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The Tenuous State of Writing in the Information Age

I don’t really do manifestos, typically, or grandstand, or
pitch tents, where writing is concerned. I also don’t ultimately think that setting
rules is a good way to foster creative thought. I do, though, like the idea of
aspiration in writing—of aiming, with all the devotion one can muster, at a
spot just above eye level, at a certain sense of quality, at a sense that
you’ve listened to the voices of influence long enough that you’re putting into
practice what they may have taught you. This publication, the one you’re
looking at, is one of a type. There are others of its type: the other parts of
this network, Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, Think Progress, Dame, Jezebel, and
numerous comrades, too many to name.
Often, the cultural articles that appear here, and in similarly aimed
publications, e.g. blogs, are distinguished by a crucial link: between what is happening on
a screen, or in an artistic work, and what is happening in the world. That phrase, “what is happening in the world,”
could mean a number of things: news events, cultural trends, or, most
poignantly, remnants from one’s own past. These pieces, then, often shear very
close to subject matter which could be considered emotionally “hot” for their
writers—content which could either inspire elation or deep rage. Because of
this, the task of the writer is doubled: the root subject must be addressed,
and then what lies behind the root subject, the context, must be addressed. And
in both cases, the task is to address the subject eloquently, and with respect
for the activity in which the writer is engaged: that is, writing. We live in a
time when individuals have more ways to express themselves and to communicate
with others than they ever had before. And communicate they do: in blog posts,
in tweets, in editorials, on personal web sites, and elsewhere. There is no
shortage of passion and sincerity in these writings, particularly the blog
posts. But the problem is that sometimes, in the course of expressing things
which are closest and deepest for the writer, articulation is sacrificed, and
some very, very basic, indispensable rules of good writing and editing are left by the wayside.

When a film or television show touches on themes that are
controversial, and perhaps does it in a way that could be seen as flawed, it’s
inevitable, in the age of instant response, that there will be, almost
immediately, a lot of writing online about the topic. Some of the writing will
be cogent, and might, through its insight, present an outlook on a subject or
theme that you might not have thought of before. It seems to this reader,
though, that often the perspectives I read on these subjects, in the process of
linking the personal to the artistic to the political, have the same general
timbre. The experience goes something like this. As is expected of me, I click
on a headline that draws my attention, usually containing the words “Here’s
Why” or “Gets Right” or “Gets Wrong,” or possibly a strongly positioned “I”
statement which reveals something about the writer’s life or attitudes which is
undeniably alluring. The article opens, I begin to read, and then this is where
I may separate from many readers, or may not. I see lives and attitudes opened
up, presented in their fullness, but I also see problems. Sometimes the
problems are small ones: a missing comma here, a missing word there, a
subject-verb agreement problem there, a misspelled proper name there. These are
easy enough to move past, since they needn’t derail the impact of a piece. Sometimes, though, the problems are a little deeper.
As you read along, you begin to notice clichés at different points in the
sentences; sometimes a whole sentence might be a cliché. And this is where the
mean-spirited, unsympathetic thoughts begin, that human compassion tells us we
must squelch: I feel like I’ve read this
before. Couldn’t another phrase have been used? I’d like to sympathize, but
this seems a little too after-school-ish for me. It’s not nice to think
these things, particularly when more personal material is being discussed;
after all, a person’s “telling of their story” is the most exalted act they
could perform, in one sense—the baring of personal history, the laying out of
each person’s true tale. How could that be faulted? In any event, sometimes the
problems lie even more deep within a piece, and this is when readers like
myself, and possibly like others, have really, really mean-spirited thoughts.
Upon reading the writer’s opinions, the reaction is one of a set of rhetorical
questions: How trite could one piece be?
What does this mean? Who does this person think he or she is? The reason
for this reaction is normally that the issue at hand has not been explored
deeply enough, the contradictory conditions not examined or countered, the
depths probed, and so what you receive, before you, is a one-dimensional
spewing, whose only argument is its thesis, and whose body is really just a
restatement of the thesis. You might well agree with that argument, and praise
it for its bravery, or its honesty, or the stridence of its tone. On the other
hand, though, you might not buy it: the sad life story, the experience of
alienation, the tale of abuse might not draw you in. Why? Because it wasn’t
written well enough, or edited well enough—or both, equally. And so rejection is
a wholly fair response.

Within the tenets of good writing there are many chestnuts.
Avoid clichés. Support your arguments with evidence. Show, don’t tell. Omit
needless words. These tenets have lasted because they distinguish, to put it
simplistically, good writing from bad, profundity from shallowness, writing
that stays fresh for a day from writing that stays fresh for decades. At the
current time, the culture we live in is a mouthy one: for every event there is
a prompt response, and then another, and then another. Blogging itself is an
industry: miraculously, individuals are paid to tell their stories. But, as
with all industries, there are pressures. Pressures for ad revenues. Pressures
for clicks. Pressures for timeliness. And the result of these pressures, it
seems to me, is that a slippage is starting to occur, in which what were once
basic rules of good writing have become somewhat less important by comparison
with these pressures, by comparison with the need to keep the wolf away from
one’s door. We read post after post, each one a window into a personal
experience, each one a microscopic look at one life among billions. And the
urgency of it all is enough that at times it seems as if the publication is
more important than what’s being published. And perhaps it is, in one sense;
maybe the act of unleashing a story one might have held close is healthy for
the writer, and healthy for the reader, cathartic. But there are a couple of
problems. One is that the act of writing, if not taken seriously, results in
bad prose, sometimes even unintelligible prose—which could, if you thought it
over long enough, negate the purpose for having written in the first place. The
other problem is that the basic tenets for what we call “good” writing don’t go
away if you ignore them. The responsibility here lies with the writer and the
editor equally. All too often, our temptation is to blame the author of an
inflammatory, or poorly considered, or baffling essay: How dare she say that! The reality, though, is that most pieces
published in forums in which there is an editor have to pass the eyes of that
editor, and so to a certain extent, the editor has to be considered to have
approved the piece wholesale: its approach, its virtues, and its flaws. Or at
the very least, the editor has to have felt good enough about the piece to
allow it to be attached to his or her name. And so, since the activity being
engaged in is writing, the writer and editor must work together: if the editor
sees problems with a piece, those problems need to be addressed, both large and
small. If these large or small problems
persist, then a simple question arises: what happened? I have to be careful how
I say the following, because I don’t want to imply that the job of an editor or
the job of a writer is by any means an easy one, or one in which emotions are
not in constant conflict with better judgment. However, I wonder if a change is
taking place in the way we, as a culture, view verbal expression. There is a
part of every writer’s mind, and every editor’s mind, that acts as a sort of
Greek chorus as the work is taking place. Why
are you doing that, it asks. Are you
sure you want to say it this way, it asks. Maybe here is a good place to start over, it suggests. That’s
not how you spell that word, it groans. You’re
repeating yourself, it nudges. And, most painfully, Sure, this meant a lot to you, but that doesn’t mean it will move
anyone else. What I wonder is, then, if that part of the writer’s or editor’s
mind is shrinking, and if the voices crying out inside it are getting fainter, as the pressures of commerce grow greater.
And if, beyond that, as readers, we’re starting to think those voices don’t matter,
after all.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

HAPPY VALLEY, PRIME SUSPECT, and the Growth of the Everywoman in Crime Dramas

When we first meet Catherine Cawood
(Sarah Lancashire), a uniformed police sergeant patrolling West Yorkshire in
Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley,
she’s dashing into a convenience store to grab a fire extinguisher and a pair
of cheap sunglasses. She’s on her way to
a local playground where one of the town’s many unemployed, heroin-addicted
youth has doused himself in petrol and is threatening to set himself on
fire. "He can send himself to paradise,
that’s his choice,” she explains to a subordinate as they walk briskly toward the
scene, “but he’s not taking my eyebrows with him." In these first moments, Wainwright tells us a
lot about the middle-aged Cawood as Cawood tells us a lot about herself, using her
own story, sketched out in broadly downbeat strokes, to build a bridge to the
suicidal young man:

Catherine: I’m Catherine, by the way. I’m 47, I’m
divorced, I live with my sister who’s a recovering heroin addict. I have two
grown-up children. One dead, one who doesn’t speak to me, and a grandson.

Man: So why? Why doesn’t he speak to you?

Catherine: It’s complicated.

Catherine: Let’s talk about you.

It’s an introduction that’s both sharp and endearing, which simultaneously
hints at one of the show’s central, if somewhat buried, themes: Carwood’s
sublimation of her lingering grief at the suicide of her daughter and her
attempt to channel it into selfless service to her family and her community. Over the course of Happy Valley‘s six episodes, the Cawood we meet in the series’
opening moments—coolly competent, pragmatic, holding on to a touch of vanity—will be pushed to, and past, her breaking point.

Happy
Valley is one of three series from Wainwright currently on-air in the U.K. (the
others are Last Tango in Halifax and Scott
& Bailey). It’s
ostensibly the story of a failed kidnapping—there’s a touch of the Coens’ Fargo in the set-up, in which a
seemingly put-upon accountant arranges a kidnapping of his boss’s daughter—and
it’s not until about half-way through that it becomes clear that it’s as much a
case-study of grief and loss as it is a police procedural. Like its protagonist, however, Happy Valley acknowledges that the world
doesn’t pause for our personal drama—there are teacher conferences, family
crises, and jobs that continue to demand our attention—and so it dutifully
trudges on with its narrative. As a
result, although the first season (of six one-hour episodes) is available in
its entirety on Netflix, it’s not a show that necessarily invites binge-watching. It digs too deeply into messy emotions,
placing as much emphasis on its characters’ reactions to events as it does on the
events themselves. In keeping with this,
actual violence is rare—though when it occurs, it is almost vulgar in its
brutality.

