Pedro Almodóvar earned his first Oscar nomination in 1988, as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made the final five for that year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film (now Best International Film). He won the same award eleven years later, for Todo Sobre Mi Madre, my introduction to his work, and was most recently nominated for the strong, introspective Pain and Glory, which earned a Best Actor nomination for Antonio Banderas two years ago.
Almodóvar’s most recent work, the outstanding Parallel Mothers, finds the director similarly pensive, but this time he’s looking outward, with a two-layered story about truth and reconciliation in Almodóvar’s native Spain, a country that is still grappling with the legacy of a dictatorship that ended nearly a half-century ago. Parallel Mothers starts with a story about a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War, then pivots abruptly into the two mothers of the title, both of whom give birth in the same hospital but find themselves intertwined by the events that come afterwards, before we return to the story of the grave in a sweeping conclusion. The middle story itself packs an emotional wallop, but it is also a grand metaphor for the challenges Spain – or really any country – faces in confronting the truth of its past.
Penelope Cruz, who got the film’s one Academy Award nomination this year (for Best Actress), plays the photographer Janis Martinez, who happens to be taking pictures of a forensic anthropologist named Arturo. The fascists killed her great-grandfather in the 1930s, forcing him first to dig the mass grave in which he’d be buried, and then tore him from his family a night later. Janis asks Arturo if he could help exhume and identify the bodies, with help from the government’s truth commission. They also sleep together, from which Janis gets pregnant, a development she welcomes, as she’s 40 and has always wanted children. She shares a room at the hospital with the teenaged Ana, who is unhappy at her condition, and they become friends for the moment, although they lose touch once they resume their lives outside the hospital. When they reconnect, Janis learns that Ana’s baby died of SIDS, and she asks Ana to move in and be her au pair, but she has an ulterior motive as well.
The Janis/Ana story itself contains multitudes; both characters are complex, with detailed backstories, reasons why they are who they are, yet no connection to each other beyond the coincidence of their simultaneous arrivals at the hospital. Janis knows a truth that she can’t bear to share with anyone, including Ana and Arturo, but without the truth – and even a chance for reconciliation – nobody can move forward with their lives. When that truth comes out, it sets off a bomb in their lives, threatening everything Janis has wanted, but that’s followed by a period of forgiveness and understanding that wouldn’t be possible without the truth, no matter how brutal. Only after that can we return to the story of the mass grave, as Arturo takes a team to the village where Janis’ great-grandfather died, and where her family still lives, and begins the process of searching for and disinterring the remains.
There’s enough metaphor and symbolism here to fill someone’s senior thesis. The parallels between the Janis/Ana story and Spain’s own uncomfortable grappling with the impacts of the Civil War and the fascist Franco’s tyrannical, forty-year reign give Parallel Mothers its narrative framework, but Almódovar has populated the film with smaller details that give depth to the story of the two women while also sharpening the connection between the nested stories. As for symbolism, there’s food everywhere here, such as when Janis teaches Ana to make a tortilla Española, a classic Spanish dish of thinly sliced potatoes poached in olive oil and finished with eggs to bind it. It’s a national dish (a big deal in a country with divers regional cuisines), and its history goes back at least 200 years; passing this knowledge from one generation to the next, as Janis does to Ana, may stand in for the idea of passing along all knowledge, presaging a later scene where the two argue in Janis’s kitchen, and the older women lectures Ana over her ignorance of her country’s history. (I don’t know if there’s any symbolism to this part, but I certainly noticed the gigantic wheel of Manchego sitting on Janis’s counter, under class, and you are fooling yourself if you think I’m not trying to figure out how to get my wife to sign off on that in our house.) The color red appears everywhere in the film, from Janis’s handbag to her phone case to various decorative objects in her home, which is an Almodóvar trademark; here it could stand in for the blood spilled in Spain’s 20th century, unmentioned and yet pervasive even if no one wishes to discuss it. There are substantial hairstyle changes, little language quirks, so many choices in the script that seem deliberate given what Almodóvar was trying to do with the concentric narratives.
This is one of my favorite films of 2021, although I wouldn’t put it at the very top. The film’s finale is moving, although it comes upon the viewer rather quickly; the script probably could have gone longer, both to resolve the Janis/Ana storyline and provide more time in the rural village where the exhumation takes place. There’s also a smaller twist in the relationship between the two women that seemed to come from nowhere, almost as a convenience, and it doesn’t contribute meaningfully enough to the plot for me to buy into it. Cruz is so good in this, with Milena Smit also superb as Ana, that combined with the literary, layered script, I still found myself lost in its depths long after I left the theater.
I’m not sure why Spain selected The Good Boss, which stars Javier Bardem (Cruz’s husband), over this as its submission to the Academy Awards this year, although the one-film-per-country thing has already outlived any usefulness it may have had, but the one nomination it got, for Cruz, is well deserved – she’s certainly better than Nicole Kidman, who may win. (Cruz also became just the fifth woman nominated twice for Best Actress for films in languages other than English, and the first to do so for two Spanish-language roles.) I have read, but have no way to verify, that the Spanish film group that chooses its submissions dislikes Almodóvar, having passed over his Volver and Bad Education, but the joke is on them, as The Good Boss made the shortlist but not the final five nominees for Best International Film.
