Song of the Summer

The only consensus regarding the 2025 Song of the Summer seems to be that there is no consensus regarding the 2025 Song of the Summer. No pop music hit has gripped the popular imagination the way, say, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” did in 2024 (even if some, like me, might contend that Carpenter’s 2025 track “Manchild” is superior.). The most popular song of the summer per Billboard metrics is “Ordinary” by Alex Warren, who is described by Wired’s Jason Parham as “a YouTuber and founding member of Hype House, the former collective of Gen Z TikTok stars,” which are words I don’t entirely understand. But despite that song’s “chart dominance,” as Parham notes, it “(doesn’t) really capture the spirit of the season.” (It also lives up to its title in the worst way, an incidental music anthem.) Parham also indicates that SoundCloud data has shown people listening a little more to old music than new music this summer. This is likely tied to TikTok and Instagram’s penchant for bringing back past hits, but might also be tied to “the changing cultural dominant” being driven by America’s President, one sort of seeking to install himself as our version of a Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, and causing people to seek, as pop critic Chris Molanphy has deemed it, musical “comfort food.” I can relate. 

Bruce Springsteen, who you may remember me mentioning once or twice on this nominal movie blog, released a box set of seven albums of unreleased material in June. Most of these were not even random compilations of never-heard songs but full-fledged records that were cut and then shelved for various reasons, including the “Streets of Philadelphia” Sessions, one that Bruce very nearly put out in 1994. In the hardcore Boss circles, this album had been known as the loops record, so-called because it was said to consist of songs based around programmed drumbeats and samples. (That turns out to be half true.) And though at the time Springsteen was reticent to release it for what would have been his third consecutive record focusing on relationships, and while it predictably can’t compare to his unrivaled seven-album run from late 1973 through 1987, it’s still quite good, as good, in fact, as anything he has released in the new century. If it had been released in 1994, I suspect it would have received mixed reviews before eventually being reclaimed like some of the less-heralded Bob Dylan albums, say “Oh Mercy.” 

They are far from spitting images but still, but I kept thinking of the “Streets of Philadelphia” Sessions as a Springsteen version of “Pure Moods,” the compilation of new age music that was released in 1994 and that it seemed like everyone I knew bought that summer. But then, new age music is intended to soothe, and though the SOPS sometimes has soothing melodies, the lyrics are mostly anything but, a juxtaposition that Springsteen works to fine effect, like “Between Heaven and Earth,” or “We Fell Down” which truly conveys the sense of something beautiful ending. It also underlines his eschewing the short story set to music mode of 1995’s “Ghost of Tom Joad” for more suggestive lyrics. He gets great mileage from the metaphor of the lead track “Blind Spot,” turns “The Little Things” into a musical manifestation of that barbed wire melded into a heart that Neil gave his girlfriend on Real World London* (*mid-90s reference, so appropriate if obscure), and “Waiting On the End of the World” comes across like both a more abstract and more specific version of “Streets of Philadelphia.” Even the record’s single rocker, “One Beautiful Morning,” is essentially an uplifting celebration of death. One song, however, stands above the rest.

“Maybe I Don’t Know You” sounds ominous from the start, and in the first two verses, Springsteen sings from the point-of-view of a husband puzzled by his wife’s seemingly newfound taste, in clothes, in music. “What’s that song you’re listening to, baby?” he sings. “I never heard you listening to that before.” (Every time I hear this lyric, I imagine Patti Scialfa in the other room listening to TLC’s “What About Your Friends.”) “Is it something new,” he wonders, “or just something you always hid?” And that leaves him wondering if he doesn’t know her like he thought he did. Springsteen, though, is no unthinking meathead, and his protagonist is not Ray Barone singing to Debra Barone. No, in the bridge, the protagonist turns introspective, confessing how she came to him for “understanding and tenderness,” but he met her with “indifference.” She wasn’t hiding these things from him, necessarily; in his stated apathy, he just wasn’t paying attention. But why wasn’t he paying attention? He explains, sort of: “And I can’t explain.” And though that’s a copout, of course, Springsteen knows it and, well, here’s the thing:

Springsteen songs are not usually about the guitar solo. There’s a reason what might be the most beloved guitar solo in the Springsteen canon is, in fact, played by Nils Lofgren. But when his solos work best, it’s because they truly conversate with the song, like on “Streets of Fire” where the solo seems to erupt like molten lava from the somber melody. The solo on “Maybe I Don’t Know You” doesn’t erupt, it’s not that kind of song, but it feels fully connected to the line preceding it. The solo itself becomes his explanation, or more accurately, his lack of one, this beautiful, pitiful cry of a man who can’t communicate, underlined in his stretching out the pronoun “I” twice as the solo winds up, like he’s gathering himself to finally explain and just...can’t. As the song concludes, you realize, it’s not whether he knows her, because he doesn’t even know himself, and I can’t help but think that such existential failure is a pretty apt illumination of where America stands as the curtain closes on the summer of 2025. 

Notes on Celebrity

During the New York Knicks NBA playoff run that ended just a few games short of the finals, the celebrities watching their team courtside at Madison Square Garden became almost as prominent as the Knick players themselves. Cameras lingered on the celebrities, articles testified to their devotion as fans, some Knicks enthusiasts even conceded they were the best part. It was reminiscent of the last couple years in which Taylor Swift synergized her brand with the NFL’s by appearing at Kansas City Chiefs game to support her beau, Travis Kelce. Honestly, though, I’m less interested in this idea of celebrities and sports through a cultural or social lens than an aesthetic one. Celebrities at football games are in skyboxes, high up and away from the action, meaning Swift was always at the mercy of the television control room, like an actor is at the mercy of the editor, hoping they choose the best take, as Javier Bardem once wryly noted upon winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Celebrities at basketball games, on the other hand, the ones courtside, at least, are always in the shot.

In the Washington Post, Will Leitch argued that it’s these moments courtside, in the throes of a typical sports fan’s insanity, hugging, screaming, wigging out, when we see stars like Timothée Chalamet and Ben Stiller for real. In specifically considering Chalamet’s enthusiasm during the Knicks run, however, Defector’s Diana Moskovitz was a bit more circumspect. “As for how much of this is real versus how much of this is performance, that is always a question, especially with someone who makes a living by being charming, present, and giving people what they want.” Even so, she concluded: “But who are we to judge?” I’m not judging, not exactly, but the question of the line between those two still intrigues me. Indeed, my man David Thomson waded into this topic in his book “Why Acting Matters,” pondering where those lines between onscreen and offscreen selves blurred and where they dissolved completely. He didn’t write about actors sitting courtside at basketball games, mind you, but it’s at basketball arenas where those two selves seem to become most spellbindingly muddled.

It’s appropriate. The basketball court, after all, is a place for performance as much as competition. And not just in the dark arts of exaggerating to draw fouls. No, I’m talking about trash talk, frequently referred to by its practitioners as an artform, a mind game but also a means of creative expression. Players don’t merely have signature moves but signature taunts and celebrations. In a league newly built on the back of three-pointers, the ones who shoot them best, from the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson to league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder, all have their own post three-point celebratory gestures. And when the Pacers completed an improbable comeback in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Knicks to send the game to overtime (where they would ultimately win), upon hitting the three-point shot that completed it, Tyrese Haliburton backpedaled and looked to the crowd while putting his hands to his neck, the universal sign of “choking,” as in, the Knicks, your Knicks, had succumbed to the pressure.