Although it is not without its dark
humor, day-to-day suffering permeates this series—there’s terminal cancer and multiple
sclerosis, alcoholism and drug abuse, high unemployment and abundant squalor. The
focus nevertheless remains on Cawood herself.
Her daughter killed herself after giving birth to her rapist’s son—a
difficult boy named Ryan who Cawood is
raising without any help from the rest of the family, save her sister. It’s the release of that rapist, Tommy Lee Royce
(James Norton), from prison—she’s been warned about it by her ex-husband but
it’s not until she sees Royce on the street that it hits her—that triggers
the return of long-suppressed turmoil. But the stressors that feed that turmoil are
everywhere, and often self-imposed. Cawood
is raising her grandson, the product of that rape, and his volatility makes her
fear that he’s inherited Royce’s violent streak; she is sheltering her sister, who
is recovering from a long-term heroin addiction; and her position on the police
force thrusts her into competing, contradictory, and occasionally impossible
roles—uniformed police officer and investigator, maternal figure and authority
figure, all at once. That she serves as
a de facto mother to everyone but her children functions as a cruel,
cosmic irony.

The mini-series form suits Happy Valley. It’s easy to imagine it collapsing under the
weight of its bleakness and interiority at a longer length. And it could just as easily get lost in its granular
focus on Cawood. At roughly six hours, Happy Valley is the same length as Top of the Lake and a few hours shy of Fargo, True Detective, and American
Horror Story, and yet its ambitions couldn’t be more different—it doesn’t
play to the crowd (or a critical culture built around recaps) with the attention-grabbing
virtuosity of Cary Fukanaga’s direction in True
Detective (a six-minute-tracking-shot!). Nor does it approach Steven
Soderbergh’s nuanced direction of The
Knick (which just this week Matt Zoller Seitz called “the greatest
sustained display of directorial virtuosity in the history of American TV”). Happy
Valley, on the other hand,is no-frills.
Because of this, perhaps, the West Yorkshire of Happy Valley is almost indistinguishable from the British police
procedurals I fell in love with in the early-to-mid nineties—Prime Suspect, Cracker (and later, I confess, even lesser series like Blood on the Wire and Rebus) – when I studied and worked in
London. Grey skies. Drab public housing. That general sense of physical and
spiritual fatigue. What surprised me,
however, is how pleasing I find its drabness.
Part of this is likely nostalgia.
But part of it is the knowledge that—having tossed aside pyrotechnics
– the show must succeed or fail on its writing and performances. In succeeding on those narrow terms, Happy Valley feels like an antidote to the
high-art pretense, elaborate composition, and under-cooked philosophy of so
many of its brethren.

I spent a lot of time thinking
about Prime Suspect while watching Happy Valley. Revisiting Prime Suspect now (something I
recommend), the sexism that Helen Mirren’s DCI Jane Tennison faces at every step—both viciously personal and blithely institutional—can feel a little heavy handed. It’s easy to forget just how radical Tennison
was when Prime Suspect debuted in
1991. [1] It wasn’t Tennison’s intelligence that made Prime Suspect so different (though it
was uncommon enough) but rather her appetites—for alcohol, for sex, and, especially,
for recognition and promotion. They
dwarfed those of the men around her, including her superiors (no small
feat). Unlike Prime Suspect’s wildly popular contemporary, Cracker, which coated its main character’s (Robbie Coltrane) bad
habits in a Romantic gloss, all part of his larger-than-life genius, Tennison’s
appetites are more thorny. She pays the
price for them just as often as they drive her forward. By staying neutral, Prime Suspect ushered in an era in which women were not only viable
protagonists in a police procedural, but were finally permitted (if not yet
entitled) to make bad decisions, and even to be occasionally unlikeable. (It
helped, of course, that Tennison’s abundant flaws were dramatized by Helen
Mirren.) The best shows that followed in its wake—like Happy Valley—have found a way not only to acknowledge their
protagonists’ flaws, but to capture the richness and complexity gained from
living with bad habits and decisions. Wainright
smartly capitalizes on Lancashire’s ability to carry Cawood through endless
registers, from the coolly competent officer we meet in Episode 1 through
periods of grief, depression, anger, and—yes—“unlikeability.” In doing so, she creates a believable, and
complicated, Everywoman.

To be clear, Cawood does not share
Tennison’s appetites, or her bad habits:
she’s far more likely to have a cup of tea than a whiskey at the end of
a long day. And yet she engages in an ill-advised affair with her married
ex-husband. And there’s a fleeting awkwardness
in some of her conversations with superiors and former colleagues that suggests
the kind of personal history neither party wants to revisit. That these plot points are not central to the
drama—and are often no more than implied—could be interpreted as a sign of
progress, though Wainwright has taken some pains to distance Cawood from Tennison,
explaining that "Prime Suspect was 20 years ago," and that, in talking to current police
officers, "None of
them seemed to think it was a big deal they were women. The police have gone
through a lot of reforms. There might be some hidden sexism, but now it’s
really not that unusual for a woman to be the head of an investigation. To try
and make an issue out of that would have felt rather old fashioned."

Perhaps she’s right.
Times change. The recent attempt to
adapt Prime Suspect to US television never
quite figured out how to translate the original’s tension into the 21^st
century. But how distant is it, really? I
got the sense watching Happy Valley that
the changes Wainwright cites aren’t, in spite of her optimism, necessarily all for the better. At least Tennison was generally left to do
her investigative work. Cawood’s
responsibilities, on the other hand, are endless—part Sherlock, part social
worker, both manager and mother. And it’s
not as if sexism has disappeared, either in or out of the station-house. It’s embodied by her superiors, who at times display
a boys-club disregard for her concerns (though, as with Tennison, they’re quick
to trot her out for public relations value.)
And it’s on display in one of the show’s best—and funniest—scenes,
when Cawood’s ex-husband, a reporter who Cawood has repeatedly pushed to write
about the Yorkshire drug trade, calls her to say that he’s followed her
advice. As he goes on and on, explaining
the workings of a local supply and demand that she deals with on a daily basis,
Cawood feigns interest in what he’s telling her—to preserve his enthusiasm,
or his pride, or just out of learned deference – as her expression simultaneously
reveals a bemused frustration that he doesn’t realize she already knows all it with
a level of detail he’ll never even comprehend. This isn’t the misogyny and sabotage that
Tennison faced—her ex-husband loves and respects her—but it’s also clear that
we’re a long way from out-growing our conditioned biases (including,
apparently, mansplaining).

It’s true,
however, that these issues aren’t the focus of Happy Valley—even if the series benefits from the heavy lifting
of those that came before, it’s content to swap the personal for the
political. But it’s not all Cawood, all the time. Underlying the kidnapping narrative is a
somewhat half-formed argument regarding evil and its origins. As the focus narrows on Cawood, however, the
peripheral stories and characters grow a little threadbare, including the
kidnapping narrative (though both George Costigan, as the father of the
kidnapped young woman, and Siobhan Finneran, as Cawood’s sister, are excellent
in their roles). Problematically, the
motives of the criminals are never entirely clear—not even their greed explains
why they take on the risk of a kidnap and ransom—though they share a few
traits: hubris, myopia, and selfishness,
to start, but also an abject refusal to take responsibility for their actions
and the damage they’ve caused.

The philosophical argument, on the other
hand, begins and ends with Tommy Lee Royce, whose violent sadism over the
course of the series confirms Cawood’s worst fears. At her
low-point, exhausted, depressed, and likely suffering from PTSD after a beating
at Royce’s hand, Cawood confesses to her ex-husband her fear that Ryan is
destined to be like his father. In answering
the age-old question of nature or nurture, however, Happy Valley comes down emphatically on the side of nurture and
against the idea of ineluctable evil. As
her ex-husband explains, Royce isn’t a sociopath, he’s a "little twisted
thing[s] who grew up unloved . . . more than unloved, despised probably,
treated like dirt on a daily basis in squalor and chaos.” And he’s right, at least to some extent—we’ve met the mother and she is, in technical terms, a nightmare. These abstract themes would be empty
exposition if it weren’t for Wainwright’s and Lancashire’s work. In numerous scenes, when Cawood’s carefully
cultivated patience and selflessness are peeled back to reveal a very real
rage, she is legitimately frightening in her isolation and her instinct to lash
out at those nearest to her. In those
scenes, Happy Valley comes closest to
making a political pitch, though it is fittingly rooted in psychology. The "little twisted thing" inside
Tommy that drives him to violence exists in each of us, it suggests, and what
holds it at bay is family, stability, and structure. And martyrs like Catherine Cawood. But given the unrelenting chaos and squalor that
threatens Happy Valley, and the
punishment Cawood endures (she half-jokes at one point that she should have “punching-bag”
written on her forehead), it’s unclear if this is any reason for optimism.

Spencer Short is an attorney and author. His collection of
poetry, Tremolo (Harper 2001), was
awarded a 2000 National Poetry Series Prize. His poetry and non-fiction have
been published in The Boston Review, Coldfront, the Columbia Review, Hyperallergic,
Men’s Digest, Slate, and Verse. He lives in Brooklyn.

