Doppelgänger: Barry Levinson's The Alto Knights

Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Witty, gripping and grandly entertaining, Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights centers on the complicated relationship of two legendary Mafiosi, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who were both recruited to work for bootlegger Giuseppe Masseria in the 1920s alongside Lucky Luciano. After the murders of Masseria and his successor, Salvatore Maranzano, Genovese became Luciano’s second in command with Costello, who claimed to have abjured violence at the end of the First World War and stopped carrying a gun, as his consigliere. Genovese took over in 1936 when Luciano went to prison and expanded the operations of the organization Luciano had reconfigured as the Commission into narcotics. But he had to flee the U.S. to avoid a murder charge and took sanctuary in Italy. (Both men had been born there: Costello in Naples, Genovese in Calabria.) Costello took over, trading drugs for gambling. When Genovese returned to the States after the war – neatly bypassing conviction for that old killing when two key witnesses against him turned up dead – he didn’t take well to being his former colleague’s underboss. All of this narrative is background, much of it unstated or understated, to Levinson’s picture, which takes place in 1957, the year Costello appeared before the Senate Committee investigating the Mafia, and the year Genovese engineered the assassination of the former head of Murder Inc., Albert Anastasia, and attempted unsuccessfully to eliminate Costello.

Form and Legacy: Jane Corkin’s Vision of Photography as Fine Art

A display wall from Between Life and Light at the Jane Corkin Gallery.

The Jane Corkin Gallery’s 45th-anniversary exhibition, Between Life and Light, begins with the space itself: a historic tank house in Toronto’s Distillery District. The oak floors and wooden beams, reimagined in 2003 by architects Shim-Sutcliffe, create a gallery of light and levels that feels both expansive and intimate. This architectural transformation mirrors the exhibition’s premise—photography as a continuum of history and innovation, spanning nearly two centuries from 1857 to 2024.

Two Visionaries Walk Into a Bar: Huysmans and Huxley

(Both titles: Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“This was the attraction of the abyss over which one is leaning, that of a life lived at white heat. It was a deliberate abdication of day to day struggles, the removal of the difficulties of existence.”

--J .K. Huysmans

“We live together, we act on and react to one another but always we are by ourselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

--Aldous Huxley

As T.A. Brown pointed out in the article “The Technology That Actually Runs The World” last December in The Atlantic Monthly, the most dominant algorithms aren’t necessarily the ones choosing what songs Spotify serves up to you supposedly based on your personal tastes, but rather the ones that control everything you see, hear or read by controlling
all the art the even gets made before it’s made, as a result of prevailing consumer taste mechanisms that it can interpret more efficiently than the most canny culture critics ever could. The article suggested that these algorithms dictate everything, from which books are published and what art gets seen, in a revolutionary paradigm shift that has become entrenched in the arts and media. The essential premise was that in 2024 culture became boring and stale due to these thuggish algorithms’ calling the shots on what gets first produced, and then gets praised. The idea is that Big Tech has flattened culture into a facsimile of its former self, and that algorithmic recommendation engines have created what amounts to a lack of all forward momentum. But long before computers ever existed, except in the minds of visionary science fiction authors such as Yevgeny Zamyatin (author of the mindblowing 1922 novel WE) and Aldous Huxley (author of the book Zamyatin inspired, Brave New World in 1931), concerns were already beginning to float to the surface of our consciousness. Or at least to the consciousness of a few heroic prescients.

Potpourri: Love Life, Don’t Eat the Mangos and Beckett Briefs

Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell in Love Life. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The review of Don’t Eat the Mangos contains spoilers.

The great Jewish Weimar composer Kurt Weill fled Berlin for New York in the early thirties. Nothing he wrote for Broadway earned him the fame he’d garnered as Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator in Germany, but he produced the music for eight shows between 1936 and 1949 (he died in 1950 at the age of fifty while he was working on a musical based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) with a fascinating range of librettists including Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, S.J. Perelman, Ogden Nash and Maxwell Anderson. And though the shows were a mixed bag, his music was usually glorious. The 1947 opera he and the poet Langston Hughes fashioned from Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene, set in a Manhattan tenement, may be the most exquisite score anyone has written for Broadway besides Porgy and Bess.

Lost and Found: Christine Byl’s Lookout

(Deep Vellum/A Strange Object.)

