Weekly Culture Menu 3.20.24

I can build my own Ikea.

Mar 20, 2024

For this week’s installment of the Weekly Culture Menu, we have a sampling of content across a variety of mediums, lengths, and sensibilities so that you can dip in and out all week. Once you subscribe, you can expect a weekly menu delivered to your inbox every Wednesday.

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📮 Do you have any menu requests? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Hi Culture Lovers! After sourcing some reader feedback, I’ve shifted the menu delivery day to Wednesdays to allow for more space between the Weekly Menu and Weekend Snack. You can now expect a fresh set of recs delivered to your inbox every Wednesday. And with that, let’s get into this week’s menu:

🍤 Amuse Bouche [ -10 mins ]

📺 Janey Godley’s Flowers Cover. This everyday person cover of Miley’s “Flowers” from Scottish comedian Janey Godley absolutely sent me. What’s true independence if not being able to “build your own Ikea?”

@janeygodley Me and shirley

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🗞️ Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ Script Blows Up All the Rules. By now, you probably know I’m not a huge fan of Oppenheimer. But as mentioned a few weeks ago, listening to Christopher Nolan talk about how he wrote the script gave me a newfound respect for the film. Further to that point, I loved
Cole Haddon
’s screenwriter perspective on just how groundbreaking the script really was. I'm a big fan of his Substack generally!

🍟 Appetizer [ -30 mins ]

🗞️ On Self Respect by Joan Didion. Since being assigned this essay in a Freshman year English class, I revisit these words nearly every year (typically around this time - something about spring). Admittedly, some portions have not aged well, but still, there continues to be relevance in Didion’s musings on what self-respect means. Though we might be able to lie to others about where we are on our journeys, at the end of the day, it’s just you and your mind. Didion ruminates on how you find peace in that space.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called ‘alienation from self.’ In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

🗞️ An Unexpected Hotbed of Y.A. Authors: Utah. I remember the first time I heard about Twilight. Vampires weren’t really my thing, but my high school was ablaze with talks of this addictive series. Admittedly, the writing left something to be desired (how many different ways can Bella bite her lip?), but I also couldn’t help but devour it because teen vampire love was really just that compelling. I soon after found out that the author, Stephanie Meyer, was Mormon. Though I’m not Mormon myself, I grew up in Utah, and it’s difficult not to have some level of familiarity with the church. I was very intrigued by the article’s investigation of why many successful authors are members of the Mormon faith and the constraints of religious practices that can be creatively challenging. Fun fact: Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fan fiction.

🍽️ Main Course [ 1 Hour+ ]

🎬 Polite Society. This was a standout for me at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, and I realized this weekend that it’s now on Amazon. The film is about a martial-arts-obsessed teen girl whose sister gets engaged, and she reacts poorly (to say the least). This is the first full-length film from writer/director Nida Manzoor, and I remember walking out thinking, “Wow - she has a point of view!” The movie has hints of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Bend It Like Beckham, and Kill Bill - a combo I didn’t know I needed. It’s a highly stylized wonder of women screaming, kicking, and laughing back at societal constraints. It's sure to be a cult classic, and I can’t wait to see what Manzoor does next with more budget. If you want a taste before you watch it, check out the clip above. But don’t watch the trailer - it gives way too much of the delightful twist away.

🧁 Dessert [ -1 hour ]

🎧 Elvis and Priscilla Deep Dive. After seeing Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, I had some questions. Namely, how did a 14-year-old girl capture the attention of a 24-year-old rock and roll star, and how did her parents allow this relationship to exist? This three-part deep dive answers many questions (not about the parents, though - that seems unanswerable). If you saw the movie, you could realistically just skip to part three, as the first two parts largely recount the memoir the film is based on, Elvis and Me. In general, I love the Shameless pop culture deep dives (the episodes about Lena Dunham and Ariana Grande are two of my favorites).

And I’ll leave you with this TikTok that had me cackling. Who amongst us hasn’t been stuck in a tiny sports bra?