[1] Prime Suspect
debuted in the U.K. just three years after the demise of Cagney & Lacey here in the U.S.– a show canceled early in its
run over concerns the characters were too tough (and thus likely to be mistaken
for lesbians) before being revamped, softened, and returned to the
line-up. Wainwright’s Scott & Bailey bears more than a
passing resemblance to Cagney & Lacey.

METAMERICANA: How Eoin Duffy’s Animated Short THE MISSING SCARF Forecasts Our Adorable, Inescapable Apocalypse

METAMERICANA: How Eoin Duffy’s THE MISSING SCARF Forecasts Our Adorable, Inescapable Apocalypse

For
many decades, the secret to making a
highly successful and thoroughly educational children’s film has really
been no secret at all: simply give a live-action, hand-puppet, or
animated avatar (all stand-ins for the child herself) an embarrassingly
simple dilemma, and then detail the tyke’s increasingly hilarious
attempts to navigate it. The last of these efforts will, of course, be
successful. The Missing Scarf,
an Academy Award-nominated animated short written by Eoin Duffy and
narrated by cult icon George Takei, now widely viewable for the first time, at first seems to check all these
boxes. In fact, it ultimately turns each of them on its head. The result
is a superlative and resoundingly educational adult film that’s every bit as abstract and harrowing as the average Sesame Street short is tactile and comforting.

The
plot: Albert the Squirrel has lost his scarf, which seems like a
consequential mishap until we meet Albert’s friends, who are
considerably worse off. Cecil the Owl is terrified of the dark, despite being nocturnal; Conrad the Beaver worries that he is incompetent at the only thing his species is known for (building dams); Edwin the Fox, despite the natural charisma of his species, believes that
his friends are plotting to kill him; and Frederick the Bear, poor
gentle brute, daily stares into the abyss of not just his own but the
entire universe’s (relatively speaking) impending self-annihilation—a
fear of individual and collective death that is, we must
concede, entirely rational.

Albert’s
friends, in other words, are facing the adult equivalent of not being
able to tie your own shoes: they’re finding it impossible to function as
members of a civil society. Cecil can’t meet his responsibilities
because he’s temperamentally incapable of facing them; Conrad accepts
his responsibilities but has no aptitude for them; Edwin has aptitude
for his responsibilities but takes no pleasure in their
fruits; and Frederick is capable, successful, and reasonably
well-adjusted—all of which gives him the time and space to realize that
absolutely nothing any of us does matters in the slightest.

Albert
offers gems of wisdom to each friend, for which service he receives no
direct compensation—as his friends haven’t seen his missing accessory.
Cecil is shown the illuminating wonders of the dark (though all he
ultimately finds is, quite literally, a steaming pile of manure); Conrad
is shown the utility of failure (though all he ultimately experiences
is the terror of drowning, as his
dam does indeed break, killing him); Edwin is shown that isolation is
often self-imposed (though when Edwin ends his self-imposed isolation
and opens his heart to his friends, they do in fact kill him); and
Frederick is shown that nature is more resilient than he suspects—a possibility he doubts, but is willing to ponder further. Throughout these
lectures, Albert is revealed to be such a wise old soul that it seems impossible that he was ever so careless as to misplace an article of
clothing in the first place. Albert, that is, is a fully formed and
fully evolved entity, one whose foibles and follies are adorable
primarily because they’re the only things that distinguish him from a
god.

But it’s at this point in the narrative of The Missing Scarf
that the genre into which Albert’s escapades have been encoded catches
up to him—and his friends—for in educational children’s films, there
is always some surprising event toward the end of the narrative that
either solves the hero’s dilemma or renders it irrelevant. In Albert’s
case, it’s the young squirrel’s sudden realization that the arrival of
spring means his scarf is no longer necessary.

This, in the world of The Missing Scarf,
is exactly when the world ends. Literally. Frederick and Albert are
both killed then and there, horribly and graphically, as is all life on
Earth. Their final moments alive are filled with confusion, terror, and
abject despair.

It’s
not entirely clear what the takeaway is here. It may have
something to do with the fact that all creative invention—for instance,
an animated short—relies on the illusion of control, indeed
the abiding artifice of what we politely call free will. To say that we
live in a world in which we may truly "create" is to assume we have
the time, space, energy, means, and culture into which a novel creation
may be put. But even if we have all these things, they just as surely
are temporary: they can be taken away from us at any time, by anyone or
anything. We could suddenly be maimed, imprisoned, or even murdered; we
could lose our ambitions, lose our will, or even lose our minds; the
world could shift all its relations beneath our feet by the time we wake
tomorrow, or instead be destroyed utterly (and just as unexpectedly) by
some outside force we can’t presently foresee. This last tragedy is
exactly what we find in the final seconds of The Missing Scarf, reminding us that our colossally sincere commitment to creation
can in half an instant be thwarted by the equally colossal irony of all
matter’s inevitable destruction.

The Missing Scarf
is equal parts funny and scary; heart-warming and heart-rending;
allegorical and desperately literal. Arguments could be made for it
to reside at any point on these (or other) polar spectra. But what’s
certain is that the film as a whole—however brief it is; indeed, it
clocks in at under seven minutes—is not just a riveting but an entirely
necessary bit of viewing for any adult who wants to understand our
cultural moment. We are suffused, today, with a sense that
while we can’t know exactly when the world as we know it will end, we do
know for reasonably certain that we are presently doing our level best
to hasten that end with (for instance) our over-use of
environment-killing fossil fuels. Similarly, we can’t know exactly what
daily obstacles and long-term tribulations we have it in us to overcome,
but we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that, right up until the moment
of our species’ annihilation, answering that question will always fall
solely to each of us as individuals.

Postmodernists
like to say that we’re at the end of history, but in fact it is far
more correct to say that we are living in the shadow of history—with an
emphasis on the word living.
Whatever fate befalls us singly, collectively, or (as to Albert and
company) in our separate and/or communal manifestation(s) as multimedia-driven,
allegorical avatars, we are compelled to rush toward that fate with as much
grace, courage, and wisdom as we can muster.

Albert starts out missing a scarf, and ends up missing his head. Too often we start out our adult lives
without our wits about us, and therefore spend many wasted years searching for things we don’t really need. The Missing Scarf
urges us to get ourselves back on track with the same alternately
optimistic and cynical urgency of a public-television clip in which
Cookie Monster learns how to avoid indigestion or Elmo learns how to
share a skateboard. The only question is, are we listening? The Missing Scarf
pulls out all the stops to get us to listen—everything from adorable cartoon
animals to a voiceover by our favorite YouTube celebrity—and for that
it deserves commendation as one of the best short films of the last
decade, animated or otherwise.

Seth Abramson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013). He has published work in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Southern Review.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, he was a public defender from 2001 to 2007 and is
presently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He runs a contemporary poetry review series for The Huffington Post and has covered graduate creative writing programs for Poets & Writers magazine since 2008.

Thanks, Mrs. Doubtfire. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

When I learned that Robin Williams
died, I watched Mrs. Doubtfire. Right before I watched it, my mother and I stood
beneath the ceiling fan in the kitchen of her Brooklyn home. She looked at me. Mrs.
Doubtfire, which showcased the brilliant performance of Williams as a newly
divorced father named Daniel and Mrs. Doubtfire, a snarky and sweet nanny, was
one of the many films we watched together in the nineties, after she and my
father were divorced. After long days spent at her nursing job, she would come
home to the apartment we shared then. At
night we would pop in VHS tapes that we’d rented or bought from a nearby
Captain Video: Beaches, Terms of Endearment, Mermaids, This Is My Life, and some
others. Each film had meaning for us because it touched upon relationships
between parents and children. I was
thirteen years old when Mrs. Doubtfire was released. I was thirty-three when I held the
dusty VHS tape that she brought me from her basement to watch in Williams’
honor. In her kitchen we both felt for this man who
entertained film watchers like us but who suffered tremendously. My mother is a
mental health nurse; he easily could have been one of her patients. Often she works with individuals who are at high risk for suicide. She sees the effects of
depression first hand. And as a teacher,
I’d lost a military student, who was warm and funny, to suicide two years earlier. The tears
in my mother’s eyes came when she asked me to remember the powerful if common
message Williams offered in the film: Children are not responsible for
their parents’ divorce. In response, I
hugged her.

These days I understand things
about her and my father’s divorce that I didn’t understand when I was
nine. Back then, all I could focus on was
my own pain. I wanted us to be a family
again, rather than being shuffled back and forth between two homes for the joint
custody arrangement my brother Michael and I had chosen. On a summer day not long before our family of
four ceased to exist, he and I took a walk to our local drugstore in Midwood, Brooklyn. It was a place where we’d often bump into neighbors because it was also near a
popular pizzeria, Sal’s. It
was next to Five Star Video, another video store that housed VHS tapes and
always had updated posters in the windows: such as the poster for Ghost,
starring Patrick Swayze. On the stretch of residential blocks towards
the stores, our four year age difference, which sometimes caused Michael to tease
me about my “black tooth,” one of my two front ones that was permanently gray
from a dead nerve after I fell on it, was put aside. I asked him who he wanted to live with. He said, “Both of them.” I rapidly agreed. It
was impossible to choose. We wanted our mother and father equally.