A few weeks ago, somewhat bored by what I was currently reading, I rummaged through my pile of unread books, and picked up a novel called Lookout, by Christine Byl. It was a signed copy, but I have no idea how I acquired it. I think it might have been in a swag bag handed to me at a literary gala. In other words, by pure chance. The book was published in 2023 by a small, independent Texan press called Deep Vellum, under their A Strange Object imprint. I thought I’d read a few pages and see if it was any good. 273 pages later, I was in tears, moved and entranced by this tale of the loving but precariously dysfunctional Kinzler family living in rural Montana. The book spans the years from 1985 to 2009, mainly focusing on their younger of two daughters, Cody.

You Wouldn't Want to Live There: Chaos: The Manson Murders

Errol Morris’s Chaos: The Manson Murders is a shallow dip in a deep pool of conspiracy and weirdness. The book it’s based on—CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), by Tom O'Neill, with Dan Piepenbring—is only one of many in the last thirty years or so whose title promised “secret history”; unlike others, it delivered. O'Neill found a multitude of buried facts and forgotten documents. He highlighted existing holes in the standard version of the Manson murders, and punched many new ones. What he didn’t do was offer a unified-field theory, with all questions answered, all contradictions squared; and that, aside from the evidence he delivered, was O’Neill’s edge over other conspiracists. The sum of his unearthing, as he readily admitted, was a mound of irreducible mystery, uncanny remains forming no definitive shape. CHAOS was both enormous fun and disturbing to the point of nightmare.

Haunted: Ibsen's Ghosts at Lincoln Center

Lily Rabe and Levon Hawke in Ghosts. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

When she reviewed Shoot the Moon in 1982, the film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m a little afraid to say how good I think [it] is – I don’t want to set up the kind of bad magic that might cause people to say they were led to expect so much that they were disappointed.” Every critic who has been at the job for a long time recognizes this dilemma, though God knows it doesn’t come around very often. Kael’s next sentence is “But I’m even more afraid that I can’t come near doing this picture justice.” That’s my mood as I sit down to compose my thoughts on Jack O’Brien’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts, from a new adaptation by Mark O’Rowe, which will be playing upstairs in Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through April 13. O’Brien, who served as artistic director at the Old Globe in San Diego for four and a half decades, has helmed dozens of plays, many of them high-profile, and I have loved some of them, like Hairspray and the 2016 Broadway revival of The Front Page and the two runs he took at All My Sons, on TV in 1987 and in New York in 2019. (The earlier version, which was released on DVD, is unforgettable.) But his work with a quintet of actors in Ghosts is one of the most staggering evenings I’ve ever spent in the theatre.

Rarely Revisited: Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love

Vincent Randazzo and Avanthika Srinivasan in The Triumph of Love. (Photo: Liza Voll.)

Pierre de Marivaux was the most important French playwright of the eighteenth century – that is, of the second half of the Neoclassical period; Molière and Racine ruled the French theatre of the first half. Yet whereas Molière has never been out of fashion and Racine’s Phaedra has been kept alive (though more in the form of revisions and adaptations than through productions of the actual text), theatre companies stopped performing Marivaux almost entirely for many years. Rare as productions of English Restoration comedies are, until perhaps thirty years ago they were more frequent than revivals of The Triumph of Love and The Game of Love and Chance, Marivaux’s most famous plays. (He was, in fact, extremely prolific.) The translators and directors who rediscovered him were struck by how modern these hybrids of high and romantic comedy are, as was the marvelous English filmmaker Clare Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci’s wife, who made a magical movie version of The Triumph of Love with postmodern touches in 2001 starring Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw. But that doesn’t mean that Marivaux has exactly returned to the repertory. It’s still unusual to find a theatre with the courage to attempt his explorations of the tension between love and reason, which play with ideas from both Shakespeare and the Restoration masters Congreve and Wycherley and are witty, cerebral and demanding in their use of language. The movie of The Triumph of Love is the only version of the play I’ve ever seen, so I was sure not to miss the one that just opened at Boston’s Huntington Theatre. (It closes April 6.)

Stoner by John Williams: The Most Famous Unknown Novel in the World

NYRBooks Classics.                University of Texas Press.     

“But first, are you experienced? Or have you ever been experienced?”