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Parallel Mothers.
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Dune.
Dune could have gone wrong so many ways, but the biggest risk in converting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic to the big screen was always the plot. The novel’s setting is iconic, from the desert planet to the sandworms, yet the complexity of the story around the Christ-like Paul Atreides stood out as the greater challenge, the one aspect of the book that couldn’t be addressed with CG. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune does a remarkable job of distilling the first half of the book into a single, accessible story that simplifies the plot without overdoing it, while also providing the look and feel that have helped make the novel an enduring classic of its genre.
(Disclaimers: I love the original Dune novel, so much that I read all five of Herbert’s increasingly terrible sequels, but have still never seen the David Lynch film adaptation from 1984.)
Dune follows the familiar template of the ‘chosen one,’ a story arc that stretches back to the Bible and continues now in YA fiction, most notably the Harry Potter series. The messiah here is Paul Atreides, the teenaged son of the Duke Leto Atreides, who rules the planet Caladan, and his concubine Lady Jessica, a member of the cultish spiritual order the Bene Gesserit. Paul exhibits unusual mental abilities from an early age that indicate that he may be the savior foretold by the Bene Gesserit’s prophecy. The story opens when the Emperor orders the Duke to take stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the drug known as spice or mélange, which also happens to be an essential element in interstellar travel. The present rules of Arrakis, House Harkonnen, are not especially keen to lose their powers, leading to armed conflict that puts Paul on the run and in charge of his own destiny.
Villeneuve’s decision with his co-screenwriters to split the book into two films, hoping the first would fare well enough that the studio would greenlight the second, paid off twice – it did do well enough that we will get a sequel, and I would argue that it only did that well because it didn’t try to cram a densely plotted 500-page novel into a 150 minute movie. There’s so much room to breathe here that Timothée Chalamet gets far more screen time to give a little depth to Paul’s character, while Rebecca Ferguson, as Lady Jessica, may be an even bigger beneficiary, as some of that character’s most important scenes would almost certainly have been cut in a single-film adaptation. Paul’s character comes alive more in the second half of the book, once he’s on the run with the Fremen people, which leaves a modest void in a first-half movie for another central character to fill, and Ferguson does so with the film’s best performance.
The cast of Dune is incredible on paper, although the result is more “I can’t believe they got Charlotte Rampling!” than “I can’t believe how great Charlotte Rampling is!” Oscar Isaac is here. So is Javier Bardem. Stephen McKinley Henderson, who you know by sight even if you don’t know him by name. And there is some value in having these very famous people, any of whom can command a scene by themselves, in smaller roles. They don’t get quite enough to do – not even as much as Jason Momoa does in a memorable turn as Duncan Idaho.
The film does look amazing, though. Villeneuve is no amateur at worldbuilding on the screen, and this is the Arrakis of the page, whether in wide shots or close-ups, feeling vast and foreboding and terrifyingly dry. You’ll find yourself craving water watching this film. Many of the special effects are impressive, especially those showing the various flying vehicles on the surface of the planet, but there’s just as much wonder in the sword fights or the scenes showing troops massed in formation when the Atreides arrive on Arrakis to take control.
Dune ended up with ten Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Cinematography, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but not Best Director, which surprised me given how much Villeneuve had to put together here even taking the script (which he co-wrote) as a given. I’m not surprised at the lack of acting nominations, given how many people and named characters in the film, and how little depth most of them get even in a film that’s a solid two and a half hours. Ferguson might have had an argument for a supporting nod, but that’s probably it. My guess is Dune wins a bunch of technical awards – ones it may very well deserve – without taking Best Picture or Adapted Screenplay. Of the four BP nominees I’ve seen so far, though, I think it’s my favorite.
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Mass.
Mass marks the directorial and writing debut of actor Fran Kranz, an actor who hasn’t done anything so far that might have indicated he was capable of this. Mass feels in so many ways like a stage play, with just four characters in one room constituting the vast majority of the film, and it pulls off a discussion of a difficult subject in an engrossing and credible way. (You can rent it on amazon or iTunes.)
Mass takes place at an Episcopalian church, almost entirely in a meeting room, where two couples, played by Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Reed Birney, and Ann Dowd, will meet some unknown period of time after a school shooting where a son of one couple killed the son of the other couple, and other classmates, before killing himself. The parents whose son committed the murders are no longer together, and have taken different paths – mom is wracked with guilt, and wants compassion, or at least more of a kinship with the grieving couple, while dad is still trying to absolve himself somehow and is bottling up his grief. Meanwhile, the parents of the victim are still deep in their grief, and can barely contain their rage when the conversation first turns to the killings. The meeting is unmoderated, but has been arranged by a counselor who seems to have worked with both couples; the four are simply left to their own devices. (I’m not saying which couple is which by design; it’s better to avoid knowing until the dialogue reveals it.)
