Shabbat
Reading List

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): After the recent season finale of Yellowjackets and series conclusion of Succession, I went in search of some new high production value drama to fill the void and happened upon From, a much-less-covered series currently streaming on MGM+. (If, like me, you didn’t know that was even a thing, you can get a seven-day free trial, or find the first season on Amazon Prime.) Despite its wildly inconsistent performances and consistently mediocre writing, the show masterfully produces an atmosphere of dread I’ve found absorbing and irresistible. From follows the population of an unnamed American town whose residents have gradually and mysteriously arrived from across the country—and are unable to escape. Continuing along the road that brought them there only leads them right back to the town in an inexplicable loop. To make matters worse, the area is plagued by nocturnal monsters who eviscerate anyone outside after dark. Kept at bay by talismans hung in all the buildings, the creatures, which assume human form until they attack, prowl outside windows and try to trick the townspeople into letting them in. (Warning for those with weak stomachs: When they succeed, the camera does not hide the gory results.)

This compelling but simple nightmare premise is just the beginning. As perplexing as its impossible-to-Google and so far unexplained title, From piles on layer after layer of mystery, from a supernatural force inciting intracommunal violence to trees capable of teleporting objects or people. The show, which concludes its second season next week, is much more interested in generating questions than answering them, prompting comparisons to Lost and fear among viewers that there will never be satisfactory explanations. (The shows share producers as well as one star, Harold Perrineau, who is excellent as the town’s self-appointed sheriff and de facto mayor.) It’s a fair concern, especially as the second season has lost some of the momentum of the first. But personally, I don’t really mind if the puzzles simply continue to accrue. Just keep the spooky vibes coming.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): It’s been a huge month in UFOs. Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, the team that brought military videos of UFOs to the front page of The New York Times in 2017, broke a story on June 5th in The Debrief about former intelligence officer-turned-whistleblower with top secret clearance named David Grusch who claims that covert programs within the Pentagon “possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin,” “based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures.” (!!!!!!!!) It is well worth reading this long article all the way through. (Kean says it was initially going to be in The Washington Post, but their vetting process was taking too long for Grusch, who was already facing threats and reprisals for his whistleblowing.) Grusch, backed up by a number of high level intelligence officials (some of whom speak on record in the piece), claims that these covert programs lack the proper oversight and are illegally keeping this knowledge from Congress. Another intelligence official with top secret clearance—whose work is so secretive he literally works under an alias at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC)—said: “The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone.” “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.” (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

At this point, Grusch has provided hundreds of pages of testimony during a Congressional inquiry devoted to investigating the claims he made in Kean and Blumenthal’s article. In an interview on the Ezra Klein show earlier this week, Kean said that as a result of this testimony, Congress has access to details that Grusch could not release to the press because of national security concerns. Kean and Klein speculated about whether we might get this yet-to-be shared information as this investigation works its way through Congress, whose staffers are a bit more “leaky” than those at the Pentagon. The entire interview with Kean is also worth a full listen: Klein is intrigued but skeptical and asks Kean thoughtful questions. If all of this is really true, how have these programs been able to keep everything under wraps for so long? Why would the Pentagon sign off on Grusch revealing this information? Do the people who approved the publicity think the revelations are false? Do they even have full knowledge of the programs within their own purview? Indeed, this last question is key to their discussion, and what it suggests about the nature and structure of the intelligence apparatus is serious conspiratorial deep state shit right out of X-Files.

I love listening to Kean on this; she’s such a great representative for the rational UFO community. She never tries to undermine the legitimacy of Klein’s questions; she says straightforwardly what she does and doesn’t know—more often the latter. But what she does know is that these are real intelligence officials with high levels of clearance involved in super secretive programs dedicated to UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena, the new “respectable” term for UFOS). “Maybe after it’s investigated it’ll come to light that none of it is true,” she tells Klein, but she wants that investigation.

Before you make a decision about what you believe, listen to Kean’s interview with Klein. Something is happening. Everyone publicly affiliated with these programs has finished their work convinced of that. It’s time to put away the idea that UFOs are just for kooks and listen to the experts.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When Jean Eustache’s film The Mother and the Whore was released in 1973, it immediately became a defining work of post-1968 French and international cinema. In its sexual frankness, its unflinching portrayals of its main characters, and its refusal of high moral or political values, it set a new aesthetic template. But despite its acclaim and influence, it has been difficult to find and is seldom screened, due to problems with distribution and rights ownership. Now, in honor of its 50th anniversary, and thanks to the indispensable Janus Films, The Mother and the Whore has been restored and is headlining a Eustache retrospective at Lincoln Center, featuring the small corpus he left behind when he died by suicide in 1981.

The Mother and the Whore, which opens today and will be screened dozens of times between now and July 13th, is painfully autobiographical, based in part on Eustache’s relationship with actress Françoise Lebrun, who appears in the film as a promiscuous nurse named Veronika (the titular “whore”). French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud stars as Alexandre, who mooches off his lover Marie (the “mother”), played by Bernadette Lafont, another major New Wave figure. It is a very Parisian film, with Alexandre spending much of his time in the famed café Les Deux Magots reading Proust—which, he explains, he treats like a job—while friends recount cynical tales of stealing wheelchairs. It is precisely because the film avoids the political militancy of its time that it has aged so well: On this viewing, at least my tenth, I was still stunned by its genius.

