Sep

12

2025

Allison Brown (managing editor): When the police invade the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll, the liberated clifftop campus in the 1960s California of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the description of the violence they unleash upon the students jolts the reader from the rhetorical delights of what so far has been a psychedelic romp through Northern Californian weird. Witnessing the scene, math professor Weed Atman is also jolted—“The true nature of police was being revealed to him”—and he is transformed by this new visceral knowledge. The awareness of the power of the state (with its corporate partners) binds together Vineland’s cast of revolutionaries, both those who submit and turn collaborator and those who refuse to be disciplined and live at society’s margins or underground. It also binds the contemporary reader’s present to the past: For those of us who watched clip after clip of the massive militarized police invasions of Palestine solidarity encampments across US campuses, the state repression brought to bear upon Vineland’s student radicals who have organized their own alternative society is breathtakingly familiar.

This binding historical consciousness is built into the novel. Published in 1990, Vineland opens its narrative in 1984 as the Reagan administration’s anti-drug campaign is underway, reopening old fronts of COINTELPRO and reinvigorating its suppressive tactics. This renewed campaign of repression against any revolutionary remnants—and the investigative journey it sets teenager Prairie Wheeler on when she finds herself among the former comrades of her estranged, radical-turned-collaborator mother, Frenesi Gates—occasions Vineland’s reconstructions of the late 1960s. These come in the form of recollections from Frenesi’s former comrades and lovers, footage from the archive of her revolutionary film collective, and the third-person narrative’s own dreamy temporal shifts. And through Prairie’s maternal genealogy, we glimpse that before COINTELPRO lay McCarthyism and the Red Scare.

At the time of its publication, Vineland disappointed the many readers and critics who had long been waiting for another Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). But recent years have brought reassessments, and more are likely to come after Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another, which takes inspiration from Vineland, comes out in theaters at the end of this month. Perhaps in 1990, the violence of American fascism that today jumps off the page was less discernable amid Vineland’s cascade of language play and stoner humor (including, but not limited to, scenes involving Porsche-fucking, a Ninjette monastery, and the Marquis de Sod lawncare company). And perhaps it’s hard, at any time, to reconcile the novel’s discursive levity with the seriousness of the danger it depicts. But reading Vineland in 2025, this mix feels exactly right: The narrative’s accretion of playfulness serves as a bulwark of humanity and creativity against the casual cruelty and vacuousness of its agents of fascism.

Such a mix is also consistent with Vineland’s overall embrace of the unruly and ajumble. Most salient, or at least most interesting to me as a Gen Xer, is Prairie Wheeler’s mixed inheritance of both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary family histories. When Vineland’s creeping, tangled narrative comes to a close, the path she will take remains uncertain. From our present vantage point, we know Generation X as a whole will turn away from radical politics. But Vineland reminds us that history continues, the wheel turns again. The children of Prairie’s generation are among those college students whose encampments across campuses last year staked out zones of liberation, galvanizing rebellion against a political order that normalizes genocide and prefiguring a world in which Palestinians, and all people, are free.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): If you were going only by the online reviews of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s new film, Honey Don’t!, you’d conclude that it is not worth watching. Critics have mostly concurred that it is “an empty shell ornately decorated with eyecatching camera angles, an acidulously sun-bright palette, and whimsical dialogue,” “phony, inert, and oddly effortful,” and “doesn’t add up to much.” But truthfully, the slate of men who have made their careers on reviewing movies have missed the essential things about this film.

The lead, Honey, is a hard-boiled private investigator played by Margaret Qualley. She’s known throughout the police force and the town, and has the stubbornness, sex appeal, and mystery classic to the film noir genre. She flirts and sleeps with women voraciously—including a police officer played fantastically by Aubrey Plaza—and is wary of settling down. We meet some of her family members and glimpse a bit of her backstory, but the film is not interested in mining her past to find out what led her to be this kind of a detective; it lets her simply exist as a character, as is traditional for male leads and rare for women. A central plotline revolves around a self-obsessed pastor who exploits women in his congregation and runs some kind of drug trafficking business, and we watch as Honey slowly pieces together clues about why women in the town keep turning up dead. The ending brings together disparate threads within the film, but in a way that defies—or perhaps completely ignores—Hollywood norms. It creates something fun and freeing in doing so. I won’t say more, because I recommend going in without knowing too much.

This is the second in a promised trilogy of lesbian films by the husband-wife duo. This blog post articulates some of my points better than I can—but be warned, it has spoilers. (I also enjoyed reading this interview with the filmmakers, which helped me understand why I liked Charlie Day’s side character as much as I did.) Honey Don’t! is over-the-top in a way that, for me, made the violence in it palatable; the bright colors and dramatic poses create a welcome separation from the all-too-real violence of the off-screen world. This may not be stylistically or substantively for everyone—but please, don’t take mainstream publications’ underwhelming response as the whole story.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, features prominently in Daniel Kehlmann’s brilliant novel The Director, a fictional account of the tragic period when the great director G.W. Pabst made films in Nazi Germany. Pabst’s situation was the result of the terrible decision to return to his homeland for family reasons after making a single unsuccessful film in the United States. The opposite pole from him, that of an ideologically committed Nazi director, is represented by Riefenstahl, director of two of the most thrillingly Nazi films of the Third Reich, Triumph of the Will and Olympia. When I interviewed Kehlmann earlier this year, he admitted he didn’t stint in his negative portrayal of Riefenstahl: “I treat her like a cartoonish villain, and I think you can do that with minor characters in a novel. You shouldn’t do that with your main characters, but you’re allowed to have cartoon villains as side characters. And I think she was pretty much like a cartoon villain.”