The dialogue is raw and doesn’t flinch from its subject, including, at one point, a detailed description of the sequence of the murders. The parents share how they found out about the massacre not long after they were sharing photos of their kids, which appears to have been their pre-arranged conversation starter. The script shines when it centers their shared grief, how both couples lost sons that day, and how this isn’t some sort of Grief Olympics between them. Kranz doesn’t try to explain the inexplicable, other than to have the shooter’s father run through the litany of possible explanations – which follows an abortive discussion of gun laws in America. The victim’s parents ask the questions you’d expect, including why the killer’s parents didn’t do something to stop this, but Kranz doesn’t give any easy answers. The end of that conversation in the meeting room might be the only time the script loses its intensity, because the quartet reaches that point abruptly given what came before. It’s relentless without ever becoming lurid or otherwise pandering to retain your attention. It’s a story about one small bit of the aftermath of a school shooting, and Kranz never loses sight of that.
Mass has received a slew of honors from local critics’ circles and independent film groups, including taking the Robert Altman Award from the Independent Spirit Awards, won in recent years by Moonlight, Spotlight, One Night in Miami…, and Marriage Story. Dowd and Isaacs have each won a supporting actor award, although I’m not sure what makes either of them ‘supporting’ in this film. All four are great, but Dowd stands out – the script gives her the most to do, and she’s incredibly affecting both in her grief and her need to be understood by the other parents. The idea that Being the Ricardos might get a Best Original Screenplay nomination over this is … well, especially aggravating because the nomination would ensure more people know that Mass exists. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, because it’s very talky, because it so resembles a play adapted to the screen, because it’s so unsparing of its topic. It is a tough watch, but it achieves everything Kranz could have wanted from his script.
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Licorice Pizza.
Licorice Pizza, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson, feels like the work of an entirely different writer than PTA’s last film, Phantom Thread. Where that movie was tense, quiet, often creepy, Licorice Pizza never stops moving – in one sense, almost literally, as the two main characters spend a substantial portion of the film running, often in less-than-sensible shoes. It’s a beautiful, quirky, and funny coming-of-age story. I just wish so much of its greatness wasn’t undone by a pointless racist gag that PTA could have excised without losing anything.
Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a precocious almost-16-year-old actor and would-be entrepreneur who spots Alana Kane (Alana Haim) when the photography company she works for comes to his school for picture day. He tries to flirt with her, despite the ten-year age gap, and somehow coaxes her into meeting him for a not-date date at the absurdly named but extremely ’70s restaurant Tail o’ the Cock, where he’s on a first-name basis with the staff and is treated like a VIP. Gary tries to get Alana some movie and TV work, while she tags along with his venture to sell waterbeds, and the two continue to move along as if they don’t actually have feelings for each other, even though we know by the time the movie ends, they have to get together somehow.
Hoffman and Haim carry this movie, Hoffman in particular, with his effortless charm and a self-aplomb way beyond his years. The age gap between them – which is larger than the one that had certain folks upset in Call Me By Your Name, although that criticism was probably about something other than their ages – is less evident on the screen, because Gary is developmentally advanced for his age, while Alana is still quite immature. The latter point especially shows up in scenes at Alana’s home, where she still lives with her parents and two older sisters, all played by Alana’s actual family (quite well, in fact – her father is a riot), and she’s very clearly the baby of the bunch, twenty-five but aimless. She hangs around with Gary and his friends, even though she knows it’s “weird,” in part because they give her a way to stave off adulthood. Because Hoffman plays Gary as this worldly teenager who understands more of adult ways than just about any teenager I know, which is built into the character’s story (and that of the real-life actor, Gary Goetzman, on whom PTA based Valentine), the love story between the two comes off as more innocent than it might otherwise.
The unsung hero of Licorice Pizza might be the costume department. Films set in the 1970s often shove that decade’s regrettable fashion choices in the viewer’s face, but Licorice Pizza instead leans into the better side of ’70s fashion. Haim is a fashion plate, wearing some gorgeous prints across a series of short dresses that wouldn’t be out of place today aside from the oversized collars. Valentine doesn’t have quite as much fun, but the white suit and fuchsia shirt he dons near the end of the film couldn’t come from any other decade.
PTA also populates the film with many real-life characters from Hollywood of the time, including Sean Penn as the legendary actor William Holden (thinly disguised as “Jack Holden”), and Bradley Cooper in an absolutely ridiculous (and very fun) turn as producer Jon Peters, with whom Cooper worked on the remake of A Star is Born. Benny Safdie appears as city councilman Joel Wachs, on whose campaign Alana works near the end of the film. If you listen carefully, you’ll catch the voice of John C. Reilly in an uncredited role as another real person. Most of this works to add color to the film, accentuating its sense of time and place, although the Holden segment goes on longer than it needs to.
