“Stations” is a semi-biographical short story I conceived of in a hotel in Tokyo (room 617 to be precise…) in early 2017 and wrote almost immediately after. The piece (particularly the ending) was heavily inspired by Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, a wonderfully cryptic ode to memory and loss. Here’s the final scene:

Okay, no more elaboration, enjoy! (Plain text below, PDF at the bottom)

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Stations

Six floors down the mirrored elevator, beyond the marble-slick lobby where they always know your name, through the garish luxury mall hawking overpriced luggage, around a Starbucks filled with travelers each on their very last cheat day, one long escalator ride under a skyscraper cineplex, enormous spider statue, comically upscale McCafe and endless flow of pedestrians, sits Roppongi Station. All in all a five-minute walk on a good day, seven or eight if you take it slow. The metro map is a tangle of criss-crossing arteries, bright colored and swerving, dotted with stations whose bolded names obscure every inch of city block. Ueno. Marunouchi. Hongo-sanchome, Korakuen, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Shinbashi. They weave into a dense knot hugging city center and unravel only as they near the map’s edges: up Nikko, down Yokohama, left Osaka and Kyoto, all fraught with possibility. Five minutes, eight max, and even the most chronically zombified guest could find him or herself alive within the system, pulsing through its atrium or hurtling toward some mysterious limb. An open door, press of a button, 200 steps and the tap of a metro card, and life could just happen to you, just like that. You pick the line. You choose the speed.

Hungry? Take the silver one to Ginza, veer a block or two off the main street, and watch as neon lights give way to something magical. Restaurants on every corner, dim-lit and nameless, the sort that don’t offer English menus and you won’t even care because there are pictures and, well, let’s face it, you wouldn’t know the names anyway. Narrow stairwells lit by those same red lanterns you’ve seen in the movies, terminating in a curtain you aren’t entirely sure you’re allowed to open. Feign enough confidence to swing it wide and you’ll probably find us, eating at the Thai joint two blocks from our apartment, squeezed into a makeshift overflow table because the recent influx of Yelp reviews has rendered legitimate walk-ins impossible. I don’t know which dish I’ll be trying, but I guarantee you she’ll be grinning over a bowl of Tom Yum. (She’s normally one to champion variety, but if she had to eat one meal only for the rest of her life, she always said, that soup would be it.) We’ll be discussing our respective days at work, or squabbling about some slight she’s certain I implied or I’m certain she shouted, or—depending on the time you visit—fumbling through clumsy small talk about the President-elect and endless greed of Bay Area landlords, all self-conscious laughs and minimal glances, unsure who we are to each other now. If they don’t have a picture menu just sit at the bar. The chef usually speaks a bit of English, and even if he doesn’t you can always point and smile.

Not like the smile you’re wearing now. That nervous, toothy variety, the kind that means you’re uncomfortable but are too polite to say so. Don’t worry, I get it. Not every meal has to be an adventure. There are still a few Snickers left in the mini bar; feel free to help yourself. There’s no shame in just being a tourist once in a while, in clinging to the comfort of the herd. No shame in the Starbucks and McDonalds—pardon, McCafes—either, and don’t let any nagging impulse to quote truly immerse yourself say otherwise. The only people who give a flying fuck about “immersion” are the tourists, which is the great irony of it all. Any local, anywhere, will say do whatever you want. Sometimes searching for The Right Thing is exhausting. Sometimes The Right Thing is to cave and enjoy whatever piece of home you can, whatever you’ve simmered in for years. So grab a guilty Big Mac and chuckle at tiny, cute cups, then ease outward cautiously, going your own pace. This is your vacation, after all, I assume. Why exactly did you say you were here?

In fact, your first stop should probably be Shibuya. Rise from the station and it all tumbles into you: blinking billboards, gravity-defying skyscrapers, its famous crosswalk constantly emptied and refilled. It’s kitschy but it really is something, rolling through waves of faces like that: silent businessmen, stumbling drunks, tourists of all stripes nearly trampled trying to snap the million-and-one-th selfie from the center. It doesn’t even matter if it’s real or cultivated—the motion blur doesn’t care about context, doesn’t lie. That existential thrill, the feeling of “lost,” it pierces all manner of meta. Just on the other side of the crosswalk is a dog statue, which you’ll probably want to claw through the crowd to snap your own photo with, and around the corner you might bump into her sister, dad, his wife, and us, forming a tenuous chain where hands never quite meet, wading through the intoxicating, glitzy stupidity of Times Square. Gold-painted dancers standing eerily still; spandexed Spiderman and inhumanly large Shrek, his felt ogre mask barreling through years of irrelevance. All of us will say the whole scene is gauche, but inwardly we’re pulled by the same riptide as everyone else: that kitsch-defying thrill of almost drowning but not. We’ll be snapping ironic selfies and plotting our escape, and you should keep an eye out for her expression when I’m not looking, because this is one of the last times I’ll see her before she tells me it’s over. I’m curious what you find.

If all that sounds exhausting, you’re ready for a drink. Swim the veins two more stops to Shinjuku and follow the herd to Piss Alley or Golden Gai for a nightcap. Tiny corridors, capillaries, packed with intimate bar and yakitori whose hunched patrons barely fit at the counter, arched backs grazing foot traffic like your bruised suitcase corners graze the ground as it rolls. It’s still touristy, of course, but in Japan even the touristy places can leave you feeling alone. It’s why Lost In Translation still resonates so deeply, even after you realize that everything our American heroes experienced was cultivated specifically for them, that they were actually anything but lost. Even in the cultivated spaces you’re outnumbered ten to one. “Touristy” means at any given counter you’ll find one or two travelers rather than none: tatted army bro silently gulping, bespectacled hipster penning biopic by the sip, mutton-chopped 30something with an interest in Japanese culture (particularly women) that strikes you as creepy and downright predatory (though you’d never say it to his chops) or, of course, us. Always us. Sipping Napa reds at the booth in the corner, sampling scotch collection from the overhead shelf, experimenting with Hot Toddy or Glühwein in the kitchen, cracking bottles of fancy beer on the couch—her stubborn European hatred of all things hoppy winding through switchbacks of begrudging truce, mild appreciation, and full-fledged enjoyment, till by the third year we’re polishing off 750ml of some double-digit ABV abomination while the sappy iTunes rental blares. You’ll see us unthawing Tivoli with paper cups of glögg; ringing in Chisinau Christmas with a bourbon her dad nearly downs all at once; sharing sours in Portland; hop monsters in Tahoe; unpronounceable stouts in Brooklyn; tasteless lagers on a fishing trip in Moldova; overpriced Corona in the Malibu sand; no-name local crafts in Boise on my birthday as a Hawaiian-shirted booze bus pedals “Highway To Hell” and the overhead canopy sags under sudden, hot rain. Other things, too. Things behind closed doors, things I wouldn’t let you see. Tiny treasures witnessed by a glass of Syrah. Endless fights where the bottle stares back, me seething with silence, knowing my quiet is the thing that keeps the argument going but fearing any word will cave in on itself, will be crushed under her response. Her final, tearful exit paired with whatever shit was in the fridge. Try soju, skip hot sake, and run like hell from any all-you-can-drink izakaya. Only blackout of my life was in one of those places. If you’re anything like me you’ll regret it by morning.

Run-ons? Slurring? I prefer the term impressionistic, oh opinionated, pixelated stranger. Speaking of impressions, I don’t mean to cultivate some grandiose image of Tortured Alcoholic. The empty Sapporo cans on the bedside table carry a certain poetic significance, I’ll grant you that, but there’s a lot more to me you don’t know. On the top of the ring is Kasuga station, my stop, dotting the neighborhood I called home for a few months forever years ago. This was before she and I had even met, save perfunctory banter at a party or two. Nearly killed myself on that first extended stay, typing out 20-hour days and 7-day weeks in a tiny, fluorescent office where we all wore slippers and nobody said a word. My hard work paid off, though, and that success is what kicked the whole thing off: starting the company, leaving the program, falling into an apartment only four blocks from hers, commiserating in late nights then laughing in late nights till eventually the relationship jump-started one—you guessed it—late night three years back. She tempered my self-destructive habits a bit, but I never did lose that drive. Neither of us did. I still work myself to death with frightening frequency, and where I come from that’s meant to impress you. Around the corner from the office sits a massive industrial complex, 30+ rows of windows exposing bleary-eyed salary men, foreheads stationed on desks in a war of attrition with the overbearing boss. (Armistice will be signaled when he finally rises, marches troops out the door, and all mutually disarm by getting too drunk to speak.) The stress really gets to you, especially here, and numbness is often less symptom than cure. She knew those pressures all too well. Up one row you’ll see her, T minus forty-eight hours till yet another deadline, making her eighth americano while the terminal spits out numbers that just don’t seem right. Me sitting exasperated beside her, insisting that a few hours of sleep will do her a world of good, that we’ll both solve it together first thing in the morning. She’ll do what I’d do, of course: shrug off sound logic and get back to work. A few windows left and it’ll be me this time, finally crawling into bed just as her alarm readies itself. Stealing a pathetic 90 minutes till yet another call from Unnamed Chinese Customer invariably tears me back to the screen. That project shaved years off my life, I’m sure of it, and it certainly didn’t do any favors for us: three months completely evaporated, evenings spent drifting through each other like ghosts. (And that’s not even mentioning last March in Beijing, when I was so burnt-out and sleep-deprived that I probably called her like, two times, tops, which of course seems absurd from where I’m sitting now.) Though I’m certain she’s awake I won’t say a word as I slide beside her that morning, if you can believe it given my present inability to shut up or even pause for punctuation. At most I’ll eek out a halfassed side-hug and lifeless cheek peck, like one of those cheery technicolored sitcoms where the wife’s always nagging and the husband’s an oaf and the queen bed is actually two twins, their edges tastefully touching to show a flaccid, FCC-approved hint of fire. Now, of course, I want to say everything and do everything there on that bed, FCC be damned, but in the window I’ll silently roll to the side to avoid that look she’s got queued up for me.

There are always more stations. Some I’ve already been, others I’d planned to visit eventually. The neighborhood below us is known for its vast sprawl of nightclubs, throbbing meccas where local and expat alike fork out obscene cover charges for the faint hope of contact and a deafening roar. We’re gyrating in there, somewhere, the me inside having become the sort of person she probably wanted all along: the salsa dancer, the great romantic, the shot of life who whisks her back to a youthfulness she once knew. Out by Hongo-sanchome are a few married friends, generals from the fluorescent days still marching strong. One just had his first son; another has two he reportedly never sees. I’m sure I’m in a tiny apartment there, too, address presently unknown. Coasting through a blissful newlywed high, her finally out of school and making a decent paycheck, our combined income and lack of responsibility able to support every romantic whim as signified by the filmic Manhattan skyline lighting the scene. Or slouched at the dining room table, cautiously planning the holiday where our parents will finally meet (a nonreligious one, we both agree, to dampen the culture clash.) Or arguing about aforementioned holiday on the couch, me with the same silence that threatens to rip the room in two, wondering how it never changed after all these years. Or raising him, or her, or them, our modest suburban home close enough to commute but far enough for the husky to run himself tired on a reasonably-priced lawn with actual grass and no hypodermic needles and a love still inside there. Or resentment, maybe, too. Or that 60’s sitcom bed. The love hotels in Ikebukuro—here I’ll tread lightly. Rooms there we’ve rented, some thrilling some bland; other rooms, unopened, rooms I truly hoped to ignite with an electric vulnerability before suddenly losing my chance. It’s…it’s complicated. Way out at the map’s periphery, out to snowy Nikko where our dogsled soars under polar night and pulsed magnetic green: something we both treasured, something I was able to give her. Him there, also, dumbly peeking through the trees and waiting for his chance at the reins. Let’s not wade into the jealousy shit. The fish market in Tsukiji, where I’d someday show her how the tuna here blows any Pacific Northwest salmon out of the water, pun absolutely intended. Hand clutching hand in a real chain this time, tightening grip against the friction of crowd, me steering through the manic marketplace and thrilled at finally playing world traveler in the relationship. To our left an enormous pile of shrimp—“shrimps” as she’ll call it. It’s a quirk of language but it always struck me as sweet; individual tributes, beings with names, owed the barest identity before being skewered and torched in that beachside Brazilian joint she still dreams about opening. Just a few weeks ago, actually. Christmas. That’s when I’d planned to bring her here for the first time.

No, no, no, I don’t feel up to it tonight. You go on ahead, maybe I’ll catch up later. Me? Stuck in the past? And you honestly think you’re fit to make that call? You who would waltz into a stranger’s hotel room armed with a suitcase, insistent look legible beneath featureless blur, and zero plan of how to get where you’re going? I know your type. You’re hardly the first and you’ve all been the same. Always black dress and heels, acute angles sharpened like something out of a repressed teenage fantasy, with a face that’s gorgeous but literally impossible to see. Always showing up here asking to dance, to explore, to see something new or cast light on old places. Well go on! No one’s stopping you. Hell, there are a thousand bone-headed club dwellers lining up for their shot. Five minutes, eight max. Just cut it with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl schtick, with the snap-out-of-it savior complex. Has it occurred to you that I don’t want to be saved tonight? I’ve been here before. I’ve already danced. I’ve seen everything I want to see, and the stations en route are jam-packed with people I can never become, people I’d rather not brush up against thank you very much. But that shouldn’t hold you back. Dance your fucking heart out. Dance like she is, like she begs me to do.

Please. You don’t need to rush out all melodramatic like that. It’s just…look, I really do hear you, and you have every right to be upset. I know exactly what I sound like, spouting tear-jerking fugues and overwrought details like something out of a masturbatory GQ travelogue. As if I knew anything about Tokyo, or love for that matter! But tonight I really am busy. Let’s meet up tomorrow. I’ll bring you to the same spot a friend once brought me, way back on that first visit, on my lone weekend off. We’ll wake up at dawn and catch the JR to Kamakura. It’s nothing like this city, none of that digital buzzing. It’s alive with something ancient, sacred, slow. Dusty streets bookended by quaint little shops, selling rice crackers and trinkets from far flung places. We can follow the dirt road all the way out till we hit this little shrine—a lovely, tranquil sanctuary dug in a hill, which if you climb on top of you can even make out the sea on the horizon. It’s touristy but not at all garish, and on a Sunday it shouldn’t be too crowded either. There are candles you can buy for a handful of change, wax prayers wrapped in specifics neither of us can read. You’ll light one in remembrance of someone long gone and then just leave it there, in the rack by the entrance, your tiny tribute glowing next to a hundred others like it; and there’s something moving, even profound, about the way they’ll all blend into one. Just because we can’t access it doesn’t make it performative or appropriative or cheap. There’s a reason we do these things, a force stronger than irony. We’ll cleanse our hands in the trickling pebbled fountain, bowed by the weight of unpronounceable gods, voices hushed to a whisper if they even sound at all. Throw a few coins, give a lone staccato clap, and peer into room 617 where I’m sitting in bed on a Saturday night in the vibrantest block of the sprawlingest city watching an old Russian flick over minibar Sapporo because she’d always asked me to and I’d always declined, all while you go insistently on about stations—Nostalghia is the name, if you want to look it up—and on the screen the lead actor cups my fifty yen flame, tremblingly wading through knee-high bath stretched all the way from sun-yellow Malibu to the sepia shores of that lake where we fished, shielding the wick of its memory so the wind and steam can’t flicker it out, and when after a few false starts he reaches the finish he sets it down between our poles, hers and mine, and the camera lingers on three solitary sticks till a subtle zoom-out reveals our absence, then the lake and the entire subway station and the knotted thousand veins I was never able to reach, junctions I unknowingly crossed in the haze, alternate lines where I’m someone I yearn for or someone she needed, old stations with grayscale feeds endlessly splicing, new stations tiled with you, me, and static—routes that I’m simply not ready to consider, terminals that I know I’ll get to someday—I’m romantic, not naïve—but I don’t want to get to them, not quite yet, because the view is still widening and now everything is shadowed (even the limbs out past the map’s periphery) all dwarfed by a giant altar of crumbling stone, a blown up miniature ruin in arthouse green-gray surrounding candle and poles and lake and Corona and Times Square and Tom Yum and love hotel and shrimps, and myriad glasses with unison clinks and those bright conversations where the heat pulsed electric and the dim where we looked through each other like ghosts, and the kid(s) and the husky and the house with the lawn and every single goddamn argument she started that I’ll never get to win, or lose, never even get to escape from as long as I’m stuck in room 617 rejecting yet another advance from yet another faceless future to sit. And watch. And redeem or, at least, remember. Give me one last cheat day; one more night. Let me hold it for the instant there’s an “it” to be held. Before the loudspeaker chimes and the tracks start to rumble and it comes tumbling in with a flame-quenching gust—

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Stations (PDF 80K)

Travel has kept me from posting about movies for a while, but there are two Christmas Day releases which I happened to catch screenings of last month: On The Basis Of Sex and Vice.

