Sorry to Bother You

I just watched Sorry to Bother You, and it's wonderful -- a brilliant, brooding, quasi-dystopia that mirrors our present all too closely. Namwali Serpell has a great piece (though with lots of spoilers - I'll try to have less, but you should probably watch it before reading this) on the film and the way its satire is grounded in literalism, but not only. The terrifying thing about the movie is that as you're watching it, you realize that much of what seems absurd is really quite plausible. Most obviously, the vaunted realm of the "power callers", their luxurious conditions and inflated salaries, as compared to the drudgery and poverty of the regular telemarketers, is fact, not fiction.

For Briahna Gray, writing for The Intercept, the crucial scene of the movie is the worker's strike that happens roughly halfway through. It is indeed a remarkable scene (I can't think of the last time a movie showed a labor strike either), and part of what's powerful about it is that it isn't a solution - it's one step in a broader struggle. And it quickly gets swept aside, as we instead follow the adventures of our protagonist, Cassius. It should be noted that it isn't obvious that Cassius will join the strike - at that point, he's already in a position to advance at work, he's starting to do better and earn money, and he is obviously hesitant to put that at risk. Although he sees the importance of the cause, his participation seems just as much based on the fact that his girlfriend, and everyone else in his social scene, are doing it too. When he's brought into the office after the strike, he thinks he'll be fired and is ready to go, but instead - plot twist! He gets a promotion, and accepts it, because after all, he won't be harming his friends' cause, he just...won't be helping it. Or so he can tell himself. Part of the cleverness of the film is that it doesn't vilify him for this choice. We disapprove, maybe, but we also understand, and can relate. Cassius is a good guy. When he learns what he'll be selling as a power caller, it gives him serious pause, but we see the seductive sway of capitalism work its charm -- not just the money he'll earn, and the comfortable lifestyle it will afford, but also (maybe even more importantly!) the feeling of being good at something, of making something happen. We cringe when he crosses the picket line, but we don't really expect him to change his mind, especially after his girlfriend's dumping him fails to sway him.

Of course, he eventually does change his mind -- but it takes some truly bizarre (or maybe not, scarier to think) developments to make that happen - not just a horrific reveal, but also direct personal risk. This is where the movie gets interesting, but also a lot hazier, even as time starts moving much more quickly, brilliantly capturing the dizzying pace of our media-cycle-dictated world. Once the conspiracy is revealed, can anything be done to stop it? The movie is fuzzy on this point. Going to the news with hard evidence does something, kind of, but not really. Ultimately, we are returned to Step One: the strike. Just gotta keep at it. Will it work? Unclear. The movie has to get back to its own loose ends, and acknowledge that maybe it's too late for Cassius, but maybe it's not, and maybe there's a whole other, more anarchic possibility if a strike won't work...but the movie declines to speculate further, and calls it a day there.

Here's the thing though - is there really a plan here? Yes, the movie does essentially argue that the strike is the only viable way forward (and gives Squeeze, the unionizing hero, a brief speech to hammer the point in). But it also shows us just how hard that is, and how even a likable, conscientious guy like Cassius can be turned away from the movement. What I like about Sorry to Bother You is that it's too smart to tell a simplistic, redemptive story about the power of organized labor to save the day, even as it matter-of-factly acknowledges that it's the best chance we have. It has been argued that movies are inadequate to capture the real, grinding, long durée of political work. This movie acknowledges that, and doesn't dress it up as something else instead. It doesn't throw up his hands and say that we're screwed, but it's not exactly optimistic, either.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned race at all. Of course, the movie's "hook" -- what I, and probably a lot of other people, thought it was going to be about, is Cassius using his "white voice" and becoming a huge success. When I say that it turns out, instead, to be a critique of today's capitalist society, I am not saying that the racial aspect isn't central, because in fact, the two are completely intertwined. The rap scene is the most vivid example; Cassius' shocked realization that humans are just raw material to be exploited and used up happens right after we see a crowd greedily soaking in his blackness, completely irregardless of his personality or his abilities. There is a lot more to say about this, and I would also really like to think more about Detroit (wonderfully played by Tessa Thompson), and especially about the way the movie leaves you in suspense over the potential threat that a romantic conflict presents (in a movie that is already very dude-heavy) -- but I really do have to get back to work now.

