Weekly Culture Menu 5.1.24

Rushed, sloppy, irritated and alive!

May 01, 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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Happy Wednesday! The Tony Award nominations were announced yesterday, and I’m thrilled that I already had plans to see “Stereophonic” next week before the inevitable most Tony-nominated play in history ticket price hike. Unsurprisingly, this star-studded season meant many famous actors received their first nominations, including Daniel Radcliffe, Jeremy Strong, Rachel McAdams, and Sarah Paulson. I was thrilled to see Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara nominated for their work in “Days of Wine and Roses.” While I didn’t love the musical, they were two of the best performances I saw this past year. And to round out the theater news, “Oh Mary” is transferring to Broadway this summer! Get tickets before they become ludicrously expensive. With that, let’s get into it!

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🍤 Amuse Bouche [ -10 mins ]

🗞️ Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder for The Hollywood Reporter. This interview was a major highlight of last week for me! If you haven’t seen The Curse yet, what are you doing? But also, you probably shouldn’t read this article until you watch it because they share how they made the mind-bending finale. If your interest still isn’t piqued, Christopher Nolan (the show's number one fan) texted Benny Safdie to ask him how they made it. Can you even imagine? Loved this quote from Fielder about choosing to enter The Curse into the Emmys as a Drama rather than a Comedy:
When I say “funny,” funny can mean a lot of things. Good stuff is all usually funny. I mean, life’s funny. Serious dramas, good dramas, are funny, because if life’s funny, and if you’re doing life, then drama should be funny.
🗞️ The 2003 New York Times Review of “Wicked" by Ben Brantley. In celebration of the Tony nominations, I thought this was a great time to revisit the scathing 2003 NYT review of “Wicked.” You should read the whole thing, but highlights include the sexism-tinged explanation of the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda as two “adversarial women” learning from each other in a manner “which recalls sobfests about female friendships like the movie ‘Beaches.’ (You keep expecting Glinda to start singing, ‘Did you ever know you were my hero, Elphaba?’).” As well as Brantley’s conclusion that “Wicked” did “not, alas, speak hopefully for the future of the Broadway musical.” Hysterical, given that “Wicked” just celebrated its twentieth year on Broadway and continues to be one of the most beloved stories about friendship. So let that remind you to keep doing what you’re doing and ignore the naysayers.

🍟 Appetizer [ -30 mins ]

📺 Alfred Molina's Career Retrospective. While I generally enjoy these Vanity Fair career retrospectives, this one felt particularly special—such a thoughtful and insightful look back at his career (so many hits!). If you’re short on time, start here. The last three minutes, where he talks about his relationship with his father and his children, are a must-see. Vanity Fair didn’t need to keep that in, but I’m so glad they did.
🗞️ ”A Time We Never Knew” by
Freya India
. As a millennial joining the workforce in 2014, I remember being called “entitled” and “lazy” by older generations. In the last couple of years, I’ve sometimes thought similar things about younger generations. And when I have those thoughts, I wonder, is this just the way? Are the older generations always just frustrated by those who come after them? When I read this piece by Freya India, I couldn’t help but empathize with kids coming up in this era. While acknowledging the many benefits of progress, India also longs for a time she’ll never know. And that’s uniquely heartbreaking.
But I never knew it. Maybe briefly, as a child. But most of us in Gen Z were given phones and tablets so early that we barely remember life before them. Most of us never knew falling in love without swiping and subscription models. We never knew having a first kiss without having watched PornHub first. We never knew flirting and romance before it became sending DMs or reacting to Snapchat stories with flame emojis. We never knew friendship before it became keeping up a Snapstreak or using each other like props to look popular on Instagram. And the freedom—we never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily; to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear of it being posted online. Or the freedom to be unavailable, to disconnect for a while without the pressure of Read Receipts and Last Active statuses. We never knew a childhood spent chasing experiences and risks and independence instead of chasing stupid likes on a screen. Never knew life without documenting and marketing and obsessively analyzing it as we went.

🍽️ Main Course [ 1 Hour+ ]

