This week's Bookmarks guest is LA-based journalist and writer Anna Rankin.
Anna has written for literary journals such as Landfall, and Turbine, and is a former fellow at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
You may have come across some of Anna's writing in Newsroom, where she has written a series of essays about living in LA during a time of lockdown, fires and riots.
Today she shares her epic list of favourite music, books, podcasts and films on Bookmarks.
Photo: Anna Rankin
Anna's picks
Books:
Master of the Eclipse, Etel Adnan, 2009.
Etel Adnan is a Lebanese-American poet, journalist, essayist and painter, and one of those writers whose books I carry with me everywhere—wherever I travel, she’s with me, and is one of my greatest of inspirations. She feels like home, inasmuch as ‘home’ exists— which is something she herself interrogates in her oeuvre, as someone who has lived in many places and felt, primarily, as well as quite literally in her case, displaced. I carry her books with me wherever I go. The title suggests the central thesis of the book, which is that history is made of shadows and light, truth is amorphous: truth is never as simple as a dualism rather it is grasped in glimpses, in passing, as an eclipse.
Born in 1925, Adnan writes extensively about the Lebanese Civil War which lasted from 1975 to 1990 and so to the the Siege of Beirut, which took place in summer 1982. She examines these through her journalism, reportage, poems and novels.
The stories in Master of the Eclipse are populated by filmmakers, poets, girls, professors, and prostitutes and they travel across myriad geographies including Beirut, Paris, Sicily, California, Iraq, and New York. The stories are impressionistic, and at times read as enigmatic notes, impressions, journalistic observations. Essentially, the book is a protracted meditation on history and war, power and poetry, love, memory, loss—and how these ricochet across time, how war reaches across the world, across time. Often told through conversations that span literature festivals, taxi cabs, balconies, between characters the stories, that are apparently both true and fictional, are taken from Adnan’s life, too. The book opens with an epigraph from Hölderlin which asks: What are poets for in destitute times? Which is as pertinent today as when it was first penned. The book answers this question by suggesting that to listen, is what poets do, what poets are for in such times. To listen and to both faithfully record such joys, despairs, sufferings, lost love, and alchemize this into a poetic form that sears time.
INRI, Raúl Zurita, 2003.
INRI is the poet’s response to the mass murder and atrocities committed under the Pinochet regime in Chile, of which he himself was personally implicated, as a 22-year-old student who was arrested by the regime during a 1973 coup and held alongside 800 others in the hold of a ship and tortured. Some, like Zurita, were let go. During those years under fascism thousands “disappeared” and authorities wouldn’t say what became of them. It wasn’t until 2001 that the extent of their torture was revealed—eyes gouged out, thrown into the ocean and the desert. INRI is a beautiful, elegiac collection of poems, or one book-length poem, separated into sections wherein the dead are reimagined as the mountains, sea, desert. This book reimagines language and the dead. The imagery is shape-shifting and repetitive—at times psychedelic-—flowers become a field covering the sea which becomes a graveyard, the sky a tomb of flowers. There are several lines of braille in the book, which intimates toward Zurita’s insistence in the work that you can’t see the dead, but you can sense and hear them in the landscape so in this way he’s suggesting that presence is freighted by absence, where the mountains, the Andes, disappear into the sea, and histories are covered over with stone. And yet, while the forgotten and the nameless transform these natural phenomena INRI is not a conventional resurrection structure; it’s a transformation.
Zurita is special to me, in part because my best friend, who is Chilean, introduced me to him, and to an extent Zurita formed a part of our relationship. One’s friends teach one how to love by showing what they love, therefore reading is inherently a social act. Further, this book is the favorite book of another dear friend, named Jen, who has for years sold books from the trunk of her car in the East Village, NYC. I met her during my first weeks living in that city, five years ago in December, and we formed a close bond. A poet, bookseller, writer, photographer and deep lover of the written word Jen and I have collaborated on a project together, where I wrote poems for her enigmatic and haunting photographed self-portraits. She has the most phenomenal book collection, and renowned online bookstore, and carries a beat-up copy of INRI everywhere she travels. I have several Zurita collections, but this one is so rich and alive, solemn and haunting in its articulation of abstract suffering and trauma—how do you remember absence, how do you mourn a body that has disappeared, or one that you couldn’t farewell in person—a pertinent question for many under Covid, and in this collection Zurita remakes these lost figures into, and inside, the very landscape in which they were killed.
