PRICE $8.99 MAR 25, 2019 MARCH 25, 2019 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Amy Davidson Sorkin on Brexit mayhem; free speech with Bubba the Love Sponge; new moons; Kathy Griffin’s comeback; many faces LIFE AND LETTERS Alexandra Schwartz 20 Benefit of the Doubt Miriam Toews reckons with her Mennonite origins SHOUTS & MURMURS Don Steinberg 27 Disturbing Digital Coincidences PERSONAL HISTORY Kathryn Schulz 28 The Stack A father’s ravenous love of books LETTER FROM LONDON Ed Caesar 32 Bad Boy The complicated life of the Brexit backer Arron Banks PROFILES Joshua Rothman 44 What Lies Beneath The layers of history in Peter Sacks’s paintings FICTION Lore Segal 54 “Dandelion” THE CRITICS POP MUSIC Carrie Battan 58 The synth-pop haze of Mike Lévy’s “Hyperion.” A CRITIC AT LARGE Hua Hsu 61 Lauren Berlant and the affective turn BOOKS 65 Briefly Noted MUSICAL EVENTS Alex Ross 66 New concertos by Thomas Adès and John Adams THE THEATRE Hilton Als 68 “Kiss Me, Kate,” “Be More Chill.” THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 70 “Hotel Mumbai,” “Ash Is Purest White.” POEMS Tess Gallagher Angela Leighton 50 56 “Ambition” “Pickpocket, Naples” COVER Mark Ulriksen DRAWINGS “Crazy Time” Roz Chast, Lars Kenseth, Sofia Warren, Tom Chitty, P C Vey, Will McPhail, Karen Sneider, Frank Cotham, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Victoria Roberts, Hartley Lin, Suerynn Lee SPOTS Annie Jen FIDELITY WEALTH MANAGEMENT TAX SEASON IS 365 DAYS A YEAR While other firms may only use tax-loss harvesting at year-end, Fidelity uses multiple personalized strategies across your managed portfolio throughout the entire year We offer: Tax-Smart Investing Strategies Ongoing Review for Tax-Loss Harvesting Ongoing Capital Gains Management Seasonal Distribution Management Ongoing Investing with National and State-Specific Municipal Bonds Ongoing Transition of Eligible Assets Talk to a Fidelity advisor today about tax-smart investing FIDELITY.COM/TAXSMART | 800.FIDELITY Investing involves risk, including risk of loss Investment minimums apply Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, Member NYSE, SIPC © 2019 FMR LLC All rights reserved 872855.1.0 WINDHAM CAMPBELL PRIZES CONTRIBUTORS The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University congratulates the 2019 prize recipients Joshua Rothman (“What Lies Beneath,” p 44) has been an editor and writer at the magazine since 2012 Alexandra Schwartz (“Benefit of the Doubt,” p 20) has been a staff writer since 2016 NONFICTION Kathryn Schulz (“The Stack,” p 28), a staff writer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing Ed Caesar (“Bad Boy,” p 32) is the author of “Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon.” Mark Ulriksen (Cover) is an artist and illustrator An exhibition of his sports paintings will be up at San Francisco’s Modernism gallery starting April 11th Angela Leighton (Poem, p 56) is the author of, most recently, “Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature” and the poetry collection “Spills.” She is a senior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge Rebecca Solnit Raghu Karnad FICTION David Chariandy Danielle McLaughlin DRAMA Patricia Cornelius Young Jean Lee POETRY Ishion Hutchinson Kwame Dawes WINDHAMCAMPBELL ORG Tess Gallagher (Poem, p 50) will publish her latest poetry collection, “Is, Is Not,” in May Alex Ross (Musical Events, p 66), the magazine’s music critic since 1996, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.” Lore Segal (Fiction, p 54) is the author of several novels, including “Half the Kingdom” and “Her First American.” Her new book, “The Journal I Did Not Keep: New and Selected Writing,” will be published in June Hilton Als (The Theatre, p 68), the magazine’s theatre critic, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism He is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p 15), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment She also writes a column for newyorker.com Leo Mirani (The Talk of the Town, p 19), a journalist based in London, is the news editor of The Economist POSTSCRIPT CULTURE DESK Maggie Nelson writes about Carolee Schneemann’s revolutionary career and a day that she spent with the artist Jia Tolentino investigates the dance company Shen Yun, which is so ubiquitous that it has become a meme Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism, and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 LEFT: ERRÓ/COURTESY THE ESTATE OF CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN, GALERIE LELONG, HALES GALLERY, AND P.P.O.W.; RIGHT: RAM HAN THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM THE MAIL ROGER STONE’S TRICKS I read with great interest Tyler Foggatt’s reporting on Roger Stone’s teen-age electioneering days in Westchester County (The Talk of the Town, March 18th) I knew Roger in school—when he was the president of the student council at John Jay High School, I was the president of the student council at the middle school In 1971, a year after Stone graduated, I started examining a Westchester County legislature race for a social-studies project, and discovered that Stone appeared to be organizing churches as part of a smear campaign against the incumbent, R Bradlee Boal, a potential violation of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits nonprofit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates (Stone later told the Washington Post that his candidate, a Republican named John Hicks-Beach, was the “dumbest politician” he had ever worked for.) To my knowledge, my amateur reporting was the first investigation into Stone’s involvement in shady campaign activities, though certainly not the last Dean Corren Burlington, Vt TAKING CARE James Marcus’s recollections of his father’s final months illustrate the pain, the poignancy, and the all-around helplessness of witnessing the suffering and decline of a loved one (“Blood Relations,” March 11th) Amid this poetry, unfortunately, is an all-too-common mischaracterization of palliative care, which Marcus describes as a signal, to patients and to their families, “that the fight is over.” Marcus’s father was offered hospice care, a form of palliation that is generally reserved for people with a life expectancy of six months or less, who are no longer pursuing “curative” treatments But palliative care can begin much sooner than this Palliative-care teams provide support to people of all ages who are suffering from serious illnesses Some of these patients have advanced diseases; others are undergoing treatment that may help them live well for a long time Palliativecare teams work alongside other specialists to help a patient understand how an illness is likely to progress, explore what is most important to his or her quality of life, and fully consider the benefits and the burdens of different treatment approaches Palliative care is additive— an extra layer of support—and it can serve an essential function in the experiences of patients and their families Kate Meyers California Health Care Foundation Oakland, Calif THE RING RETURNS Through May 11 À LA MODE In Helen Rosner’s article about contemporary Japanese food, she writes that the French chef Paul Bocuse “pioneered what became known as nouvelle cuisine, a modern reimagining of French cooking” (“A Season for Everything,” March 11th) It’s true that Bocuse is remembered as the figurehead of this movement But, when I interviewed him in the nineteen-eighties, he took pains to distance himself from nouvelle cuisine In another interview, in 2007, with the magazine Madame Figaro, Bocuse, then eighty years old, explained that, in the late sixties, he and twelve other chefs—including Roger Vergé, Raymond Oliver, and Pierre Troisgros— had been considered the leaders of the grande cuisine franỗaise, and that critics like Henri Gault, who coined the term “nouvelle cuisine,” wanted to rebrand them As a result, Bocuse’s mission—the innovative use of traditional techniques, showcasing seasonal local produce—became associated with an élitist aesthetic, inaccessible to most people “La nouvelle cuisine,” he said, disparagingly, “is all about the bill!” Drew Smith London, U.K The Met’s breathtaking production of Wagner’s four-part epic is back, with soprano Christine Goerke starring as Brünnhilde in opera’s ultimate theatrical journey metopera.org/ring 212.362.6000 • Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter PHOTO: VINCENT PETERS / MET OPERA MARCH 20 – 26, 2019 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN In 1938, George Balanchine choreographed dances for Vera Zorina in the Rodgers and Hart musical “I Married an Angel,” and married her onstage So it’s a cute bit of historical rhyming that Joshua Bergasse, the