Who is America?

I'm not a big fan of Sacha Baron Cohen.* But I felt a weird sense of obligation to at least check out the new show because I'd heard that he poses as a Gender Studies professor from Reed College, my alma mater, and my sense of obligation is weird. I find Sascha Baron Cohen's schtick mostly pretty uncomfortable and unpleasant, and not especially funny. And I was assuming that the show would basically involve a lot of scenes designed to amuse liberals by exposing Trump supporters as idiots or hypocrites, a project that I'm not all that excited by. All this is to say: I assumed that I wouldn't like it. And for the most part, I didn't, but I will say that it's a lot smarter -- and more insidious -- than I gave it credit for, and parts of it were actually quite powerful.

The opening encounter is between SBC and Bernie Sanders. SBC plays a crazy anti-Obamacare activist who tries to persuade Sanders that instead of complaining about the 1%, he should just help everybody else move into it. Sanders, the purist, doesn't take the easy out of saying that his policies aim to do just that, but instead points out the math problem involved. It's completely ridiculous, but I did get a chuckle out of SBC's explanation of how you can accomplish this transformation by moving first moving the 9 from 99 into the 1, making it 19, and onwards. It's just so gloriously absurd, I couldn't help it.
  But in typical SBC style, the real target here isn't Sanders. He is his usual gruff, snappish self, and while clearly annoyed and impatient, he is never actively rude or unpleasant. Rather, we are to laugh at the character SBC is playing. And parts of this character are the run-of-the-mill features that are pretty much typical jabs at the crazed conspiracy-theory right-winger: alternative facts and bad math. But the man's repulsive physical appearance, and the fact that he's in a motorized scooter (not because he's disabled, but to conserve his body's resources), are from a nastier strain. It's exactly what I don't like about SBC.

The second round is the Gender Studies prof character (I never heard Reed get mentioned, but maybe I missed it?) dining with a staunchly pro-Trump couple. This is where the show does something semi-clever, namely, it completely turns the tables on the viewers expecting to get to mock some Trumpies for being intolerant misogynist racists. The couple is absolutely charming and extremely likable. As SBC says increasingly outrageous things, they are consistently polite, even as they struggle to maintain their composure. At one point the wife reminds her husband not to judge others (his facial expressions are fantastic). They are nothing like what you imagine Trump supporters to be -- if you ran into them socially and didn't discuss politics, you could easily assume they were Democrats. The real object of humor here is the Gender Studies prof, and the crazy things he believes. It's a vicious satire of identity politics. I fast forwarded through most of it, not because I'm a precious snowflake, but because it was boring and kind of gross.

The third round is in some ways the most interesting. SBC plays a newly released convict who visits an art gallery trying to peddle with paintings. The joke here is that the paintings are created out of his feces and ejaculate, and the gallery owner takes them seriously as art. And here, I guess, the joke's on me too, because I don't think there's anything dumb about that. And I actually kind of liked the paintings.
   There's a subtle jab here, though, at the borderline sexual excitement that the elite art world derives from appreciating the suffering of others. At one point he says that the subject of one portrait retaliated by raping him, which emphasizes the point, perhaps, but effectively derails the argument, because most people will probably see it as "ha ha, prison rape." It's unfortunate, not just because that's an appalling rape joke, but because it's a lost opportunity for meaningful critique.
  That said -- I enjoyed the sexual energy of the scene. The gallery owner has claimed that she had no idea what was going on, and maybe she didn't, but she gamely goes along for the ride, even donating some of her pubic hair to the cause. She keeps a straight face through the most disgusting explanations of the paintings (which, god help me, I laughed at), but she isn't pious about it (this is probably why the aforementioned critique never quite takes off -- she's too sardonic). I liked her. I came away from it with a sense of appreciation for the weird, wonderful, kinky nature of the art world.

