I have to confess before I start: I’m writing this essay partly from ignorance. I haven’t seen Hamilton, because I don’t have a spare $700 for the live show and don’t feel like giving any more of my disposable income to the Disney Corporation than I already have. I have listened to the soundtrack. In terms of the quality of the music, the best of it is catchy and fun, but none of it is especially striking lyrically (this parody is indistinguishable from the original) and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s use of rap as a genre is on the level of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s use of 70s rock.

So, now that that’s done with—

What the hell is Hamilton, anyway?

I ask because there’s a tendency to view Hamilton as a sort of panorama of American history, and there’s a corresponding anger about how the musical leaves out part of that history—slavery. How can a musical claim to be about the founding of America and leave out something so important to everything that followed?

I think that Hamilton is distasteful. Watching black and brown men and women pretend to be white slaveholders has connotations that are impossible to ignore. I also think that pretending that Hamilton is about history gives it too much credit as a story. Compare Hamilton with the last big American history-themed musical, 1776, which ends with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Pen is put to paper, the Liberty Bell rings, and the theatergoer is supposed to get into their taxi thinking that they’ve witnessed (at a theatrical remove) an event that had some sort of effect on all humanity, including themselves—capital-H History. Had the Declaration never happened, 1776 posits, everything would be different. Today’s viewer might think “yes, for the better,” but the sense of difference is still the same.

Hamilton doesn’t have that same sense of universal effect. The historical events of Hamilton are important in that they affect Alexander Hamilton and his personal goals. The Declaration of Independence leads to the Revolutionary War, which means that Hamilton can find a patron and glory on the battlefield. The Revolutionary War is also important because it brings Alexander Hamilton into the way of rich ladies, one of whom he can marry. After the war is won, the Constitution is written and the structures of government are created. These events are important because they mean that Alexander Hamilton has a chance to impress other people with his oratory and to make decisions on behalf of the state (the quality or content of these decisions isn’t as important as the fact that Hamilton is making them—he’s got “skin in the game.”) Then John Adams becomes president, which is important because John Adams doesn’t like Hamilton and calls him a “creole.” I think this is supposed to be racism, even though both Adams and Hamilton were white by the definitions of the day, but the important thing is that Hamilton’s ambitions are halted by his annoying new boss. And so on, until Thomas Jefferson becomes president, which is important because Hamilton’s involvement pisses Aaron Burr off enough to get him to airhole Hamilton, end of play.

Does anybody really expect a story told on these terms to contain a measured representation of any issue of the time, much less an issue that could potentially unnerve theatergoers, such as slavery? Obviously, slavery was debated at the time of the Revolution and during the writing of the Constitution (and other media about the Revolutionary era, such as 1776, do go into the founders’ positions on slavery, clumsily or not). However, Alexander Hamilton didn’t own slaves—he didn’t have skin in that particular game—so in the universe of Hamilton, slaves don’t really exist. Hamilton can’t be accused of ignoring issues like slavery because it’s too narcissistic in its worldview to address issues at all. That narcissism works to some extent, because it makes it easier to avoid engaging with issues that a 21st-century audience might find unnerving. But it also disqualifies Hamilton as any sort of historical primer; history, by definition, has to involve more than one person.

So, Hamilton isn’t really meant to be a history lesson. What is it, then? What exactly are we supposed to take away from Hamilton?

In terms of tone, Hamilton seems to be all about the goodness of the American Dream—that if you try hard enough, riches and happiness will come to you. But in terms of the arc of its protagonist’s life, Hamilton isn’t the “poor boy made good,” Horatio Alger tale that its tone suggests. Instead, it’s the classic 19th-century tale of a cash-strapped but imaginative provincial whose desires propel them toward their goals, but who ends up ruined because of those same desires. Hamilton wants to make a mark on the world and to be rich, and he succeeds up to a point, but he loses certain patrons, angers his peers, makes a poor choice of mistress, and is touchy about his honor when it would be better to stand down. All these decisions lead him to an early grave.

Usually these tales of early extinction are told with an especially cynical twist at the ending. Emma Bovary drinks poison and dies pathetically while a peasant croaks at the window, and that other famous media duelist, Barry Lyndon, ends up dying back in his poor little town, only his much put-upon mother at his side.

However, for a musical about a social striver who is killed in a duel, Hamilton has a remarkably optimistic end. Hamilton perishes assured in the knowledge that he’ll ascend to heaven, Aaron Burr repents of of his foolishness in killing him, and then everyone gathers together for one last song about how great Hamilton was and how they’ll make sure that he’s remembered properly. It’s the exact opposite of the famous title card at the end of Barry Lyndon, about how “they are all equal now.”

So, despite being a musical about, again, a social striver who is killed in a duel, this isn’t a statement about the inevitable result of biting off more than you can chew. Part of this is the sort of nationalism that Manuel wants to promote. On his “deathbed,” Hamilton sings about “America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me/You let me make a difference.” The message is clear—unlike nasty old Europe, which punishes the ambitious, America allows them to thrive.

Except Alexander Hamilton didn’t exactly thrive—he ended up dead in his late forties, which wasn’t old even for the early 19th century. Whatever old world ways America shed, dueling wasn’t one of them, and that ended Hamilton’s life. This isn’t a tale of a wicked world, but it isn’t exactly a tale of reward for virtue, either.

So, again, what is Hamilton? Hamilton is three hours of Alexander Hamilton and how events affected him, and the musical goes to great lengths to reassure the viewer that Hamilton is the kind of person worth spending three hours and $700 on. The opening number is about how the other characters are “waiting in the wings” for Hamilton, and it doesn’t let up from there. There are constant statements about how smart Hamilton is, how charming, how witty, how handsome. There’s very little showing of these skills, and a lot of telling about them, and some of these attractions simply can’t be told into being—Miranda isn’t an ugly man, but he isn’t the irresistible sexual magnet that the lyrics describe—but the viewer could be excused if after watching, they thought that Alexander Hamilton was the smartest, most attractive man to walk the earth.