director and choreographer of the City Center Encores! production of the show (March 20-24), recently married its star, Sara Mearns (above) One of the boldest ballerinas at New York City Ballet, which Balanchine founded at City Center, in 1948, Mearns is making her début in a speaking role Angelic dancing shouldn’t give her any trouble PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER HAPAK ART “Epic Abstraction” Metropolitan Museum A desire to shake up received art history is more than admirable today—it’s urgent for a future of pluralist values But this wishfully canonexpanding show of painting and sculpture from the past eight decades effectively reinforces the old status quo The first room affects like a mighty organ chord: it contains the Met’s two best paintings by Jackson Pollock: “Pasiphaë” (1943), a quaking compaction of mythological elements, and “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” (1950), a singing orchestration of drips— bluntly material and, inextricably, sublime The adjective “epic” does little enough to honor Pollock’s mid-century glory, which anchors the standard art-historical saga of Abstract Expressionism as a revolution that stole the former thunder of Paris and set a stratospheric benchmark for subsequent artists The show takes the old valuation as a given without mentioning its vulnerabilities: rhetorical inflation, often, and macho entitlement, always This perspective casts artists whose works reacted against or shrugged off Abstract Expressionism as little fish around the Leviathan.—Peter Schjeldahl (Ongoing.) and Eero Saarinen; it’s a classic design, but, owing to technological limitations in its day, it wasn’t mass-produced until 2006 Starting in 1938, MOMA mounted an annual exhibition called “Useful Objects,” which championed the inexpensive and doubled as recommendations for holiday gifts No item had a value of more than five dollars the first year; a decade later, the limit was a hundred dollars By the fifties, the museum had established partnerships with national retailers for the exhibited products, from textiles to appliances, and, in the eighties, it opened its own design store In the current show, the most compelling items are the everyday gems: Timo Sarpaneva’s cast-iron and teak casserole, from 1959; the original Slinky, from 1945; and a collapsible wire basket, from 1953, as graceful as a Ruth Asawa sculpture.—Johanna Fateman (Through June 15.) Ian Cheng Gladstone Meet BOB, a “Bag of Beliefs,” just like you Unlike you, BOB is a serpent, whose existence plays out in real time (this is a live CHELSEA simulation, not a video loop), on a twelvefoot-high screen An unpredictable number of heads emerge from its inconstant skin, which shifts, depending on the day, from pale orange to crimson This chimeric demon is made up of “demons,” A.I lingo for programs that kick in under specific conditions In Cheng’s show, the condition is you, making offerings via a free iOS app Offered a mushroom or a piece of fruit, BOB might eat it; offered a bomb, BOB might escape or be killed Has our hero learned anything during its weeks-long saga of death and rebirth? Hard to tell, but thrilling to ponder The entertainment industry employs technology to numb minds; this brilliant young philosopher-artist uses it to spelunk consciousness.—Andrea K Scott (Through March 23.) Charles LeDray Freeman The bite-size world of LeDray’s miniature sculptures is the real world scaled to thought—which, of course, must be compact enough to fit into our crowded skulls His subjects (clothes, a catcher’s mitt, a hotel key, tools, a DOWNTOWN IN THE MUSEUMS “Lucio Fontana” Met Breuer ILLUSTRATION BY ROMAN KLONEK The Italian artist is famous for the monochrome canvases, neatly slashed with knives, that he made—or executed—between 1958 and his death, ten years later, at the age of sixty-nine This retrospective, curated by Iria Candela, has a melancholy aspect: it is among the last of the Met’s shows in Marcel Breuer’s granite alcazar on Madison Avenue, which the museum has occupied since the Whitney moved downtown, in 2015 Conveniently, the chaste brutalism of the Breuer building—finished in 1966, the year that Fontana won the Grand Prize for an Italian painter at the Venice Biennale—feels perfect for it, housing a period style in period style Despite pleasant surprises— notably involving the artist’s lesser-known ceramic sculptures, which veer between figuration and abstraction and can suggest the euphoric neo-Baroque of a drunk Bernini—the show has a droopy feel of avant-gardism left out in the rain of subsequent history So does a lot of once radical twentieth-century art these days, as myths of progress in culture complete their long collapse and mystiques of innovation gravitate from individual genius to corporate branding.—P.S (Through April 14.) “The Value of Good Design” Museum of Modern Art The simple flask of the Chemex coffeemaker, the austere fan of aluminum tines on a garden rake, and the airtight allure of first-generation Tupperware exemplify the democratic promise of the Good Design movement in this edifying survey, which highlights (although not exclusively) the museum’s role in its history Also on view—and among the winners of MOMA’s first design competition, held in 1940-41—is a molded plywood chair by Charles Eames Last month, the incomparable Johanna Burton left her curatorial perch at the New Museum to become the director of the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Ohio Her knack for harmonizing visual pleasure and vanguard ideas will be missed (An elegant writer, Burton enlists words in the service of art, which sounds simple enough, until you consider how many curators just the reverse.) Her swan song at the museum is a joyful and fierce one-person show, “The Anthropophagic Effect” (through June 9), by Jeffrey Gibson, a midcareer Choctaw and Chippewa artist who puts traditional techniques (beading, basket weaving) and materials (porcupine quills, birch bark) to firebrand ends Kinship, whether by choice or by blood, is crucial to Gibson, who understands that objects accrue the most meaningful value in relation to people, not bank accounts Don’t be surprised if you walk into this fifth-floor exhibition, whose walls are covered with rainbow tessellations of triangles, and see the artist’s runway-ready riffs on ceremonial garments, which usually hang from the ceiling, being worn by his friends in an ad-hoc photo shoot A tender selection of crafts made by or belonging to Gibson’s family is also on view.—Andrea K Scott THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 On Mike Lévy’s new album, artists such as Pharrell Williams and HAIM play bruised and moody versions of themselves ILLUSTRATION BY SIGGI EGGERTSSON THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 59 The New Yorker Crossword Puzzle Stack for a publisher’s assistant Dulce et (Horatian maxim) Flavoring used in biscotti Landmark 1973 court case, familiarly Do the rest of the puzzle, and find a new one every week, at newyorker.com/crossword 60 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 likes to reference: “When I’m looking in your face, you give me faith,” he says “I feel this faith This must be fate.” Most of the record, particularly its drifty, despondent back half, discards the conventional rhythms of dance music, relying instead on a chromatic, arrhythmic synth-pop haze The sound is not exactly popular, but it’s influential and ubiquitous nonetheless—indebted to the eighties but largely divorced from any particular era It’s the sort of music best suited to movie soundtracks, a major channel of distribution for electronic music in recent decades It’s no coincidence that “Forever,” the best song on “Hyperion,” features Electric Youth, the Canadian band heard on the soundtrack for “Drive,” Nicolas Winding Refn’s brooding, highly stylized thriller (In 2015, Lévy produced the soundtrack for “Disorder,” a French thriller about a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder.) Much of the record is filled with empty, contemplative space, which can be challenging to sit with It has all the despondence of Lévy’s earlier work, without any of the horsepower—a result that feels like the outcome of a battle between Lévy’s stubborn impulses and the expectation that he make mainstage music he name Gesaffelstein is a portmanteau combining Albert Einstein with the Wagnerian term Gesamtkunstwerk, which can be loosely translated as “total art work.” (Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet; Hyperion is the name of an esoteric figure in Greek mythology.) This comically highfalutin self-presentation would be familiar to Kraftwerk, the German act that, in the seventies, legitimatized electronic