Recently, watching Mrs. Doubtfire
for the first time in years, I found myself paying closer attention to the
parents’ words and actions, and less attention to the children’s. While I am not a parent, Michael is. So are
many of my friends. I am a constant
witness to their responsibilities, in addition to the ones my own parents still
hold. I am trying to secure a full time
job in a difficult field and economy.
They continue to embrace their roles with nothing but love. I didn’t fully see how that kind of love
could exist in life or in the film while watching it in the apartment my mother
and I shared. I could only find myself
in Daniel’s children, viewing the three of them, and Michael and I, as victims
of “a broken home.” I was sullen Lydia,
who wasn’t used to having her parents living in separate homes. I was Chris, who resented having had a
birthday; if I hadn’t had a stupid plaster paint and clown party at age seven
with the son of the man my mother was seeing after the divorce and later
married, maybe they wouldn’t have coupled up, and she and my father could get
back together. I was Natalie, who hated how my parents didn’t get along; they’d
gone from smiling on Christmas mornings together, when Michael and I opened our
gifts, to being unkind about one another in the same way that Robin Williams
angrily delivered the line, “You’re my goddamn kids too.” But as an adult, I understood that I hadn’t
been the only one who felt badly. My
parents had their struggles as well.

In Mrs. Doubtfire, Daniel hugs his
children when he moves out. My mother hugged us when her friend Susan helped
her carry furniture down the stairs of our home. Standing by the couch witnessing this was one
of the saddest moments I had experienced yet.
My mother wasn’t crying, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t hurting. She was holding it together for Michael and me. My father did the same when suddenly
he had to make dinners and manage a household on his own much like Daniel and
his ex-wife Miranda. The difference is
that the film ended after 125 minutes, and my parents’ job was never really
done. From those early days of packing
lunches, making sure we had the things we needed, such as school uniforms,
books, food and a roof over our heads, to today when they are doing all they
can to be good grandparents to Michael’s daughter and eventually his son, they stand by us. In the past I saw Michael and myself as part of
their failed marriage. I now know that
the vacations they didn’t take, the expensive clothes they never bought, and
the very few dinners they had out were done for the same reasons stated at the
end of the movie. I can still hear Robin
Williams’ voice in my head: “If there’s love, dear, those are the ties that bind.”

Although Robin Williams is no longer with us, his
roles as Daniel and Mrs. Doubtfire will continue to shine because of what they
represent to families who experience divorce firsthand. There will always be families like mine, who
have learned to adjust to less than ideal circumstances. There will be children who need to be
reassured that “grown up problems” have nothing to do with them, and they are
still loved. When I hugged my mother
last night, we both said we felt terrible about Robin Williams. And I’m certain
that we were appreciative, not just of each other but of Mrs. Doubtfire, too.

Kathryn
Buckley lives in New York and teaches in New Jersey so she spends lots
of time on trains. When she isn’t grading papers, reading or writing
she goes to concerts, spends time with people she is fond of who
tolerate her and her strange ways and uses Fujifilm disposable cameras
to take pictures she actually has developed because she prefers the
Stone Age to this digital one. She has an MFA in Fiction from The New
School and her work has appeared in From the Heart of Brooklyn Volume 2,
Toad Journal, The American, Ebibliotekos, 34th Parallel, and Eclectica and
is forthcoming in The Chaffey Review.

Finding the Best in YOU’RE THE WORST

My generation was ruined by Friends. The popular ‘90s sitcom, which recently celebrated the
20th anniversary of its premiere, flaunted vicious lies. It told us that, despite
our being undereducated, underemployed, and underwhelmed, we could have
beautiful apartments, plentiful leisure time, and love. I’m just entering my
late 30s, the same age that Ross, Chandler, Joey, Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe
would have reached at the show’s end, and I have neither a beautiful apartment,
nor leisure time, nor love. And worse, my expectations of those things, whether
by osmosis or by syndication (or both), have been manipulated and tempered by
the false hope embodied by the Central Perk 6 and the endless stream of
imitative sitcoms and romcoms that followed in Friends’ wake. FX’s You’re
the Worst is the antithesis of Friends,
an exploration of contemporary relationships that is fearless in its
dissemination of the futile and frustrating search for love.

The freshman sitcom from former Weeds and Orange is the New
Black writer Stephen Falk finished its first season last week, and here’s
hoping for the sake of the impressionable, helpless, loveless, spoiled
millennials who may have found this gem of a program that FX renews it for many
seasons to come. While Friends
placated a greedy generation while pandering to its flawed aspirations, You’re the Worst celebrates the flawed,
and panders to no one. The show is fiercely loyal to its rhetoric, finding
truth and honesty in the day-to-day frailties of its characters. You’re the Worst is a brilliant
re-imagining of the romantic sitcom, an exercise in using dark humour and
cynicism to provide a realistic and surprisingly hopeful outlook on life, while
eschewing the tropes of the genre, which made my generation cynical and
hopeless in life and love.

You’re the Worst
revolves around Jimmy Shive-Overly (Chris Geere) and Gretchen Cutler (Aya Cash);
two deeply wounded late 20-somethings who hook up at a common friend’s wedding.
Their first night together establishes both their selfish individualism and
rabid idiosyncrasies: He’s a failed novelist with a foot fetish. She’s a
publicist who once burned down her high school to avoid a math test. They are certainly
not the milquetoast insights of typical sitcom fare. Their expectation is that
they are indulging in a one-night stand, which breeds honesty in their pillow
talk. Yet somewhere in the twisted marginalia of their liaison, they find their
flaws bring them closer, and a romantic sitcom is born. Where once Ross and
Rachel’s will they/won’t they tied a generation to the deceit of Thursday
nights, Jimmy and Gretchen begin You’re
the Worst’s narrative arc by answering that question, and then they build a
show by endeavouring to sort through the painful minutiae involved in making a
relationship work.

The problem with the success of Friends (besides leading me to believe I could afford a Lower East
Side loft earning minimum wage) and the other seminal sitcoms of its era is
that it bred formulaic attempts at counterfeit programming. What resulted was
an endless supply of stock players who paled in comparison to the original
characters, and homogenized the medium. The wacky neighbour, the sarcastic best
friend, the couple with it all, the manic pixie dream girl. In a commentary on,
and indictment of, these archetypes, You’re
the Worst manages to both include and defy these trope characters beyond
its leads. The wacky neighbour (Killian) is a lonely kid (Shane Francis Smith).
The sarcastic best friend (Edgar) is a war vet with PTSD (the excellent Desmin
Borges). The perfect couple (Lindsay and Paul) is anything but (the equally
excellent Kether Donohue and Allan McLeod). And the manic pixie dream girl
(Cash’s Gretchen) is… well, okay, some things never change. However, You’re the Worst dares its audience to
indulge not in laughing at the comically flawed as did its sitcom ancestors,
but the comedy of the flawed, which is far more honest and infinitely more
entertaining.

At the core of the show is the relationship between Jimmy
and Gretchen, and the brilliant twisted chemistry between Geere and Cash. While
sitcoms like Friends operate under
the false understanding that love and its consummation is impossible yet oddly
inevitable, You’re the Worst contends
that consummation and love are easy, but breakups and heartbreak are
inevitable. In the show’s first season’s finale, the two main paramours end up
moving in together. Not because they love each other, which they might. Not
because it makes sense financially, which it could. And not because the
audience demands it. Rather because Gretchen sets fire to her apartment with a
poorly maintained vibrator. That never happened to Rachel. But the truth
remains that life is more often dictated by happenstance that shapes important
decisions, as opposed to grandiose and theatrical declarations. In the pounding
rain. With Coldplay playing.

Beyond discussion of love and a distain for archetypes, You’re the Worst finds delight in the
notion that people are quite simply fucked up. Television typically treats us
to caricatures of the wounded, clowns for our amusement, monkeys who dance for
twenty-two minutes a week, twenty-six times a year, and infinitely into the
abyss of syndication. For those of us
all too aware of our flaws, our struggles, our shortcomings, these characters
are insulting, because they demean our reality. You’re the Worst manages to gratify itself in the blemished
weaknesses of its characters, and in doing so satisfies the audience’s need for
empathy. Jimmy is a narcissist and coming to terms with the limitations of his talents.
Gretchen is a drug-addled slob, a barely competent adult. Lindsay is an
adulterer in a quietly broken marriage. Everybody is promiscuous. And in
contrast to the tired sitcom fare we’ve been drowned by, yet asked to aspire to
for twenty years, in truth many people are promiscuous, narcissistic,
drug-addled, barely competent adults coming to terms with the limits of our
talents. Yet in You’re the Worst, the
fucked-up are not exploited as caricatures, as television is wont to do. They’re
simply presented as average. And within the comfort of that acceptance, the
vindication of normality is the essence of the show’s ability to find humour in
our flaws.

As the finale makes its way to its conclusion, the central
couple are startled by the decision to cohabitate. Gretchen looks at Jimmy, and
with hesitatant affection, she says, “We’re gonna do this even though we know
there is only one way this ends. Whether in a week or twenty years there is
horrible sadness and pain coming and we’re inviting it.” There is a powerful
and beautiful honesty in that declaration, a vicious truth that is rarely found
in television, let alone a sitcom. And yet, they’re willing to try. The sad
inevitability of their end demands that the audience follows them to their
demise. But not with trepidation or worry, but with understanding and empathy.
Because for most of us, the inevitable end is the norm, whether in learned
truth or cynical expectation, and the route there is all we have. To find
humour in that commonality is comforting, and that is what makes You’re the Worst the most engaging
exploration of relationships within the sitcom genre in recent memory. In fact,
there may have never been a more honest examination of the history and mythology
of a relationship on television before.