Haliburton’s choke gesture was a conscious echo of another Indiana Pacer, Reggie Miller, from over 30 years ago. Miller not only made the choke gesture; he directed it at Spike Lee, the Knicks superfan who spent all of Game 5 in the 1994 Eastern Conference Finals jawing at the Pacers star from his Madison Square Garden courtside seat. As Miller himself said in “Winning Time,” the 2010 ESPN documentary chronicling the Knicks/Pacers rivalry, by sitting courtside, Lee wanted to be part of the game and so he obliged him. It suggests courtside celebrities as akin to Parisian café dwellers, both spectators and participants in the action. Indeed, in the 2003 NBA playoff game between the Los Angeles Lakers and San Antonio Spurs, when Lakers fanatic Jack Nicholson stood up from his courtside seat and berated the referees over a foul called on the team’s star Shaquille O’Neal, nearly getting himself ejected, he seemed to be burying himself in the role of a lifetime: Jack Nicholson as Los Angeles Lakers Head Coach. That’s sort of the ultimate manifestation of courtside celebrities, or how we think of courtside celebrities, in a sense playing to the game on the court as the players might play to the crowd. That’s what made Indiana’s T.J. McConnell dragging Chalamet and his lady friend, the Other Kylie, so apropos; if you wanna “play,” you’re gonna pay.

That brings us to Beyoncé. She went viral during Game 3 of the 2019 NBA Finals when she appeared to side-eye Nicole Curran, the wife of Golden State owner Joe Lacob, who was sitting to her left while conversing with Knowles’s husband Jay-Z to her right. This assessment of the situation was immediately denounced by Beyoncé’s publicist and anyway, that phony drama doesn’t pique my interest. Lost in all that hullabaloo was the moment at the start of the third quarter of the same game when Beyoncé and Jay-Z were ushered to their courtside seats a few moments after the second half had begun. Because the game was already in progress, the two stars had to wait until the action was at the other end of the court, meaning they strode to their seats in full view of the crowd and TV audience while the players were playing the NBA Finals. And yet, ineffably, you could feel every eye in the house drawn away from the game and to these two celebrities.

Jay-Z, beer in hand, was sort of sauntering in that laid-back I’m Kind of a Big Deal way, performing by trying to make it appear as he if wasn’t performing. Beyoncé, on the other hand, was shrewder. She was just walking to her seat. She could have been anybody if she hadn’t been Beyoncé. But she was Beyoncé. All these other courtside celebrities, consciously or not, are seeking out the camera, spiritually urging the TV control room to cut to them. Beyoncé did no such thing. If certain actors know that acting is being, Beyoncé knew that celebrity was being. Shit, even the Queen had a box at Royal Albert Hall with her name on it. Queen Bey remade the sideline, the court, and the camera in her name without lifting a finger to write it figuratively or literally. Nobody has ever looked more famous.

10 Times Jerry Seinfeld Was Funny on Seinfeld

Throughout the never-ending press tour for his poorly received “Unfrosted,” Jerry Seinfeld spent as much time putting his foot in his own mouth as hyping his product, an inadvertent late career coming out as a reactionary. It was something to ruefully acknowledge before moving on with the rest of your day. That is not what many people did, however, or at least, not what many social media users did. Many people sought to tell the whole world via social media that they never thought “Seinfeld” was funny, or more accurately, that they never thought Jerry on “Seinfeld” was funny. This was less about appraising art, though, then staking out the moral high ground, or being seen staking out the moral high ground, I should say, performatively staking out the moral high ground even if they tended to stake it out on social media which just exists down there in the mud. It was wearying. The problem with a show of a piety, another American funnyman whose own dubious character was eventually revealed once said, is that it’s open to everybody. Sorry, masses, but I am not impressed. And even if some people were being 100% forthright in their opinion of an unfunny Jerry, that’s not true either. And as the kids say, I’ve got the receipts, ten of them, in fact. 

By his own admission, Seinfeld was not a good actor, and never really even became a good actor by the end of the series. Yet, he was frequently funny, albeit in a different way than his trio of gifted co-stars. The examples of Jerry Seinfeld being funny listed below are, I want to be clear, Jerry Seinfeld being funny independent of the material; this is strictly about delivery of the material or performing to accentuate or underline the material. His “second spitter” monologue, or the “Schindler’s List” make out session, things of this nature, are objectively hilarious but are not necessarily examples of Jerry Seinfeld himself being the foremost reason they are funny. No, in his own unique way, Seinfeld made the following 10 moments as much as the material. 

10 Times Jerry Seinfeld Was Funny on Seinfeld

1. If Seinfeld frequently came across on the verge of breaking during myriad one-liners, his lips curling into a conspicuous grin as he said it, or even as he was about to say it, this habit could also work to advantage. It never worked to his advantage more than the capper to the first half of the beloved Keith Hernandez-starring episode in Season 3. You know the moment, after George’s attempts to extend his unemployment benefits by claiming to have interviewed for a job selling latex and giving Jerry’s phone number as the faux latex sales office only to have it go awry when the unemployment office calls and Kramer answers, causing George to run out of the bathroom and fall to the floor, pants around his ankles, at which point Jerry enters from the hall and remarks, “And you want to be my latex salesman.” It’s a great line, that goes without saying, and is impeccably built to within the script, but Seinfeld the actor is what truly brings it home. If so much of the show was Jerry reacting to the inane behavior of his friends, this is his greatest reaction, when the character’s innate stand-up comic instincts take over. If Seinfeld smiles as he says it, that’s because in that moment he is essentially standing on a stage, observing a hapless member of the crowd, feeling the joke come to him in real-time, and then making it.

2. Was there ever a greater conceit illustrating mankind’s eternal penchant for guilty pleasures than in Season 6’s “The Beard” when Jerry is forced to take a lie detector test by the police sergeant (Katherine LaNasa) he is dating to determine whether or not he watches “Melrose Place.” And if Seinfeld was not a great actor, as previously established, well, that fact only helps him here. Hooked up to so many polygraph chords, he tries to act nonchalant, irrefutably failing.

3. Anyone submitting that Jerry was never funny because Jerry Seinfeld was revealed to be a real-life smug jerk is objectively overruled by Season 4’s “The Airport” in which his character cheerfully, quickly, selfishly accepts a first-class airplane ticket over Elaine, resigning her to coach, because Seinfeld’s innate smug jerkiness has never been deployed to greater comic effect. It’s funny because he’s an asshole; a first-class asshole. 

4. “Seinfeld’s” vision of New York was conspicuously white, a valid criticism, though the show was not entirely blind to it. Or, maybe I should say, the show was aware of a kind of blinkered white perspective that fancies itself aware as Season 5’s “The Dinner Party” illustrates with Jerry’s single greatest monologue in which he boils all of society’s racial problems down to a Black and white cookie. “You really should write an op ed for The Times,” says Elaine, a suggestion that Jerry actually takes seriously, casting his eyes around the room, drinking in this idea, and going “mmmmmmm.” That “mmmmmmm” is just hysterical. I imagine that every time Ross Douthat, or David Brooks, or Bret Stephens sits down to compose an op-ed for The Times, they cast their eyes around the room and go “mmmmmmm” just like Jerry.   