Talk Stories, Jamaica Kincaid, 2001 ed.
Kincaid is an Antiguan-American essayist, novelist and gardening writer who wrote many pieces for the New Yorker column, “The Talk of the Town” for nine years, of which 77, reported between 1974-1983, encompass ‘Talk Stories’, a chatty, vivid document of the era of an old, literary New York and its mores. Part reportage part social commentary the vignettes are alive and dazzling on the page—whether notes on a long literary luncheon, her walks downtown, notes on an observation or passing impression, an elevator trip, a book launch—nothing is uninteresting to her— her impressions are often screwball in humor, wry, alert and deft. Adroit and porous to the world in which she is tasked with responding to, she asserts that she was “an outsider in a world of insiders” as a Black immigrant to the US in the predominantly white, well-to-do upper-crust world of the New York City literati. Given this distance she thus offers bracing insight into the subtle hypocrisies and social structures within that world.
Kincaid is naturally funny on the page, both ruthless and kind, and this collection has been a joy to thumb through in a time of protracted quarantine where I, like many here, mourn and long for the buzz and chaotic energy of the street, of late night bars and midnight dinners and visits to the cinema, book readings and lectures and matinees and spa visits and subway trips to nowhere—I live in LA but I miss, and loved, my life in New York City, which was so alive, full of chance encounter, absurdities and possibilities. These pieces remind me of life on the street and affirm that people are, indeed, what constitute a city, more so than the built landscape itself, although that, of course, plays a substantial role, no less so in the architectural splendor of the two American cities in which I’ve lived. Life indoors has made these essays even more pertinent, never again will I take such joys of the street and city life for granted.
Notes of A Native Son, James Baldwin, 1955.
Hardly requires an intro: all writers admire and revere Baldwin. This collection is an American classic, encompassing essays on his life in Harlem, movies, the protest novel, and so on. He articulated to white America what it was to be a Black American in white America, and did so with arresting clarity, force and grace. I’ve been re-reading Baldwin again because I’m writing my own essays, and I don’t believe there’s a better essayist, and he reminds me what to strive for: precision and truth. He reminds me to weed out untruths. I’m reading him, too, because he was writing during a time in some respects similar to this one, in terms of another civil rights era, of mass upheaval and change and police brutality and societal reckoning in a time of violence and rupture across the nation. Some of the similarities in these essays with regards to white supremacy and its dominance in all areas of life are astoundingly relevant, still, which is a sobering truth to reckon with.
I’m re-reading Didion, too, for similar reasons—her favorite writer was Baldwin, and I retain an enduring admiration and love for Didion, despite the limits of her political beliefs. At the level of the sentence she too is a total pro. Baldwin is a beacon, not only stylistically and so forth, but so too for his moral clarity and urgency. Above my desk I’ve always pinned a line of his: ‘If there is no moral question there’s no reason to write’ which reminds me that unless you have something you genuinely believe needs to said, you’re merely taking up space and I’m mindful of this, when there are many urgent voices and stories that need to be heard. He was a moral writer in the sense that he believed we, as collective humanity, can be better, might live with magnitude and grace and justice. To accept and face the truth of a situation, no matter how ugly and damning and not turn away nor construct false narratives to avoid the truth. And so too to never accept such truths as being inevitable. Everyone since Baldwin attempts to write with equal grace, precision, wit and force, but none are ever so so skillful. He reminds me to keep my heart and mind clean, away from the noise.
2. Poem A Partial History from A Sand Book, Ariana Reines, 2019.
Reines has been described as “one of the crucial voices of her generation” and has been an enormous influence on me over the years. A poet, playwright, translator and performance artist, A Sand Book is her fourth poetry collection, and is itself a sprawling epic about climate change, relentless war, capitalism and surveillance, police brutality, fascism genocide, mental illness, gender, love, the occult. I was lucky enough to attend her reading last year here at Skylight Books, where she read this poem and I’ve gotta say, I teared up hearing this. A Partial History, is an epic in the grandest tradition, in the sense that it examines psychic and material disintegration. Formally, it’s an epic both in form and content albeit very much situated and interrogative of contemporaneity. This poem searches for snatches of fleeting meaning — inside and against the controlled, mediated imagery of the screen in and under which we’re forced to participate, by our own design and the ceaselessly unfolding catastrophe in which we live. It’s the epic refrain of our moment: “We were lost in a language of images. / It was growing difficult to speak,” “Yet talk / Was everywhere.” Reines writes as the diviner, conjuring glimpses of meaning within the chaos of the 21st Century through the mists of a crystal ball, but yet eschews offering any direct advice, or solution, or salve.