music, sending an enduring shock wave through popular culture Lévy is a student of Kraftwerk, and part of his power lies in his ability to create an all-encompassing concept, uniting his music with a distinct visual aesthetic; he often pairs his songs with striking, cinematic videos Some of Lévy’s work on “Hyperion”— like the album’s bright, pointillistic, eponymous opener—seems like an explicit homage to his German forebears, T whose work can often be found in major art museums There are perhaps no musicians whom history has trampled over so forcefully as electronic producers, who are disproportionately burdened by whipsaw shifts in popular taste Lacking the force of celebrity that typically accompanies marketable vocalists, they can easily be overlooked Those who try to keep up with the tides of pop music usually so by capitalizing on trends and aligning themselves with current stars Even the seemingly too-big-to-fail E.D.M industry risks becoming obsolete; earnings have declined of late, and the figure of the party-starting festival d.j has come to feel cartoonish (Kraftwerk, in fact, is one of the only acts to make it out of the gantlet of electronic music with its legacy intact.) In this era, in which artists live and die by their ability to sell concert tickets, electronic producers have been forced into two schools One is made up of an underground network of aficionados who perform mostly in smaller clubs in Europe and Asia; the other is part of the cash machine of radio-oriented E.D.M Rarely does an artist traverse these worlds with ease Electronic music’s middle class, of which Lévy can be considered a member, is shrinking On “Hyperion,” Lévy steps lightly over the shaky bridge between heritage and modernism, between anonymity and notoriety Its mix of meditative mood music and in-your-face pop is, at best, a valiant experiment; at worst, it’s a polished but listless attempt At Coachella, this April, Lévy will return to live performing for the first time in years, appearing on the same stages as Ariana Grande and Dillon Francis, a d.j known for his crowd-pleasing take on the bleating fusion genre called moombahton It’s unclear how Lévy might go about translating something like the ambient, ten-minute song “Humanity Gone,” his album’s closer, to thousands of distractible festival attendees (Even more unclear is how he’ll fare in a suit, in arid hundred-degree weather.) He may retain his status as a disgruntled outsider—which is to say, he’ll feel like himself Lauren Berlant sees all politics as sentimental, trailing a fantasy of the good life Dream, Berlant suggests, amounts to a cruel optimism, a condition “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing.” We are accustomed to longing for things that we know are bad for us, like cigarettes or cake Perhaps your emotional state is calibrated around a sports team, like the New York Knicks, and despite hopes that next season will be better you vaguely understand that you’ll be let down anyway But our Sisyphean pursuit of the good life has higher stakes, and its amalgam of fantasy and futility is something that we process as experience before we rationalize it in thought These feelings, Berlant says, are the “body’s response to the world, something you’re always catching up to.” “Cruel Optimism” was dense and academic, but it proved enormously influential Its timing was serendipitous The book was published at a moment when Barack Obama could still credibly draw upon “the audacity of hope,” and, with a second term in sight, people wondered if he would finally unleash the progressive will that many believed lingered deep inside him Those who opposed him continued to work themselves into a radical frenzy, as the Republican mainstream reoriented itself around the Tea Party Berlant tuned in to a wider sense of disaffection—the feeling among average voters that neither of these visions for change was really about them, or for them According to Berlant, these suspicions manifested themselves in mundane ways: hoarding things or overeating might be attempts to overcome feelings of personal powerlessness And her affective framework was a means of understanding larger manifestations of these suspicions, too: the Occupy movement, which began in September, 2011, could be seen as a response to the cruel optimism of capitalism, the pent-up outrage of citizens realizing that they’d been chasing nothing more than a dream In the years that followed, Berlant’s interest in the immediacy of what others call “felt experience” helped explain why people were feeling increasingly unsteady It was as though they were in relationships that PHOTOGRAPH BY WHITTEN SABBATINI THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 A CRITIC AT LARGE THAT FEELING WHEN What affect theory teaches about the new age of anxiety BY HUA HSU n October, 2011, the literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant published “Cruel Optimism,” a meditation on our attachment to dreams that we know are destined to be dashed Berlant had taught in the English Department at the University of Chicago since 1984 She had established herself as a skilled interpreter of film and literature, starting out with a series of influential, interlinked books that she called her “national sentimentality trilogy.” A sense of national identity, these books argued, wasn’t so much a set of conscious decisions that we make as it was a set of compulsions—attach- I ments and identifications—that we feel In “Cruel Optimism,” Berlant moved from theorizing about genres of fiction to theorizing about “genres for life.” We like to imagine that our life follows some kind of trajectory, like the plot of a novel, and that by recognizing its arc we might, in turn, become its author But often what we feel instead is a sense of precariousness—a gut-level suspicion that hard work, thrift, and following the rules won’t give us control over the story, much less guarantee a happy ending For all that, we keep on hoping, and that persuades us to keep on living The persistence of the American 61 “As a gesture of good faith, my client is offering the large ball of rubber bands inside the ‘random stuff ’ drawer.” • lacked reciprocity Her work, like the school of thought that had produced it, was attentive to the buffeting emotional weather of everyday life: consider our Twitter-fed swings of anger and mirth, the oversharing and moodiness ascribed to younger generations, the paranoia stoked by proliferating conspiracy theories, even the emergence of the eternally sad pop star Shortly after the publication of “Cruel Optimism,” Berlant began to sense a subtle, atmospheric disturbance In September of 2012, she offered a diagnosis on her blog: Many of you would say that Donald Trump was excluded from the Republican convention, has no traction as a political candidate, and is generally viewed as a clown whose spewing occasionally hits in the vicinity of an opinion that a reasonable person could defend But I am here to tell you that he actually won the Republican nomination and is dominating the airwaves during this election season He is not doing this with “dark money” or Koch-like influence peddling He has done this the way the fabled butterfly does it, as its wing-flapping sets off revolutions Berlant felt Trump’s spectral presence everywhere, his bluster mimicked and channelled by the Party establishment Though hardly a man of 62 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 • nuance, he had tapped into the subtleties of affective politics She called it “the Trumping of Politics.” iterary criticism used to be centered on meaning The critic interrogated a poem or a passage, and applied her preferred theory of how meanings were produced and where they could be found A New Critic might have scrutinized form and irony, explicating the interplay between overt and actual meaning; a deconstructionist might have been attuned to the way the metaphors and propositions in a passage undermined each other; a historicist to the way the meanings of a text might be situated within larger political or social tensions For each, the task was interpretation, and the currency was meaning In the past couple of decades, however, a different approach has emerged, claiming the rubric “affect theory.” Under its influence, critics attended to affective charge They saw our world as shaped not simply by narratives and arguments but also by nonlinguistic effects—by mood, by atmosphere, by feelings The so-called affective turn was propelled, in no small part, by a series L of essays, starting in the mid-nineteen-nineties, by the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who had become fascinated by the work of the psychologist Silvan Tomkins He had identified nine primary “affects,” some positive (interest, enjoyment), most negative (anger, fear, shame, disgust, “dissmell”), one neutral (surprise) Tomkins—who had a background in theatre—believed that people acted toward one another according to social scripts We could achieve peace or happiness by understanding how the scripts worked and by avoiding situations that triggered negative affects But literary critics like Sedgwick were less interested in figuring out how to make people better than in understanding why we feel the way we During the two-thousands, affect theory became one of the dominant paradigms of literary studies, and a bridge to other fields, notably social psychology, anthropology, and political theory Scholars like Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, and Ann Cvetkovich began exploring the emotional contours of life during increasingly precarious times They were circling around a kind of overstimulated numbness, considering everything from what it meant to call something “interesting”—a hedge against actual judgment—to the relationship between economic anxiety and mental health In “Ugly Feelings” (2005), Ngai published a “bestiary of affects,” including animatedness, envy, irritation, paranoia, and the combination of shock and boredom that she called “stuplimity.” Other affect theorists noted that, amid a sense of dawning futility, many people seem to derive their greatest pleasure from making others feel bad; disaffection and disillusionment are contagions we can spread ourselves Berlant roots her version of affect theory less in works of psychology than in works of Marxist thought, especially those of Raymond Williams, who, back in the nineteen-fifties, wrote of the “structure of feeling.” He was trying to describe how we come to agree on social or cultural conventions—the intuitive, pre-ideological sense a cohort has that one version of the future is feasible while another is not Berlant, in turn, sought to chronicle “dramas of adjustment” that have overtaken the postwar, boom-time conceptions of the good life, and that might “force into being new recognitions of what a life is and ought to be.” The draw of the American Dream, in her view, has always been its seductive invitation to fuse one’s “private fortune with that of the nation.” When she began teaching at the University of Chicago, in the mid-eighties, Ronald Reagan spoke confidently of a “morning in America,” and the American story of postwar prosperity still seemed possible General skepticism about meritocracy and opportunity, felt most acutely by marginalized groups who couldn’t see themselves in picket-fence campaign ads, had yet to go mainstream Berlant saw the contradictions within the public realm played out in sentimental fiction These works were often seen as unserious because of their appeal to emotion and their focus on the domestic sphere, and yet they could move people to act In sentimental fiction, we encounter righteous solutions to problems that feel unresolvable in real life Berlant held that American popular culture had been built, layer by layer, from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “The Simpsons,” upon the assumption that identifying with “someone else’s stress, pain, or humiliated identity” could change you “Popular culture relies on keeping sacrosanct this aspect of sentimentality—that ‘underneath’ we are all alike,” she observed Everyone has heartstrings Over time, she wrote, we had grown addicted to having them pulled, rather than focussing on what the pulling could accomplish by way of political change We’d replaced tangible action with affective experience “What does it mean for the theory and practice of social transformation,” she asked in a 1999 essay, “when feeling good becomes evidence of justice’s triumph?” Somewhere along the way, doing good had come to seem irrelevant—or maybe just felt impossible n 2002, Berlant helped found the Feel Tank Chicago—her version of that ubiquitous vehicle of policymaking the think tank The collective consisted of academic colleagues, artists, and activists who sought to take “the emotional temperature of the body politic.” It functioned both as a support network and as a strategy workshop for “political depressives.” Underneath the playful conceit was the very serious possibility that politics was essentially theatre, and that it was basically impossible to opt out of one’s part in it As Berlant later wrote, in “Cruel Optimism,” “The political depressive might be cool, cynical, shut off, searingly rational or averse, and yet, having adopted a mode that might be called detachment, may not really be detached at all, but navigating an ongoing and sustaining relationship to the scene and circuit of optimism and disappointment.” We dream of swimming toward a beautiful horizon, but in truth, Berlant evocatively observed, we are constantly “dogpaddling around a space whose contours remain obscure.” What stories we tell ourselves in order to stay afloat? In December, 2007, she started a blog called Supervalent Thought, dedicated to slowing the world down, zooming in on its mundanities Some of its most bewitching posts had a voyeuristic intimacy, cataloguing interactions on city streets or in coffee shops, scrutinizing non- verbal cues, gestures, and fleeting expressions—the traces of affect that litter our daily lives In one post, Berlant recounts an argument between a cashier and an angry customer at a convenience store The customer leaves in a huff but forgets his credit card, and the “aggrieved” yet duty-bound cashier rushes out after him, hoping to get his attention with an unusually loud whistle—the kind “that you know requires your fingers.” When the cashier returned, Berlant complimented him on his technique “He told us a story about elementary school,” she wrote “He said he had had a math teacher who insulted and shamed him One day she was using him as an example, and he just put his fingers in his mouth and blew.” It was an experience that couldn’t be easily distilled into lesson; it endured as a lingering affect Berlant was interested in the “atmosphere” of scenes like these, acted out by dispirited characters in search of a plot “The Hundreds” (Duke), Berlant’s latest book, co-written with Kathleen Stewart, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, grows out of these short writing exercises Each entry is an experiment in “following out the impact of things” in a hundred I “Five-second rule!” You deserve a good laugh Get cartoons and more funny stuff in your in-box with the Daily Humor newsletter Sign up at newyorker.com/humoremail 64 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 words, or a multiple of a hundred words The result is a strange and captivating book It is an inventory of what Berlant and Stewart call “ordinaries,” which arise from encounters with the world that are “not events of knowing, units of anything, or revelations of realness, or facts.” They are records of affect, meditations, manifestos, and prose poems There are entries on smoothies and weird encounters at the liquor store, digressions on selfies, yoga, and capitalism, a reference to the TV show “Search Party” and the real-estate app Zillow The authors sift through the detritus of the American Dream— the symptoms of cruel optimism Men at the local deli seem to suspect that life is “a set of roadblocks cooked down to a rage.” One particularly haunting page recounts an argument that the narrator had with a neighbor over a urinating dog Another woman walks by, trying to calm the author down and bring her “back to the good.” “His words were spitballs; hers were gently bouncing tennis balls He was a rage machine; she was a sympathy machine, but she seemed so tired, too, and I could only imagine why.” In Berlant and Stewart’s hands, affect theory provides a way of understanding the sensations and resignations of the present, the normalized exhaustion that comes with life in the new economy It is a way of framing uniquely modern questions: Where did the seeming surplus of emotionality that we see on the Internet come from, and what might it become? What new political feelings were being produced by the rudderless drift of life in the gig economy? What if millennials were unintelligible to their parents simply because they have resigned themselves to precariousness as life’s defining feature? A lot of affect theory is abstruse to the point where you forget that it aims to describe basic facets of everyday reality Stewart’s books have been a notable exception, interweaving diaristic observation and everyday reportage with critical theory The sentences in Berlant’s previous books and articles tended to be very long, conveying the sweeping complexity of her ideas But she seems invigorated by the