5. There were many great moments involving Jerry’s pathological resistance to germs, of course, like the one in Season 8’s “The Pothole” when he is forced to fish the toothbrush of his girlfriend Jenna (Kristin Davis) out of her toilet bowl. Director Andy Ackerman deserves plaudits for concocting a point-of-view shot from within the toilet, an impressive feat in its own right that Seinfeld the actor, nevertheless, manages to top with the side-splitting expression of a germaphobe literally staring down his greatest fear.

6. Even better, though, is another moment involving another girlfriend’s (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson) toothbrush in Season 6’s “The Doodle.” Upon discovering he has forgotten his own teeth-cleaning device at home, his girlfriend insists he use hers, and Seinfeld has his alter onscreen ego desperately will himself to try and use it until ultimately, finally, as if there is an invisible force field between his lips and the bristles, he realizes he just can’t.

7. The best moment of Season 7’s famed “The Soup Nazi” occurs when George, unable to tamp down his own instincts enough to not complain about failing to get free bread with his soup, gets hit with the first “no soup for you!” and has his just paid-for soup literally taken away. It’s hilarious, of course, the shellshocked George just standing there in the wake of this unbelievable turn of events, and then that hilarity is accentuated when Jerry glares at him for deigning to disregard the rules and physically signals for his friend to get the hell out of there. In the subsequent scene, Jerry literally mentions living under a Nazi regime, but that moment before lives it. There is a hysterically exaggerated desperation and terror in Seinfeld the actor’s mannerism that lets you know he’s been cowed. 

8/9/10. My favorite Jerry Seinfeld moment is, in fact, three of them rolled into one scene in Season 6’s “The Secretary” that takes us through the three stages of agony of what we might deem Mandatory Fun. In this case, the Mandatory Fun is the second time in season 6 in which Jerry is forced to take hack comedian Kenny Bania (Steve Hytner) out to an unwanted dinner in exchange for a personal favor. In fact, this time the pesky Bania has negotiated two dinners. 

When Bania asks if Jerry if he is enjoying his soup, Seinfeld’s reply, “I’m having a wonderful time” is as thinly veiled as thinly veiled contempt can possibly get, a man reconciled to a necessary but torturous life choice.

But after that, when Bania begins pontificating on whether they should have their second meal at the same place, or try a new restaurant instead, unable to sit through the whole foregone spiel, Jerry cuts him off. “Yeah, yeah, I know. This would be good, but it would be the same,” he says, the veil coming off, just leaving the contempt sitting there in the open. “But if we go someplace else, it would be different, but it might not be as good.” And as he concludes, Seinfeld the actor has Jerry lean forward, contempt giving way to pure rage. “It’s a gamble. I get it.”

The rage, though, bounces off the oblivious Bania like he’s brick wall. Then he begins telling Jerry how he has scored a date with a woman from a dry-cleaning ticket previously belonging to Kramer on which Jerry’s next-door neighbor had written the phone number for one Uma Thurman. That’s why when Bania explains his date is with “some woman named Uma...hope she’s good looking,” Seinfeld the actor has Jerry respond with that look right up there, rage now dissolving into sheer disbelieving disgust. In fact, it’s sort of the same look I get whenever someone tries to tell me Jerry wasn’t funny on “Seinfeld.” 

Notes on Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman, upon recently receiving the American Film Institute Award for Lifetime Achievement.

A confession: the first time I ever watched a Nicole Kidman movie was because I thought she was cute. The movie was “Billy Bathgate,” and so this was 1991, and so I was 14 years old, and so, please, cut me at least a little slack. I wanted to see Robert Benton’s adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow novel because one year out from “Goodfellas” every idiot 14-year-old boy was obsessed with mob movies, but also because every commercial they ran for “Billy Bathgate” during college football games and primetime television showed Nicole Kidman at least once and, man, was she pretty. My embarrassing shallowness, however, was evocative of the shallow, and dense, way Hollywood promoted Kidman in the 1990s. The industry saw her as a movie star, but never understood what that meant, never determined what persona they were selling, sort of mingling generic beautiful woman with Tom Cruise’s Other Half, emblemized in forgettable projects like “Malice” (1993) and “Days of Thunder” (1990). There was not a persona to sell, however, because even then Kidman was what she is now, an actor, subsuming herself in roles rather than standing apart from them. She carried her half of “Dead Calm” (1989) as capably as Sam Neill carried his, demonstrated her future propensity for total commitment in “To Die For” (1995), and in “Batman Forever” (1995), quite frankly, went above and beyond the call of duty. Well before Christopher Nolan invested his Dark Knight trilogy with seriousness, Kidman was helping her movie earn its PG-13 rating by conveying (earmuffs!) just how seriously her character wanted to fuck Batman.

If there was a single moment when the broader populace truly became aware of Kidman’s immense ability it was when she donned a prosthetic nose to play Virginia Wolff in “The Hours” (2002), underlined in her winning the Oscar for Best Actress. Kidman is almost always a transformative actor, whether she is changing her appearance or not, but transformation is so much more conspicuous when it’s literal. It was more than that, though, as the invaluable culture writer Anne Helen Petersen wrote in 2017 when assessing Kidman’s career; in playing the part, Kidman “got ugly...Her performance of dowdiness, in other words, is made remarkable by just how unnatural it must have been.” By not being beautiful, Kidman was “proving” she could act for the doofs who somehow did not already realize she could. “With ‘The Hours’ (Kidman) takes another step away from her movie-star persona and firmly becomes an actor playing a role,” Andrew O’Hehir wrote for Salon, proving Petersen’s point even as he gives Kidman a rave, “rather than a celebrity playing herself under a different name.” He continued: “For an actress to give up her face -- her most marketable commodity -- even for one role, is a startling decision.”

In essence, O’Hehir was writing that Kidman had assumed a mask, but the truth was, Kidman had been donning masks her whole career. Emily Nussbaum noted as much for The New Yorker in 2017, writing that Kidman offered not “transparency, (but) a different gift: she can wear a mask and simultaneously let you feel what it’s like to hide behind it.” Though she infuses roles with a sense of her own individual ideas about the person she is playing, like essentially imagining Lucille Ball in “Being the Ricardos” as Michael Jordan of “The Last Dance,” Kidman is not playing herself, the crucial delineation. Rather, she conceals herself, a kind of Kidman Kabuki, and like that ancient school of Japanese art, she uses such artifice to transmit emotions of who she is playing directly to the audience.

Yet, in the last few years, a curious thing has happened. In our strange present, where the very idea of what constitutes a movie has become muddled, and big screens and small screens and all the screens in-between have figuratively blurred to the point where it can be difficult to tell them apart, few have managed to carve out a distinct presence across all these spectrums like Kidman. Not just in movies and TV, but social media too, and not just by starting her own Instagram account, but in how her work has been harvested for TikTok and memes. This includes clips of her past roles, of course, like her time-stopping close-up in “The Stepford Wives,” and even her various reactions on talk shows and at awards shows, but I’m thinking even more specifically. I’m thinking, of course, about the AMC Theatres commercial in which Kidman was enlisted in 2021 as an ambassador for the movie multiplex chain to help implore the public to return to movie theaters after the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

This commercial has been parodied endlessly, from Olivia Rodrigo on TikTok to Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars to Morgan Freeman at Kidman’s recent AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony. Crucially, though, Kidman herself is not resorting to self-parody. She is Pure Camp, in the way that Susan Sontag famously saw it, exaggerated, fantastic, passionate, and naive, so deadly serious in effusing such religious grandiosity over the act of going to the movies that it is impossible take seriously. But it’s more. Because she is not playing a character, she is playing herself, except in quotation marks. “It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman,’” Sontag wrote. And it is not Kidman, but “Kidman.” It is Nicole Kidman finally becoming a movie star by creating her own persona without, still, having to give her real self away.

