Search Results for: movies

Why I Wanted To Finish My Father’s Life’s Work

Illustration by Homestead Studio, inspired by photo supplied by the author

Karen Brown | Longreads | December 2019 | 9 minutes (2,139 words)

“Do you think you’ll pursue more significant work one day?”

That’s the kind of casual barb my father would deliver over breakfast on my visits home after I was well into my career as a radio journalist.

That may seem unsupportive, which was not typical. He was the emotional rock in my life for 50 years. He chaperoned my elementary school dances, read every article I wrote for the high school newspaper, and later, sent around news of my journalism awards to his friends and colleagues. Every year, he wrote me a birthday card extolling all the ways he admired me.

And yet. He had this dream for my career, that I would become a nationally prominent journalist who might one day topple a presidency and change the world. Instead I became a regionally-respected public radio reporter who mostly does health-related features.

He made those comments about his tempered expectations to let me know he could be both loving and honest. But to me, they felt annoying and unfair. In the end, we’d reach a mutual understanding that no one gets to do exactly what they dream of.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those conversations as I put my own writing projects on the back burner to try to finish my father’s final book.
Read more…

Thumbing a Ride: What I Learned from Siskel and Ebert

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 26, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,634 words)

Thumbing a Ride: What I Learned from Siskel and Ebert

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Dipti S. Barot | Longreads | November 2019 | 11 minutes (2,634 words)

When I was a teenager, I made the unusual decision to switch schools midway through high school. I kept having the distinct, nagging feeling that there was much more to explore beyond the comfortable bubble of my tiny private school, and if I didn’t leave, then my growth would be stunted forever. One of my best friends at the time wrote me a lovely metaphorical story as my farewell gift. It was about two beautiful bird friends who lived in a gorgeous garden surrounded by tall walls, one of whom wants to fly outside to discover new worlds. And fly away I did. I transferred to a large public school shortly thereafter and immediately realized that I needed to find friends, and fast. Fate intervened in the form of two middle aged white gentlemen who soon became my constant weekly companions during this rough transition. Their names were Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.

Times were financially topsy turvy for our family then, and television provided an escape from that. I don’t specifically remember stumbling upon Siskel and Ebert the first time, but it likely happened when I was surfing the limited number of local TV channels that our antenna could catch for free. It was a half-hour movie review show, where two critics who wrote for rival newspapers in Chicago would get together and talk shop and share their opinions on the movies of the day.

This 16-year-old brown girl was likely an outlier in the target demographic for two white men from the Midwest around my Dad’s age. Undoubtedly it was one of their classic, boisterous back and forth bickerings that must have given me enough pause to stay on their channel rather than continue surfing, the sheer magnetism of their bursts of antagonism drawing me in. But once I discovered them, I was hooked. There was no going back.

I had one date and one date alone every Saturday evening at 6:30pm, and I would make sure that no other commitments would stand in the way of my special time with my guys. Of course, there were no other plans to cancel or reshuffle, because the reality of having no close friends during your junior year of high school had paved the way for many an empty weekend. And thus began the tradition of Siskel and Ebert Saturday nights with my dudes. I relished their repartee, their intelligent banter, their expressions of disgust and contempt towards disappointing movies, and oftentimes towards each other.

This last category was what I imagine hooked the most fans, and certainly the reason I got lured. When do you get to see intelligent people who actually respect each other disagree so passionately that it’s as if sparks are ricocheting off the screen? There was chubby Roger Ebert, often the meaner of the two, with his barbed complaints about his partner’s latest opinions, and there was the tall, balding Gene Siskel, the gentler and kinder one, more likely to throw up his hands in exasperation. With Siskel and Ebert, you got to peek into the unvarnished moments where they wanted to throttle each other, and it was an intellectual exercise in rhetorical gymnastics, layered with the antics and drama of World Wrestling Federation. It was a bedazzling polemical display.
Read more…

Let Me Show You the World

aladdin's magic lamp with human figures sharing stories in the background
Illustration by Cat Finnie

Iman Sultan | Longreads | November 2019 | 16 minutes (4,062 words)

 

In Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, released back in May, Princess Jasmine finds herself in the clutches of the palace guards after Jafar has taken over the throne and stripped her father, the rightful Sultan, of his majestic turban. Trapped in a moment of doe-eyed silence and unable to reverse her situation, Jasmine is dragged away in a dreamlike sequence. Then, in a striking departure from the 1992 animated film of the same name, she suddenly breaks out into song.

“Written in stone, every rule, every word,” she sings. “Centuries old and unbending. Stay in your place, better seen and not heard. But now that story is ending…”

In the age of Disney live-action remakes, Aladdin has shattered the box office and proven the commercial viability of the genre. Bringing in a little over a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, and with a sequel already under discussion, Aladdin revealed to the public that a diverse cast, strong female leads, and a reformed Disney isn’t just good for the culture. It’s also — if not primarily — good for business.

A dizzying, colorful, and high-budget romp, 21st-century Aladdin tries to do it all: the leads are of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian descent. Will Smith plays a genie who yearns for freedom. Naomi Scott reimagines Jasmine as an unbending, dignified princess who claims political agency and saves her kingdom from the impending doom of the evil Jafar.

“I saw her as a young woman, not a teenager, with a mature strength that can cut you down,” the British-Gujarati actress told British Vogue. “So I said to them, ‘Just to let you know, I want to play her strong, and if that’s not what you’re looking for, that’s okay, but it’s not for me.’”

Aladdin is seemingly designed to transcend feminist or antiracist criticism by embodying diversity and “strong” womanhood itself. The filmmakers created a near-identical copy of the animated film with tweaks that, in the words of producer Dan Lin, proved Disney “could create a movie that was both diverse and inclusive” as well as “wildly commercial.” Arabic interjections like yalla are casually heard in the background; the Genie seems to riff his dance moves off of Bollywood choreography; elaborate costumes echo elements from South Asian, Kurdish, and Turkish clothing; and the controversial lyrics of the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” shift from “barbaric” (in the 1992 version) to “chaotic.”

And yet, despite these touches, the essence of the remake remains near-identical: it blends cultures together, distorts the source material, and uses “Arabian Nights” as a song title that sets the atmosphere of a film that ultimately takes place in a fictional world. But the world of Aladdin, the storytelling behind it, and the rich tradition of orally passing down tales across generations in Southwest Asia are not fictional — they’re real.