neurotic limitations of this form, which pro- duces a kind of frenzied poetry “The Hundreds” calls to mind the adventurous, hybrid style of Fred Moten (the book includes a brief poem by him), Maggie Nelson, or Claudia Rankine, all of whom bend available literary forms into workable vessels for new ideas Berlant leans into the wit and vulnerability on the edges of her previous work “There is nothing I love more than watching someone use their freedom,” she writes “I’ll coast in awkward transit, family meals, and acrid sex to get next to a freedom I’ll fling myself at ordinary monsters if in the crevasse of the mistake I get next to a freedom We bear each other hoping to breathe in each other’s freedom.” The most penetrating moments of “The Hundreds” occur when the authors meditate on what it means to write about life in the first place Their efforts end up telling us something about what it means to assess our lives without giving up on ourselves: “We make a pass at a swell in realism, and look for the hook We back up at the hint of something We butt in We try to describe the smell; we trim the fat to pinpoint what seems to be the matter here.” It’s like an asymptote, moving toward but never arriving at the point of convergence This is, of course, the geometry of cruel optimism—the endless chase for a destination you’ll never reach It’s tiring work: “When writing fails the relation of word and world, it spins out like car wheels in mud, leaving you stranded and tired of trying.” is optimistic,” Ber“A lllantattachment argued in “Cruel Optimism,” because it forces us out of ourselves From there, we enter “into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.” The challenge is finding configurations that don’t simply reproduce the same old patterns of life There’s a stirring moment, at the end of “Cruel Optimism,” when Berlant writes about the book’s cover image, a painting that depicts the artist and disability activist Riva Lehrer lying beside her dog, Zora Lehrer seems to float behind Zora, her hand covering her face Zora is blind in one eye and wears a cone around her neck They are, by conventional standards, limited and vulnerable beings But, to Berlant, they are a “team.” They “seem at peace with each other’s bodily being, and seem to have given each other what they came for: companionship, reciprocity, care, protection.” In the absence of real stability—the state of affairs that we must come to terms with—there is still the possibility of true solidarity, the experience of “having adventures and being in the impasse together, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and also, allowing for some healing and resting, waiting for it not to drop.” In moments like these, Berlant’s work can feel strangely and kindly optimistic What’s moving about her reading of Lehrer’s painting is this awareness of the boundaries between these bodies, as well as the atmosphere they nevertheless share Maybe relinquishing or recalibrating our fantasies of the good life doesn’t lead to absolute darkness It can simply be a matter of coming to grips with different possibilities of communion, figuring out who benefits from our collective weariness The political backdrop that inspired “Cruel Optimism” seems quaint compared with the divisiveness of the present But attentiveness to affect encourages us to imagine ourselves beyond the present: even if feelings of exhaustion, indifference, or disillusionment may have been naturalized, that doesn’t mean they’re natural “No one wants to be a bad or compromised kind of force in the world, but the latter is just inevitable,” Berlant once wrote in a short essay on her personal credos “The question is how to develop ways to accentuate those contradictions, to interrupt their banality and to move them somewhere.” We can build worlds out of these small ambitions We continue to write, even if it occasionally feels as though we were spinning our wheels, and we continue to live, even if it means giving up the certainty that our story is going to end the way we want it to Writing on her blog a few years ago, Berlant issued what she described as her collective’s secret motto: “We refuse to be worn out.” BRIEFLY NOTED How to Hide an Empire, by Daniel Immerwahr (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) This history makes a compelling case that the United States has maintained an unacknowledged empire for nearly as long as it has had a navy Immerwahr shows how America amassed a network of overseas outposts and territories that, at its height, in 1941, accounted for some thirteen per cent of the U.S population Most illuminating are the book’s portraits of the inhabitants of annexed lands—Puerto Rico, the Philippines, the Virgin Islands Many never won either independence or full statehood and voting rights As a newspaper noted in 1848, America wanted “all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people.” In the Dark Room, by Brian Dillon (Fitzcarraldo) “What knowl- edge can an object preserve?” The question underpins this extraordinary memoir, in which grief drives an intense scrutiny of the spaces (a childhood home) and the “interconnected artifacts” (photographs, knickknacks) that form “a partial record of a more chaotic and expansive reality.” Dillon lost his mother as a teen-ager, and his father a few years later Unsentimental and precise, he reckons with a past simultaneously vanished and all too present, drawing inventively on Proust, Nabokov, De Quincey, and St Augustine Grief and memory are perennial subjects, but this meditation on “the image of an intimacy to which we can never return” contains original and striking insights The Hundred Wells of Salaga, by Ayesha Harruna Attah (Other Press) Set in the nineteenth-century kingdom of Gonja (in present-day Ghana), this dazzling historical drama traces the intertwining lives of Wurche, a princess, and Aminah, her slave Fighting to control slave markets and routes, volatile coalitions of local chiefs and Europeans bring about the destruction of ancient cities and states Details—calabashes of millet beer; medicines of ebony roots, baobab leaves, and dawadawa bark; the “square, brown leather talismans” on soldiers’ smocks— immerse us in the era, and the destinies of Attah’s characters express wider disruptions Wurche, “out of curiosity, out of defiance,” has a baby with a German colonist, and Aminah falls in love with a man who was to have sold her Territory of Light, by Yuko Tsushima, translated from the Japa- nese by Geraldine Harcourt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) This novel, by an eminent Japanese writer who died in 2016, appeared in 1979, in the wake of Japan’s women’s-liberation movement An unnamed woman, whose husband has asked for a separation, settles into an apartment with her young daughter and explores independent life She meets other women who are no longer “ordinary”—a colleague who’s been dating a married man, an elderly eccentric, a bar-hopping, Sanskrit-speaking hippie—and explores intimacy with men Tsushima paints a complex picture of modern Japanese womanhood, and of the anxieties of breaking with tradition The protagonist thinks of asking her husband, “Maybe we’ve got it wrong—weren’t we hoping for something different?” THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 65 MUSICAL EVENTS THE CONCERTO CHALLENGE John Adams and Thomas Adès offer new takes on a beloved form BY ALEX ROSS that has long governed the form Chaya Czernowin’s “Guardian,” for cello and orchestra, inverts the polarity, so that, in the composer’s words, “the cello grows to include the orchestra within its resonant body.” The solo instrument is amplified, allowing the slightest touches of bow on string to carry into the hall Liza Lim’s “Speak, Be Silent” places a solo violin amid an ensemble dominated by wind, brass, and percussion Lim’s extraordinary ear for timbre and texture brings about a synthesis of disparate voices, illustrating the work’s epigraph, from Rumi: “Just remember, when you’re in union, / you don’t have to fear / that you’ll be drained.” he ever-formidable British composer Thomas Adès takes a different tack in his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, which had its première at the Boston Symphony on March 7th, with a Carnegie Hall performance to follow on March 20th Here is an unabashed showpiece in the grand manner, replete with thundering double octaves, framerattling two-hand chords, and keyboardsweeping glissandos A program note written by Adès is almost comically oldfashioned, inviting the audience to listen for first and second themes, development and recapitulation, and so on Yet the work is far more than an exercise in nostalgia It is an unruly romp across familiar terrain—at once a paean