What Kind of Big Screen Bruce Do We Want?

In the year 2000, Bruce Springsteen appeared briefly in the Stephen Frears-directed adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity” not so much as himself as a vision of the main character (John Cusack). And as much as I enjoyed “Blinded by the Light” (2019), and the 2013 fan service documentary “Springsteen & I” too, Planet Earth Poet Laureate’s cameo in “High Fidelity” essentially summarized in less than 60 seconds what both those movies took their entire run times to say, that for Springsteen fans, he exists as a spiritual sherpa. And though I’m biased as a longtime resident of E Street, it has always seemed to me that’s all we ever really needed of Bruce on the big screen. He, himself, saw the speciousness of the whole potential exercise back in 1983 when he recorded the cheeky rockabilly “Born in the U.S.A.” outtake “TV Movie.” What, did we really want him to get “Rocketman-ed,” or “Bohemian Rhapsody-ed,” or “Walk the Line-d?” “You might get to thinking you’re ahead of the game / but when you break it all down / it all comes out the same,” sang James McMurtry in “Painting by Numbers,” essentially describing the majority of musician biopics, mere vessels for their actors to get Academy Award nominations, sticking to a formula so rote that “Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story” took it apart element by element.

In 2017, there was some vague news about a movie called “Asbury Park,” set in the Jersey beach town and around its preeminent rock club, the Stone Pony, where Springsteen got his start that, back then at least, seemed to suggest Springsteen would play a supporting role. That was intriguing, not only not making a Springsteen biopic but in a movie about Springsteen’s old stomping ground, keeping him to the side, maybe like a Wolfman Jack in “American Graffiti,” looming large without being the star of the show. As stated, though, that was 2017, and in visiting that prospective film’s entry on IMDb, one discovers that it remains “In Development,” left, perhaps, to hike the streets up in the sky*. (*Obscure Springsteen reference.) If, however, “Asbury Park” is not the answer to our unconventional Springsteen biopic dreams, then perhaps “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is.

I only just learned that Scott Cooper, who wrote and directed Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart,” is slated to helm a Bruce Springsteen movie with “The Bear’s” Jeremy Allen White reportedly in talks to star as The Boss himself. Forget whether White may or may not make a credible Bruce (can he do a hoarse laugh?). That’s of less interest to me than the idea supporting the movie and the idea, thankfully, does not appear to be a biopic, or at least, not a traditional biopic, based as it is on Warren Zanes’s book of the same title about Springsteen recording his sixth studio album “Nebraska,” the one he recorded entirely on a 4-track recorder in his New Jersey bedroom, and that also, more or less, is when he conceived of the ensuing “Born in the U.S.A.” too. This is an idea that gives the potential movie crucial focus and real potential. (It is also possible, I concede, that this movie begins with Bruce sitting down at the 4-track recorder in his New Jersey bedroom, triggering the first flashback of many, a la aforementioned Dewey Cox, who “has to think about his entire life before he plays.”)

The involvement of Springsteen himself and his longtime manager Jon Landau might be cause for concern, at least in terms of Cooper having the room to honest and unmerciful, but maybe their involvement is just to ensure Cooper has full access to the singer’s catalogue, so “Atlantic City” doesn’t have to be translated into “Ocean City” like “Piece of My Heart” into “Chunk of My Lung.” But overall, I find myself encouraged. It has the potential to function as a companion piece to “Air” (2023), which claimed in words to know what “Born in the U.S.A.” was about even as the movie itself suggested otherwise, just as “Nebraska” and “Born in the U.S.A.” “were two sides of the same coin,” to quote the rock critic Elizabeth Nelson. “The umbrage-filled bluster of one and the quiet violence of the other taken together are a prophetic nightmare vision of a contemporary America, which can’t tell the difference between an execution and a compliment.” 

Nelson saw further than that, even, to “a relationship between Springsteen and his audience (that) is as moving and unhealthy as rock has ever had on offer,” noting that “‘Nebraska’ was a low confidence vote in a country that simultaneously made him rich and made him doubt everything.” It’s mere wishcasting, especially in a genre where affirmations tend to be what general audiences want more than provocations or questions, but I like imagining a Bruce biopic that rather than reconsecrating the fan relationship one more time might have the guts to hold it up to the light.

Critical Acumen Lies Bleeding

Last Friday I went to see Rose Glass’s neo-noir “Love Lies Bleeding” at Chicago’s Landmark Theatre, the Century Centre Cinema, in the mall that time forgot, on North Clark. Early in the movie, Kristen Stewart’s character Lou is trying to reverse psych herself into quitting cigarettes by listening to a self-help cassette tape (the movie is set in 1989) warning of the ways in which society brainwashes you into smoking in the first place. I found it interesting, this talk of brainwashing, given how “Love Lies Bleeding” starts…at least, how “Love Lies Bleeding” starts at a Landmark Theatre. That is to say, “Love Lies Bleeding” at a Landmark Theatre does not begin with, like, you know, the movie itself, but with a pre-movie introduction. An exclusive intro is how the Century Centre Cinema’s web site bills it, though this intro is not really a formal presentation of the movie to come so much as an advertisement for it, or maybe more accurately, an endorsement of it. I’m reminded of the public speaking adage, to begin by telling ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, except in this case, Landmark Theatres is telling us what to think about what it shows us before it shows us.

Loyal and extreme frustrated followers might recall that last August I was semi-horrified to discover the existence of MovieTok, a subset of TikTok, the online short video hosting platform that Congress is currently trying to ban in lieu of doing anything for the true greater good, in which people reviewed, not critiqued, underline, movies. Indeed, these MovieTok reviewers are “not,” as Reggie Ugwu noted in a New York Times profile of them, “critics in the traditional sense.” Rather, “their upbeat videos,” Ugwu wrote, “earn them contracts with Hollywood studios.” And though Ugwu deemed them a “new breed,” they were only new compared to, say, Siskel & Ebert, who might have worked under the umbrella of Disney for a decade-plus but nevertheless had it stipulated in their contract that they remained free to critique, underline, any Disney production in any manner they saw fit. No, MovieTok is just a modern version of the public relation hacks that studios employed during the Golden Age to give them good copy, no matter what, to, yes, advertise and endorse their product. And lo and behold, just when I thought “Love Lies Bleeding” was about to start, here was the very same Millennial PR hack I had name-checked in my post stumping for the movie I was about to see. Reader, I was livid. 

In general, I don’t care for a pre-movie intro. I’ll make an allowance for the introductions of Ben Mankiewicz, and Robert Osborne before him, on Turner Classic Movies because, as the cable channel’s name implies, these are movies shown in a historical context, their artistic judgements long since rendered. But I don’t like Tom Cruise thanking for me coming to the theater before pitching his latest tentpole, and I really don’t like how ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentaries always begin with the director telling me what the movie we are about to see is about: if you do your job, the movie will tell me what your movie is about. At least, though, they are not telling me that the movie I’m about to see is brilliant – a word my MovieTok adversary used, though in the form of an adverb, as I recall from memory – and destined to be remembered as among the great second feature films of famous directors. What I ultimately thought of “Love Lies Bleeding” is neither here nor there in this context, and in a sense, that’s what Landmark Theatres and my MovieTok adversary were trying to tell me too. It was not even subliminal, this message, it was right to my face; it was the subtext, to paraphrase “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” rapidly becoming text.