Read more…

Under the Influence: Watch(wo)men

Jacques Benazra

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  7 minutes (1,716 words)

Part three in a three-part series on the influencer economy. Read part one, “White Lies,” and part two, “Deeper than Beauty.”

* * *

“I haven’t believed the purity of my own intentions ever since I became my own salesperson.” Imagine PewDiePie — the Swedish influencer who at one point was the most-subscribed user on YouTube for literally just playing video games while spewing alt-right fodder, the guy name-checked by a mass shooter yet little scrutinized by anyone, let alone himself — saying that. “I saw the gap widening between the story we told and the situation on the ground.” Imagine Logan Paul , another YouTuber whose popularity is barely examined perhaps because his Jackass-lite routine suggests there is nothing to him beyond the denigration of all living things from rats to suicide victims, saying that. Those quotes, both published in The Cut, come from women, both of them influencers: the first is Tavi Gevinson, whose success as the founder of the teen magazine Rookie has been parlayed into an acting career fueled by Instagram; the second is Caroline Calloway’s ghostwriter Natalie Beach, who exposed her employer as a largely empty vessel filled by Beach’s own talents. Theirs came in a long line of critiques recently piled onto the influencing industry (and those within it), critiques that seemed to be overwhelmingly delivered by women like Gevinson, like Beach, even like me.

I notice male influencers interrogating video games, superhero movies … even women. What I don’t notice is male influencers interrogating this interrogation. But is it really only women who are contemplating this industry and their roles within it? Who are capable of thinking a little, instead of constantly doing? According to Crystal Abidin, who has been studying influencers for more than a decade, the lack of clarity starts at the source, with the word itself. “I think the politics of naming and self-branding contributes to the perception that there are more women scholars or more women influencers looking at these things,” says the author of Internet Celebrity (2018), “when I don’t actually feel that this is the case.” The case is what it always has been: We watch women as they watch themselves, a Matryoshka doll of reflection and self-reflection, and we watch men as they watch themselves, with little more than a passing glance.

* * *

On its face, influencing is visibly feminine, which tracks if you think about what an influencer actually does. “You are basically in the business of persuading people to like you,” says Abidin. While women may not be considered authorities on much, they are certainly expected to have a handle on likability. Some women in the influencing industry even feel they have an advantage over men, since the job lends itself particularly well to the emotional-labor savvy. That the most successful influencers tend to project the most empathy explains in part why queer male influencers do so well in the lifestyle niche (one of the industry’s most lucrative) — their emotional acuity tends to exceed that of many straight men, who have never been forced into introspection by oppression.  

But being introspective can also be a liability — it’s harder to function online when you’re reflecting on how every decision might impact you. At the BBC, #vanlife-r Brianna Madia presented the calculus this way: “How vulnerable can you be? What piece of information can I expose about myself? How wide can I rip my chest open for all of these people?” Any potential balance is something of a myth since the “authenticity bind,” identified by media and communication professor Jefferson Pooley in an essay in the 2010 book Blowing up the Brand, ensures that female influencers lose out either way: They are shameless if they share and a sham if they don’t. Gevinson’s essay described internalizing just this dilemma, dividing her life into “the part of myself that had learned to register experience as only fully realized once primed for public consumption, but that was monitored by the other part of myself, the part that knew the actual sharing of these specific moments would appear inauthentic.”

Women subject themselves online to a sort of identity fracturing on two levels, internal and external. Not only do they actively present themselves through a medium designed for the male gaze, but we actively receive and process them from this same vantage point, one that views them fundamentally as sex objects. Female influencers are siphoned into more visual platforms (Instagram, Facebook) where they deal in subjects requiring more visual expertise (beauty, fashion), while the text-based spaces (Reddit, Digg) that emphasize more expansive subject matter (politics, tech) are more hospitable to men. Ultimately, authenticity is not the only bind women find themselves in — they are also primarily valued as a gender by the qualities we devalue as a society. They are pressured not to perform “real work,” but instead to do emotional labor, to be more personal and intimate. It’s virtually the only arena in which they can succeed, for which they are simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. 

Even women’s content is secondary to their physical appearance, however, since this all falls under the male gaze, remember, and the male gaze objectifies first. “Your body is your calling card” is how Abidin explains it. Regardless of your skills, if you gain weight, like queer beauty influencer Mina Gerges did, you lose value. If you are expected to be single and you are suddenly coupled, once again, your value drops. The constant scrutiny of women’s personal lives impels them to do the same, deconstructing themselves in a way they might not were they left to simply live without constantly being dissected. But any woman in a world that surveils women is familiar with this everyday tyranny, so it follows that female academics would recognize it. As women experiencing the same repression offline, they gravitate toward studying it in a way that men, who are free of this quotidian analysis and self-analysis, don’t. “There’s a lived experience there,” explains Abidin. “We are trained to specifically look out for these things.”

Men are trained not to look at anything but the work, whether it’s offline or online. “There’s this tremendous culture of toxicity around being vulnerable,” says Gerges, “and around sharing real things and talking about our emotions and about talking about our struggles.” The same way female academics may have more of a personal interest in fashion and beauty, male scholars are likely inclined toward male-coded subjects like gaming and tech. Regardless of the actual gender breakdown in these two arenas, women are perpetually believed to be a subculture within them the way men are believed to be in lifestyle, despite the number of male makeup artists and stylists who dominate the sphere. So while it’s been reported that women make up 75 percent of the influencing industry, Abidin is skeptical: “We have to consider the politics of vocabulary.” Since the standard beauty influencer is female, both because beauty is associated with women and influencing is too, any males within this sector are identified by their gender. Gamers, however, shed the influencing moniker entirely and are popularly referred to as e-sports players or online streamers — no gender marker required, because the standard is male — while scholars (as well as the industry) classify them as content creators in the online creative industry rather than influencers in the influencing industry. “They’re conceptually a bit more distinct for academics who are giant nerds,” quips Abidin, “but in essence you are looking at the same thing.”