--Jimi Hendrix

Like most folks who read books and watch films as a professional activity, it can sometimes feel as if we’re expected to pass cogent judgment on all books or films (or in my case also on music, visual art and buildings) to discern and share whether something is worth reading or watching. To me, however, life is too short to advise people on what to avoid, what didn’t work, succeed or achieve its creative aims, and what the artistic flaws were that made it a failure. There are plenty of good critics who do that to some degree, and I too enjoy reading their opinions, but I’d much rather talk about films, music or in this case books, that are so marvelous that they can or might actually alter the course of your life in some significant way if you read them. Stoner, released by John Williams in 1965, is just such a book. So is the book about his book, written by Charles Shields in 2018. In fact, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel might even be that rare case of a work that will really help readers to appreciate the whereof and what-for of the book it examines, in such micro-detail and macro-fondness, that it could even benefit from being consumed prior to Stoner itself.

Crash Landing: Karen Kain’s Swan Lake Stumbles Again

Genevieve Penn Nabity and National Ballet of Canada artists in Swan Lake. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

The National Ballet of Canada’s revival of Karen Kain’s Swan Lake is back, and two years later, it remains an exercise in frustration. What should have been a triumphant reimagining of one of ballet’s most iconic works is instead a muddled mess—a lavish production that fails to soar and instead flounders in its own contradictions.

Neglected Gem: Backbeat (1994)

From left: Scot Williams as Pete Best, Gary Bakewell as Paul McCartney, Ian Hart as John Lennon, and Chris O'Neill as George Harrison. (Photo: Channel Four Films.)

Backbeat covers a great period, 1960-62, when The Beatles, still teenagers and still unknown at home in England, played in cruddy Hamburg clubs (where the sailors used to ogle them) before the young avant-garde art crowd took them up. It’s about the friendship between John Lennon (Ian Hart) and Stu Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorff), an abstract expressionist painter he met at art school in Liverpool who dropped out to put together a band with John and travel to Germany; and about the uneasy, ambiguous triangle created when Sutcliffe fell in love with the German photographer Astrid Kirchherr (Sheryl Lee). The story is a fascinating one. But the film, directed by Iain Softley from a script he wrote with Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward, never caught on and has long been forgotten, though I love to teach it (my students always greet it enthusiastically) and, more than thirty years on, I think it deserves some attention.

Incandescent Visions: George Stamos’ "Sister Nightlight" Debuts in Toronto

George Stamos. (Photo: Susan Moss.)

George Stamos’ Sister Nightlight, which opened Thursday at Toronto’s Citadel and closed March 8, was a daring fusion of performance art, dance improvisation, and narrative storytelling. The piece began in darkness with Stamos—a Montreal-based artist and performer renowned for his inventive explorations of memory and identity—speaking into a microphone. His voice was unpretentious and intimate, drawing the audience into a fireside-style monologue that recounted a joyful childhood beachside campout with family and friends. Among the vivid details was a stumble into the bushes for a long, relaxing piss at night—a moment both mundane and evocative.

Primal Screen Therapy: The Optical Unconscious Writ Large

“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can ever hope to tackle."

--Stanley Kubrick

“Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb; you sit there still and meditate in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen. One should go to the cinema with the innocence of a fetus.”

          --Federico Fellini​​​​​​​

Culture critic Walter Benjamin once remarked that the invention of the camera introduced us to unconscious optics, just as Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis did for unconscious impulses, and he knew whereof he spoke. That insight reveals the same prescience that Freud’s chief acolyte and primary competitor Carl Jung also sensed, in a somewhat more refined and spiritual manner: that cinema is the artful language of dreams we speak while we’re still awake. Two insightful books, American Avant-Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-Between by Rebecca Sheehan and Screening Fears: On Protective Media by Francesco Casetti, share an equally insightful exploration of the archetypal and collective mythologies that define classic cinema regardless of its genre. Looking at films through a psychological lens provides us with a valuable map and a discursive language which we can use to orient ourselves within the imaginal landscape of the motion picture art form. These two books, with a kind of cogent synchronicity, also definitely offer a deep dive into cinema as the quintessential art form of the 20th century. They deftly penetrate our shared psychic myths as revealed through the language of films and thus help us to more deeply understand our own hopes and fears while doing so, and as such they supply a kind of primal screen therapy which assists the audience in conversing with our own optical unconscious.

Cycles of Transformation at The National Ballet of Canada

Genevieve Penn Nabity and Christopher Gerty in The Four Seasons. Gerty was injured and replaced by Larkin Miller in the performance our critic attended. (Photo: Carolina Kuras.)