There’s a concept I heard recently which stuck with me. It’s the idea of “liberal Doritos” ¹, denoting media which exists to reiterate progressive concepts (or express outrage at their conservative counterparts) without expounding in any meaningful way. Pod Save America, viral John Oliver rants, whatever fraction of Twitter follows Robert Reich. There’s nothing wrong with Doritos, per se, but they aren’t particularly nourishing either — that hunger which drove you to crack open a bag isn’t one a twelve pack can satisfy. It’s an empty calorie addiction: the more you eat, the more you crave, and the more vaguely uncomfortable you feel. A moderate amount might be good for your mental health, but keep an eye on that systolic.

If certain podcasts are liberal Doritos, On The Basis Of Sex (3/5) is an IV filled with liberal hot fudge: a treacly indulgence that delivers on its promise and asks for nothing in return. A hagiographic take on the early life and career of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, it’s exactly what its trailers (and final release date) implied: well-acted, well-intentioned, and, well, obvious. Felicity Jones gives a perfectly charismatic performance as RBG, Armie Hammer her improbably wonderful husband, Sam Waterston and Stephen Root her bah-humbug-a-woman’s-place-is-in-the-kitchen antagonists, and so on: the battle lines are drawn in crayon, along with helpful “Stand here to be on the right side of history” labels lest any of us get confused about the hot button issue of Are Wealthy White Women People Also. Applause lines outnumber moral dilemmas about 8000 to 0: save Justin Theroux’s ACLU head, there isn’t a whiff of uncertainty to be found here — let alone a discernible flaw under Ruth’s halo. While none of that is surprising, or a genuine threat to its feel-good aims, it certainly makes for a toothless final product. But hey, who needs teeth when you’ve got that sweet, sweet drip.

Vice (3.5/5) similarly features an all star cast standing on telegraphed sides of history, but there’s nothing sweet about it. Adam McKay’s directorial follow up to The Big Short is what happens when you crush liberal Doritos into a cool ranch powder, chop it fine with the edge of a Michael Moore DVD, and start sniffing. It’s a wild, abrasive ride, is what I’m saying; and while it’s not holding any of its punches, it also isn’t out to remotely challenge you. Christian Bale’s portrayal of Dick Cheney is absolutely incredible, and Amy Adams more than holds her own as Lynne. I’m sure somewhere on McKay’s editing machine lives a deliciously bleak, complex biopic starring the two of them. This one, though, tips its hand faster than you can slur “Halliburton” at a neighboring barstool, complete with maniacal laughter, cutaways to nature documentaries, and the least necessary narrator this side of Casino. I believe almost every word of what it’s saying, but did it have to stand so close to my face? Vice is a movie which somehow italicizes its own underlines; a giddy takedown of the Cheney dynasty which basks in its biases, which has zero desire to appear balanced or impartial. And hey, maybe balance is overrated in 2018; maybe it’s right to let loose and just feel angry for a night. God knows it’s an entertaining way to pass the time. But if you expected something cogent or educational like The Big Short, you’ve come to the wrong place. This particular upper wasn’t prescribed to help you study. Chris and I chatted about On The Basis Of Sex a few weeks back.

A loopy walk through the 2016-2018 cinematic landscape and the societal stages of grief it mirrors, as filtered through the music of Phil Elverum and Kimya Dawson

In this piece, I’m going to reference a bunch of recent films, mildly spoiling several in the process: Manchester By The Sea, A Ghost Story, BlacKkKlansman, Blindspotting, Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette”¹. Odds are, there are at least some of these you haven’t seen. I’ll do my best to write this in a way that doesn’t ruin your future enjoyment, and doesn’t require prior knowledge to follow along. I’ll also be blurring quite a few lines in the process—real-life grief and fictional tragedy, actors and the characters they play—in a manner that would seem calloused if taken literally. Take this, instead, in the spirit that I write; as a personal rumination on blurry things.

Intro

So thank you Geneviève, cause you take what is in your head
And you make things that are so beautiful and share them with your friends
We all become important when we realize our goal
Should be to figure out our role within the context of the whole
And yeah rock n’ roll is fun, but if you ever hear someone
Say “You are huge,” look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun
Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky
Say “I am just a speck of dust inside a giant’s eye”
– Kimya Dawson, “I Like Giants” (2006)

The feeling of being in the mountains
Is a dream of self-negation[…]
But actual negation
When your person is gone
And the bedroom door yawns
There is nothing to learn
Her absence is a scream
Saying nothing
– Mount Eerie, “Emptiness Pt. 2” (2017)

I sing to you
I sing to you, Geneviève
I sing to you
You don’t exist.
I sing to you, though.
– Mount Eerie, “Tintin in Tibet” (2018)

With an hour to kill before the AJJ concert, my girlfriend and I put on an episode of Variety’s “Actors on Actors.” In it, two actors sit alone in a room and quiz one another on their artistic process; the premise being that an inside baseball conversation might probe at deeper truths than a typical interview. Example topics: How did you channel that specific emotion? What attracted you to this particular director? How do you balance instinct and pliability?

This particular conversation was between Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams, there to promote Jackie and Manchester By The Sea, respectively. Both had portrayed women upended by tragedy, so their conversation naturally turned to grief. Portman discussed the confines of historical fiction on a technical level, where her need to be literally accurate felt at odds with her desire to be emotionally honest in her mourning. Williams hit a more personal note, wondering how anyone could genuinely embody grief without letting it destroy them. The role had required her to “put on” grief during her daily commute to the New England coast, to inhabit and discard it repeatedly, at will. As she discussed the toll that balancing act exerted, I couldn’t help but remember another public tragedy—the passing of her child’s father, Heath Ledger—and the voyeuristic artist-consumed-by-a-role narrative that surrounded it.

Later, at the bar between openers, I revisited my review of Manchester By The Sea—something I’d felt reasonably proud of at the time of writing. With two years remove, it felt clumsy. Some bits still rang true: the banality of tragedy, the notion of an “apprenticeship in grief.” But my read of the film had been fundamentally lopsided; I’d managed to spend paragraphs waxing poetic about my own insecurities and Casey Affleck’s brooding, without granting Williams a single word. All that heaviness she’d confessed to, of a grief so lived-in it clung to the evening commute…and for what? A footnote? It’s not that I hadn’t noticed her performance. Quite the opposite. Come Oscar season I’d be singing her praises. It’s that I couldn’t find an interesting way of describing the sadness she possessed. Affleck’s inward destruction felt more profound, more “artistic,” than Williams’ outward agony. This was the same year that I’d heap praises on Louis C.K.’s Horace and Pete for its similarly understated treatment of flawed, haunted men. Google either name today and a pattern might emerge.

I rejoined the fray for the second opener, Kimya Dawson, a former “anti-folk” artist best known as one half of The Moldy Peaches. I hadn’t followed her career since Juno, and though I’d been a fan my expectations were low. Hadn’t that whole scene been a flash in the pan? It stripped away pretense, sure, but what substantive replacement had it proposed? Off-key ukuleles and ditties about friendship? In hindsight, it felt extremely mid-2000’s. It felt twee. My suspicions seemed all but confirmed when she walked out to the stage, armed with tiny guitar and stool, and asked the crowd to sit down. After a bit of scattered, awkward laughter, they complied; some four hundred hipsters sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce on a beer-sticky floor lit by disco ball sparkles. Preemptively, I cringed.

Then she started to play. Kimya opened with her recent foray into children’s music, strumming silly songs about farts and the alphabet to a game (if mildly confused) audience. Slowly, though, a progression emerged. Nursery rhymes gave way to thinly-veiled allegories, gave way to labyrinthine personal stories, gave way to perfectly-articulated insecurities. It wasn’t cute for cuteness’ sake; it was sharpened poetry, using childlike directness to disarm and surprise. It was actually, come to think of it, pretty damn clever. Then she performed a song that was neither cute nor clever: a rumination on childhood loss, grappling with the early passing of a friend. I’d encourage you to stop reading and listen to this one for yourself.

Quarter century later it’s still hard to take
But with every red taillight I scream out your name
I say “Daniel, Daniel, Daniel,
Baby Boy, Baby Boy, Baby Boy”

After the final “baby boy” ended, you could have heard a pin drop in that crowded auditorium. It floored me. And in its overwhelming directness, it brought me back to a performance I’d seen earlier this February: Phil Elverum, i.e., Mount Eerie. He too had brought an audience to tears using nothing but hushed vocals and plucked nylon strings. But his was a more adult pain, “catatonic and raw,” confronting the recent loss of his wife, Geneviève Castrée. Or, rather, her death: “loss” seems like a euphemism he would eschew for sturdier diction. Over the course of an hour he dissected his grief with uncompromising frankness. Sometimes this turned inward, chronicling his sudden loss of normalcy (“I now wield the power to transform a grocery store aisle into a canyon of pity and confusion”). Others it turned outward, addressing her directly (“The second dead body I ever saw was you, Geneviève, when I watched you turn from alive to dead right here in our house”). But that evening was always about pain, focused and clear, a communion of grief among a handful of strangers. A group which, incidentally, had counted Michelle Williams among their number—sitting behind the merch table, visibly moved.

Dawson’s next piece was an act of political protest, redirecting her anguish from personal pain to social upheaval:

Hands up, don’t shoot, I can’t breathe
Black lives matter, no justice no peace
I know that we can overcome because I had a dream
A dream we tore this racist broken system apart at the seams

As the crowd lifted in that chorus, I marveled at how much her show seemed to mimic an evolution of art in general. That if navel-gazing art about art had defined my youth, and raw directness (childish or adult) the past few years, the new normal was an earnest contradiction. A tone at odds with its message. A smile betrayed by its tears. Peppy singalongs about police brutality, fiery exhortations with a cotton candy sheen. I thought about Spike Lee, and his insistence on pulling the rug out from his own narrative; about Hannah Gadsby, and her refusal to release the tension she’d instilled. And it seemed to me, then, that we were in the middle of an inflection point, of some new collective stage of grief. Not from denial to anger to an eventual acceptance, but from artifice to authenticity to a dissonance that couldn’t, shouldn’t, resolve.

While Kimya strummed through the rest of her setlist, I felt all of these pieces begin to coalesce. In film, in music, in the culture writ large. I saw a through-line of tangled heartaches for which poetry offered no respite, an exodus of storytellers disillusioned with fiction but unsure of any alternate promised land. She sang about personal demons and the need to be valued—to be reminded of her own strength, her power, her lovability. She sang about friendship, contentedness, the beauty of little things. And she sang about a giant, standing on the edge of a cliff, wishing she were dead; about negating ourselves in service to some larger whole. A story which, I’d later learn, was given to her by a dear friend: cartoonist, musician, and late wife of Phil, Geneviève Castrée. The same voice which led one artist to such metaphorical heights would inspire another to forego metaphor entirely; Dawson’s dream of self negation versus Elverum’s gasping actualization, a giant rebuffed by an echo. Was there a unified message in this seeming incongruity? Or was that friction, itself, the point?

Scaling down: the quest for authenticity

All girls feel too big sometimes, regardless of their size
– Kimya Dawson, “I Like Giants” (2006)

I turned my head, I closed my eyes, I felt my size
– The Microphones, “I Felt My Size” (2001)

To help explain how my perception of art is changing, it’s useful to go back to the first medium that really gripped me. So while this essay is primarily about my current obsession, film, it’s going to take a detour into my former one: mid-90’s to mid-2000’s indie folk. (I know, I know. I hate the label too).

At the time I was musically coming of age, folk-adjacent movements were a dime a dozen. There were the largely meaningless umbrella headings of “alt country” or “indie folk,” connoting anything from the hushed vocals of Iron and Wine to the stomp-and-howl fire of Okkervil River, from the low-fi poetry of The Mountain Goats to the rich orchestral flourishes of Sufjan Stevens. Within that fold was the revivalist genre of “freak folk,” helmed by rising figures like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart. An homage to the psychedelic folk of the 60’s, theirs encouraged a more freewheeling style of expression: chants, whistles, Appalachian yelps. AJJ (then “Andrew Jackson Jihad”) were beginning to explore a different sort of chaos with their “folk punk” sound, brimming with manic, burn-it-down freneticism. Conor Oberst was composing delicate “emo folk” as Bright Eyes; David Thomas Broughton a haunting, layered “avant-folk”; the Decemberists a jaunty “baroque folk.” And then there was “anti-folk.”

None of this was set in stone, of course—these hip delineations were simply how I categorized the world at 15, back when enjoyment meant fandom and fandom meant, essentially, an enormous filing cabinet of intelligent-sounding labels. But from what I could gather, and what the name implied, anti-folk was inherently reactionary: much like punk’s relationship to 70’s stadium rock, it defined itself primarily by what it wasn’t. Popularized by The Moldy Peaches in the late 90’s—and catapulted into the Zeitgeist with the release of 2005’s Juno—it seemed to be a rebellion against overseriousness, against even a whiff of pretense. The music was simple, arguably to a fault: a ukulele noodling over two or three chords, tune…adjacent?…vocals, and kidspeak diction:

Here is the church and here is the steeple
We sure are cute for two ugly people
I don’t see what anyone can see
In anyone else but you
– The Moldy Peaches, “Anyone Else But You”

But where, exactly, had this rebellion come from? After all, the genre it stemmed from could hardly be called ostentatious: while the mid-2000’s would usher in more radio-friendly era, the indie scene of yore had minimalism in its blood. Its most mythic figures were often solo acts, performing under cryptic monikers and foregoing the trappings of mainstream appeal.