Despite the increasing number of women leaders in the influencing industry, particularly in Asia, men overwhelmingly hold the highest paid positions on the business side of things — they run media conglomerates, platforms, and even agencies scouting for talent. “So much of the money, so much of the power is still traditionally modeled after the tech industry,” says Abidin. “It’s men-heavy. You still get the same old boys clubs, you get the same gated networks.” These men make as many if not more decisions about what you see on their platforms as the women making the content, which is to say they are shaping the conversations around influencers, they’re just doing it a lot less visibly. The real question is whether they are at least hazarding some answers to the concerns — from pay gaps to opportunity hierarchies around race and gender — that appear to be predominantly surfaced by women. Abidin thinks they’re aware of the quest for equality, but if it affects their bottom line, in an industry that is particularly transient, they are less likely to react. From her work on the ground, Abidin senses that the women in charge “are the ones pushing for the change,” because they see their treatment in influencing as a symptom of their treatment in workplaces as a whole. Perhaps predictably, in Abidin’s experience, environments where there is more gender equity offline — Nordic countries, for instance — see men on the business side more open to reflecting this balance online.

* * *

“Amid all the self-worth-measuring that has made up my experience of the internet,” wrote Gevinson, “I believe there was also self-actualizing, and that there still can be.” This self-actualization has been the arena of the women who are exposing the sexism and racism inherent in the influencing industry, increasing its transparency and uncovering the need for parity at the top. Women of color seem to be particularly enlightened, with Valerie Eguavoen launching the Instagram page You Belong Now to promote overlooked influencers, and Shannae Ingleton-Smith and Tania Cascilla founding Facebook group The Glow Up to support black influencers.  This seems to have had a sort of trickle-up effect in which women in charge have realized that the inequities faced by these influencers are just another example of discriminatory labor practices. Outside of that, female academics are parsing the effects of this dynamic on the industry. “I think the beautiful thing is that a lot of women have pushed against that unrealistic standard that has been sold to women for so long,” says Gerges. “Unfortunately for men, there’s still so much shame about talking about these things.” But the same way female influencers have established agency within the industry — for instance, making a living wage while rearing kids — similarly non-stereotypical male influencers like Gerges are introducing an alternative. Perhaps he too will inspire those within and around the industry to do better. He is an influencer after all.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

‘By Choice, and Not By Choice…Time Is Going To Change You.’

Apollo and Daphne by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, c. 1470-80. Oil on panel. (VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)

Zan Romanoff  | Longreads | November 2019 | 13 minutes (3,494 words)

 

I first encountered Nina MacLaughlin on Tumblr: at some point around 2010, I stumbled onto her blog, Carpentrix, in which she was chronicling the transition from working as a full-time journalist to doing carpentry in and around her native Massachusetts.

I fell in love with the physicality of her writing, the force and attention with which she inhabited the world, and for years, I watched from across the internet (and the country) as she renovated countless kitchens and bathrooms for strangers, hand-built tables for her brothers, and, more recently, got into making spoons.

MacLaughlin published a memoir, Hammer Head, about her career transition in 2015; as it happens, we met in real life that same year — when my best friend married one of those brothers on a bright, cold Boston afternoon.

Wake, Siren is MacLaughlin’s first work of book-length fiction; it re-tells the stories of the female characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reimagining a cast of mostly silent women as a chorus of voices who have plenty to say about the ways that they’ve been (mis)treated and (mis)represented throughout history. Read more…

Every One of Us Is Other: Looking Back on Representation in “Heavenly Creatures” 25 Years Later

WingNut Films

Alex DiFrancesco | Longreads | November 15, 2019 | 9 minutes (2,578 words)

In 1994, years before showing us the wonders and terrors of Middle Earth, Peter Jackson released a film that some still consider his finest work to date. The film was Heavenly Creatures, the real-life story of the 1954 Parker-Hulme murders in Christchurch, New Zealand. It won awards all over the festival circuit before receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

To provide a brief background to the history of the case and the film: Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme met as teeangers and went on to form a loving and obsessive friendship built around a mythical world that they created and escaped to frequently when the real world proved too much for them. When the girls’ parents began to fear they were developing an “unnatural,” queer bond, they decided to separate the young women. The girls, in retaliation and hopes they would be together forever, decided to murder Parker’s mother. They committed the act on June 22, 1954, bludgeoning the mother to death with a brick in a stocking.

Peter Jackson’s fourth film (after low-budget splatter-fests Bad Taste and Dead Alive and a Muppet-Show-gone-perverse venture called Meet the Feebles) was a departure for him. Jackson’s partner Fran Walsh had been passionate about the real-life Parker-Hulme murders for many years, and Jackson joined in the obsession. The film would take Jackson out of the realm of camp and cult, and catapult him into the playing field that made all of his later blockbusters possible. Attempts had been made to tell the salacious murder story before, including Michelanne Forster’s play Daughters of Heaven, but one reason that those attempts may have fallen flat was that no one before Jackson had had quite his empathy and dedication to the girls portrayed in the film. New Zealand filmmaker Costa Botes, a friend and one-time collaborator of Jackson’s, in a lengthy 2002 piece for NZ Edge, told a story that he believed exemplifies Jackson’s dedication:

He had already found black and white photographs of the Hulme family’s Port Levy summer house, but had no idea what colour it was painted in the 1950s. Anyone else would have built a recreation and settled for a best guess.

Jackson flew to Christchurch, drove two hours to the site, and then proceeded to dig in a grown over rubbish pile he found in the back. He emerged with a wooden shingle. Comparing it to his photographs, he realised he was holding a name plate that used to be screwed above the front door at the time of the Hulmes occupancy. Traces of original green paint still clung to the plate.

Thus, the colour the Port Levy house ended up being painted in the film was … exactly the right colour.

This dedication would be admirable for any director to undertake, but why exactly Jackson was so dedicated to this story is another matter.

In a 1994 Los Angeles Times article, Jackson himself said that the story had been around for decades. “But in all this time … the story has never been told sympathetically.”