Elsewhere, I’ve noticed this poem has frequently been compared to Ginsberg’s renowned poem of his time, Howl, itself an epic, sprawling meditation on exploitation and madness, and asks too for people to examine the nature of capitalism and other forms of oppression. I can see how and why this relationship between the two works has been established. Howl is, of course, known as the poem of the counter-culture of his era, and years later he said it was really about his mother, ‘accepting her madness’, which resonates with Reines herself given much of her work orbits around her own mother and their relationship, and her mother’s mental health issues.
Under lockdown she initiated her own school / classes over Zoom and I attended/watched/whatever you want to call it her series on the Rilke Elegies, which was a total savior in those early months trapped indoors, and a true gift, like everything she does.
3.Films:
‘Trilogy on modernity and its discontents’ (L’Avventura, 1960; La Notte, 1961; L’Eclisse, 1961), Michelangelo Antonioni.
I re-watched this trilogy fairly early on in the pandemic for its distilled tone, mood, pace, and themes of contemporary malaise and modern alienation—the struggle to connect to one another, to reach one another as humans. Given what we are experiencing, it’s no surprise some of us are drawn toward works that examine the grand and solemn themes of alienation, love, betrayal, desire, fate. These are the affective states that give life texture, and meaning. If anything, this protracted time indoors has given rise to dormant feelings, pathologies, reckonings and realisations and films show us how to see ourselves and each other through the lives of others. Personally, I’ve experienced several sad and painful things over this time, one in particular, and to process such a loss has been difficult in a time where we can’t connect with others. It’s been impossible to separate a personal tragedy from the wider tragedy at large. It’s felt as though my internal world has mirrored the outside world—which is to say, it feels like a giant heartbreak has smothered the world, and it has.
It might, then, make sense to avoid those works that only further engender such sorrow, but I am always drawn to those solemn, heavy and universal themes in art and life. This trilogy, shot on beautiful black and white film wherein the shadows and light and indeed the scenery itself is its own character—is preoccupied with Antonioni’s beloved theme of disconnection and breakdown—in the interior, psychological sense, but so too in the broader social world of the bourgeoisie and the working class, of the agricultural and industrial and the city, and so on. His protagonists, often women, struggle with ennui and confusion, romantic and mental deterioration. The first of this series, L’Avventura, was said to have ‘invented a new film grammar’, and this is the most iconic work of the three, and my favorite for its precise and moving portrait of spiritual and mental isolation, modern malaise and the complexities of facing one’s subjectivity which is to say, the distrust of the idea of a singular, unified self.
The Fog, John Carpenter, 1980.
I live in LA, and I love movies, and I was born in the ‘80s, so, naturally, I love Carpenter, who also composes genius and bizarro film scores. Most known for schlocky horrors and psychological thrillers including the iconic and cult classics They Live, Halloween, Escape from New York, etc, Carpenter’s films are inarguably perfect classics. I remember being terrified and obsessed with this film when I first saw it, and I love this genre of almost…corny psychological horror, which is to say you must suspend belief several times over, and which is genre-consistent in orbiting around a wholesome dinky American small town peopled by an archetypal cast of characters who together face an external, paranormal phenomenon. I love the aesthetic, the dialogue, the era itself (the 70s and 80s are arguably the pinnacle of American cinema) and I just love this genre of weirdly innocent schmaltzy horror that at times feels kind of heavy handed in its dealing with the uncanny and kitsch but is just, so, perfect. It’s soothing and homely like your most beloved jeans and reminds me of being a kid. In August this year, I was working on a piece published in Essential Services #2 (Editor of metro mag, Henry Oliver’s lockdown digital/print project) about Freud’s oceanic feeling from his Civilization and its Discontents, borders, Malibu, and so on, and I wrote about this film for its relevant themes of colonial repression and haunting.