Dancers in leaf-green unitards slip into a line at the rear of the stage, their arms raised overhead, wrists connected, fingers fanned into a vessel-like shape—a motif in David Dawson’s The Four Seasons. Subtle yet striking, the gesture suggests an offering, a quiet acknowledgment of something greater than oneself. Dawson, a British choreographer with a distinguished European pedigree, has built his career on crafting works that channel this sense of humility and connection into movement, transforming classical ballet into a language of both physical and spiritual exploration. His choreography demands not only technical precision but also an ability to embody its emotional weight, asking dancers to balance control with a sense of surrender—to the music, to the movement, and to the larger themes it seeks to express.

Meeting the Moment: September 5

Peter Sarsgaard (left) and cast in September 5. (Photo: Paramount.)

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Nick Braccia, to Critics at Large.

Like many movie lovers, I have grown so cynical about contemporary releases that when I stumble upon something great, I’m left staggered. That was exactly my reaction after watching September 5, Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum’s docudrama thriller about the Israeli hostage crisis and the murder of eleven athletes and coaches by the Palestinian militant group Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Despite award noms, nobody’s talking about it—certainly not Paramount, which released it – and that’s a terrible shame, because September 5 is a masterfully calibrated newsroom pressure cooker, engineered with the same craftsmanship the ABC Sports team applied on the movie’s titular day, when seasoned pros accustomed to lower stakes were suddenly called to a higher purpose, broadcasting the unfolding catastrophe to 900 million.

Alone with David Lynch: Notes from a Séance

David Lynch in the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (2016).

A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.

 — “Opening Statement” of “The Archivist,” from The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016), by Mark Frost

Only a few times have I ever felt that being in an audience enhanced my experience of a film. For me art has always been a private thing: “just me and a mirror and my brain,” as The Bee Gees once put it. The obvious benefit of solitary viewing is that you needn’t filter out your neighbors’ responses—contagions of fidgeting whenever action slows or logic separates, gales of laughter at aggressively unfunny jokes. Freed from the bullying influence of consensus, you watch differently; you don’t expect a film to perform for you in the same way. Instead of saying, “Here I am, entertain me,” you adopt the less adversarial, more absorptive role of the engaged bystander. You let the thing develop on its own terms, taking whatever risks it chooses to become whatever it wants to be. Then you judge how well, or if, it did that.

The Brain Doctor: William Burroughs (1914-1997)

Portrait of William S. Burroughs by Lance Austin Olsen.

“Language is a virus.”

W. B.

William S. Burroughs’ supernal and subterranean Beat influence on Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac alone would secure him a stable place in the modernist canon of American letters, as would Norman Mailer’s prescient early acclamation, “Burroughs might be the only American writer of sheer genius.” For me, Alexander Kafka penned what I’ve long felt was an ideal characterization of this experimental literary legend: “Burroughs was an ethereal intermediary between the here and the fiery beyond, pausing to give us the purgatorial skinny.” That skinny was transmitted in haunting and disturbing novels such as Junky (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962), among many others. However, it was through his influence on every other aspect of 20th-century culture in all media that his spectral presence as a testifier was most perhaps most long-lasting.

Intoxicating: People, Places and Things at Coal Mine Theatre

Kwaku Okyere, Louise Lambert, Sarah Murphy-Dyson and Nickeshia Garrick in People, Places and Things (Photo: Elana Emer)

Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things has landed at Toronto’s Coal Mine Theatre in a production that is as intimate as it is harrowing. Directed by Diana Bentley, this Canadian English-language debut transforms the celebrated 2015 play into an immersive experience, leveraging the theatre’s compact, square stage to pull the audience into Emma’s chaotic journey through addiction and recovery.

A Regal Triumph: La Reine-Garçon Shines at the Four Seasons Centre

Kirsten McKinnon as Christine (played by Kirsten Leblanc at the performance our critic saw) in La Reine-Garçon. (Photo: Michael Cooper.)

At a time when Canada’s cultural sovereignty faces external pressures, the Canadian Opera Company, in collaboration with Opéra de Montréal, has delivered a resounding artistic statement with La Reine-Garçon. This polished production, currently at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre until Feb. 15, exemplifies the heights of Canadian operatic achievement.