Though he grew up in another era, though he was a white cisgender heterosexual man, Jackson, along with Walsh, was the first to reach through time with sympathy for Parker and Hulme. Or, perhaps, it could be something closer to empathy. Surely, Jackson’s early feature films, the splatter-fests like Bad Taste, which was made on weekends, (movies that were made around life events like a cast member marrying a devout Christian, being unable to work on the Sundays the films were shot (in the case of Bad Taste), being written out of the script, then written back in after his divorce), were not far off from the fantasy world that Parker and Hulme created to escape to, portrayed with gruesome life-sized plasticine figures in the film. Both were obsessive and thought out to the smallest detail. Both were ongoing projects that Jackson and the girls spent years on, relentlessly refusing to give them up despite any attempts by nature or man to interrupt them. And though the film doesn’t skirt the issue of the girls’ connection verging into homosexuality, Jackson doesn’t flinch away from it or sensationalize it, either. The sex scenes in the film juxtapose a disintersted, disconnected Parker having sex with a male boarder in her parents’ guest room against a scene in which Parker and Hulme experiment sexually with each other, acting out the roles of matinée stars to gently disguise their fascination with and passion for each other.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


While I wouldn’t suggest that Jackson or Walsh could intimately know any of what these girls went through in their repressed time, when they were further repressed by their gender and their obsessive love for each other, the pair seem to have been able to take their own experiences and morphed them into care and even understanding for these murderous young women. Particularly, Jackson seems to view the girls’ make-believe world as a creative outlet not dissimilar from his own acts of creativity — a world both the filmmaker and the girls went to great pains to portray in full and vibrant reality. While the girls made painstaking figurines of the characters who inhabited “the fourth world,” as they called it, Jackson’s work in recreating it went above and beyond much of the CGI work of the time, including claymation battle scenes and orgies, in what would later become the studios that made orcs and elves for Lord of the Rings. This empathy with these girls so unlike himself, created through the bridges he was able to build to them in the understanding of their lives and fantasies, becomes particularly relevant in our time, which no longer allows many examples of sloppy representation by those outside a demographic being represented to slide by unnoticed. Jackson’s approach and careful attention to detail in his portrayal becomes important because it’s a prototypical example of how we can use our own inner worlds and emotions to create, lovingly and with care, the world of someone who is nothing like us.

Though he grew up in another era, though he was a white cisgender heterosexual man, Jackson, along with Walsh, was the first to reach through time with sympathy for Parker and Hulme.

I am not playing devil’s advocate here. I firmly agree that some representation of marginalized people in art is better left undone. For example, Ariel Schrag’s Adam, a book in which a young cisgender man is mistaken for a trans man and becomes part of the queer community so he can make friends and find dates, was written by a cisgender lesbian and used transgender people as a foil for the lives of cis people. The television show Transparent notoriously chose a cisgender actor, Jeffrey Tambor, to play a transgender lead.

Though the topic is thornier in the example above, poor or sloppy representation typically happens when we view those outside our purview as “other.” There have been countless classes and panel discussions in the arts about “writing the other.” But the fact is, each of us is “other” to everyone else, and it is the job of art to lessen the distance of that othering. Essayist and editor Janice Lee, in a presentation at the Thinking Its Presence conference in 2017, likened the distance between any two humans as the same between a human and a badger.

What I’m going to propose though is that the impossible distance between a human and a badger, that daunting and difficult and impossible divide, all of the differences between a human and a badger, is the same impossible distance between any two humans. But that the similarities between two humans, that which makes us alive and living, that closeness that can be intimated, is the same possible closeness between a human and a badger.

I’m also going to propose that attempting to occupy the point of view of a badger is just as important as the attempt and willingness to occupy the point of view of a different human being other than yourself. If we can consider the similarities between humans and badgers in a way that unites us, both as creatures of this planet, both as creatures that want to live and find intimacy differently but similarly, then we might be able to understand the differences and similarities between humans too.

It would be presumptuous to assume Jackson felt the same way when portraying these girls so outside his own purview. But Jackson took several steps toward making sure the girls themselves were represented in ways that humanized them. For one, he poured obsessively over the diaries left behind by Pauline Parker, making the voiceover of the film the girls’ own words. He dug through court records and diaries to find and interview living friends and family, including former classmates of the girls, to round out his understanding of the girls, their love for each other, and their final, horrific act. The film, through camerawork and the voiceover of words directly from Parker’s diary, stays remarkably close to the girls, their sensitiblities, and their actions, until the very end, when the murder is committed, and the camera and the viewer are made to pull away. Up until this point, Jackson sticks to the facts of the girls’ lives and friendship as the girls would have told them themselves. The murder itself, while factual, reels away and lacks the steady gaze that Jackson has cast on these facts throughout. (“I can understand everything but their motivation for the murder, everything until the leap they made from the fantasy of killing to its reality,” Jackson said in the Los Angeles Times interview.) And perhaps, in a world where we are so removed from one another that it is suggested most of us could never understand one another, this documentary-ish approach is a necessary one. Perhaps it is not just good filmmaking to dig through the rubble of a demolished house to find the color scheme, to obsess over the history left behind by people themselves in their first-person accounts, but perhaps it is a living example of the empathy necessary to cross the divide between any one human and another.

But the fact is, each of us is “other” to everyone else, and it is the job of art to lessen the distance of that othering.

Whether or not the girls were actually homosexual is still a piece of conjecture. While Jackson’s film portrays the girls engaging in sexual acts with each other and shows a scene in which a psychologist labels the girls “depraved homosexuals” (it was the ’50s when homosexuality was still firmly in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an unquestionable mental illness), it’s never been “proven,” if such a thing can be “proven.” What seems important is that Jackson never used the piece of potential information to sensationalize the way others had in the past, nor the way that someone who is decidedly not homosexual might be tempted to. Accounts from newspapers and tabloids of the time the murder was committed were relentless in their othering of the lesbian schoolgirl murderers. In the digital newspaper collection of the Christchurch city libraries, one article recounts a psychiatrist’s view of the girls as homosexual and insane. “Their association, I consider, proved tragic for them. There is evidence that their friendship became a homosexual one. There is no proof there was a physical relationship, although there is a lot of suggestive evidence from the diary that this occurred. There is evidence that they had baths together and had frequent talks on sexual matters. That is not a healthy relationship in itself, but more important, it prevents the development of adult sexual relationships. I don’t mean by that physical relationships, but attachment to people of the opposite sex. Homosexuality is frequently related to paranoia.” Jackson, according to the interview in the Los Angeles Times, found little use in these accounts.