It tells the story of an eerie, glowing fog that creeps over a small Californian coastal town, a fog that is, in fact, an embodiment of mariners killed in a shipwreck in 1880; evidence of which is found by the priest inside a wall of his church. The document outlines a tale wherein the six founders of the town, including the priest’s grandfather, purposefully sank a ship owned by a leprosy-afflicted man who wanted to establish a leper colony nearby. A classic supernatural/ psychological thriller/ horror narrative ensues and it has a disturbing, vengeful ending. After watching, I was compelled to draw analogies with the settler colony, whereby the sins of the (colonial) fathers will always return (return of the repressed) in some guise and meet their final retribution, that water has memory (as Toni Morrison asserts) and the the ocean bears and holds generational trauma. In this instance, it’s a natural phenomenon that comes for justice. Starring icons of the genre and the era, Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis, even writing about it makes me want to watch it again, now, which I most likely will.
News from Home, Chantal Akerman, 1976.
Chantal is one of my most beloved influences, and enduring loves. A film I made last year, that was shown in the Mayfair Art Fair online over lockdown, is in large part a love letter to her, and this film, or docu-film, perhaps, which consists of street scenes of ‘70s New York City, before the neoliberal policies swept through the city and forever changed its profile. Over long takes of city-scapes of the places and sites she would walk are the words of the letters sent to her by her mother, a Holocaust survivor who lived in Brussels, read as a voice over, and displayed in text across the screen. She and her mother were extremely close, and these letters, sent between 1971-1973 are bittersweet, sad, witty, longing, concerned. Not once are any replies read back to her mother, so there’s the sense it’s a one-sided relationship, which as far as I’m concerned is typical of the mother-daughter relationship dynamic and something I relate to, even though I’m close to my mother in this almost telepathic sense, that can withstand two months of silence. Much of her oeuvre is about her mother, with whom she was almost suffocatingly close and devoted, yet she’s plagued by guilt, in part due to the fact she lived in NYC, away from her, all the while knowing how much her mother lost.
This is a classic work of avant-garde cinema and although she never applied the word ‘feminist’ to her work or self—she eschewed all labels—her oeuvre overall is credited as fundamental to feminist filmmaking. Over lockdown the Criterion channel screened all her films and documentaries, and I was thus fortunate enough to go through her entire catalogue. She was also friends with Jonas Mekas, who founded Anthology Film Archives in NYC, a veritable trove of cinema and history, and a place I frequent every time I’m there. Each time I watch News from Home, I think of myself and my mother and our relationship, which is mostly epistolary and based on sending one another correspondence. My mother sends me postcards, books, letters and we have a relationship around a shared love of words. The contents of the letters Chantal’s mother sends echo those words of my mothers’, which feels painful and bittersweet all at once. There’s an entire psychoanalytical matrix of reading to it. So too does her relationship to her mother have an obvious and unmistakably psychoanalytic drive, where there’s this abject attachment of love and revulsion and guilt. At times in her various works she’s repulsed by her mother, at other times there’s this undercurrent of a psycho-sexual dynamic and yet still it’s incredibly sweet irrespective of such complexity.
News from Home is one of my all-time favorite films and influences, I’m certain I wouldn’t have made a film if I’d not ever seen it. It wouldn’t have seemed possible. It’s an enduringly elegant composition of a city, a meditation on disconnection and alienation in both the personal/familial sense, as well as the broader sense of urban disconnection, from the gaze of the outsider, the wanderer, a woman, alone. It’s about memory, desire, loss, loyalty, and the difficulties of unbridgeable distance. Over lockdown I also read her diary, translated a year or so ago, which offered further insight into her mind and methods of being and thinking. Reading letters exchanged between writers is another of my favorite genres, of which I’ve read a few in recent months, and this film operates as an expanded love letter to the past, to memory—which vanishes as soon as you attempt to capture it.
Atlantics, Mati Diop, 2019.
The supernatural romance/psychological drama and feature debut of French-Sengalese director and actress Mati Diop is haunting, poetic, poignant, hypnotic, melancholic and dazzling in tone, mood and scope, both realist and magical. I was moved in a way that I’ve not been in a long time by a contemporary film. Atlantics explores the return of the repressed, the refugee crisis, the material reality of capitalist exploitation, class migration, grief, ghosts, loss and love. The very ocean itself is its own character, a symbol for passage and borders, a site of possibility and death. So too is it a social commentary and feminist treatise of an immigrant narrative told through the eyes of a young girl whose love is forced to leave via a boat to Spain after being exploited by his employer, who refuses to pay his workers for their labor on a construction site. As the narrative progresses, it becomes apparent the men have perished at sea, and return in paranormal form via possession of the bodies of the young women they left behind. In interviews, Diop said she was inspired by the supernatural spirits of Islamic culture, that can possess in any form. Not only do the spirits inhabit the women as a way to reclaim what’s rightfully theirs—wages— the concept might also function as a critique of the way women’s bodies are policed by men.