When you go see a movie at Landmark, apparently, you no longer even have to decide for yourself whether or not it’s good – more specifically, whether or not you thought it was good. No, they’ll do that for you, and right at the beginning, saving you all that pesky intellectual work, a truly ominous development in the Art v Content War in which the latter continues to win. Indeed, I look forward to the day when you buy your $15 ticket, the Landmark Theatre Exclusive Intro tells you what to think of the movie you bought a ticket to see, and because they do, you don’t even have to stay for the movie. They don’t even show the movie! You just walk back outside after a few minutes, write a five-star review on Letterboxd, and go right back to scrolling.

Adventures in Movie Posters, part 281

After “Freelance” (“barely a movie,” raves Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com), our next crack at the would-be rom com resurrection is “Anyone but You,” starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, and slated for a Christmas release. I believe that both Sweeney and Powell have the juice. In fact, Sweeney, by this blog’s estimation, gave one of the year’s best performances in “Reality.” I was excited to see “Anyone but You,” albeit in a wait-for-streaming sort of way...until I saw the poster. Whether it’s worse than the awful “Freelance” poster might well be in the eye of the beholder, but it’s bad. Don’t judge a movie by a poster, and all that, and I’m trying real hard not to, I swear, but also, man, it’s so, so easy. Look at this thing.

Let’s start at the top here and work our way down. Because the reversed names, as in the wrong name is above the wrong person, gets us off to a rocky start. I mean, it’s nice to see Sydney Sweeney come before Glen Powell, and I would like to believe that Powell, who from my perch thousands of miles away in flyover country seems like a decent fellow, encouraged it. And though I know names being reversed is a regular occurrence, typically tied to contract and marketing flapdoodle, the right hand not doing what the left hand is doing, and all that, it just looks so haphazard and unprofessional. I mean, these marketing geniuses will babble about the importance of first impressions all the livelong day, and then they turn around give me this crap? What’s a dumb blogger supposed to think?! Practice what you PowerPoint!

Given the bare feet and their wet clothes, Sweeney and Powell would seem to have just taken a dunk in Sydney Harbour. Yet, their hair remains conspicuously coiffed, photoshop mixing with marketing so that the feet, so to speak, don’t know what the hands are doing. Speaking of the hands, or more to the point, the arms, them being crossed would suggest the duo being comically at odds. But those facial expressions! What are those?! They’re not at odds! Powell’s expression seems to have been taken from some heartthrob promo photo, not an unexpected plunge into the water, while Sweeney’s appears to have been grabbed from some paparazzi photo of her waiting in line at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Why would you do your star like that?! Besides which, given the wet clothes and the champagne bottle beside them, isn’t the takeaway supposed to be wacky rom com? They don’t look romantically tipsy; they look like two disinterested brats with champagne problems. What in god’s name are we doing?!

As for the tagline...I mean, the tagline could have worked, if they looked like the perfect couple, which they don’t! Because of everything we just said! [Steams comes out of ears.]

Sigh. At least, though, we can all take refuge in the image of Sydney Harbour, or more specifically, the Sydney Opera House, the burgeoning cinematic Tour Eiffel of the capital of New South Wales. At least, that’s how I imagine it, seeing this poster, the Sydney Opera House viewable from every pier, every wharf, every dock, imagining a whole new movie shot for me to obsess over, the Over the Shoulder Eiffel Tower Shot transformed into the Under the Bare Feet Sydney Opera House shot, an image Quentin Tarantino could love. 

The Ultimate Movie Star Advertisement

Among its many virtues, Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” (2003) comically exemplified not just the soul-sucking experience of a movie star shooting a commercial but how commercials take the shine off the movie star shooting it, as it did fictional American movie star Bob Harris (Bill Murray). You can be the most famous actor in the world, but when you’re shilling, you’re shilling, can’t get around it, reduced to the humiliating totem of some corporation. That’s why, as “Lost in Translation” knew, so many American movie stars choose to do their ad work overseas, where the humiliation can’t be seen in their home country. Or couldn’t be seen in their home country, anyway, until the advent of YouTube, which Harrison Ford probably wasn’t counting on during all those old Kirin Beer spots. This post is specifically about movie stars, yes, but before movies took over my life, nobody was cooler to my youthful Olympics-addled brain in the late 80s and early 90s than American Athletics superstar Carl Lewis. And while his ad for Coffee Pokka does not completely diminish all those Gold Medals and 28 inch long jumps, it doesn’t help.

Those T-Mobile ads airing right now where John Travolta recreates “Grease” alongside Zach Braff and Donald Faison for T-Mobile don’t help either; they merely remind you how much the actor’s star has already dimmed (again). Matthew Broderick taking a Ferris Bueller-ish day off for Honda in 2012 relegated his once larger-than-life character to something more adult, which is to say more parental, which is to say something squarer, like Jason Sudeikis in “Booksmart” asking, cluelessly, “Was that Cardi B?” Karl Malden repurposed his plainspoken persona for those long-running American Express ads with the omnipresent catchphrase in the name of fearmongering, if Columbo had become a F*x N*ws commentator. In some weird way, those AMC movie ads have been a boon to Nicole Kidman, at least where meme culture is concerned. But memes, in which imitation and repetition is the thing, are antithetical to the singular notion of the Movie Star. Matthew McConaughey’s Twenty-Ten spots for Lincoln played like stone-faced parodies while James Garner going to bat for Mazda in the 80s mostly became an accidental reflection of David Leisure becoming Joe Isuzu that same decade.

Come to think of it, Leisure put into perspective how utilizing comic actors rather than Movie Stars has long been the likeliest winning ad strategy, with Leslie Nielson and John Cleese doing crack work, respectively, for Coors and Magnavox (see above) back in the day. In our postmodern present, then, some Movie Stars have tried duplicating that comedic strategy, whether it’s Melissa McCarthy’s light-hearted spots for Booking.com or Ben Affleck’s more meta bits for Dunkin’, though like so many, these effect a try-hard strain. Burt Reynolds tried way too hard in making fun of his divorce from Loni Anderson while getting paid by Quaker State back in the 90s, cringy meta. Jeff Goldblum’s bits for Apartments.com as a tech tycoon Brad Bellflower barely effect anything, impossibly managing to throw cold water on the actor’s unique energy. Andy Samberg appearing in all these ads for Corona (along with Snoop Dogg and now Eli Manning too) work best to remind us that all Corona ever needed was that one palm tree decorated for the holidays. 

Some dramatic actors have found a way around the negating power of advertisements by only lending vocals, a la Sam Elliott for The Beef Industry Council and Gene Hackman for United Airlines, their commanding voices giving each spot’s tagline surprising heft, echoing the accompanying Aaron Copland’s “Rodeo” and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” respectively, rather than being overwhelmed by them. Could Orson Welles have managed such a trick had they kept him offscreen way back when for Paul Masson wine? We’ll never know. 