A Film Quarterly review of Heavenly Creatures suggests that Jackson veered away from the connection between homosexuality and insanity that even the girls hid behind in their trial by considering it a “red herring” in light of the rest of their powerful, intimate feminine relationship. Simply put, Jackson didn’t seem to care whether the girls were in love with each other because he knew they were in love with each other, and that bond of love and obsession carried enough weight to transcend categories of easy and dismissive identification. While their potential homosexuality wasn’t irrelevant (it was portrayed in a scene as inventive and intimate as the rest of their relationship, mentioned earlier, in which the girls’ sexual ecounters were informed partly by their fantasy world and partly by their love for each other), it also wasn’t an easy out, a way of othering that allowed Jackson the explanation for the unthinkable that so many sought in the story.

Jackson’s approach and careful attention to detail in his portrayal becomes important because it’s a prototypical example of how we can use our own inner worlds and emotions to create, lovingly and with care, the world of someone who is nothing like us.

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. There was little self-representation in those times. Visibility in the realm of popular culture was almost nonexistent for queer and trans people, not as anything other than a punchline or a sideshow dweller, a flippant one-liner on The Simpsons about Homer’s mistreated uncle Frank who transitioned because of childhood trauma, or a “bearded lady” in the circus. When I first came across Heavenly Creatures in the early 2000s, years after its release, I would find something like understanding there. I was a nascent queer, just beginning to identify as bisexual, living briefly back in my small hometown, working at a video store, and understanding the repression that Parker and Hulme may have felt in ways that I wouldn’t have expected someone like Jackson to. In those days, we took what we could get, and when what we got was something as shining as this film, it didn’t really matter as much where it had come from, just that someone had appropriately seen. Years later, after I had cut off ties with my own family (its own sort of murder, I suppose) in order to live my life as an out trans person, I rewatched the film and marveled again at how little judgement Jackson lorded over these girls, and how much care and sympathy he afforded them. How dedicated he was to telling their story in their words, how his sympathies, throughout the film, are firmly with the girls — not with the parents terrorized by a diagnosis of homosexuality, or a world outside Parker and Hulme’s deeply imagined one. I wonder about the generation of ’90s queers who felt the same, in some little way. Being seen is a powerful thing — sometimes being seen by someone nothing like you is powerful in ways that can’t be replicated by someone who hasn’t had to make the leap between potential consciousnesses.

We live in a time when “own voices” is becoming the norm — rightfully and happily so in most cases. It seems that many, to paraphrase Janice Lee, are not ready to do the work of leaping over the divide that is between one living being and another in a sensitive and caring way, not, in many cases, in a way that we might consider artful. Yet those of us who see ourselves portrayed poorly or with little sensitivity in the media are also, often, aware that this trend will never stop. And, in some ways, it should not. We should never stop trying to bridge the space between us, doing the work that art insists we do to understand one another. However, there are prototypes for understanding and sensitivity all around us. I believe Heavenly Creatures is one of the finest examples of an artist finding one of the multitudes of self and using it to show the lives of people who, for all reasonable purposes, are utterly unlike him.

***

Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and more. Their first novel, an acid western, was published in 2015, and their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their second novel All City (Seven Stories Press), in 2019. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is currently an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University. They can be found @DiFantastico on Twitter.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Jason Stavers
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Tom Junod Remembers Fred Rogers: “You Were a Child Once, Too”

Getty Images

At the Atlantic, Tom Junod recalls his friendship with Fred Rogers 16 years after Fred’s death. Junod and Rogers traded 70 emails around the time Junod’s Esquire profile of Rogers, ‘Can You Say…”Hero”?’ was published in 1998. The author considers the movies made about Rogers’ life, as well as how Fred would have responded to today’s routine mass violence and the growing lack of civility in political discourse.

As for Fred: It’s true that he lost, and that the digitization of all human endeavor has devoured his legacy as eagerly as it has devoured everything else. But that he stands at the height of his reputation 16 years after his death shows the persistence of a certain kind of human hunger—the hunger for goodness. He had faith in us, and even if his faith turns out to have been misplaced, even if we have abandoned him, he somehow endures, standing between us and our electrified antipathies and recriminations like the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square in a red sweater. He is a warrior, all right, because he is not just unarmed, outgunned, outnumbered; he is long gone, and yet he keeps up the fight.

Read the story

Walking Across California

Image by Kevin Bosc, Counterpoint Publishing

Nick Neely | Alta California | Counterpoint | November 2019 | 49 minutes (9,706 words)

 

Evening approached as I strolled west, back toward the ocean, past San Luis Rey’s trailer parks and down the river levee’s bike path, vaguely looking for a place to camp or simply reassurance that there would be a place to camp if I walked a few more miles. The river channel was a bottomland of scrub, deadwood, and patches of sand, with larger cottonwoods shivering, a revelation of groundwater. Hard to imagine a flood in this dry land that would warrant a levee of this size, but history must justify it. Several figures in a culvert raised my guard as I first approached the levee, but it was only three kids with their pit bull, sharing a joint.

In the distance, parachutists were swinging in descent. Camp Pendleton marines, I thought at first, but the base was north of the river, beyond a ridge. These were just civilians falling toward the Oceanside Municipal Airport for a thrill and the evening view. On Benet Road I crossed the river, seeing on my phone’s screen another dotted line, a trail, one that might be less traveled. Maybe I could camp there. Past the driveway to Prince of Peace Abbey, past a scrapyard with battered cars piled up, I came to a sign where the road dead-ended: No Trespassing — Area Patrolled. A man was changing the oil of his old vehicle just there. When I asked if anybody went down that way, his mumbles were unintelligible, but my impression was, No, it was a bad idea. A semitruck idled nearby with its driver hidden behind tinted glass. Feeling a little desperate, I turned around. Read more…

Lindy West is Preaching to the Choir

Jenny Jimenez / Hatchette Books

Sara Fredman | Longreads | November 2019 | 17 minutes (4,696 words)

 
The title of Lindy West’s new book, The Witches Are Coming, derives from a New York Times column West wrote in October 2017 about the then-unfolding of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Woody Allen had warned against creating “a witch hunt atmosphere,” where men have to worry about their every move, and West was not having it. Or, more precisely, she was all too ready to have it. “The witches are coming,” she wrote, “but not for your life. We’re coming for your legacy … we have our stories, and we’re going to keep telling them.” For West, there is witchcraft to be found in truth-telling, a power that she says “by definition cannot be likable.” 