The final segment is the one you've probably seen on facebook or whatever, where SBC plays an Israeli "terrorism expert" promoting his program of training 4 year olds to use weapons. The caricature of Israeli military types raises the same issues that most of SBC's characters do -- something I wrote about years ago in my post on Borat, when it came out (which by the way is a lot more generous than I remember feeling). But leaving that aside, this isn't, I think, "tricking" Republicans any more than Stephen Colbert ever did. I have zero sympathy. These guys were willing to go on camera and endorse a program to arm 4-year-olds. Because they're fucking insane.
  This portion is fairly brilliantly executed. After the character is established, we see him talking to Florida Rep Matt Gaetz, who hears him out but refuses to give an answer. “Typically members of Congress don’t just hear a story about a program and then indicate whether they support it or not,” he says, giving himself an out -- and perfectly setting up the next sequence of a series of men who are cheerfully willing to indicate their support.
  This is paired with a devastating "infomercial" that SBC makes with the help of Philip Van Cleave,  which is basically a brightly-colored show for kids, teaching them to load Puppy Pistol with his bullet lunchbox. It's scathing, and very funny, and totally horrific.
  The cherry on top is a conversation with Larry Pratt, who is so blatantly racist and misogynist that he could be a caricature, but guess what, he isn't. It almost feels like a cheap shot, but here, again, I can't help myself, I'm glad that piece of shit got caught saying it on camera. It might not sway any of his supporters, but at least it's on the record now.

So, overall: it's better than I expected. It is, I think, truly taking aim at both sides of the political spectrum, though it remains to be seen how much people actually understand that. But it probably does just as much bad as good. The humor is sometimes smart and deserved, but just as often crude and reinforcing hurtful or awful stereotypes. This is part of what makes SBC so interesting, perhaps: that he absolutely refuses the moral highground that good satire seemingly depends on, and creates something a lot muddier.

I have to confess that I'm curious, in spite of myself, to see what happens next.

A More Beautiful and Terrible History, by Jeanne Theoharis

The Preface to the book lays out its compelling thesis: that civil rights history has been sanitized, transformed into a "narrative of dreamy heroes and accidental heroines." (xiii) Radical critiques of structural inequality have been replaced with feel-good stories of individual heroism that furthermore place their struggle firmly in the past, allowing them to be safely celebrated in the present without threatening the status quo. Everyone is allowed to feel good about themselves for being part of a nation whose history includes such glorious heroism -- indeed, she says, such revisionism casts the movement as "an almost inevitable aspect of American democracy rather than as the outcome of Black organization." (x)  Theoharis offers a clear, compelling, evidence-laden explanation of how "the recounting of national histories is never separate from present day politics." (xi) -- one I will very likely assign to students in the future. What we need, she says, is more honest, uncomfortable history, so as to act more effectively in the present, to perceive current injustices and more effectively strategize how they can be overcome.

The book is frequently a blistering critique of the complacency wrought by a comfortable ignorance. To see the press, for instance, as a powerful instrument within the struggle is to overlook the fact that the press regularly did not cover -- and continues to ignore -- the various efforts of Black organizers, presenting protests as isolated incidents, the actions of an ungrateful populace. We frequently see movies as powerful political statements, but over and over, Theoharis shows us how films like Detroit or The Butler are guilty of the same kinds of misrepresentation. She is particularly excoriating in writing about how people in the North, in cities such as Boston or Detroit, congratulated themselves for open-mindedness, even as they enacted policies every bit as vicious as those in the supposedly more racist South. The book is a fascinating and truly eye-opening account, an absolutely necessary corrective to a history that is frequently invoked but rarely, we realize, engaged with in any meaningful way.

But it is also extremely repetitive, and structured in a somewhat befuddled way, such that it keeps doubling back to add another point to an earlier example, to remind us of how something discussed before is relevant here as well. I wondered, first, whether this was because it was written for a popular audience rather than an academic one, but then, whether this was a product of the author's anger and frustration.