Keira Knightley’s ads for Chanel honored her Movie Star quality, a la Daniel Craig dancing for Belvedere Vodka, but those where essentially short films, cheats, in other words. No, reproducing that cinematic je ne sais quoi in 30 seconds or less, that’s the true test. Wilford Brimley was a perfect match for Quaker Oats, though his unassuming air always ran counter to the room-filling sensation of movie stardom, not unlike Jennifer Garner, really, who has managed to survive all these spots for Capital One for so long because her best Movie Star quality is an un-Movie Star-like affability. 

George Clooney’s Nespresso ads never compromise his innate magnetism even as they tend toward comedy, making splendid use of his penchant for droll facial expressions, one of the few successes of the genre. (In his more recent commercial work for Casamigos Tequila, on the other hand, Clooney is trying way too hard to appear as one of the guys, though that might be a product of him being a founder, knowing he has to sell it and working too hard at it.) James Coburn succeeded for Schlitz in the 70s in commercials that were kinda comedy bits, though Coburn played them less straight than unaffected, in his wholly committed but insouciant vibe presaging the celebrated Most Interesting Man in the World ad campaign of Dos Equis by a few decades. But no Movie Star – and here, now, finally we reach our point – has ever managed to maintain his or her Movie Star allure while pitching a product more than Penélope Cruz for Emirates.  

Every time in the last few weeks that I have seen this commercial, during every college football game, and every baseball playoff game, and every Real Housewives of Salt Lake episode, I have gasped. Every single time. These days may well be the strangest of my semi-long life, and I submit as Exhibit QXY-102 the above advertisement. Because the above advertisement more skillfully conveys the majesty of the Movie Star than most, nay, virtually all modern movies. It was directed by Robert Stromberg, who also directed Angelina Jolie’s “Maleficent,” suggesting he knows his way around a Movie Star, and in the above advertisement, all he and Pé require to maximize her Movie Star wattage is sixteen seconds and three shots.

In the first shot, Cruz beckons us into her private cabin aboard the Emirates airliner, allowing us to share this small space with her, at once rendering her Movie Star quality more intimate and more luminous. In the next shot, we are in the cabin with her, looking at her in repose in a medium shot, and though she is elegantly dressed and impeccably coiffed (that goes without saying), Cruz’s air is casual, relaxed, making us feel like we belong there too. Even so, the light pouring through the windows, like that scene in “The Irishman,” still gives her a tinge of the ethereal, which comes fully into focus when it cuts to the signature Movie Star shot, a close-up, overwhelming us. And if for her other myriad Emirates spots, Cruz is doing something, texting, watching fútbol, even showering, by doing nothing here other than basking, the ad becomes about nothing more than us basking in her presence, Emirates and the majesty of Pé becoming one.

Let's Talk About the Born in the U.S.A. Scene(s) in Air

There’s a scene in the 1984-set “Air,” director Ben Affleck’s retelling of how one Michael Jordan came to be the face of Nike, when the shoe company’s VP of marketing Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) explains how he has not so much misconstrued the lyrics to one of Bruce Springsteen’s big pop hits of that summer, “Born in the U.S.A,” but never really listened to them at all, assuming the song to be a message of hope, to borrow the 40th President’s distortion, when, in fact, it’s a blistering critique of the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is not the best “Born in the U.S.A.” scene in movie history. No, that remains Michael Moore’s otherwise mediocre “Canadian Bacon,” in which a few overly gung-ho Americans invading Canada (it’s complicated) begin singing the chorus to “Born in the U.S.A.” in celebration…and then realize they don’t know any of the other words. It’s a better scene because it essentially lives out Strasser’s speech, though as a longtime Springsteen fan who has been driven around the bend for years by so many misinterpretations of the song, I appreciate the monologue, nevertheless. Once, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and fed up with the patriotic correctness coursing through American culture, and in a fit of embarrassing self-righteousness, I told some dee jay at some bar who saw fit to play “Born in the U.S.A.” that he wasn’t hearing the song right. I was surprised my friends were still at the table when I returned.

 

 

The dee jay, it should be said, conceded my point vis-a-vis the song’s point only to then explain that given the late 2001 context, he was compelled to play it anyway, which struck me as bizarre, confirming the song’s truth while furthering its misconception. And that’s sort of what “Air” does too, explicitly stating that the song, it’s not about what you think it’s about, and yet, misappropriating the ironic triumphalism by dropping the needle on the song for the triumphant end credits, including one showing how the Jumpman logo, the pinnacle of corporate emblems came to be. In explaining the decision to use the song in that spot, Music Supervisor Andrea von Foerster told Esquire, “Many people do still think of that song as like, ‘Yay, America,’ so it was a nice way to end the story about these underdogs,” which, what? “Everything about the sequence hints at some troubling, unspoken tension between what we’re seeing and what it means,” Adam Nayman summarized for The Ringer, “but not to the point where it actually changes the material’s meaning: It’s irony without teeth, and it wouldn’t know who to bite if it could. The main takeaways from ‘Air’ are that an essentially faceless corporation found a way to humanize itself through a perfectly chosen surrogate superhero, and that the middle-aged dudes who made the pick were visionaries—cool rocking daddies in the U.S.A.” 

Bruce might be the American artist for whom I have the greatest affinity, as I said when my friend Jaime posed that question during her Walt Whitman Bicentennial Shindig a few years ago, but recently, whether he knows (cares) or not, the two of us have been on the outs. He played Wrigley Field not long ago and I didn’t go, didn’t want to go, wasn’t even sad about missing it. The tickets, they were just too much and that exorbitant price pissed me off as it did many other fans. “If there’s any complaints on the way out, you can have your money back,” he said in the aftermath of the uproar, as if that meant anything. I wouldn’t want my money back after having lunch at Le Grand Véfour either, Boss, but the question is, can I afford to have it in the first place? A songwriter who has excelled on putting himself in other people’s shoes, suddenly couldn’t. I know, I know, you can’t fight Ticketmaster. Pearl Jam fought Ticketmaster in the 90s and Ticketmaster won. If they couldn’t win, then what was Bruce supposed to do? I don’t know, at the absolute least, he could have not written all this off to market forces. He could have made some move toward understanding and remedying the fan’s lament, as The Cure’s Robert Smith nobly did. Thinking bigger, if not dreamily outlandish, given that he sets his prices, he could have set his prices as zero, meaning the tickets would have solely been Ticketmaster fees, exerting pressure on the monopoly by starkly putting into perspective its highway robbery. 

It might be unfair to ask an artist, any artist, to charge literally nothing to see them live, but then again, Springsteen sold his entire catalog to Sony in 2021 for what was reported as $500 million. And per a Credit Suisse 2016 wealth report, there are less than 2,500 US citizens with a net worth of $500 million or more. That means Bruce Springsteen, blue collar icon, meets the criteria of the so-called “super-rich.” A super-rich person couldn’t play a few shows for free to say, hey, look at what Ticketmaster is doing to you? In fact, that $500 million deal is why “Born in the U.S.A.” was allowed to appear in “Air” in the first place. When Lee Iacocca came calling in 1986 with an offer of $12 million to recast Springsteen’s protest song as the “Like a Rock” of Chrysler, Bruce could tell the CEO to stuff it because it was his song, literally his recording and his intellectual property. And upon selling his catalog to Sony, he literally gave away his recording and his intellectual property, and if, say, Bank of America wants to license “Born in the U.S.A.,” he has signed away the power to stop them.  