I counted Phil Elverum (The Microphones, Mount Eerie) among these figures, his The Glow Pt. 2 having reached a cultlike status in my corner of the world. Finding a Microphones LP in a used record store was the stuff of legend, akin to finding a Banksy mural in your neighborhood alleyway. Crafting layered soundscapes out of feedback whirring and plucked strings, his songs were simultaneously oblique and direct, with lyrics that rang as mystic confessions:

From high above you
I saw your earthling body wrapped in wool
The glow surrounds you
And when you breathed in, I felt the pull
– The Microphones, “The Pull”

If Phil had a soft spot for the occasional high concept, his peers intentionally eschewed them. Bill Callahan (Smog), for his part, was perfecting a much more traditional country sound—his brilliance was his brevity, wielded like a knife. Jaw-dropping beauty was found as often in the gaps as in the lyrics themselves, in the undercurrent of loneliness and sorrow:

Most of my fantasies are of making someone else come
Most of my fantasies are of to be of use
To be of some hard, simple, undeniable use
– Smog, “To Be Of Use”

Meanwhile, Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia, Magnolia Electric Co.) was navigating a more tortured route, pairing trembling wails with sparse accompaniment: a minor-key guitar riff, a whispered female vocal, or sometimes nothing but rickety percussion and desert wind. His was a music that lodged in your skull; that gnawed away at you, haunted:

Put no limits on the words
Simply to live, that is my plan
In a city that breaks us
I will say nothing
– Songs: Ohia, “No Limits On The Words”

Foretelling it all was Will Oldham (Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy), whose rugged aesthetic and allergy to interviews cast him in an almost monastic light. With a warbling voice, ramshackle arrangements, and stories that trafficked in the genre’s more depraved traditions, he was about as far from modern “rock star” as a performer could be. If anything his music felt like a ghost of Americana past: menacing and tender, mournful and hardened. Stripped away to its barest essentials, everything suddenly mattered. When his voice cracked, you felt a lifetime of heartbreak; when he barked like a dog, he barked cold gospel truth. His was a darkness which could revitalize Johnny Cash; a gnarled, prickly something which would attract filmmakers as diverse as John Sayles, Harmony Korine, Kelly Reichardt, and eventually David Lowery. But more on that later.

There is absence, there is lack
There are wolves here abound
You will miss me
When I turn around
When you have no one
No one can hurt you
– Palace Brothers, “You Will Miss Me When I Burn”

Suffice it to say, there was no shortage of simplicity. Certainly not in the music: the ghastly thumps of Oldham’s “Come a Little Dog” or Molina’s “Lightning Risked It All” make Dawson’s work sound damn near overproduced. Nor in the lyrics themselves: if these artists had anything in common, it was a knack for the understated, the terrifying beauty of the everyday word. No, what anti-folk rebelled against had less to do with art than with the aura that surrounded it—with me, in other words, and all my hyperbolic praise. It argued that folk didn’t need to devastate. It didn’t need to be shrouded in mystery, wrapped in generational darkness, “gorgeously” anything. Folk could be two people professing feelings with no agenda, not even a meta-agenda of appearing confessional, saying no more or less than what was meant. All girls feel too big sometimes. We sure are cute for two ugly people. It’s not as if I don’t like you, it just makes me sad. I miss you. I’m in love with how you feel. Why can’t you forgive me?

You’ll notice a lot of first-person pronouns there. Without a pretense to hide behind, the self inevitably took center stage. And what did the self of an artist worry about? Ephemerality. Its place in the universe. Its place, more specifically, in the musical landscape: was its contribution “huge,” or was it “a speck of dust”? Did any of this ultimately matter? Fellow anti-folkster Jeffrey Lewis put a finer point on it with his breathless epic Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror, chronicling a fantasy day-in-the-life of a struggling artist whose chance encounter with Will Oldham sends him down an existential spiral:

This quest for greatness, or at least hipness
Just a scam and too much trouble
But then, what makes one human being worthy of an easy ride?
Born to be a natural artist you love or hate but can’t deny
While us minions in our millions tumble into history’s chasm
We might have a couple of laughs but we’re still wastes of protoplasm

As art struggled to let go of outward posturing, it seemed the only direction left to reach for was inward. Pierce its own bubble, critique its own value. To my adolescent sensibilities, there could be no greater meaning than this: to self-analyze, to willfully implode. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman had blown my mind with Adaptation (2002), the film about the impossibility of making a film about a book about orchids—nature, blissfully apathetic, having created something more stirring than all layers of human invention. A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (2000) used the memoir format to prove the impossibility of memoirs, a sort of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem for honesty in storytelling. And David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” (2004) would remain a favorite of mine for years: an examination of the toxic reductiveness of overthinking, and—in a tour de force ending—the mental gymnastics required to convert a human being into a character. That Wallace himself chose to end his life only added to its allure—though I’d never have admitted it at the time. This was supposed to be about about rejecting mythologies, not constructing new ones.

The dam would eventually break in the music scene, and all that competing obsessiveness would relax into something more straightforward, loose. Molina and Oberst would both evolve from their tortured solo aesthetics into a more joyous, full-band sound. Dawson would cultivate a more constructive lightness, defined by advocacy and positive thought. And while Elverum would maintain a bit of that sartorial buffer, the whimsy and joy grew easier to spot. One of my favorites from this era, “Voice in the Headphones,” might also be the most straightforward of his career; a simple ode to the power of music.

Oldham, for his part, would soon invert that gloomy “hipness” Lewis had skewered, moving from tranquil (2006’s Then The Letting Go) to hopeful (2007’s Lie Down In The Light) to downright giddy (2008’s Beware!), and confounding fans in the process. When I finally saw him in 2010, the former Jandek-esque prophet was dancing in denim overalls at an outdoor bluegrass festival, ear-to-ear and banjo twanging. The next time I’d encounter him would be in the soundtrack of a Disney movie, David Lowery’s remake of Pete’s Dragon. And hearing him croon about dragons in magical forests would feel right somehow. Like something he’d been working at all along. The trajectory from inner darkness to childlike wonder, it turns out, is a short, straight line.

The mad that we feel: childlike simplicity

What protects us as kids slowly makes us insane
So I’m trying to dismantle barricades
Brick by brick in an attempt to set free my brain
– Kimya Dawson, “Daniel (Baby Boy)” (2014)

Hank: Maybe that’s just something the brain invents to survive.
Manny: Yeah. Like maybe your brain invented me to distract you from the fact that eventually your eyes are gonna stop blinking and your mouth will stop chewing and your blood will stop pumping and then you’re gonna shit yourself. And that’s it.
– Swiss Army Man (2016)

Since at least 2010, I’ve put together an annual Best Films Of The Year list. They’ve tended to be disjointed and, like any ranking, inherently personal. But in my 2016 recap, I wanted to try something different. Staring at my 10 or 15 chosen titles, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were collectively telling a story. Or rather, that they were attempts at answering similar questions: fragments of some national meditation or societal self-talk, a people reiterating basic truths for fear that they might slip.

Recently single and digging for profundity in just about anything, I was, of course, projecting. But I wasn’t the only one grasping for meaning: many in my generation, who had come of voting age during the first Obama election, were experiencing our first real taste of political despair. That fall of 2016 was, we’d hoped, the crest of a particularly ugly wave; of bitterness, xenophobia, fearmongering, bigotry. That wave had always existed to those who were paying attention, or who (be it by skin color, parentage, sexuality, religion) weren’t afforded the luxury of ignorance. But to those of us who were a bit more naive, more starry-eyed about national politics, it roared from a depth we hadn’t anticipated. It shattered something fundamental. Things I’d taken as bedrock truths, even formed an identity around—the power of empathy to change minds, the ability to reach consensus through good faith conversation, the inherent goodness of the majority if only it could be properly harnessed—had proven absurdly insufficient. Words failed, dramatically, in the face of whatever this was. And what was left in its wake wasn’t that old, Bush-era cynicism. It was confusion, shock, a prodding at the most basic of questions. Are we fundamentally good? Can we genuinely love? Is there any value left in honest conversation? Who, exactly, are we trying to be?

That yearning pulsed through the stories we told. Largely absent was the typical “clever” fare—the antihero we root for against our better judgement, the brash-talking cynic who triumphs over a bland status quo. Instead I saw a purity of feeling, often achingly direct; a collection of capital T Themes being mainlined into our collective psyche. All too often, our culture pits honesty against subtlety: when a work lays its messages bare, it’s seen as obvious, artless. So it’s fitting that many of the films that hit me hardest had been framed around explaining things to children—providing cover for a sincerity that might otherwise be rejected.

Some of these were literal children’s movies. Zootopia used animals to paint a dual picture of American society: here is how it ought to be, free of short-sighted divisions, and here is how it is, rooted in xenophobic fear. So did Pete’s Dragon confront grief and familial loss; so would Coco the need to anchor our identities in sturdier soil. Truths so simple, so obvious, yet capable of reducing a reviewer to tears. When Won’t You Be My Neighbor hit theatres this year, it finally rendered all of this subtext as text, showing how lessons ostensibly meant for children often ripple through society at large. It posits that children’s entertainment can serve as a form of therapy; that unadorned truths can pierce even a lifetime of hardness. Like Kimya to her Daniel, we dismantle barricades in the presence of Fred’s tiger, and there’s some catharsis in the sheer simplicity of his response. Rogers’ words to a 1969 Senate committee resound, today, like a political exhortation:

What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…
And nothing you do seems very right?
– Fred Rogers, featured in Won’t You Be My Neighbor

Other films, more explicitly aimed at adults, used a teacher/student framing device to present hard truths in a similarly childlike way. In Room, a young mother (“Ma”) teaches her son to survive via an ad hoc set of rules and rewards, her optimistic fictions barely veiling the turmoil within. And Swiss Army Man would take a similar concept to bizarre extremes, letting emotionally-stunted adults play the role of both student and teacher; crafting storybook lessons to navigate the awkward vagaries of 21st century life.

Perhaps most striking, though, was Manchester By The Sea, where the flaws of the teacher comprised their own lesson. Casey Affleck’s Lee knows more about suffering than just about anyone, but constructively coping isn’t a luxury he’s been afforded. So when his nephew, Patrick, loses his father, he can’t find much of value to say—neither platitudes like Rogers’ nor coping fantasies like Ma’s. Knowledge is imparted instead by osmosis; by the raw outbursts he allows his nephew to see. Here the needs are, interestingly, inverted: Patrick isn’t a wide-eyed child grasping for answers, he’s a teen who believes himself to be coping just fine. Lee is tasked with imparting a messier lesson—to let Patrick know that he isn’t fine, that none of us are. That grief was never meant to be easy or quick. As we watch Lee himself mourn, destructively, through Patrick’s eyes, empty reassurances thaw into something harder to name. It isn’t okay. It was never supposed to be.

This pattern would continue—is continuing—on plenty of fronts. Coming of age stories may be the most common vehicle for unsubtle communication, with many recent films featuring a seminal third act conversation between a young protagonist and an adult mentor, speaking with a candor they’d otherwise avoid. And sometimes the proxy isn’t a child at all, but an onscreen audience—free of all context and thereby a similarly blank slate². Regardless of the recipient, the outcome is the same: the unadorned expression of shared emotional truth. We crave these lessons not because they are new or surprising, but precisely because they are already known to us. Maybe by reiterating those answers that hide in plain sight, we can shake loose the dread that obscures them.

Words fail: unfiltered anguish

I am a container of stories about you
And I bring you up repeatedly, uninvited to
– Mount Eerie, “My Chasm” (2017)

Patrick: You can’t make small talk like every other grown-up in the world?
Lee: No.
– Manchester By The Sea (2016)

But answers are not always readily available. And narratives, even simple or childlike, can’t help but fill in the gaps—tilting earnest dialogue into rhetorical flights, imbuing silence with unearned profundity. When even understatement appears to be a brand or meta-statement, when the dialogue utterer can’t help but see the critic behind the camera, how can hard truths be authentically preserved?

A hunger for intimacy has always existed: what was all that tortured folk for, after all, if not to give some window into raw emotion? We’ve always yearned for the howling, the blood; we want to hear poetry borne of pain, but we also want the mic left on while the poet gets up from his chair. Yet in this lopsided post-election era, where all our accumulated words are dwarfed by baser forces, that hunger feels more manic, somehow. Anger, obsession, depression, hope—we’ve seen these torn apart and manipulated, reworked to sell products. We’ve become allergic to performative authenticity: even the act of crafting seems to dampen the blow. We gravitate, instead, towards a pain so natural—so overwhelming—it drowns out the craft.

My first real experience with this phenomenon came a few years prior in the music world. In my brusque rundown of the aughts’ indie scene, I left off a name that proved tough to pin down: Mark Kozelek. As frontman of the Red House Painters in the 90’s, he channeled a shimmering, downbeat sort of beauty. His was a mournfulness you could swim in. At the turn of the century he stripped down and went solo, aiming for a gentler, singer-songwriter ethos—a sound which he’d expand (under the moniker of Sun Kil Moon) into an earthy Americana. The sorrow was there, of course, but it took on a lush, romantic hue. Over the years, though, the hue started to shift. His songwriting would become increasingly more blunt, verbose, culminating in the release of 2014’s Benji.

Carissa was thirty-five
You don’t just raise two kids, take out your trash and die.

In the opening track, “Carissa,” Mark mourns the unexpected death of his second cousin. But rather than wrap it in poetry, he describes the event in near stream-of-consciousness detail: phone calls, travel plans, family histories. Rising to a chorus, he declares—with Will Oldham’s backing—the need “to find a deeper meaning in this senseless tragedy.” From there, the album dives headlong into mortality; not via abstract fictions, but the real deaths of people with names: the schoolchildren lost in the Sandy Hook massacre, an uncle lost in a fire, a childhood friend killed in an accident, and always, just below the surface, Carissa. What little artifice there had been (partitions between chorus and verse, discernible melody) seemed to erode as the album progressed: this was a man openly grieving, tearing down barricades between feeling and art.

Benji was as close a touchstone as I could find to Phil Elverum’s monumental A Crow Looked At Me. Recorded just months after his wife’s passing in the summer of 2016, it documents the mourning process in unbearable detail. I wrote a bit up top about its beauty and frankness. What I haven’t discussed, yet, is its daring refusal toward sentiment or closure. There is no wistful reflection to be found in Phil’s grieving, no light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel upswing. Even Mark’s quiet impulse to “find a deeper meaning” is absent, here. In his haunting opening lines, he instead denounces even the possibility of resolution:

Death is real
Someone’s there and then they’re not
And it’s not for singing about
It’s not for making into art
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb
When I walk into the room where you were
And look into the emptiness instead
All fails
My knees fail
My brain fails
Words fail

“It’s dumb,” he concludes, “and I don’t want to learn anything from this.” He proceeds to make good on that commitment, refusing to wrap his pain in a conceptual bow. On death as a natural counter to life: “I reject nature, I disagree.” On the philosophy of his earlier art: “Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about, back before I knew my way around these hospitals.” When confronted with a reminder of Geneviève: “Now I can only see you on the fridge in lifeless pictures.” When pondering the symbolism of a flower: “What could anything mean in this crushing absurdity?” There is no Candle In The Wind, here, no metaphorical living-on. He sings, instead, of “dried out, bloody, end-of-life tissues,” of “throwing out [her] underwear”; the banal realities of death standing as their own, unedited thing. If there’s any acknowledgment of universality—that grief might generalize beyond Elverum’s walls—it’s found in the final track. Here, like so many of us, he sees his sorrow mingle with post-election malaise:

Sweet kid, what is this world we’re giving you?
Smoldering and fascist with no mother?