While The Mother and the Whore is singularly revelatory, the other films in the retrospective fill out the picture of Eustache and his world. He was a child of small-town France (what’s known as “La France profonde”), and most of his works are accounts of life there. Numéro Zéro presents nothing but the filmmaker’s beloved grandmother, who partially raised him, telling her life story, a tale of sorrow and misery that mirrors France’s. Eustache made two versions of the documentary The Virgin of Pessac—one in 1968, the other in 1979—which are set in one of the towns he grew up in near Bordeaux and document an annual contest to name the “most virtuous” young woman. Viewed together, the films form a kind of history of France as it existed before, during, and after May ’68, and a look at the persistence of tradition. Eustache’s final major film, My Little Loves, is also set in Pessac, as well as his childhood town of Narbonne, and recounts his childhood discovery of desire, disappointment, and the love of cinema. The retrospective’s other offerings include two medium-length films being shown together, Robinson’s Place and Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, which most plainly exhibit the cynical view of women and sexual relations that we can glimpse throughout Eustache’s oeuvre.

Eustache retrospectives are a rare occurrence—Lincoln Center last had one about 20 years ago—so this is an event not to be missed. Now that his films are in the hands of Janus Films, we can hope they will soon finally be available for home viewing and in cinemas across the country.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): In the introduction to Getting Lost, a collection of diaries documenting a love affair she had in 1989, the French novelist Annie Ernaux writes that she chose to publish her journals when she returned to the diaries years later and found that they captured “something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation.” The resulting book, translated into English for the first time last year by Allison L. Strayer, records the writer’s single-minded obsession with a mysterious Russian diplomat named S. That S., as the diaries describe him, is not particularly compelling, nor deep, nor charming is unimportant; what matters is the effect he has on Ernaux: that she longs for him at every moment of every day, lives only for the ring of the phone, her mood dictated only by his presence or absence.

It’s not always easy to stare this total monomania directly in the face. Ernaux reproduces the text of her diaries without any annotation, the desire unadulterated by hindsight, and the force of this passion is almost illegible to anyone not in its grasp. Even Ernaux herself eventually loses the ability to inhabit the diaries’ state in mind, as she notes in the introduction: Visiting Russia a decade later, she “no longer cared whether [S.] was alive or dead.” In the diaries, she’s aware this will eventually happen, and that it will both restore her sanity and result in a loss of feeling and perspective. That’s why it’s so important to record an emotional experience as it comes to pass. To “see things with more distance,” as she writes in the diary, will be to “become incapable of writing what I’m writing here, of being attentive to these shifts of feeling inside people . . . provoked by passion, desire, and jealousy.” Indeed, for Ernaux, the affair was its own artistic pursuit. Though she writes that her absorption in it drained her interest in the writerly achievements and publishing industry gossip that preoccupy her colleagues, the experience seems to bring her closer to the act of writing; “I have lived out this passion in the same way I write, with the same commitment.”

It becomes clear over the course of the diaries that their intensity represents Ernaux’s desire not just for an unnamed man but for an organizing principle of life itself. To wait by the phone may be excruciating, but it’s still something to do and to live for. “How am I going to live without hope, without waiting?” she wonders as she anticipates S.’s departure. His imminent absence is described as death, emptiness, the abyss. Which means that his presence is a simple opportunity to “live for the sake of living,” to experience “pure life.”

Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): Last week, I dutifully schlepped up to Lincoln Center and white-knuckled it through Blue Jean, British director Georgia Oakley’s debut feature about the consumptive paranoia of Jean Newman, a lesbian gym teacher in Thatcher-era Newcastle. Maggie sets the stage in the film’s opening scenes, intoning on the radio about Section 28, a new prohibition on the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools. Jean, freshly divorced from her ex-husband and a new fixture of the one-bar-town’s queer scene, finds herself overwhelmed and isolated by the prospect of losing her job if the thick layer of hairspray coating her boyish bob and her punk girlfriend draw too much attention.

I’m putting it a little facetiously. I was, truthfully, blown away by Blue Jean’s narrative delicacy, which treats plot points that could have landed as eye-rollingly familiar beats of a lesbian period drama with new emotional resonance. Much of that is a credit to Rosy McEwen’s performance as Jean, which, while stony-faced, is full of depth and intention. The film’s exploration of how ambient political stress damages people—and leads them to bad personal choices—lifts it out of the category of low-calorie representational fare.

Oakley, who also wrote the film, has mentioned that her research for the script included interviewing a handful of lesbian gym teachers who worked while Section 28 was in effect. This commitment to documenting the world these women created for themselves deserves credit for breathing new life into some tired genre tropes. (Lovers of the indie lesbian limited-release will recognize these: the more comfortably out partner who feels boxed in by her lover’s discomfort; the well-meaning co-workers who want to know why their closeted colleague just won’t come for the after-hours drink; the tacitly disapproving biological family who wish their daughter/sister/aunt would grow her hair back out; and a cameo for The Well of Loneliness, which made me groan).

But it is Jean’s distant, strained relationship with Lois, a student who is herself suspected of being queer, that represents the film’s real departure from a certain genre peer group. Jean, in effect, refuses to mentor Lois, and a climactic moment of betrayal between the two characters turns what could have been flat, easy fan service into the film’s raison d’être. Without revealing too much, Jean simply cannot meet the political and personal demands placed on her, and in operating from a place of self-preservation and gnawing anxiety, she fails to protect Lois. The scene precipitates a synthesis for Jean: in a short redemption arc that plays out less simply than it sounds, she attempts to make amends with her former student and the community members she’s alienated over the course of the film.