One of the things that is really striking about the book -- and this could be because I listened to the audio version, and the narrator added a certain inflection, or it could be me projecting, but I really don't think so -- is that it radiates pure rage. How could it not, talking about Jeff Sessions touting his appreciation for Rosa Parks, or Trump's comments about Frederick Douglass "being recognized more and more"? Did you know that FBI training now includes a trip to the MLK Memorial in DC, where future agents pick a favorite quote to discuss? It's absolutely crazy-making. And then you layer on a discussion of how Black Lives Matter or Standing Rock activists are unfavorably compared to their predecessors, and you can see how someone with a detailed knowledge of the past would be inclined to LET ME JUST SAY THIS ONE MORE TIME IN CASE YOU MISSED IT BEFORE.

But I do also wonder about the differences between academic and mass-market non-fiction. I've been reading a lot more non-fiction in the last few years, mostly because there are things I want to learn about. Often as not, I find myself wishing they were more academic. I think people see the books for a general audience as being written with less jargon, in a more approachable style, but the writing often seems grating and flat to me (I *hated* Devil in the White City, for instance, even though the story was pretty cool, and a lot of Ghettoside came off as trite to my ears). What I really miss though, especially in a book like China's Second Continent, is an argument, or at very least, some active reflection. Less facts, more ideas! You'd think that such directness would be more typical of the mass-market works, and you do find it in more political writing (like this book, or The New Jim Crow), but it still seems more typical of academic books, to me. Admittedly, though, when I think of academic monographs, I do think of something dense (and I don't just mean the spacing on the page, though that honestly is probably part of it), that I can't just pick up and read casually. Whence this sense of weight, I wonder?

A new plan

I started this blog when I was in graduate school. The idea was that it would help me prepare for my PhD exams by forcing me to write out some thoughts about every book on my list, something more overarching than the notes I was jotting down while reading. Plus, I figured it would be good for me to hone my skills as a critic by analyzing the various other things I read or watched (there has always been a part of me that yearned to have a regular column reviewing books or movies or maybe restaurants, though that always seemed harder.*). Blogs were the it thing back then, and I wanted to have one, but I was also very determined to have a specific agenda and strict parameters. No self-indulgent musings about my personal life (unless they were occasioned by a book I was reading)! No half-baked ideas about politics or society!

I really enjoyed writing it, and then something strange happened. I was having a hard time with my academic writing, feeling increasingly blocked and frustrated, and then I happened upon some guide for getting un-stuck in your research that discussed writing anxiety. It was really eye-opening, because that was absolutely what I had, and I hadn't even realized it. One of the things that the guide pointed out was that many people who are anxious about their academic writing have no problems doing all kinds of other writing. Why not try to channel that same joy and productivity into your work, the book suggested. A great idea, but I ended up doing the opposite, and became totally self-conscious and constipated about blogging, too. And then I modeled for myself the whole miserable cycle of writing anxiety, with guilt and self-recrimination and mounting insecurity and everything. What fun.

But now I'm starting to come out from under the rock again. For one thing, I increasingly recognize that I like blogs. I have long enjoyed the one written by Mimi Smartypants, whom I have never met, but she lives in Chicago and I think maybe I always imagine that we will somehow meet and become friends. And then there are these people whom I admire and adore who write blogs at varying levels of seriousness and frequency (like this one and this one and this one), and their stuff is totally delightful and fascinating. For another, I've been enthralled by amazing essays written by academics in various forums that have a more personal, intimate angle (like this and this and this). And I've thought, I want to do that.

It's scary. Honestly, even writing this post is kind of scary. It feels embarrassing and self-aggrandizing and unseemly. It might be all of those things. But if I'm capable of being utterly shameless in many contexts where I find that many people (usually women) I know are completely hamstrung with embarrassment,** maybe I can channel some of that sang froid in this direction.