to tradition and a sophisticated burlesque of it The soloist at the first performances, which Adès conducted, was the Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein Few concertos have ever been more immaculately tailored to their first interpreter Gerstein is a heavyweight performer, having conquered Liszt’s monstrously difficult Transcendental Études In 2017, he joined the Boston Symphony for a rare performance of Ferruccio Busoni’s even more monstrous Piano Concerto (A recording of that outing was recently released by the Myrios Classics label.) Some of Adès’s madcap writing in the concerto may doff a hat to Busoni’s Mephistophelian masterpiece Adès also nods to the fact that Gerstein is a serious jazz player, a brilliant exponent of Gershwin It can’t be an accident that the concerto’s opening gesture brushes against the intervals of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.” The first movement follows the ru- T lamorous, gladiatorial, faintly disreputable, the concerto is an essential feature of modern concert life Few symphony orchestras venture far into a season without summoning a soloist to execute the majestic opening arpeggios of Beethoven’s “Emperor,” the throat-clearing double-stops of the Dvořák Cello Concerto, or some other familiar bold gesture Orchestral economics would presumably collapse without a supply of celebrity soloists playing celebrity works The disreputability of the genre has to with its slightly seedy showmanship, its carnival trappings The virtuoso violinist is a devilish hypnotist, descended from Paganini The pianist is a Lisztian magician, conjuring wonders from a long black box G Contemporary composers who produce concertos—there is a steady demand for them, always threatening to become a glut—must contend with the genre’s history of hoary theatrics In the disillusioned twentieth century, the standard Romantic narrative of heroic struggle fell from fashion The soloist more often acted the part of a solitary wanderer, traversing the damaged landscapes of modernity Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, composed in 1935, follows a trajectory of crisis, lamentation, and dissolution In Elliott Carter’s Piano Concerto, written three decades later, the soloist is all but trampled underfoot by a rampaging orchestra Two significant recent concertos dismantle the duality of self and community Composers writing concertos must contend with the genre’s history of hoary theatrics 66 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY SERGIY MAIDUKOV diments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn Trumpets and trombones join in with wah-wah mutes Adès’s fractal orchestration and atomizing interplay of intervals keep the Jazz Age ambience at a distance: nothing stays fixed In the recapitulation, the Bette Davis theme assumes grander proportions, with solemn, unmuted horns in attendance The first theme returns in the coda, amid delirious orchestral commentary A pell-mell duet of piccolo and xylophone had me on the brink of laughing out loud The middle movement, marked “Andante gravemente,” plunges into melancholy A funereal procession of winds and brass, more or less in B-flat minor, leads into a courtly, neo-Baroque theme An intricately expressive countermelody floats high into the piano’s upper register, adorned with Chopinesque curlicues An atmosphere of dejection gathers as the piano becomes fixated on a three-note pattern and the orchestra sinks into the bass regions Many concertos draw a contrast between bravura and sorrowful moods; here the division is stark enough that it suggests the musical equivalent of manic depression The finale begins where the first movement left off, in a state of controlled chaos The orchestra squawks and snorts, a clarinet caterwauls, the piano cartwheels through complex polyrhythms, themes devolve into disjointed practice scales; an attempt at a noble chorale is pitched too high and becomes ridiculous These antics lead to a crisis and another depressive standstill A joyously anarchic coda overcomes the lingering shadows The failed chorale assumes properly grandiose proportions, although it is undercut by an over-the-top cascade of double octaves, doubled goofily by glockenspiel A cracking whip and a thudding bass drum bring this sublime conjuration to an end If anyone in the audience guffawed, a huge ovation covered it he same week that the Adès made its début in Boston, the Los Angeles Philharmonic introduced a new concerto by John Adams, titled “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” T Yuja Wang was the soloist, and Gustavo Dudamel conducted Adams’s playful title, quoting a remark apocryphally attributed to Martin Luther, led me to expect another example of what the composer has called his “trickster” mode—the most notorious instance being “Grand Pianola Music,” from 1982, in which Beethoven’s “Emperor” arpeggios are thrown into a mixer with Rachmaninoff and ragtime Some of that spirit persists in “Must the Devil,” but it turns out to be one of Adams’s darker, more abstract utterances The piece begins in trickster style, with the soloist playing a funky ostinato modelled on Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme and a detuned honky-tonk piano adding offbeat accents As this jollity grinds on, though, it takes on a machinelike brutality A composer who has long used popular material to poke at the solemnity of the classical tradition here seems to be exposing the dominating urge behind much pop music One hears echoes of apocalyptic episodes in Adams’s latter-day stage works: the doom-laden Corn Dance of “Doctor Atomic,” the malignant Americana of “Girls of the Golden West.” Whereas the slow movement of the Adès concerto suggests an inward despair, the middle section of “Must the Devil” tries to escape into a meditative sphere The piano is given a delicately meandering unaccompanied melody; Wang, virtuosic even in pianissimo, made it glisten in the air The orchestra seems uncertain how to respond, and a full-blown lyrical episode fails to develop The piano, ringing variations on its theme, falls into a bouncing tarantella rhythm The orchestra seizes on this playful pattern, giving it a monotonous, ominous thrust Thus begins the finale, which resumes and intensifies the first movement’s abrasive drive The ending is abrupt and chilling Three times, the strings intervene with sustained D’s in stacked octaves, as if issuing warnings A brutal last stampede is cut short by a blaring dissonance in the horns and a reverberating chime—an alarm like the one that sounds in “Doctor Atomic” just before the final detonation On the East Coast, Adès offers a mirage of joy; on the West Coast, Adams stares into the storm Iconic Style From classic cartoons to signature covers, the New Yorker archive has memorable images for your walls newyorkerstore.com Prints, gifts, mugs, and more Enter TNY20 for 20% off THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 67 THE THEATRE LONGING AND BELONGING The art of aspiration in “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Be More Chill.” BY HILTON ALS lthough I have seen the theatre treasure Kelli O’Hara on Broadway only a handful of times—including in her Tony Award-winning performance as Anna, in the 2015 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I”—I always feel as though I’d just watched her in one thing or another, or read something about her, or maybe even glimpsed her on the street This sensation is due, in large part, to the familiarity she projects onstage and engenders in her audience, regardless of the role she’s playing Lovely and light in her approach to her characters’ motivations and actions, O’Hara expresses herself through a very particular prism: she makes us feel that, no A matter what conflicts tear at the seams of the story being told, it somehow relates to all of us And it’s a pleasure to watch as O’Hara refuses to allow pretense into her pretending: in her best work, she shows, as clearly as she can and without overthinking her impulses, what defines you and you and you Possessed of an exceptional warmth and charity toward other performers, though never condescending, she’s an actress who is free, it seems, of “drama.” To my mind, only O’Hara could have taken on the role of Cathy Whitaker, a nineteen-fifties housewife who becomes romantically involved with a black man, in the 2013 musical version of Todd Haynes’s 2002 movie, “Far Kelli O’Hara and Will Chase as a director and his muse at odds with each other 68 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 from Heaven.” There were a lot of plot points to cover in the show—Cathy’s husband is gay, the town she lives in is pretty much segregated, and so on— yet O’Hara presented the story