Apr

24

2026

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Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): There are a great many heavy, serious things I’ve been reading and watching, but because we all need it, I thought I would share something that brought me about an hour of pure, unmitigated joy and escapism. Who among us elder millennials and Gen X cusps does not have the softest of spots for Richard Linklater’s 1993 movie Dazed and Confused, about the last day of school in Austin, Texas, in 1976? Among the many things I love about it is the way it’s very much of a specific time (the mid-’70s) and also out of it: The early ’90s was almost a sister period, the fashion sense and hedonistic sensibilities of two decades prior having cycled back around. But more importantly, the time is youth. There’s a loving and intoxicating portrait of American adolescence that both takes it seriously and grants it its frivolity. Of course, so much of that is tied up with sex—it’s the climate of the film, it’s in the air. Attractions circulate and shift directions with the wind.

That’s why it was so much fun to stumble upon a 2020 oral history of the real-life flirtations and hookups on the set of Dazed and Confused among the young, horny cast. Parker Posey seeking solace from her fraying relationship in Anthony Rapp! Joey Lauren Adams and Rory Cochrane listening to music together until 4 am! (And Ben Affleck getting none, ha!) Milla Jovovich was only 16 but ended up eloping with her onscreen boyfriend Shawn Andrews (her mother forced an annulment soon after). Jason London fell in “love-at-first sight” at auditions with Chrisse Harnos. In other words, it was all real. They were having an unforgettable summer together, sneaking in and out of each other’s hotel rooms, falling in love, being reckless and hormonal. If you’re a fan of the movie, I promise you’ll get a kick out of this little history.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Rheology begins as a science lecture. Bulbul Chakraborty, a real-life physics professor at Brandeis, stands before a blackboard, chalking formulas and amiably explaining the mysteries of sand (rheology is the study of how matter changes form under pressure). Sand is a “fragile matter,” she demonstrates, that can flow like water and also behave like something fixed and firm. Which is it, she amiably asks, liquid or solid?

Something similar might be asked of theater—it’s a flowing evanescent figment made of fleshly humans—and writer-director Chowdhury soon tacitly draws the analogy. Some 20 minutes into her lecture, Chakraborty sips some water and, alarmingly, begins to choke. Only when Chowdhury rises from a seat in the audience, to give her acting notes and to urge her to try again, do we know that she was faking. But she wasn’t at all faking in the sense one expects in the theater. She is no actor playing a fictional character; she is not only a real physicist, but also Chowdhury’s real-life mother, and in this false-but-true theatrical moment in which she struggles to breathe, Rheology changes its own form—and then does so again and again.

It morphs from science lesson into fourth wall-busting self-reflection, and then into operatic histrionics (a live cellist heightening the ginned-up emotion), surrealist fantasy, Tagore-inspired melodrama, and sentimental mother-son duet, all as Chowdhury imagines the unimaginable: his mother’s inevitable death. As it prances across these forms, the piece is by turns playful, tender, uncanny, and in one scene, when Chowdhury curls up next his mother and sucks his thumb, creepily Oedipal.

Performance theorists have long figured theater as a rehearsal for death. Herb Blau famously noted that it’s the only art form in which its medium—the human body—is moving toward its demise as we watch; Peggy Phelan argued that performance “becomes itself through disappearance.”

But Rheology also dramatizes a mother and son understanding each other in the fullness of their distinct lives—Chowdhury literally giving stage to Chakraborty’s arcane field of physics (as well as showing something of her existence before parenthood and her experience of losing her own mother) and Chakraborty literally entering the theatrical realm where her son professionally dwells. This profound mutual recognition makes it easy to believe Chakraborty when she reassures Chowdhury—who insists he will die without her—“You will hold your shape.”

When I saw Rheology last spring at the Bushwick Starr—it is now revived at Playwrights Horizons—it was just months after my own mother had died (at age 97—Chakraborty is only in her early 70s) and I had been feeling far more liquid than solid. Chakraborty described my state: I was like grains of sand that “hold together even as they come apart from themselves.”