I was refreshed, though run emotionally ragged, by how Blue Jean refuses to be a canned coming out story or coming-of-age affair. As the film’s plodding, careful political aspirations came into view, I realized just how worth the schlep it was.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Mark Cousins’s The March on Rome is an impressive, detailed, and necessary analysis of the original fascism. Movies about Germany’s imitation and ultimate surpassing of Mussolini’s regime are many; films that look closely at Italian fascism’s rise and its legacy are far fewer. Cousins approaches the subject through a dissection of a 44-minute propaganda film from 1922, titled A Noi! (To Us!). This film, full of fakery and deception, is a depiction of the March on Rome of October 1922, in which the National Fascist Party took power. It’s of next to no interest cinematically, but Cousins sees its content and technique as perfect representations of the fascist ideology. Examining key scenes moment by moment, he demonstrates how shots portraying the supposedly huge masses of marching Neopolitan fascists were framed to make the crowds look larger. Cousins also reveals how shots that seem to show the Blackshirts’ entry into Rome are actually reenactments; their real arrival, which occurred under a downpour, would have been insufficiently heroic. Fascism was a fraud from its first moments.

The March on Rome covers much ground beyond the march itself: the backroom deals that allowed Mussolini to become head of the government, the ways he manipulated crowds, Italy’s wars and imperialist crimes in Africa, and the people’s eventual disgust with the regime they had so faithfully supported for over 20 years. But Cousins doesn’t only consider fascism in the past. Throughout the film we see buildings, statues, and plazas in Rome that still bear fascist symbols or slogans; it’s a tremendously effective way to show the ideology’s tenacious hold. Far less successful are the film’s final ten minutes, in which Cousins explores contemporary instances of what he considers fascism, from Hungary to Brazil to France to the United States. While this coda is totally superfluous, the rest of the film is required viewing.

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Last weekend, after years of insistent recommendations from labor organizer friends and ahead of the annual Boston Dyke March, I decided to finally watch Pride. I had missed enough union movie nights over the years to have a vague idea of what the 2014 film was about: the true story of queer activists supporting the UK miners’ strike in the 1980s in a show of capital-s Solidarity.

Indeed, within minutes of the action starting, the film’s gay protagonist, Mark Ashton (based on a real-life activist by the same name), gives a speech that could be taught in Labor 101 classes to outline why solidarity matters. In conversation with his queer friends, Ashton notes that cops haven’t been harassing them lately—but it’s only because they’re too busy harassing miners. Solidarity, then, is not born of empathy for a completely separate cause, but a recognition that all struggles are connected. Fueled by this realization, Ashton spends nearly the entirety of the film’s run time convincing his fellow queer activists that the miners’ fight was also theirs (although his dedication to the cause might’ve been more believable had the movie not erased his communist credentials).

I admit I went into the film jaded. Years of labor organizing have made me suspicious of stories of solidarity, which can act as a kind of escapist fantasy—telling the weary organizer that even though she spends most days getting doors slammed in her face, there is light at the end of the tunnel. But if Pride is an escapist fantasy, it is an excellent one, really capturing the allure of unlikely alliances. There’s a quick montage of queer activists struggling to find miners who will accept their help, but after only a few slammed phone receivers, they find an open-minded miner who warmly invites them down to his Welsh village to thank them for their strike-fund donations. Once in Wales, the queer activists face some bigotry, but they quickly win many of the miners over with impassioned speeches, material resources, and sheer flamboyance (one burly miner quickly abandons his homophobic attitudes when he realizes that his gay comrades could teach him how to dance so he could win over the ladies).

This film is, of course, based on a true story, meaning that this alliance really did happen. But my inner cynic had to wonder, could have been so easy, and so tender, and so pure? Why did the miners not abandon their queer allies when it meant bad press for their strike? And why did gay people help miners so single-mindedly despite the near-constant homophobia? In the film, the characters seemed to make these decisions simply because solidarity is good, but few real people I’ve known work like that, and I wish the film dwelt on these dilemmas of solidarity rather than introducing them and then waving them away.

But ultimately, the film isn’t a documentary: it’s a feel good movement biopic, and on those terms, it succeeds. Even though I found the story unbelievable, I watched, longing to believe. I reveled in each victory, each conversation where miners and queer people connected on a personal level, each moment antagonists failed at breaking the alliance. I was moved by the triumphant ending and for a moment, pretended it were true: that the miners’ strike had actually ended in a way that merited soaring music, that pride parades had remained a scene of political struggle rather than becoming a corporate-funded equality theater, and that true solidarity was still possible.

Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): Maybe you too were unsettled by the cloud of smoke that settled over the Northeast this week. In an effort to abate my despair over the climate emergency already consuming us, as well as the dull headache that came on after biking through the smog, I turned back to one of my favorite books by Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The novel follows Janina, an older Polish woman who lives on a rural, windswept plateau near the Czech border, as she investigates a series of beguiling murders, apparently committed by Mother Nature herself.

The novel is ultimately an eco-thriller, concerned with the rights of animals and the natural world. It’s a genre I don’t particularly care for, but what attracted me to Tokarczuk’s take on the form—and kept me engaged until the last page—is its narrator’s fascinating, singular voice. Janina lives in a closed, remote world, and her psychology mirrors the circumstances of her social life. She operates in her own epistemological universe, re-naming everyone she encounters, capitalizing nouns as it pleases her, and charting the stars according to her own astrological system. (One subplot follows her attempt to translate William Blake’s verse into Polish—an amusing metatextual puzzle for the English-language reader, who has to parse Lloyd-Jones’s translations of Janina’s Polish renderings.) Tokarczuk’s careful depiction of Janina’s consumptive solipsism—as well as her miserly worldview and righteous anger, which fuel the novel—is vividly on display in her reaction to her neighbor’s corpse, which she stumbles upon in one of the novel’s opening scenes:

As I looked at Big Foot’s poor, twisted body I found it hard to believe that only yesterday I’d been afraid of this Person. I disliked him. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say that I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn’t even regard him as a human Being. Now he was lying on the stained floor in his dirty underwear, small and skinny, limp and harmless. Just a piece of matter, which some unimaginable processes had reduced to a fragile object, separated from everything else. It made me feel sad, horrified, for even someone as foul as he was did not deserve death. Who on earth does? The same fate awaits me too, and Oddball, and the Deer outside; one day we shall all be nothing more than corpses.

