Last Week's New Yorker Review: November 17
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of November 17
“He turns a pimple into a beauty mark.”
Must-Reads:
“Bad Dads” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang knows it’s like auteur like daughter. I am usually pretty against the double movie review, but if Chang can do them with this much detail-density and genuine connection between the films, I’m all for it. The mixed-negative take on the “zonked out” new Trier does excellent work praising fine craft while explaining how it doesn’t serve the story or its aims. Too many critics assume that every thoughtful film is a successful film, but if the philosophy is basic, no amount of window-dressing will make it profound. Chang also gets to the heart of Baumbach’s recent project, which is to find “the sharp edges in soft material”. This is meant to be a criticism, but I think it’s quite deliberate; I’m the world’s biggest White Noise defender, a film that brilliantly reconfigured the visual language of a Disney family movie to comment on the linguistics of mass culture as potently as DeLillo’s original text. It seems the new film is also metatextual, but Chang doesn’t find that aspect overwhelming or distracting, because the performances are dialed in. Especially Adam Sandler, who may finally get that Oscar nomination his whole career has obviously been leading to.
“Under the Influence” (The Political Scene) - Antonia Hitchens doesn’t have to be a Luddite to smash a Loomer too. One of the first Trump 2.0 pieces in the magazine that manages the appropriate level of tsuris, asking whether Loomer is nuts or corrupt and landing on: Yes. Hitchens’ work has been a mixed bag; she’s more invested in the politics of personality than, say, an Evan Osnos, which can set off certain alarms, especially given who her father is. But this piece spares no adulation, grudging or otherwise, for Loomer, who says, before the first section is up, that Donald Trump is the only “‘person on this planet who… I can actually empathize with. I really do believe that.” Hitchens is more interested in Loomer’s delusional mindset than her hatefulness, but she still grants Loomer enough agency to condemn her. That’s also true of her meticulous dissection of the content Loomer puts out in support of various interest groups, obviously to her financial benefit. Yes, these groups are using her, but she’s not being snowed. Hitchens manages a fair bit of humor, but she seems genuinely unnerved by Loomer, who is neither uniquely craven nor uniquely evil, but is the first person who thought to lock herself to Twitter and throw away the key.
Window-Shop:
“Until Tomorrow” (Books) - Katy Waldman tells a life-in-the-day story. Gives away a hell of a lot of the plot of this novel-in-installments with the ultra-Euro title On The Calculation of Volume, frustrating me a bit as I was planning on reading it already. But Waldman does very strong work unpacking both the context of the novels and their meanings, especially the ways in which the political shift the third book takes is and is not portended by the earlier installments. (“Why did Tara spend hundreds of days contemplating Thomas, hair styles, loneliness? Why didn’t it occur to her that she might be able to help people?”) Saying a novel has “an improvisatory quality” would not usually be a compliment, but Waldman makes a strong case that, essentially, the usual formal rigidity implied by the time-loop plot benefits from the loosening – “rewiring”, in Waldman’s words – of other strictures. She crafts this sophisticated formal analysis almost entirely from Balle’s quotes, yet makes clear this novel is far from self-explanatory, let alone didactic. Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself, (I am of indeterminate size, my volume demands calculation.)
“Art of the Real” (The Art World) - Hilton Als unpacks the Rauschen nesting doll. Even coming from Als, who is grandfathered into being allowed to say such things, claiming that Robert Rauschenberg is underappreciated because of woke (or technically the art world favoring woke) is pretty wild, silly stuff. Rauschenberg’s legacy is doing fine; if every major artist got a comprehensive exhibition for their hundredth birthday, contemporary art museums would become one-hundred-years-ago museums. A range of small focused shows seems totally fair and right. Mostly, Als does focus on the content of those shows, at least after a decent chunk of biography, both his and Rauschenberg’s, well-selected. Rauschenberg, somewhat miraculously, found a way to use the “vocabulary of modernism” to his own ends with his silk-screen works, featuring giant copies of mass representations which ask us to enter a “dream world” in which we “think not about where we stand but about what we can love or learn there.” Als marries complaint and appreciation, and while I much prefer the latter, I don’t mind a bit of the former along the way. And I would absolutely watch the Lily Tomlin-as-Rauschenberg movie. What’s Todd Haynes up to?