That racist gag, though. John Michael Higgins plays a real person, Jerome Frick, who owned a Japanese restaurant in the LA area called Mikado. In the film, he appears once with his Japanese wife, and speaks to her in slow, exaggerated English with a mock-Asian accent. He appears again, later, with a different Japanese wife, and pulls the same shit. There is a punchline there, at Frick’s expense (turns out he’s just an ignorant asshole), but I’m not sure any punchline could justify that lead-up. It appears that Jerome Frick’s second wife, Hiroko, was a fluent English speaker, yet PTA only has the two women speak Japanese in the film. Perhaps this was some complicated way to mock the real-life Frick – and, for what it’s worth, the punchline itself is funny – but few if any viewers will be in on the joke, and the whole thread adds precisely nothing to the film. It’s a shame that either nobody called PTA out on it, or, more likely, that he just ignored them. The Hollywood Reporter just published a longer piece on the controversy this morning, which links to a November interview with PTA where he tries to defend it as true to the time period.
If that bit were cut from the movie, Licorice Pizza would be just about perfect; it’s still my favorite of the movies I’ve seen so far, even with the bitter taste of that failed gag. The chemistry between the leads is so strong – both should be in the running for Oscar nominations, and both scored Golden Globe nods already – that almost everything around the two of them melts away. Maybe there will be a director’s cut that spares us those objectionable scenes, because the rest of this movie is wonderful.
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The Luminaries.
Eleanor Catton won the 2013 Booker Prize for her massive novel The Luminaries, becoming the youngest-ever winner of the prize, all the more remarkable for how much the novel sounds like the creation of a much older mind. It’s part mystery, part historical fiction, a dash of picaresque, and at times a bit of a mess, with one of the most untidy endings I can recall in a novel of this magnitude.
The Luminaries takes us to 1866, to New Zealand’s South Island, and walks us into a gold-rush town called Hokitika with the newly arrived prospector Walter Moody, who is there to pan for gold, and instead wanders headlong into a series of interconnected mysteries in the town involving a corrupt sea captain, a missing goldpanner, a dead hermit, an opium-addicted prostitute, a possibly-bogus will, a vendetta, Sinophobia, a M?ori miner, and more. The twelve men he meets are all caught up in the web of mysteries in some way, with their connections forming an elaborate tapestry that puts Moody (and the reader) well into the weeds before any resolution appears. The mysteries are gripping, but they’re far better because of the strength of all of the characters Catton has created; if anything, Moody is this novel’s Nick Jenkins, the observer character who is himself not all that interesting.
The central mystery revolves around that dead hermit, Crosbie Wells, and his unknown relationship to the conniving captain Francis Carver, and their shared connection to Anna Wetherell, the prostitute who was found unconscious, possibly as a result of a failed suicide attempt, on the side of a road the same night that Wells was found dead in his hovel. That question drives the plot, but the way Catton unfurls it, character by character, shows incredible plotting for such a young novelist, and allows her to give the reader a cornucopia of fascinating and often weird characters, most sympathetic, a few decidedly not so. You come for the mystery, but you stay for the weirdos.
Catton did make two significant structural choices in the novel that didn’t quite work for me. She used the signs of the western zodiac and other astrology tidbits to title the chapters, and the twelve men are supposed to correspond to those signs. Astrology is woo, and if there’s a real connection between the zodiac signs and anything in the book, I missed it, and I’m not terribly sorry about it. She also concludes the novel’s main narrative somewhat abruptly, and then jumps back in time to provide a mostly linear narrative of what actually happened before Moody arrived, an answer key of sorts at the back of the book. Doing so is not an inherently bad choice – every mystery needs its solution – but the switch was sudden, and after the climax of the main story, which has an unexpected event that triggers the end, we get very little resolution or explanation of what happened or how the main characters react to it.
I’ve read plenty of 800+ page novels, but few are actual page-turners. The Luminaries flew by, with prose that evokes the 19th century without sounding like it was written in the 19th century – there’s some formality, some nods to colloquial English of the time, but the majority of the prose reads like it was written more recently. That central narrative gripped me from fairly early on in the story, and Catton increases its complexity (and thus the reader’s confusion) quite well before the gradual revelations of different characters’ parts in the overall drama. The Booker Prize winners’ list is a real mixed bag, but this is one of the better ones I’ve read – and one of the most readable, too.
Next up: I’m partway through this year’s Booker Prize winner, The Promise, by Damon Galgut.
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Furnace.
Furnace was one of the big hits of Gen Con in 2021, earning a big crowd around the two booths demoing it (Arcane Wonders is the U.S. distributor and had copies for sale, while the original publisher, Hobby World, offered demos). It’s a brilliant game that combines resource trading with engine-building over four rounds, with some simultaneous actions that can keep game play to 30-40 minutes once everyone knows the game. If you’ve played Century Spice Road, Furnace takes that game’s main feature and builds a way better game around it – and I like CSR quite a bit. Furnace is out of stock at amazon now but I believe another printing is coming.