The narrative also explores the lack of options for young working class women who are expected to marry. Ada, the protagonist, has an arranged marriage impending to a wealthy man, but her heart belongs to the poor worker who died at sea. She cares not for such trappings of wealth. Diop explores a range of themes partly by using traditional Senegalese folklore as a plot device and through this examines cultural, gender and social norms, infusing a material subject with the transcendent, the mythic. It’s also a deeply beautiful and emotional treatise on love, desire, longing and loss—the veracity of love and the way love is articulated in the body. In terms of my selecting it here, this film has a natural relationship and synthesis with The Fog, and I also wrote about Atlantics in the aforementioned piece for some of the similar themes of colonial theft, extractive and exploitive capitalism and its ruinous effects on not only the material world, but on love, too—how it sucks the blood of love, as well as quite literally kills people for profit.
4.Podcasts:
On Being.
My favorite of all podcasts, no contest. Since the first episode I listened to, in 2014, I think, I’ve not missed one. I play back old favorite episodes all the time. Host Krista Tippett is a total life inspiration. This podcast has kept me alive and given me life, and over my years of moving around Tippett, who was, in fact, a journalist, but speaks with the soothing cadence of a philosopher-therapist, has been a constant companion and grounding. She’s an anchor and has been my therapist when I’ve not had the means for one and I genuinely can’t function without this show; it’s influence on me is immeasurable, incalculable. I have clear and present memories of nightly dusk walks in 2015, living in Wairoa where I’d moved for my first job as a journalist, knowing no one, listening to her, and sensing there was something deep at work in me, there, and then, at that time, which was formative for me, and sealed in my heart.
The show began on public radio, initially called Speaking of Faith, and played on Sunday mornings. Self-described as a show which treated the religious/spiritual aspects of life as seriously as economic, politics, and so on, it has since broadened out into examining expressions of the intersection of faith, spiritual inquiry, social healing, and so forth. The opening prompt to those guests on her show, which span writers, poets, public intellectuals, professors, theologians and other religious figures and the like, orbits around the spiritual dimension of one’s life. She almost always opens by asking each guest of the initial and integral religious background of said guest’s life, then goes deeper into what it means to be human, how one lives, who we are to each other, and so forth, alongside more conventional journalistic inquiries into each guest’s life and work. The art of the interview, as a podcast and radio genre, is probably my favorite when it comes to these modes of listening.
Between The Covers.
A literary radio show and podcast hosted by Portland-based David Naimon and publishing press Tin House. Long-form, in-depth conversations with writers, and one of my favorite literary shows. Naimon is extraordinarily intelligent, precise, well-researched and asks impeccably thoughtful and considered questions of his guests, who are consistently the best writers working today, both old and young and from vastly different backgrounds. Difficult to think of a radio show host who asks more adroit and revealing questions, and undertakes such extensive research of his interview subjects. A rich listening experience that feels like downing a tonic.
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism.
A Leftist podcast that was created to counter those other podcasts for the American Left that focus more on more conventionally democratic, rather than radical, strategies. The aim of this podcast is, in their words, to give voice to liberation movements, communists, activists and organizers to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and dreams with a focus primarily on marginalized communities, and so too those perspectives from the global south to highlight anti-capitalist imperialist policies that disproportionally affect those outside imperial nations. While there is an array of thoughtful and brilliant interviews, I selected this podcast mostly for a phenomenally inspiring and urgent conversation between the hosts and writers Fred Moten and Stefano Harney back in July.
Democracy Now!
The first thing I listen to in the morning in the shower for news. I have this great speaker in my shower that’s water resistant, perfect for taking long baths and listening to audio books. Independent audience-supported news that produces daily, global, news—both headline and in-depth news, with long interviews with leading public intellectuals and those on the frontlines. Offers the broadest scope of the news for the day, and Amy Goodman is a national treasure for her work.