For the first time in U.S. history, single people (16 and
over) are the majority, according to data used by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. And while television loves to exploit the lives of the unattached,
it has always done so with the understanding that true love is an impending
determinant, that eccentricity is a phase, that the flawed can be fixed. You’re the Worst revels in the majesty
of eccentricity and flaw, and argues that heartbreak is inevitable, and yet
indulges wonderfully in the narrative of the attempt to settle that argument. Like
relationships, we never really know when a sitcom will end. As a result, the
norm has been to couple and uncouple characters until the audience, or the
network, has seen enough. In You’re the
Worst, we’re being treated to a truly prodigious employment of the sitcom
and the device of love. I just hope FX allows us to continue to indulge in its
journey.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The
Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among
others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY
with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare
Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publishing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press,
2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out
Hockey Player (Found Press,
2013). Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

METAMERICANA: Why James Franco’s MAKING A SCENE Is Worth Your Patience

The
half century-long postmodern era—roughly, 1945 to 1995—gave us the
parody, in which an artwork comments on and finally trivializes its
source material by closely emulating it. Our present period in art has
given us something superficially similar but in fact quite different:
the remake, in which an artwork comments on art itself by differentially
reproducing an earlier work. In a remake, it may simply be that primary
elements in the source material are retooled (as with
James Franco and Seth Rogen’s shot-for-shot re-shoot of Kanye West’s "Bound 2" music video), or it may be that the concept of the original work is
maintained while all its constituent elements are refurbished (as with the new sequence of Spider-Man
movies). The purpose of the remake is not to deconstruct and critique
an original artifact, but to reconstruct, and thereby expand upon, an
idea that’s already implicitly been deconstructed by our earlier
consumption of it. Franco’s newest project,
the AOL On Originals television series "Making a Scene," deserves
credit for using dated but immediately recognizable source material to
create cinematic moments entirely of our time—and moments that are
remakes rather than parodies, for which reason alone they deserve more
attention than we might otherwise offer them.

Too
frequently, we confuse remakes
with parodies because we assume ironic intent on the part of a remake’s
author. In reality, remakes, however funny they may sometimes seem to
us, are merely opportunities for us to envision how an artistic idea
might otherwise have played out. This "re-visioning" has a significant
social function; in a time in which we are constantly erasing and
recreating, online, both ourselves and the texts and imagery we
associate with ourselves, remakes are an instrumental good. They confirm
for us our ability, even in the chaos of the Information Age, to
idiosyncratically process intensely personal data in a way we find
satisfying. Just as Franco’s "Bound 2"
paradoxically opted to remake rather than parody West as a way of
clearing space for its own artistic vision, Making a Scene is not
about looking for a cheap laugh. Rather it is concerned with—all the
show’s superficial trappings aside—promoting a lingering
self-contemplation.

Just
as we can and must distinguish between parodies and remakes, there’s a
difference between pastiche (a postmodern technique in which one artist
imitates the style of another) and intertextuality (a technique native
to the current era, in which a single artist uses multiple source
materials to construct an entirely new statement). Where pastiche calls
attention to the banality and of the past and the ease with which we can
commodify it in the present—thereby deconstructing both past and
present—intertextuality is entirely about the creation of the new. Making a Scene may use the remake and
the "mash-up" as its tactical components, but its strategic ambition is
an important statement on intertextuality. When Franco
"mashes up" two
movies (through a chaotic juxtaposition of characters and scenes), he
simultaneously honors and creates critical distance from the films he
exploits.

Those
who see Franco’s Making a Scene as a thoroughly cynical enterprise
are seeing it through a lens it entirely rejects. Though it’s
especially hard to do with the work of James Franco, it’s important to
distinguish between how a work makes us feel (which is often a product
of our biases) and
what a work is capable of making
us feel. As with all Franco’s other recent projects, Making a Scene
offers little if you treat it as merely another basis for your ongoing
grievance against Franco—an imposition upon you personally that the
actor intends condescendingly—and seems a minor act of genius if you
consider how much it runs against the conventional wisdom of late
postmodernism. Franco’s aim in Making a Scene seems to be to play
"straight" a series of gestures his audience can’t possibly take
seriously, thereby challenging them to consider whether we still live in
the age of parody or, instead, the age of what cultural theorists call
"informed naivete."

The difference between pastiche and intertextuality has been recently discussed by Dutch cultural theorists Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in ArtPulse,
and the distinction is worth consideration by anyone who is sick of hipster
irony and poststructuralist moping. What we learn from Vermuelen and van
den Akker is that Franco is not actually asking to be taken
seriously—or, in the alternative, to be laughed at. All he’s doing is
enacting a series of data-processing
events that many people are always-already engaged in anyway. Do you
remember the movie Reservoir Dogs? Good. How about Dirty Dancing?
Okay. Do your memories of movies as distinct as these two sometimes run
together, so that you accidentally attribute actors and scenes and
one-liners to one movie that actually belong to another? If you’re
anything like me, the answer is sure—sometimes. And if you’re like me,
the sensation of feeling like you’re drowning in popular culture and
your own life experiences is not always, in fact is not often,
particularly unpleasant. Our experiences shape us, and our local and
national cultures often act as our psychic foundation, a fact that
contemporary art like Franco’s performs without judgment or irony. Thus
this mash-up of Reservoir Dogs and Dirty Dancing
from the first episode of Making a Scene, which shows Jennifer Grey’s
character superimposed over a (literally) tortured patrolman from
Tarantino’s smash hit, just as Tarantino’s Mr. Blonde is laid atop
Patrick Swayze’s ne’er-do-well dance instructor Johnny.

Watching "Grey" dancing with "Johnny" while drenched in buckets of blood from the goriest scene in Reservoir Dogs
isn’t exactly entertaining, nor is it precisely funny or precisely
distressing. It’s something else entirely—a reenactment of the way
memory works that feels intuitively reasonable even as we don’t quite
know what to do with it emotionally or intellectually. In foregrounding
content like this via an original series, Franco is taking a significant
risk and placing significant faith in an audience base that, if we’re
honest, has never shown him much patience or grace. But it’s a risk
that’s entirely of our time, and perhaps more relevant to how we live
today—or might wish to live—than the despairing irony we were all
steeped in throughout the nineties. In other words, how about we just leave
Jimmy alone for a moment and see where he’s going with all this? We
might just find that, however
self-aggrandizing we sometimes assume Franco to be, this latest project
is much more about us than it is about him.

Of Scalpels and Synthesizers: The Music of THE KNICK

The latest series from director Steven Soderbergh begins
jarringly, with an uncomfortably intimate, front-row seat view of a disastrous C-section
operation. This widely discussed scene
set the tone for what has evolved into a consistently disconcerting and
uncompromising show, one that immerses viewers in the grimy, gory, greedy world of a
turn-of-the-century New York hospital.
Soderbergh has said that he wanted to give a vision of the past that was anything but nostalgic, and in this he has certainly succeeded.

One of the more jarring manifestations of this
anti-nostalgic vision is the show’s innovative synthesizer score, composed by
long-time Soderbergh collaborator, Cliff Martinez. After a steady diet of Ken Burns
documentaries, one might have expected to hear the stately rhythms of ragtime
or perhaps the Irish folk music or Italian opera that one could reasonably have
expected to hear blaring from the New York bars and music halls of
yesteryear. Instead, the images of
horse-drawn carriages and gaslit streets are accompanied by the kinds of sounds
we might associate with dystopian visions of the future. The combination of old and new is both
unsettling and revelatory.

Martinez has worked with Soderbergh for some twenty-five
years, ever since he composed the score for the director’s explosive debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Since then he has continued to hone his
signature sound: a taut, tensile aural web where melody and rhythm are
inextricable. Sequenced melody patterns
emerge and evolve slowly, like a Philip Glass symphony, adapting to the
changing dynamics of the film. Martinez’
music does not so much accompany scenes as insinuate itself into them: what begins
as a barely heard rhythmic tapping may slowly blossom into vast, crystalline
sound structures, as in his mesmerizing soundtrack to Solaris; elsewhere, a subtle heart-beat will mount in tension along with
scraping industrial noises before fading to lurk in the background, as in Contagion. His masterpiece may be the score for Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, where his brooding urban nocturne takes on a presence as substantial
as that of any of the film’s characters.

The soundtrack for The
Knick does not stand apart from Martinez’ previous work so much in its
sounds and melodies as in its relation to context. We first hear it in the sequence leading up
to the disastrous C-section operation, where we see Dr. John Thackery waking in
an opium den, calling a horse-drawn cab, and surreptitiously shooting up in the
back seat before ascending the steps of Knickerbocker Hospital. We’ve certainly seen similar seedy dealings
in previous portrayals of turn-of-the-century life but never with a soundtrack
so jarringly modern. Combining elements
of house music and old-school German electronica, The Knick’s opening number wouldn’t sound out of place in a hipster
bar or a zombie film soundtrack; in the context of 1900s New York, it is so
blatantly anachronistic as to risk undermining any possible suspension of
disbelief the director might have achieved through the show’s painstaking set
design and costuming. And this may well
be the point.

Consider The Knick’s
premise: a once state of the art but now struggling hospital finds itself in
thrall to its major donors, and unwittingly involved in a host of illegalities
thanks to its double-dealing financial manager.
Head surgeon Thackery copes with the mounting pressures of his job
through chronic drug use. In a bid for
racial progressiveness, the hospital’s chief benefactor pressures them into
hiring a black surgeon, who must struggle against the entrenched racism of the
medical institution. In short, nothing
central to the show’s premise requires that it be set in the past: all of these
elements unfortunately remain part of American life in the twenty-first
century. Indeed, one might even regard
the show as timely, given its depiction of the greed running through the
medical industry, and the reluctance of even its most enlightened members to go
against the status quo. While the show’s
portrayal of race is necessarily one that involves more blatant forms of
oppression and disenfranchisement than we typically see now, to regard the
problems it portrays as a thing of the past would be disingenuous or naïve.