Needless to say, the novel does not make for lighthearted escapism—much of the action is gruesome, disgusting, and difficult to read—but the alternate world reflected through Janina’s consciousness is deeply absorbing. I regret to report, however, that like many mystery novels, Tokarczuk’s narrative runs out of steam by the final act. But if you’re thinking about what it means to live on this earth as systems of exploitation—and even certain individuals—work to corrode our natural world, then this might be the tour de force you’re looking for.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): With the exception of a few versions of his most iconic piece, 4’33”, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a recording of a work by John Cage. He’s certainly absent from my modest vinyl collection—which would have been fine by him. The preeminent 20th-century avant-garde composer was famously hostile to recorded music, which he once said “destroys one’s need for real music” and “makes people think that they’re engaging in a musical activity when they’re actually not”; he even remarked that “it would be an act of charity . . . to smash [records] whenever they are discovered.” But why? In a conversation that appears in For the Birds, a collection of exchanges between Cage and the philosopher Daniel Charles, the latter reflects that “records, according to you, are nothing more than postcards . . . ”; Cage responds: “which ruin the landscape.”

This quip lends musician and scholar David Grubbs’s fascinating 2014 book Records Ruin the Landscape its title. The core of Grubbs’s project is to investigate Cage’s and his peers’ antipathy toward records, as well as the music that exceeded the confines of the medium, which emerged just as the heyday of certain experimental genres came into focus during the 1960s. As Grubbs explains in the introduction, “Cage’s opposition to the fixed form of the record . . . is the expression of a pioneer of works that are indeterminate as regards performance, works that on the basis of their design change significantly with each iteration,” and the various kinds of avant-garde music the book explores are likewise “predicated on being experienced in live performance.” Nevertheless, most of the artists considered here did—however begrudgingly—record their music. While these recordings rarely circulated at the time, their release in subsequent decades earned the works an audience well beyond those who originally heard them in person. Grubbs shows how Cage, his contempt notwithstanding, “created unprecedented types of recordings,” finding surprising ways to contest the medium’s constraints.

Grubbs, himself a record lover, is a generous yet critical guide to the ideas of the musicians he studies. He takes their provocations seriously, using them not only to illuminate experimental works that escape documentation, but also to defamiliarize the phenomenon of recorded music and raise probing questions about its very nature. At the same time, he complicates Cage and others’ antagonism toward the form into a more fruitful ambivalence, while highlighting the elitism and racism that has often undergirded avant-garde attitudes. (The latter comes to the fore in Grubbs’s discussions of Henry Flynt—a practitioner of “avant-garde hillbilly music” whose folk roots Cage considered unserious—and of “free improvisation,” which sought to “obscure its relation to jazz improvisation” through what scholar and composer George E. Lewis calls “a notion of spontaneity that excludes history or memory.”) Despite the heady material, Grubbs’s style is pleasantly chatty and digressive, though the book’s structure is sometimes distractingly haphazard; we wouldn’t have lost much if he’d cut the deflating final chapter on online archives, and I sometimes longed for more synthesis of the insights scattered throughout the text. Still, Records Ruin the Landscape is both an engaging inquiry and a vivid introduction to a wealth of interesting music—which, ironically, we must now access through the medium its practitioners largely disdained.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Last fall, the Library of America published Frederick Douglass: Speeches and Writings, an essential collection of works by the great fighter against slavery and oppression. Unlike his autobiographies, many of Douglass’s occasional writings and addresses have not been readily available, and certainly not in such a comprehensive form as this. Included in this collection, edited by Douglass’s biographer David W. Blight, are more than a hundred pieces of various types from across Douglass’s long and active life. These letters, articles, and speeches—as well as a novella—are filled with the anger, intelligence, and clarity that make him such a singular figure. Every page of this generous anthology, the single largest volume of his works ever assembled, still packs a punch. Most could have been written the day before yesterday—a reflection on both Douglass’s genius and the enduring legacy of our wretched nation’s criminal history.

As many of these pieces show, Douglass excelled at making his militant points through acerbic humor. In an 1841 speech given in Massachusetts on “American Prejudice and Southern Religion,” he spoke cuttingly of Northern racism and Christianity’s role in its perpetuation and wryly related this tale: “Another young lady fell into a trance—when she awoke, she declared she had been to Heaven; her friends were all anxious to know what and whom she had seen there; so she told the whole story. But there was one good old lady whose curiosity went beyond that of all the others—and she inquired of the girl that had the vision, if she saw any black folks in Heaven? After some hesitation, the reply was, ‘Oh! I didn’t go into the kitchen!’ Thus you see, my hearers, this prejudice goes even into the church of God.” His wit comes through, too, in an 1845 letter to the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in which he describes the sorry state of American “democracy”: “Yes, they actually got up a mob—a real American, republican, democratic, Christian mob—and that, too, on the deck of a British steamer, and in sight of the beautiful high lands of Dungarvan! I declare, it is enough to make a slave ashamed of the country that enslaved him, to think of it.”