Likability is in the news again, with the New York Times reporting this week that 41% of voters surveyed who support Joe Biden but not Elizabeth Warren say they agree with the statement that most of the women who run for president “just aren’t that likable.” But, as West and I discussed when we spoke over the phone last month, likability is hardly an objective category. It depends as much on who is doing the liking as it does on who is being liked. In other words, audience — or in the case of politics, the makeup of the electorate — matters. The Witches Are Coming knows its audience. It isn’t aimed at the Woody Allens or the Donald Trumps of the world; its title functions as more of a mantra for would-be practitioners of its witchcraft than a warning to potential victims. And the truths West tells in The Witches Are Coming will likely find a cadre of would-be witches eager to like them. Over the last decade, West has gone from a local Seattle favorite to a writer with a national profile, a best-selling memoir, Shrill, and a well-received TV show of the same name. In one of her essays, West cheekily addresses racists but she acknowledges that her writing isn’t for everyone, least of all Trump supporters. Instead, she talks about the value of preaching to the choir — in her words, the ones “who show up every week.” 

Still, it’s possible that even West’s devoted audience isn’t entirely ready to hear all of the truths she’s here to tell. The essays in The Witches Are Coming cover a wide range of seemingly disparate topics, from the #metoo movement to climate change; Ted Bundy, Adam Sandler, and Joan Rivers all get chapters, as does a 90s culture that West believes taught her that activism was lame. They share an emphasis on the power of voice: Who gets to speak and share their stories? How do we react when those stories are shared? And they often dwell on the ways in which we try to avoid having hard conversations about our culture. What the essays don’t do is provide any easy solutions. When I spoke to her, West was comfortable saying she doesn’t have all the answers and the book functions as a series of questions that attempt, at various points, to challenge, inspire, and reassure an audience she assumes is ready to take on the cultural challenges we face as we head into the third decade of the millennium. 

* * *

Sara Fredman: Shrill told a specifically feminist story: what it’s like to walk around the world in a woman’s body, and in your particular body; what it means to try and fit yourself into like cultural and physical spaces that aren’t built for you. The Witches Are Coming pans out quite a bit and engages more broadly with politics and systemic inequities and what it means to live in our culture right now, particularly for marginalized groups. What compelled you to use this wider lens? How was the writing process different for this book as opposed to Shrill

Lindy West: Well, part of it is that there’s something vulnerable and very raw and sort of overexposed about writing memoir and I needed a break from writing memoir. So that was part of it but I think that a hallmark of the Trump era is this feeling of being overwhelmed. I’m not one of those people who thinks that this is a good thing because it’s forcing people to wake up. But I do think that it has forced a lot of people to confront how many different things are broken in our country and the ways that he’s been able to exploit those broken systems and the ways that his fans absolutely relish that brokenness. It’s really been a dark and scary time. And I just felt like that feeling of being overwhelmed is such a part of this time, so I wanted to address it in some way. I’m not an expert in anything, I don’t have a degree in policy. I’m just a person who I think is a relatively good communicator and I have this platform and this book is my attempt at gathering in all of the different parts of this great, big, overwhelming mess as best I can, trying to hold them all together and look at them at the same time and be honest and accountable about reality. That’s what this writing process felt like to me. I don’t know anything special but the point of the book is hopefully to make people feel less alone and hopefully to galvanize people a little bit. It’s the same as writing a list. If you can put something down on paper in a way where you can look at it all at once, it becomes less daunting. And you can’t cover everything but this was my attempt at trying to consolidate it so you can start cutting it up into bite-sized pieces. 

It reminds me of when my daughter was dealing with anxiety as a really little person and I spoke to a child psychologist who said you have to name it before you can deal with it. And I feel like that’s so much of what you’re doing, naming it for us. Not that we don’t know, obviously, what we’re dealing with, but getting it down on paper is the first step because it’s so overwhelming. 

Yeah, and it’s also scary to look at because it’s so much more comfortable to be in denial. 

Once you start looking at like — “oh my God, what do we do?” — it’s really scary. And I think a lot of people — particularly privileged people and especially white people — who have the luxury of living in denial to a great extent, that’s really seductive. And I think that the first step absolutely is just naming what’s happening around us and what’s happened before us. That’s just the first step to repairing some of these really deep illnesses in our society. 

But I’m interested in how you conceive of your audience. Is there an element in this book, do you think, of preaching to the choir or do you see it as galvanizing those who would already tend to agree with you but just might be complacent or think that there’s not much they can do? Do you think you might change anyone’s mind? 

I know that I have changed people’s minds with my writing before because I hear from them. I clearly did not write this book for Trump supporters to read and be like, “Huh, I never thought about that.” Obviously that’s not going to happen. I don’t feel any kind of qualms about preaching to the choir. I get accused of that a lot and I’m like, great, the choir is who shows up every week. And we have a lot of shit to do and if the choir is feeling despair and doesn’t know what to do with themselves, I have some ideas for them and I would like them to feel energized and galvanized and I would like them to not feel hopeless. The choir is who’s showing up because they want to be preached to so I don’t really mind when people say that about my work. I don’t think everything has to be changing people’s minds. And I don’t know that there are many books that are going to reach across that partisan divide. I think that’s the work of very, very long, slow culture change or one ultra-charismatic politician TBD who maybe hasn’t been born yet. 

When I teach argumentative writing, I usually start our discussion by asking if the students can give an example of a piece of writing that changed their minds because I think it’s extraordinarily difficult to change someone’s mind. And it’s always a very interesting discussion but this semester, one of my students said that he used to be anti-abortion and then started seeing all these Twitter threads of women talking about their abortions and they changed his mind. And I was flabbergasted because when does this ever happen? But then it was like, “Oh my gosh, that was on Twitter.” And I bring this up because you started the Shout Your Abortion movement on Twitter and, in this book, you write that “personal story telling is an engine of humanization, which is in turn an engine of empathy.” So here I have this kid who’s telling me he changed his opinion on abortion because of Twitter threads but Twitter can often be this toxic wasteland for women. What do we do about the fact that this is a major platform for changing minds but it’s also the main arena for policing and punishing women’s voices? What would be your advice for women who want to try to change the world by sharing their stories but don’t want to participate in an abusive garbage platform?