In Furnace, players will bid on cards from a central market and add the ones they win to their own play areas, where they will create engines of card actions they’ll execute in order, one card at a time, to try to convert resources into other resources and eventually into money. Furnace’s most notable new mechanic is that there is value in losing the bid for a card: If you bid on a card but don’t win it, you get “compensation,” which is shown at the top of that card, separate from the card’s actions (shown on the bottom). Compensation can be straight resources, or the right to convert resources you already own into others. You get that compensation multiplied by the value of your losing bid, which can be up to 3 – so if you bid 3 and lost, you triple the resource gains, or get to do the conversion up to three times. Thus you will often bid on cards you intend to lose, or will bid on cards hoping someone else will outbid you.
The bidding is independent of your cash and your resources; each player has four tokens, numbered 1 through 4, that they bid on the cards in the display. Players go around the table, bidding one token per turn, until everyone has used all of their tokens. After the bidding is completed and players receive the cards they won or compensation they receive, they place those cards in their play area, next to the cards they already have – the basic game lets you reorder the cards every turn, but I prefer the advanced rule where you must keep them in a row and can’t re-order the ones you already have – executing the actions on those cards, top to bottom on each card, then left to right. You repeat these steps over four rounds, and the game ends.
The cards you acquire all have at least one action available now, and each has one action that is shown only in outline at the bottom. That action is available after you upgrade the card, which requires an upgrade token and an upgrade action, both of which are shown on every player’s start card; you can upgrade as many cards with that action as you have available tokens. The resource exchanges are always in your favor, as in CSR, so the only reason you might choose not to use one of those actions is later in the game when you won’t have a chance to cash out the second resource type. Early in the game, at least, it’s usually a good idea to convert everything you can, and then tailor your bids in the next round to whatever resources you seem to have and are able to generate.
The game also has five Capitalist cards that you can distribute randomly that give every player a special ability throughout the game, such as an extra value-2 token for bidding, or the ability to gain extra compensation when losing a bid. There’s a fair dispute among players about whether these cards are balanced enough, but they also aren’t necessary to play or enjoy the game.
Furnace is easily one of the best games of 2021, and has the advantage of being accessible, both in terms of rules and playing time, while also presenting players with sufficient challenge for even more experienced gamers. There’s some randomness in the card draws – when I taught my parents at Thanksgiving, we had an unfortunate first round where almost none of the eight cards in the market offered resources as compensation, so everyone got off to a slower start – but after that, it’s all up to you. It’ll certainly end up in my top 10 for the year, which is scheduled to run next week over at Paste.
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Infinite Powers.
I’m a sucker for a good book about math, but a lot of books about math aren’t that good – either they’re dry, or they don’t do enough to explain why any of this matters. (Sometimes it doesn’t matter, as in Prime Obsession, but the author did such a good job of explaining the problem, and benefited from the fact that it’s still unsolved.) Steven Strogatz’s Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe manages to be entertaining, practical, and also educational, as the author builds up the reader through some essentials of pre-calculus before getting into the good stuff, to the point that I recommended that my daughter check it out before next year when she takes calculus in school.
Calculus underlies everything in the universe; it is the foundation upon which the universe, and everything in it, functions. It is also one of humanity’s most remarkable discoveries, one that required multiple leaps of mathematical faith to uncover hidden truths about the universe. Physicist Richard Feynman quipped that it is “the language that God talks,” although he meant it in a secular sense, while mathematician Felix Klein said that one could not understand “the basis on which the scientific explanation of nature rests” without at least some understanding of differential and integral calculus.
The story of how both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz simultaneously discovered calculus in the late 1600s, doing so both with their own remarkable insights and by building on the discoveries of mathematicians before them, going back to the ancient Greeks, would by itself be enough for an entertaining history. Strogatz does start with that, and uses the history as scaffolding to bring the reader up from algebra through geometry and trigonometry to the mathematics of limits, which is the essential precursor to calculus, before getting to the main event.
Or I should say “events,” as differential and integral calculus, while two sides of the same analytical coin, were discovered at separate times, with separate methods, and Strogatz tells their stories separately before bringing them together towards the end of the book. Differential calculus is what we learn first in schools, at least in the United States. It’s the mathematics of the rates of change; the rate at which a function changes is the derivative of that function. Acceleration is the derivative of velocity – that is, the rate at which velocity is changing. Velocity, in turn, is the derivative of position – the rate at which an object’s position changes. That also makes acceleration the second derivative of position, which is why you see a 2 in the formula for the acceleration of an object falling due to Earth’s gravity (9.8 m/s2): a position might be measured in meters, so velocity is measured as the change in position (meters) by time (seconds), and acceleration is the change in velocity (meters per second) by time (seconds, again).