Given the show’s contemporary resonance, then, it is
somewhat baffling to hear director Soderbergh say, as he did in a recent Rolling Stone interview: “Your
overwhelming sense watching the show is one of happiness that you’re living in
2014. I wanted to make sure that’s what people were feeling.” The overwhelming sense I get, which for me is
a central appeal of the show, is that not much has really changed since 1900,
and that the messed-up health care system we have is the product of decades of
greed and failed ambitions. Ambulance
drivers in the show are paid a bounty according to the number of injured or
sick patients they are able to bring to the hospital. Though presumably this doesn’t happen any
more, is it really any more shocking than doctors getting money from drug
companies for peddling their wares to patients, regardless of whether these
products are going to do them any good?
Though doctors might not shoot cocaine with silver-handled needles
before going into surgery, some very possibly take painkillers pilfered from the
pharmacy’s stock before scrubbing up.

What is most challenging about the series is the way it
makes us ponder the relationship between present and past; the soundtrack fosters
this. The synthesizer itself is a
complex signifier: long used in film to conjure sounds and visions of the
future, it has also taken on a retro patina through its association with
nineteen-seventies progressive rock and disco.
Martinez’ soundtrack exploits the disjunction, as he shifts from his signature minimalism
into more brazen territory, alternately evoking the soundscapes of 1970s Berlin
and 1990s British rave culture. It is also
telling that one of Martinez’ signature instruments is an arcane construction
called a “baschet cristal” that makes sounds from vibrating rods and fiberglass
plates. Used by mid-century avant garde
composers who saw it as an instrument of the future, now it sounds more like a
relic from some long-lost world’s fair exhibit.
Martinez’ music occupies a similar aural twilight zone.

Notwithstanding Soderbergh’s own observations regarding the
distance between past and present, The
Knick offers one of the freshest manifestations of what dramatist Bertolt
Brecht called “defamiliarization,” in which the audience is reminded that what they
are watching is a performance. Brecht
achieved this effect through epic dramas, often set at epochal moments of the
past, which the audience gradually came to recognize as a defamiliarized
version of the world in which they were presently living. The
Knick also seems to traffic in what has been called “hauntology,” where
forgotten or unrealized visions of the past are felt to linger on, ghost-like,
into the present. For Jacques Derrida,
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 left unrealized communist utopias to
wander like specters through the Wall Streets and shopping malls of
capitalism. When we watch The Knick we might wonder whether black
doctors like Dr. Algernon Edwards really operated secret hospitals for black
patients in the bowels of white institutions, and whether these secret locations might have
offered a more positive model for health care than what we have now. By scoring Soderbergh’s series with such a
rich array of musical anachronisms, Cliff Martinez helps to raise challenging
questions about present and past; a lesser composer might simply have
offered ragtime.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

Joan Rivers: A Trailblazer Who Got Stuck in the Mud

Humor can be the cut and the balm—sometimes
one-in-the-same, in the course of a single joke. Sarah Silverman wryly laments: “I was raped
by a doctor, always a bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl.” Wanda Sykes riffs
on how “Black folks, we always have to be dignified, ‘cause if we fuck up, we
just set everybody else back a couple of years. We should have killed Flava
Flav like ten years ago!” A young Joan Rivers does a bit about her mother’s
desperation to marry her off: “Oh, Joan, there’s a man at the door with a mask
and a gun!”

Comedy can also be the hand on the backs of our
necks. Tracy Morgan tells his audience that, if his son came out to him, he’d
stab the boy to death. Daniel Tosh artlessly ponders the fate of a female
heckler: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right
now? Like, right now?” Joan Rivers serves as the commissioner of the fashion
police: “I took Elizabeth Taylor to Sea World. It was so embarrassing. Shamu
the whale jumps out of the water; she asks ‘does he come with fries?’”

Rivers occupies a complex position in comedy. Her
early work is rightly lauded for its unflinching candor about women’s issues,
and for bringing those issues—the pressure to marry and the tedium of
housewifery, the joys and annoyances of sex, and even abortion—to a national
audience. She is celebrated for serving as the first woman to host her own late
night talk show, and venerated for her tenacity in the wake of tragedy (the
betrayal of her beloved mentor, Johnny Carson; the suicide of her husband and
producer). As a writer and a feminist, I should have called in my own tribute
on the switchboard of Facebook. And yet, I can’t. Rivers’ early work may have
been a slingshot lobbing stones against the powers-that-be, but, in her later years,
her cruelty became a cannon unloading upon the oppressed. She trafficked in
tired slut-shaming and fat jokes.

In perhaps the only way that I will ever be likened
to Elizabeth Taylor, I too have endured my fair share of comparisons to Shamu.
I was a fat girl who became a fat woman, even after dieting and exercising and
binging and purging and taking “nutritional supplements” more potent than 50’s
housewife’s physician-prescribed speed. My fat ass has been the butt of so many
jokes over so many years that I’ve become intimately acquainted with the ways
that “humor” can be used to enforce social codes. Before I was ever aware of
her history, Joan Rivers was that voice that came from the TV in my mother’s
bedroom, a voice that, despite its off-putting raspiness, affected a favorite
wicked aunt chumminess that drew me in until it spit me out: “If Kate Winslet
had dropped a couple of pounds, the Titanic never would have sunk.”

I wasn’t one of those high school girls whose
ticket sales bought James Cameron a summer home, still, I could look up to Kate
Winslet: I would never have her hourglass figure (or her gorgeous red curls),
but her body, and its emancipation from Paltrow thinness, was far closer to
mine than any other modern starlet’s. And there she was on the silver screen,
the real ship of dreams. Ravishing. Desired. So, when Joan Rivers let it rip
with that joke, she was issuing a warning to every fat girl (every girl,
really): There’s only one way to be a woman, and there’s a price to pay for not
looking the part.

This is why,
unlike so many of my peers, I come to bury Joan Rivers, not to praise her.
Rivers famously quipped that, upon her death, her body shouldn’t be donated to
science, but to Tupperware: In truth, all of that plastic has been melted down
and sculpted into an altar to St. Joan of Snark, the groundbreaking vulgarian
who spoke the brutal truths that nice girls were never supposed to say (let
alone in public). Rivers muscled her way to prominence in a male-dominated
field, and she worked steadily for fifty years. It’s no wonder, then, that an
armada of think pieces seeks to defend Rivers as a capital-F feminist (even if
she’d have been reluctant to claim the label for herself). In Time magazine,
Eliana Dockterman equates Rivers’ legendary work ethic and savvy for
self-promotion as an innately feminist endeavor: “Nothing was off-limits as Rivers
wise-cracked her way to the top. And it was this
undisguised and ‘unladylike’ desire for success that made Rivers a feminist
icon.”

Assessments like this
strike me as an uncomfortably corporatized definition of feminism: The will to
work alone does not a feminist make, especially if the work affirms the
structures and mentalities that shame women—for their bodies (though weight was
one of Rivers’ primary comic milieux, she was also free and easy with the word
tranny); their sexualities (and anyone who fell on either side of the
virgin/whore dichotomy was fair game, as evidenced by her cracks about Taylor
Swift’s knees being “together more than Melissa and I” and the Kardashian
sisters needing to find “true love standing up. They’ve had more men land on
them than we’d had in Afghanistan.”); and even for being the victims of
violence (she once said that “those women in Cleveland” had more space in the basement
where they’d been raped and tortured than she had in her daughter’s supposedly
cramped living room; she also joked about slapping Rihanna for possibly
reconciling with Chris Brown).

If her latter-day
humor was particularly vicious toward women, it certainly didn’t spare the
gents. In Rivers’ world, men are shallow dogs following the bone of lithe,
leggy female beauty. They are sexual bullies who don’t see women as people.
They are simultaneously the arbiters of a very specific standard of female attractiveness
and horny devils unable to get it in their pants: “I
said to my husband, ‘Why don’t you call out my name when we’re making love?’ He
said, ‘I don’t want to wake you up.’”

Rivers’ full buy-in to the aesthetic standards that confine
women manifests in more than her stage act; she co-signed with a scalpel. Over
the years, her face attained a stretched-taut surrealness that turned her into
a breathing caricature. There is an unintended but undeniably apt symbolism in
the idea that her natural ability to register and express authentic feeling was
tombed under layers of scar tissue. Her self-loathing, and not her wit, became
her weapon.

As a thirtysomething, I have grown up with the Joan Rivers
who puffed out her cheeks and imitated (her version of) a fat woman’s waddle on
the Letterman Show when discussing Adele, remarking that the latter’s song
“Rolling in the Deep” (which should surely be etched in a Mount Rushmore of
number one pop songs of all time) should be called “Rolling in the Deep Fried Chicken”—diminishing
Adele’s accomplishments as a singer and songwriter by reducing her to a body.
Today’s “Rolling in the Deep Fried Chicken” is yesterday’s “Elizabeth Taylor is
so fat, she has Ragu in her veins.”