Meanwhile, Hamilton’s flaws are of the type that people trot out in job interviews—works too hard, too devoted to his causes, too likely to give it the old college try, etc. If he sins, it’s because he’s tempted mightily—his mistress comes on to him, in what must be a historically incorrect example (one thing that’s erased in the musical is Hamilton’s notoriously horny nature). After Hamilton dies,Hamilton turns into humanist hagiography; the last word in the story is given to his wife, Eliza, who sings of how she spends the rest of her fifty years of life to promoting his memory. This isn’t treated as rather pathetic womanly devotion, as with Barry Lyndon’s mother; it’s just the natural outcome of being around someone as wonderful as Hamilton.

In the end, what Hamilton really is is a fantasy—of being inherently memorable enough to have an unshakable hold on people, even after you die. Even if you treat people badly, you can ask forgiveness, and others will not only forgive, they will worship, such as Eliza; those who wrong you will suffer for it, in ways that are even worse than your own death. (Hamilton’s Aaron Burr laments that “I survived, but I paid for it;” the real Aaron Burr went on to serve out his vice-presidential term and become a land speculator. His wife did use Alexander Hamilton, Jr., as her divorce lawyer, though.) If you are good enough, if you are the prettiest and the most clever, someone will remember that you were around. (It doesn’t really matter what you did, just that people are talking about it.) You will be a star, even after you die… and isn’t that really the most important thing of all?

Netflix isn’t the only streaming service cramming its content in; as part of its transition from Now/Go to Max, HBO is also putting out all sorts of streaming content! I watched one of its latest, Run, which is a weird hybrid in a lot of ways.

Ruby and Billy were college sweethearts who made a pact to run away together on a train if they ever got bored with their grown-up lives. Fifteen years after they break up, Billy texts Ruby, and away they go across the USA. Unsurprisingly, time hasn’t stood still, and Ruby (Merritt Wever) is now a wife and mother, while Billy (Domhnall Gleeson, using his native Irish accent) is now a motivational speaker (although this brings up questions—is there a huge market for motivational speakers in Ireland? The United Kingdom? I can’t imagine a British company dragging out Gleeson in a skinny-cut suit to inspire a bunch of sodden middle-managers who just want to drink in a Wetherspoons and be racist, but perhaps I am misunderstanding the culture.)

So Run has a premise, but it doesn’t really have a plot. At first, it’s a romance. The writers seem faintly concerned that the characters are unappealing, especially Ruby, who’s run off on her family (Wever gets a lot of throwaway speeches on feminist issues, to convince us that she is woke to her own circumstances). Personally, I don’t care. I don’t need to watch lovers who are upstanding moral citizens, I just have to be convinced that they’re interested in each other—and I never got that sense about Ruby and Billy. After Ruby confesses to Billy that she lied to him about becoming a star architect—her youthful goal—and that her career actually ended in total humiliation, Billy’s response is to gripe that Ruby didn’t tell him that she had children (although he could have found that out through a simple name search; the show’s technological level wavers between 1999 and the present, depending on the needs of the plot). These are people who were supposedly pining over each other for 15 years; doesn’t Billy care at all about how Ruby feels? Similarly, when Billy confesses his own professional humiliations to Ruby, she has absolutely no reaction, even though it’s been established that she disapproved of his career as a motivational speaker. Is she sympathetic? Pitying? Does she want to tell him that she knows that he’s better than the man he is now? Or does she want to tell him that he got what he deserved? Never mind, these characters don’t interact; they’re more like each others’ masturbatory aids.

Perhaps because the romance isn’t really there, by the fourth episode, Run starts in on the thriller mechanics. There are quarrels over mysterious bags of money, and deaths of secondary characters, and the police get involved. Phoebe Waller-Bridge shows up in a role that seems to exist purely to showcase that Phoebe Waller-Bridge is more charismatic than Gleeson or Wever. (Both Waller-Bridge and Gleeson have romantic arcs with women, but Waller-Bridge is depicted as a competent and caring partner, despite picking up dead animals for a living; by the end of the show, Gleeson’s Billy is a manipulative, drippy mess who needs his girlfriend to clean up his puke. It’s a vibe!) Finally, the train pulls into the station, and the show just ends, with neither Billy or Ruby any different than when they started. If I have to take a guess at what it all means, I think it’s supposed to be some sort of middle-aged bildungsroman, with the put-upon Ruby realizing that she doesn’t need no man and that she needs to take charge of her own life, but it’s such a botch of an ending that it’s not really worth the guess.

One thing I can confidently say about that Run is that it is incredibly short, with under three hours of content in total, counting credits, recaps, and promos for other HBO material. Like Space Force, the issues of how the show got made becomes more interesting than the show itself. What was the creators’ original intent? Did they really think that this story worked in the format in which it’s presented? Perhaps Run was originally meant to be a movie, but the comparative availability of streaming money meant stretching out a two-hour script into seven episodes. Alternatively, Run was greenlit purely on the involvement of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and the writers then had to scramble to think up the plot. In addition, Run originally aired in weekly installments, but the episodes aren’t all structured with traditional cliffhangers. Was this even ever meant to go on air, or was it originally meant to go direct to streaming? Like Space Force, I suspect this is a makework show—HBO needs material to fill out its catalog, and they’re willing to give money away to anyone with a name. It’s nice that Waller-Bridge and Vicky Jones got their friends paid, but again, someone should remember that ideally there is a viewer involved at the end of this process.