not as a series of crises, the shattering and remaking of various intimacies, but, rather, as an opportunity to offer the audience a view into the ways in which society can dictate how women live their lives It was a mournful show, and O’Hara added a kind of unwritten score beneath the musical proper It was a small, plaintive, lonely sound, not spoken or sung but still audible, thanks to the force of O’Hara’s rendering—the smallness was that of Cathy’s life That all these pluses add up to a minus for O’Hara in the revival of Cole Porter’s 1948 musical, “Kiss Me, Kate” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at Studio 54, under the direction of Scott Ellis), tells you just how much of a hindrance preternatural kindness can be in a story that revolves, partly, around actressy grandstanding Porter wrote “Kiss Me, Kate”—his twenty-first Broadway show—in the midst of great physical pain, caused by the aftermath of a terrible horse-riding accident But pain was never the subject of his effervescent, literate work Longing was, and it’s longing—the inconvenience, the heartache, and the joy that one experiences while longing for another, especially if that other got away—that his heroine, Lilli Vanessi (O’Hara), expresses for her director, co-star, and former husband, Fred Graham (the lively Will Chase) Fred is staging a production of “The Taming of the Shrew,” in which he plays Petruchio, the suitor who eventually wins the hand of the tough and tough-talking Katherina (played by Lilli), the daughter of a Paduan lord Petruchio “tames” the shrew by surprising her: when they meet, he doesn’t hurl her invectives back at her, as a less intelligent man might; he throws her off by treating her rude words as a kind of caress, and turns her on with his skill with language Once he has won her, Petruchio resorts to more primitive methods to control Katherina, such as denying her food and clothing, and, in the end, she is remade as an ideal wife: docile, dependent on Petruchio’s attention and his power over her ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS GASH That’s one narrative line in the script of “Kiss Me, Kate”—Shakespeare’s Another was written by Sam and Bella Spewack, who also co-wrote the 1940 screwball comedy “My Favorite Wife,” and it involves the usual staples of comic mayhem—mistaken identity, crooks, and so on—as well as a director and his muse who are at odds with each other until they realize what they have and have had all along: a shared creativity that heightens their love Theatre is a corrective to whatever each finds uncontrollable in the other From the 1934 film “Twentieth Century,” starring Carole Lombard and John Barrymore, to the underrated masterpiece “Esther Kahn” (2000), with Summer Phoenix, many works have been written about the complicated relationship between a female performer and a male director What creates the tension in almost all of them is not so much the director’s wish to control his protégée as the actress’s success in becoming a star and exercising the self-interest of one—revelling in the diminished power of the man who used to run the show The Spewacks were an inspired choice to pen the script; they had a famously tumultuous marriage and they understood the push and pull that many directors and actors engage in as part of their process—an exchange that, inevitably, replicates certain traditional gender battles These are twisted versions of human intimacy, and, while they aren’t beyond O’Hara’s understanding, she doesn’t add anything to the script’s underbelly of domination and strife She is perfect when Katherina (and thus Lilli) kisses Petruchio (Fred), but we don’t see her trials or how they have transformed her O’Hara lacks the all-out physical ruthlessness of an Audra McDonald or the scratch and bite that Patti LuPone would have brought to the role Because O’Hara’s Lilli doesn’t seem to feel oppressed, she has nothing to struggle against, and her diva displays none of the divadom that “Kiss Me, Kate” requires. n its time, “Kiss Me, Kate” conferred some welcome sophistication on the backstage-musical genre I don’t really know what, if anything, “Be More Chill” (at the Lyceum, with music and lyrics I by Joe Iconis and book by Joe Tracz) contributes to the contemporary musical form Although it’s based on Ned Vizzini’s popular 2004 young-adult novel, “Be More Chill” feels like an old show, or a lesser version of a show we’ve already seen and liked better, such as the 2016 Broadway staging of “Dear Evan Hansen.” In a musical market dominated by sweet stories with little conflict and happy endings, “Dear Evan Hansen” offered audiences something fresh: a protagonist who isn’t especially likable In fact, Evan is creepy He lies to be liked, and his great desire—to belong to a society that is creepy, too— only makes his story that much more disturbing and memorable Like Evan, “Be More Chill” ’s Jeremy Heere (Will Roland) wants to belong to something, and, of course, it’s the world of the cool kids at school that he aspires to, but they’re not really having it He’s an outsider’s outsider, an only child living with a single father, Mr Heere ( Jason SweetTooth Williams), who munches on Cap’n Crunch and doesn’t really hear Jeremy: he’s locked in post-breakup grief, or frozen in something like adolescence himself Mr Heere and his son are starving for emotional nourishment, and Jeremy wants to find it in Christine Canigula (Stephanie Hsu), a popular classmate Hsu is amusing and energetic as a theatre-mad adolescent, but what can she to make any of these clichés resonate, especially once a science-fiction element is introduced, rocketing the already flimsy plot up to the galaxies of bad show biz? Like Hsu, Tiffany Mann, who plays the school gossip, Jenna, is a talented performer I was happy to watch and learn from She has an amazing set of pipes, and the emotional truth she fights for in her songs lies not in the lyrics or the music but in her soul And yet, because she’s black, the director, Stephen Brackett, has her black it up at times—you know, by being sassy and the like—and it was in those moments especially that I wondered where Vizzini’s sensitive story of inclusion had gone, and why ♦ Photograph / Amanda Villarosa WE’RE GOING TO C O LO M B I A a n d yo u s h o u l d join us! May 11th - th / June 15th - 23rd C A R TAG E N A + M E D E L L Í N - DAY I T I N E R A R Y That’s Too Bad Department From the Buffalo News LOVEJOY CORNER STORE MAY FACE LOSS OF LICENSE AS NUISANCE B O O K YO U R S P O T N O W a t e l c a m i n o t r a v e l / w o2019 m e n - w h o - t 69 ravel THE CURRENT CINEMA ARMS AND THE MEN “Hotel Mumbai” and “Ash Is Purest White.” BY ANTHONY LANE n 2008, a series of attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai, launched by the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, left more than a hundred and sixty people dead The attacks began on November 26th and lasted until the 29th Many locations were targeted around the city, including a hospital and a Jewish community center, but the most well-pub- I they hear the edicts of their leader, who is referred to as the Bull, and whom we never see “God is with you Paradise awaits you,” he tells the militants As an augury of such bliss, the water around them shines like melting gold They reach the city’s shore and split up, bound for their various objectives In the toilets of a railroad station, two of the guys Anthony Maras’s film revisits the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008 licized assault—though not the most lethal—took place at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, commonly known as the Taj Throughout the operation, the militants, numbering only ten, remained in contact with their handlers, who were based in Pakistan One message, which two of the killers were told to read out, ran as follows: “This is just a trailer The real film is yet to come.” What kind of feature presentation Lashkar-e-Taiba has in mind, one shudders to think For the moment, though, we have “Hotel Mumbai,” directed by Anthony Maras, which wastes no time in gunning the story to life We join the young terrorists as they crouch in a rubber boat, skimming across the sea Each of them has an earpiece, through which 70 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 unload guns from their backpacks As they leave the toilets and start shooting, the camera stays put, resisting the temptation to pursue them and see what havoc they wreak The rest of the film is seldom so restrained With so much mayhem to choose from, why should Maras and his coscreenwriter, John Collee, focus on the Taj? Lurking below the movie is an unsavory irony: the killers and the filmmakers picked the hotel for the same reasons First, because