Yet she reassured me, too, and so did the show, even as it shattered me.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In the ’70s, it seemed that every week there was a new film released by Lina Wertmüller. She was an over-the-top director whose films I didn’t much like, preferring Bresson, Rohmer, Wenders, and Truffaut. In truth, I found her films unpleasant—her exaggerated characters struck me as buffoons of no interest, her attitude toward them as contemptuous and facile. But the restoration and rerelease of the first film of her major period, 1972’s The Seduction of Mimi, has shown me that I wasn’t nearly as intelligent and sophisticated a cinephile as I thought I was when I was 20.

It is not in any way a subtle film; its characters are not granted depth, and their lives and circumstances are not painted in subtle shadings. Everything in it is larger than life, pushed to the extreme. I didn’t see then what I see clearly now: The Seduction of Mimi is an opera without songs. In his brilliant Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler talks about how operas were the novels of illiterate Italy. The Seduction of Mimi applies the spirit of opera to the European art film, making its points broadly and brutally, but even so, with great truth.

The original title of the film translates to The Metallurgist Mimi Wounded in Honor, which pretty much tells the tale. The titular Mimi is a poor Sicilian laborer, unhappily married, who moves, as so many from southern Italy did, to Turin. Though he lost a job for voting Communist, through Mafia connections he manages to get a new job in an auto factory, and he immediately falls in with the Communists there. He becomes enamored of a beautiful supporter of the far left; playing on every possible stereotype of the over-sexed southerner, Wertmüller has him sweep her off her feet. They have a child, and he leaves politics behind. After another run in with the Mafia, he is transferred to his native region, where he falls into a caricatural—an operatic—version of a tale of jealousy and infidelity.

Mimi—played by Wertmüller’s favorite actor, Giancarlo Giannini—is a cartoon version of a Sicilian, with slicked back hair, out-of-date attire, and revoltingly reactionary attitudes toward women despite his professed Communism. Every gesture he makes is grand, every emotion spills off the screen in its excess. He is honest to the max, unfaithful to the max, an imposing lover to the max, a cuckold to the max, and an avenger to the max. Everyone around him is cut on the same cloth, from his Turinese lover, played by Wertmüller regular Mariangela Melato, to his Sicilian wife, his wife’s lover, and his wife’s lover’s wife, whom he impregnates out of spite.

No one is realistic, and the score by Piero Piccioni accentuates the operatic nature of the film. Mimi is, of course, one of the most famous of all names in Italian opera, but in the opera it is that of a woman, the female lead in La bohème. That it’s borne here by a man (his real name is Carmelo) is just another way for Wertmüller to mock the hyper-masculinity of the character.

Wertmüller’s satire is broad and all-encompassing. Crooked capitalists, southern Italians, masculinity, reactionary womanhood, and hippie leftism all take it on the chin. Wertmüller’s touch is not flawless, and there are moments of grotesque cruelty that are simply mean-spirited. But The Seduction of Mimi is a magnificent relic of a time when there was a left in Italy, when the working class and its organizations were feared and hated. More than a relic, it’s a film that marked an epoch in Italian cinema.

The Facebook comments and WhatsApp diatribes I have written and deleted over the past several years, if compiled, would fill a book. Thank God they will not be. It would be a chronicle of aggravation, in which I repeatedly trip the wire of someone else’s grievance or condescension, falling into the pit where they await me, also ensnared. (You think my internationalist reading of Hanukkah is blithely naive? Well, when we dispassionately consider the scholarly sources, it does seem that perhaps you are the idiot, not I.) Though I confess that I am particularly vulnerable to reactive polemic—to the sadomasochistic exhilaration of a verbal ping-pong match, in which the smashes and slices grow ever more nastily violent—I’m hardly alone. I have been subjected to much unmerited attack, and have observed thirdhand even more. And while I sometimes feel I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by online arguments, there are real reasons to enter the fray. Here we all are, after all, amid a genocide. And we are immediately proximate, by a ghostly digital affordance, to others sharing infinitely graded, subtly differentiated outrages, with no clarity on which misstatements of fact to correct, which unabashed barbarities to contest.