To end on a nice note: Rich Sommer has a small part as Ruby’s rich, doltishly smug husband (he plays in a ukelele band!) and he pulls if off perfectly.

Even in the most tumultuous times, my commitment to watching the stupidest shit remains unshaken. That’s right, reader—while you were out marching in the street, I was watching Netflix. Specifically, Netflix’s Space Force. I may have done other things as well, but I’m sure that the most important thing I did for America was suffer through exactly two episodes of this show.

The premise of Space Force, as stated in the title, is that United States has created a space force, and Steve Carell is the dopey, soft-racist, bomb-happy general who runs it. This seems like a setup for satire at bureaucracy’s expense a la Armando Ianucci. Since it’s made by Greg Daniels and Steve Carell, though, the general is played as a pathetic, good-intentioned clown with family problems, and the episodes (at least the two that I could sit through) end with a humanizing moment in which his worldview is validated. The effect is nauseating, as if Kubrick’s Jack D. Ripper had the lead role on a family sitcom from the 1990s. Maybe there’s a straight-up emotional plot about Carell learning to let go of his daughter and his precious bodily fluids later on, I don’t know; I’m not brave enough to find out.

There’s not a character here that rises above the cardboard; there’s the rebellious teenage daughter, the scary foreigners, the put-upon coworkers, the status-obsessed wife. (For some reason, the wife is in prison; I think it’s so that Carell can get cucked by one of the lady prison guards for a laugh, thus freeing him to have a pathos-laden flirtation with a coworker—like I said, I’m not finding out whether I’m right on this one.) A lot of the put-upon coworkers are Asian or black, which makes for an uncomfortable dynamic in which nonwhite people constantly have to cater to a white idiot’s whims. This happens often enough in real life, of course, but since Carell is supposed to ultimately be a sympathetic sweetheart, it’s obnoxious. I couldn’t blame these people if they rose up and strapped him to a rocket.

Carell is the main problem here, since he created the thing and is by far the main performer. He tends to do best when he’s part of a comedic ensemble; whatever you think about The Office, Carell had a bunch of other talented performers to bounce off of on that show, so it wasn’t just him gurning all the time. Space Force assumes you love Carell’s schtick enough that you’d watch an entire half-hour of it straight, with no chaser except the lamest jokes about social media, Trump, and foreigners. There’s nobody else here except John Malkovich, picking up a paycheck, and Fred Willard in his last role, and if you remember Willard for any of his many delightful roles I implore you not to watch this, in which he plays a senile old man who attempts to tend to his wandering, farting wife. I hope Willard’s family enjoys the money, but none of the rest of us had to see this shit!

And, well, why do we have to see this shit? Is it really meant to be viewed at all? The obviousness of the jokes and the clunkiness of the plots makes me suspect that Space Force was put together as a make-work project for a few big names to collect a streaming service handout, which was guaranteed regardless of the quality of the eventual output. Since all the episodes are put onto the platform at once, a bad show can just disappear into the ether, instead of attracting the shame of low Nielsen ratings as in the broadcast past. There are a bunch of these makework shows out there, as various corporations compete to build streaming media libraries, but they’re like the fake books on the bookshelves at a furniture store—there’s form there, but no meaningful content. Netflix is the perpetrator in this particular case, but the other streaming services are guilty, too.

Aside from Netflix, the Pentagon publicity office can’t avoid blame for Space Force, as they were probably involved in order to get people used to the idea of being fried up by space lasers (or, more likely, suffering through mass-casualty war on earth for an insult suffered in space). In the end, that’s what takes Space Force over the border from merely stale and awful to actively offensive—the idea that the heavens, which have been a source of inspiration, awe, and curiosity throughout the entirety of human history, have been reduced to a garbage heap presided over by a bunch of squabbling, murderous bureaucrats should make you want to scream in rage, not chuckle. The addition of a full minute’s worth of Steve Carell singing “Kokomo” is merely the icing on the cake.

Everybody is watching Tiger King right now. Everybody isn’t really everybody, of course–everybody with a Netflix subscription, and with a taste for documentaries, and with the time to stream a seven-hour series. But everyone who likes to talk about “culture,” including me, is watching Tiger King and writing about it, and a surprising amount of people really don’t like that it exists. This may be partly an accident of timing, as the kind of people who are binge streaming Netflix documentaries are all cooped up in their houses, in terrible moods. But there’s another problem: Tiger King is exploitative. 

There’s no doubt about it: The world of Tiger King is exploitative. It’s a pyramid of exploitation, in fact. The ones at the bottom of that pyramid are the poor tigers, who are a dangerous nuisance when their wild habitats overlap with human habitation, but make a lovely accessory when kept in a Western cage. There are more captive tigers now than free ones, which suggests that there is nowhere for these creatures to go unless they’re in service of man’s ego. The most horrific example of this egomania is Doc Antle’s Myrtle Beach zoo, which breeds cubs not for sale, but simply for petting and posing. After the tigers grow large enough to threaten the human customers–a matter of a few months–they are euthanized. 

One step up, in that at least they’re technically not caged, are the people who work at these zoos. Like the tigers, they have nowhere else to go, although it’s because they’re young or desperate or both. Antle preys on young girls with a naive devotion to the concept of wildlife protection, while Joe Exotic picks up drifters fresh out of prison. The workers don’t make enough to have their own housing, so they’re kept in lodgings full of vermin, and fed a diet on the same level; Barbara, a woman who worked for Antle as a teenager, remembers shaking roaches out of her daily bread. Joe’s employees do slightly better, as they get their pick of the expired grocery store meat that otherwise goes into the tiger feed.