Two Servos, With Love: Broadway's Maybe Happy Ending and Gypsy

Helen J Shen and Darren Criss in Maybe Happy Ending.

The musical Maybe Happy Ending is first surprising, then charming, and finally touching. It’s a romantic musical about robots written by Will Aronson (who composed the music) and Hue Park (who collaborated with Aronson on the book and lyrics), that comes to Broadway by way of Korea. The two protagonists, Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen), live across the hall from each other in apartments in the Helperbot Yards in Seoul, where they were left after their owners “retired” them – though Oliver is under the impression that his, James (played by Marcus Choi in flashbacks), will be coming by any day to pick him up and ferry him to his home on Jeju Island. It’s been twelve years, but Oliver continues to live in happy expectation, watching the movies James taught him to love and listening to the classic jazz that is his special legacy from James. (James continued Oliver’s subscription to Jazz Monthly when he departed.) Oliver’s only companion is a plant he’s named HwaBoon – another gift from James – until one day Claire knocks on his door and asks him to let her use his recharger. At first, true to the conventional romantic-comedy set-up, they don’t like each other, but they warm up and eventually realize that, in defiance of the way their manufacturer created them, they have begun to have feelings for each other. And since Claire’s owner left her with her old car, the bots are able to embark on the archetypal romantic-comedy journey, to Jeju Island to find the long-gone James.

So Long, Marianne (1946-2025): What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

Marianne Faithfull. (Photo: Peter Seeger.)

“The men and women who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or culture the most extensive, but rather those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their own personality into a sort of mirror.”

Marcel Proust

If there is a sadder singer-songwriter on earth, I’m not sure who it might be. The late Marianne Faithfull was sadder than Neil Young, sadder than Leonard Cohen, sadder than sad. She even exceeds the sorrow and bleakness quotient of one of the great lamenters of all time, Nico, the chanteuse of pain who originally performed with The Velvet Underground but who left them, probably because they were too happy for her. She might be sadder that Amy Winehouse, although she was fortunate enough to live a full half-century longer than the poor lamentable Amy. Marianne Faithfull was the dark side of Joni Mitchell: while it’s true that Mitchell had her own dark side, Faithfull was the dark side of Joni’s dark side. She was an exile who lived in a dream world for so long that her reports from its frontier took on the status of legend. She was also, apart from being a consummate risk-taker, an empath of the highest order, with a remarkable ability for turning sheer survival practically into an authentic religion.

A Smattering of Recent Releases

Tye Sheridan and Jude Law in The Order.

The Order (available on Apple+), based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s book The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground, is taut and gripping. It tells the true story of a secret white supremacist organization housed in the Pacific Northwest – the brainchild of a young man named Bob Mathews who splintered off from the Aryan Nation because he found them too weak-minded, all talk and no action – which the FBI uncovered and busted in 1985. Like other violent self-proclaimed revolutionaries (Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, for one), Mathews uses William Luther Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, as a guidebook. He prepares to declare war on the U.S. government by staging, with a small cohort, a series of robberies and bombings and the murder of Alan Berg (played in the film by Marc Maron), a confrontational Jewish radio talk-show host in Denver who has been taking on rabidly anti-Semitic callers.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig: A Way Must Be Made

Missagh Zareh and Soheila Golestani in Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Part political chronicle, part thriller and part family drama, the Iranian film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, is complex and terrifying. Like Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, released last summer, it captures an ongoing situation so disturbing that we can’t shake it off when we leave the theatre. Its focus is on Iman (Missagh Zareh), who works in the justice system, and on his family: his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and their two teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), who is at university, and Sana (Setareh Maleki), still in high school. Iman has just been promoted to interrogator, which puts him on track to become a judge, a distinction that brings with it not just a more enviable salary but also a larger house. But as his colleague, Ghaderi (Reza Akhlaghirad), cautions him, the job is dangerous because those who believe they have been charged unjustly may seek revenge on him and his family. It carries moral perils as well: Iman, who has behaved with strict rectitude during a twenty-year career, is immediately asked to sign off on a wiretapping without having a chance to read the file; when he hesitates, his supervisor overrides him. And things get worse. Tehran has been swept up in protests over the arrest of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini for wearing her hijab improperly, and her suspicious death in custody, he is pressured to confirm death indictments against other young people, one a boy the same age as Rezvan.