it is a contained space in which to shoot Second—and there’s no getting around this—because it holds plenty of Westerners, whose value, whether as real-life hostages or as dramatis personae, is there to be exploited Third, because the Taj is a fount of opulence, designed to woo you, whatever the purpose of your visit The terrorists gawk at the sight of the lobby, but so does David (Armie Hammer), an American architect who comes to stay, with his wife, Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi), their baby, and their British nanny To be fair, Maras and Collee are all too conscious of this cultural slant, and they make a sterling effort to correct it Hence the introduction of a Sikh waiter named Arjun (Dev Patel) He drops his daughter off with his pregnant wife, who is at work, and steers his scooter through teeming streets to the Taj Soon afterward, just in case we’ve missed the contrast in living standards, we are offered a closeup of a thermometer being dipped into the milky water of a bath that has already been run, and strewn with rose petals, ahead of a guest’s arrival at the hotel I was half expecting a slogan to flash onscreen: “Feeling Guilty Yet?” Later, when a horde of terrified guests seek refuge near the top of the building with the loyal Arjun as their protector, one aging white lady complains about his turban Only a wild surmise, but I think she’s a racist Some of the actors play real people Anupam Kher, for instance, who was excellent as the therapist in “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012), brings a comparable calm to his portrayal of Hemant Oberoi, the Taj’s head chef, who bore himself courageously during the siege According to the end credits, however, some of the others who were trapped there have been “subsumed fictionally,” which sounds painful David and Zahra are products of the subsumption, and so is Vasili ( Jason Isaacs), a rich Russian misogynist for whom it is difficult to root It transpires that he has had Special Forces training, and what’s interesting is how little that avails him— or anyone else—in his hour of need, and how exasperated you feel, as a moviegoer, by his lack of initiative He must have seen “Die Hard” (1988), so what the hell is he waiting for? “Hotel Mumbai” belongs to an odd postmillennial genre: the queasy and half-cathartic thriller, based on actual outrages of recent times Other examples include Peter Berg’s “Patriots Day” (2016), which investigates the bombings at the Boston Marathon, and Paul Greengrass’s “22 July” (2018), which ILLUSTRATION BY GAURAB THAKALI recounts the mass slaughter committed by Anders Behring Breivik, in Norway In each case, the carefully managed tensions of the plot invite you to be excited, while the bleakness of the historical facts at once dares and forbids you to enjoy yourself The characters both and don’t behave like folks in the movies are meant to; often, the cavalry is late showing up, or doesn’t come at all Greengrass set the tone with “United 93” (2006), about the airplane that was hijacked on 9/11 and, thanks to intrepid passengers, fell short of its target Is it any surprise that this disturbing brand of cinema was triggered by 9/11, a catastrophe that, despite the valor it called forth, and the wars that ensued, lies beyond redemption and revenge? Or that “Hotel Mumbai,” a well-staged model of the form, should leave you feeling fidgety and low? You can admire a film, reel at the horrors it unfolds, and still wind up asking yourself, helplessly, what it was all for irearms abound in “Hotel Mumbai,” and they incalculable harm, yet none have the dramatic impact that is made by a single handgun in “Ash Is Purest White.” Aimed at nothing in particular, the gun hurts nobody It belongs to a gangster named Bin (Fan Liao), who wields influence—though less than he believes—in the northern Chinese city of Datong We know he’s minor league because of a scene in a night club, where he dances with Qiao (Zhao Tao), who is not his moll so much as his partner in crime The year is 2001, although it might as well be 1978, given the cheesy lighting and the fact that everyone’s going nuts to “Y.M.C.A.” Half- F way through the song, there’s a clatter, and Bin’s gun falls to the floor, amid the revellers Qiao gives him a short, hard stare, fully loaded with scorn Looks can kill, even when guns don’t “Ash Is Purest White” is directed by Jia Zhangke, who specializes in small, involved tales that somehow unscroll into broader truths, often of the most withering sort, about his native land A century and a half ago, and thousands of miles away, the same gift was bestowed on Émile Zola; I can picture the novelist watching, with solemn approval, the start of the new film, in which the camera inspects a busload of passengers—young and old, smoking and yawning—and finally alights on Qiao In “Still Life” (2006), Jia used a similar procedure, locating his hero only after surveying the crowded deck of a ferry In each case, we sense an entire society both summoning and deserving the attention of the artist, who can reach out, more or less at random, and pluck a story worth telling Qiao, not Bin, dominates the latest film It is her fortunes that we follow, and her deeds that set the course of the plot When Bin is cornered by thugs and beaten up, she takes his gun—there it is again—and fires into the air to make them stop Charged with possessing an illegal weapon, she refuses to snitch, and serves five years in jail Upon her release, she goes hunting for him, in a distant province, only to be rejected Later still, we find her back in Datong, clearly wielding some power in criminal circles, yet content to care for Bin, a much diminished figure, when he appears Why? She strikes me as a free and stubborn spirit Asked to ex- plain her attitude, she says, “We talk about righteousness.” Fans of Jia will feel at home in this movie, resounding as it does with echoes of its precursors The three-part span of the narrative is as wide as that traversed by “Mountains May Depart” (2015) Nothing was more unexpected, in “Still Life,” than the glow of a passing U.F.O., which made for a charming break in Jia’s visual sobriety, and the same thing happens here, to miraculous effect On a more concrete level, the changes that we witness in Datong, like the looming promise, or threat, of the vast Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River, reflect an enduring obsession with all that fails to endure Do not be gulled by the slow pace of Jia’s stories; they are ceaselessly alive to his country’s haste, as it rushes to erase and to construct, and his sympathies tilt to those uncertain souls who simply can’t keep up Above all, there is Zhao Tao Trained as a dancer, she has been the leading lady in many of Jia’s films, starting with “Platform” (2000), and his wife since 2012 Theirs may be the most fruitful partnership between a director and a spouse (can we please abandon the rusty and constricting notion of the muse?) since Roberto Rossellini joined forces with Ingrid Bergman All that we treasure in Jia is there in Zhao’s scrutinizing gaze, at once pointed and guarded, and in the fierce patience with which she deliberates before taking action Near the end of the film, Qiao even smashes a teapot over someone’s head In her world, presumably, that means war NEWYORKER.COM Richard Brody blogs about movies THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC COPYRIGHT ©2019 CONDÉ NAST ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE U.S.A VOLUME XCV, NO 5, March 25, 2019 THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for five combined issues: February 18 & 25, June 10 & 17, July & 15, August & 12, and December 23 & 30) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007 Chris Mitchell, chief business officer; 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Just bring me back the one with the fly in it.” Matthew Thill, South Pasadena, Calif “Before you go, describe the iceberg salad.” Adam Santiago, New York City “I wish we’d seen that before we ate Dave.” Zak Snoderly, Boise, Idaho ... irreverently of the sacred and the serious 20 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 move from the sinful world, and some still Members of Manitoba Colony aren’t on the electrical grid They make their living... the Mir space station to warm the country’s dark northern regions with reflected sunlight The project was abandoned when the mirror, an eighty-three-foot-wide sheet THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019. .. “Songs from the Soil,” a so-called visual poem by the Danish filmmaker Phie Ambo, which follows the seasons on a biodynamic farm Also on the program is the 10 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019 world