So, a new plan. I'm going to try to loosen up and let myself be exploratory (ie, half-baked and/or straight up dumb) and experimental (ie, incoherent and/or ridiculous). I'm not going full blogger yet -- I still want to retain a link, however tenuous, to things I'm reading/watching/listening to. But maybe it will stray a little (or a lot). And, perhaps more importantly (for my process, anyhow), I might post about things I'm in the middle of, rather than waiting until I've finished and Had Some Thoughts. I always tell my students that writing is a process of thought, not a record of it. I know that, and I've been reminded of it over and over and over as I curse myself for putting off writing until I have some kind of idea, meanwhile slowly losing all the ideas I was actually having but never worked out in writing -- but it's so, so hard. So I'm going to try to make myself do it here, in hopes that it will get easier, and that I'll get better at it. I think that doing it on computer and publicly will help produce the kind of writing that I'm interested in (I've tried keeping a diary -- ahem, journal -- and it doesn't work the same way, it seems). And perhaps people will read it and leave comments or somehow respond, and that might be nice too. We shall see.


(I love footnotes, I cannot think without footnotes)

* I briefly had a gig writing reviews of soups from various restaurants for a website. The only payment was the free soup, and the reviews had to be positive. It was reasonably fun, but I ran out of adjectives pretty quickly. I did, however, have a food blog, about bacon and pork-related things (I'll have you know that I started it before bacon was cool.). It did stray into the somewhat more personal, but also garnered a somewhat alarming amount of attention. I regularly received bacon-related products in the mail to review. But I really didn't care enough about it. Then I moved to Turkey, where pork was verboten, and the whole thing sort of petered out.
I totally forgot that I apparently also had a restaurant blog. It never amounted to much. It really is harder for me, apparently, despite loving food and restaurants and being opinionated.

** A short list includes breastfeeding in public, licking off the plate in fancy restaurants, helping myself to seconds and thirds or to the last bite on a communal plate, changing in front of others, asking questions, breaking rules, appearing in public looking like a mess thanks to being rather clueless about make-up and too broke and lazy for elaborate grooming...  Yes, most of this is certainly due to privilege. I try to use my powers for good (I'm not saying that flippantly). 

My favorites from 2017

I didn't read anything by Barbara Pym this year! That must be the nagging emptiness I was feeling...

But I did read a lot of really terrific books. Usually when I sit down to compile these lists, I find that it actually isn't that hard to settle on a top 10 out of everything I've read. This time I almost gave up and decided to do a top 20. How could I possibly have a top 10 that didn't include A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I would unhesitatingly rank as one of the most important formal innovations in novelistic form of the last 15 years? Well, because while it may well have been one of the best works I read, when you get down to the awful business of quantifying your love, you find that you might have just a smidgin more of it for something like a slender little novella by Arthur Schnitzler, perhaps because you read it at just the right moment, or because something about its particular droll voice endeared it to you in a special way, or because I love Schnitzler, and there is a particular thrill in reading a new book by someone whose work you adore and finding that it delights you just as much as their other books. On the other hand, while A Little Life completely undid me emotionally in a way that very few fictions have, reflecting back on it I found that it didn't leave as much of a trace as I might have expected (unlike Yanagihara's People in the Trees, whose meditations on science and modernity still echo occasionally through my mind).

I was thinking to myself that my list this year had a lot more contemporary authors than have graced it in previous years, but when I actually checked, this proved to be incorrect (for 2015 and 2014; apparently I didn't make a list in 2016. Really, self? Ugh.). I think the illusion was produced in part by the fact that I fully expect that works by some of the authors listed below will appear in my favorites list next year -- I'm really looking forward to reading Jesmyn Ward's Sing Unburied, Sing and Marie NDiaye's My Heart Hemmed In, for instance. And I recently finished Yuri Herrera's Kingdom Cons, and while I didn't love it as much as Signs, it further entrenched my sense that Herrera is one of the more interesting writers working today, and someone I'll definitely be keeping an eye on. I guess I actually read a pretty good amount of contemporary writing, and it's nice to be reminded that there are great new books coming out all the time.