3. Music.
Xtal, from Selected Ambient Works 85-92, Aphex Twin.
A perfect song, an electronic soundscape you can project all kinds of ideas, thoughts and desires onto. I walk a lot, for hours at a time, especially at night, and often listen to electronic music, a lot of Burial, too. Electronic music has the innate ability to conjure emotion without the distraction or emotional manipulation of words. It’s a pure, sensory, fluid experience to walk at night and listen to the shifting, hypnotic, emotion of this song, which sounds like the thumping heart of the club as well as the heart of a city, breaking apart and being built again. Sounds like total atmosphere in space, a complete experience.
El Derecho de Vivir en Paz, Víctor Jara, 1971.
*Translates as ‘The right to live in peace’
Jara was a Chilean poet, teacher, theatre director, songwriter and member of the Chilean communist party, who was tortured and executed by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1973. Jara wrote songs about love, peace, social justice. This choice has a direct synthesis with Zurita, as well as the uprising that occurred in Chile late last year. Once seized, his torturers smashed his hands and mocked him by asking him to sing and play guitar. The brutal way he was murdered made him a symbol of struggle for human rights and justice for those killed under the regime. In October’s uprising in Chile last year thousands sang this song, and I still get chills when I watch videos on YouTube of those thousands singing this song en-masse, holding and playing guitars. It’s the song for a collective, united politics of liberation, for the collective internationalist project of the struggle for emancipation, justice and human rights across the world.
Nostalgia from Cinema Paradiso, Yo-Yo Ma plays Ennio Morricone, 2004.
Morricone died earlier this year, and was, of course, one of, if not the most, famous and skillful film composers—probably best known for the infamous The Good, The Bad and The Ugly theme. This particular track was a collaboration he did with Yo-Yo Ma, and it’s from the incredibly sweet 1988 film Cinema Paradiso, which tells the story of a young boy who finds solace in the Cinema Paradiso movie house, and befriends the elderly projectionist. I love it because it’s calming and emotional, and reminds me of the magic of being a child intoxicated with the magic of cinema.
Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Colour of Anyhow, 1970.
Beverly Glenn Copeland is a 76-year-old trans man born in 1944 who plays jazz, new age, folk music, and was, among many other things, also a writer on Sesame Street. I first heard, and loved, his 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies; a kind of new age keyboard album recorded with an Atari computer and a drum machine, and later found this album, and loved this classic folk song on it. He has an amazing and moving life story, and is well worth looking up and, naturally, listening to.
4. TV
You Tube.
I spend an inordinate and possibly obscene amount of time traipsing through the treasure trove that is YouTube. Watching lectures, interviews, debates, documentaries, old films and TV shows—it’s the most phenomenal and valuable resource, despite how addled and brain damaged I feel following a 10-hour deep dive into its recesses.
Six Feet Under 2001-2005.
An ensemble family saga and the perfect show to watch during quar. I finished it a week and a half ago and my life feels notably absent and lacking without the Fisher family, proprietors of a legacy family-owned funeral parlor. Speaking broadly, it’s a conventional family narrative about interpersonal relationships and the like, but it quickly goes deep into the subject of death, which it explores through the personal, religious, and philosophical. A repeat plot device has one of the respective characters of the family in conversation with their deceased father, which creator Alan Ball described as ‘representing the character’s internal dialogues, as expressed in the form of external conversations’. I’m drawn to the complex intricacies of family dramas, peopled like a Russian novel—my mother introduced me to Russian literature and its grand, moral themes and questions. Watching this show is like reading a Dostoevsky novel. This show is, thematically, my ideal show: emotionally and ethically intricate, examines the blur in things—recognizes that truth is complex and nuanced , deals with repression, the return of the repressed, death, the uncanny and the abject ( see Kristeva’s essay Powers of Horror for a primer) the symbolises of belief, primal and unexamined emotions and beliefs and how these manifest in our relationships; often in ruinous ways, the existence and nature/being of God, love, therapy culture, psychology, infidelity, religious guilt, mortality, morality, desire, and other personal reckonings that resonate outward into a broader social frame.