In some circumstances, religious Jews must critique. The requirement of tokhehah—rebuke or correction—is derived from this week’s (double) parshah, Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, in which God commands the Israelites, “Reprove your fellow.” Which emails, texts, and posts qualify? This verse has occasioned a voluminous rabbinic literature, which I will not rehearse in full, lest you censure me for long-windedness. Who is “your fellow,” who must, or even can, be rebuked? The early sage Rabbi Elazar son Azaryah once exclaimed, “I swear there is no one in this generation who is able to accept reproof.” Meanwhile Rabbi Akiva swore that no one in his generation knew how to rebuke. Even as they renounce tokhehah, however, these rabbis are implicitly performing it, eschewing direct reproof but delivering a second-order, generalized sermon, thus anticipating the liberal (or me, above) bemoaning “our” uncivil discourse.

Puzzlingly, in our parshah, this divine directive appears as one of several short, staccato directives, whose relations are tantalizingly ambiguous: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself: I am God.” That but, for instance, is often rendered as “and”—a translational nuance on which hinges the question: Is incurring guilt invoked to limit critique or to motivate it? The latter option implies a doctrine of collective responsibility. When I did not castigate my Israeli acquaintance for soliciting contributions to buy body armor for West Bank settlers, perhaps it is as if I had Venmoed her the cash. And then, are those different terms for the vexing Other (brother, kinsman, countryman, fellow) merely elegantly varied synonyms, or are subtle contrasts intended between differently neighborly intimacies and what they require of us? And so on—one can easily multiply questions. I suspect intentional obscurity, perhaps capturing the absurdity of settling fine-grained interpersonal and emotional problems with pithy maxims.

Last year I learned a medieval hot take about tokhehah, which I found novel and refreshing. Ramban, a 13th-century Catalan commentator, suggests that the Torah is not talking about general moral correction, but about cases when someone has wronged you. Ramban’s proposal has the advantage of tying the verses into a neat bundle. When someone acts against your will, you may want to fester in resentment or to retaliate; the Torah implores us in such a case to indulge neither temptation, but instead to advocate for our needs directly. As additional evidence, Ramban points to what tokhehah means when it appears in a story in Breishit: “Abraham reproved the [foreign king] Abimelech for the well of water his servants stole”—that is, about Abraham’s direct, material interest. For the Ramban, we are commanded to rectify only the errors that harm us.

Ramban’s suggestion intriguingly anticipates a classic Marxist insight. Marx, as the philosopher Vanessa Christina Wills elaborates in her level-headed recent book, Marx’s Ethical Vision, is skeptical of the idea that merely telling people what to do can improve the world—not because Marx is amoral, but because he thinks social change results out of self-interested struggles of historical classes. Marx could vituperate and excoriate with the best of them, but rarely by appealing to abstract rules—and with no delusion that he could reliably persuade elites to act against their interests. Rather, Marxists organize the working class by appealing to—if also sometimes clarifying—what they need and want. They thus see “moralism”—ascetic sermons about placing one’s duties above one’s needs, or a faith in abstract ethical debate divorced from a historical theory of change—as itself bourgeois ideology, which mystifies the world and impedes working-class power.

Marx’s and Ramban’s privileging of interest almost necessitates some sort of ethical psychotherapy, to untangle which of our immediate responses derive from our real needs, and which are the intellectual ephemera of scholastic point-scoring, utopian fantasies of convincing someone of something their salary depends on their not understanding, the profitable anxieties induced by the digital platforms and their sinister logics, or the perversely libidinal pleasures of moral disputation itself. In other words, when God concludes “I am God,” the assertion may be that universal critique is a uniquely divine prerogative. Our humbler job is just to look after ourselves.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book, Fictions of God, is out now.