“I guess nobody likes the feeling that they wrote a song and in some way the song is bein’ stolen from them,” Springsteen told Kurt Loder in 1984, “or presented in a fashion they don’t feel they’d want to present it in.” He was talking about bootlegs, but he could have been talking about his music in general, though, of course, once he sold it to Sony, it couldn’t be stolen, just possibly presented in a fashion he might not have wanted it presented in, and part of me hopes when he saw “Born in the U.S.A.” kick in at the end of “Air” that he thought, wait a minute now. I’m being unfairly idealistic, perhaps, especially in a world where streaming has reduced the earnings of musicians to a measly trickle. But Bruce is also one of the few musicians remaining who could absorb that hit, and more than that, one who once opined that the key to adulthood is finding a way to maintain your idealism after your innocence is gone, a sentiment I have carried with me, and that I suppose I had hoped he was still carrying with him too. He frequently puts his music where his mouth is, true, and reliably votes blue, fair enough, but it was gravely disappointing to see that in the one way in which he can make a direct and immediate impact on his own fans, he was content to sit it out, lest his pocketbook take a hit, becoming the very cool rocking daddy he legendarily mocked. It’s funny, in a sad sort of way, that at a time when American unions and workers seem more galvanized than ever, and despite still being in strong enough shape to power his marathon shows, workaday hero Bruce Springsteen has gone soft. 

Hope Springs Eternal

The casts of Wes Anderson movies are typically so stacked that you’d be forgiven for thinking everyone has already been in one. And yet, Hope Davis, ironically given that this blog once argued she should literally be in everything, has never been in a Wes Anderson movie. And though I’m someone who might well have argued Wes’s “The French Dispatch” was the best movie of 2021, meaning I was aware of the existence of Anderson’s forthcoming “Asteroid City,” it had somehow escaped me that Hope Davis was in “Asteroid City” until I saw the trailer. I confess, I missed most of the trailer because every time she appeared, it took my breath away.

Davis is fifty-nine, after all, meaning she is considered a spinster in Tinseltown terms, well past The Hollywood Age Cutoff Line for women, mostly relegated to television, essentially allowed to appear in movies if she is playing someone’s mother, like “Captain America: Civil War.” Indeed, a 2014 study indicated that the careers of women in Hollywood peak at age 34. Sure enough, the Hope Davis-starring Cinema Romantico canon rom com “Next Stop Wonderland” was released in 1998 when Davis, born in 1964, was 34. I’ll be God damned.

Now Davis might seem outside the Wes Anderson wheelhouse given that his movies tend to call for fussiness – exactness – in his performers and Davis’s preeminent asset has often been a naturalistic quality, the frazzled eye of the station-wagon storm in the 1996 indie epic “The Daytrippers,” the genuine loving exasperation she evinces beneath that wig in “American Splendor,” or functioning as the true heart and soul of “About Schmidt,” her moving life exhaustion the kitchen-sink counter to all the stylized acting going on around her. But I mean, c’mon, man, she made her name in the 90s indie scene and you couldn’t hack it in the 90s indie scene if you couldn’t be credibly, nay, charismatically witheringly dry. And in the “Asteroid City” trailer, Davis’s gift for deadpan is on full display, innately illustrating my argument that she should be in everything because even though she’s never been in a Wes Anderson coffeehouse and is surrounded by Wes Anderson regulars she fits right in like she’s been there the whole time.   

The man who reviews a trailer is the man who’s lost his mind but, hey, what do I sound like if not a man who’s lost his mind? And when I saw Hope Davis in the “Asteroid City” trailer, I saw her second onscreen credit, 33 years ago, the nameless French Ticket Agent in “Home Alone” filtered through the French New Wave, just with an American accent, glorious, resplendent ennui. 

In a Bleak Place

I have been reading Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson’s “Hollywood: The Oral History” in which they provide a full account of the motion picture industry exclusively through quotes culled from interviews with a wide range of actors and directors and producers and craftspeople down through the years. If there is one phrase most favored in the quotations of Silent and Golden Age players, it is this: “in those days.” I swear that someone must begin or end an anecdote with the phrase “in those days” at least 700 times. It means that so many of these observations are looking back on the past, infused with studio system nostalgia. It’s certainly true that the studio system was beneficial in terms of both producing quality movies and in providing a middle-class lifestyle for people who were not the stars. But pulled from the files of Two Things Can Be True at Once, management was just as stringent in dictating to labor what they could and could not do, who they could and could not work for, and a lof of people interviewed seem to have selective memories about why the studio system ultimately came apart. You might have thought that between then and now, labor and management would have found a way to peaceably co-exist, but if the arc of moral universe bends toward justice, the arc of the economic universe bends the other way. Planet Earth Laureate Bruce Springsteen had it nailed in 1978 when he sang “poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything.” Then again, really, at this point, in 2023, where everything costs more than ever and few hardly make more than they did when everything cost so much less, poor man, I think, just wants to be lower middle class. 

The Writers Guild of America, as you doubt know, has gone on strike. Cinema Romantico stands in solidarity with them. The WGA is making several demands, including staffing and wage requirements on account of their generally being overworked and underpaid, a similar ditch into which so many purported American Dreams have plunged in recent times. But the WGA is also asking for safeguards against emergent Artificial Intelligence technology being deployed to devise stories and scripts and potentially eliminate all their jobs. Oh, like so many I once had visions of the machines as our glorious deliverers of a post-work utopia where we would all be free to just read and write and sip coffee and stare into space and watch all the late-tipoff time Lakers/Warriors games because we wouldn’t need to get to bed early to get up early to get to our jobs to make the money to pay for the cable package needed to watch the Lakers/Warriors game in the first place. But for all the satisfying comforts and conveniences rendered by so much high-tech progress, no matter how many times some tech bro dismisses you as a Luddite for deigning to wonder if every single technological advance is truly for the better, it’s increasingly clear that technology and humanity are on divergent paths, professing it’s all in the name of a better, happier world even as it only exacerbates that economic divide. 

Indeed, if Hollywood bigwigs can put more money in their own pockets by implementing all-AI storytellers, they would do it in a heartbeat, and at present I suspect anyone mounting an AI is Art argument of being a management plant. To them, art is Robert McKee’s Story fed through a computer, not something to study and evaluate and create, not something in conversation with itself through the years (decades) [centuries], not something that helps explain us, but art as an end result, as one more thing that can be done via algorithm. Not that management has ever really cared that much about art, of course. In Michael Schulman’s New Yorker piece on the writer strike he quoted Lila Byock, who has written for television’s “The Leftovers” and “Watchmen” among others, as saying “What the streamers want most right now is ‘second-screen content,’ where you can be on your phone while it’s on.” You want to stick to the sunny side of the street, but what is a statement like if that not two gloomy, rain-drenched sidewalks leading nowhere? 

This all made me remember my Monet-hating friend from Manhattan, an art student with the bravery to critically consider art. It made me already feel nostalgic (“In those days, we made the art ourselves”) for when my movie critiques would elicit protestations of nitpicking, that I was taking movies too seriously, that movies are about escape, man, and it made me imagine a future where people only watch movies on second screens while paying real watching Tik-Tok or playing Candy Crush on first screens and then skim my review on the last blogspot of whatever movie was on their second screen and excoriate me for watching the movie (on my first screen) at all. 