Douglass was also a master of sober reflection. In another letter to Garrison, composed the following year, Douglass writes beautifully on a subject that was dear to him: his and his people’s relationship to America: “And as to nation,” he writes, “I belong to none. I have no protection at home, or resting-place abroad. The land of my birth welcomes me to her shores only as a slave, and spurns with contempt the idea of treating me differently. So that I am an outcast from the society of my childhood, and an outlaw in the land of my birth . . . If ever I had any patriotism, or any capacity for the feeling, it was whipt out of me long since by the lash of the American soul-drivers.”

As this truly majestic collection attests, Douglass is still a vital presence. Writers who take up these same subjects today can only aspire to write like him.

This week, the Jewish Currents Slack was ablaze with takes on and responses to the series finale of HBO’s Succession. Is this the end of prestige television? Did the writers of this micro-generation’s most tweeted-about show stick the landing? This week, we’re bringing you four reactions to the series, which, unfortunately, do contain spoilers.

This week, news editor Aparna Gopalan expresses dismay in her colleagues’ ability to sample “different flavors of vileness;” executive editor Nora Caplan-Bricker reflects on the fourth season as a redemption of the show as a whole, even if the siblings themselves are irredeemable; associate editor Mari Cohen considers what it means for Succession to be, at its core, a show about the media; and editor-in-chief Arielle Angel apologizes to Shiv.

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): You can’t escape Succession. I would know; I’ve tried. Mentions of the HBO show have clogged my social media for months, and for months, I’ve scrolled past them. But rejoining the Jewish Currents Slack destroyed my resolve. Quite apart from wanting to be part of the conversation, I became curious about the series that could impassion even my most sober colleagues. So I rounded up my housemates and pressed play on episode one of season one, just as Twitter buzzed about the series finale.

Unfortunately, the show was just what I expected: a prestige entertainment product about a bunch of scheming suits who, tiresomely, were also a family. It was capably executed, of course: well-paced, fluid, and full of shocking and memorable scenes (I still retch thinking of cousin Greg puking out of the mascot costume’s eye sockets). Production value aside, though, I just didn’t care about any of the characters on offer, let alone which of them would eventually sit the boring, corporate Iron Throne of their dad’s media empire. From reading reviews, I’ve gathered that each character is supposed to give us a different window into how plutocrats are fucked up, perhaps further fueling righteous outrage. But if you, like me, weren’t able to get past episode one because you aren’t all that interested in sampling different flavors of vileness, I’m just here to tell you that despite what the rest of this newsletter will make you feel, you are not alone.

Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): At the beginning of this season, I was worried about Succession. After a third season that spun its wheels (at least until the redemptive finale), the fourth seemed at risk of leaning into what I considered the show’s worst impulses. Remember the scene in the first episode where the siblings work on the pitch deck for their start-up “The Hundred,” which Kendall describes as “Substack-meets-Masterclass-meets-The Economist-meets-The New Yorker”? In such moments, you could practically feel the show hamming it up for the audience, pitching its bons mots toward the chattering classes that sat, Tweetdecks open, just beyond the fourth wall. The pleasure of watching Succession always stemmed from its particular blend of pathos and comedy, but I think it sometimes wobbled when it went too far in the direction of satire. It was excellent at reflecting our brutal present with almost unparalleled verisimilitude—this season’s rightly celebrated election-night episode, for example, felt almost unbearably real—but it didn’t actually have much beyond the obvious to say about the gilded world of the .00001% and their anti-democratic chokehold on our society. On the level of political analysis, I think there’s truth in New Republic TV critic Phillip Maciak’s amusing suggestion that Succession is “a photo negative version of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing,” having “swapped out Sorkin’s pious centrist liberalism with a qualitatively better, but no less pious, left anti-capitalism.”

Happily, I think the show itself understood that if its sociological portraiture was merely convincing, its psychological dimension was richly compelling—never more so than this season. It’s hard to imagine a more inherently interesting topic than the sibling relationship, with its intrinsic solidarities and built-in forms of competition. And I could never get enough of the shifting alliances between the three (well, four) Roys, whose shared damage made them the only people capable of understanding each other even as it conditioned them to try to destroy one another. I would also contend that Succession’s tale of a patriarch who won’t retire has a particular resonance given the real concentration of wealth and power among senior citizens—not because the show’s hothouse flower protagonists captured anything new in a broad sense about that predicament, but because so much family conflict does indeed play out intergenerationally. (Please don’t read anything into this, Mom and Dad!)