Without further ado, alphabetically by title, my top 10 favorite books of 2017:

Ladivine, by Marie NDiaye -- Haunting, raw, slightly surreal; I was mesmerized by the gorgeous prose (beautifully rendered by Jordan Stump's phenomenal translation).

Late Fame, by Arthur Schnitzler -- I have a great weakness for Schnitzler, and this melancholic, humorous little meditation on art, aging, and celebrity was no exception.

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders -- This dazzling multi-vocal novel has all the emotional power of Saunders' short fiction. A riveting, playful exploration of the mythos of American history that resonates with some of the more painful conversations happening in contemporary culture in really interesting ways.

Manual for Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin -- These stories are every bit as good as everyone says they are. Wrenching but also, often, very funny, or sweet. Read them.

Notes on a Foreign Country, by Suzy Hansen -- Few books so fully live up to the promise of travel literature. Seeking to better understand Turkey, Hansen discovers, instead, America; the legacies of its foreign policy, and how they figure into American identity. Revelatory.

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler -- I don't even usually like sci-fi, but wow. In a year when everyone was really excited by the dystopian visions of The Handmaid's Tale, 1984, and The Power (which I'm almost done with), it was this novel that seemed the most terrifyingly to me like a prescient vision of an increasingly probable future.

Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera -- A mesmerizing modernization of the epic form played out on the US-Mexican border.

Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg -- Brave and beautiful, this is an important work of historical testimony, but also a powerful, searching exploration of gender identity.

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, by Sherman Alexie -- Absolutely stunning. Moving, wry, tender, intricate.

You Should Have Left, by Daniel Kehlmann -- I was absolutely delighted by the delicious terrors of this little book, which reminded me of Danielewski's House of Leaves (another favorite) in its visceral rendering of a mind-bendingly horrifying premise.


Runners-up:
A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan; Men We Reaped, by Jesmyn Ward; A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara; The Door, by Magda Szabo; 10:04 by Ben Lerner; A Greater Music, by Bae Suah; Not One Day, by Anne Garreta; Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, by Eka Kurniawan; A Horse Walks into a Bar, by David Grossman; The Iliac Crest, by Cristina Rivera Garza.

A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

Yanagihara's People in the Trees was one of the best books I read last year, so I had been looking forward to this. I had been forewarned, thankfully, of how devastating it was going to be, which is -- maximally. The best comparison I can think of is the film (I haven't read the book, though I suspect it's comparable) The Piano Teacher. It is brutal and awful and very very difficult. It completely unzips you emotionally. Is it worth it?

Well, to me, yes, it was. I am pretty squeamish about violence and cruelty in books/movies. I quit watching Game of Thrones, and walked out of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I can handle atrocity better in books, but I refuse, for instance, to read anything else by Gillian Flynn after reading Dark Places. So it's not like I'm a glutton for punishment, or immune to the emotional suffering that these kinds of things inflict. I'm pretty highly vulnerable to it, so if I'm going to subject myself, there needs to be serious payoff.

I started this blogpost intending to muse on the curious fact that this kind of grueling tale seems increasingly popular, both in "high" culture (Knausgaard, Ferrante) and in more mainstream stuff, but I don't really have anything to say about that, at least not yet. I am interested in what makes the calculus of cost/benefit pay off, ie, why I found this book genuinely rewarding and pleasurable, as opposed to my intense hatred for what to me seems like the torture porn of a lot of comparatively milder things. But I guess I don't want to delve that deeply into my own psyche, at least not publicly, in that way right now, aside from a few remarks. I will say though, that I think that People in the Trees produces that suffering more purposefully than A Little Life does. By this I mean that in the earlier novel, the awfulness is more clearly in the service of a broader reflection on modernity, science, and forms of knowledge, which to many may seem more noble and justifiable than what this later book, I think, is doing.