You've Gotta Stand for Something (or You'll Watch Anything)

My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I just returned from a short trip to New York City where, among other activities, we visited The Met, as one does, making sure to fit in some cool, refreshing French Impressionism. And as I reveled in a whole wall of glorious Monets, a couple early-twentysomethings, one guy, one girl, passed behind me, left to right, taking in the same paintings at a much swifter pace. Indeed, while the guy seemed at least generally interested, looking, leaning forward, the young woman’s posture was indifferent, slouched back, arms crossed, and as they departed the room, she said in an immaculately haughty vocal fry, “It’s just a bunch of pastoral landscapes.” I had to actively fight to hold in my laughter, and not because I was mad at her.

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The movie industry is going through some sort of seismic shift, one we will not fully understand, no matter how many people tell you they already do, until we are completely on the other side of it, though a good chunk of this ongoing reconfiguration pertains to the endless desire for pure, continual content. In writing about “the merciless drive for profit and the soulless imperatives” of modern college basketball, the esteemed Charlie Pierce noted that such a dynamic is engaged “once sports becomes about producing content rather than playing the games.” He may as well have been writing about cinema. Because there, too, the merciless drive for profit has fostered an incessant need to produce content rather than make movies. Yes, yes, the movies have always been a business, thank you very much, but the first major film studios and the people men who ran them made movies too.

This new inclination to eschew making movies for producing content is increasingly yielding something strange and alienating, a midpoint between late critic Manny Farber’s theory of White Elephant movies and Termite Art, the latter nibbling around the edges of the more formal former, Jetson Food Pill film, down the gullet, evoking the burgeoning AI art movement in spirit, strictly synthetic. Of course, people like Farber existed to help hold the movies accountable. And though he was a critic, movies have always been a form of mass entertainment, and with mass entertainment, if you buy a ticket, you, too, get to be a critic, them’s the rules, and yet more and more in our Let People Enjoy Things culture, wide swaths of people take offense to any criticism in the first place, exposing just the kind of apathy toward critical thinking that op ed columnists frequently cite the younger generations for lacking. No one wants to appraise movies, to hold them accountable, just consume them, which is how we frequently end up with ostensible analysis prefaced by the dreaded “Sure,” something like Sure, the actors are flat, and the camera is never in the right place, but it’s a movie, and I was distracted. WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as suspicious of the reflexive consensus bashers as I am of the consensus, but if you aren’t honest with art on both ends of the spectrum and everything in-between, that’s how art gradually gives way to mush. And if it seems like I’m just one more old man yelling at clouds, I’m honestly not, because in that young woman’s upturned nose toward my main man Claude, considering, deciding, and then dismissing, I saw hope for the future. 

Vibes and Stuff

I am no art historian, mind you, nor an armchair art historian even, just a guy who went to the Cézanne exhibit at Chicago’s Art Institute this past summer and read all the placards, most of which were intent on explaining the French painter’s intense relationship with vibrations. For him, these helpful signboards would essentially explain, it wasn’t enough to capture the thing in the painting – the fruit, the sky, the person – but the essence, nay, the feeling, the sensation, the vibration of the thing. When Cézanne said he wanted to astonish Paris with an apple, it meant, it seemed to me, that he did not merely want people to see a recreation of a Golden or a Granny or a Reine de Reinette, but to evince through a painting the sensation an apple would arouse in your presence by not just heightening your sense here in looking at his painting but to the way it would otherwise imperceptibly heighten your sense in the presence of an actual Golden or Granny or Reine de Renette. When I saw Still Life Bread And Leg Of Lamb, reader, without even realizing I was doing it, I licked my lips.

The word vibration has over the years been shortened into vibe, generally described as an ambiance or a feeling, like what Jackie DeShannon is singing about in “When You Walk in the Room.” That pop classic was released in 1964, a couple years before The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” which helped confer a hippie association on vibes. But vibes as we understand them now in terms of art, a kind of intrinsic emotional resonance, were around in 60s cinema too. Jean-Luc Godard (RIP) distributed vibes like party favors; Monica Vitti (RIP) rode the vibes of Antonioni like waves. Honestly, cinematic vibes go back even further to Howard Hawks taking Chandler and Hemingway novels, breaking them down, and then building them back up entirely in the vibes of Bogey and Bacall. Even Jean Harlow transcended the convoluted, contrived plot of something like “China Seas” by virtue of her platinum blonde vibes.

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the vibes.

As narrative cinema and narrative TV, however, grew ever more alike, with cliffhangers leading to new movies like new seasons, where knowledge is required of other plot lines in previous movies or similar movie universes, movie viewers became less enamored with vibes. Consider “Top Gun: Maverick,” frequently being described as better than “Top Gun” because it has a better, clearer narrative than the original which was just a sensory explosion of vibes. At the same time, however, it seems as if people began noticing the absence of vibes and started pushing back. Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times professed that “Tenet” should be understood as all vibes (though I grasp the larger point, I disagree with this take nevertheless, because Christopher Nolan is too taken with his own plots to think strictly in terms of vibes) and the invaluable culture writer Molly Lambert has frequently asked for less plot, more vibes. Kyle Chayka of The New Yorker has noted how Tik-Tok has become a vessel for a modern vibes revival, though what he’s writing about there, “the collection of real-world observations, strung together in a filmic montage,” evokes what something like Aaron Katz’s “Quiet City” was already doing back in 2007. The vibes revival of which Chayka writes might explain the long overdue reappraisal of Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice” (2006) as a masterpiece given how in so many ways it ditched story to harvest transcendence from the essence of a mojito, the sensation of the sky, the vibration of a speedboat seatbelt being buckled. The vibes have always been there.

Vibes have staged such a comeback that in a Through the Looking Glass situation they have even begun invading TV, like Hulu’s tale of a Chicago Italian Beef joint “The Bear,” leaving some people and critics raised on the age of Golden TV baffled. “(T)hat’s all there is,” Soraya Roberts semi-infamously lamented for Defector, “no thoughts, only vibes. Shows like these have no real point, only the aura of a point, one expressed through music, cinematography, set design, direction and acting, without a solid enough story or developed characters to ground it all.” Indeed, “The Bear” is not television as we have come to understand it. Even if television is sometimes framed as being like a movie, that’s generally because a series is a closed loop, a one-off season and that is not what “The Bear” program creator and executive producer Christopher Storer is up to. In fact, the worst part of the first season is precisely how it bridges to the inevitable second season by virtue of a plot twist that feels like an oddly earnest and inadvertent manifestation of the comic “Arrested Development” adage “There’s always money in the banana stand.”

No, “The Bear” is best understood not as an eight episode first season but as a sort of vibes suite, eight pieces of mood in which Storer and his team deploy all the devices Roberts is criticizing – music, cinematography, set design, direction and acting – to create that mood. The emergent recap culture of the last decade in which plot details are described and then contextualized in some attempt to fit them on the fly into a theory of a broader overarching theme is frankly useless in the face of something like “The Bear,” which is less surface than depth, to borrow a phrase from one of the Cézanne placards, a series of aesthetic choices meant to elicit a series of sensations and vibrations of a pressure-cooked kitchen, pockets of emotional release from all that pressure (the show might not get Chicago, as it were, in toto but every one of the smoke breaks in a back alley between people in white aprons looks like the ones I’ve been seeing in alleys behind restaurants from the train going to and from work for the last 17 years) and fleeting moments of beauty like the treats conjured up by an aspiring pastry chef.

Storer astonished dumb old TV with a cake; if you think that cake is no substitute for story, shit, I can’t help you.