Maybe that’s why the scene I keep going back to from the finale is the one in which Shiv and Roman, having temporarily agreed to join forces with Kendall, make him a disgusting smoothie—or what they all call, in a childlike sing-song, a “meal fit for a king.” As the siblings goof around in their mother’s kitchen, it feels almost like they’re tunneling back into their shared childhood—as if they could rewrite history, fusing themselves together at the primordial point where their father began splitting them. It’s a moment of sheer guilelessness unlike any we’ve seen before in this series—which is why its inevitable betrayal felt to me, when it came, like a point of no return. Even as Kendall drinks the strange brew his siblings have made for him, we know that this stunted trio and their fragile bond will surely be dashed against the shoals of the adult world, which they are so unprepared to take part in, or even perhaps to survive.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): For most of the time one is watching Succession, it’s easy enough to forget that the squabbling Roy siblings are engaged in a fight over inheriting what is specifically a media company—American Television Network, a rough analogy to Fox News, is the marquee product of Waystar Royco. Sure, there are a few hints as to what the hundreds of thousands of employees ruled by the Roy patriarch and his cronies are actually doing with their time—we see mentions of a popular Tucker Carlson like demagogue figure; a campaign against the network by a Bernie Sanders stand-in; a feud with the well-heeled Pierce family, who own a competing liberal news network. But otherwise, the world of Succession characters is siloed into private jets, boardrooms, chauffeured limos, and doormanned Manhattan lofts, distant from any average American home where ATN might be blaring day and night and mostly uninterested in the army of news vans ostensibly trawling the country at the family’s behest. The siblings have no grand vision for political change, no desire for public influence or even artistic vanity; they are negotiating over nothing more than access to corporate power and to the thrilling game of profit maximization. (It’s worth noting that they’re not really even negotiating over their ability to enrich themselves, since each kid already has access to 100 millions of dollars in cashable shares. Personal wealth is such a constant that it melts into air, no longer a meaningful motivating factor. Money, here, is a poker chip or Monopoly bill, simply something to up the stakes of the game.) Only occasionally are we reminded that decisions leak out from the boardrooms the siblings occupy, down the company chain, and into other people’s lives. In a famous and painfully on the nose season 2 scene, Kendall Roy shows up unannounced to Vaulter, Waystar Royco’s newly acquired digital news startup, and fires every single one of the company’s employees on the spot. This is corporate’s response to flagging traffic and an incipient staff unionization effort, he claims. Vaulter’s content, impact, and approach are irrelevant—the acquisition is a line item on a spreadsheet. For Kendall, if Vaulter means anything, it’s just an opportunity to impress his father.

The final stretch of Succession’s final season once again brings the Roys’ machinations in direct contact (though here only minimal conflict) with a news operation. This time, the show places us on the floor of ATN on presidential election night for an hour-long, anxiety-inducing episode that had me pacing around my living room. I found myself experiencing somatic echoes of November 2016 and 2020, sick to my stomach over whether a nationalist figure even creepier than Trump would successfully win a presidency in a fictional world. As vote tallies begin to roll in from various states, Succession reminds us that, even if a network like ATN has no official right to nominate the president, it certainly has outsized power to create a narrative that, once rooted, is hard to undo. In the last ten minutes of the episode, where we see different characters discuss how ATN’s call will influence court decisions and victory speeches, we realize how liable material events are to bend to a media narrative’s will.

In real life, the editorial side of news networks would probably be slightly more firewalled from corporate operations, but the fact that these decisions are made by insulated executives rings true. In this episode and the following ones, Shiv Roy becomes, alternately, the audience’s moral stand-in—a liberal genuinely horrified at the prospect of a Mencken presidency—and symbol of morality’s true and total irrelevance, as she later courts Mencken anyway in hope of gaining power. Yes, Shiv talks about wanting to clean up ATN and root out its right-wing fear mongers, but it’s never a core demand, never a clear vision, never something that can’t be compromised for the sake of the CEO seat. By the finale, fittingly, ATN’s political entanglements and the hordes of anti-Mencken protestors rallying against the network have mostly receded into the background, with Kendall, Roman, and Shiv back in their Upper East Side castles and Caribbean vacation homes, trying to outmaneuver each other. This is about them, not anyone else. The news is just any product, and the audience is just any consumer.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): The most reasonable read on the moment Shiv realizes that she’s going to vote “yes” on the GoJo sale and hand the family company over to a sociopathic Swedish edgelord is that Shiv has just made a quick power calculation: She thinks she’s going to have more power with Tom at the helm than if it’s Kendall. And if she can land the fatal stab in Ken’s heart, considering how dismissive and nakedly duplicitous he’s always been in relation to her ambitions, all the better.

But I saw this moment very differently: as a moment of grace, even care, for the men in her life, one that is all the more powerful for how rarely (if ever) these virtues appear in the show. After all, Shiv knows by now she can’t trust either of these men; Tom has fucked her over at least as many times as Ken, and if anything, Tom’s backstabbing has felt like an even deeper betrayal.

But remember, Shiv wants Tom. She explicitly asks him, in her own miserly way, if he’s willing to stay with her. And as much as she tries to pass it off as some kind of “arrangement,” her watery eyes make clear that the request is her attempt to mitigate some profound chasm of loneliness in her life, to have something resembling “family.” It’s easy to forget that Shiv wants Tom given how clearly she sees all that’s odious in him—and how often she expresses it, to his face and behind his back (her comment to Mattson about Tom’s alacrity to “suck the biggest dick in the room” seems relevant here). But if you see those acts as the compulsive behaviors of an abused child, and not necessarily as expressions of hatred or contempt, things start to shift. The truth is that while Tom might be capable of a loving relationship with another partner, Shiv, like all of the Roy children, is not. Tom is what she has, and he is wavering on whether she is what he wants. In that regard, I read her last-minute vote reversal as her gift to Tom, the ultimate olive branch, and a way she might push him, at least for the moment, to consider her shitty offer. Much has been made of the unclasped hand-hold at the end of the episode, but this is basically the marriage they had before. It’s not a deterioration: It’s back to the status quo.

I also don’t think this moment is without concern for her brothers. In fact, if I had to parse the look on her face in that boardroom scene—even before she realizes what she might give to Tom—it seems to be a kind of ineffable realization of how this whole saga has mangled the siblings from the moment of their very birth. That first look is a look of horror, and also the mask she has repeatedly had to wear to cover the horror. A “no” vote promises more of the same. Of course, Ken comes back to her with all the wrong reasons why she should stay the course: He makes it about him, and argues only glancingly that his success would also benefit her, which gives her the chance to consider Tom. The icing on the cake is when he skips to patriarchal entitlement: “I’m the eldest boy!” he shouts at her, as if that isn’t the expression of everything that harms her. And yet, when Shiv tells Ken that she doesn’t think he’d be “good at it,” I don’t see malice, but mercy. Ken thinks he’ll die if he doesn’t ascend the throne. He may very well die if he does. Roman recognizes the mercy—and the rightness—of Shiv’s decision. Ken may never recognize it, but I don’t think this is the end for the siblings. The truth is that their father and his empire has made them as lonely as they are brutal. But this has made their relationships surprisingly resilient; there is no one else who understands this like one another.

