But Oh, That Magic Feeling, Nowhere to Go

Connections, plus my top ten films of the year

The Sunday Letter #43

I recently started exchanging voice notes with one of my best friends. She lives in another city, and I was craving a way to check in without us both needing to be free and available online. While neither of us had ever really used the feature before, we took to it easily, our notes becoming longer and longer. We take notes while we listen and drift in and out of topics. In a recent note, she remarked, “I feel like we’re on a podcast.”

A goal I have in the new year is to be better about reaching out to friends individually. I’ve been noticing that the friends I tend to communicate with the most are the ones who are also online frequently, easy as it is to give a quick ‘like’ to an Instagram story or shoot off a quick “happy birthday!” at a selfie. But I’m disappointed in myself for this impulse, noticing how I’m not blameless in how this becomes an easy excuse not to check in with others.

Now, more than ever, we’re all finding ourselves glued to our phones in a mix of horrors and, somehow, simultaneous joys. I visit with a beloved friend and her angelic twins, who are almost one and absorbing everything in the world with gusto and wonder. Between baby-voiced cooing, we discuss our mental states and a desire to be well without escaping from that which makes us unwell: the realities of the world, the demands of witnessing humanity as an act of care and love. I’m proud of her and all my other loved ones, who manage to care so endlessly for others both inside of their life and outside of it; strangers halfway across the world whom they fight for every day.

I visited with another friend yesterday, and we discussed art and connection, and he challenged me on the idea of whether AI-produced art can be good if the effort involved in learning to communicate through AI is itself a practice. I don’t know, I said. I think the effort is half the thing, the other thing is the heart.

Writing, the best kind, is a journey of interpersonal sharing.

As Kazuo Ishiguro said, “in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”

And maybe I’m a foolishly-naive luddite, but I don’t believe AI understands what he’s saying.

The proudest writing I’ve completed is writing that I feel mortified to share. And sometimes how I navigate this is by pretending no one I know will ever read it. Yet I simultaneously believe that this newsletter can itself replace regular communication. Sometimes I find myself thinking that the friends of mine who read it regularly are already seeing in my head every week, and thus they must be sick of me and not need to hear any more. Or, I’ll be in conversation with a friend and repeating an idea I’ve spoken about here, and I’ll see them nod and smile and say, Oh yes, I remember what you wrote about that.

But really, those moments exemplify why I started this newsletter in the first place: to reflect briefly on a moment in time, on what I was thinking about and reflecting on during any given week. It won’t always be pretty or easy, and maybe sometimes it’ll be self-doubting or indicting. But that’s the honest truth of it, and that’ll always be much more interesting to me.

Sending you off into the holidays with The Beatles: But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go.

Best of 2023

In the spirit of reminiscing, I’ll be counting down the last few weeks of 2023 with a new “best of” list every Sunday. Last week was about my favourite purchases of the year; this week, my favourite films. In order of first to last watched:

1. Aftersun (2022)

2. Past Lives (2023) | Review

3. Singin’ in the Rain (1952) | Review

4. The Producers (1967)

5. The Philadelphia Story (1940) | Review

6. Anatomy of a Fall (2023) | Review

7. Bringing Up Baby (1938) | Review

8. May December (2023) | Review

9. Funny Girl (1968) | Review

10. American Symphony (2023) | Review

Honourable mentions: Triangle of Sadness (2022); The Worst Person in the World (2021); Black Bear (2020); Waiting for Guffman (1996); Jane Fonda in Five Acts (2018); Heat (1995); Theatre Camp (2023); The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004); The Way We Were (1973); Bergman Island (2021); Duck Soup (1933).

What were your favourite films that you watched this year? Let me know!

This week’s recommendations

I watched Maestro last week when it released on Netflix. Unfortunately, despite its grandest ambitions, Bradley Cooper’s latest Oscar-bait is hollowed-out fluff. The elision of Bernstein’s queerness seems to be almost a message in itself, with many (including yours truly) wondering if there was a reason that so much of the heart of the film came from seeing this complicated family embrace at the end, with less forgiveness and acceptance than just avoidance. Is Irina Shayk Bradley Cooper’s Felicia Bernstein? I need

Gossip Time

to report on this.

It’s more a portrait of a marriage than a portrait of a career, critics and fans alike admit. And is that enough? Should it be? There’s little depth to their characters—one moment, Felicia indicts Lenny for the “hate in your heart,” because he has grown sloppy in his affairs with younger men; not simply because everyone else can see it, but because she’s forced to see it too, despite opting into their arrangement with clear eyes. Then she, and we, finally see him perform in a majestic cathedral in the first extended sequence of him actually being the great musician everyone’s saying he is. He runs to kiss her and she says, you don’t have hate in your heart. I felt like I was watching a student project pastiche of vintage romances of lore with absolutely none of the depth. Just watch a George Cukor film instead.

As Sarah from

The Squawk

pointed out, “Lenny’s homosexual affairs [are] treated as if they are precisely the same thing as a heterosexual affair—the result of personal weakness and not systemic marginalization.” And perhaps that’s why it’s difficult for critics not to wonder whether there was a deeper personal connection between Cooper and Bernstein that kept him from pulling too hard at the covers, the veneer of approval from the Bernstein family too important to squander by delving any deeper.

Of Maestro, Bernstein’s son said, “I don’t know if by seeing the film I learned more about our family or about Lenny Bernstein…But I do know that I learned a lot about Bradley Cooper.” And…exactly!

*

I was also pretty disappointed with Poor Things, despite it having so many makings of a new favourite for me. Despite stunning visuals, Emma Stone, Yorgos Lanthimos, dreamy science fantasy sequences, and Charlie from Girls (!!!), it just didn’t captivate me like other Lanthimos films have in the past. While observing a woman (Stone) trying to develop her intelligence, emotions, and sense of forgiveness while maintaining a belief in human kindness over cruelty, I was incredibly bored, and that’s harder said than done! There’s even an extended sequence in which she finds empowerment and independence through sex work and socialism. Should have been my kryptonite! And yet. And yet…it felt empty and directionless, and lacking the teeth of a Yorgos film that I’d been accustomed to, perhaps out of fealty to the main character, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, she’s certainly a sympathetic woman.¹ But where does that leave the audience as they’re along for a 2 hour movie in which a woman clunks along without hardly ever interacting with systems beyond her interpersonal relationships, while still trying to paint such systems with broad strokes? No deeper indictment of assault, power dynamics in sex, of women’s autonomy, of patriarchal class structures, of marriage or a woman’s desire for life outside of a gilded castle built for her.

Would love to hear thoughts on both films if you’ve seen them!

1. I won’t spoil her dark origins, but she is not just one woman, which makes her fealty to her creator even more maddening.