A Little Life has been called the Great Gay American Novel, an important Bildungsroman, and a powerful portrayal of (gay male) friendships. All of those descriptions seem pretty wrong-headed to me.* Actually, this is arguably one of the novel's flaws -- it seems to start out intending to be one of those things, but after a few hundred pages, it changes its mind and does something else entirely. Instead, it becomes a fairly relentless and intense story of trauma and recovery (or lack thereof). What makes it so incredible to me, I guess, is that it's a remarkable, uncannily accurate portrayal of self-loathing, but more specifically, of the ways it can exist within the confines of a relationship that is wonderfully warm and intimate. In other words, it's about how devastatingly awful human affective attachments can be, but also how absolutely marvelous -- both utter hell and something akin to grace.

This is not exactly a recommendation. I can't recommend this novel, not only because it is in fact flawed in many ways (it's too long, too lurid, and too idealistic), but also because I can't in good conscience advocate that anyone subject themselves to it. But I also cannot help enthusiastically telling you that I absolutely loved it.




* Tanya Agathocleous has a really interesting and smart reading of it in relation to those descriptors, and to queer futurity, though be forewarned that it is very heavy on spoilers, so best saved for after reading the novel, or for after resolutely deciding not to read it: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/life-narrative-end-times/

Colossal

The less you know about Colossal going into it, the better. Which is to say that if you haven't seen it, you should maybe stop reading now and come back when you have, though what I have to say about it doesn't contain any actual spoilers. It's just that it's a creative and unexpected movie that continuously keeps you guessing, and the surprise element is one of its great pleasures (as many people have noted, Anne Hathaway's performance is another one). I don't intend to review the movie overall so much as to get out a few of the things I've been muddling over since seeing it (and try, again, to be better about keeping this blog).

One of the things that I really appreciated about the movie is that it represents both the pleasures and the pitfalls of heavy drinking with genuine nuance. Unlike Trainwreck, which admits that staying up late and getting drunk can be awfully fun but ultimately insists that the heroine get rid of all the booze in her possession in order to be redeemed*, Colossal acknowledges the damage alcohol can wreak, and the need for limits, while also criticizing the tendency to moralize those limits (and highlighting the gendered ways that such moralizing tends to play out). It doesn't offer a simple solution - the movie's final scene is brilliantly ambiguous in this regard - and I love it for that. 

Overall, this is a really satisfying female-empowerment story. It treads a very fine line between showing you some of the ways in which sexism structures the main character's experiences without letting it dictate the narrative arc, or effectively disempower her altogether. Sometimes, arguably, this means bending away from realism. But it's so welcome and so satisfying to see a woman winning in a way that doesn't feel blatantly idealistic and contrived. This means that sometimes she doesn't win. This also means that sometimes what it means to win turns out to be something other than you (have been taught by Hollywood to) expect. That's how life works. It's refreshing to see a film that gets that.

I have more ambivalent feelings about the way that South Korea figures in to the movie as an uneasy combination of symbol and real place. It literally becomes an arena for (white) Americans to work out their issues, and sustains massive damage in the process. An elegant metaphor for actual political/economic/affective processes, but is the film critiquing them or repeating them? A bit of both? I do think that the movie insists upon South Korea's tangible reality as an actual place with actual people, and not just a tragedy that you see on tv, in important ways. I think that the monster movie aspect is loving homage and thoughtful hybrid rather than cultural appropriation. But I also want to hear what other smart people think about it (especially people of color), and I don't think it's my place to make a firm pronouncement on the matter. To my surprise, a brief google search turned up nothing (well, for some reason, it did turn up a lot of articles about the Gilmore Girls, which I haven't seen but I gather has some very problematic representations of Asians). I will probably be considered a killjoy for even raising the question when the movie is doing such awesome things re: gender, but them's the breaks. 

In the meantime though, you should totally go see the movie. It's not perfect or even mind-blowingly amazing (there's a whole other conversation to be had about how weirdly passive the minor characters are - like, I get that they're minor, but they are so blatantly without agency that it kind of boggles the mind), but, like Bad Moms, which I unfortunately didn't write about here, it's one of those rare movies that seems to be imagining someone like me as the audience while still being relatively mainstream. So go give it some money.

* There were a lot of things that I liked about that movie, but it turns out that that's what stuck with me, and apparently I can't forgive it.