One last, somewhat unrelated thought: A friend asked me by text, “Why not Shiv? She could have done it.” I was baffled by this take, and then I had to step back to examine my own bafflement. Did I really think there was evidence that Shiv was a less serious contender than either of her brothers, or was I just told over and over by the men in the show that she was no good? Was she incapable of rising because she wasn’t savvy or cutthroat enough, or because, at the end of the day, the men were never going to allow her to ascend? One thing to admire in this season is the masterful way it plays with the complicity of the audience. Why do we root for our silly, evil, undeserving overlords? Personally, I’ve been sitting with the way I was recruited into the show’s misogyny. Sorry, Shiv.

Before you go: Our Spring issue will be arriving in mailboxes soon! We’re offering a special promotion for newsletter readers: Receive 50% off the cover price when you use the code “SPRING23” at checkout. Subscribe now to receive our award-winning magazine. You’ll receive 3 quarterly issues, and our winter gift, delivered to your door.

And Jewish Currents contributor and nightlight producer Fancy Feast is co-hosting an all-star, anything-goes, highbrow-meets-lowbrow burlesque and variety extravaganza on Sunday, June 4th at 7:30 at the Abrons Arts Center headlined by Drag Race winner Sasha Velour! The Fuck You Revue’s JEWTOPIA is co-produced by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship and the Jewish Museum of Maryland as part of “Material/Inheritance,” an exhibition of boundary-pushing, community-building contemporary Jewish art. You can buy tickets here, and if you’re in New York, you should check it out!

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Before 2020, I went to see live music as often as possible. When the pandemic arrived, canceling tours and shutting down venues, it resulted in the longest stretch I’ve spent away from shows since I was 14. After catching two concerts in late 2021—when widespread vaccine availability made packing into a room of strangers feel reasonable again—I went back into lockdown at the beginning of 2022, with the premature arrival of my twin sons. Since then, I’ve settled for the occasional livestream, biding my time until I could return to the real thing.

I finally ventured out to a show on Monday night, when I caught Sunset Rubdown at the Fine Line in my home city of Minneapolis. One of my favorite bands since high school, Sunset Rubdown began in 2005 as the solo project of Spencer Krug, one of the two main singers and songwriters in Montreal indie rock mainstays Wolf Parade—he’s the one with the warbling voice you’ll hear leading songs like “I’ll Believe in Anything” and “You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son.” Krug, along with Jordan Robson-Cramer, Michael Doerksen, and Camilla Wynne Ingr (of the underappreciated indie pop band Pony Up!) made three excellent albums of increasingly elaborate art rock, marked by intricate, often bombastic compositions and Krug’s dense, surreal lyrics. The group disbanded unceremoniously in 2009, before I ever got a chance to see them, and reunited at the end of last year. (Fittingly for a band whose songs often traverse mystical terrain, Krug says the reunion was inspired by a dream.)

After more than a decade of hoping I’d have this opportunity and years of nearly no live music, my expectations were high, but the show exceeded them. The sound was pristine and the performers’ enthusiasm clear as they rocketed through a set list of tracks that spanned their brief catalog, from the anthemic desperation of “Stadiums and Shrines II” to the manic jubilation of “The Mending of the Gown.” The audience’s energy matched the band’s, as attendees bounced and swayed, mouthing or shouting along with Krug’s knotty lyric; it seemed that nearly everyone else had also been eagerly anticipating this day. Standing in the crowd, catching glimpses of those around me, I had the strange sense that something latent had been activated in all these neighbors I’d never met—that this band’s return from the dead had assembled a community that had been there all along, waiting.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): A few weeks ago—seemingly out of nowhere—I had the thought, “I’d love to get high and watch Fantasia.” I am an infrequent smoker, and I had not seen the animated classic since I was a kid, but I remembered loving it. Fantasia is a series of seven orchestral arrangements accompanied by cartoon vignettes, and the only dialogue in the film comes in between scenes, when the silhouette of a conductor, flanked by his orchestra, earnestly provides context for each piece in the program. I had not realized that it was first released in 1940, and that it was Disney’s third-ever animated feature (Snow White and Pinocchio were the first and second). Rewatching it now, it feels clear that Fantasia was created during a special, early period of experimentation in commercial studio animation. It’s artwork created for art’s sake, brought into the world simply because a group of people thought it would be beautiful.

I gathered a small group of friends to watch the movie last weekend. If you have seen Fantasia before and are planning a rewatch, I can’t recommend enough doing it with people who have never seen the film! It was fun to witness their joy at the moving images on the screen. One friend had been scared of it as a child, citing the violence of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the canonical vignette where Mickey Mouse, as the titular apprentice, brings a broomstick to life to help him fill a well—only for everything to go terribly awry. Truthfully, that’s my least favorite piece of the bunch; the logic of the story feels more disciplinary than compassionate. The group also agreed that it might have been more enjoyable had Mickey not been the lead. (Eighty years ago, his inclusion may have been a cute or winking addition; today, his figure feels overdetermined with the power of the multi-billion dollar Disney empire.)

