say that I understand what draws critics to him. The way he and DP Drew Daniels move the camera is electrifying: somehow both claustrophobic and sweeping, peering into the hearts of their protagonists. They grapple with themes of cosmic significance: fear, forgiveness, the inheritance of anger, the catharsis of new love, the beautiful risk of being open. It’s no surprise that he got his start working with Terrence Malick. His aims, if not his execution, are clearly cut from the same cloth.

If there’s one thing that most clearly separates Shults and Malick, though, it’s maturity. Namely, the maturity to tackle the right subject, make it ring true, and cut out all else — to orient all that technically showy pretension toward one laser-sharp point. Waves, unfortunately, is the sort of film that tries to be about absolutely everything. Pick any Very Special Episode of a YA show out of a hat, and you’re likely to find it mirrored here, with all the nuance and levity of a child’s obituary. The problem isn’t that it’s dour; it’s that it goes so capital-B Big so often, it doesn’t give our hearts a chance to catch up. If Malick is obsessed with the enormity of what’s inside — that refracting chamber of whispered uncertainties that undergirds every human moment — Shults opts for an outside that is so huge, so dramatic, it drowns out the whisper. It’s the farthest thing from A Hidden Life. It’s a Life so underlined it could be identified from space.

So what’s the appropriate recipe for melodrama? What separates the Big Moments that work on me from the ones that make me feel used? I’m still struggling to piece that together. But I think a part of it has to do with the story being told. Does it feel personal, honest? Is it exorcizing something real? In the case of Waves, I simply don’t feel that vulnerability — however wonderfully its cast does to sell it (and Russell and Brown do particularly good work here). I hesitate to say that a white filmmaker shouldn’t be the one to tell this particular story, but I do think that’s a part of it. Watching Tyler make mistake after cliched mistake, I couldn’t help but feel a bit…gross. Like I wasn’t watching a real family going through real ups and downs, but some idealized white liberal projection of what terrible things might happen to That Sort of Family and what Solvable Social Issues rendered them inevitable. Like an exercise in empathy meant solely to reassure me — how hard this must have been, how heavy the burden, and how altruistic of me to walk a mile in their shoes! Take that with a grain of salt: I have no knowledge of how this film came to be, or how personal its storyline is. This is as likely my own issue as it is Shults’. But the baggage is strong with this one, and I could never quite shake it.

Which is a shame, because if I could step outside of that part of myself, I’d call this a rather beautiful film. The cinematography is breathtaking, particularly in its use of abstract color and light. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross turn out a haunting score, per usual. The script, or at least the back half, knows when to take its time and breathe. It’s all there, and it’s all promising: there’s room for melodrama, for turbulent highs and lows, in our art. But turbulence, however beautiful, can’t move you without some emotional undercurrent to sustain it. This one never quite pulled me.

Pairs with: The Tree Of Life, Moonlight, Euphoria (I’m told?)

Episode link: TIFF 2019: Waves