The only way to claw one’s way out of the heap is to be sexually interesting to the boss. Man or woman, being the boss’s property (and one of Joe’s ex-husbands actually has “Property of Joe Exotic” tattooed across his pelvis) is the only way to guarantee decent food and shelter, at least for a time. Joe bought his husbands dirt bikes and meth, and they got to stay in an actual house, not a shared trailer. Antle, who houses his employees in stables, turns the favored ones into catgirls, dressing them up in suits with ears and buying them boob jobs; those who make the cut get turned into wives, each of whom gets their own house. This isn’t about attraction; Joe’s husbands had tastes for women, and whatever taste they had for men, Joe may or may not have been to that taste. That doesn’t matter, just like it’s not even questioned whether Antle and Jeff Lowe’s women are attracted to them personally or to whatever power they have over their immediate surroundings. It’s simply assumed that it’s better to have some assets and your habits paid for than not, although the position is dangerous, both psychologically and physically. Travis, one of Joe’s husbands, kills himself in despair over his strung-out lifestyle, while Jeff assaulted his ex-wife and is last seen in Tiger King praising the attractiveness of the nannies he’s hiring for his heavily pregnant current wife (said wife is instructed to get to the trainer immediately after birth to rebuild her figure). 

The highest on this pyramid of exploitation are the men who run the zoos, but sitting on the pointy end of a pyramid is still uncomfortable. The world of the exotic zookeeper is one of broken contracts, unprofitably illegal deals, and glitz that’s mostly useful to conceal the machinations of short-term hustles. Jeff cons the financially desperate Joe by showing off his Vegas mansion, but he spends most of his time in Vegas sneaking tiger cubs into casinos for photo sessions and attending court dates. The mansion is rented, and the “wealth” quickly melts away. There’s no brotherhood among these thieves, either; for all their bitching about “animal rights people,” they’re quick to turn on each other for the slightest benefit. After he’s sentenced, Joe immediately calls PETA to rat out his fellow zookeepers, and a quick search reveals that Jeff is currently praising himself for “taking down” Tim Stark, the “monster” zookeeper that he attempted to swindle after he dried out Joe. (Stark was busted this year by the USDA, although it probably didn’t take Jeff Lowe for them to figure that his zoo wasn’t on the up and up.)

The only person depicted in Tiger King who isn’t fully involved in this tooth-and-claw lifestyle is Carole Baskin, who may or may not have thrown her millionaire husband to the tigers before he had the opportunity to divorce her. The zookeepers’ hatred of Carole probably stems from general misogyny and from her seeming hypocrisy in keeping wild cats in a “rescue,” but note that Carole is the only person in the show who seems to have financial security; she also is the only person who can draw in a volunteer workforce, thus reinforcing that security. Carole can attract the upper-middle-class money and approval that men like Joe and Antle can never hope to attain, and they hate her passionately for it. (Note also that their social position as men means that they never had a chance at attaining riches through Carole’s method–marriage, whether Carole forcibly ended that marriage with a big cat or not.)

If even the top of the pyramid isn’t worth that much, what’s left? Well, there’s always show business. One of the story arcs in Tiger King involves Joe’s first attempt to make himself a television star. He was almost part of a bygone era of entertainment, that despite ending a year or two ago, seems like it’s been dead for decades: the high era of workplace reality television. Anyone who watched tv during the past 15 years knows the genre: a man runs some sort of business that’s high-stakes or lucrative or simply tawdry. Sometimes there’s a competition for a crappy prize, and sometimes the subject is simply the drama of the particular career involved, but the focus is always on the boss–the man (and it is always a man) who is the patriarch, sometimes literally, of the operation. The ur-daddy of that world is Donald Trump, of course, but the smaller stars–the kind of men who Joe Exotic might compare with–were Dog the Bounty Hunter and the men off Pawn Stars and American Chopper. These were stories about big white guys and their slightly smaller yet still large white guy friends, who held down violent jobs, or jobs that at least had the whiff of violence or seediness about them. On paper, Joe Exotic seemed like a good fit: he would be different because he was openly gay, but that was just another selling point, as there wasn’t a gay member of that television community yet and besides, it meant he could wear more interesting outfits than black tank tops and black jeans. 

However, Joe’s attempt at fame failed after Joe’s personal recording studio burned down with all the footage inside. Who set the fire is an open question–Joe swears it’s producer Rick Kirkham, while Rick blames Joe–but what’s interesting is (presumably) what didn’t burn: footage of Joe sitting on a giant throne and a credit sequence of Joe turning toward the camera while the words “Tiger King” flash up on the screen. It’s flattering footage of a man who can tame both his wild beasts and his workers, ready to strut his stuff on a minor cable channel at 10-9 central. Joe supposedly watched this opening over and over. 

Rick Kirkham doesn’t flatter Joe Exotic anymore. He now calls him an evil man, but he also expected to make a mint off of selling Joe’s image to the public–the problem wasn’t that Joe killed his tigers when they got old or vicious, or that Joe treated his human workers like shit, but that Joe tended to sign contracts, then throw tantrums later. We don’t know what exactly was in the contract that Rick had Joe sign, just that Rick threatened Joe that he “owned him.” Perhaps Rick was going to take Joe’s depiction in a different direction than Joe wanted–”Hell of the Tiger Zoos!”–or perhaps Joe realized that he had signed away his image to Rick, and Rick would get to be a millionaire, not him. If Joe had had a good lawyer, he might have had one of the last of the workplace reality shows and right now he would be busy posting Tiktok videos on washing his tigers’ paws, not locked away in prison. 

I wonder what the reality show would have looked like had Rick managed to get it to air, and if the critics who now find the documentary Tiger King exploitative would find the “reality” Tiger King entertaining. The abuse that Joe rained down upon his animals and workers probably would have been completely hidden or reworked as just part of the natural order, with the strong lording over the weak. (One of Joe’s workers remembers that he would become personally nastier when the cameras were on, as if he instinctively knew the demands of the nasty boss archetype.) His husbands probably would have been roped into performing for the cameras, and they would have been encouraged to play up and against each other to create drama or to suck up to Joe to project a loving image that didn’t really exist. No doubt the animals would have been encouraged to play up to the cameras as well, to their detriment and the detriment of the people who worked with them. 

Joe’s own temper and the shift in the media landscape to streaming made that reality show impossible, yet we’re all still thinking in reality show terms, as if having one’s story broadcast or streamed is a great reward in and of itself that should be reserved for “good people.” For example, Alissa Wilkinson identifies Barbara, the woman who stayed in Doc Antle’s disgusting stables, and Saff Saffery as the people whose stories should have been told, because “they seem untouched by the seemingly megalomaniacal tendencies of Joe or Antle.” However, we really don’t know much about Barbara or Saff; inquiring into their life stories might uncover the kind of problematic actions that would suddenly make them undeserving of the “gift” of storytelling, or they might simply be megalomaniacal about something else that might be distasteful to the critical viewer, like MLMs or jade eggs or guns. We also have no idea whether they would want the kind of invasive interviewing and camera work that a documentary like Tiger King involves; the format rewards people who have a narcissistic need to get their story across. Perhaps it would be best if we allowed ourselves to enjoy gawking at those who like to be gawked at, and didn’t force everyone else into the Joe Exotic pattern. It might make the Joes of this world a little nicer, at the very least.

Since I’m stuck mostly inside and can do as I please, why not another Star Wars post? Why not a post about why the sequels are bad? No, really, why not a post about why they were bad without all the awful, cod-political arguments that this discussion always devolves into? It’s always okay to dislike a movie, but here are some reasons why these movies are terrible that don’t get a lot of attention and also don’t involve the kind of reasoning that makes me want to shoot myself in the face.

1. Technology, part 1. Star Wars, at its best, has had amazing visuals. And I mean amazing–the kind of stuff that immediately produces a thrill down the spine. The practical effects in the original trilogy were genuinely impressive for their time, as was Lucas’s use of CGI in the prequels. None of the effects in the sequels reaches a level that impresses today’s viewer in the same way. This doesn’t mean that the effects are bad, or even that today’s benchmarks for special effects are anything more than seeing how much CGI you can smush into one frame (see Marvel). It does mean that the sequel watcher is denied the magic of witnessing an effect that was previously deemed difficult or impossible to visualize–the unreal made real. 
2. Technology, part 2. In 1977, the Star Wars galaxy was decidedly futuristic, despite being nominally set in the “long, long ago.” Spaceships, instant communication, and talking robots all immediately became parts of the popular imagination. The problem is that none of these items are imaginary anymore. Integrated chips and smartphones have made almost every element of Star Wars’s analog universe either everyday or obsolete. Instead of interacting with magical versions of familiar technology, the characters look like they’re walking around a set full of retro junk. It’s especially obvious in the sequences with the bad guys, who now look like they’re off-brand war reenactors instead of oppressive totalitarians. 
3. The lack of romance. Previous Star Wars romances certainly weren’t deep explorations of the human heart, and the Anakin-Padme relationship is probably one of the clumsiest romances ever projected onto a cinema screen, but at least Lucas tried. None of the characters in the sequels even so much as flirts. Disney hired a more racially diverse cast of attractive young people, then studiously avoided allowing any of those young people a romantic arc. The result is that the sequels seem strangely prudish even for a franchise aimed toward children, as if any sort of sexual content (and this being Star Wars, it would have involved a smooch or a skimpy outfit) is inherently disgusting.
4. Bad influences. Lucas was famously influenced by the serials of his childhood and Kurosawa. Rian Johnson seems to have been influenced by the 00s version of Battlestar Galactica, with its dark, conspiratorial tone, which is well and good except that Galactica depended on a weekly episodic structure to be exciting and its mournful claustrophobia clashes horribly with a franchise that’s supposed to be about swashbuckling in space. JJ Abrams is basically a producer and the few movies he’s directed have been franchise entries. He adds explosions and turquoise backgrounds to these established stories, then resells them as new product. Expecting either of these directors to produce a fun, weird series of stories was expecting the impossible.
5. Television. The people who made the original Star Wars series and the prequels came from a time in which movies were seen as a higher art form than television. That’s no longer the case, and it’s mostly for the best, but the golden age of television may have had an adverse effect on the men who made the Star Wars movies. Johnson and Abrams have some television in their background (Abrams much more than Johnson). Both The Force Awakens and Last Jedi are structured like television episodes. Abrams sets up a lot of story hooks for later episodes and ends on a cliffhanger, as if he has to get the audience to come back for next Thursday’s episode. Johnson stuffs four plots into Last Jedi, all of which might have been developed enough to be interesting in a television season format. Unfortunately, he has 2.5 hours to play with, instead of 12, and it doesn’t work. 
6. It’s forty fucking years later. Star Wars is often credited with killing off the American movie renaissance of the 1970s. The description of this stone-cold murder is often couched in political terms, but it’s really less about “left” and “right” and more about the storytelling focus–if moviemaking pre-Star Wars was about an adult protagonist making their way through a confusing everyday world, with varying results, moviemaking after Star Wars became about young adults or children overcoming fantastical evil. This is a wild generalization, of course, but it’s a generalization that’s set Star Wars up as a modern ur-story, with wannabe screenwriters blathering on about the “hero’s journey,” the triumph over adversity, and so on. In this way, Star Wars became a victim of its own success–every story became Star Wars and Star Wars, in and of itself, is no longer special. Selling a tired, jaded audience of middle-aged adults the exact same story about young folks saving the universe doesn’t work so well the second time around, and frankly, it shouldn’t. 

Disclaimer: This review contains spoilers.

Any review of J.J. Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker seemingly has to be in conversation with The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson’s previous entry in the Star Wars series, so let’s start with this: I didn’t like Last Jedi, and I don’t think that the backlash to it stemmed from racism or sexism but from the fact that the film takes the most beloved character in a series running on nostalgia and has him attempt to murder his own innocent nephew, instantly shattering the dreams and aspirations of millions of childhoods. In addition, Last Jedi killed the sequel trilogy’s momentum, leaving characters who should be barrelling into their last adventure in a state of stasis. It’s not an especially good movie, much less the masterpiece of sci-fi innovation that it’s sometimes described as.

That said, The Last Jedi still exists. And if you’re interested in the few plot threads that that movie left hanging–is romance blooming between Finn and Rose? is the sniveling Hux plotting a grisly revenge on Kylo Ren? how will tormented Kylo handle ruling the galaxy?–congratulations, because you are getting an answer to none of those questions. Instead, Rise of Skywalker reboots the sequel trilogy in the very first scene, revealing that everything up to this point was due to the machinations of–yes–Emperor Palpatine himself, who somehow survived the explosion of the Death Star and has been sitting around in outer space waiting for shit to go down.

From then on, Abrams retreads Jedi, not just Return of but Last, too. Did you like it when Finn pined after Rey and rode space horsies with his adventure companion? You’re going to see it again, only with Naomi Ackie instead of Kelly Marie Tran, who has to go back to her home planet–er, I mean stay behind and tend to the Resistance ships. Did you like it when Rey had a dark side vision of herself? You’re going to see it again, only this time it’s obvious that she’s having a dark side vision because her doppelganger literally hisses at her and bares snake teeth, in case you were too stupid to get it the first time. Did you like the psychic tug-of-war between Rey and Kylo, in which Kylo attempts to turn Rey to the service of a dark master while tempting her with visions of her past? I hope you did because you’re going to see it again, only with the visual flair and entertaining fight choreography of Last Jedi replaced with clumsy flashbacks and the leaden screenwriting of Chris Terrio. It’s as if Abrams is determined to show that he can do what Johnson did, and do it better, only it’s inevitably just louder and dumber and he shows himself up as a clumsier filmmaker than his cleverboots predecessor.

There’s not much going on outside this pissing match–some dynastic nonsense, and some aborted subplots, which were probably cut down to the bare minimum to increase the sales of ancillary books and comics. It all ends up with the bad guys deploying more superweapons than ever before, and the good guys overcoming them with more hope and love than ever before (certainly not with tactics–lovers of Rogue One-style space battles will be utterly disappointed).

Yet for all the speechifying about hope and love (and there is a lot of it), Rise is terrified of emotional connection. I don’t mean this purely on the romantic level, although if you’ve read that there’s a queer kiss in the film, it 1. lasts for a half-second and 2. is actually the only bit of successful romance you’re going to get in the movie and therefore, the entire sequel trilogy. Poe ends up with a wary ex (who doesn’t kiss him! Oscar Isaac went three Star Wars movies without a kiss! Oscar Isaac!) and Finn’s newest love interest ends up having a bizarre moment with Billy Dee Williams’s Lando Calrissian, who’s either her father or her lover. Rey ends up with Kylo, for all of five seconds, and then is relegated to the chaste love of adoptive ghostparents Luke and Leia, showing up at the end looking like they’ve been airbrushed onto the side of a truck.

The platonic relationships aren’t so hot, either. Rey’s relationship with Leia is awkward, but it’s understandably constrained by the amount of footage left of Carrie Fisher. More disappointing are the relationships between Poe, Rey, and Finn, who are finally united as a trio, but spend most of their time snapping at each other and making sub-Whedon quips. There are a few fake deaths and a few real ones before the real players start falling in the third act, but these are either obvious fakeouts or land with the impact of a wet rag.

That’s what’s ultimately wrong with Rise of Skywalker–the movie refuses to stop to let you care about anything. If you enjoy the emotional moments associated with the Star Wars story–Anakin’s fall to the darkness, Luke’s triumph over evil, any of the romances (ok, Han and Leia, I still can’t deal with “I hate sand!”)–Rise of Skywalker doesn’t have time for you. It wants you to displace all the energy you’d spend on enjoying a coherent storyline onto familiar Star Wars things–the Millennium Falcon, the droids, and all the different-colored stormtroopers, because you can buy models of those things and put money in Disney’s pocket. The remaining actors from the original trilogy are things, too, existing simply to remind you that you once associated positive emotions with them so you can buy the associated costumes and hundred-dollar lightsabers.

You can’t say you weren’t warned, though: Abrams starts off the standard crawl with “The dead speak!” This is all dead stuff. The saddest thing is that, at this point, it’s hard to remember it was ever alive at all.

Notes:

• The visuals for Rise are probably the dullest of the sequel trilogy, and were it not for the prequels’ use of early CGI they’d be in the running for worst of the entire series. Lucas had an eye for color and costuming; everything here is generic murky blue and orange, and the costumes look like they were bought on sale at REI. Adam Driver is reduced to wandering around in a fisherman’s sweater for the last third of the movie. A fisherman’s sweater!
• I don’t remember the other Star Wars films displaying quite so much sadistic glee in the deaths of the baddies. The camera lingers on dead stormtroopers, and Abrams adapts the “captain-going-down-with-his-ship” moment from Last Jedi so that you can see exactly how many peons are burning alive in an enclosed space. Did we really give up smooches for this?
• Speaking of smooches, does anyone want their sexuality represented by J.J. Abrams? His sequels make Lucas’s Star Wars look like The Pillow Book. I’m not an expert in Abrams’s works, though, so if anyone can offer an example of his other work depicting human connection, I’d be glad to hear of it.

Peter Strickland presents two tales of horror centered on a dress that tortures its wearers to death. Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays the lonely divorcee who buys the dress for a first date, and (in the weaker story) Leo Bill inherits the dress for his stag do. Both come to bad ends, as the dress wounds them, squeaks in their closets, plays havoc in their washing machines, and generally annoys them before leading them on to their fatal ends.

Parts of this movie look great–most of the costumes, and almost all of the sets. In Fabric takes place in a sort of haunted, half-satanic 70s Britain, a great vibe that’s thrown off by the proprietors of demonic department store , who speak in gibberish and look like something out of late-stage Tim Burton. They have a connection with the cursed dress and of course they’re up to pervy tricks with the mannequins, which is notable entirely because the evil store owner’s pop-eyed, manic come face looks exactly like the 1990s cartoon character George Liquor.

The problem is that a haunted dress, or at least this haunted dress, isn’t an especially potent antagonist. Instead of body horror, Strickland goes for creepy, but it doesn’t work–there’s only so scared you can be of a flying dress, and the dress isn’t quite outwardly deadly enough to be funny. The best parts don’t have to do with the dress at all, but are the quarrels between Baptiste and Gwendoline Christie, the rich bitch girlfriend of Baptiste’s teenage son. Christie is a perfect monster of artsy selfishness, and Baptiste conveys her own loneliness and the horror of displacement within one’s own house perfectly.

What is the truth about Chernobyl? After 35 years, there still isn’t a definitive answer. Outside the obvious horrors–the explosion, the fire, the poisonous radiation–the details tend to change with the telling. The exact cause of the reactor meltdown is still a matter of academic dispute, as is what happened to the people involved. Workers are recorded as dead of acute radiation poisoning by one author, then reappear, retired and healthy, in retrospectives written years later. In addition, television and Internet video immortalizes some witnesses and not others. For example, Alexander Yuvchenko, who was in the plant on the night of the explosion, is forever onscreen as an unlikely survivor of that night. He died of radiation-linked leukemia in 2016, but he lived long enough to make it in front of a Western documentary’s lens. Others did not.

Perhaps it’s that authors create the understandings that best fit an existing set of ideas. For British author Adam Higginbotham, the men and women who helped clean up Chernobyl disappeared from public view after the fall of the Soviet Union, victims of post-Communist neglect; for the Ukrainian professor Serhii Plokhy, the medical needs and welfare of the same people were the cause of a massive (if justified) drain on the resources of the newborn Ukrainian republic. Where you stand changes your view.

The lesson of Craig Mazin’s miniseries Chernobyl isn’t exactly the aftereffects of the accident. Rather, it’s the importance of the truth. Characters lecture about it, wonder about its nature, whether it exists at all. The closest thing the series has to a villain, reckless engineer Anatoly Dyatlov (who did exist), sneers “There is no truth!” from his hospital bed. His opposite, the scientist Ulana Khomyuk (who did not), is described as a “truth ninja” by actress Emily Watson. 

The glowing reviews for Chernobyl signal critics’ acceptance of that narrative. The series–which I personally found a mix of decent horror and banal exposition–is the premier example of government fallen into lies. “It exposes a government paralyzed by its own secrecy while shining a light on the selfless citizens who gave their lives to protect their countrymen–and perhaps the world,” writes Lorraine Ali in the Los Angeles Times. Many critics extrapolate the decay of Chernobyl to the decay of the present-day U.S. system, bringing the moral of the story back plainly to the reader. The series reflects “our inability to agree on facts apart from political spin,” NPR opines. “It doesn’t take a nuclear physicist to see why it makes a lot of sense to look back on this moment right now,” agrees Rolling Stone.

The hero of Chernobyl is unquestionably scientist Valery Legasov. He is introduced to us as he finishes his taped memoirs before he dies by his own hand, his quest for the truth about Chernobyl seemingly having led him down a dark path. The rest of the series, excepting the horror show parts, follows Legasov on his mission to find the facts, first to stop the plant’s complete collapse and then to prevent a second accident from occurring elsewhere.

Legasov is portrayed as a professional whose cloistered habits leave him unaware of the machinations of the state around him. He has no family or friends (although none of the characters do, unless said family and friends are there to be poisoned by radiation) and he is brusque and cold in his habits and played by salt-of-the-earth Jared Harris, just in case we are even tempted to think he is dishonest. “To be a scientist is to be naive,” Legasov declaims to Khomyuk. “We are so focused on our search for truth we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it.”

As Masha Gessen points out in the New Yorker, the actual Legasov couldn’t have been that much of a professional naif. As someone with a successful career in a closed, oppressive society, he certainly would have known the rules. Gessen argues that this faux naivete lets the Soviet system off the hook–but really, who needs to damn the Soviet system to an American audience? Mazin’s Legasov is more a creature of American screenwriting–the audience has to have a hero-surrogate to lead them through the story. On the face of it, the actual Legasov wasn’t a hero, or at least not so much more so than any of the other people involved. He helped with the attempts to put out the fire at Chernobyl with sand and lead, and the fire did go out, even though we don’t know precisely how much of that was effort and how much was luck, and he did leave behind a memoir (although, like so much else with Chernobyl, there are several competing transcripts floating around). We do know that Legasov blamed the Soviet nuclear establishment for emphasizing cost-cutting and deemphasizing training and safety. We also know that he didn’t leave behind the suicide note in Mazin’s script.

Perhaps the faux-Legasov exists to maintain the heroic narrative–this particular hero’s sacrifice doesn’t go unrewarded, even if the character himself can never know it. We, the viewers, can tut-tut over his death while appreciating the ending. The truth wins out, the state responds–as the ending titles reveal, the reactors were retrofitted, despite the expense–and, in the end, evil (in the form of the Soviet system) is eradicated. By taking a personal risk and exposing the truth of the Soviet system, Legasov guarantees the safety of all mankind.

For, in Mazin’s worldview, truth changes things. It’s a physical property, like radiation–you can’t see it, but it affects everyone. Even the state has to respond to it–the revelation of the truth, whether by one person or a collective, will sway the behavior of a superior, even a superior as ethically bankrupt as a late-Soviet bureaucrat.

But what a state that knows, but doesn’t care, even when its behavior is exposed? Ignore the current parallels that we’re supposed to understand, and think about the example of Flint. The residents of Flint were forced to drink poisoned water, and none of the officials charged will ever be brought to court. The governor at the time, Rick Snyder, did have to turn down an appointment to Harvard, a disappointment he blamed on “our current political environment and its lack of civility,” but that was all.

It’s accepted that this state can kill, with impunity, and without even a show of reassurance to the troubled. But that’s not the sort of message that cheers the heart (or gets universal four-star reviews). Mazin’s work provides a fantasy in which the viewer can retreat away from reality into the pleasures of watching one’s own goodness prevail. It’s the middlebrow version of retro-porn like Stranger Things.

By now, everyone knows about Sarah Dessen and how her unhappiness made somebody who didn’t like her books very, very much unhappier, and how many of her fellow authors jumped to her defense, as if she were a cringing child instead of a very rich, very popular author. And everyone knows that Jennifer Weiner, another very rich and very popular author, made the biggest fool of herself.

However, not everyone knows that Weiner predicted the situation in her own books. I swear it’s true; the story is called Everyone’s a Critic, and the publisher says it’s Donna Tartt crossed with Stephen King and Shirley Jackson. Not quite, but it is a look into the mindset of a woman who equated the opinion of an English major from Aberdeen, South Dakota to the sexual assault of 250 children. 

The plot: Laurel Spellman, a book critic for an eminent but money-losing newspaper, is enlisted to lead tourists around Paris for a week or two. One of the tourists is Tess Kravitz, a romance writer who loves to promote her books and keeps pushing a copy on Laurel, to the point where the book starts showing up even when Tess isn’t around. Laurel eventually is driven mad by the book, hallucinates, and falls off a hotel balcony to her death. It turns out that Tess and her agent (who may be the devil, although I’m probably making the story more interesting than it’s meant to be) colluded to madden Laurel and push her off the balcony, all as revenge for a bad review that Laurel wrote of a book by Tess’s mother. 

Laurel is a grotesque–a friendless, drunken, pill-addled bitch who’s simultaneously frigid and a slut and who is subject to an escalating series of physical and emotional humiliations during her sojourn in Paris. (Weiner describes Laurel’s urinary tract infection with prim relish, referring to the character’s aching “privates.”) Laurel is a grotesque because she is a critic, or as she puts it, someone who champions “interesting” books. Actual interesting books do not exist in Weiner’s universe–there are literary books, which can only be written by thin white men, and genre works, and anyone who reads the former does so out of pretense alone. In turn, Laurel is interested in “interesting” works because she’s predatory (she trades good reviews for sex with thin white men) and snobbish. 

To emphasize Laurel’s sins, Weiner flashes back to a scene in Laurel’s youth, during which she tells her mother that the Thorn Birds is silly and that books should be challenging. In response, her dying mother tells Laurel that she’ll die alone and unloved, without a partner or children. This is presented as a normal sort of thing you’d tell a child who made fun of your book, instead of absolutely deranged, and of course it comes true. (The good women in this story are all self-effacing, cooking, cleaning mothers or, if not mothers themselves, devoted daughters who buy sweets for the people around them.)

The hate curdles the story to the point where time collapses. Our antiheroine, who is pushing seventy, remininces about her early career days, in which she somehow was a Manolo Blahnik-wearing Sex and the City imitator. Characters who despise the Internet somehow know and use the word “sheeple.” A woman who’s been dead for 50 years is recalled as complaining about The Corrections. 

The rest of the characters are just as blurry as the timeline. Flight attendants, maids, the young–they all exist to humiliate Laurel and enjoy the company of her nemesis. One of these characters is a young woman who’s on the Paris trip with her family. Weiner doesn’t bother to give the girl a name, but we do know that she’s pretty, and that she openly wonders why Laurel hasn’t reviewed more women, and that she carries a tote with a “Read More Women” slogan,  and that she announces that she’s going to write her thesis on the unjust treatment of female authors by the literary establishment. In short, in the eternal war between boring books by men and easy books by women, she’s on the side of the angels of the house (and they really are–the good women mother and cook, or at least buy people pastries, while the bad women buy expensive clothes and drink by themselves).

I think that we can extrapolate from this story. Weiner assumes that this is what a good young feminist woman is and does–look pretty and defend womanhood, which in this case means her avatar. She doesn’t judge by content, but by class, or rather by family–the big family of women, who all look out for each other, as long as they play by certain social rules.

The idea that an actual young woman might do otherwise must have come as a terrible shock, so much so that Weiner couldn’t comprehend her as a woman, but as some sort of creature poisoned by masculinity, unable to partake in the pleasures of real teenage girls, and out to pervert young minds. A woman who judges turns out to be no woman at all–and worthy of murder, if not in real life (alas!), at least online.