As I see these remarks
on list after list of “Joan Rivers’ Best Burns,” I think of Margaret Cho’s
appearance on Rivers’ online interview series In Bed with Joan, and how
their conversation turned to Cho’s body—specifically, how svelte she’d become.
Rivers recalls meeting Cho years prior, when Cho was the anointed It Girl with
a sitcom in the works: “You were a bit of a …” she says, and her pause is the
plank that Cho must walk down before jumping into the deep. A bit of a fat
girl, she admits. Never mind that Cho’s studio-mandated compulsion to lose
weight (and lose it fast) resulted in kidney failure.

Cho may be considered one of Rivers’ heirs apparent, but she
proves that there’s more than one way to be woman who brings a carefully
calibrated cruelty to comedy. Her stand-up is more akin to Rivers’ early work,
bringing a “and fuck you if you don’t like it” bravado to her real talk about
her real pain. Her filth and fury is deployed against the double standards and
the beauty standards that Rivers, in her later years, always endorsed. Cho’s
stand-up film I’m the One that I Want details—with naked rage and
unexpected pathos—her own private Hell-as-a-hamster-wheel of constant dieting:
“I knew I was crazy because I was watching Jesus Christ Superstar and the part where Jesus carries the
cross up the mountain, I actually said to myself, ‘Wow! That must be a really good workout! Yeah, because you’re
doing arms and cardio!’”

She roars and
rampages and names names (including the actual producer whose “concerns” set
Cho on that hamster wheel); still, she shows the kind of woundedness and
vulnerability typically denied to any “nice girl,” in any era, by recounting,
with a necessary explicitness, the physical ravages of all that dieting. She
describes being in the ER, broken and bleeding, and then vaults into an
impersonation of the aggressively earnest nurse who tends to her: “Hi, my name
is Gwen and I’m here to wash your vagina!” This
hyper-attentiveness to the body and its failings (in terms of true mechanical
break-down and in meeting cultural expectations) isn’t just the province of
women.

Much has been written about “And So Did the
Fat Lady,” the episode of Louie that deals earnestly (if not always
successfully) with the stigmatization of fat women; and most of that critique
has focused on the epic monologue delivered by Vanessa, the titular fat
lady—however, the episode also shows how Louie’s hesitance to date Vanessa
stems from his own poor body image and fear of guilt by association (something
that Vanessa even calls him on: “You know, if
you were standing over there looking at us, you know what you’d see? That we
totally match.”). This episode
skewers the contradictions between America’s cult of thinness and the glut of
consumption that comes with a Starbucks on every corner. Louie and his brother
partake in a “bang bang,” a family tradition of going to two different
restaurants (in this case, an Indian place and a diner) and ordering
full-course meals.

Louis C.K. ribs
himself about his weight, but he still shows great tenderness toward his own
fat body. In the season four finale, he takes a romantic bath with his
long-time crush, Pamela; the camera lingers on Louie’s derriere and Pamela
cracks a joke, and yes, when Louie lowers himself into the tub, water sloshes
to the floor, snuffing some of the candles. However, this awkwardness somehow
makes that final moment between Louie and Pamela even sweeter.

Watching Cho and C.K. prompts the question of what
Rivers could’ve done if she’d applied the same tenacity she showed for Liz
Taylor’s waist line to a culture that expects women to be perpetually thin and
everlastingly young. There could be something undeniably powerful in Rivers’
self-abnegation. When so many of our stories about women still hinge on their
prettiness and their experience of being desired, being an outlier to those
desires creates a sense of obliterating isolation. Rivers’ barbs at her own
expense may have come dressed in the baubles and furs of vicious wit, but
underneath those pearls and those stoles there was a naked little heart beating
in sorrow and wrath—and its pulse became a siren song.

Rivers was canny enough to recognize that the
breadth and intensity of her cosmetic surgeries had become a key component of
her celebrity, at times eclipsing her actual body of work. She played herself on
an episode of Nip/Tuck where she implored the plastic surgeon
protagonists to undo all that she’d had done because she wanted her grandson to
see her natural face. She’s horrified by the computer simulation of that
natural face, with all of the lines and wrinkles that anyone lucky enough to
live into their seventies could expect, and she opts for another face lift. The
predictability of this reversal is supposed to be the punchline, but the fact
that a woman with Rivers’ history and influence still views her self-worth
through the prisms of youth and attractiveness is just plain sad.

The difference between Rivers’ quip that her
husband killed himself because she removed the bag over her head during sex (or
that the only she conceived her daughter because her husband rolled over in his
sleep) and Cho’s riff on the producer’s comment about the roundness of her face
(“I had no idea that I was this giant face taking over America! Here comes the
face!”) is that Cho places the shame squarely where it belongs—on our culture,
and its militant insistence on one type of beauty.

Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of what some
could view as Rivers’ artistic decline is that she was once brilliantly,
blazingly capable of taking our culture to task. “I feel sorry for any single
girls today … the whole society is not for single girls,” she says, in a now
widely circulated clip from the Ed Sullivan show. The clip was filmed in 1967,
and Rivers—who looks shockingly girlish, unrecognizable from the woman she’ll
become—speaks directly to those single girls because she was one of them,
peppering her bit with “you know that!” and “isn’t that so? Yes! Yes!” and “it
just kills me!” She rips into the double standards around attractiveness: “a
boy on a date, all he has to be is clean and able to pick up the check … the
girl has to be well-dressed, her face has to look nice, the hair has to be in
shape …” Her take on the pressure to settle down and start a family young (too
young) belongs in a more caustic version of The Bell Jar: “The neighbors
would come over and ask ‘how’s Joan, still not married?’ and my mother would
say ‘if she were alive.’ Do you know how that hurts, when you’re sitting right
there?”

As I watched this clip, still in shock that this
scrappy young woman (the kind of girl I’d want to get drinks with) had ever
become the comic who told women in her audience that they were single because
they were over-educated (“no man will ever put his hand up your dress looking
for a library card”), I thought of how timeless her words remain, of how I
could see them being written in a monologue on Girls, one likely
delivered by Lena Dunham, architect of lines like “So any mean thing someone’s gonna
think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me, probably in the
last half hour.”

I may never be equipped to fully appreciate Joan Rivers;
if, in order to be thankful for her work, I needed to experience a time when
Happy Homemaker was the only role for women and the word abortion was verboten
on TV. She may always be a trailblazer who got stuck in the mud. But I know
that humor can burn and soothe in the same beat: I remember calling a good
friend after I was rushed to the ER with chest pains and palpitations; I told
her that the attending physician warned me off the diet pills, purging, and
starvation unless I wanted “a more severe cardiac incident.” Without pausing,
my friend quipped, “So, you have to choose between your face or your ass or
your heart.” I laughed, and that laugh, however short, was a moment away from my
fear; that laugh acknowledged the untenable position I’d allowed myself to be
put in, because of the things I believed I needed to be.

Laura Bogart’s work has appeared on The Rumpus, Salon, Manifest-Station,
The Nervous Breakdown, RogerEbert.com and JMWW Journal, among other
publications. She is currently at work on a novel.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: Bloody Handprints: What Comes After Domestic Violence in Television and Life

In episode “Fifty-One” of Breaking
Bad, Walter White buys Walt Jr. a
gorgeous, fast-moving and expensive red sports car, even though Skyler has expressly
asked him not to. It’s a subtle move of dominance. Walt has already made it
clear that he is the one who will be calling all the shots, and this is another
way to drive a wedge between Walt Jr. and Skyler by painting himself as the
better, cooler parent. A few scenes
later we cut to Walt and Skyler in bed together, Skyler turned away from Walt
as they spoon; the camera affording us a view of a close up of Skyler’s face,
as Walt gently strokes her arm and tells her that everything is going to be
okay, putting in a coyly worded request for a chocolate cake to celebrate his
birthday. Throughout this monologue, Skyler’s eyes remain dead and far away.
She knows Walt’s gestures of affection are not meant to actually open a warm
dialogue about the future; they are about quietly asserting Walt’s dominance
and control. Skyler is no longer an equal partner to a man she loves; she is a
prisoner in her own home.

As TV dramas that focus on male antihero protagonists have
become increasingly in vogue over the last 10 years, the women who
bear the brunt of their specific brand of male entitlement and rage have become increasingly noticeable. Female
characters in shows ranging from Mad Men to Game of Thrones are constantly subjected to verbal, sexual and physical violence, sometimes from the
male characters we admire and love. Male-on-female violence is portrayed as
normal and is often sexualized or depicted as romantic or glamorous. While I’m
a fan of all three shows I just mentioned, I also worry about the ubiquity of the
victimized woman in many of these programs and how the attitudes towards women
presented in these otherwise nuanced, intelligent shows might bleed over into real
life.

I’ve been thinking recently of Breaking Bad in light of
the recently released footage showing Ray Rice punching his now wife, Janay
Rice, in the face. After all, at its heart, Breaking
Bad is a story about family and
violence, the family that Walt continues to claim to love, even as he selfishly
destroys it in order to become a drug kingpin. Walt’s transformation from
gentle chemistry teacher to leader of a drug ring comes at the expense of his
wife and children. He goes from being a protector to being someone who controls
every aspect of his family’s small suburban life, continuously putting his
wife and children at immense risk.

The fact that Walt wants to provide for his family is often
listed as the most sympathetic excuse for his actions. In reality, it is
probably his most evil trait. Walter White’s transformation into a formidable
antihero is complex and rife with important moral questions, but Walt’s bad
behavior is often presented as less menacing than edgy; the newly evolved
Heisenberg, after all, has his fast sports cars and pork pie hat, his pithy,
brilliant one-liners. While clearly Walt is intended to be a villain by the end
of the series, many people still view Walt as a sympathetic figure and, while
Walt’s actions are never forgiven, they often do seem to be lionized. By the
end of the series Walt is presented as a flawed and tragic hero who did what he
needed to do in order to save the person he loved most: himself.