The writing is wry, cutting, intelligent, verbose, and flawless in its slow reveal of each character’s motivations and inner life. I often hit pause to take notes on a scene or piece of dialogue. It’s also ahead of its time in terms of how it examined infidelity, sex on screen, the queer scene, elderly love lives, etc. As a trope, each episode opens with a death—some more memorable, which is to say gruesome—than others, but each death is a preemptive gesture to the unfolding narrative of that particular episode. Incidentally, the friend I’ve been watching it with lives right around the corner from the Fisher home, a 1904 Queen-Anne style manse and historic landmark. When he realized it was right around the corner from his place, we went straight there to confirm, went back once we’d finished the series to grieve the loss of our adored family who we’d adopted. We’re still talking about the family as though its ours. Furthermore, I often take walks around Hollywood Forever, the devastatingly sublime and rambling cemetery in which many scenes are filmed. It’s probably my favorite place to walk in LA. The finale is one of if not the greatest finale television ever made and stained my mind for days following; I kept tearing up. I had to watch it several times just to process the depth and range of its emotional tenor. It raises the most unexpected emotion in its viewers, I think, particularly in an American culture that actively or subconsciously engages in a collective pact of denial of death. Overall it’s a tragic show in the most profoundly Grecian understanding of the word—not romantic nor idealistic and negates easy answers, and overall it’s a masterpiece. Also notable is its roll-call of 2000’s actors, fashion aesthetic and sappy indie music that permeated the era. A classic, and one I wish I’d had growing up when it first appeared, although there’s a strong possibility it may have engendered even more insufferable traits and an even more entrenched romantic attachment style with the world, given my own similarities and preoccupations as shared with certain characters.
Succession, 2018—
A tale of a brutal, Machiavellian family empire. Biblical, Shakespearean, in theme but also said to have been, and clearly is, inspired by the publishing tycoon Rupert Murdoch and sons, and, surely Trump and his failsons (internet parlance for tragic, accursed sons obsessed with gleaning their fathers love and respect, which is always withheld and manipulated in service of the fathers twisted mores). This show is already a classic of the depraved wealthy family drama genre, some might say Soprano’s level writing, and I wouldn’t argue. A viciously adroit satirical drama-comedy it centers on the Roy family, who own a global media and hospitality company and are each fighting for control amid the patriarch’s failing health. Thus far, the two seasons follow the saga of the family who are not only outlandishly rich and powerful but in equal proportion dysfunctional and corrupt. Its themes are eternal yet set in present-time; the limits of familial loyalty, the ruinous nature of power and desire, the despicable methods used to seize such power, the depths of betrayal latent within each character. The varying manipulative appeals made to one another’s ego in service of some despotic scheme are a class act in sociopathy. It might as well be reality TV in real time, all things considered. The writing on this show is impeccable, cutting and savage. Beyond compare in terms of its articulation of media, politics and power in the 21st Century. My friend Robin tells me the writers room is majority female which is why, they remark, it’s so biting and nuanced about people vanities. And it’s true—the insults and sly comments and brief-yet-drenched-in-expression glances are practically an operational user guide to Freud’s id-ego-superego at work in terms of the precise locale in which these comments and looks are designed to land and how they’re both received and thus acted upon by the received. The power dynamics at work in each relationship are blatantly transparent to the viewer, who always senses the underlying shadow of motive, yet never to the character too trapped within their ego, and each character is at heart pathetic, neurotic, morally evacuated and chaotically damaged. It’s ethically complex, too, when you find yourself rooting for Kendall, the eldest son who has a dark void where a conscience ought to be.
The relationship between the somewhat estranged and naïve cousin Greg, and Tom, hapless husband of Shiv, the sole daughter in the family, is charmingly abusive and culminates in an unforgettable and excruciatingly awkward, and doomed, court deposition scene. Everyone loves Roman, played by Kieran Culkin, and with good reason—he’s a flinchy enigma and endearing screw-up who yet has a shred of a heart left and who delivers his lines with perfect and often pithy, droll cadence and seamless timing. Incidentally, it also stars one of my favorite and underrated actors, Eric Bogosian, as a Bernie-like Democratic presidential candidate. I’m not alone when I express that this show engenders a desire to act in such equally treacherous and depraved ways as its characters; that’s how complete the writing of each character is. It reminds me that as a child I was vying on the side of Cruella DeVille, not the puppies, in 101 Dalmatians, which perhaps suggests a predilection for glamor and a well-crafted villain, who are, afterall, always the more complex and thus enduring characters, therefore their actions are deemed forgivable. In such narratives there is always, however, one Judas who endures.
