Gawker - Poptimism goes the weasel

On 'And Just Like That,' Che Diaz is a beautiful portrait of reality

One of the most popular archetypes that has emerged in film and television during the last 15 years or so is Sad Funny Guy. You’ve almost certainly seen something whose protagonist falls into this category. Imagine a TV show or movie about a comedian who, plot twist, has a dark inner life or, alternately, is revealed to have been the victim of some tragedy or, god forbid, childhood trauma. He also fucks a lot, but poorly. That’s the joke. Did you think of Funny People? Or Louie? Or Crashing? Or The Big Sick? Or, tangentially, Master of None? Those are all Sad Funny Guy tentpoles.

The goal of this archetype is to show the comedian as a full person. Because, you know, when we (regular people) encounter comedians on stage, they are hilarious rays of light with the power to make us spit out the first gin and tonic of a two-drink minimum. But once they leave the stage? They have a darkness that the rest of the world doesn’t see. This is the kind of thing Aristotle was talking about in Poetics.

What this archetype hints at, and almost always avoids committing to, is that a comedian’s number one trait is being annoying. In that way, And Just Like That is one of the only pieces of media to get it right (Joker being the other). You might spend most of an episode thinking, “If Che Diaz says one more thing I’m going to turn off my television,” but that just means that Sara Ramirez is giving the performance of their career. And you should be thankful — in real life, you can’t turn a comedian off.

Behind her tiny sunglasses, a model cries.

In early December, Bella Hadid announced she was back as a Victoria’s Secret model, almost two years after the fallout from a New York Times investigation alleging a shocking “culture of misogyny” inside a company previously known for its radical feminist ethos that resulted in the mass exodus of some of its most prized “Angels.” Throughout the ensuing press tour promoting her new role as a “VS Collective ambassador,” Hadid has claimed that since her return to Victoria’s Secret she has felt “empowered again,” which is good for her.

I am very grateful that Hadid is promoting something — especially something this momentous for women — because it means we will get more interviews from her. I love Bella Hadid; she is my favorite living hot person. She was born rich and hot and will die rich and hot, and for that reason she is incredibly unrelatable, but she still triumphantly insists she is just like everyone else. In an interview for Wall Street Journal Magazine’s “My Monday Morning” series, in which the magazine asks celebrities and CEOs with access to dozens of assistants about productivity and routines, Hadid opens up about how she starts her weeks.

She does morning pages because she loves The Artist’s Way, she loves smoothies and going to the gym, and she loves dressing herself without the help of a stylist. But the real nugget of gold is when she is asked about posting a photo of herself crying on Instagram.

Try it out at your next party

Like most people, I had a lot of time on my hands these past few years, and I spent most of it on my phone. This — in concert with anxiety medication and other substances legal and otherwise — has made my brain weak, like a puddle of slime. I’ve never had a very good memory, but by summer of 2021, I saw the little memory that I did have evaporate unceremoniously while Googling “ben afleCk brther bad 1.”

In time, I grew frustrated with how much of an idiot I had become. I couldn’t remember the name of Joan Holloway’s military husband from Mad Men without looking it up, or the name of the guy I went to college with who would come into my dorm regularly to talk about how much he worked out, or even the boiling time for a soft-boiled egg. None of this was especially useful or life-changing information, but I wanted to remember it without making a shameful mess of my search history. If people with good memories erect elaborate memory palaces through which to remember stuff, I lived under a bridge in my underpants.

Inspired by a desire to impress and wow myself and others, and to see if my brain was capable of neuroplasticity, a term people who do crossword puzzles are obsessed with, I decided to stop looking stuff up online and see what happened. When I couldn’t remember Greg from Mad Men, instead of instantly turning to my phone, I just sat there, thinking, very hard. And so my new skill was born. And I call that skill: Strong Brain.

His latest novel wrestles with the sins of certain types of storytelling

Derrick Hall is about as well-adjusted as a teenager can be: affable, responsible, even willing to indulge his parents’ sentimentality as the fall of his senior year flashes by. He even has a part-time job (albeit a secret one working the cash register at the local porn store). It’s 1986 in Milpitas, California, and Derrick’s interactions with his friends and classmates seem to crackle with the weight of a new disequilibrium — adulthood, or something close to it, lingers on the horizon, rendering every bike ride home along the scenic route or whispered conversation in the back of Spanish class oddly bittersweet. Derrick is applying to colleges — his mother keeps leaving brochures out on the kitchen table, carefully arranging them to look casually placed — but his childhood buddy Seth is facing a less certain future: he’s a good kid, bright and creative, but has never been able to apply himself in school.

When the porn store shuts down, Derrick invites Seth to check out the abandoned storefront. Seth’s imagination begins to run wild, cycling through the possibilities made tangible by a secret space of their own, beyond the province of adult eyes. In a blur of long afternoons and sleepless nights, Derrick and Seth transform the shop into a combination of clubhouse and installation art project alongside their friends Alex and Angela. The newly decorated store is an ode to the obscene and occult: an angel made of raunchy VHS covers hangs from the ceiling; the roof is covered with a spray-painted mural of a giant ghoul; witches and wizards adorn the walls of the video booth arcade in the back. It’s a space the teenagers can call their own while basking in the dimming glow of their adolescence. It’s also the place where one of them will commit a grisly double murder.

The porn store teens are the emotional heart of Devil House, John Darnielle’s third novel, out January 25, but they’re ultimately characters in someone else’s story.

It's good when critics dislike things

I don’t pretend to know why anybody does anything. Why did Richard Joseph, a graduate student at McGill University, write a piece calling into question the motives behind literary hatchet jobs and why did his editors at the Los Angeles Review of Books give it the bland headline “Everyone’s a Critic,” when the piece is in fact about a few specific prominent critics? I do not know. Why did Yair Rosenberg, a political journalist, write in his Atlantic newsletter that the problem with critics is that they’re alienated from the appetites of actually existing audiences? I do not know. Why did a prominent novelist who claims not to read reviews of her work tell a New Yorker writer that she doesn’t “think much” of one of her harshest critics and follow that assessment with “I hate his writing.” Impossible to tell.

Poor critics! In Joseph’s account, they are craven seekers of clicks launching personal attacks against memoirists and novelists. In Rosenberg’s, they are slaves to the winds of Twitter, declaring artists such as Lin-Manuel Miranda and J.K. Rowling moribund even though the people still love them. These arguments cast critics either as sadists acting in bad faith or as spineless conformists trapped in myopia-inducing digital consensus bubbles. Against this backdrop, it’s somewhat refreshing to hear an author say she hates the guy who panned her last book. Whoops! She merely hates his writing — nothing personal.