Culture, Digested: Leo Season Links
#Resistance returns, Edna O'Brien leaves us, and TikTok therapists
A couple weeks ago, Nico and I recorded a podcast where we talked about what has really changed since 2016. One thing that definitely hasn’t is that op-ed pages are only about things the columnists watched in movies and on television. But when I see a headline like “How Twisters Failed Us,” and it’s not about how the two leads don’t kiss, I wonder what it will take to derail the Hot Take Express.
I think it started around JD Vance and Hillbilly Elegy — look, Tom, we don’t actually have to go to rural Pennsylvania to talk to people we can just read about them in this book! Columnists stopped having a man of the people attitude, going around town to figure out what people feel and think about issues, and became more about dictating what they thought people should feel and think. And because they didn’t know anybody who didn’t already agree with them, they preferred the invented people in film and TV to use as examples.
But we’re also still getting a lot of #Resistance leftovers, those brave writers and artists who pledged to fight Donald Trump with their art. Listen, it’s not their fault, their professors were probably all on the CIA payroll. I do think Allison Hewitt Ward’s essay on the art world’s “attack” on Trump is still the best on the subject.
Anti-Trump art makes the mistake of thinking that its gestures will directly impact Donald Trump (“I want these drawings to haunt Donald” one artist writes of his drawings addressed to Donald in the first person) or even sway public opinion, but it also takes a stand, if an infantile one, against the complexity of the present and indulges in a perverse fairy tale crisis.
When Joe Biden was elected, a small part of the relief was just in the feeling that we wouldn’t have to put up with sanctimonious #Resistance writers anymore, but of course it didn’t turn out that way. It continued. Elizabeth Gilbert so bravely stood up to Russia, Barbara Kingsolver felt things, deeply, about the opioid crisis. And in the brief moment post-assassination attempt when it looked like a Trump presidency was once again on the horizon, the #Resistance reassembled.
Like Molly Jong Fast, fantasizing wildly about being put on some sort of McCarthy-esque “enemy of the people” list by Trump and needing to flee the country. “Now, whether I—a liberal writer, podcaster, and MSNBC commentator—would make such a Trump ‘enemies’ list remains to be seen.” I do think there is a segment of the media class that is hungry for the emergence of fascism so they can stand resolutely against it. I just don’t think Molly Jong Fast is the freedom fighter she dreams about being. But I’m sure we can solve all of this with a Handmaid’s Tale spinoff series and some more 1984 retellings from the perspective of Julia. (There were two!!!!!)
Anyway! A real one left us, and we should pause for a moment. Edna O’Brien was a dame. Her books are spiky and venomous, and even in the ones you never heard of but pick up at the used bookstore on a whim there is something that will get you by the throat.
Her image, as a hottie, as a partner to famous men, as the dinner party guest who will destroy you, as a woman unafraid to banter with the monstrous men of the era, often eclipsed her work. And that’s a shame, because those books are glorious. If you are not familiar with her work, The Country Girls, the trilogy that made her famous, is great. But her books on Byron and Joyce reveal a steely intelligence and cunning, In the Forest will stick a knife in your guts, and her out of print memoir Mother Ireland shows you how to do autobiography without sentimentality or pity. Wicked woman, she leaves a hole in the world.
Wesley Lowery is making the case for a publicly funded media company for the protection of democracy. The article is worth a read.
Hal Hartley was interviewed for Caesura about his 1997 movie Henry Fool. I love that movie beyond all reason. I recently rewatched it, having not seen it for maybe five years or so, and after it was over I burst into tears trying to explain to someone why I love it so much. Anyway, Hartley has some great things to say about it.
Family estrangement is on the rise, in part because of therapists on TikTok and YouTube. There are whole volumes to be written on the “democratization” of therapy via social media, the rise of trauma and neurodivergence self-diagnosis, the telehealth companies where patients can essentially pay to get diagnosed and treated for whatever mental health issue they want, and therapists raking in cash for making cute little dance videos about ADHD symptoms. (If people have recommendations for thoughtful and in-depth coverage about these sorts of topics, I’d love to hear them! So far, the New York Times seems to be doing the best and most critical coverage on the subject, but there has to be someone else. Surely.)
There was a TikTok therapist who went viral for a rant about black men and the emotional damage they do in relationships. She ended up getting fired and harassed for it. But I also think making blanket diagnoses based on gender, talking shit about your clients, and participating in social media discourse is or should be an ethics violation? I know it’s for branding purposes, but that just makes it worse.
The family estrangement stuff is particularly weird, as that is the first step in creating a cult. But these are just cults of one. Follower and guru, in one individual. Therapists make videos about how you should consider cutting off your family if they “traumatized” you or “harm” you — squishy words that resist clinical definition — and then make videos taunting family members who have been estranged and reach out begging for explanation.
A distraught mother wrote, “Our daughter won’t talk to me because of ‘therapists’ like you.”
This scolding did not have the intended effect on Mr. Teahan, who turned it into content on Tiktok and Facebook, giggling helplessly as he gasped, “Your mom’s in my DMs.”
I kind of feel like the first requirement for any therapist has to be the inner fortitude to withstand the addictive power of the “like” and the increasing follower count, but what the fuck do I know.
And finally, family members are accusing Elon Musk of violating custody arrangements to keep his children away from their mothers. I do wish these sorts of things got better coverage, the way rich people use family courts to control and manipulate exes. Like the years-long custody battle MIA has been in over her son. These issues rarely get written about outside of gossip rags — probably because the New York Times doesn’t want to lose access to people like Musk, the Kardashians, or the rich people affiliated with MIA’s ex by challenging their narratives. I would subscribe to a Substack that is just 100% family court disputes of the rich and famous, past and present. Someone get on it.
In case you missed it, Cobi Chiodi Powell wrote for us about late style filmmaking and the end of the auteur.
This bit really got me:
However, though the caesuras and discontinuities contribute to the show’s horror, there is simultaneously a heartbreaking respect on display, the deep love Lynch has for his actors, an acknowledgement of the ways in which Peaks and its actors are mutually constitutive. Consider how mainstream IP has treated real illness and death since The Return. Paul Walker is awkwardly shuttled out as a CGI construction in Furious 7; Carrie Fisher’s death is, likewise, glossed over with CGI and unused footage; Doctor Sleep uses a deep-faked Jack Nicholson; Ghostbusters: Afterlife ends with a CGI Harold Ramis ghost standing alongside the other original Ghostbusters. And though Top Gun: Maverick at least incorporates Val Kilmer’s illness into its narrative, his one line is generated by AI trained on recordings of Kilmer speaking. Lynch’s caesuras, on the other hand, are a recognition that narrative art is made by real people. The loss of these real people cannot be glossed over with CGI or narrative handwaving. Their loss is like their loss to any other community to which they belong: a destabilization: the injection of incoherence into something once legible.