I don’t know. I’m certainly not telling people that they need to get off Twitter. I love Twitter. I think Twitter is incredible in a lot of ways and I had a lot of fun on Twitter and I learned a lot on Twitter. All of that is real and if people can find a place, a way to navigate Twitter that feels safe and productive to them, that’s great, you know, go ahead and stay. I left Twitter because of the president. It wasn’t so much the getting trolled all the time. I just felt ethically disgusting validating that platform or embracing the platform with my presence. So while I do think it might be a net gain for the world if we all left Twitter and let it die and move to a different platform, I don’t know what that platform is. That’s all well and good to suggest but in practical terms, it doesn’t really do much for us. We don’t have it yet. Shout Your Abortion happened on Twitter 100% and I know firsthand that that movement has changed a lot of people’s lives. And it’s just one of many absolutely incredible spontaneous outpourings of truths that have happened on Twitter that have changed a lot about the landscape that we live in. So I don’t have anything wise to say beyond that it sucks. Some people get to use this platform and have fun and feel safe and laugh and goof off with their friends and some people, in order to do any of that, have to figure out how to armor themselves against really, really violent, horrific abuse. And the fact that it’s racialized and it’s gendered, it’s just a really apt and a really disgusting reflection of our society at large. If I had a solution for our society at large, I promise I’d tell everyone. It’s real tricky because people absolutely need that platform and there’s a lot of good stuff happening there. I choose to not be there, but I don’t begrudge people who do. And even though I don’t have a lot of faith in them, I hope that Twitter continues to try to make that space safe for everyone. And maybe they’ll figure it out. 

That idea of how some people get to exist very benignly, safely and other people have a totally different experience of the world, you touch on that in your chapter on Ted Bundy and likability, which kind of fed my soul because I write a series for Longreads on TV antiheroes and gender, trying to figure out why we find it so easy to like men who do bad things and so hard to like women who do anything at all. Your argument is that likability is a con and that it can’t possibly be an objective criterion in our sexist, racist culture, which I found very compelling. But you also have a TV show and, I think, in the opinion of most critics, you created a likable character in Annie Easton. 

I know. 

Although there was some criticism that I remember seeing when season one came out that she wasn’t shrill enough, which I guess meant that she was so likable that she was unlikable, which hilariously and sadly proves your point. Can you talk a little bit about the process of creating that character? Did you fall into the likability trap at all? Were there discussions of “we want audiences to like this character” or “I’m crafting the character in such a way” in order to get audiences to like or relate to her? 

Yeah. I’m sure I’ve absolutely contradicted myself in print because I definitely have said that part of my purpose in the show, part of my goal, was to create a fat person that you like because I just think that that’s such an excellent way to change people’s minds — if you can fall in love with this character that you’re used to seeing as a kind of negative archetype, a stock character, a sidekick, a sort of broken person, a work in progress. If you can make a fully realized human being that people care about in a genuine way, then that might affect the way that they think about the fat people around them in their lives. So I’ve certainly said that in interviews and then I condemned myself in my book, which I hadn’t realized, so thank you for pointing that out. You’re always working within the confines of the culture that you’re working in. I guess maybe you can exploit that system to a degree. 

I think that the way it’s been set up like likability is a con. My argument in the series has basically been that these stories of antiheroes have been told in such a way that it stacks the deck for liking a certain character. We wouldn’t ordinarily like a mob boss or a meth kingpin, but because we get these backstories, because we see that they’re just trying to provide for their families and they’re thoughtful, they get interiority, all that stuff, and we find ourselves rooting for them in spite of ourselves because it’s been stacked. It’s all about how you construct a narrative. And so I think it’s so cool and fascinating to be thoughtful about that, but for the kind of character who doesn’t usually get that kind of narrative structure. 

Yeah and also, you know, Annie is not likable universally. I am, in the chapter, talking more about the idea of this sort of blanket, nice, universal likability that actually isn’t what we’re going for in the show. There’s plenty of people who are mad about her abortion, who hate her for being fat even though she’s nice. But I think you’re right. I think if you are a flattened person, then your likability can only be hollow. And all it can do is pander to stereotypes and traditional gender roles. But if you can make a character that is alive, it’s likable in a much more nutritious way. And you’re still within the confines of a fucked-up culture and there’s stuff about Annie that I’m sure is problematic in some way. But everything is just this kind of weird dance. You’re trying to position yourself in this matrix of fucked-up forces. 

I think it’s a complex thing but I think it’s telling that you were able to create this character who you want to root for despite the fact that she was doing all of these things that have not traditionally been likable characteristics. So that’s moving the needle but also probably reflective of the fact that so many women saw themselves for the first time in this character and that we have more women’s voices in pop culture criticism and all that stuff to say “this is a great portrayal.” So I guess it’s all about representation. Which is another topic that you talk about a lot. You’ve spoken about it in Shrill and in this book as well. And the chapter on likability comes right after the chapter on Adam Sandler, which argues that all Adam Sandler movies share a number of major unnerving qualities. I’m the same age as you and I’ve always seen myself in your arguments that so much of pop culture when we were growing up just wasn’t for us. I’m finding that part of adulthood for me is figuring out what I actually like because so much of my youth was spent subconsciously shaping myself to fit a pop culture that wasn’t created by people like me. 

Totally. 

And actually Adam Sandler was a notable exception in one tiny little way. His Hannukah song was like the first time my religion had a major pop culture moment. But that was literally the one thing. 

I mean, I almost put it in the book that “O.J. Simpson, not a Jew” is an incredible joke. It’s a very, very good line. 

It was so of a moment. You could write a chapter on that. 

Yeah, for sure. 


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


So I guess I’m wondering whether you think things have shifted enough. Is it that pop culture has become a bigger tent such that it speaks to girls and young women in the same way it does to boys and young men? Or has it just become fragmented? You have teenage daughters. Do you feel that it’s different now? 

It’s definitely different. I don’t know that it’s like, you know, “Oh, we fixed it.” It’s so much better, there’s so much more diverse representation, different ways to be a girl on TV, than there were when we were growing up. But still 99% of the actresses on TV look exactly alike and lo and behold, that’s what all the teenage girls at my daughters’ schools happen to strive to look like. And that’s just exactly the same as it was when we were teenagers. But at the same time there’s a lot more depth and breadth to the female characters and the different kinds of women’s stories that we see on TV. I mean, when we were kids, you couldn’t have interracial couples. I was at Jezebel already when Cheerios had an ad with an interracial couple and people lost their minds. So that was 2012 at the earliest. So things absolutely are moving and shifting. My daughters are so clued in. They’re so on top of the media that they consume and monitoring it and policing it and thinking critically about it. And that’s another thing that Twitter has, I think, taught a lot of young people. It’s just a constant global conversation churning about every single thing in the world. And so my daughters are hyperaware of racist bullshit and sexist bullshit and homophobic bullshit in the media around them and it’s amazing. In a different interview, someone asked me: How do you equip your kids to navigate the sort of media landscape? And I think I kind of rambled on about, you know, “You gotta be honest with them and always talk to them like they are smart and they can handle it and don’t dumb things down,” blah, blah, blah. But I’m realizing in this moment that my real answer is, don’t worry about it, they got it. My daughters are so much smarter about media literacy.