Integral calculus goes the other way – given an object’s acceleration, what is its velocity at a given point in time? Given its velocity, what is its position? But Leibniz and Newton – I expect to hear from Newton’s lawyers for listing him second – conceived of integration as a way to solve an entirely different problem: How to determine the area under a curved function. Those two didn’t think of it that way – the concept of a function came somewhat later – but they understood the need to find out the area underneath a curve, and came up, independently, with the same solution, which broke apart the space into a series of rectangles of known heights and near-zero widths, giving rise to the infinitesimals familiar to any student who’s taken integral calculus. They aren’t real numbers, although they do appear in more arcane number systems like the hyperreals, yet the sum of the areas of this infinitesimally narrow rectangles turns out to be a real number, giving you the area under the curve in question. This insight, which was probably Leibniz’s first, opened the world up for integral calculus, which turns out to have no end of important applications in physics, biology, and beyond.
Strogatz grounds the book in those applications, devoting the last quarter or so of Infinite Powers to discussing the modern ways in which we depend on calculus, even taking its existence for granted. GPS devices are the most obvious way, as the system wouldn’t function without the precision that calculus, which GPS uses for dealing with errors in the measurements of distances, offers – indeed, it’s also used to help planes land accurately. Yet calculus appears in even less-expected places; biologists used it to model the shape of the double helix of strands of DNA, treating a discrete object (DNA is just a series of connected molecules) as a continuous one. If your high school student ever asks why they need to learn this stuff, Infinite Powers has the answers, but also gives the reader the background to understand the author’s explanations even if you haven’t taken math in a few decades.
Next up: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
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Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is the story of cognitive dissonance, from its origins in the 1950s – one of the authors worked with Dr. Leon Festinger, the man who coined the term – to the modern day, when we routinely hear politicians, police officers, and sportsball figures employ it to avoid blame for their errors. What Dr. Carol Tavris and Dr. Elliot Aronson, the authors of the book, emphasize in Mistakes Were Made, however, is that this is not mere fecklessness, or sociopathy, or evil, but a natural defense mechanism in our brains that protects our sense of self.
Cognitive dissonance refers to the conflict that arises in our brains when an established belief runs into contradictory information. We have the choice: Admit our beliefs were mistaken, and conform our beliefs to the new information; or, explain away the new information, by dismissing it, or interpreting it more favorably (and less accurately), so that our preconceived notions remain intact. You can see this playing out right now on social media, where anti-vaxxers and COVID denialists will refuse to accept the copious amounts of evidence undermining their views, claiming that any contradictory research came from “Pharma shills,” or was in unreliable journals (like JAMA or BMJ, you know, sketchy ones) or offering specious objections, like the possible trollbot account claiming a sample size of 2300 was too small.
The term goes back to the 1950s, however, when a deranged Wisconsin housewife named Dorothy Martin claimed she’d been communicating with an alien race, and a bunch of other morons followed her, in some cases selling their worldly possessions, because the Earth was going to be destroyed and the aliens were coming to pick them up and bring them to … I don’t know where, the fifth dimension or something. Known as the Seekers, they were inevitably disappointed when the aliens didn’t know. The crazy woman at the head of the cult claimed that the aliens had changed their minds, and her followers had somehow saved the planet after all.
What interested Festinger and his colleagues was how the adherents responded to the obvious disconfirmation of their beliefs. The aliens didn’t come, because there were no aliens. Yet many of the believers still believed, despite the absolute failure of the prophecy – giving Festinger et al the name of their publication on the aftermath, When Prophecy Fails. The ways in which these people would contort their thinking to avoid the reality that they’d just fallen for a giant scam, giving up their wealth, their jobs, sometimes even family connections to chase this illusion opened up a new field of study for psychologists.
Tavris and Aronson take this concept and pull it forward into modern contexts so we can identify cognitive dissonance in ourselves and in others, and then figure out what to do about it when it rears its ugly head. They give many examples from politicians, such as the members of the Bush Administration who said it wasn’t torture if we did it – a line of argument that President Obama did not reject when he could have – even though we were torturing people at Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, and other so-called “black sites.” They also show how cognitive dissonance works in more commonplace contexts, such as how it can affect married couples’ abilities to solve conflicts between them – how we respond to issues big and small in our marriages (or other long-term relationships) can determine whether these relationships endure, but we may be stymied by our minds’ need to preserve our senses of self. We aren’t bad people, we just made mistakes – or mistakes were made, by someone – and it’s easier to remain believers in our inherent goodness if we deny the mistakes, or ascribe them to an external cause. (You can take this to the extreme, where abusers say that their victims “made” them hit them.)
