Romance, jealousy, a pop star, a horse girl, simmering anger and resentment, alleged saliva

By Fran Hoepfner

The long-awaited premiere was the most cinematic event of the year thus far

While you were off on the beach or celebrating unions and work solidarity, an earth-shattering culture event occurred some thousands of miles away in the sinking city of Venice, Italy, where the year’s best film premiered on what they call “the Lido” over yonder. Olivia Wilde’s sophomore feature Don’t Worry Darling, which critics are calling “(mostly) well acted, and merely tedious” at best, and “disingenuous, easy, cheeky” at worst, has been dwarfed by its richly textured, multilayered, twisty, turny press tour that culminated in the cinematic spectacle of the year: the DWD Venice premiere.

All year long, we got teasers of the drama that would unfold — TikToks implying assistants signed NDAs to avoid talking about on-set drama, star Florence Pugh’s ghosting on her promotional obligations — which snowballed into a proper trailer of the action to come two weeks ago. Wilde vied for quickly rescinded brownie points for apparently firing Shia LaBeouf from the film. LaBeouf, in turn, says (and perhaps proved) that the director actually fought for him to stay in the movie before he wound up quitting. Wilde went on to explain incels to Maggie Gyllenhaal, plead the Fifth on her relationship with Harry Styles, and praise Florence Pugh, who remained silent and absent. Continue reading

By Katie Kadue

A history of paranoid reading

“What is a woman?” the conservative commentator Matt Walsh inquires, muses, demands, and shouts in his recent documentary of that name. Walsh, like many others who loudly ask this question, thinks he already knows the answer. As his wife confirms at the end of the film in the family kitchen, a woman is “an adult human female, who” — here she hands him an apparently woman-proof jar — “needs help opening this.” Walsh goes to such great lengths to feign not knowing what a woman is in order to expose those who, in his view, really don’t: people who use the word “woman” to refer to trans women. For Walsh and other patrollers of the gender boundary, trans women are a contamination risk. They stand accused of infiltrating not only physical women’s spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms but also the clean conceptual space of the category “woman”: they are, according to this transphobic logic, men who fraudulently claim to be women. The suspicion of trans women as threats to the integrity of “true” womanhood has precipitated violence against them while exacerbating the paranoid surveillance of all women, from the harassment of short-haired cis women in public restrooms to the obsessive deconstruction of online photographs to yield “proof” that actresses’’ jawlines and collarbone placements make them incontrovertibly male. Continue reading

By Allie Jones

A Liz Lemon joke converted her

Jennifer Lawrence is on the cover of Vogue this month talking about her new film Causeway, her new baby boy Cy — named for her art gallerist husband Cooke Maroney’s favorite artist, Cy Twombly — and her somewhat newfound progressive values. The coverline, a quote from J-Law herself, pretty much says it all: “YOU HAVE TO BE POLITICAL.” You do have to.

Today, Lawrence is fired up about the fall of Roe and angry at her Trump-voting dad and disgusted by J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate candidate from Ohio. “He’s not a hillbilly if he wrote a huge book,” she told Vogue. “Rich twat. I mean, I’m a rich twat, but I’m not running for office pretending that I’m not.” Continue reading

By Claire Carusillo

Who are you, again? She asked

My Queen Lilibet Sr. gave the ol’ two-fingered salute to tradition and and formally appointed the conservative Liz Truss, the U.K.’s third Prime Minister in three years, somewhere other than the government seat in London for the first time in her 70-year reign. Refusing to be moved far from her lawn chair on vacay, or whatever the Scottish equivalent of that is (atop a sheep who is holding a muzzle-loading pistol betwixt his wee teeth), Lil invited the PM to form a government in her name in her drawing room at Balmoral Castle on Tuesday.

The sea foam and gold color story in Lil’s Scottish drawing room is really quite fab when it comes to decorative office schemes for women who want to have it all without ever having to leave the house. And as the nation’s third female PM and the youngest female PM ever at the nubile age of 47, Truss does have it all (as long as we’re rounding up the mere 57 percent of conservative votes that went in Truss’s favor to constitute “all”). Continue reading

By Kate Shannon Jenkins

Contemporary literature seems largely uninterested in moral transformation

The redemption arc, in clumsy hands, becomes cheesy and unbelievable, offending good taste more often than not. Granted. But literature has, in the past, found ways to handle this sort of plot delicately, and to great effect. After all, the question of how a person changes ought to absolutely possess a novelist – as a matter of philosophical inquiry, but also as a representation of a real phenomenon that can and sometimes even does happen. Ideas about redemption motivated Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; degradation and disgrace – another form of moral transformation that might be understood as the redemption arc’s darker twin – were magnificently explored through the Shakespearean tragedies, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, even Proust’s humiliated M. Swann.

The American cultural imagination in particular has always wanted to believe in personal transformation — self-determination is sort of our whole schtick — and during our post-#MeToo, post-Trump moment, when the culture is very busy debating the eventual fate of the “canceled,” the dearth of transformation narratives in contemporary ideas fiction is striking. Possibly writers believe such stories juvenile, unsophisticated, or moralistic, despite classic evidence to the contrary. Or else they fear correct politics now preclude second chances, at least to perpetrators of ideological crimes. Anyhow, there are costs to this sort of affected cynicism. Good literature does not require character transformation, of course, but the reader’s belief in this potential resolution — a barely perceptible slide on a grand scale of moral possibility, if not the dramatic relinquishing/embracing of evil we’ve come to expect from Hollywood — is often what keeps us reading. To watch a character struggle toward and fail to achieve some desired change is among the most heartbreaking experiences literature can impart. Continue reading