The new documentary on this cartoon villain, Riefenstahl, is intended as a dagger in the heart of what little reputation the titular director still has. This is not the first documentary on her, and excerpts and outtakes from a previous film, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, are used to great effect. The earlier film was made during Riefenstahl’s lengthy lifetime (she died at age 101 in 2003), and she gladly participated in what she attempted to turn into a whitewashing of her life and career. The new film’s director, Andres Veiel, assembles excerpts from a variety of TV appearances in Germany, Canada, the US, France and the United Kingdom, in which Riefenstahl repeats ad nauseam her claims that the films she made to the glory of Hitler and the Thousand Year Reich were nothing but jobs.

At one point, she claims that had she been asked by Stalin or Roosevelt to make films for them, she’d have done it and aimed for the same high quality she attained in her famous hymns to the New Germany and its leader. That Nietzschean Nazism permeated her entire aesthetic even before the war is undeniable, and she never addresses it. Despite the extensive record of her frequent contacts with Hitler, despite the photos showing him greeting her with great affection, she denies there was any such connection between them. And anyway, she didn’t know of any of the horrors inflicted by the Germans. Her constant repetition of that claim earned her the support and affection of fellow Germans of her generation, amply demonstrated by taped phone conversations with ordinary viewers of her appearances that are preserved in her archives.

Most damning of all is a moment shown from early in World War II, in September 1939, when Riefenstahl was accompanying the invading Wehrmacht into Poland and filming its activities. In a well-documented incident, she was present for the murder of 22 Polish Jews, after she complained they were interfering with a shot she was setting up. There even exists a photo, published in magazines after the war, of her screaming in horror as the mass killing ends. And yet, she claims, she was never there.

Riefenstahl the film is a perfect representation of Riefenstahl the person—a moral coward, lacking in any remorse, unable to accept her responsibility for any of her acts. She was in all this, very much a German of her generation.

This week’s parshah, Ki Tavo, ends with a set of blessings and curses. If the Israelites follow God’s ways, they will have bountiful harvests and military victories, and God will ensure that they “will always be at the top and never at the bottom.” If they deviate from God’s commandments, however, they will face the full severity of God’s wrath: plague, drought, slavery, exile, and death. In laying out these two possible futures, the parshah emphasizes our immense individual and collective responsibility: It is always within our power to choose good over evil, obedience over waywardness. The great medieval commentator Maimonides adopts, and also radicalizes, this approach in his Laws of Repentance, where he argues that the very fact that God offers directives is the best evidence of free will. “If God were to decree that a person be righteous or wicked,” he writes, then “how could God command us through the prophets, ‘Do this’ or ‘Don’t do this’?”

Accordingly, Maimonides insists that “each person is fit to be as righteous as Moses or as wicked as [the sinful Israelite king] Jeroboam” and makes the argument—at once inspiring and terrifying—that we should imagine that each of us, as well as the entire world, is fully balanced between merit and liability, such that every choice has cosmic consequences: “If one commits a single sin, they have made themselves and the entire world liable and caused it to be destroyed,” he writes. Maimonides recognizes that we are not always aware of the choices before us. “If men possessed wisdom,” he writes elsewhere, “they would not cause any injury to themselves or to others.” But he sees this, too, as a choice: Each of us “has the power to learn and understand,” and if we are ignorant enough to sin, that is itself our fault.

We are now in the month of Elul, a time of reflection and repentance ahead of Rosh HaShanah. As part of my preparations for the High Holidays, I have been rereading Maimonides’s Laws of Repentance. Throughout my study, I’ve thought again and again about those in communities who still won’t actively oppose—or who even still support—Israel’s genocide in Gaza. How can these people choose to be so willfully ignorant? If they still haven’t changed their minds, isn’t it time to give up on them? The more frustrated I get, the more I also feel proud of myself and my friends: Haven’t we modeled exactly what Maimonides demands?

But when I think about my own transition away from Zionism, Maimonides’s framework doesn’t feel honest. I didn’t change my politics because I woke up one day and realized I’d been wrong: It was only through conversations with patient friends, coming across the right books at the right time, and seeing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank firsthand that I slowly came to reckon with the ongoing Nakba that Israel has carried out against Palestinians. “God sends each person stirrings of repentance . . . against their will,” writes Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen, the 19th-century Polish Hasidic master. His words speak to a painful truth that Maimonides does not acknowledge: Our transformations are often less a result of individual agency than the fruit of relationships and experiences that we don’t choose. All teshuvah, Rav Tzadok argues, is therefore a microcosmic reenactment of the acceptance of the Torah, which according to a rabbinic midrash was not freely elected; God held Mount Sinai over the heads of the Israelites and forced them to accept the covenant. Rav Tzadok does believe that it’s our responsibility to take advantage of these unearned “stirrings of repentance,” but even our ability to do that is conditioned by psychic and emotional forces that lie largely outside of our consciousness. In Freud’s words, “The ego is not master in its own house.”

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t hold our communities accountable: As the philosopher Mari Ruti insists, “The fact that our actions are often unconsciously motivated does not absolve us of responsibility for the suffering we might inflict on others.” But what are our responsibilities to those communities? If Maimonides is right, though we’re obligated to do our best to educate them, at a certain point their failure to listen is their choice and their sin, and we’re off the hook. But if Rav Tzadok is right that our moral standing is less the result of our virtue than our luck, we’re deeply indebted to all those who have steered us away from becoming who we would otherwise have been. Don’t we owe others the same commitment?

Aron Wander is a rabbi, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.