There are two chapters here that I found especially damning, and very frustrating to read because they underscore how insoluble these problems might be. One looks at wrongful convictions, and how prosecutors and police officers refuse to admit they got the wrong guy even when DNA evidence proves that they got the wrong guy. The forces who put the Central Park Five in prison still insisted those five innocent men were guilty even after someone else admitted he was the sole culprit. The other troubling chapter looked at the awful history of repressed memory therapy, which is bullshit – there are no “repressed memories,” so the whole idea is based on a lie. Memories can be altered by suggestion, however, and we have substantial experimental research showing how easily you can implant a memory into someone’s mind, and have them believe it was real. Yet therapists pushed this nonsense extensively in the 1980s, leading to the day care sex abuse scares (which put many innocent people in jail, sometimes for decades), and some still push it today. I just saw a tweet from someone I don’t know who said he was dealing with the trauma of learning he’d been sexually abused as a child, memories he had repressed and only learned about through therapy. It’s nonsense, and now his life – and probably that of at least one family member – will be destroyed by a possibly well-meaning but definitely wrong therapist. Tavris and Aronson provide numerous examples, often from cases well-covered in the media, of therapists insisting that their “discoveries” were correct, or displaying open hostility to evidence-based methods and even threatening scientists whose research showed that repressed memories aren’t real.
I see this stuff play out pretty much any time I say something negative about a team. I pointed out on a podcast last week that the Mets have overlooked numerous qualified candidates of color, in apparent violation of baseball’s “Selig rule,” while reaching well beyond normal circles and apparently targeting less qualified candidates. The response from some Met fans was bitter acknowledgement, but many Met fans responded by attacking me, claiming I couldn’t possibly know what I know (as if, say, I couldn’t just call or text a reported candidate to see if he’d been contacted), or to otherwise defend the Mets’ bizarre behavior. Many pointed out that they tried to interview the Yankees’ Jean Afterman, yet she has made it clear for years that she has no interest in a GM job, which makes this request – if it happened at all – eyewash, a way to appear to comply with the Selig rule’s letter rather than its intent. Allowing cognitive dissonance to drive an irrational defense of yourself, or your family, or maybe even your company is bad enough, but allowing it to make you an irrational defender of a sportsball team in which you have no stake other than your fandom? I might buy a thousand copies of Craig Calcaterra’s new book and just hand it out at random.
Theauthors updated Mistakes Were Made in 2016, in a third edition that includes a new prologue and updates many parts of the text, with references to more recent events, like the murders of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, so that the text doesn’t feel as dated with its extensive look at the errors that led us into the Iraq War. I also appreciated the short section on Andrew Wakefield and how his paper has created gravitational waves of cognitive dissonance that we will probably face until our species drives itself extinct. I couldn’t help but wonder, however, how the authors might feel now about Michael Shermer, who appears in a story about people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens (he had such an experience, but knew it was the result of a bout of sleep paralysis) and who provides a quote for the back of the book … but who was accused of sexual harassment and worse before this last edition was published. Did cognitive dissonance lead them to dismiss the allegations (from multiple women) and leave the story and quote in place? The authors are human, too, and certainly as prone to experiencing cognitive dissonance as anyone else is. Perhaps it only strengthens the arguments in this short and easy-to-read book. Mistakes Were Made should be handed to every high school student in the country, at least until we ban books from schools entirely.
Next up: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
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Passing.
Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing had, somehow, never been adapted for the screen until this year, despite decades of acclaim – Penguin included it in their Classics series, and LitHub named it one of the 50 best short novels published before 1970 – and themes of race and identity that have lost nothing in relevance since the novel’s publication. Rebecca Hall, star of 2018’s Christine, took on the task of both writing the screenplay and directing the film, producing a highly faithful version of Larsen’s original story that preserves the original’s ambiguity and incisive eye on its main characters.
The novel and film focus on two Black women, Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), who were friends in childhood but drifted apart at some point afterwards, only to stumble upon each other in Manhattan one day – in a tea room where both women are “passing” as white. Irene learns that Clare has been passing for years, to the point of marrying a white man who has no idea of her racial background, and that as part of the ruse, Clare puts on a show of hating all Black people – even more so than her husband does. Irene has married a successful doctor (Andre Holland), living in Harlem with their two boys, and is very involved in the Negro Women’s League – a cause to which Clare seems to attach herself, at least as far as attending the social events where she can slide back and forth between her two identities. When Clare becomes closer to Irene’s husband, who is happy to pay her some attention, Irene starts to doubt her friend’s motives, and a coincidental meeting puts them all on the inevitable collision course with the truth.
Hall’s script hews almost completely to Larsen’s original story, down to the characters and settings, a sensible choice given the strength of the original material – especially the characterization of Clare, who might have less screen time than Irene but is the most interesting character by far, as she dances with danger by trying to live in both worlds at the same time. Negga has to be headed for awards nominations with this performance, where she takes the heedless Clare of the book and makes her more subtle, daring with the chances she takes but more sympathetic as she hints at the ways in which she’s trapped herself by passing to this extent. Is she flirting with Irene’s husband, or does she just enjoy the attention of men other than the husband she secretly loathes? (Is he flirting back, or just being chivalrous?) The two women both appear to envy what the other has; Clare is the life of the party, and has access to a whole world that is closed to Irene, while Irene never has the stress of passing, and does not have to deny her identity, or give up her family and friends to have material wealth. Both actresses portray this exquisitely, through tone and expression as well as Hall’s dialogue. Negga in particular could strip paint off the walls just through a change in how she looks at another character, while Thompson’s portrayal of Irene is understated because of the way that character keeps her mistrust and rage bottled up.