Echoes of a Vanishing World: Last Landscape at Buddies in Bad Times

The cast of Last Landscape. (Photo by Fran Chudnoff.)

A droning litany of environmental crises emanates from a laptop in a cramped, cardboard-walled apartment. Outside, a dog’s incessant barking punctuates the claustrophobic atmosphere. This unsettling opening of Last Landscape at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre thrusts us into a world teetering on the brink of ecological collapse, as envisioned by Toronto-based theatre artist Adam Paolozza, the show’s creator and director.

Short Cuts

Flow. (Courtesy of Janus Films.)

Flow: This gorgeous-looking animated film from Latvia, written by Gints Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza and directed by Zilbalodis, is one of the few treasures of a disappointing holiday season. Set in a jungle in the wake of a tsunami, it seems to take place at the end of the world – there are no human beings in it, and the animals who populate it travel on a deserted sailboat. Its subject is the surprising harmony of living creatures who need to look to each other to survive. Flow has an obvious underlying melancholy, but it’s sweet and playful. The protagonist is a cat, a natural loner who is befriended by a secretary bird, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur and a Labrador. The most striking relationship is between the cat and the secretary bird, whose attempt to reach out with an offering of freshly caught fish is met with hostility from his pack, who ostracize him and step on his wings so he can’t fly away with them. On the boat with the others, the cat reciprocates; he also figures out how to navigate the bird’s regal pride. This coming together of two solitary creatures in a strange, almost mystical friendship is the most touching element of the film but far from the only one.

Argonaut of Modernity: Impersonating Pessoa

“You are what you contemplate, so choose wisely.”

--Machado de Assis

Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.

This new entry into the modernist archive by CultureLab member Bartholomew Ryan, Critical Lives: Fernando Pessoa, sheds fresh and welcome light on one of the most mysterious and elusive figures in the annals of contemporary literary culture. He was, in fact, not only a prototypical modernist, but also a stylistic harbinger of the amorphous postmodern ethos long before it even existed. The French writer Jules Michelet once declaimed, “Each epoch dreams the era to follow it.” Pessoa seems to have been the brilliant dreamer who imagined the relativistic and quantum-drenched psychological environment in which we currently dwell. Assis certainly knew whereof he spoke, for both he and his younger countryman Pessoa may have bravely contemplated the very shaky future we all live in now as a wobbly present.

Narcissism Disguised As Altruism

I have a confession: for eighteen months, I’ve been addicted to Sixteen Tons Entertainment’s Emergency(2023, a.k.a. Emergency [Free to Play]), the latest entry in a real-time strategy (RTS) series (1998–) created by Ralph Stock. I’ve gone cold turkey twice, and every time the game has haunted my daydreams and nightmares till I downloaded it again. Now I just accept that I’ll have to spend half an hour each day on this thing.

Coming of Age as an Apologue – and the Reverse

Elliott Heffernan and Saiorse Ronan in Steve McQueen's Blitz. (Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Apple TV+.)

Steve McQueen’s film Blitz, set in September 1940, in the early days of Hitler’s incessant bombing of London, is an obvious labor of love. It takes place over just a couple of days, during which Rita (Saiorse Ronan), an armaments factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), on a train bound for the countryside with other children but he jumps out and tries to make his way back to Stepney, the working-class neighborhood where he lives with Rita and her father (Paul Weller); he never knew his father, who is African and was deported unjustly after a street fight. Production designer Adam Stockhausen’s recreations of the period are gorgeous, as is the cinematography by Yorick Le Soux, the favorite collaborator of the French director Olivier Assayas. The editing by Peter Sciberras is masterful: it actualizes McQueen’s remarkable sense of rhythm, which was showcased in his Small Axe series and especially in Lovers Rock. The film is propelled forward, moving back and forth between Rita and her wayward boy with remarkable fluidity and from one London location to another so that the continuity is simultaneously whole-cloth and fragmented. It contains a number of beautifully constructed setpieces that rank with the finest work that has been done with this period in film. And along the way McQueen takes care to pay homage to some of its predecessors: Hope and Glory, Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, Atonement. (There’s also a subplot out of Oliver Twist and a speech in an underground shelter by a left-wing character, played by Leigh Gill, who seems to have been inspired by Agate in Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty.)

Genius is Pain: A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown. (Photo: Macall Polay. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.)