📚The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin. The Stepford Wives is one of those books that many people feel like they’ve read because “Stepford Wife” has become such common parlance to conjure images of outsized domesticity (especially with the rise of the trad wife movement). But you're missing out if your introduction to the term is the 2004 movie adaptation that strays pretty far from the original text. Written in 1972, the book is a feminist horror novel centered on Joanna Eberhart, a semi-professional photographer who relocates from New York City to a suburban Connecticut town (Stepford) with her husband and children. Upon arriving, she quickly notices the women are unusually submissive to their husbands and solely concerned with housework. As she watches other newly arrived, independent-thinking women transform overnight into visions of “ideal” femininity and abandon their interests, she becomes rightfully concerned that there’s something more sinister at play. Levin’s simple prose artfully disguises the story’s threatening undercurrent and escalates from realism to sci-fi horror so seamlessly that you could almost miss it. It’s no wonder the story has served as an enduring cultural reference point (Get Out, Ex Machina, and Don’t Worry Darling, to name a few). A favorite moment is when Bobbie (another Stepford newcomer) describes visiting a neighboring town and being thrilled to see “women who were rushed and sloppy and irritated and alive.” If that isn’t an honest summary of what it means to be acknowledged for your full humanity, I don’t know what is! Once you read it, I highly recommend listening to The Stepford Wives episode of You’re Wrong About, where host Sarah Marshall argues that the book is based on a true story… dun dun dun.
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📺 Baby Reindeer. Like many people who have watched the Netflix sensation Baby Reindeer over the past few weeks, I can’t stop thinking about it. The series stars its writer and creator, Richard Gadd, who plays Donny Dunn, a fictionalized version of himself. The show opens with Donny in a police station, reporting that a woman has been stalking him for the last six months. Surprised, the policeman asks him why he waited to report her - a question with a nuanced answer that the series explores over its seven episodes. The screen then goes black, and you’re told, “This is a true story” - a fact that is particularly harrowing as the story continues, and you watch Gadd reenact what I imagine are some of the most traumatic moments of his life. To put it simply, I’m blown away by him. The series adapts two of Gadd’s previous one-man shows - the 2016 “Monkey See Monkey Do” (where he unpacks being sexually abused while running 10 miles on a treadmill) and the 2019 “Baby Reindeer” (where he talks about his experience of being stalked). Gadd has shared that the story is “emotionally” all true, but the timeline has been changed for the sake of dramatic structure, and details of the people involved have been altered to protect their identities (if you’re curious about the actual timeline - this interview is great). The real stalkers' tally included 41,000 emails, 350 hours worth of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, and 106 pages of letters. Unsurprisingly, the “trueness” of the story has become a story in itself. Despite Gadd asking people to stand down, internet sleuths have allegedly figured out who his former stalker is. But honestly, the “trueness” of it all is the least interesting part to me.
Unlike Fatal Attraction, where Glenn Close is sexualized (until she’s terrifying), or Misery, where Kathy Bates is undoubtedly evil, Baby Reindeer is a complex portrayal of two people whose lives become deeply intertwined as they both struggle with mental illness. Jessica Gunning is breathtakingly perfect as his stalker, creating a realized and multi-dimensional woman that is all at once hauntingly terrifying, charmingly naive, and terribly sad. And though this is a story about a man being stalked, that’s this nesting doll of a series’ outermost layer. As we learn more about Donny’s history, we observe a reality about abuse that is so painfully true and not often depicted as honestly: the residual emotional effects of an initial abuse are intrinsically linked to subsequent abuse. And relatedly, there can be a profoundly complex psychological attachment to an abuser that can’t be neatly explained (especially in the eyes of the law). While Gadd is undoubtedly a victim, he does not shy away from sharing his most unflattering thoughts and actions, including that he feels complicit and believes he sought out some of what happened to him. And so, as a viewer, your feelings are complicated because they should be! There’s no part of this story that is simple. Without giving too much away, at the end of the sixth episode, he has this moment where he’s talking about his desire to be famous and believing fame means that people are too distracted by the notoriety to see you as your deepest insecurities. Listening to this monologue, I couldn’t help but wonder what emotional toll it has taken on him to mine his personal life and perform such radical honesty. I think we should feel very grateful he did, but I can only imagine how complex his relationship with all of this must be. If you haven’t watched it yet, expect to be rattled and know that it deals with many incredibly complex issues, but wow, it’s worth it (the sixth episode is maybe the most compelling television Netflix has ever produced). Also, Stephen King came out today and said he’s just grateful Misery came out first, so if that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is.

🧁 Dessert [ -1 hour ]

📚 Fan Fiction - A Satire by Tavi Gevinson of
TGmail
. It appears that my love letter to Taylor Swift last week only scared off a few of you - great news! If you’re less interested in her music and more curious about the cult of celebrity obsession, writer/actor/internet cool girl Tavi Gevinson wrote this incredible zine about Swift. Taking inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (a novel about a poet whose neighbor is obsessed with him that includes a 999-line poem), Gevinson explores the relationship between being a fan, a critic, and a friend to Taylor Swift (they were once in the same circles - unclear if they still are). The last section is an increasingly unhinged fictitious email interaction between them (though in interviews, she likes to be cagey about the level of truth). Regardless, it’s a fascinating portrayal of obsessive fandom. Excitingly, my very kind best friend snagged a hard copy for me at her local UWS bookshop (check here to see if there are any left at a location near you). Otherwise, you can read the digital version at the link.

And I’ll leave you with this woman’s flawless logic about an alien abduction.

@libbiehiggins How does Crystal feel about alien love? 👽

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