One might imagine this vacuum of sentiment would make for an asphyxiating experience, but far from it: the album is a complex, emotional masterpiece. On first listen the sadness may have deafening; but as I grew more accustomed, more (is there any way to admit this?) numb to that primary emotion, others were amplified. Some seemed to mimic grief itself: bewilderment, release, contradictory warmth, inexplicable calm. Others mimicked precisely nothing, and remain elusive even as I write. It’s a work at once overwhelming and slippery, revealing different aspects of itself with each new listen. By eschewing one or two layers of authorial “meaning”, it appears Elverum was making room for something even deeper and more expressive: a grief preserved rather than a grief crafted, living on as its own multifaceted art³.

While Phil was recording his stages of grief, Kenneth Lonergan was exploring two different strains. Lee’s “teaching” of grief in Manchester By The Sea has already been discussed, guiding his nephew through the highs and lows of familial loss. What I haven’t addressed is Lee’s reaction to his own trauma—the terrible history he shares with his ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams), undergirding much of the film. Where Patrick’s loss can bear scrutiny, even dark comedy, Lee’s loss—the unexpected tragedy that tore his family apart—remains largely unutterable. Why voice it, when there’s nothing to learn? He instead directs his pain inward, a container of stories that will never unseal. Randi, for her part, isn’t even granted an onscreen silence: but for a few searing emotional outbursts, her grieving process is left entirely to our imagination. And when we, the audience, are finally privy to their shared memory, there is no redemption in sight: a third act conversation between Affleck and Williams provides none of the relief we’ve been conditioned to expect. Instead it’s fragmented, haunted—a scream of absence, saying nothing.

Others would examine this haunting in more literal ways⁴. In A Ghost Story, Casey Affleck returns to an even more reclusive state of sorrow. Here he is not the bereaved survivor left to mourn alone, but the voiceless object of mourning itself—a literal ghost, behind white sheet and eye-holes, doomed to watch the world’s inevitable forgetting. Neither he nor his wife (Rooney Mara) are even granted names: death is the only substance, here, all else is translucent. When his sudden passing leaves Mara paralyzed and alone, we long for even the clarity of a Lee-style outburst. Instead there is only numb routine. We watch her in silence from across the room: collapsed on the kitchen floor, soaking a bedroom pillow, doing chores for no one. For four unbroken minutes, we watch her eat an entire pie, hunger giving way to desperation giving way to a violent need to feel. There’s no resolution to their story. We’re granted no closure. Mara leaves, eventually, and Affleck’s nameless ghost remains, tethered to the plot of land as it continues without him. Buildings are torn down and erected. Tenants come and go. In one of the only moments of sustained dialogue in the film, Will Oldham appears as a mysterious partygoer. Gone is the lightness that propelled him across the stage; gone too any hint of childlike joy. He instead gives a lengthy, depressing speech about the end of universe, prognosticating at no one in particular with what Wallace might call “that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer.”

Oldham muses about the impermanence of all things, artistic or otherwise—how despite all striving and noble intention, everything we create will eventually dissipate. Entropy will always win. All symphonies will go unheard; all books will go unread. “Everything that ever made you feel good or stand up tall…it’ll all go.” Or, as Jeffrey Lewis once put it to him, “We might have a couple laughs, but we’re still wastes of protoplasm.” In another film, or another era, this might come across as David Lowery’s clumsy attempt at profundity—some self-satisfied commentary about the futility of art itself. Here it feels jarring, intentionally deflated. The heat death of the universe, the ethereal nature of art? It only amounts to conceptual emptiness. Real death has entered the house, heavy and sheet-clad, and all lofty hypotheticals now feel utterly besides the point. Feel dumb. No, the truth isn’t found in some sermon on endgames, it’s found in the gasping here and now: a longing between the walls which no theory can account for and no moral can sanctify.

This tension: authentic contradiction

Open your fucking eyes now and look, and see.
You might think you know what’s happening,
But you don’t feel it like we do
To feel it it has to be you, cut you
But you don’t know what the cut do
You all reflex, but when reflux bleeds the gut
Then you see the faces
Leave the vases
…
I am both pictures!
See both pictures!
– Collin, Blindspotting (2018)

And this tension, it’s yours. I am not helping you anymore. You need to learn what this feels like.
– Hannah Gadsby, Nannette (2018)

There’s a purity in much of what I’ve covered here: unfiltered outbursts, deafening silence. While they don’t offer conclusions in the traditional sense, they come with a clarity of feeling that’s nearly as satisfying. Clean, unmuddied grief often serves as its own answer.

Real world grief, however, is rarely so elegant. And guilt-free pain is only the exception that proves the rule. All too often, our hurt is tangled in something uglier, more self-serving. For every spurned lover seeking a second chance, there’s another whose agency is being actively undermined; behind every tragedy in search of a villain lies a symmetric tragedy about the depths to which one can fall. We mistake narcissism for nuance; we perform our trauma for social capital. While we mourn the rise of overt bigotry into politics, a quiet voice reminds us that it has always been present—that our flimsy shock is, if anything, a primary contributor to its persistence. We decry abuses of power and rally for change, till those we’ve rallied behind are powerful enough to fail us. We’ve seen our lamentations amplified to drown out other voices; watched our fears weaponized, laser-focused and exploited. We’ve learned that empathy can fuel inertia just as easily as its absence fuels backwards motion. The more we listen, it seems, the more complicated our allegiances become. And as the year progresses—from Kaepernick to Kavanaugh—that need to listen has only become more urgent.

By contrast, there’s a whiff of one-sidedness to most of the fictions I’ve offered so far. Consider, one last time, Manchester By The Sea. By zeroing in on the pain absorbed by our protagonist, I’ve turned a blind eye to the hurt he radiates outward. Because behind the complex antihero narrative lives a complementary truth; that Lee was not the only casualty of his temper. That Randi, left to suffer in isolation, may well trace a more meaningful arc. Despite enduring the same hell, she did not crawl inward: she fell to Lee’s depths and climbed up alone, even to the point of impossible forgiveness. She, in a broader sense, is the film’s silent hero—and Lee a frequent source of her pain. It’s difficult not to let current events further color this picture. On one side is Michelle Williams, sufferer of both public losses and private injustice—recipient of Weinstein’s unwanted advances, leading two recent films mired by the behavior of abusive male costars. Rather than retreat, she has come back swinging: a vocal advocate for equal pay in Hollywood, Williams also walked this year’s red carpet with #MeToo founder Tarana Burke. On the other side is Affleck, facing credible accusations of sexual harassment. Still quietly equivocating, still clutching that Oscar.

Broader considerations complicate our stories, particularly where gender roles are concerned. Looking at many of the films I’ve heaped praise on, it’s hard not to see an unflattering dual: the woman-as-object to our unrequited lover, the abusive fruits of our “brave” vulnerability. (Some, to their credit, welcome this criticism: see The Big Sick and Swiss Army Man⁵). And going down the list of musicians I’ve idolized, I see a pattern which (at its most generous) rhymes: Oldham, Callahan, Molina, Kozelek—all brilliant, brooding, white, male. Each with a handful of songs that strike me as deeply uncomfortable under a modern lens—stories of rage, obsession, of a love and violence inextricably entwined. So too with Charlie Kaufman and the protagonists made in his image, whose neuroticisms so often leave emotional abuses in their wake. Much more so with David Foster Wallace and his real-life harassment of Mary Karr. The list, I am sure, goes depressingly on⁶.

Early in his career, Oldham offered a simple theory: “when you have no one, no one can hurt you.” But there are more ramifications of a man being an island. When you have no one, no one can help you. When you have no one, no one can teach you. When you have no one, no one can stop you. And if we are in need of anything, in 2018, it’s some collective form of balance. A broader social awareness, to check our baser impulses and widen our blinders, before we self destruct.

Perhaps the most elegant formulation of this need came in Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, the self-fashioned comedy special about quitting comedy. From the moment it begins, her set is an evisceration of the struggling artist mythos—as fueled by fellow comedians like Louis C.K.—and of single-perspective narrative in general. But hers is a work argued primarily via contradiction: an exercise in building, then demolishing, structurally viable points of view.

After priming the audience with a self-deprecating joke, Gadsby eases into a conversation about art history. She then employs a looping pattern, iteratively revisiting both subjects (humor and art) to color their meanings. We’re asked to consider her original “joke,” a story about a man confronting her at a bar. It had two components: a synthetic tension handed to the audience, and a moment of subversion which released it. The moment we accept this formulation, though, Gadsby circles back to undermine it, providing broader social context (of her own upbringing in Tasmania and the homophobia that surrounded it) that dampens the instance’s specific release—a small chuckle might temper anecdotal bigotry, but it has no firepower against society at large. Moments later she contradicts the story entirely, replacing the original ending with a horrific tale of violence and abuse—not only muting our laughter, but effectively damning it. Even that condemnation, though, is yet again re-examined and critiqued, as Gadsby confesses that her anger, while ostensibly more honest, is no more constructive than the original joke; that by denying us a punchline, she has only replaced one misleading force with another:

But this is why I must quit comedy, because the only way I can tell my truth and put tension in the room is with anger. And I am angry, and I believe I’ve got every right to be angry, but what I don’t have a right to do is to spread anger. I don’t. Because anger, just like laughter, can connect a room of strangers like nothing else. But anger, even if it’s connected to laughter, will not relieve tension because anger is a tension. It is a toxic, infectious tension. And it knows no other purpose than to spread blind hatred, and I want no part of it, because I take my freedom of speech as a responsibility, and just because I can position myself as a victim does not make my anger constructive. It never is constructive.

Her discussion of art history traces a similarly loopy arc. The traditional narrative of Van Gogh’s genius—a “tortured artist” whose creativity stemmed from mental illness—is immediately undercut by competing factors. We’re told to imagine that his medication, not his illness, was the real genesis of his creation. But no sooner have we granted this premise than she’s flipped it on its head: perhaps his story is about neither symptom nor cure, but about human connection at large. So with Picasso: a joking take-down of his simultaneous perspective technique morphs into a searing indictment of his sexual abuses, only to loop back again to the notion that he was right, metaphorically speaking, about broadening our scope.

Gadsby’s vulnerability is what lends Nanette its resonance. But what gives it longevity is her masterful construction. While her story only raises questions—does not, in her parlance, release any tension—her manner of telling hints at its own solution. The viewer may note that there is no clean thesis at the end of her monologue, or at least none that holds up in the context of repeat performance. Because the truth is that Gadsby did not, in fact, quit comedy at all. She continues, night after night, to both make people laugh and lament the failure of laughter; to give voice to outrage then denounce the tension it brings; to spread one victim’s point of view and know that it is not toxic, that it can be immensely constructive. She presents multiple views not only of the same event, but of her own presentation—leveraging self-criticism as both inoculant and weapon. She has, quite intentionally, fulfilled Picasso’s original goal. She has painted from multiple viewpoints at once.

How can we communicate conflicting feelings? How can we tear down our idols (be they Picasso or C.K.) while both learning from their impact and reiterating their indictment? How can we authentically voice our deepest anxieties—our childlike uncertainty, our adult anguish—without putting them on a pedestal and steamrolling others in our orbit? Revel in cognitive dissonance. Present the contradiction. Give the audience the tension⁷.

When it comes to the subject of race in America, tension is virtually inevitable. Particularly for a person of color who wishes to speak truth to a mainstream audience. For here, the issue is not primarily past trauma but perpetual harm; a message tailored to an audience complicit in its own suppression. So it’s fitting that many who thrive in this medium do so by subverting the audience’s expectations. The summer of 2018 in particular has seen the release of multiple works by black auteurs which leverage tonal dissonance as a means of expression, presenting as upbeat on first inspection only to burst into something visceral and indicting⁸. Here, I’ll focus on two examples: Blindspotting and BlacKkKlansman. In one, dissonance is an explicit theme, meant to be wrestled with and unpacked on screen. In the other, it’s somehow both more and less present: an uneasy subcurrent, and a concealed weapon.

Blindspotting personalizes the concept of clashing perspectives, arguing that a black man in America might experience one situation in multiple, conflicting ways. Daveed Diggs’ Collin longs to glide through life with an easy smile, but he can’t drown out the reality of gunshots—that police threat which, at any moment, might turn an innocent night out into Channel 5 news. He likens his predicament to Rubin’s figure-ground vase illusion, in which an observer will see either a light vase or two dark silhouettes depending on their choice of focus: each interpretation can only exist when the other disappears, yet any accurate description requires acknowledgement of both. Conflicting interpretations haunt everything in Collin’s world. His ex, Val, might be the only person who truly sees his goodness, but she also can’t unsee his lone moment of rage. He prides himself in being “bigger” than his anger, but he’s haunted by that anger wherever he goes. He laments the granola gentrification of Oakland, but he also (if he’s honest) likes the overpriced juice. As we criss-cross between lighthearted figure and somber ground, we’re thrust into a similarly dissonant headspace. When Collin points a gun at a murderous police officer’s head, we feel the visceral thrill of revenge; when he chooses to walk away, we feel the catharsis of letting it go. Our leads don’t ultimately choose a side, nor do they offer any conclusive reprieve. They instead exist in a superposition of states: of calm and storm, peacefulness and riot. A late act conversation explores this tension:

Collin: What did you come up with for the double picture one, the face and the vase one?
Val: Oh I liked that one, it was “blindspotting”
Collin: Why “blindspotting?”
Val: ‘Cause it’s all about how you can look at something, and there can be another thing there that you aren’t seeing, so you’ve got a blind spot.
Collin: But, if somebody points out the other picture to you, doesn’t that make it not a blind spot anymore?
Val: No, because you can’t go against what your brain wants to see first. Unless you spend the time to retrain your brain, which is hella hard. So you’re always going to be instinctually blind to the spot you aren’t seeing…
[silence]
Val: Collin?
Collin: When you look at me now, do you always see the fight first?

Perhaps more controversial is BlacKkKlansman. For the bulk of the runtime, Spike Lee’s film—a retelling of a 1970’s infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan by a black police officer—offers only the barest hint of conflict. Ron Stallworth, the officer in charge of the sting, sees little or no contradiction between his service on the force and his self-described desire for “the liberation of black people.” And he is, quite frankly, given little reason to change that: his targets are uncomplicated, bumbling racists; his peers on the force are generally decent, even heroic, save for a single, cartoonish lone wolf. His activist girlfriend might argue that he’s living a lie, that he “can’t change a corrupt system from inside.” But all signs in this fable point to the contrary.

Until the film’s final moments, when reality rears its head. After our characters achieve their inevitable victory, Lee fast-forwards four decades to modern day America. We learn that the events of the film haven’t put a dent in the true enemy; that white supremacism has not only continued, but thrived. Former caricatures are now prominent politicians. Phrases that had seemed ludicrous in Ron’s story—tirades so vile they’d bordered on comedic—are now being chanted with palpable menace. We witness the tragic events of Charlottesville through unflinching documentary footage: tiki-torched marchers, passionate counter-protesters, screeching tires, devastation. Here there is no narrative cushion, no calming retreat back into the world of fiction. Only an upside-down flag and a jarring cut to black.

Critics have argued over Lee’s true intentions—in particular, whether he is being direct or subversive in his improbably rosy take on American policing. And for a filmmaker this didactic, that context certainly matters. But I felt he was carving a third path, neither ironic nor earnest—face or vase. Rather, that he was giving voice to the lost narratives he longs to return to: the uncomplicated rights and wrongs that 70’s television had promised and society had forcefully ripped away. Good Cop Saves The Day, Bad Cop Is Taken Down By His Noble Peers, Black And White Partner Forge A Perfect Alliance™ . Today more than ever, we recognize that these technicolored fictions can’t peacefully coexist—that change can’t come from within a broken system, that “good men” don’t willingly prop up hateful peers. But there’s a reason they’ve survived this long. It feels good to take these myths for a spin; to milk one limited perspective for every ounce of hope it’s worth. So Lee gives us both, the easy triumph we wish we could have and the crushing reality that renders it impossible. He lets that whiplash speak for itself; lets our tension be its own conclusion.

Conclusion: clear and metaphor-free

Freddie, Alton, Oscar, Walter, Eric, and Stephon
Philando, Sam, Tamir and Terence, Michael, Sandra, Sean
A story never told becomes a story dead and gone
Together we can make a space where all these names live on.
– Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, spoken word performance (2018)

That’s where you live now
Or at least that’s where I hold you
And we’re still here without you
Sleeping and the sun’s coming up
In the ruins of our household, we wake up again
Mount Eerie, “Crow, Pt. 2” (2018)

In writing this, I’ve attempted to turn a wave of independent voices into a unified story about the culture at large: tracing a dramatic arc from artifice to simplicity to vulnerability to contradiction, and tenuously stacking it beside current events. As we’ve seen, though, the world can’t be compressed into a single perspective. The truth is that art isn’t a wave, it’s a roaring rapid, with forces pulling in every conceivable direction. Upon sober reflection, the art-about-art trend of my youth was neither groundbreaking nor temporary, and the open-wound vulnerability of the Trump years has echoed throughout history. Who can listen to Otis Redding and not hear pangs of generational grief? What defines the golden age of hip hop, if not its insistence on brazen emotional truths? Direct, searing art has always existed, and the pain it mirrors is often political—be it Civil Rights anguish, Tough On Crime oppression, existential terror in times of war, or existential dread in times of peace.

Everything is cyclical: for every bleeding poet who trades melancholy for lightness, ten blistering tragi-heroes will take her place. Even the presentation of contradictions in place of a cohesive narrative, the thing that felt so present, so 2018, has been handed down through generations. Call it Vonnegut’s postmodernism or Wallace’s New Sincerity, we are always seeking some self-referential authenticity—some means of forwarding conflict directly to the audience. Toni Morrison wasn’t mourning the rise of the alt-right when she wrote her cacophonic masterpiece; neither was Zadie Smith imagining Daveed Diggs’ Oakland when she penned her own paradoxical debut⁹. And we don’t even need to venture beyond Spike’s own oeuvre to find the same devastating formula he employed with BlacKkKlansman—an upbeat tone unmoored by its explosive denouement. If anything, that tension is what launched his career.

Maybe it’s fairer to say, then, that the story has never really been about artistic progress, but rather about cultural receptiveness. My own receptiveness, to be more specific. My tolerance for hipness weakening with each passing political reality, my knee-jerk love of the “sincere” and “vulnerable” giving way to martyr worship and toppled altars, only to land exactly where Dawson began: the realization that our ultimate goal should be empathy, advocacy, community. “Should be to figure out our role within the context of the whole.” Artists have been shouting this in every medium, through countless “modern” trends. But it’s only now, after years of self-imposed distortion, that I’m able to hear them clearly.

Now that I do hear them, what is there to learn? When all roads lead to artifice but realism only undermines the truth, how do we honestly participate in that communion? Phil Elverum offers a glimpse of a third path. In his latest EP, Now Only, he continues to meditate on the passing of Geneviève with the same intense clarity. But absent is the paralysis of grief that haunted his previous work; that honesty so potent it threatened to blot out the sun. Instead, he intentionally muddies the waters. He considers how his life has persisted nonetheless; how those songs were not the end of anything, despite their air of logical finality. He wonders at the irony of going to a music festival, “to play these death songs to a bunch of young people on drugs” while acknowledging the limits of his sorrow, as “these waves hit less frequently” and grief “becomes calcified, frozen in stories.” And he recognizes that while life is “absurd” in the wake of this loss, it is no less vital for that absurdity. Camus would surely agree: what matters isn’t the goal but the fact of a goal, the “now only” of our irrational striving. A substance that is neither meaning nor its cynical absence. In his 10-minute epic “Distortion,” Phil paints a picture of the universe that’s eerily reminiscent to Oldham’s vision in A Ghost Story. But this time, his narrative retains its emotional tether. We may well crumble and vanish in some vast future bleakness, but the present is vibrant and gleaming:

I keep you breathing through my lungs
In a constant uncomfortable stream of memories trailing out
Until I am dead too
And then eventually the people who remember me will also die
Containing what it was like to stand in the same air with me
And breathe and wonder why
And then distortion
And then the silence of space
The Night Palace
The ocean blurring
But in my tears right now
Light gleams

In last year’s “songs about the echo,” Elverum had insisted that there was “nothing to learn”; that “conceptual emptiness” was powerless in the face of actual death. Yet far from ringing hollow, his earlier concepts strike me, today, as prophetic. This one in particular: “Lost wisdom is a quiet echo on loud wind¹⁰.” Despite the muffling gusts of heartache, he continues to tease out hidden meanings; to make more expansive art, to impart some shapeless wisdom on his listeners. Even to embrace that Sisyphean paradox, of opening himself back up to love. This summer, headlines revealed that a secret wedding had taken place among close friends and family: Phil had gotten remarried. His new bride? Michelle Williams.

Hackneyed narratives abound, here, and yet I can’t help but proffer my own—that honest despair might deepen, rather than subsume, the hope that belies it. That inbound trains are for building as well as discarding, and even disproved mountains can be gorgeous on second ascent.

So, for lack of conclusions, I’ll end where I began. In those gap years, when I was so infatuated with conscious artistry I’d lost sight of meaning, Kimya Dawson was busy speaking truths that mattered. Even—especially—when those truths seemed contradictory. To close out her Chapel set, she played one final song that lodged in my skull: an understated anthem, in my memory, of self-love and acceptance. But what I’d heard, it turns out, was only half the story. In The Uncluded’s “Teleprompters,” Dawson and Aesop Rock trade alternating fears about modern day living—and alternating mechanisms for coping nonetheless. To Dawson, the fear is in the noise: external stimuli which would shame or confuse. Her peace comes, instead, from a childhood coping mechanism; a curated inner monologue that would feel right at home alongside Rogers’ Senate recitation. To Aesop, the monologue is the sickness rather than the cure, fraught with anxiety and unsolvable social concerns. Far from silencing competing external factors, he finds solace in amplifying them, in letting communal uncertainties drown out the dread:

Kimya:
I preach self-love, I know it’s true
It’s easier to say than do
I sing these messages to you
But now I need to hear them too
I am beautiful
I am powerful
I am strong
And I am lovable

Aesop:
Big dummy dig a hole in the dirt
He put his head in the hole; he is alone in this world
And dying slowly from the comfort of his home full of worms
Until you hear a little voice say “Let’s go get dessert”
Wait, what?
“You need to get out more”

And clocking in some 10,000 words, I think that’s one conclusion I can safely draw: I do need to get out more. Out of this piece, these grief-tinted glasses and the seemingly blinding political glare that forced them on, my swirling cauldron of half-connected concepts that I know can’t distill with one tenth the clarity of a strummed ukulele and mention of giants—lived-in wisdom echoed through chapel roof and disco ball for an ad hoc congregation of cross-legged strangers, exiled from the past, uncertain of the future, betrayed by sincerity and sickened by cynicism, rapt, unmoored, indivisibly plural, knowing nothing sturdy or resolvable or total but a gleamingly cacophonous Now.

---

Acknowledgements

This essay has been gnawing at me for longer than I’d care to admit; morphing from a 2am iMessage rant to a string of beer-soaked conversations to a handful of drafts written in manic flight-and-hotel-room bursts for an audience I still haven’t quite defined. I doubt I ever would have hit the “post” button if not for some wonderfully patient people.

Chris, Jamie, Dylan, and Foh; for talking through my early post-concert ramblings and helping them start to take shape. Those (almost certainly annoying) conversations are the reason this exists. Randy, Julius, and Jake; for reading early drafts and giving valuable feedback about what was working, what wasn’t. Niels, for powering through a version of this that was somehow 50% longer (and 200% more reference-heavy) than the present monster, and helping to steer it towards something with a fighting chance of legibility. Whether I’ve succeeded on that last point is highly debatable, but know that I am personally far happier with the finished work as a result of your generosity. Daniel, for criticizing just about everything while encouraging me to post it anyway. Fuck the reviews, love the reviewers. And finally, Joanna, for continually encouraging me to write, even when it didn’t make a lick of sense. I love you, and I’m sorry in advance for the next one of these you’ll have to indulge in three, two, one…

I knew them as The Bad Kids. Huddled around the stairs in the back of the chapel, taking turns doing flips off some precarious ledge. Long matted hair over scratches and acne; Converse, army jacket, tattered jeans. Popular in a narrow sense — within certain circles, to a “certain sort” of girl. Hints of a rocky home life: her laminated smile at the parent teacher conference, the truck’s don’t-make-me-ask-twice idling out front, an older sibling that looks vaguely stretched out or hollowed. Aggressive but never threatening. Crass but never cruel. Under a teacher’s stare: disingenuous “yes sir”s, side-eyes and snickers, hands in back pockets waiting out the clock. Out of earshot: brown paper bags with mysterious contents, punches and shattered glass. Sexual references I was too prudish to get, cueing laughs that would strain into gurgly. “Gay” and “emo” hurled as insults, and yet: skinny dips, Tom DeLonge, nut punches, wrestling, sweaty yell-sung anthems and acoustic power chords. Both hard and not hard, “cool” until suddenly not. There was something pure and unselfconscious in their messiness; a bond that, while temporary and conditional, bridged traditional faultlines more deftly than most. Class and ethnicity, machismo and charisma, looks, temperament, academic success — wasn’t it all just a canvas for bruising?

Many incredible slice-of-life films have been devoted to rowdy youth: think Andrea Arnold, Harmony Korine. They function for me as anthropological studies, burrowing into a specific chaos I know nothing about to reveal something universal and potent. What strikes me about Mid90’s and Minding the Gap, though, is how authentically they dissect subjects I’m both versed in and stacked with baggage against. And how well they force me to find beauty despite it. Like a skateboard-related metaphor I’m too dweeby to come up with, they catapult from familiar ground to searing emotional heights in one fluid motion, tilting my perspective on the upswing. They guide me away from detached observation, to an empathy I didn’t know I had.

Both films leverage similar material (a small group of male skateboarders with best-left-unmentioned family lives) to prod at similar themes (cycles of abuse, repression, breaking free). But they veer apart in interesting, complementary ways. Jonah Hill’s directorial debut Mid90’s (4/5) is a quite good movie about the day-to-day grind: moments of wordless connection or sudden calamity, and the way some inciting event (tiny or grand) can bring the former crashing into the latter. To use his words, it’s a “jagged” movie, and the abrasive way it tumbles between moods (keenly observed details, first-film-going-way-too-big dramatic arcs) speaks volumes about the headspace of its leads: what drives them, and what they’re trying to expel with all that flailing. If it’s about the present “why”, Minding the Gap (5/5) is about the “what next”: what will they tear up when a knee doesn’t cut it? Bing Liu’s documentary follows three friends (himself included) who, having skated together as teenagers, feel their 20something lives start to diverge. All saw skateboarding as a means of escape, having been hurt in similar ways. But their choices — how they grow up and respond to past trauma — couldn’t be more different: one tries to isolate it, one learns to contextualize it, and one finds himself paying it terribly forward. It’s tempting to compare this to the Up documentary series, but that doesn’t do justice to its sheer presence. This is a film that requires extraordinary emotional balance — refusing to demonize or excuse its subjects — and makes it seem weightless, natural. It’s gorgeous, and human, and breathtaking in scope, and to say any more would only dull it.

Now I keep coming back to The Bad Kids. What sharpened them? Did they ever sand it down? What about me and my own jagged edges — my casual cruelties, sense of superiority, ownership — cushioned by skin-deep piety? Outside: disingenuous “love the sinner”s, bowed eyes, judging. Inside: air punches and shattered glass. At least the rowdy ones had the courage to make it literal. With the camera pointed at the front of the chapel, maybe my own ugly is even harder to root for. Or maybe it’s just another tilted perspective, waiting to be sanctified by a similarly neat trick. We all had our chaos to deal with. Some of us waited for years to unpack it. Others scraped it against metal to see if it would spark.

Chris and I get a little nostalgic, but I really enjoyed recording this episode of the podcast.

If Beale Street Could Talk is beautiful in style and substance — but those two types of beauty (Jenkins’ claustrophobic intimacy, Baldwin’s universal prose) sometimes make for an odd pairing. It has that distinct brand of theatricality that comes from a director smitten by source material; a golden-hour shimmering that makes even the rawest outburst feel buffered by glass. As an adaptation it’s excellent, relishing in James Baldwin’s dialogue and giving his ideas room to breathe. As an essay on the black experience it’s scorching — and has never been more sadly relevant. But as a Barry Jenkins film, it didn’t hit me with the force I’d expected, lacking both the exposed nerve of Medicine for Melancholy and the delicate specificity of Moonlight. It felt, instead, like Moonlight’s third act stretched to feature length: a fluid conversation piece, bathed in gorgeous yellow and blue, between old friends in need of unburdening. With Chiron, each furtive glance contained multitudes; variations on a tune he’d been playing for a lifetime. Here, though, a lifetime is just one of many key signatures: there’s a Tish, Fonny, and Beale Street to be heard in every town, if we’d abstract incidentals and listen. I just wish the film had let me live in their particular melody a bit longer, and spent less time on conscious transposition.

Chris and I talk Beale Street, Waking Life, and that bizarre Mill Valley Film Festival Q&A in Episode 522 of The Spoiler Warning Podcast

Critics are often derided as joyless, and not without reason — browse any Best Of list and you’re liable to find a deluge of somber dramas, with one lone comedy (ideally “biting”, rarely fun) thrown in for good measure. But I’d argue this isn’t the whole story; or at least that, in the age of Trump, it’s rapidly changing. What critics are really craving is purity, mostness — and while “most profound” and “heartfelt” are still the prized orchids, there’s demand for all manner of bloom. In 2018 alone: Mission Impossible Fallout is heralded as the most audacious, stunt-driven; Blockers the most delightfully raunchy; Black Panther the most ambitiously Marvel-ous; Won’t You Be My Neighbor the most happy-sad, simple; Paddington 2 the most tender, heart-melting. Even Mamma Mia 2 is winning some critical love: yes it’s silly, the headlines grant, but it’s *proudly silly, exuberantly so. In the war against dourness and national malaise, we’ve realized that late night cynicism only has so much firepower. Sometimes we need to bring out the big guns. Sometimes we need Swedish pop music. On an island. With Cher.

I’ve yet to see Meryl’s latest, but I’m calling it early. Crazy Rich Asians is my Mamma Mia: the big, spectacle-driven rom com that wears its predictability on its sleeve, using well-worn tropes as narrative scaffolding to support a charismatic-as-hell cast, a glamorous shooting location, plenty of razzle dazzle and a killer soundtrack to boot. And it addresses similar questions (what are the limits of family, for one) in vivid, new contexts. To juggle all this while also holding the distinction of being the first Hollywood film with an Asian-majority cast in 25 (!) years — and to not only bear that pressure but thrive in it, wear it effortlessly? Well, that’s cause for everyone to pop the trunk, throw on something fancy, and hit the dance floor.

Which isn’t to say this is a perfect movie, or even a particularly piercing one. If anything, it’s the flaws that make it so nostalgic, so guiltily fun: be it trying-on-the-dress montage or airplane confession, a rowdy BFF with a third act pep talk or a male lead with all the intrigue and expressiveness of a cologne-scented body pillow, this bears every hallmark of a vintage, Wedding Singer-era rom com. With the requisite highs and lows that come with it. But for every obvious plot device or stock character, there are two more compelling ones waiting in the wings: Michelle Yeoh and Gemma Chan ooze scene-stealing intensity, and aforementioned BFF Awkwafina does enough heavy lifting to warrant her own spin-off. Even the trope-ier side characters give it their all, with Ken Jeong and Jimmy O. Yang bringing the zany, Nico Santos the fabulous, and Chris Pang the abs. (Did I say that last part out loud?) Holding together the absurdly large cast is the wonderful Constance Wu. She has multiple hats to wear, here, and she balances them deftly: empathetic audience surrogate, grounded straight man, comic foil, dramatic lead. She’s a generous team player who knows when to yield the floor and when to let her particularities shine. 

As a rom com alone, this is well above average. As a meta-rebuke to Hollywood “conventional wisdom”, it’s a slam dunk. One can rightly question whether the premise (a comedy about the ultra wealthy, set in a country reeling from classist divisions) brings up more problems than it solves, or whether it genuinely represents the Asian community at large (counter question: why hold it to that standard?). But there can be no questioning the death blow it deals to industry cop-outs regarding “marketability” or “talent pool size.” Scrolling through the IMDB list, I see 20+ memorable stars-in-waiting, with as diverse a range as any recent blockbuster of note. If Hollywood has a lick of sense, this won’t be the last we see of them.

Chris and I talk romantic conventions, my personal nostalgia for the Singapore Skyline, and Hollywood’s apparent conflation of university lectures and TED talks in this week’s episode of The Spoiler Warning Podcast.

In my review of Sicario, I praised its style but found huge faults with its substance. Namely its reckless use of real-world trauma, without a clear point of view to back it up: “Crossing lines is easy. The border between mood-building and sadism — between calls to arms and empty protest — is a point.”

Day of the Soldado only solidifies what that film’s second act, and Taylor Sheridan’s mortifying post-Hell Or High Water Drafthouse Q&A (wherein he drunkenly explained “the actual problems” of race in America) hinted at: that the critically beloved screenwriter knows the cadence of profundity and outrage, but he doesn’t have a clue what it means. Fire and fury, meet nothing. Nothing, meet a shit ton of fire.

Soldado reminds me of everything that’s gross about Game of Thrones, minus everything that makes it so compelling. Gone is any palace intrigue, any clever game of political chess or stirring character moment before the mayhem. Depravity is the only thing we have room for in this universe. Forget mystery; it’s nihilism wrapped in nihilism shrouded in nihilism. It’s Benicio del Toro shooting a man in the head so we can watch his blood splatter on a teenage girl’s face. It’s Josh Brolin air-striking a Somalian smuggler’s family just to look hard. It’s a bearded border crosser shouting in Arabic, then exploding in full view of the camera; it’s that same scene played out three more times in the presence of mothers and children, literally seconds later. Oh, to be sure, it will turn the tables on all of this — it’s the government, man, it’s a metaphor for our own xenophobia, bro, it’s about antiheroes and us being our own worst enemies, sheeple — but all I see is a gaping black hole where a point was supposed to be.

It builds dread. It ramps up the stakes. It is, at times, genuinely thrilling. But thrill alone doesn’t edify. Shock alone doesn’t make you brave. And while everything is technically fair use in art — no image too vile, no current event too fresh — if you’re going to reach for weapons this potent (and timely) you’d better be goddamn sure you know how to aim them. At best, Soldado doesn’t care where it’s aiming. At worst, it’s knowingly aiming them in the wrong direction. No respect for this one.

Chris, Carson, and I debate the relative merits of the Sicario universe in Episode 506:

For a week or two now I’ve been toying with an idea for a long-form essay, about The Perils Of Being “Technically Right.” I’d been seeing a trend in various patterns of thought—Men’s Rights Activism, extreme libertarianism, certain theological movements—and felt that, on some level, they were all manifestations of the same problem. Timely, maybe. Not urgent.

Maybe I’ll write that one someday. But the news of the past week—namely, the morally indefensible separation of children from parents as a deterrent for border crossing—added a new sense of urgency. Not because I’m somehow shocked the administration would attempt it: it’s been obvious that our president, and in particular my namesake on his staff, has absolutely no shame on such matters. But because people I know, compassionate men and women with children of their own, feel compelled to play Devil’s Advocate on the administration’s behalf. I think Stephen Colbert summed it up best last night, in a tweet more piercing than any multi-pronged argument I could make:

One thing I know for sure: no one on the right side of history has ever had to nitpick what the definition of “cage” is.

— Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) June 19, 2018

How did we get here? From the Muslim ban to the “free speech” of Charlottesville to the separation of innocent (yes, innocent, by whatever pole you tune your moral compass to) children? How have such obvious statements become so necessary, so revolutionary?

Tiny digression which I promise has point: it might surprise some of you to learn that there’s a movement in American Christianity best described as “Hipster Calvinism.” Popular among young people, primarily those brought up in the more touchy-feely evangelical tradition, it promises to counter Joel Osteen’s toothy aphorisms with solid Biblical truth. Paired, ideally, with black coffee, a cigar, and a combative Twitter feed. Here are the agreed-upon tenets: God is absolutely sovereign, therefore everything, good or evil, was preordained from the beginning of time. Those who are saved are saved by God’s will; those who are damned never had a fighting chance. Here are some frequent side effects: a belief that social justice is, at best, a red herring. An admiration for some deeply flawed (but ideologically pure) theologians, and politicians with similar unerring consistency. A disdain for compassion-based pleas to “accept the gift of salvation” and its perceived watering down of Biblical truth; a preference for the fire and full quivers of Jonathan Edwards. Repent, because you must! Or don’t, because you can’t.

I’m not here to debate theology; I’m sure some will practice such things with none of my blindspots, and frankly I’m just not interested. But I am going to tell you the impact it had on me. At 13, I was obsessed. I trawled message boards. I devoured books whose authors would, one by one, spectacularly let me down in the years to come. I argued with anyone who would listen, and plenty who would rather not. I gossiped, if you can believe it, about other churchgoing kids who didn’t happen to share these views — weakminded, neo-Pelagian cowards who needed a security blanket against the cruelties of Impeccable Logic. I made some of the kindest people I’ve ever known in my life cry, feel less-than, isolated. “Free gift,” “choice”—all so much bleeding heart nonsense. Had they even read Romans 9?

I’m here from the future to tell Younger Me a hard-won truth: you make a few valid points, and more importantly, you are totally wrong. At least about everything that matters. Those statements aren’t just compatible, they’re often complementary: being right about the wrong thing is the most dangerous sort of wrong. I had walled myself into this esoteric bunker of my own design—this subargument of a subargument about which I could form a bulletproof defense—and, in the process, found myself fighting on the wrong side of the wrong war. I might not have been wrong about the literal read of the text (zero desire to weigh in there), but what I chose to emphasize, to the detriment of all else, betrayed my true values. I had chosen cold, intellectual rigor over common sense compassion. I’d burrowed into specific diction, based on narrow assumptions, without ever stepping back and thinking about the world at large—the lives I was reducing to some rounding error in a broader logical framework. All those friends who hand-waved away my concerns with higher calls to “love” and “serve” weren’t weak, or afraid, or dishonest to do so. They were just about ten years ahead of me.

But it felt /good/ to be certain. To be right about something manageable, something I could snark about from my tower of Correctness. And I think, in this world where so much is presented as a war of hyperbole, it’s tempting to latch onto something tiny and concrete. Something you can reason through step by step and, so doing, numb yourself to the bigger picture. Technically the verbiage of a given law is colorblind. Technically giving mothers more decision power than fathers could, in some theoretical vacuum, be unjustly exploited. Technically believing the victim over the accused opens the door for elaborate, orchestrated attacks from malicious actors. Technically if you believe in unconstrained market forces, you must slash everything else to properly test the hypothesis. Technically if a law is a law, it’s meant to be 100% enforced, is it not? Technically free will is an impossible notion however you slice it; technically if we’re all particles governed by known forces, we can no more “choose” something than we chose to be born. Technically freedom of speech has no stated caveats. Technically the law already existed, it just wasn’t wielded this particular way. Technically nothing is cruel if you frame it in a certain light, or zoom in to the pixel level. Technically a camp isn’t a cage.

Forests and trees. Every argument here has some tiny seed of a point to its credit, often based on unshared or incomplete premises. That’s how ideologies gain power: put on blinders, isolate X detail, ignore confounding factors and call it The Real Problem. They don’t win at the end of the debate, they win because of the debate’s existence. They win the moment you play ball and agree to their terms, to set all else aside for a spirited discussion of theoretical end-games and slippery slopes. By granting unconscionable assumptions for the sake of “theory,” you’ve already lost your most powerful asset: the actual, hurting world as you know it to be. You’ll find a treasure trove of compelling-seeming arguments and cherry-picked hypotheticals to busy yourself with, scoring minuscule technical victories and setbacks while the things that matter slip away.

But those who nitpick over the definition of “cage” will always, always be wrong. Just like those who look at social justice and say “but what about…” will always wind up on the losing side of history. They’ll enjoy the intellectual purity, the thrill of a well fought tête-à-tête, and they might even be vindicated with a platform: but they’ll have lost sight of the blindingly obvious. By all means, be open. Be thorough. Check your work twice. And if the derived result runs counter to basic notions of compassion or human worth, burn it all and start again. Don’t let technicalities dull action into apathy. Technically Right is just Wrong with an ego.

TLDR: My last day of Cannes writeups! Shoplifters is a heart-wrenching, nuanced, complicated work of art, easily worthy of the Palme d’Or; Yomeddine is a good-natured but fairly simplistic film which often dips into saccharine territory, I applaud its casting while questioning why exactly it was forced to compete; Under the Silver Lake is Lebowski meets Pynchon, a wildly entertaining labyrinthian noir which leaves me with more questions than answers and, also, with a few conspiracy theories of my own (mainly regarding The Crying Of Lot 49 and Yo La Tengo). Ending, of course, with a shameless litany of plugs.

(See Day 0 , Day 1, and Day 2 writeups)

Introduction

Continuing my “write about each day of Cannes while drinking in a different country” tradition (France, Polynesia, USA), my fourth and final installment comes from Korea. Particularly the Mikkeller bar in Seoul, which I stumbled upon by chance and couldn’t for the life of me believe exists—Mikkeller happening to be my favorite bar in San Francisco since it opened just a few years ago. It’s a small, small world.

Short aside: I’m also writing this the day after Anthony Bourdain’s tragic passing. And while no one Googling “Cannes Korea beer”, or whatever random combination happened to bring you to this site, is likely to be asking for it, I feel compelled to say at least a few words. From a fairly early age, Bourdain has inspired me—in my younger days as a brash-talking, no-nonsense nonfiction author, and in later years as a true citizen of the world; an example of how something fiery can age beautifully into something gentle and complex, world-wise but never weary, always curious, always capable of change. His ability to find that perfect phrase to communicate a feeling, the perfect exemplar to evoke a whole, was unparalleled. And I can’t help but think that all of this—sitting in a bar on the other side of the world, writing when I ought to be visiting some kitschy souvenir shop, and writing about highfalutin movies no less—is at least partly his doing. There’s a reason I spent my evenings at Cannes eating steak tartar, sleep-deprived, performing my life for an audience of zero. Your body is an amusement park, not a temple. Bourdain had Thompson and Burroughs to romanticize to unhealthy extremes; I have Bourdain. And I’ll miss him a lot.

Okay, on to the movies! The last few posts dragged on far longer than I’d meant them to, and I have a bus to catch labeled in characters I can’t read. So I’ll try to keep this brief. The final day of Cannes is devoted to two things: the evening awards ceremony, and a rerun blitz. Having only been allotted 2 days of the festival proper, that blitz was an absolute lifeline for me—and I quickly realized it’d be impossible to catch everything I’d wanted to, even if I skipped the gala entirely (which I did). The insanely long lines, which had so burned me before, were of particular concern here. So I sacrificed my more optimistic plans (e.g. Cold War –> Shoplifters –> Capernaum –> Asako I & II –> Don Quixote premiere) for something more tractable: skip the 8am shows altogether, line up early for Shoplifters to guarantee a spot, try for Capernaum, then play it by ear.

Shoplifters (4.5/5)

There’s a reason I organized my entire day around Shoplifters: the buzz had not only been wonderful, it had seemed tailor-made to my tastes. “Searing”, “earnest”, “family drama”—the headlines may as well read “Stephen will eat this up.” And at a festival which tends to emphasize formal bravado over emotional resonance, they promised a welcome respite.

I’m pleased to report that Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest more than lived up to the hype. It’s beautiful, heartwarming, resonant, true, and likely my favorite of the festival—not because of those attributes I mentioned (though they certainly help), but because of the brilliant ways it complicates them. This film is a genuine miracle in the festival circuit: one that deftly blends two very different types of drama without doing disservice to either.

First, there is the movie I was promised: a searing, earnest family drama set in outer Tokyo. If anything, the beauty of this half (what I’d reductively deem the “Sundance” or “Tribeca” portion) is in the gentle way Kore-eda lets his characters reveal themselves, so I’m hesitant to say any more than necessary. Shoplifters is the story of the Shibata family: Hatsue the elder matriach (Kirin Kiki), her grown daughters Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) and Nobuyo (Sakura Andô), Nobuyo’s husband Osamu (Lily Franky), and their son Shota (Jyo Kairi). The five of them live together in a tiny, cramped household, overflowing with the trinkets of a life well lived, and utterly lacking in privacy. Not that they’d need it, of course: the Shibatas are inseparable, and—unlike any dramatic family I can think of—they seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company. They cook together, they laugh together. They even steal together. Hence the trinkets, and the title.

The film opens with Osamu and Shota stealing supplies from a local store. And while that sounds like a crucial part of the story, I’d argue it isn’t: shoplifting is, like so many things in this narrative, just a tiny act of self-assertion the Shibatas do to survive. Like every action they take, it’s a communal experience. Secret handshakes are given. Routines are well-rehearsed. And when the tiny duo do pull off their Oceans 2 heist, we’re hard-pressed to feel particularly sorry for anyone: neither the two grinning boys clutching shiny new fishing poles, nor the offscreen shopkeeper who hardly noted their absence. If anything, we share in their mischievous grins—in the thrill of minor victories against a world that rarely grants major ones. It’s a tiny moral complication, a loose thread in a tapestry that might someday unravel but, for now, fits just fine.