I feel like I was so dumb. I feel dumb compared to them. 

Yeah. And the thing also about them is they’re not embarrassed to be militant. 

I really appreciated that activism chapter. It was cheering.

I worry about it being a little bit, um, too sweeping, too broad, because I’m ultimately talking about my own experience in high school, but it’s definitely real. 

You talk about how activism was viewed when we were in high school, how save the whales was a punchline, like, “Oh, you care about this? Pretty lame.” And the fact that we grew up in that culture, I mean it’s so sad.

So sad. 

What could we have done if that wasn’t the predominant cultural attitude toward activism? 

And it was absolutely by design, you know? People did that to us and that’s so messed up. 

Changing topics from the future to the past, your Joan Rivers chapter made me think about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel because the show is supposed to be loosely based on Joan Rivers and other early female comics. But in your chapter you point out the crucible Joan Rivers operated in. There were such limited choices facing women in comedy and she was shaped by the forces around her. If she wanted to do this thing, she needed to work in a certain way. And the show takes a totally different route. It allows its protagonist to remain likable — there’s that likability again — while killing it as a female comic. She gets to keep her humanity and also do comedy. And she’s pretty and everybody loves her but nobody sexually harasses her. Except for maybe comments, like, [old timey voice] “What’s that broad doing here?” Nobody’s grabbing any locations on her body. Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorker’s TV critic, made a very similar point when she wrote about the show. But I think that your chapter on Joan Rivers offers this kind of sliding doors alternative story that the show could be telling and it would be a heavier show and less triumphalist. And I know you’ve worked in comedy and you’ve written about the role that comedy plays in culture and the responsibilities of its practitioners. It seems to me like an example of what you talk about in “choosing the lie,” right? 

Totally. 

It’s enjoyable entertainment but maybe another example of how we choose to gloss over the things that make us uncomfortable. 

Yeah, and that does a great disservice to women who are struggling in that field or in any similar field where, you know, we can just tell a story about a plucky gal who excels in her job and doesn’t face any of those really dark complications, if she’s even able to get there at all. There are so many people who were run out of comedy by sexist creeps. We don’t know who they are, we don’t know how many of them there are, we don’t know their names because they never got to do it. So I think it is easy to be like, [old timey voice] “Well if you just try hard and you got good jokes, anyone can do it!” That’s just bootstraps again. Like, if you failed, you must not have tried hard enough or you must not have been good enough when really there are — not to be a broken record — but there are massive, powerful, entrenched systems in place that move the ride for some people and make it impossible for other people, or at least very, very painful and grueling. And you’re not going to fix that, you’re not going to fix the world, if you don’t look at those honestly. 

I thought about the Chip and Joanna Gaines chapter when the whole Ellen and George W. Bush thing happened. 

Right, I thought about it too. “Oh, my chapter!” 

Ellen commented and said, “Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean I’m not gonna be friends with them.” But in your chapter on Chip and Joanna, you write: “The partisan divide is not insignificant or cute.” So how did you feel about that whole kerfuffle?

Like everything else, it’s just really complicated. It would have been incredibly powerful if Ellen had made some public statement like, “You know what? He’s my friend and I really love him as a person, but it’s true that he did XYZ horrific things to the LGBTQ community and I feel …” You know what I mean? I think more transparency is always really powerful. But also, she’s walking a tightrope. 

Right. So what do we say to people who, like Chip and Joanna, are trying to shelter in this neutrality cocoon and walk that tightrope? What do we, as consumers of pop culture, do about that? 

I don’t know, like, constantly bitch about it on Twitter? I don’t know. I think that part of this book, that I try to get into over and over and over again, is that all of this stuff is really messy; there’s not a perfect system. I think that it’s good to always encourage people to be principled and transparent and honest. Ellen or Chip and Joanna could have used those moments as an opportunity to have a complicated, candid conversation and they chose not to. And I understand that there are probably teams of publicists telling them what to do. 

Same with the candidates who got that question, you know, about “friends who aren’t like you.”

Yeah, I mean, you know what? I don’t have any friends who are homophobic, right-wing, racist monsters. Monsters is not a productive term. People, real people. I don’t have those people as my friends and I frankly don’t understand how that would work. But I also recognize that I live in Seattle and I live in a bubble and I am not confronted with messy situations. I couldn’t find you a Trump supporter if you were gonna give me $1 million. I don’t even know where to look. And so I recognize that it’s more complicated than that. I think all we can do is continue to have these conversations in public and resist falling into absolutely useless clichés like “I don’t need all my friends to believe the exact same way as me.” Like, yeah, I don’t need all my friends to root for the same sports team as me but I do need all my friends to feel the same way I do about racism and homophobia and transphobia. I do need that and I think that that is a virtue. I think that that is a good thing.

Right, and the stakes of being kind to people who are not being kind on a much grander scale with major systemic consequences. 

Yeah, and that doesn’t mean that we have to — I’m not advocating violence. Look, if there are people in your life that believe horrific things and you love those people and you care about them, of course you don’t have to cut those people out of your life. But I do think that a great start would be to at least try to communicate with them in a real way, like not in a contentious way where you’re arguing about politics, but in a human way, like we’re talking about human beings and people’s lives. It’s yet another question to which I don’t have a perfect answer because, you know, I think I said this in the book that we’ve torn down some old systems and we haven’t built new ones yet and we’re still kind of beta testing, we’re troubleshooting. I think that most people are good, or at least mean well and want to be kind. And I think a lot of people are really controlled by fear and resentment and I don’t think that that’s insurmountable. But I also don’t know how to fix it, except for doing what I’m already doing, which is using my platform to say the same eight things over and over and over again until I die. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

* * *

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands