But a millionaire-led discourse is why these conversations about contemporary ethics always dead-ends in the question, What is the best way to spend money? Jessa and Nico discuss why our rich love anti-social behavior (they always have! they are bored!) and why, ultimately, their class solidarities will probably always be with the Epstein class.

Audio below or in the usual podcast places. Shownotes and references after the paywall.

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One of the first shots in Yellow Letters, İlker Çatak’s new film about the political repression of artists and academics in Turkey, is of Brecht’s bright red X. While the story takes place in contemporary Turkey, the German-Turkish filmmaker made the decision to make the film in “exile,” with Berlin standing in for Ankara and Hamburg standing in for Istanbul. Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm stands in for Ankara’s national theater. The sense of displacement – German street signs and visual references – contributes to this sense of disorientation.

Derya and Aziz are high profile figures in the theater scene, and Aziz is the playwright of the show Derya is starring in. We only see a moment of Aziz’s play, but it seems like standard Resistance stuff, about voices, bodies, oppression. While the Kaiser might not be in his box, the Governor and his team are in the good seats in the front. When the governor requests a photo with the cast, Derya refuses to come out of her dressing room.

Aziz is also a professor at the university, and Çatak gives another little wink to Brecht by having one of his books on Aziz’s desk during his class on dramaturgy. But the class is dispersed because Aziz insists the students join a protest going on outside. The point of the protest is also vague, there’s a rainbow flag and a poster with an anti-war slogan. But the Brecht references are subtle and cheeky. Every artist wants to be a Brecht when it comes to his creative output, but they are less interested in taking on the consequences and responsibilities he faced for that work.

The two small acts – the refusal of the photograph and the suggestion to join the protest -- create a cascade of consequences for the pair, and they are not the only ones caught up in it. Brecht’s red X will reappear – this time on Aziz’s office door at the university after he is suspended. But many of his colleagues are also targeted and suspended without pay. Aziz and others are accused of various nonsense, including insulting the president and supporting terrorism. His play is pulled from the schedule at the theater, and Derya is let go from the company. Suddenly finding themselves with no income and with a daughter in high school, they move in with Aziz’s mother in Istanbul.

The radical, if left around long enough, will eventually become institutionalized. Brecht is on the approved curriculum of a state university in a nation led by a dictator. But Aziz wants to be both radical and a part of the institution, he wants to claim a rebellious status while also enjoying the stability of employment and patronage. He seems surprised to find he’s no longer allowed to have both, and he must compromise on one side or the other.

There’s a funny moment when, after moving in with his mother to save on rent, Derya and Aziz go to visit her brother. Her brother is “traditional,” as Derya calls him. He runs a shop, he does favors for people like the police chief, he goes to the Friday prayers and circulates among the people who run the city. When he introduces Aziz to the man who runs a fleet of taxis and suggests he start driving for money, Aziz visibly recoils. He is still applying for work as an academic, making a little money on the side doing translations. The idea of doing labor for money disgusts him and disturbs his self-conception.

Aziz seems to comfort himself with the knowledge that his play disturbed the powerful with his radical play, but it’s much more likely that it was Derya’s snub that pushed them into danger. Autocrats, war criminals, and blowhards love rebellious artists, they are very useful in promoting an image of tolerance and self-awareness. What they don’t love is an artist who refuses to let their aura be exploited.

A conversation swirls around the whole movie: are we doing enough? Are we radical enough? Are we resisting hard enough? A younger woman scolds the married couple for being too comfortable and too compromised by their association with the national theater. But she herself works at a small theater in Istanbul, performing plays about Kurdish identity and other lightly political subjects, to a cosmopolitan audience that has agreed in advance with everything that is going to happen on stage. Aziz explodes when Derya decides she wants to move on with their lives, get new jobs, adjust to the new reality. He wants to sit in his oppression, thinking it is important for him to do so.

Lately I’ve been sensitive to the misuse of Brecht as the anti-hatred (anti-racist, anti-misogynist, whatever) grift reshapes itself into the anti-authoritarian grift. But Brecht is an inconvenient figure to such figures, because of the quality of his work, the rethinking of form, the political integrity, and the acceptance of consequences. That last one is maybe the most important, in an age when professors want to claim some sort of endangered status while also claiming to be brave activists. They don’t see their system as part of The System, they somehow see themselves as outsiders or marginalized.

But unlike Derya, Brecht is conveniently dead. When professors and writers and others on the anti-authoritarian grift want to exploit his aura by posing smiling next to him, he can’t refuse.

The tone is not satirical, Çatak is not insisting that these people are all ridiculous for trying to fight against a repressive regime. The characters retain real dignity, and the compromises each are forced to make are agonizing. The repeated retort that people make to Aziz, “You’re trying to save the world with theater,” is made in jest, in condemnation, and in admiration. It’s a fool’s errand, yes, but there is dignity in being the fool.

Yellow Letters is currently playing in Germany, with distribution to other nations to follow.

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Recommended:

• Have really been getting into Helke Sander’s films lately. Saw her short “From Reports of the Guard and Patrol Services No. 1” and was gutted by it.

• I really like The Dream podcast, but this conversation with Terra Newell, whose story was depicted in the podcast and then TV series Dirty John, was especially good. The true crime industry, newspapers, and the media just keep inventing new ways of exploiting victims and survivors every single day! From being repeatedly lied to by the LA Times reporter to various media companies pretending they had no money to give her, to endless merch and spinoffs about the worst day of her life, I mean, Jesus Christ. (My favorite bit is when a producer takes her to the restaurant across the street from where she was almost killed for a meeting.)

• It’s worth reading about the literary agent who worked as an intermediary between Jeffrey Epstein and various stars of the science world.

• The smartest take on the Hungary election comes from Equator.

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Dark Matter is one of those places that use the word “immersive” a lot and where the artwork is primarily background for selfies. Dramatic lighting, some large blobby structures, reflective surfaces. The website explains that Christopher Bauder, the founder, merges “technical sophistication with artistic sensitivity to create multi-sensory art experiences.” What he has created is not so much art as just a million or so Instagram posts.

I was going to the Reethaus to experience “The Nightingale’s Song,” a project that sought to honor the strange songbird whose melancholy, nocturnal call has inspired poetry from England to Persia. The nightingale is now endangered, and so here we all are, to… pay attention to that? Unclear.

Anyway, you enter the Reethaus, someone tells you “the listening experience has just begun,” so you take off your shoes, you step into the auditorium, and the experience commences. The experience is being in a room where there are mats and pillows on the floor, where sophisticated, cultured adults are laid out like kindergarten nap time, and the disembodied sound of a bird is piped in through speakers. I left after about thirty seconds. It cost ten euro.

But the appeal is not really listening to an artificial bird experience in a room surrounded by women lying together petting each other’s hair. It is the setting itself, the Flussbad, which used to be a public bathing area, and then it was where houseboats used to gather, and now it is private property. Oh, I’m sorry, it is, according to the pamphlet I was handed, “an experiential hospitality collective that reframes the way we live, work, and come together.” It creates “the reimagining of human potential.” It has a QR code where I can “Join Us” and rent out a studio space that “combines vanguard design with maximum functionality.”

They use Berlin’s glamorous/horrific past to sell us on this disappointing present. The site for the Flussbad isn’t just on the river, it’s at the “site of historic Weimar-era river baths.” Berlin has created brands out of its dead artists and most exciting moments – Weimar is a brand, the GDR is a brand, 1968 is a brand. All to sell you some real estate in a mediocre city that has sold off everything interesting about it.

Bertolt Brecht is a brand. Actually, he was a meme back in 2016. You couldn’t go onto social media without some 17 year old posting, “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” Brecht’s brand is about Resistance, about Art, about Truth. With Brecht’s brand taking up so much space, you barely need to do anything other than flash his work around the stage to confuse the audience into thinking that you are the profound genius instead of him.

The Brecht-inspired play Four Walls and a Roof has played all over Europe in the past couple of years. Lebanese artists Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué use Brecht’s double exile – first from Germany and then from the United States – to begin a conversation about resistance and singing about dark times. Except the conversation never begins, if it’s not Brecht there may as well be nothing happening on the stage.

Majdalanie and Mroué go through the biography of Brecht to illuminate what he was up against. First the Nazis (always a crowd pleaser) and then the House Unamerican Activities Committee. In each instance, they tell us, he not only resisted, he created. Off to the side of the stage, Henrik Kairies plays the piano and sings Brecht’s songs. He’s an impressive force, and the songs are still quite moving and stirring. It is the only interesting thing happening on the stage.

Throughout Four Walls and a Roof, Majdalanie and Mroué suggest that our time is much like the Nazis’ time. There are consequences for expressing the wrong political opinion. There are wars happening. And yet they don’t explicitly draw this out, maybe because then they would have to admit, as difficult as this specific moment is, it is not actually the same as World War II. And they are not resisting like Bertolt Brecht. It also becomes clear that the creators don’t seem to know much about Brecht. It becomes a bit like someone reading a Wikipedia article to you, and charging you money for the experience.

Contemporary artists frequently use the past to avoid strictly defining the evils of our time. Everything is always referential. Oh, if you lost a gallery show because you vocally supported Palestine, that is like the purges of Jews from the universities. Oh, if you want to make some statement about the mistakes of the past, that is like when the Red Army Faction fought against the imperialist, capitalist class. Sometimes I think that the reason contemporary artists avoid engaging with real contemporary politics in the places they live is because they’d accidentally reveal to themselves and to others they are mostly members of the oppressive class, which can easily happen despite being part of the oppressed identity group.

Unfortunately for most Berlin artists, what was interesting about Brecht was not that he made art during dark times, it was that he made good art. And his exile through many nations over long years is not like their decision to move to Europe when the United States became politically inconvenient for them. No matter how many panel discussions you host, multimedia features you create, or podcasts you release about our relationship to the living world, your intentional community (that rents studio space for 30 euro a square meter) will never become Bauhaus.

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• In all the coverage that the New York Times has done with the problems of the Met Opera, they only recently got around to noticing that the experiencing of going to the Met sucks. Neither the set designer nor the conductor seemed to notice that the way things are set up, no one beyond the orchestra seats can hear what the fuck is going on. The design swallows the voices of the singers, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin is notorious for not giving a shit if the music sounds good in a space. If you are in the cheap seats, your auditory experience is terrible. But of course that is where the poor people sit, so why bother to make sure they are having a good time? Both Yannick and Yuval Sharon (the director) are “hot,” meaning they are good at giving donors what they want and they are good at spectacle, but their productions are not good quality. Some of the worst operas I’ve seen in my life were directed by Sharon, and some of the worst orchestral experiences I’ve had were conducted by Yannick. I don’t know, if you are going to be paid millions of dollars while everyone else works for prestige and pennies, if you are going to flown around the world and fussed over, maybe you should be good at your fucking job.

• A colleague put me on to the Duo Étrange and their album i wish i were dead and I quite like it.

• Adam Tooze paid tribute to Alexander Kluge, a writer and filmmaker who is sadly not as well known outside of Germany as he deserves to be. I absolutely love Seagull Books, and they’ve been publishing Kluge’s work in English reliably and beautifully for the last decade or so. It’s hard to say where to start if you are unfamiliar with his work, although the book I’ve thought about a lot is the one I read most recently, Anyone Who Utters a Consoling Word is a Traitor.

Audio below or in the usual podcast places. Shownotes and references after the paywall.

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Audio below or in the usual podcast places. Shownotes and references after the paywall.

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Never do they hit on the idea that maybe it’s not about what the MFA does to the individual writer and is instead about the larger role the university plays in American society in maintaining a strict divide in our class system between the haves and the have-nots. That the MFA system filters out the lower classes and those without access to or who have rejected the university system.

I’ve written about this before, because every time the discourse happens I am somehow surprised the writers who continue to discourse have no awareness of this divide, not even enough to add that weird little pledge of privilege they know to do when it comes to race, gender, etc. People who benefit from a system are never going to notice its machinery in any real way, because that would inconvenience them. So on and on it goes. “Actually, I had a professor who introduced me to William Gass.” “Actually, the worst guy in my MFA immediately got a book deal while all the geniuses did not.” Fascinating.

Sometimes I’ll wonder why they don’t seem to care about the cultural irrelevance of literature, the closed loop of their world. Then I remember they don’t care because a closed loop is easier to control. In a world like that, there can be no invaders or usurpers. They dictate who is good and it always just accidentally happens to be them.

When the media tour for Lindy West’s memoir started, I saw a couple people say they were “mourning” the Lindy West they thought they knew. Whether or not her memoir about “growing” through becoming polyamorous is sincere or some sort of elaborate form of constructing a narrative to help remove self-doubt, it is still an object through which her readers are expected to examine their choices and polish up their opinions about lifestyle, even if in an antagonistic mode.

Fans are and have always been weird. Once you go from product to producer, you’re in a weird imaginative space. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, as long as you maintain some kind of distinction between you and them – and the parts you’ve created in your head versus the parts that actually exist.

I think the terrible thing about 2010s feminism is that we were encouraged to blur the distinction between us and them – them being the role models of feminist living. Their success, we were told, was our success. They would show us how to find pathways through the chaos of technofeudalism and find success and happiness. And never mind the fact that these women almost all had things like parents mentioned in the Panama Papers, familial connections to the Clinton Foundation, generational wealth, etc etc etc etc. If they can do it so can you.

Which is why so many of them spat out stories of trauma. Someone being mean to you is a universal experience, and it looks like, on the surface at least, an obstacle. If you also had someone be mean to you, watching someone else overcome that obstacle was supposed to inspire you to do the same. But again, leaving out the part about the Panama Papers.

A television screen is not a mirror. And yet people will treat it as such. Much of the “controversy” around movies like One Battle After Another came down to, “is that how you see me?” Not just in the depiction of black characters, but also in the depiction of “the left.” Is that how you see me? Silly, or easily corrupted, or fearful, or useless? How dare you confuse me with this person. But the person making the demand of representation is the one conflating their self with the character, not the creator.

Then a demand is made that what they see on the screen be more “accurate.” “Actually, the American radicals of 1968 weren’t like that at all,” etc etc. But they don’t know, because they don’t know anything about the American radicals of 1968 except for what they saw in a movie. Or read in a book written by someone taking money from the CIA. Everywhere is distortion, or projection, or a kind of fairy glamour, and they’re not understanding the difference.

In a culture that is a closed loop, that is supported by people demanding art be a mirror, that offers us stars with the idea that their success is our success, the whole thing runs on imaginative solidarity. We root for certain people, and we show our support by giving them our money, and we assume there will be some trickle down effect for us. After all, we are showing our solidarity with them, they have to give us something in this exchange.

We model our behavior after their behavior. The various levels of discourse about what a good book is – from social media to MFA programs to literary criticism to what gets bought – tells writers who are outside the closed loop that if they follow their guidance there might be admittance. But there won’t be, because they are leaving out the information about the Panama Papers. They’re not acknowledging the basic functions of the university system.

When a system is in decline, its participants become rigid. No changes, please. When profits dwindle, when relevance slips, when quality plummets, people freeze out of anxiety and make moves to reap as much from the dying world as they possibly can. And that is what is happening in American culture, from the Paramount takeover of WB to the Met Opera looking to sell corporate sponsorships of its box seats to American literature giving us ever more rich girl lit even if the rich girls are fascists now.

The reason the discourses from the outside get ever further from reality, ever more insistent and nasty, is because the culture is a closed loop. Because it’s in decline. Because entry points have been sealed off. Because the people currently in it are going to drain everything they can from it before it dies.

Meanwhile our creators will pretend they have solidarity with you by talking about how they are socialists, how relatable they are, how much they care about feminism and identity politics, how much they love you. And we keep it all going by believing them.

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A quick note:

Joseph and I had to pause the Revolution and Ruin book club for a few months due to various things going on in our individual professional and personal lives. Not a big deal, but time became short for both of us. We’ll resume in the summer with Demons.

“Do you want to put it on?” Amanda Boxer asked me in her London sitting room, holding her mother’s striped silk housecoat out toward me. Boxer, an actress, had worn it on stage once. In the 1930s in Shanghai, a tailor had made this coat for Boxer’s mother, journalist Emily Hahn. The edges of its hems lay crisp in my hands. I slipped my arms into the sleeves and felt the fabric tense across my shoulder blades. Too small.

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She’d led a glamorous life in 1930s China. All the things I knew about her buzzed around us: how Hahn had set off alone at age 24 amid the Great Depression to live in the Belgian Congo for a year and a half to write a book; her life in Shanghai, going to dance hall openings and reporting for The New Yorker; her moves, first to Chongqing and then to Hong Kong, amid the crescendo of World War II; staying in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation, selling her jewelry on the black market to keep her newborn daughter and future husband alive. Hahn was “tough,” as Boxer described her mother. I felt the nubby textured buttons of the housecoat under my thumbs, admired the vibrant teal and smooth matte black stripes of its fabric, its neatly pintucked shoulders.

The housecoats—there were two of them, one black and blue, one a burgundy and gold Chinese brocade—had been everywhere Hahn lived after Shanghai. They inserted themselves into scenes I’d researched for my book on Hahn, her friend Rebecca West, their mutual acquaintance, Martha Gellhorn, and their wider cohort of pioneering, restless literary journalists. I imagined Hahn shrugging the red one across her shoulders after she took off clothes I knew she’d worn: simple dresses to travel; the glimmering sheath of green and silver lamé she slipped into for an evening event as a fêted novelist in Shanghai; the blouses and skirts and rubber boots she’d brought to rainy Chongqing. She’d left those items behind for other reporters who stayed at the press hostel to inherit. A woman didn’t take decent clothing out of wartime Chongqing.

Clothes always got Hahn where she wanted to go. Not that she always seemed to wear the right thing, per se. Her London friends among the Bright Young Things in the 1920s, stylish artists and dancers, had made fun of the sweat stains in the armpits of her dresses and then admired how she not only took a joke but answered right back with such wit and warmth. Later, in Shanghai, Hahn spent an evening at a nightclub disguised as an overdressed dancer-for-hire in a too-new frock. Her seams were fresher, not frayed. She forged ahead anyway, waltzing with a Scottish engineer, an Italian sailor, and an American marine who left without paying her. At the end of the evening she gave her earnings to the women who’d let her join their ranks for a night and left.

After all that, and after World War II began, Hahn spent a year in occupied Hong Kong. Her New Yorker colleagues assumed her dead. When she finally accepted the deal the U.S. government had struck with the Japanese for her repatriation, did she lift this fabric to her face and breathe it in, hoping she could still smell something of the place she loved, the life of danger and independence that she knew even then she would never recover?

I think about this housecoat all the time. This was my first long trip away from my children, a research trip to the single city where Hahn, West, and Gellhorn had all lived. I’d been shocked by how my children had reoriented my priorities: I never thought I’d stop caring about markers of individualism like clothing and travel choices, but it had been years since I’d been able to travel, years since I’d liked what I wore. Writing about Hahn and her cohort had been the thread that connected the pre-child me with the woman who stood in Boxer’s sitting room, rubbing my thumb and index fingers along the silk that Hahn had once worn. All of her confidence and daring flooded me.

Hahn, West, and Gellhorn knew that clothing could help or hinder a woman’s access to certain physical spaces. Most women who traveled alone understood how what they wore might subvert other people’s expectations. In the 19^th century some travelers wrote letters home about the veiled hats they wore to block the gazes of curious men, others about the coarse fabrics and simple clothes that implied travel for necessity, toward a job or an ill family member, rather than for joy or pleasure. Hahn, like the first woman to circumnavigate the globe two centuries before her, had dressed like a boy when she set out on a 1920s road trip across the United States in a Model T. West picked her reporting outfits with care. When Gellhorn crossed the Pyrenees en route to the first of many conflicts she covered, the Spanish Civil War, in a car stuffed full of canned goods and oranges, she had worn slacks, a windbreaker, and a scarf over her blonde hair. She was often the only blonde in the room.

In that Shanghai dance hall, Hahn had understood immediately how her dress marked her as an imposter from the start; she should have chosen a worn fabric, a less sophisticated cut, she admonished herself. She might have learned from her onetime mentor, West: In the 1940s, West had looked like any traveling mother to the younger reporter who met her in a train station when they both headed toward Nuremberg, even though West preferred to dress with flair.

Photos of West hint at an essential playfulness, an innate awareness of what clothing could portray and when she might harness that utility and force. A snapshot of her in middle-aged reporting action confirms that journalist version of her: a wide stiff skirt, falling in folds around her body, a contrasting cape-like jacket mimicking its gentle breadth, notebook in hand. At home, a decade or two later, with her cat in her arms, she wore a printed Moschino-esque jacket, with trompe l’oeil grommets in x-like formations, a jeweled collar around her elegant neck. And older still, on a balcony in Mexico, her final reporting trip, she wore a white shift dress with big black geometric dots, redolent of Marimekko. Appropriate in all circumstances but pressing toward the edge of needing clothes for one’s own self-possession. She had blown the entirety of her first paycheck for a novel on a beautiful hat.

In my research, I encountered many younger women writers who looked up to West as the very model of an independent, passionate-to-the-point-of-unhinged woman who had found incredible literary success on her own terms. As they got older, Hahn’s friendship with West had moved from mentorship to a genuine, close relationship of equals. By then, Hahn had left Hong Kong for New York and then New York for her husband’s family home in England.

She had carried and birthed two babies and gained an unusual hesitance for a woman as bold as she. She didn’t publish much reporting for a while. There was no clear path, then, for her to be both a wife and mother, and the writer she knew herself to be, the wanderer whose habit of movement was stitched into her nerves and intellect. I imagine that her “imperial impatience,” as her niece described her disposition in a poem she wrote for Hahn’s funeral, could have folded inward. Maybe she looked at herself and the circumstances of her life with a combination of acceptance and annoyance.

That, at least, is what my own impatience and restlessness did to me after I, like Hahn, went through two pregnancies. Like many mothers of infants, with our changing bodies, our exhaustion, and our sudden domesticity, I had given up on my own sense of why I should care about clothing. I wore leggings I never liked, I glanced with confused resignation at the stains breastmilk left on the men’s button-down shirts I favored and then changed out of those shirts into something cleaner and even more shapeless. As the years passed, I also acquired a muddled sense of which duties to my family I should heed and which I could push aside, a perplexity over what mattered and why. Everything about my children seemed so important; everything about me seemed less so, though I knew that wasn’t right, either.

Then I pulled Hahn’s housecoat up my arms. I am six inches taller than she and my frame that much broader. I am not willowy, but then again, neither was she. These parallels: they thrilled me. She had led a real life, I understood with fresh and irreducible urgency, with real choices that had real consequences.

Hahn had made her way back out into the world, though it took a few years and a number of tough decisions. She wrote closely-observed features for The New Yorker into her eighties. Thinking about her housecoats in the months after I’d returned from England, I felt almost as if one of those striped sleeves had held a ghostly arm that reached from past into present to push me toward my own future. I began to think differently about my children and the selfhood I might cultivate amid the tremendous devotion of raising them. I hadn’t talked to anyone at home much in that week away, and the sensation of missing my family had been revelatory. When I returned, I found myself worrying less about our daily interactions, laughing more. I began to wear my old leather jacket again, eager to feel the stiffness at my elbows. The tug around my waist as I zipped into it felt comforting, its tightness a sign of strength as it straightened my spine, not a rebuke to my altered body. I pulled other items I’d loved before back into rotation.

I had spent years reading Hahn’s writing, but I needed to see and feel the clothing she had worn as she blazed a path, swashbuckling in her housecoat as Gellhorn had in slacks and West in her Nicole Groult suits, to learn how to apply the lessons I might learn from her life to my own. When faced with a “do or do not” that I couldn’t wrestle through, I began to ask myself, “What Would Emily Hahn Do?”—capitalized just so in my mind. I didn’t always, or really even very often, have the exact same response that I thought Hahn might have, but her influence was never wasted. I carried her presence close to me. I had felt the texture of her housecoat, after all.

Toward the end of Martha Gellhorn’s life, a younger novelist had asked her where she’d bought a beautiful piece of clothing. “Oxfam,” Gellhorn said, “I don’t give a fuck about clothes.” But I think what she was really trying to say was that the way she cared about clothing was not the way that a woman was expected to care about what she wore.

For these women—for women who want and get to travel; for me—what we wear moves us toward where we need to go.

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Julia Cooke is the author of Starry and Restless, published last month; Come Fly the World, a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist and a Malala Yousafzai’s Literati book club pick; and The Other Side of Paradise. Her essays have appeared in A Public Space, Salon, The Threepenny Review, Smithsonian, Tin House, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her reporting has been published in Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, Playboy, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Audio below or in the usual podcast places. Shownotes and references after the paywall.

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In certain corners of the internet the latest tranche of the Epstein files has reawakened some of the most outrageous ideas from the QAnon conspiracy theory, superimposing the wildest details from the new documents onto its basic structure. According to various TikToks and Instagram reels, Jeffrey Epstein and his depraved crew of scientists, politicians, and lawyers ate babies and human feces; also, Epstein is still alive because someone is using a Fortnite username potentially connected to him, and the baby-eating elites are building underground cities through various philanthropies. That’s just the tip of the iceberg; a scroll through social media yields more red-string-on-a-cork-board theories ranging from the merely odd to the fantastically antisemitic.

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The resurgence is likely due, at least in part, to the Department of Justice’s decision to release such a massive number of poorly redacted and completely decontextualized documents, including some rogue Satanic Panic-esque claims. Perhaps the most glaring component is the government’s lack of interest in investigating new claims, or seeking accountability from others involved.

As frustrating and distracting as its resurgence is, QAnon had a kernel of truth to it: There are powerful people exploiting children and enriching themselves in the process. The reality is just a lot sadder, more mundane, and far less stupid than the fevered imaginings of boomers on 4chan and white suburban moms on TikTok.

That’s what rankles about the resurgent conspiracy theories: They imply that what we already know — that Epstein and his powerful connections abused girls and young women for years — somehow isn’t bad enough. And that seems particularly egregious given the widespread sex trafficking of minor girls and young women is absolutely still happening. It is happening on a large scale, it is happening in this country and others, and it is happening to girls who have been made to believe, perhaps correctly, that there are no other options available to them.

An October story in the New York Times Magazine reports that men are paying for sex with girls as young as 11 years old in Los Angeles. The girls are being trafficked on the street, out in the open. The people who traffic them are not well-known, and they do not come from power, but they are made relatively wealthy by exploiting girls, and they enforce their power through threats and violence. The girls themselves are the victims of institutional failure at all levels, from under-resourced and overwhelmed child welfare agencies, to foster care, to the police. Their parents are absent, dead, abusive, or have addiction issues, and for many there seems to be no way out.

As the political spectacle over the release of the Epstein files reached a fever pitch late last year, I wondered if anyone actually wanted this kind of abuse to stop, or at least for there to be less of it; I’m not naive enough to think sexual exploitation is just going to stop if we just put our collective minds to it. But I don’t really think stopping sex abuse and trafficking is the goal, even for people who advocate for justice for the victims. Indeed, the second Trump administration has enacted massive cuts to what law enforcement resources we have in this country to find and prosecute the perpetrators of child sex trafficking.

We might say that sexual abuse and trafficking is evidence of a diseased social infrastructure; the fact that it has happened for centuries across cultures does not make it integral to a functional society. Considering that, it is worthwhile to ask what it would take for society to dramatically reduce sexual exploitation, for its polity to inoculate itself against that scourge. To do that, we would have to instigate revolutionary social change — ending legal child marriage, processing rape kit backlogs, aggressively funding public schools, removing restrictions on welfare accessibility, lowering the cost of post-secondary education — I could go on, and I will. But the point is, as much as this is a misogyny problem (it is), it is also a class problem. Those two categories are of course entwined — perhaps less egregiously now than they were during the heyday of Kate Millet or Silvia Federici — but some of the phenomena those writers identified persist today, particularly but not exclusively outside of developed countries. Epstein and his coterie seemed to take advantage of that dynamic quite liberally in Eastern Europe and , Russia, the Balkans, and other post-conflict zones, where political instability, conflict, lack of economic opportunity, and misogyny intersect.

Epstein’s vast wealth, especially in comparison to his victims’ economic positions, enabled his crimes. Simultaneously, his access to the bodies and lives of girls and young women were the currency with which he forged relationships that helped him grow his wealth and power.

The term “the Epstein class” was first used publicly by California Rep. Ro Khanna (then derided by David Brooks in what turned out to be a pretty embarrassing column), and it addresses the shocking level of power, access, and impunity that obscene wealth provides. That is important to highlight; the problem is not necessarily that Epstein and the people in his orbit are uniquely depraved, but rather that for decades they could rely on their enormous wealth and power to intimidate victims, stifle prosecutions, and potentially wield influence in ways we do not yet know. The people in Epstein’s circle were protected by their wealth, and they protected each other. The rich, it turns out, have class solidarity.

A level of populist outrage against the crimes and excesses of the rich and powerful is appropriate here, so long as it is guided by facts and not conspiracy theories. The public response has been, overwhelmingly, to call for the heads of these men and their enablers, which is emotionally resonant but politically and intellectually limited. Punishment is not a deterrent, because rich and powerful people are so often insulated from it. And punishment, no matter how immediately satisfying to the spectator, is an inadequate method of delivering justice; it does little in the way of actually protecting society if it is not coupled with efforts to change the conditions under which the crimes occurred. Besides, it’s not just Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell (or R. Kelly, P. Diddy, Peter Nygaard, and so on) and their rich friends who commit these kinds of crimes. Instead of merely wondering how we should punish the perpetrators, we would do well to think about how we might make life within our societies both more dignified and more free, particularly for people at risk of victimization.

All exploitation has at its root inequality — an asymmetrical distribution of opportunity and social support, and the absence of a political and legal structure that aims to give everyone in a given society the necessary access to those resources. Whether we’re talking about garment workers in Bangladesh, contract-based AI content moderators in Kenya, children being sexually exploited on the streets of Los Angeles, or the crimes Epstein committed against girls and young women from all over the world, the common thread is the victims’ lack of options in a system that is simply uninterested in ensuring or protecting their rights.

The women and girls Epstein and some in his circle abused didn’t all have the same level or kinds of vulnerability, that’s true. In one email in the latest tranche, an unidentified young woman from Latvia reports having never had her teeth cleaned before. Virginia Giuffre had been repeatedly sexually abused, trafficked, and in and out of the foster system by the time she met Ghislaine Maxwell as a 16-year-old. Annie Farmer seems to have a more stable home life, but, as she said in an interview last year with WBUR, “I had my sights set on going to a good college, but I was also concerned about how I would pay for it. And so I think Epstein was just a master at recognizing vulnerabilities and what he heard interested him.”

A 2022 case against Epstein’s estate, initiated by the government of the Virgin Islands, puts it thus: Epstein and his inner circle “deceptively lured underage girls and women into its sex trafficking ring with money and promises of employment, career opportunities and school assistance. The Epstein Enterprise preyed on their financial and other vulnerabilities, and promised victims money, shelter, gifts, employment, tuition and other items of value.”

Can you imagine a society in which a teenage Giuffre had well-resourced, caring foster parents in a well-regulated system, or access to the kinds of therapeutic and legal resources to keep her safe in her parents’ home? Or one in which Farmer didn’t need to worry about paying for a good education because there are prestigious, competitive universities that don’t cost the equivalent of a suburban home to attend?

Can you imagine a society in which Ana, the main character in that fairly grotesque and condescending October NYT Magazine story about child sex trafficking in LA, didn’t have to depend on a single nonprofit to house and support her as she tried to leave the sex trade? Or one that values free, high-quality health care, so girls and young women coming from foreign countries to model or go to school needn’t rely on Epstein and his connections to pay their medical bills (not to mention one that regulated the predatory modeling industry)?

Numerous studies across time and from around the world link poverty, lack of education, and inadequate or absent social services, in addition to gender and cultural factors, as the main drivers of sex trafficking. (I’m not talking in this essay about sex work overall; the logic of this piece and my politics is that informed, consensual adult sex work should be but one safe, well-compensated option among many. But there’s plenty of good work out there about whether and how the consensual adult sex trade should be regulated, so I don’t need to address that further.) And the anecdotal data from Epstein’s victims seems to have borne that out. If you think about it, neither the teenage girls who were promised $200 or training for massage school, nor those who benefited from Epstein’s alleged admissions and financial arrangements with Columbia and New York University were really asking for much. The young women and girls who came to the US to model weren’t, either — they wanted and deserved basic access to opportunities that would give them a place in society, a shot at a decent and dignified life.

It’s disappointing but not surprising that national politicians have not really connected the dots here — between the affordability crisis, the relative decimation of economic mobility, and shrinking access to basic social welfare like high-quality free education, and the immense vulnerability those circumstances create. (It’s also quite possible that they have done so internally, but have absolutely no interest in addressing the problem.) Reps. Khanna and Thomas Massie (R-KY) have been at the forefront of the fight to make the files transparent, co-sponsoring the bill that eventually became the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The law asks for documents related to Epstein’s financial network and information about his influential friends, as well as information about any government officials involved in investigations, plea deals, settlements, or other legal proceedings against Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell.

I don’t mean to suggest that the demand for transparency itself is wrong or foolish; on the contrary, as a journalist I’m relieved to see lawmakers fight for our right to information. I’m in favor of transparency for transparency’s sake. We have a right to see those documents, and the government has a duty to release them to the public. But we and our elected officials must also consider what we want to accomplish with the information we obtain.

Before she left Congress earlier this year, QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene was about a quarter of the way there; she did hold the line on getting the Epstein files released and has also started to notice the cost of living crisis, but she doesn’t seem to have the capacity to articulate the social outgrowths of economic crisis.

Maybe that’s because we find something suspect and unsettling about teenage girls. Megyn Kelly thinks it’s not that bad for an adult man to have sex with a 15-year-old girl; noted virgin Nick Fuentes thinks it’s cool. Luca Guadagnino made a whole movie about a woman who denies and hides, then uses, her own statutory rape for career gains. There was Amy Fisher, the Long Island Lolita, in the 90s and, before her, poor, deeply misinterpreted Dolores herself. We insult their intellect and dismiss or malign their feelings and desires, but ignore them completely or hold them responsible when they’re abused.

It’s not that surprising that Epstein continued to make powerful friends and abuse and traffic women following his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Epstein’s sentencing and meager jail time coincided with the global financial crisis and subsequent Wall Street bailout. You could say that those were banner years for the wealthy — and the systems that uphold that wealth at the expense of ordinary people — getting away with “it” writ large. In response to such impunity we got Occupy Wall Street and #MeToo, which were little more than expressions of frustration without clear visions of a desired outcome nor political pathways to achieving them. Now instead of vigorous fact-finding, legal accountability for perpetrators and enablers, reparations for victims, and radical social change, it seems likely history will repeat itself.

—-

The scale of the crimes and the network, the power, the wealth, the degeneracy, the constant revelations of new facts, new names, new payoffs, new victims — parsing through the scandal is an enormously addictive spectacle.

Part of the thrill of digging through the Epstein files is coming across the name of a famous or powerful person, learning that they either are a creep or are happy to have lunch with a creep on his sex crime island with their wife and children then lie about it, and then watching Pam Bondi have a meltdown on C-SPAN when members of Congress have a few questions about that.

The whole thing feels a little like skiing down a gigantic mountain at night. You don’t know how high it is or what’s at the bottom; the dark figures of trees and other skiers flash by in the periphery but there’s only a sliver of moonlight, bouncing and glittering on the snow, to see by. At any second, you could hurtle right off a cliff and disappear into the still night air forever. And also there is an avalanche and you’ve never actually skied before.

This moment feels exhilarating, terrible, heavy with possibility and threat, portentous and endless. One has the hope that maybe, maybe the next revelation will unlock everything, change politics, change our lives, reorder society, set things right.

But the demand for more files, more information, from both Republican and Democratic officials, has been based upon the desire to “get” their enemies. Republicans who supported the president’s claims that it would be made public hoped that powerful Democrats would be exposed. And in Trump’s entanglements with Epstein, Democrats grasp at a win — something they have failed to deliver on the policy front.

Producing and consuming the various sixty-second Epstein conspiracy videos gives us each the illusory feeling that we are doing something, even if the US government isn’t. We are participating in this scandal without asking ourselves what is to be gained from making content about the connections between Epstein and the Mossad.

I think Maxwell does need to be in prison, and it’s probably not the worst thing in the world that Larry Summers has retired from public life for now, but is that it? It’s not as if stripping Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal title suddenly expanded access to child income tax credits. But the UK is perhaps asking the right question: What are we doing, enabling and enriching people who do such heinous things at our own expense? What have we lost by making this dynamic a given in our culture?

When I look at the Epstein files, I see women and girls paying an enormous price for things that every human being deserves: education, dental care, a roof over their head. In exchange, they unwittingly give up their psyches, their agency, their sense of self, and their trust. And instead of asking whether this is really the kind of society we want to live in, we are stuck on the surface, stretching the ugly reality into ever-stranger and more dazzling spectacles.

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Ellen Ioanes is a New York- and Beirut-based journalist. Covering a broad range of topics from the defense industry to internet culture, her work has appeared in Vox, the American Prospect, the Intercept, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, and other outlets.

Audio below or in the usual podcast places. Shownotes and references after the paywall.

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Audio below or in the usual podcast places. Shownotes and references after the paywall.

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Others were indistinguishable from propaganda, made by activists with an agenda. Part of that agenda that seemed very clear in one documentary was to counter years of propaganda from “the other side” – in this case, Israel. But I don’t know if the way to bring nuance to a difficult situation is to just bash your viewer with the opposite point of view with all the subtlety of a brick to the head. (My only note at that screening: “This would be perfect for Netflix (derogatory).”

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What they had in common was a lack of curiosity about their subjects. They had already decided what the story was, and they seemed disinterested in exploration or deviation. That seems to be the reason why so many of these works were structured by autobiographical narrative – every revelation in the film said nothing about the world because the filmmaker was too busy telling us about their selves. The lack of curiosity was also revealed in a lack of curiosity about that self; there were no question marks, just full stops.

It wasn’t lost on me that the festival was starting right when Frederick Wiseman died, whose wide-open curiosity and careful attention created some of the greatest documentary work in American filmmaking. I did hear several documentary filmmakers credit Wiseman from the stage and note his passing, but I saw very little of his influence in the works.

The works were about narrative reinforcement. We in the audience are assumed to be in agreement with the filmmaker when we walk in. Russia is evil. Immigration law is bad. Women are powerful agents of change. Even when I agreed, the films felt insulting and didactic.

The most remarkable documentaries I saw were part of the festival’s Lost in the 90s program, which included restorations of big Hollywood films like John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood but also a lot of short fiction and documentary films from around the fall of the Soviet Union.

The documentaries made right around the time of German reunification or right after the fall of the previous regimes were fascinating in their uncertainty. No one has any idea how this is going to work out, and the camera feels exploratory.

One documentary, In the Splendour of Happiness, stood out. Filmed in 1990, the five filmmakers watch various processes of reunification – a local election, a political party handing out free beer in a small East German town, the opening up of Stasi headquarters to visitors, and a celebratory rally. Each of these moments, meant to be uplifting and exciting, easily spun out into anxiety and anger. A crowd gathered around the free beer realizes there’s a man who was involved with the Stasi among them. Someone at the Stasi headquarters overhears someone else say they had “no idea” what was going on with the secret police and an argument about Germany’s tendency toward blissful ignorance breaks out.

You see a lot of people from East Germany trying to sell what they can to the curious Western tourists. They are selling trinkets of their past, medals bestowed upon them by the GDR, flags they carried representing their towns or places of work, pins and other souvenirs. Things that provided social meaning are now meaningless trinkets, and the best one can hope to get out of them is a couple marks.

In one remarkable scene, chunks of the Berlin Wall are being auctioned off. The camera scans the stock – blocks of the wall marked with numbers, designating where in the city it stood but also which part of the graffiti might bring in the highest bidder. A woman from the East starts to argue with the auctioneer, saying she and others from the GDR can’t possibly compete. The exchange rate with the two different currencies puts them at a disadvantage. Others around her chime in, ostensibly from the West, and start to argue that the Ossies are freeloaders, a burden to West’s system. They bring nothing of value to the new state, just a deficit. The scene ends abruptly.

Their story, their past, their experiences are being sold off right in front of them, souvenirs of other people’s oppression. Their story isn’t theirs anymore, someone else bought the rights to it and will say whatever they like. They’ll tell the world what your life was like, and they will be surprised when you are not grateful.

After this moment, the narrative solidified. Reunification was successful, the West rescued the East, and all ambivalences are either resolved or repressed. Curiosity about life in “the East” died pretty quickly after reunification, and i’s only very recently that writers like Jenny Erpenbeck and Anne Raabe have found a wide audience. It’s taken a long time for a counternarrative to re-emerge, that maybe the East was something other than a mistake that deserved to be eradicated.

It’s not just that certainty is bad for art, although that is also true. It’s that it’s so good for selling things. Berlin needed narrative certainty to sell itself to an international audience, and it did it very well. The new documentaries I saw weren’t just wanting me to agree with them, they were trying to sell me something: a political cause, the idea of a specific filmmaker as a great artist, another war or two.

Berlin is starting to question its narrative and become curious about its history again. The dominant story is not holding together, and people who had bought into it and moved here from the United States or Spain or the UK to be here and participate in that story are feeling betrayed, hence the calls to boycott the city, the nation’s institutions, the Berlinale festival itself. But now it just makes me more curious. And I hope it makes others curious as well.

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Recommended:

• This is the final dispatch from a very strange Berlinale! I was thinking about writing something about the hideous Rosebush Pruning, but as it is almost certainly coming soon to a theater near you, and it’s already been thoroughly savaged, I’ll save it. It’s another failed satire about the ultra-rich, and I’ve written enough about that already.

• I think every writer has a horror story about the Los Angeles Review of Books, of trying to get paid by them, terrible edits by multiple people, on and on. But it’s also a very good example of arts nonprofit waste — they employ a lot of people, they have big connections with famous writers, and they get big donations and foundation money, and yet nothing they have ever published has been memorable. Arts nonprofits like these are not about contributing to the world of letters, it is a support system for the culturally irrelevant. This investigation into What Is Their Deal is good.

• Very wary of seeming like this is now a pro-Tucker Carlson publication — it is not! definitely not! — but I watched every second of this interview with Mike Huckabee. It gives you a glimpse of the possible world we could live in if journalists asked questions of our rocks-for-brains politicians. The funny thing is that while I was watching this, I got an ad by Tucker Carlson selling some prayer app, but in it he starts talking about the parable of the prodigal son, and he says, “it is a reminder that it is never too late.” When you return home, you will not be shamed you will be celebrated. And I thought, someone needs to show Tucker Carlson this ad with Tucker Carlson so he will know that he can still come back.

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means that our dream factory is owned and operated by the mega wealthy. The Kardashian family is a group of vapid billionaires, whose constant documentation and broadcasting of their every move has revealed them to be not only devoid of vitality but aggressively avoiding it. So the dream being presented in this ad is the dream to be not a person, to be passive and empty, bored and unmoving. To have all the money in the world and to spend it blanking yourself out.

I see this ad as I leave Berlinale, usually overwhelmed and trying to process the four or five films I just saw. All of this is also part of the dream factory, and, because of the nonsense about politics and whether art is political and whether art will save us from fascism, I’m being asked constantly to think about what this is for, what it does, what it creates. And the answer that everyone is quick to provide is that it creates empathy.

I’m skeptical about that, but I’m willing to take their word for it.

Two films I’ve seen have made me cry. The first was Rose, Markus Schleinzer’s film about a woman in the 17^th century who lived in Germany as a man. After fighting in the Thirty Years War, she falsely lays claim to an estate and attempts to live as a man within a small community. The other was At the Sea, Kornél Mundruczó’s film about a woman trying to get her life back together after spending six months in a rehab facility for alcoholism. Both films are about women struggling to keep their lives together as their lives aggressively try to fall apart, and both made me cry. But only one made me feel manipulated.

Rose struck me as a deeply humane film. It is easy to treat the past as a mistake that has been corrected. This is especially true with films about gender and sexuality, where all problems of the past have been solved through progressive politics. There’s an especially egregious example of this playing at the Berlinale, about 19^th century lesbians. It’s just endless rip-offs and inferior takes on Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which wasn’t even a good movie to begin with. The playbook is, find a woman or a gay person, portray their problems as stemming from their closeted state or societal misogyny, and make their situation worse so there can be catharsis through tragedy and the audience can leave the theater thinking, well, at least we don’t have to worry about forcing gay men into heterosexual marriages or burning women for heresy, we’re really so enlightened now.

Rose avoids these cliches. Rose is played by an absolutely luminous Sandra Hüller, her face twisted and scarred from a war injury. She wears the bullet that caused the damage around her neck. She sets about restoring the estate, working the land and building on the property. But then she starts to think about expansion, into new revenue streams and new territories, and she fails to consider the consequences. When her neighbor says he’ll only let her access the stream on his property if she marries one of his daughters, the mechanism that will lead to disaster is sprung.

Rose is tricky – sympathetic but amoral, quick witted yet impulsive. She is based on various women throughout history who have lived as men, women who fought in wars, owned land, even women who married other women and lived undetected. The film allows much about Rose’s identity to be ambiguous, like her sexuality and what may have happened to her before she started to wear trousers. And the violence that she experiences through the film is left off camera, reported to the audience but not depicted. This seems like a particularly humane choice, leaving Rose with her dignity even as her attackers try to strip it from her.

All these decisions lead up to Rose being allowed to be a person, not a gender, not an oppressed minority, not a stand-in for a contemporary audience’s fears. Near the end of the film, Rose thoughtfully suggests that maybe she doesn’t believe in God, that maybe humanity imagined themselves into life. Rose certainly did. I didn’t just cry in the theater, but again back at the apartment, as I was describing the film to someone.

Then a few days later I saw At the Sea. Amy Adams plays Laura, a woman who escaped into rehab after causing an accident while drunk with her son in the car. Her son was unharmed, but it was the rock bottom she needed to stop drinking. She stays at the rehab facility for six months, and we’re shown lavish grounds, a pool where she swims all by herself, a large, airy room she has to herself. She has to rejoin her family and daily life at their Cape Cod summer home and her job as the head of the dance company her father founded.

Amy Adams is great, the supporting cast is great, there are All That Jazz-adjacent flashbacks of her dancing as a child with her domineering, alcoholic father. But I’m also starting to feel manipulated, because the addiction storyline is reliant on audience members having seen a bunch of other movies about addiction about people hitting rock bottom, about the struggles of sobriety, about the fear of relapse. It is heavily reliant on cliches about 12 step programs and the trajectory of rehabilitation. It’s also reliant on cliches about art. It’s important, we know, that she fight her way through this and reclaim her position at the dance company because art is important or something. And without the audience being asked to bring all these associations and familiarity with the subject matter to the viewing experience then it is ultimately a story about a rich white lady and her problems and we’re supposed to care about them because she’s played by Amy Adams.

Because there really isn’t that much dramatic tension in falling donations and nonprofit administration unless the audience feels all these things about ART. But it can’t conjure up for its own self what those things might be. The dance scenes, with the exception of one, are actually pretty boring. They don’t really express much, except for how the individual is feeling. It is trying hard to be All That Jazz, but doesn’t have its pathos or dark seductiveness or glamour. It wants so much for art to be meaningful to the world – for empathy and for self-expression – that it forgets to be good or thoughtful or entertaining.

Which is why I felt manipulated when I did cry, at the spot in the movie you’d exactly expect someone to cry. Oh no, this woman who still so fragile experiences a crisis – will she be able to maintain her sobriety in the face of real hardship? Of course she can, because this is the uplifting version of the addiction story – breakdown as breakthrough – not the tragic death spiral version of addiction.

I did have empathy, but it felt like something of a waste. These people are fine, their problems are small, they’re having a good time in their summer homes, emailing Jeffrey Epstein, exploiting their workers, taking sabbaticals to Bali. I felt the way I always do staring at the Jenner perfume ad – if you’re going to ask me to dream and feel and be inspired, you have to give me something in return. And I’ve got nothing.

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Recommended:

• This Guardian story about an award winning French novel that seems to be based on a real life, nonconsenting figure — the therapy patient of the novelist’s wife, no less — is great and should be made into a movie immediately.

• Maybe the best thing I’ve seen at the festival, other than Rose and The Blood Countess, is the documentary Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time. In the early 90s, Želimir Žilnik and a small crew dressed a man up like Tito and had him walk around Belgrade. The film is funny and moving and wonderful. There’s a small excerpt online.

In August 2004, the Oxygen network (Oprah Winfrey’s baby) introduced Snapped to the world. The true crime show’s tagline: “From socialites to secretaries, female killers share one thing in common: they all snapped.” Now in its thirty-sixth season, Snapped is Oxygen’s longest running program and has spawned spin-offs including Snapped: Killer Couples and Snapped: Behind Bars.

Snapped, and true crime shows like it, are a significant source of information about the criminal legal system. But for true crime to sell, it must be compelling—so producers of true crime sensationalize stories. Snapped is a prime example. Producer Zak Weisfeld contends that Snapped does not involve “the old stereotypes of battered women who are trying to defend themselves. This is the dark side of female empowerment. This is not syrupy, and these women are not sympathetic.” To tell those stories, Snapped takes liberties in its presentation of cases. Nancy Seaman, for example, killed her husband in self-defense after thirty-one years of abuse during their marriage. But, journalist Melissa Jeltsen observes, the Snapped episode on Seaman “focus[ed] on the salacious and titillating details of her crime.” Seaman told Jeltsen, “They didn’t tell a story of a woman who was a kind, loyal, gentle person, a devoted and faithful wife, loving mother, and award-winning teacher. No… they portrayed me as some ax-wielding crazy who ‘snapped’ and killed her husband. That’s not what happened.” When Mindy Dodd saw the episode Snapped made about her after she killed her husband, who had previously been her stepfather and who had sexually abused her since childhood, she felt that the show minimized the abuse she experienced, choosing instead to tell the prosecution’s story.

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Kim: I believe I was one of the first Snapped episodes ever made, when the Oxygen network was brand new. I knew they were making an episode on my case and from the working title Snapped I knew it wouldn’t be a balanced piece. Still, a friend of mine tried to say nice things about me which ended up on the cutting room floor or as a punch line somehow. My episode seems to air frequently after all these years, and I often wonder if the public will ever tire of seeing it.

Dixie Shanahan Duty, the subject of an early episode of Snapped, had an experience similar to Mindy Dodd’s. Duty killed her husband, Scott Shanahan, after enduring decades of abuse. The episode makes mention of some of what Duty experienced during her marriage: a black eye during her first pregnancy; Shanahan’s control of her actions; Shanahan “beating” Duty. It covers an incident during which Shanahan bound Duty’s hands and feet with wire coat hangers and threw her in the basement for three days. The show then cuts to Scott Shanahan’s disappearance in the fall of 2002. Friends and neighbors observed that Duty was healthier, happier, and better off after Shanahan left. As one friend told Snapped, “No one had really cared. Nobody looked for him.” In July 2003, though, a “concerned citizen called the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department and asked them to investigate.” Police ultimately found Shanahan’s body in the back bedroom of Duty and Shanahan’s home; he had been shot in the back of the head.

Snapped recounts how Duty’s neighbors and friends in Defiance, Iowa, came together to pay her bail. One of Duty’s co-workers told Snapped, “if she wouldn’t have killed him in self-defense, eventually he would have killed her.” Duty rejected a plea deal and testified in her own defense. At trial, she described how, on the day Shanahan was killed, he beat her, told her he would kill their unborn child, and pointed a gun at her and threatened to kill her. Duty decided to call for help, but the only phone was in Shanahan’s room. As she moved toward the phone, Duty said, Shanahan started to come towards her, so she grabbed the gun he had earlier pointed at her and shot it. As jury foreman Chad Bruns recalls on Snapped, “The defense tried to make Scott look like he was a very bad person.”

This might seem like a balanced portrayal of what happened in Defiance, Iowa, on August 30, 2002. But no thirty-minute show (approximately twenty-one minutes with commercial breaks) could ever convey the horror of Duty’s nineteen years with Scott Shanahan.

Kim: The lives represented on a 30-minute true crime episode cannot be fleshed out beyond the quick designation of “good” or “bad.” They are flattened into easily digestible tropes because mitigating circumstances might muddy the formulaic narrative, confuse viewers who crave the palatable justice such shows offer. Complicated characters are bad for the brand.

At trial, Duty testified to numerous other incidents of violence that Snapped did not include in its account. Duty described how Shanahan had abused her verbally and physically from the beginning of their relationship. Shanahan beat Duty because she visited her family, because his mother was ill, because his grandfather died. While his mother was alive, Shanahan beat both his mother and Duty about twice a week. After Shanahan’s mother died, Duty testified, Shanahan “[w]ent off the wall... beating [Duty] more frequently about anything.” Shanahan beat Duty during each of her pregnancies; during her second pregnancy, after Duty refused to have an abortion, Shanahan targeted her stomach, telling her that he would get rid of the baby. Duty testified that Shanahan threw her down the basement steps, chipping her teeth. He beat her on top of the head with a cowboy boot. He poked her in the eye until it bled. Shanahan broke two doors by smashing Duty’s head into them, ran over her legs with a lawn tractor, and smashed a plate of potatoes over her head because they were runny. All of this, in addition to the regular beatings. None of that made it on to Snapped.

Snapped also gave airtime to the prosecution’s theory that Duty had a financial motive in killing Shanahan. In 1994, Shanahan’s mother died, leaving him a house and $150,000. By 2002, though, the money had run out, and, Snapped’s omniscient narrator explains, “once the money was gone, Dixie decided to get rid of Scott.”

Prosecutors, like Snapped, conceded that Duty had been a victim of intimate partner violence. But they blamed Duty for that violence. Snapped recounts how Duty asked law enforcement for assistance on three occasions. The first instance resulted in a two-day jail stay for Shanahan and a stay away order, which Duty later asked to have lifted. The second led to four days in jail. But, the Snapped narrator explains, after the second jail stay, “Once again, Dixie decided to give Scott another chance, and he moved back in.” The show then cuts to a “friend of Dixie Shanahan,” Marcie Carl, saying, “I don’t know, she thought she couldn’t make it on her own—she was kind of codependent on him in a weird way.” Another friend suggested, “She didn’t know no different.” What Snapped does not mention (but what Duty testified to at trial) was that Duty had promised Shanahan’s mother, Beverly, to whom she was deeply devoted, that she would never leave Shanahan. Or that after each incident, Shanahan would call Duty, her family, and her friends relentlessly, promising to change, begging her to come back, asking her friends to urge her to go back to him. Shanahan was charged a third time after the basement incident; by then, Duty had moved to Texas with her children. “Unfortunately,” the narrator says, “Dixie neglected to take care of a little unfinished business from her old life: her husband’s court date,” and adds, “Dixie decided not to testify... out of fear, or love.”

Moreover, what the account of Duty’s encounters with law enforcement misses entirely is how useless law enforcement was in keeping her safe. Six days in jail (two after the first arrest, four after the second) did nothing to deter or decrease Shanahan’s violence. Rather than acknowledging that the intervention of law enforcement had not made Shanahan less violent, and that Duty was likely far safer in Texas than she would have been if she had returned to Iowa, Snapped blamed Duty for her failure to participate in prosecution, saying, “Prosecutors had no choice but to drop the charges against Scott.” But prosecutors had ample evidence of Duty’s victimization: they saw Duty’s injuries (two black eyes); they had Duty’s statement about what Shanahan had done to her; and they saw the hole in the door created when Shanahan rammed Duty’s head through it. Prosecutors could have pursued the case without Duty. They chose not to.

The last few minutes of the episode recount Duty’s conviction for second degree murder and the prosecution’s theories: that the position of Scott Shanahan on the bed demonstrated that he was sleeping, not reaching for a gun; that if she had acted in self-defense, Duty would have called police rather than pretending Shanahan was alive (and forging his name on checks); that “[h]er attempt to cover this up really rebutted” her self-defense claim. At the end of the episode, one juror seems to express regret about the length of the sentence imposed. Snapped provides the number of the National Domestic Violence Hotline with the message “Abuse is never OK. If you or someone you love is in an abusive relationship, there is help available.” But only Duty’s defense attorney is seen questioning whether justice was done in this case.

The story that Snapped told about Dixie Shanahan Duty shaped how viewers would subsequently see her. Snapped told a story that minimized the violence she endured for nineteen years, held her responsible for the violence done to her, and portrayed her as a gold digger and a liar. She returned to the community with that image.

Kim: How many of Snapped’s featured women have themselves suffered traumas? I’ve always said of my own case that “damaged woman makes horrible choices” would sell far less than “calculating, diabolical wife murders husband on romantic getaway.” The narrative was shaped early (pretrial coverage) and often. Violent male offenders don’t titillate the media like a violent female offender does, yet a higher percentage of us have suffered significant traumas before offending, often at the hands of men.

I always instinctively felt that true crime producers who approached me for my cooperation promising to value my input for their work were a lot like the police detectives who’d told me they “only want to help me” with cuffs and a gun under their jacket. Say what they want, both specialize in twisting words to fit an already developed story line.

I occasionally flip past a program featuring an incarcerated woman, easy to spot because of the uniform and background that scream “guilty!” I wonder why they chose to participate. Are they hoping for a miracle? Did they need the money? Or were they just desperate to tell a truth? I continue channel surfing, saying a little prayer that they get what they sought, a little worried they didn’t, angry at the predatory true crime producer that used her for profit.

True crime media like Snapped shapes the public’s understanding of what it means to be a criminalized survivor. As criminologist Diana Rickard writes, “Crime news and crime entertainment are usually built around ‘ideal victims,’ those in whom innocence and virtue, in the broadest, most stereotypical strokes, can be imbued.” Those stereotypes are reinforced when true crime rejects the victimization claims of criminalized survivors—and imperfect victims like the women portrayed on Snapped pay the price.

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Leigh Goodmark is the Marjorie Cook Professor of Law and director of the Gender, Prison, and Trauma clinic at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law and the author of Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism.

Kim Hricko is an award-winning writer whose work has previously been published in the Washington Post and the Marshall Project.

Kwaneta Harris is a renowned prison journalist and a Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow. Her work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, The Appeal, Truthout, the Dallas Morning News, Slate, Inquest, Scalawag Magazine, the Austin Chronicle, the Texas Observer, and Prism. She is currently at work on her first book.

Adapted from “The True Harms of True Crime,” Wisconsin Journal of Gender, Law and Society, Volume 40, No. 1 (Spring 2025).

Audio here or in the usual podcast places. Shownotes and references after the paywall.

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German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger takes the story of the 16^th century countess and, along with her collaborator the novelist Elfriede Jelinek, brings her to life in contemporary Vienna. Life is the wrong word. Death? Undeath? Ottinger makes the transfer of wealth, vitality, and life from the poor to the rich literal, because Bathory and her aristocratic family are all vampires, feeding on the poor and the beautiful and whomever they cross paths with. It’s a very bloody romp.

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She has cast Isabelle Huppert as Báthory, dressing her in red gowns that accentuate her alabaster complexion – it doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to believe her as a vampire, nor as she gazes on young women and draws them into her embrace is it hard to imagine being so entranced that you’d let her destroy you.

Bathory is hunting for the only thing that poses a real threat to her and her kind in order to destroy it, a book, and, legend says, if a vampire cries real tears onto its pages can turn them back into a mortal human being. She crosses the Austro-Hungarian empire looking for clues as to the location of the book, and as she journeys she goes deeper into the history of the empire.

She calls Lenin, Stalin, and Mao “family,” and suggests that Lenin is not dead in his embalmed state, just hibernating, fed regularly with the blood of dissenters. He, too, could rise again to hunt and feast. The further along in her journey she gets, the older the undead become. Here is Johann Josef Wenzel Anton Franz Karl Graf Radetzky von Radetz, Czech noble and Austrian general, hanging out with his friends, nostalgic for the Napoleonic Wars and singing old family songs in a crypt. There is a ghastly cast of war-wounded who cry out for meat and blood, dressed in the military uniforms weighed down with glorious medals. They survive because the young die, and they want more.

Báthory is accompanied by her nephew Bubi, who has decided to go vegetarian. He survives on pastries and strudels and all the confections the Austrian aristocracy delights in. (At one moment, he leaps at the neck of a cake sculpted in the likeness of Sisi, the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary who had been assassinated by an anarchist. He takes a large chunk from her throat, and he ends up with a mouth full of frosting.) That sugar, of course, was brought to Europe via slavery and empire, so it’s just another kind of blood in less gory packaging.

Bubi is the youngest of the family, and he’s beset with neuroticism about the death his family lives on. He is disgusted by blood, but he enjoys too much everything that comes with it: the art, the clothing, the comforts of wealth. He can’t bring himself to sever ties entirely, but he can’t calm his conscience either. He drags with him his psychoanalyst, who of course doesn’t believe his patient is really a vampire, and shrieks and faints throughout. Well, it’s fair millennial representation, this vegetarian vampire, as they are a generation who frets over their privileges yet can’t bring themselves to renounce them and live without.

As always, Ottinger brings in a troupe of people, from German theater, from her past collaborations, even from Eurovision. And as always, the outfits are characters in themselves, from Huppert’s blood red gowns to Conchita Wurst’s ceremonial robes. She brings in opera costume designer Jorge Jara to dream big and he dreams in the colors of blood and death.

Ulrike Ottinger has made films for decades, films that are loose and strange and occasionally unpleasant. But the films themselves always seem to be having a good time, as if the films have achieved some kind of sentience. Her film Freak Orlando is a rebellious adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel, with the alluring arthouse actress Magdalena Montezuma traveling through British history and its empire through the centuries. In Ticket of No Return, Tabea Blumenschein plays a woman who travels to Berlin with the express purpose of drinking herself to death while dressed fabulously. These films move around, her characters travel from one city or one bar to another, but also they are in constant motion, thinking, trying, pounding.

Ottinger, like her peer Fassbinder, was always thinking out loud about power and violence. Maybe turning the European power structure into vampires is a little too on the nose now that our superrich really are injecting themselves with the blood of the youthful. But it’s a compelling metaphor nonetheless, because when Bathory draws a victim in, they are flattered, they are willing. Just like us.

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The Bathory film could have been a girlboss film. There’s been a historical reclamation of Bathory – those rumors that she drank and bathed in blood were just a patriarchal plot to take her land! I imagine a younger filmmaker would have taken that route, restored the countess’s good name.

I fear this because of all the girlboss movies I’ve seen in the past week at Berlinale. If I were going to define the girlboss narrative, I would say there are a few crucial elements. The first is that she is always underestimated because of her gender, and there will be male characters around to tell her what is expected of her and telling her what she can’t do. Her primary goal in a girlboss film is about career or personal ambition and the pursuit of independence. The next is that nothing is ever really her fault, if something goes wrong it is ultimately caused by misogyny and not incompetence. And finally, the girlboss character will triumph at the cost of others, but the viewer will root for her nonetheless, because she’s been through so much.

The most strictly girlboss film I saw at Berlinale was also its headliner: No Good Men, a film about a woman trying to get ahead in a misogynistic newsroom in Afghanistan. Naru has recently left her marriage, and she is insisting that there are no good men in Afghanistan. As she fights to prove herself to her male coworkers, the men become awed by her talents just as her husband tries to take her down. It’s a very silly movie, not because Shahrbanoo Sadat is not an interesting and vulnerable performer, but because it was meant to be politically potent and timely and yet had a very limited, Westernized feminist fable to sell.

But there have been other girlbosses – women whose only problem is they love too much, care too much, want too much. That sort of thing. The scourge of these easy narrative structures – easy to write and easy to watch and easy to replicate.

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The event was such a disaster that it’s probably not even worth pointing out that the whole thing was a set up. One of the questions asked at the event, by Tilo Jung, was, “How can movies help fight the rise of fascism?” It’s a question that would be naïve coming out of the mouth of a five-year-old child (especially in Berlin!!!!!!). It is worthy of an indignant response, but of course the question is never going to go viral, just the idiotic response to the idiotic question.

It’s absurd that Berlinale either didn’t anticipate these questions and workshop answers or they did and this is the best they could come up with. Either way, the wobbliness and awkwardness of the answers revealed an inability to engage with the real world or take seriously the most pressing issues of the international community gathered here in Berlin.

The statement that was released much too late after the disastrous press conference was not technically wrong but still unsatisfying. Tricia Tuttle, the Festival Director, wrote that “artists should not be expected to comment about all broader debates… [nor] to speak on every political issue.” This is obviously true. And yet, coming after years of controversy, the departure of key figures, and calls for boycott, the truth isn’t really the point.

Berlin brought this on themselves by, year after year, fumbling political questions and being aggressively strange about Israel and Palestine. The Berlinale in 2024 turned into a shitshow by overly aggressive management of controversies, including the mayor labeling the award-winning documentary No Other Land antisemitic and the establishment of the “Tiny House Project,” a “dialogue” space set up where people could go get educated about the problem of antisemitism. This was set against a backdrop of other artistic institutions canceling shows by artists who expressed support of Palestine and images of Berlin police being aggressive and violent toward unarmed protesters.

But Berlin and the Berlinale are being held to a different standard than other cities and other arts festivals. The Berlinale is often referred to as the most “political” of the film festivals, but its critics are getting caught up in a strange nostalgia and a process of disillusionment. Berlin was never what its most ardent supporters thought it was.

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The arts press has been filled with eulogies for Berlin since Germany’s support of Israel became clear after the attacks on October 7^th. The nation’s support of Israel had – before that day – been seen as a part of Germany’s much praised recovery from the evils of the Nazi era. But after Israel began its genocide in Gaza, activists demanded that Germany betray their alliance. The nation’s inability/unwillingness to do so revealed that maybe that “recovery” was just replacing one rigid thought with its opposite.

But before that revelation, Germany’s so-called recovery from the Nazi era and the downfall of the Soviet bloc had created in Berlin a safe (cheap) haven for artists and activists who were fleeing difficult or worrying governments of their own. Susan Neiman’s (silly) book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil was frequently cited as Americans searched for examples of “good” countries, “good” cities. Americans, coming out of the turmoil of Donald Trump’s first election, suddenly realized it was chic to talk about America’s evils and historic ills, and started to talk about Germany as an example of a nation that had done it right. Questions about memory, historical revocation, and representations of the past became fruitful for the cultural industries. But it also required a profound misunderstanding of both German history and contemporary German politics.

But then artists and culture workers weren’t coming to Berlin to engage with Berlin itself. John Holten writes, in one of the many eulogies of “Berlin” that have been written in the last couple years, “Many artists didn’t move to Germany when they moved to Berlin, but to what one friend of mine called a ‘cosmopolitan nowhere.’” That cosmopolitan nowhere allowed (mostly) Westerners to live not in the city but in a bubble that floated above the city, traveling from panel discussion to opening to bar to club and back again. This “nowhere” has often been discussed as if it were a flaw of Berlin itself, rather than the result of deliberate choices the cosmopolitans were actively making.

It was a consequence-free zone, a place where one didn’t really need to take responsibility for one’s self, but simply float in a Euro bubble of “art.” The idea that Berlin had somehow been purified by and through the torturous 20th century allowed artists and activists in the Nowhere to not think about the local and instead deal with the global. Berlin was safe because it was good — it had all the right political alliances and associations — and that allowed its expat community to think and act on a larger scale. And while the city and its physical and political reality had little effect on this demographic, this demographic had a shattering effect on the city itself – creating a housing crisis out of nowhere, driving up rents, Anglo-cizing the city, and bringing (largely) American ways of creating, articulating, and distributing art until it crowded out any alternative.

This move into Berlin followed the post-1989 landgrab by the West, a pouring into and exploitation of the “empty spaces” created by the economic devastation that followed the fall of the Wall. West Germans bought East German property. IKEA bought a forest in Romania. Westerners bought the sources of Eastern European spring water. The American corporation Cargill owns a suspicious amount of farmland in Poland. A friend once told me a story of a trip they took to the east of Germany, where a woman who owned the hotel he stayed at had to spend every evening hiding from Westerners who wanted to buy her property with a big bag of cash.

The political consequences of that era are stark and obvious for anyone who takes a moment to look, from the continued economic decline of previous communist regions/nations to the rise of the far right, to the international, private ownership of what were once public resources. But that’s not what the cosmopolitan class means when they talk about how art should be political.

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It’s interesting to think about what the people calling for a boycott of the Berlinale, the people declaring things have gotten bad enough in Berlin that they will now “go back” to their nations of origin, They don’t pursue the citizenship that would give them the voting rights that would allow them to participate in local and national elections. Nor do they ever acknowledge the effect that having such a significant population of relatively wealthy international Westerners without voting rights clustered in a handful of neighborhoods affects local politics. And being at a distance from their places of origin allows them to remain disengaged from the political reality back home, except for in the vaguest of ways.

So when the cosmopolitans say they are “political,” they mean they have opinions about international events that are far away from where they reside. In other words, they are political in ways that do not come with consequences. Or at least it didn’t, before Germany started canceling shows for artists who publicly showed support for Palestine.

Most of the films I’ve seen at Berlinale so far have been political, and in non-subtle and tedious ways. In a film from Pakistan, a woman berates a man for his fragile masculinity. In a film from Afghanistan, a woman berates a man for his misogyny. In a horror film, the supernatural figure at the center of it is a representation of capitalism. The films I am scheduled to see next week are more of the same: documentaries about Palestine, narrative films about rape culture, award-bait films about historical lesbians struggling against a homophobic culture. They are didactic and made for a film culture that is dependent on hot takes and op-eds.

But when the West bought up the East, they didn’t build structures or institutions to create the utopia they were so desperately seeking. They bought up the land and built a Nowhere. If they do “go back,” that will be their legacy.

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• Wrote about Taylor Swift’s grievance politics, The Gilded Age, the failed satire of Succession and other Jesse Armstrong intellectual properties, and our imaginative investment in the super rich for The American Scholar.

• Also wrote about Tucker Carlson for the Telegraph. Again.

• One of the strangest/best things I’ve seen at Berlinale was the restoration of The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel. It’s a Soviet-era science fiction film from Estonia, and if you haven’t experienced Soviet SF, you’re missing out. Luckily it’s available for streaming at Klassiki.