On the way home, Osamu and Shota meet Juri (Miyu Sasaki), a hungry five-year-old girl—and, as becomes abundantly, wordlessly clear, a victim of abuse. Dinner leads to a sleepover leads to an open invitation to stay, and before long Juri is a member of the ad hoc Shibata clan, with a fresh haircut and new name to boot. She’s a ray of sunshine, and I mean that without a hint of irony: Juri is an adorable addition to the family, and her tiny arc provides the film its emotional fulcrum. Her shy smiles speak volumes, and her slow, vulnerable dethawing—with Shota, with Osamu, and in a particularly tear-inducing scene, with her new “mother” Nobuyo—speaks louder still. The Shibatas are lucky to have found her; she’s lucky to have found them. And if overheard newscasts about a missing girl and kidnappers threaten the stability of that happy family, well, the mute button is right over there.

For much of the runtime, we’re content to just live in that space: quiet, naturalistic observations of a self-anointed family doing what they can to keep each other warm. Then, toward the end, things start to shift (the “Cannes” portion, if you will). I won’t spoil it except to say that whatever you think the film (or this review) is telegraphing, it’s probably going to miss the mark. It’s a twist of the knife, a well-earned gut punch that would send any lesser film spiraling into sadcore melodrama. But this is not any film. While its drama is heightened, and we’re forced to question many of the truths we’ve come to accept, the heart of the story is never undercut, never less than true. That humanism remains, even as the complications of the world grow to match it. But like whisky to wood, the searing family drama of Act 1 is able to absorb these outside contaminants into something sweet, subtle, complex; evolving from “heartfelt” into something hard to name and harder, still, to forget.

Shoplifters is a movie about grace, companionship, and the tiny choices we make to open ourselves to one another. It’s sad, but never despairing; heartfelt, but never treacly, formally impeccable, but never sterile; complicated, but never at the expense of soul. I loved it to pieces.

Yomeddine (2.5/5)

I’d strategically chosen an aisle seat in the back row of Shoplifters, to make for a quick escape. Why? Because the second most-talked-about (albeit polarizing) film was starting in only 70 minutes: Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum. Having been burned once before by line-cutting assholes, I was determined to make it right. So I forewent lunch and coffee, and ran my ass of. I got in line—a long one, to be sure, but still safely within the realm of possibility. Only to be foiled, again, by said assholes. As the hour went by, a sea of faux phone-callers, faux looking-for-the-bathroomers, and other faux-adults-living-in-a-society swarmed past the single-file line, waiting for a gap to slide in once the doors opened. Eventually, a group of older French women (with far more tolerance for conflict than I possess) created a human barrier, arms linked and ready to shout, to stop any further intruders. But the damage was already done, and my heroic comrades were turned away, with me, at the very front of the queue. Left to stink-eye the 50something aggressors as they shuffled inside. Le sigh.

Pro tip: unlike other theatres with dividers and rails, the line at the Soixantième Theatre is entirely built on trust; which is the first thing to go out the window in a crisis. It might start single-file. It will not stay single file. Accept this, and convince everyone ahead of you to collapse into a mob early so the cheaters can’t get in.

And so, after another failed attempt at making my second choice screening, I landed in line for Yomeddine, a film about which I knew absolutely nothing. And about which, I’m afraid, there’s very little to say.

Or rather, there’s little constructive to say. A goodnatured road flick between an orphan and a leper as they journey from their colony to their home by birth, Abu Bakr Shawky’s Yomeddine doesn’t have an insincere bone in its body. It’s the sort of film whose heart is so invariably in the right place, it makes honest criticism feel like firing a kitten from a job it never applied for: an awful, and confusing, situation for all parties. Yomeddine is sweet, warm, and well-suited for plenty of things. Cannes just doesn’t happen to be one of them. So, I’ll keep the criticism extremely brief and end on a high note.

Brief criticism: this is an extremely sentimental, heartstring-tugging film with little to speak of by way of craft or nuance. In general, that is fine with me (though a bit bewildering as an In Competition Cannes screening). Here I think it’s sentimental to a fault; that despite good intentions, its eagerness to moralize and simplify has the unintentional effect of infantilizing those same characters it is trying to elevate. The moments of real pathos are nearly always undercut by moments where we see the strings too neatly.

High note: I can’t applaud Shawky enough for authentically casting this film—particularly Rady Gamal as Beshay, the man driven to exile by leprosy. There’s a practical component to this, of course: with the camera nearly always trained on Gamal’s face and hands, any reliance on prosthetics would have felt distracting and phony. But it also lends the film a real undercurrent of sincerity, of social power. When Beshay, surrounded on a bus, cries out “I am a human being”, it’s more than a nod to Elephant Man—it comes off as a genuine howl of anguish, a political statement existing in this world, today. And it resonates deeply. His charisma elevates even the most saccharine dialogue. Like Sean Baker, I admire Shawky’s commitment to letting marginalized groups portray themselves, to choose rugged realism over cheap sentiment. I only wish the script had followed suit.

Under the Silver Lake (4/5)

After making some new friends in line, and scarfing a much needed Big Mac, I made it to what would be my last film of the festival: Under The Silver Lake in the Buñuel Theatre.

In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Of Lot 49 (which, by coincidence, I was in the middle of at the time of watching this), the protagonist Oedipa is sent to San Narcisco, a planned community in the LA area, to handle her wealthy, dead ex’s estate. Slowly she discovers—or, at least, she believes herself to have discovered—an intricate plot with a shadowy organization at the helm. Tristero, or Trystero, depending on who you ask. A phrase in a play, a symbol on a stamp, a message coded in song, a pile of skeletons at the bottom of the lake—everywhere she looks is another sign, another whiff of Trystero’s centuries-old power. Late in the book, as the threads seemingly unravel without end, the sheer volume of information makes her question her sanity against that of America:

“For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge, and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth’s numinous beauty…or only a power spectrum. Tremaine the Swastika Salesman’s reprieve from holocaust was either an injustice, or the absence of a wind; the bones of the GI’s at the bottom of Lake Inverarity were there either for a reason that mattered to the world, or for skin divers and cigarette smokers. Ones and zeroes. So did the couples arrange themselves. At Vesperhaven House either an accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it. Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America, and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.”

If you’ve seen Under The Silver Lake, David Robert Mitchell’s labyrinthian LA comedy / noir, your spidey senses might be tingling from that passage. Messages layered in song, bones at the bottom of the lake, tedious preparations for inevitable death. Other similarities, too, omitted from the quote above: a dead billionaire pulling strings, a meaningless tryst that sets the thing off, homeless men “speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible.” To the majority of you who haven’t seen the film, don’t worry, I couldn’t spoil this shit if I tried. But like Andrew Garfield’s Sam, I’m sensing a pattern here, some fundamental thing holding both works together. And pattern begets obsession. It may be that Mitchell is making an intentional ode to Pynchon (beyond the obvious genre comparisons), or it may be that paranoia has a sort of shared logic, a rhythm, that reveals itself in all manner of art. Either a reviewer hunting for allusions in a film brimming with zany-for-zany’s-sake kitchen sink details, or a flesh and blood Tristero waiting to rise. Ones and zeroes.

Right, so. On to the plot—if it’s even possible to speak of one. Sam (Garfield) is a young man living in Silver Lake, fresh off the heels of a breakup. He’s obsessed with sex; he’s obsessed with everything. His apartment is filled with knick-knacks and posters. He trawls Wheel Of Fortune for hidden messages. He’s simultaneously chill and menacing, capable of sudden bursts of violence and easy social charm. He’s also, well, a bit of a creep: the film opens with him peeping on his topless neighbor with binoculars. Within minutes he’s already slept with a second woman (Riki Lindhome) and begun eyeing a third, lending a whiff of manic desperation to the proceedings.

The “third” in question is Sarah (Riley Keough), his beautiful, enigmatic downstairs neighbor whom he has only known from afar (see also: binoculars). When at last he works up the courage to speak with her, they hit it off surprisingly well. They even share an evening together—and plan on many more—till she vanishes, the next morning, without a trace. Sam begins combing through clues, trying to make sense of her disappearance, but with each exposed thread he teases ten more present themselves. A missing billionaire, Jefferson Sevence (Chris Gann), whose daughter Millicent (Callie Hernandez) eventually joins the hunt. An indie-pop Jesus (Luke Baines) and his merry band of singing brides. A mysterious killer who is said to be terrorizing the neighborhood dogs. A comic fan (Patrick Fischler) who claims to have uncovered all number of mysteries lurking beneath the surface of LA—some merely criminal, others ghastly and supernatural. A girl who does performative dancing with balloons (Grace Van Patten, a welcome return after The Meyerowitz Stories), and a secret club under the Hollywood Forever cemetery involving REM and cookies. Blurry figures like the Homeless King (David Yow), the Man At The End (Don McManus), and—in the most jaw-dropping scene in the movie—a man we’ll simply call The Songwriter (Jeremy Bobb).

Part Big Lebowski and part Inherent Vice, Under The Silver Lake is designed to drive “aha!” narrative junkies crazy; to keep the audience in a perpetual haze of unknowing. Its comic tone and exaggerated style suggests we never take one event too seriously (or literally, pending interpretation), but it plays its noir tensions so well we’re incapable of letting go. Like Pynchon, Mitchell dangles the answers just out of reach to absorb us in his protagonist’s obsession. But even that time-honored trope—promising riches at the end of the maze, only to cut to credits as we round the last bend—might just be subverted here. We’re granted access to places your typical noir would refuse. Or is that just another fast one it’s pulling on us? A half-resolution meant to whet our appetites, to leave us gnawing for deeper answers after the credits roll? Either way, it’s a dazzling, unpredictable affair.

Originally set to release later this week, the film has now been pushed back till December. I can only speculate as to why. Reviews from the festival were mixed, and often cited perceived misogyny in the film’s depiction of women. I think this interpretation is totally valid, though not what Mitchell intended—it’s a movie about pop culture, and he’s playing with some of its classic tropes, getting into the headspace of a self-absorbed character only a sociopath would root for. One might argue that intentions don’t matter, or at least aren’t the point: of all the ways to be subversive, why must so many films return to this particular well? Either way, I’d imagine a few tweaks in the editing room could drastically tip the scales on the social front. If I were A24, I might decide to give Mitchell an extra few months to rework it. Or, you know, maybe it has to do with Incredibles 2 somehow. Hell if I know.

There’s another way to read this movie, beyond the obvious noir send-up: that its conclusion is not meant to be taken literally, but is meant to carry real weight. Which is to say, that all this ostensible aimlessness actually has a point. It involves seeing Sam’s journey as emotional rather than physical, and it hinges on that prior relationship we get glimmers of. I think it’s best described by way of a personal anecdote.

Wandering Amoeba records the day after my first breakup, my 18-year-old self was hunting for clues. I’d ended things and (temporarily) cut communication with everyone even peripherally involved, bunkered down in the recesses of my brain. And I felt, sifting through decades of pop culture, that I might find an answer, or at least a narrative throughline. Something to make all my competing transmissions—relief, loneliness, guilt, shame, excitement—cohere into sturdier material. To tell me that my inner chaos was part of a grand lineage, centuries in the making, of heartbreak and romance and rebellion against complacency. A real Trystero, rather than a trite teenage hormone. I leafed through booklets for what felt like hours, but nothing caught my eye. Till this one song played on the overhead speaker, my first introduction to a band that would help me through 11 long years of confused transmissions:

“What did I miss here?
What can’t you take anymore?
Expecting a whisper,
I heard the slam of a door.
…
The way that I feel
when you laugh
is like laughing.
The way that I feel
when you cry
is so bad.”

Yo La Tengo, “The Crying Of Lot G”. Coincidence? Let me consult Vanna and get back to you.

Wrapping Up

And with that, I’m done with my drawn-out Cannes reflections! Here’s hoping for theatrical releases for some of these gems, and more festival opportunities in the future. In the meantime, if you liked any of these takes, there’s plenty more where that came from. You can check out my best of the year writeups. Or browse all reviews on this site or letterboxd. A former-fundamentalist therapy session, an Academy Award documentary blitz, or effusive praise for recent films? I’ve got you. Book reviews? Sure, I’ve got nowhere to be. Or, as always, listen to me blabber on The Spoiler Warning Podcast and tweet petty arguments back at me. You know, internet stuff.

TLDR: I share a few tricks about how to stay hydrated and sane at the festival, and review what was easily my favorite day in film. BlacKkKlansman is a howl of outrage at the racism in the core of American institutions, provocative and powerful; Knife + Heart is an exercise in eroticism that feels like Refn-lite, bold open then fizzle; The Wild Pear Tree sees Ceylan going full Linklater with a sprawling epic on wisdom, creativity, and the idealism of youth.

Intro

Friday was my favorite day of the [mini-]festival for a number of reasons. Day 0, acted as a cold shower after an all-night bender, a jolting cleanse of the palate. It featured one of the more provocative films of the festival, but I wasn’t quite ready to handle it. Day 1 was pleasant but lopsided: outside the cinema was all chaos and uncertainty, inside was predictable and fairly surface level, featuring three enjoyable entries which accomplished their goals but asked very little of me. Day 2 is where it all starts to really click.

First order of business: I finally had a handle on the festival. I knew where every theatre was, and roughly how early one needed to arrive in line (pro tip: 2 hours was a guarantee every time, 90 minutes still plenty in hindsight). I had a schedule in my pocket with a clearly laid out timeline and room for coffee breaks. I had learned to keep a bag with a 50cl bottle of water (the maximum allowed past security) with me at all times, and knew the handful of places where said bottles could be replenished. Perhaps most importantly, I realized the “smartly dressed” requirement of non-gala screenings was basically a euphemism for “try to not be naked.” No suit, no bowtie, no goddamn tuxedo shoes: those could all be retrieved from my AirBnB after movie #2 or (spoilers for day 3) stuffed in a canvas bag next to the Kind bars. Honestly, would I look any less out of place next to Cate Blanchett if my bottom shelf Men’s Wearhouse jacket had ten fewer wrinkles? Embrace your lower social stratum. I cannot stress how much better a comfy tee and Allbirds feel after two days of sweating into the same suit.

Second: the movies were more interesting across the board. Which isn’t necessarily to say they were the best (at least one was, in my opinion, a contender for worst); only that they provoked a much stronger reaction. So let’s get to the reactions!

BlacKkKlansman (4.5/5)

After missing Capernaum and then nearly missing Sorry Angel, I decided to take no chances with the first-come-first-served policy — particularly when it came to my most anticipated film of the festival. So, by 7:30am, I was already croissant-stuffed, caffeinated, and happily in line for the 9:30 showing of BlacKkKlansman. Behind at least 50 other patrons, who I can only imagine are either related to Spike Lee or physically incapable of sleep.

They were right to wait it out, though. BlacKkKlansman is dynamite draped in an American flag and stuffed in a disco ball at Tomi Lahren Karaoke Night in the local oil refinery. Which is to say, Lee still knows how to pack a goddamn punch. If Birth of a Nation was “history written with lightning”, Lee’s film is history written with fifty pounds of C-4. Or, maybe, it’s the terrifying present written in history’s ink.

For the uninitiated: in 1979, an undercover police officer by the name of Ron Stallworth successfully joined the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. What began as an epithet-filled phone tirade to gather intel, snowballed into 9 months of in-person meetings, thwarted cross burnings, and a direct conversation with (not making this up) David Duke. In addition to being one of the first major infiltrations of the post-Civil-Rights era KKK by a local police force, the story is made all the more poignant by one minor detail: Stallworth is a black man. The first black man, in fact, to ever serve in the Colorado Springs police department.