Skyler, who goes from being a strong, smart and willful
protagonist to a kind of cowering shadow of her former self, is never portrayed
as a hero. Her story is swallowed up by Walt’s. Indeed, many viewers took
tremendous joy from her slow collapse under Walt’s thumb. Often feminists cite
hatred of female characters under the broad, nebulous heading of “misogyny,” but the specific reason that Skyler was such a maligned character may have less
to do with a general hatred of women than with a specific discomfort at seeing the
White household descend into domestic violence and not wanting to blame Walt
for the deterioration. Skyler’s defiant attitude towards Walt, her refusal to
be willed into submission and go along with his egomaniacal plans, were
initially what inspired fans rooting for Walt to hate her.
Others criticized her when she began to become more desperate, give in to
Walt’s demands and eventually align herself with him after being worn out,
terrorized, and brainwashed by a person who was once her loving partner.

We spend a lot of time criticizing victims of domestic violence,
but we also spend a lot of time talking about them as victims, rather than
seeing them as whole people who are forced, by circumstance, to make a series
of genuinely complex and heartbreaking decisions. When footage is released of
Ray Rice knocking out his fiancé, we rush to see the evidence but don’t really
know what to do with it. A few commentators have struggled to excuse or defend
Rice’s actions, while others have complained that we simply don’t have context
to understand why he would do such a thing. Most mainstream discussion has
rushed to Janay Rice’s defense by pointing out the ways that she was an
innocent victim of a horrible crime.

But when Janay Rice herself responded to the public distribution
of this footage, she was primarily angry that she had been directly embarrassed by the
sudden media exposure. And why wouldn’t she be? When discussing Janay Rice, many
commentators rushed to criticize her choices, or simply left her out of her own
story. While the term “victim” is meant to put the blame on the perpetrator, it
also serves to flatten the person who has been hurt. We may feel sympathy for
victims, but we don’t see them as full people, with rich life stories, with the
combination of triumphs and mistakes that comprises each of our lives. In the
case of Breaking Bad, the
audience often could only think of Skyler in absolutes: either a shrew or a
victim, a bitch or a victim, a ball-buster or a victim.

We have plenty of stories where male protagonists fight
adversity and triumph over it, with dedication, with fists, with spiritual and
intellectual epiphanies that nurture individual growth. For female survivors of
domestic violence, we don’t tend to offer a similar opportunity for triumph. I
admire the number of women who have come forward to share their own stories
about how they experienced partner violence, but I also resent the fact that the
media still often presents these stories like a series of broken sighs and
resignations, rather than a deeply heroic act.

Even when leaving is presented as strategic, it is still
presented as a victim’s last decision, the path of least resistance, the thing
the weaker animal does when it knows it lost. The Skyler at the end of Breaking Bad is a
shadow of her former self, forced to support herself off the ugly drug money
she swore she would never take. Walt meanwhile is given his swan song, his
bloody handprint a signature stamp on the top of his baby blue.

We forgive a lot of male bad behavior. We are primed to see male characters as awash in their own hero’s journeys,
where the choices they make fundamentally matter, where they are leading the
charge of their own destiny. When Walt bellows at Skyler, “I am the one who
knocks,” late in the series, audiences applaud how Walt has been utterly
transformed. We see him as both menacing and brave, badass and brutal. In
contrast, in the world of the antihero, women have never been the ones to knock. We’ve been the ones to respond to that
knocking, the girls who end up dead in bloody bags washed to the shore, the
women condemned to stand by their man, or the women finally saved by a good
man.

This isn’t necessarily true in all media representations of
women. One of the reasons Buffy the Vampire Slayer succeeded as a feminist T.V. series is that although Buffy was
sometimes victimized, she was never ultimately portrayed as a victim. Her
response to trauma was complex and multifaceted, but she was consistently
portrayed as someone who is a survivor, rather than a victim of circumstances
beyond her control. In the same way, The Hunger Games’ Katniss’s greatest asset was not simply her skill at using a
bow and arrow, but her sheer resilience in the face of evil.

Of course both of these stories are the domain of fantasy,
rather than the gritty realism we are supposed to see on any number of
antihero-centered T.V. dramas, genuinely brilliant, riveting shows, where,
nonetheless, female characters are often created in order to be broken. It’s time for women (and men) to start pushing back harder against narratives
that flatten female characters into either villains or victims of circumstances
beyond their control, and demand that female characters
are afforded a chance at redemption. I want a story that doesn’t end with death or leaving,
a world where we expect female protagonists, even those who experience violence
and pain, to ultimately carve out a new future.

Arielle Bernstein is
a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American
University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The
Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She
has been listed four times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book.

Can We Be FRANK? What Semi-Fictional Band “The Soronprfbs” Means for Music

The
drummer doesn’t speak. The lead guitarist speaks only French. The
theremin player is homicidal. The original keyboardist has been fired,
and now acts as roadie and manager. The replacement keyboardist has been
sectioned by local authorities after a suicide attempt. The replacement
for the replacement has never played in a band before. And the lead
singer wears a giant Frank Sidebottom head
at all times; no one in the band knows his last name or has ever seen
his face. Nor has the band ever successfully completed a gig or recorded
a single track.

This is the state of affairs for the unpronounceable and obscure band "The Soronprfbs"—the subject of Frank—as the film opens. What Frank asks
us to be most perplexed by, however, is not the set of personalities that
comprise the Soronprfbs but the music itself. Indeed, in play throughout
Frank is a question almost
always answered in the affirmative in music biopics, and in the negative
in mockumentaries: "Is the music any good?" Frank
not only straddles the biopic and mockumentary genres, but also answers
this question only ambiguously: "Maybe." (And adds, implicitly, "Does
it matter?")

At
the center of the Soronprfbs is "Frank," a mysterious former asylum
inmate from Kansas whose commitment to his obtuse but possibly brilliant
musical vision calls to mind the late Syd Barrett. When Jon, an
ambitious but not particularly talented keyboardist, is recruited into
the Soronprfbs on an emergency basis, an unstated tug of war between
Frank and his newest band member is initiated, with the soul of the
Soronprfbs in the balance. The allegory behind the film’s iconic
struggle is reasonably well-defined: how do artists balance their
materialist ambitions and popular sensibilities with the antisocial and
tormented genius of authentic inspiration? It’s a question easily
answered when and where ambition and inspiration conjoin to produce a
popular sound (cf. Taylor Swift) or one embraced by a small but
committed legion of fans (cf. Deafheaven), but what about when the
ambition and inspiration
are real, but the sound they produce lies well outside any listener’s
present interest or even understanding?

It’s
telling that Jon helps the Soronprfbs gain a grassroots following not
so much through dissemination of the band’s songs, but by using social
media (Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube) to draw attention to the band’s
compositional process and camera-ready idiosyncracies. When the band
finally shows up at SXSW, many have heard of them but almost no one
knows their music–a perfect statement on how
social media drives an interest in artists that’s independent from the
art they make. Does this discrepancy between social media buzz and
genuine appreciation suggest that the Soronprfbs are mere poseurs? Frank
asks us to consider that perhaps there’s no such thing as a poseur
anymore, as (a) even self-consciously idiosyncratic music can be entirely
earnest, and (b) ultimately the excitement a band generates in and
around the national music scene has a longer-lasting impact than the
music itself.

To be clear, though, the Soronprfbs—in the opinion of this writer—are pretty great. The Frank
OST is an album of music experiments that’s eminently listenable; cross
the Doors with the United States of America and a skin-of-their-teeth
sixties garage band like the Lemon Drops and you’ve got a good idea of
what the Soronprfbs sound like. It’s Grinderman meets the Hombres;
Phosphorescent meets Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
In other words, there’s a tripped-out, DIY sensibility behind the
Soronprfbs that’s mirrored in more contemporary acts like Neutral Milk
Hotel and the other members of the Elephant Six Collective. That the
Soronprfbs are only semi-fictional—adding to the "meta" quality of a film whose
OST includes the album whose creation it documents, the Soronprfbs have actually played some live shows—only adds to the sense that Frank is a movie about the artist’s ethos in both our own and previous eras.

While
Michael Fassbender’s voice won’t win any awards, there’s something
winning about the improvisational sound of the Soronprfbs. If the New
Sincerity’s self-consciously hip earnestness—equally aware of and
committed to its studied but joyful eccentricities—had a sound, it
might well be this. Frank
cautions us, however, that in this new age of post-deconstructive
reconstruction, a swing to either of the most eligible extremes set
before the artist (the self-consciousness of ambition or the
inspirations of eccentricity) can be destructive. In the end, it’s not
clear whether the Soronprfbs can survive as both a popular and
an organically inspired band without inhabiting—and inhabiting
only—the ambiguous middle spaces of social media and barely-heard first
albums. While in the real world the Soronprfbs, along with Fassbender,
may give a well-received concert or two, or even appear (as they did) on
The Colbert Report, in the film
both the Klieg lights of SXSW and the bohemian isolation of a recording
studio nestled deep in the English woods pose terminal dangers to the
group. Maybe, in the
Internet Age, the pressures of a stage "IRL" mark the beginning of the
end for certain forms of art, while situation in the midst of perpetual
buzz and an ever-elusive artistic vision allows artists the room they
require to explore new methods of creation.