“Revolutionary Whiplash” (American Chronicles) - Jill Lepore signs an Exhibit 1776 and makes it all the way to the semiquincentennial-finals. Not really about the Revolution at all, but instead very specifically about curatorial approaches to history-museum exhibitions about the Revolution, in the wake of Trump. It’s not riveting, but at least it’s clear how passionate and specific Lepore’s perspective is. The real reason to read this, though, is for the next-to-last section, a rave of the new Ken Burns documentary on the Revolution which is easily the best piece of TV criticism to appear in the magazine this year. Lepore has a very specific view of what makes the show so acute, one that is pretty funny to hear coming from an academic who is also a popular historian – basically, the reliance on academics over pop historians gives the show the kind of nuance and “searing, challenging” sophistication that earlier Burns works have sometimes lacked. Lepore makes room for a surprising amount of formal critique: Though the show uses a “familiar visual vocabulary”, one with “a lot of muddy boots and many guttering candles”, because it is grounded in the shared but divergent senses of “possibility” across each of the war’s subjects, it affirms the “dignity and meaning” of a fight that could seem fought by too “mongrel and polyglot” a group to ever result in a coherent polity. Somehow, we won. Despite all that’s been done in its name, America is a testament to the strength of its ideals.
Goldfield on Bourdain (Takes) - You probably know this story; there’s nothing that new here. It’s still charming and heartfelt.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Moving the Dial” (Books) - David Denby Show of Shows receipts. Man, this is tough; Denby does decent work trying to describe Caesar’s comedy, but conveying comedy on the page is near-impossible and television sketch comedy even harder. So Denby’s case for Caesar’s brilliance falls entirely flat (an extended satire of Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu in “ersatz Japanese liberally sprinkled with Yiddish” might very well be brilliant, or it might be belabored, annoying, and/or racist), and in the absence of a demonstration of that brilliance, the frustration of Caesar’s failures to reclaim his brief heights of success aren’t especially potent. Watching poor transfers on YouTube was not, for me, an especially relevant endeavor. As a nuts-and-bolts story, this is more compelling, especially when exploring the bizarre exigencies of television as a brand new technology. (A TV-set company produced the progenitor of Caesar’s show, creating a marketplace for televisions; they then cancelled the show to focus on selling more televisions.) The thesis that Caesar’s intellectualism was actually unpopular is one I’m unsure about; I’m inclined to think that audiences can embrace worldly content if it’s marketed correctly, and I wonder if it wasn’t really advertisers who wanted pappier pabulum in the shape, size, and smell – aldehydic – of Lawrence Welk. (From Whence Cometh Lawrence Welk? The answer to that riddle is one of about fifty required to get past the Great Sphinx of Frankfurt.)
“Hard Mode” (Pop Music) - Kelefa Sanneh is saved by the bel canto. A serviceable introduction to Rosalía and her striking latest pivot, a largely successful turn toward operatic phrasing and Björkian poetic confessionalism, complete with cosign. The actual review is really just two paragraphs, and they get partly eaten, unfortunately, by Sanneh monologuing about algorithmic listening – he’s not wrong, but we get it. Not a bad choice for pre- or post-album listening, and the album is well worth listening to. But far too paltry to stand alone.