Hall shot the film in black and white, which certainly helps evoke the 1920s (pre-Crash) setting, but also creates additional ambiguity around the varying skin tones of the main characters. If you had never seen Thompson or Negga before Passing, you might not immediately know either woman was Black. (Negga is part Ethiopian and part Irish, and has been vocal about her identification with and interest in Black history.) Negga’s hair is dyed blonde, further developing her racial ambiguity and making it easier to see how she might slide back and forth between the white world of midtown Manhattan – and her racist husband – and Irene’s world of Harlem. It is as un-showy a directorial effort as you might find, especially for someone’s debut in that chair, but that makes it all the more remarkable, and one I hope is fully recognized by critics and awards shows.
I’ve only seen two movies that are awards contenders for 2021, this and In the Heights, so saying this is one of the best things I’ve seen all year seems rather disingenuous, but I feel confident I won’t see five better movies than Passing in this cycle. It’s so well-written and well-acted, and it is the type of movie I especially enjoy. Passing has a leisurely rhythm that contrasts the seriousness of its subject matter in such a way that the conclusion packs the maximum possible punch, and even though I knew what was coming, I still felt the full impact because Hall and her two leads set it up so well.
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Bird by Bird.
When I asked readers for suggestions for books about writing, the second-most cited book, after Stephen King’s On Writing, was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. It’s a wonderful, slim book of short but very potent essays on just about everything related to writing, with an emphasis on fiction (and, at that, I’d say the short form), but much of it is also applicable to other forms of writing or merely the act of writing itself. It inspired me, and I say that as someone who is infrequently inspired at this point, even when it comes to writing about things I enjoy.
The book is filled with advice, and I don’t want to reproduce much of it here, because you should go read the book itself, and also because the advice just sounds much better in Lamott’s voice, with her wry humor and copious examples. She draws extensively on her experience teaching writing classes as well as writing for herself, allowing her to speak about things like writer’s block, creating credible characters, publishing, not publishing, and more in both her own voice and those of her students. I found nearly all of this advice to either ring true to my own experiences – especially that on writer’s block, something I haven’t truly experienced, because I can always just write something else and get things moving again – or to answer questions I’ve always had, such as how to do things like create those credible characters or write dialogue that sounds true, both to how people talk (which isn’t as easy as it sounds) and to the characters speaking it.
There’s plenty in here on getting started, which is something I often hear from aspiring writers is a huge part of the problem – they want to write, but can’t figure out how to begin. (With the first word, of course.) Lamott has sage advice on reasons to write, and reasons not to do so – not if you think it’s a quick route to wealth, or financial freedom, or popularity; if you doubt her, she has plenty of failure stories from her own career, from books rejected by publishers to dealing with self-doubt and the voices in her head that love to tell her she’s not any good at writing. (She is, though. Very.) It’s always helpful to know that other writers, especially those who have had more success than I have or have had longer careers, deal with the same kind of doubts and impostor syndrome that I do, and to be reminded that writing is its own end. Writing should give you joy, to use the popular bromide of the day. If it doesn’t, don’t do it. If it does, then how much you make from it – if you make anything at all, if you even publish – doesn’t matter.
Lamott is an irreverent writer who is perhaps best known for some of her writing on faith, including the best-selling Traveling Mercies, and while her beliefs do show up in the pages here, I thought it was always in service of her larger points, without proselytizing or excluding; on the contrary, she goes out of her way to include people of all faiths and no faiths in the book. I can’t say I was concerned – I try to read as diverse a set of authors as possible – but I include this for anyone who might have felt disinclined to read for Bird by Bird for this reason.
The title of Bird by Bird comes from a wonderful anecdote within an early essay that, in short, is the writing equivalent of taking it one day at a time. One of the biggest obstacles I have always faced as a writer, regardless of my subject, has been the discouragement I feel when I think about the whole project – its size, yes, but my ability to complete it, and make it good, and in a timely fashion, and not to be distracted by that thing I’ve been meaning to bake or that game I’ve wanted to play. So much of Bird by Bird comprises gentle reminders that you can do this, and it’s okay to fail, or think you’re going to fail. Just keep going, bird by bird.
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I also read another of your recommendations, Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing. It’s a twee book with advice written to look like verse, in a voice that would make me think violent thoughts about any teacher who lectured in it. There’s some useful advice buried within it, but I encountered at least as much advice that I would say I violate every time I start to write, and while it’s written by a journalist largely for journalists, I’m not sure how much of the counsel here I’d truly endorse. I did enjoy the last 50 pages, with examples of bad writing from students he’s taught over the years, which ranges from the execrable to the unintentionally hilarious. It’s more than a matter of laughing at bad writing, but many of the examples illuminate problems with the language itself, ways in which English, or a lack of command of it, can lead us astray. There’s value in that. Perhaps he should have made three-fourths of the book out of that, and limited his advice to the remainder – without the pompous formatting.