My fond memories of the movie largely held up, and it was interesting to revisit some of my early impressions. My absolute favorite vignette remains the penultimate “Dance of the Hours,” which features hippos who, clad in ballet flats and tutus, daintily, playfully pirouette and drowsily float on bubbles. I have an analysis now for why I love it—having to do with the intersections of fat positivity, bodily autonomy, and gender performance—but I had none of that language then; I just knew that I loved it. Similarly, the gracefulness of the fairies in “The Nutcracker Suite”—as they turn the green leaves into autumn hues and, later, light their surroundings with frost and snowflakes—is as visually stunning as I remember. However, now that I’ve migrated from the West Coast to the East, the changing leaves are no longer an abstract concept, but a referent to part of my experience of the world.

There were places, too, where the film showed its age. In a piece set in prehistoric times, the music climaxes just its characters—a set of imposing dinosaurs—die out from a series of natural disasters, including a widespread drought. It had never occurred to me, really, that there was a time before scientists understood that it was a meteor strike that catalyzed prehistoric mass extinction. In a more damning mark of its era—as one of my friends showed us, pulling up images on his phone—the original film included a caricatured Black centaur in “The Pastoral Symphony,” who serves the other (lighter-skinned or pastel hued) centaurs, as they primp and preen in preparation to meet potential mates. According to our research, she was excised from the film as of the 1969 re-release. I feel my review would be incomplete without mentioning this, and pointing out the subsequent absence of any Black representation. The centaurs’ storyline was also, unsurprisingly, completely heteronormative, but that didn’t stop my friends and I from lovingly chatting about the trans and lesbian couples we spotted among them.

Overall, it’s incredible that the film remains legible and a pleasure to watch. Next up: Fantasia 2000, the sequel produced for the 60th anniversary of its predecessor’s premier. I remember adoring the vignette set to “Rhapsody in Blue,” which includes characters colliding with each other as they traipse and skate through a bustling New York City. Now, having lived here for almost a decade, I still catch myself enchanted by the dynamism and chaos of the urban landscape. I’m looking forward to seeing what feels familiar and what resonates anew.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In 2011, the Hungarian director Béla Tarr retired from filmmaking after completing The Turin Horse, a brilliant account of the later life of the horse Friedrich Nietzsche embraced as he descended into his final madness, a film Tarr co-directed with his wife, Ágnes Hranitzky. Tarr was only 56 when he left cinema for good, and his final films stand at the heights of 21st-century cinema—among them Werckmeister Harmonies, also co-directed by Hranitzky. Originally released in 2000, the film is now showing at Lincoln Center in a newly restored version.

Like all of Tarr’s most important works, Werckmeister Harmonies was co-written by the novelist Lászlo Krasznahorkai (and is based on his book The Melancholy of Resistance). Their collaboration is perhaps the most important one between a great writer and cineaste there has ever been, except for the brief partnership between Peter Handke and Wim Wenders. In Werckmeister Harmonies—as in Tarr’s 1994 adaptation of Krasznahorkai’s classic novel Sátántangó—their visions blend perfectly. Tarr’s cinematic aesthetic is a correlative of Krasznahorkai’s literary one, and vice versa; they are artistic twins separated at birth. Both men are preoccupied with the brutal conditions of the Hungarian countryside and those who inhabit it, and Krasznahorkai’s bleak, winding prose matches Tarr’s visual style—his long takes, the stark chiaroscuro of black-and-white cinematography—as each portrays a desperate, degrading world.

In Werckmeister Harmonies, the main character, János, is a kind of naïf, a man who lives in an unnamed town in which he is clearly not accepted by those around him. His uncle György, the local intellectual, is a composer obsessed with the horrors inflicted on humanity by the imperfection of the musical scale. A circus arrives, displaying a preserved whale, which enthralls János and no one else. While he waits to be the first to visit the specimen, hostile locals—followers of another member of the circus, The Prince—fill the square, and we soon learn that they are bent on the destruction of their town.

The ignorant masses’ blind following of ignoble leaders is a theme dear to Krasznahorkai, and Tarr deepens the darkness of his own vision to accommodate it: Joyless, intoxicated revels feature prominently in his films, but here the scale is expanded from the usual crowd of local drunks at a bar. The centerpiece of the film is a lengthy shot of the residents marching together to sack the town, and as the camera moves along with the crowd, Tarr portrays them as a body acting as one, with their cries adding to the terror they inspire. (Sound is always brilliantly manipulated in Tarr’s films.) Inexplicably, the townspeople attack the local hospital, beating up patients and destroying equipment, before returning home sheepishly, their senseless dreams fulfilled. This violent outburst drives János—the representative of decency—mad, and his uncle abandons his war on classical tuning. Goodness and thought have been vanquished.

Before you go: Our Spring issue will be arriving in mailboxes soon! We’re offering a special promotion for newsletter readers: Receive 50% off the cover price when you use the code “SPRING23” at checkout. Subscribe now to receive our award-winning magazine. You’ll receive 3 quarterly issues, and our winter gift, delivered to your door.

And Jewish Currents contributor and nightlight producer Fancy Feast is co-hosting an all-star, anything-goes, highbrow-meets-lowbrow burlesque and variety extravaganza on Sunday, June 4th at 7:30 at the Abrons Arts Center headlined by Drag Race winner Sasha Velour! The Fuck You Revue’s JEWTOPIA is co-produced by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship and the Jewish Museum of Maryland as part of “Material/Inheritance,” an exhibition of boundary-pushing, community-building contemporary Jewish art. You can buy tickets here, and if you’re in New York, you should check it out!