“Going Through the Motions” (Profiles) - Amanda Petrusich Byrne’s bridges. It’s seriously annoying to write a profile of David Byrne that credits the Talking Heads’ music and styling almost entirely to him, then skips over his entire lengthy solo career in music, except the album he’s currently touring. (Petrusich does mention his amazing Playing the Building installation in a ferry terminal, which I experienced as a child and will never forget.) I have my own reasons to be peeved by Byrne’s dismissal of his neurodiversity, as well as the specific language Petrusich uses while discussing it; the broader point, though, is that if her thesis is that all Byrne’s art is about alienation – fair enough – it’s troublesome to portray the source of that alienation as purely a matter of inspiration; just a thread Byrne finds compelling, not a potential source of struggle or pain. Byrne is partly to blame for this; the new album is probably the worst thing he’s put out because it ladles on didactic positivity – it may as well be an instruction manual on how not to be 1980s David Byrne! (Sample lyrics: “I met a girl, she gave me a kiss … I began to see things, there’s more and not less / every atom and tree is shouting out ‘yes!’.) The simplistic cheeriness is frankly upsetting from the “My chest is aching, burns like a furnace / the burning keeps me alive” guy. He’s gotten old, and is now telling us to turn the heat down and put on a sweater. Petrusich claims that the reason fans will dislike this turn is because it’s “inauthentic”, but I think it’s totally authentic, just authentically boring, hacky, cod Buddhist, and more than a little mercenary. If you only have nice things to say, why say anything at all? Byrne’s not a sellout, but he has lost his touch.1
The aforementioned gap in time defines this piece, yet Petrusich seems determined never to mention it; there are five or six paragraphs just about how the Heads chose what clothes to wear, yet we smash cut from 1984 to the present day, with only a brief stop to recount the one Talking Heads reunion performance. I’m not going to stan for Rei Momo, but at the very least Byrne’s solo work is worth looking at for what it lacks: the group compositional sense that puts the punch in “Born Under Punches”. There are nice moments amidst all this – nobody needs to be sold on the Stop Making Sense film, I don’t think, but Petrusich’s appreciation is solid – but the overall vibe is one of defensiveness toward Byrne present, and an insistence on his continuity with Byrne past. It would be a stronger argument if we were shown what happened in between.
“Mystery Man” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Anna Russell has a Johnson up her sleeve. An absolutely baffling choice to assign to Johnson a writer who apparently is mixed-to-negative on each of his features except, I guess, the first Knives Out. As a fan and follower of Johnson since The Brothers Bloom (superb and, if “overstuffed,” delightfully so) who thinks his Star Wars movie is staggering and the definitive blockbuster of our first quarter-century, I’m aggrieved; I could have enough critical distance to admire Russell’s article regardless, though… if only it were incisive in its critique and not, instead, repeatedly dismissive. It breaks perhaps the foremost rule of feature writing: The writer must find the subject interesting. Russell spends one scant paragraph on each of Johnson’s pre-Knives films; in the case of The Last Jedi, it’s mostly spent on the backlash to the film. She never even mentions Johnson’s Breaking Bad episodes, certainly some of the series’ best and most ambitious; the often superb Poker Face doesn’t earn even an adjective. She also seems disengaged from the workings of murder mysteries, acting as though “wonky puzzle-making” couldn’t possibly “move people” itself, or hold any appeal to mass audiences. The new Knives film’s details are “tedious at times”, apparently. By this metric, Bresson, Melville, Kubrick, Ford, and any other number of great directors who prize meticulousness over more open displays of pathos would surely be condemned as well. Russell comes around, a bit, to his sly fastidiousness at the very end. But anyone that pays the least bit of attention to Johnson’s work will notice its detail-oriented nature. There is far more at play, and Russell decides to scoff instead of digging in.
Letters:
Susan in the comments for the weekend edition responds to my rave review of Sonnambula at the Met Opera: “Nadine Sierra is, for me at least, the finest soprano alive - sheerly effortless, creamy, lush, intelligent singing, and somehow she's also gorgeous. Really the only reason to see this opera, which is one of the dumbest operas ever.” I agree that the plot is stupid, but I think the current production came a long way toward making it cohere! At the very least, it was moving.
Michael O. says, regarding James Marcus’ piece on his daughter’s transition, “Whatever your perspective on anything, can we all agree that discussing your sex life with your parents is ‘cringe’ (as the young people say)?” I’m all for different strokes, but I’m with you there!
quadru
To be fair to the guy, it took him a while – his solo work has been, if never astonishing, largely consistent until this latest effort, and not exactly declining steadily, either; 2001’s Look Into the Eyeball is probably his best. ↩