That’s all I know of the underlying true events. What follows, in Spike’s take, is an audacious mash-up of genres and themes, pairing heavy subject matter with disarmingly playful tropes. It’s an incisive examination of policing in America and its intractably racist impact, but it’s also a fist-pumping buddy cop flick — seemingly without irony. It’s a searing look at racial resentment and the wild delusions it breeds at every level of society, played as an Us-vs-Them satire with a narrowly-defined group of Bad Guys. It’s very brutal and very sad, confronting bigotry and hate speech with more directness than I’ve seen in years. But it’s also, somehow, riotously funny — when it chooses to be.

I recognize that, as a white filmgoer, I am profoundly at risk of missing the point here: Dave Chapelle and my generation’s subsequent purple-drinking horde of laughing-for-all-the-wrong-reasons frat bros come to mind. So it’s tempting to understate the humor of the premise; to downgrade “riotously funny” into “acerbic takedown” or “biting satire” and maintain healthy detachment from the comic beats. And yet I think it’d be a huge disservice to Lee to do so, to ignore what might be his most ferocious talent: baldly provoking the audience, playing meticulously-tuned contradictions. Yes, BlacKkKlansman is an acerbic takedown of America’s quote evolution on race endquote, and it’s also a biting satire of the “good people on both sides” doublespeak that persists today. But it isn’t only that. It’s also endearing, and screwball, and moving, and hopeful while simultaneously despairing of hope. It basks both in pride and despair, reveling in dance scenes and communal gatherings and firebrand speeches with rapt young audiences, while reminding us how far there is to go. It’s powerfully cynical and, also, urgently not. It expresses the inherent contradiction of being black in America, and particularly black in American law enforcement — a battle of psyches well reflected in popular culture of the era. “Archie Bunker made bigotry a joke” notes one onscreen officer, but television never could decide which America to take seriously. Is it Andy Griffith’s or Amos n’ Andy’s? Is it Starsky and Hutch’s Gran Torino, or Bo and Luke’s Confederate Dodge? It’s clear that the system is broken, that these technicolored fictions can’t peacefully coexist — Good Cop Saves The Day, Bad Cop Has A Heart Of Gold, Defiantly Individualistic Cop Does It Alone And Wins The Support Of His Chief. But that doesn’t make those dreams any easier to abandon, or any less tempting to take for a spin.

Our hero, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), is the perfect audience surrogate. He’s as quick-witted and idealistic as we’d wish ourselves to be, and as prone to self-doubt as we genuinely are. He thinks he can do good from within the force, but it’s never clear whether his tenuous alliance is propping up something worth saving. Part of that doubt comes from Patrice (Laura Harrier), a black student activist he falls for while undercover. She thinks there can be no hedging, no middle ground: if the institution is inherently racist, it can’t be changed from within. One apparent argument to the contrary is Flip (Adam Driver), Ron’s partner on the force. He seems, by all accounts, to be a bona fide Good Cop — good partner, good friend, doesn’t think much of race but lands generally on the right side when he does. While Ron climbs the Klan hierarchy primarily by phone, Flip acts as his stand-in for all face-to-face meetings. A Jew in a room of devout anti-Semites, all that hate speech sounds nearly as ridiculous coming from his mouth as it does from Ron’s. Or at least, on paper, it ought to. His ability to stand idly by while others use it, well, that tracks a bit better.

Bill Hicks once joked that the most fervent Creationists often look the most “un-evolved.” Judging by the Klan depicted here, a similar dictum might hold: those who shout “white power” seem to be the biproduct of a gene repository more bathtub- than pool-sized. There’s befuddled Ivanhoe (Paul Walter Hauser), effectively reprising the role of I, Tonya’s Shawn but with slightly more discernible delusions. There’s also the vapidly conniving Felix (Jasper Pääkkönen), a conspiracy-theorizing gun nut who keeps a “Jew-detector test” in his basement, and his wife Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), who supports to her husband’s bigotry with the precise gusto she might support a Defense Of Marriage bake sale at her local Focus On The Family outing. And, of course, there is David Duke (Topher Grace), whose faux intellect and political sheen seem poised to delude an audience of precisely one — himself.

Much like Do The Right Thing, BlacKkKlansman is content to be one thing — excellently — for the bulk of its runtime, before a last-minute pivot sets the whole thing ablaze. In the former film (also a hit at Cannes), I believe that sudden rush of feeling was absolutely vital to its meaning; it’s the hindsight thesis, and it would be as hard to discuss without spoiling as it would be a terrible thing to spoil. In the case of BlacKkKlansman, though, the moment in question is less a twist than an urgent coda. A spoiler would be neither particularly ruinous nor necessary.

So I’ll just say this. In the last few minutes, Spike makes explicit what ought have been weighing on any conscientious audience: that this may play as a comedic period piece with an upbeat ending, but the subjects it deals with are neither funny nor confined to history. And that happy endings are only the exceptions which prove the rule. All the anger and hindsight hopelessness, left as (fierce) subtext throughout the runtime, is finally given room to scream. It’s a gut-wrenching underline, relating the Department’s “both extremists are dangerous” complacency to that of a certain sitting president in the wake of Charlottesville (more of my thoughts here). While Spike’s vision would have held up wonderfully without this moment, I think we’re in a far better — if, admittedly, more hopeless — place for its inclusion. It’s damning, confrontational, and exactly as pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you unexpected as it ought to be. In my audience, you could hear a pin drop as the credits rolled. I hope yours reacts the same. Comfort isn’t a luxury we have any right to demand.

Knife + Heart (2.5/5)

After being knocked over the head by a film which deserves a lengthy discussion, I sprinted to the Soixantième Theatre to catch another which, in hindsight, warrants very little. Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart (Un couteau dans le coeur) is one of those features that would have benefited greatly from a featurette runtime; it starts with a bang (in more ways than one, hyuck hyuck), but gradually worsens as its story unfolds.

It’s France, it’s the 1970’s, and love is in the air. Also porn. And murder. And, somehow, M83. The film follows Anne (Vanessa Paradis), a director/producer in a low budget gay porn studio who longs to win back her former lover / current editor Loïs (Kate Moran). When a masked murderer begins targeting members of her cast, Anne’s first response isn’t to stop shooting; it’s to use it as inspiration for a total script rewrite. Thus, Homocidal is born. As more and more elaborate, grisly murders are orchestrated, her script simply absorbs them into its hamfisted plot, causing one to…well, wonder. Is she terrified of being next, and channeling her angst into creativity? Is she fetishizing the brutality happening to her coworkers? Is she provoking the killer on purpose? Is she the killer?

It’s tempting to call this a murder mystery. But despite the whodunnit synopsis, it’s clear rather early on that Gonzalez is wholly unconcerned with lobbing (let alone answering) any questions. Or creating tension at all, really. Instead, he’s toying with genre for genre’s sake, making a throwback slasher / sexploitation flick with the cadence of an EDM music video. 100% style, 0% substance.

And I’m all for style over substance, if done right. For the first 10 or 20 minutes, Knife + Heart totally nails it. With its classic mingling of sex and violence, oozing red palette, and propensity for synths, Knife + Heart’s opening plays like a gentler, more erotic Nicolas Winding Refn. In a barely-lit nightclub, a pornstar is picked up by a wordless, leather-clad stranger; meanwhile, we see one of his films mid-edit. What follows is a series of cross-cuts set to crescendoing soundtrack. On the one hand, a kinky encounter turned into a gruesome murder; on the other, a softcore porno being looped and spliced. There’s an air of magic, of heightened reality, to the proceedings: the shifting soft focus, the near-subliminal negative shots, the way the killer squeals like death while a raven flaps its wings. The way editing itself might be its own kind of violence. It doesn’t insist on being taken seriously, of course — but it is insisting on something.

My problem isn’t that the film barely has a storyline, or that what little it has is (by design) ridiculous. It’s that even its style has no movement, no arc. Where Refn would bask in waves of tension, Gonzalez seems content to strum the same chord till the bar closes. It feels like he had a single tonal idea and he blew it in his opening salvo: after the first murder and the first sexual encounter, where is there to go but “same”? We meet more of the cast, someone is murdered. We watch some porn shoots, someone is murdered. Trans characters appear, someone is murdered. Anne throws a picnic, someone is murdered. Anne goes to the forest, someone is murdered. It’s all painted with roughly the same brush: the world is washed out and soft focus, the killer is dark and sensual, M83 plays until the stabbing reaches a climax, rinse, wash, repeat. Each time less shocking, and less impactful, than the time before. Once the stylistic arsenal is tapped out, we’re simply left with a plot about as valuable as the one in Anne’s dirty videos: fine as set dressing, but never built to stand alone.

For its eye for visual flourish and its commitment to genre, this one is at least an interesting experiment. I just wish it had done more with the raw materials.

The Wild Pear Tree (4.5/5)

Quick run to the AirBnB to change into a look I workshopped through the festival, called The Divorced Dad’s Black Tie (requisite tuxedo jacket + the loosest of bowties, business casual Kohl’s shirt with the top button undone and a coffee stain at the breast pocket and the sleeves rolled high, whatever black pants don’t stink, sunglasses) and we’re back in the action! And by “the action” I mean a two hour line in direct sunlight, to hopefully catch the 6:30pm premiere of The Wild Pear Tree.

Hard-learned tip corner: Unlike some other spaces at Cannes, the Grand Lumiere’s Last Minute line is pretty evenly split between pre- and post-security, both of which are outdoors. It is also likely the longest line one will stand in, and leads to a theatre with A) no clear restroom options and B) no appropriate time to use said options if they did exist. Take advantage of the pre-security line with a bigger water bottle and some snack food. Come armed with an empty 50cl bottle to transfer to when the security line forces you to leave all that at the gate. Bring sunscreen if you want to live. No need to put on the coat or bowtie until the exact moment the line starts moving — but then, hurry. Finally, stay hydrated while remembering that you will have at least 4 hours until your next chance at a restroom — 5+ if you happen to be seeing a 180 minute Turkish epic. So maybe don’t go too gung-ho on the whole “I can chug this whole 1.5L bottle before security” thing.

Having gone too gung-ho on the whole “I can chug this whole 1.5L bottle before security” thing, I was already hurting by the time I was seated — in the second-to-front row, in full visibility of the Director’s seat. An internal war raged over the relative shames of “Getting up in the middle of a movie in view of the director” and “Pissing one’s dress pants on the sly.” Ever conscious of social faux pas, I opted for route two. Or, as luck would have it, route three: “accepting that the pain will never go away, redirecting one’s nerve endings elsewhere, and hoping for the best.”

View from the seat. Note the English subtitle bar below the screen, and the trapped man with 1.5L of water in his bladder behind the camera.

The best did arrive, on multiple fronts: I’m happy to report that I not only survived The Wild Pear Tree (Turkish: Ahlat Agaci), I quite loved it. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest reads like one of those memoir-esque slow burns a novelist might write some years after their initial burst of fame — still in full command of their powers but with much less to prove, their fire having cooled into something more introspective, tender, bemused. (Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead are on my mind as recently-discovered examples.) It’s a sprawling, messy, and very talky epic about everyday creativity; a meditation on the relative virtues of artistic purity and contentment, passion and stability. But it’s also a gentle coming-of-age story, a portrait of the artist (director?) as a young man as he navigates love, faith, economic angst, and familial strife in modern-day Canakkale. It’s Chekhov meets Linklater, but it’s so much more than that. You can be a lot of things, it turns out, with three hours to burn.

Sinan (Dogu Demirkol) is a young man looking to carve out a life for himself. A fresh-faced college grad but not yet employed, he’s in that transitory phase where everything is amplified to its most romantic extreme. He’s an aspiring novelist who wants his work to bleed something new; it’s metafictional, it’s memoir-esque, it’s kind of hopeful but also dark and honest, it’s kind of about the countryside and its wild pear trees, but also about every possible goddamn thing. He sees faults in even those authors he admires, moments of weakness or saccharine shortcuts that a True Artist ought never take. He’s resigned to a life with precisely two options: either sell his novels, or die a failure. After all, what other route is there? That of his father (Murat Cemcir), the pie-in-the-sky go-getter who gambled his family’s livelihood away? Or his mother (Bennu Yildirimlar), the warmhearted realist who tamped down her dreams to be saddled to him? His childhood friend Hatice (Hazar Ergüçlü), preordained for a loveless marriage of “what-if”s and servitude in the same godforsaken village she was born? An imam like his grandfather and so many around him, peddling comfortable falsehoods for respect and cash?

If it isn’t clear yet, I don’t agree with these reductive takes. Neither, I’m sure, does Ceylan — his third act, in particular, has some beautiful reversals up its sleeve. It’s clear that Sinan has a lot of learning to do. At the same time, we never veer into satire at the young man’s expense. Like Chekhov’s Konstantin, his youthful fire is able to brighten and burn in equal measure; we see the blindspots in his black-and-white certainty, but we also remember how good it felt to be so sure. Of anything. As the year unfolds, and Sinan wanders through various Linklater-esque conversations, we start to see both the cracks in his armor and the context that fortified it. There’s the extended argument with a novelist (Serkan Keskin) that feels right out of Waking Life, an impassioned battle between two levels of truths — Sinan’s technicalities about integrity and the artistic process vs the author’s higher truth that there’s more to life than purity. How many times has my own life fit that template, be it theology or politics or (hell) taste in film? We run so easily to one particular battle, till age (slowly) reveals we’ve been fighting the wrong war — missing the forest for the pear tree. There’s also the heart-wrenching confrontation with his mother a la Boyhood, where Sinan’s attempt at a tough love speech only proves how little he understands about toughness or love. Or the complementary arguments with his father, the fulcrum of the film, who Sinan doesn’t seem to realize is the logical end of his own brash idealism: he can be loved as a child or he can be read as a brilliant thinker, but never from the same source. And, perhaps most memorably, we’re treated to a Before-style walk-and-chat with two competing imams, a hard-liner and a pragmatist, pretending to instruct Sinan while secretly debating each other. Each party represents a facet of Turkey’s complicated relationship with religion: should it provide top-down instruction, bottom-up comfort, or be handwaved away like an offer of tea?

As with Ceylan’s brilliant Once Upon a Time In Anatolia, Wild Pear Tree is in love with its scenery — the muted greens and browns of an autumn countryside, a snow-covered landscape shrouded by mist. Wide, silent shots punctuate the talky bits beautifully. But gone (for the most part) are the heavier stylistic flourishes, the slow pans through candlelit darkness or tracking shots of some tiny natural ripple. It’s a less showy, stripped down affair. It lulls us into each conversation, giving us just enough beauty to stay invested but never so much that its style overtakes its substance. In that sense, it’s doubtful this will be lauded with the extreme praise of his last two outings. But in my mind, the simplicity is a virtue that raises it above the pack. It’s exactly how this story needed to be told: an understated pace to temper its overstated protagonist.

There is one exception to that no-flourish rule: the closing shot. I won’t spoil it; it’s gorgeous, and haunting. Instead, I’ll leave you with the passage I thought of as it played — a wildly romantic philosophy text that, if we’re being honest, meant much more to me in my Sinan days, back before I learned to take such things with a grain of salt. It comes from Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus:

All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Next week: Yommedine, Under the Silver Lake, Palme d’Or winning Shoplifters, and the close of the festival.