Long conflicted on its subject, I was reluctant to see A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s biopic of the young Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet), which traces his development from a barbed-wire folksinger to the sleek provocateur who caused a near-riot at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by assailing a crowd of purists with noisy, abstract blues rock. (“Dylan goes electric” is the legendary summa, as well as the title of the Elijah Wald book on which Mangold and Jay Cocks based their screenplay.) But people I value kept saying the movie was better than they’d expected, and it turns out they were right. More than that, though. Still reeling a bit from The Philosophy of Modern Song, I've had difficulty wanting to listen to Dylan these past two years. This movie snapped me out of that, precisely by taking me past the artist and into the art, the limits of one into the free skies of the other.

Off the Shelf: Life Is What Happens to You While You’re Busy Making Other Plans: House

The cast of House. From left: Omar Epps, Olivia Wilde, Robert Sean Leonard, Hugh Laurie, Lisa Edelstein, Jesse Spencer, Jennifer Morrison, Peter Jacobson. (Photo: Joe Viles/NBC.)

I despise prestige television. Art relies on limitations, and narrative is an architecture. Thirteen hours of a single story deprives you of both, and “fleshing out” each character’s backstory is just exploring so many blind alleys. No, give me episodic television anytime.

Time Transfixed: The Momentary Music of Hemisphere

“My desire was not to compose, but to project sounds into time, free from any compositional rhetoric. Music which specifically defined pitch but allowed the temporal dimension to remain indeterminate, thus creating a sonic world where each instrument is living out its own individual life in its own individual sound world.”

Morton Feldman

To become transfixed is to be rendered motionless with wonder, to be immobilized by astonishment. To some extent it touches upon the condition which in more classical eras was associated with what was known as the sublime, a state akin to awe. The sublime is still with us, of course, but it is often sublimated since the course of modernism conducted its now well-known radical discontinuity. This was especially the case in the domain of music, which is a durational art, one occurring strictly as momentary sonic situations, relying historically on the laws of harmony in order to soothe the savage breast. The aleatory and organic flow of what became known as “new music,” however, tended to naturally embrace dissonance in a manner which celebrates time transfixed. If we try to imagine the notion of time transfixed we can also determine how frozen time might amount to space itself: to hear and see them as one in the same quantum thing, or, in Zen terms, no-thing.

New on Broadway: Eureka Day, Death Becomes Her and Swept Away

From left: Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, and Jessica Hecht in Eureka Day. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Eureka Day premiered in a production by Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company half a dozen years ago, and it’s finally arrived on Broadway via off-Broadway (in 2019) and London (in 2022). Written by Jonathan Spector and directed by Anna D. Shapiro, it’s a sensationally funny satire of contemporary woke communities – about the impossibility of reaching consensus among progressive people who are trying painfully hard to maintain, or at least convey, sensitivity to each other’s viewpoints when reality seems to have deliquesced into a bog of ferociously held competing opinions. The characters we meet are five members of the board of a private Berkeley elementary school called Eureka Day School who find they have to meet a crisis: a mumps epidemic that divides the parents, some of whom believe in traditional medical practices and some of whom resolutely do not. The school’s middle-aged director is Don, who has a gentle manner and almost bottomless patience but whose demeanor, as Bill Irwin plays him, suggests that his desperation to keep an even keel and indicate respect toward all the other voices in the room has been eating away at him. (He’s like one of Christopher Durang’s befuddled heroes, but without the repressed anger that flares up suddenly every now and then.) Eli (Thomas Middleditch) is a tech billionaire and young father whose generosity has funded the struggling school’s various initiatives, like an all-gender washroom. Eli’s son and the daughter of another board member, Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz), are good friends, and their play dates enable the adults to engage in extramarital games of their own; though Eli claims that he and his wife have an open relationship, it turns out that either he’s misrepresented the situation to Meiko or else he and his wife don’t necessarily agree on the rules. The latest addition to the group is Carina (Amber Gray), a Black woman whose perspective, according to the longest-running member, Suzanne (Jessica Hecht), is particularly welcome. Suzanne articulates that view euphemistically, but it comes across as presumptuous and condescending – especially since Carina, like the others, comes from a comfortable middle-class background. But Suzanne is a genius at spurious apologies that sound perfectly sincere, so the colleagues who find her putting words in their mouths tend to trip over themselves when they call her out on it, or come across as more brusque than they’d intended.