Reading Priestdaddy on Father's Day

I finished reading Patricia Lockwood's memoir Priestdaddy in June, the night before Father's Day. When I awoke the next morning, I realized that the book had shifted shape while I slept. A few scattered details now stood out for me from the rest, and once I allowed them to cluster, they began to look like a completely different story about fathers than the comical one I thought I'd been reading.

The Lights Keep Going On and Off

Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States, and we now know what it feels like to be in the Upside Down.

I'm referring to the alternate universe in the Netflix series Stranger Things into which the boy Will Byers is transported. Named to describe the underside of the board for the fantasy role-playing game Will and his friends play in his basement, the Upside Down is also a parallel dimension embedded within his own home and hometown of Hawkins, Indiana. After being abducted by an otherworldly creature set loose by the insidious experiments conducted by the scientists and bureaucrats who work at the Department of Energy compound in Hawkins, Will sends messages from the Upside Down to his mother through the electrical system of their tract house, through lights that flash on and off.

Why electricity? And why--of all possible government agencies on which to pin evil--the seemingly benign Department of Energy? My answer to these questions is that the neoliberal present we inhabit--whose own catastrophic end we may now be experiencing--began in many ways with the energy crisis of the 1970s, an era whose dimmed lights helped propel the political rise of Ronald Reagan and the economic rise of Donald Trump. 

Labor and Freedom in OITNB Season 3

The labor movement and the women's movement are woven together with astonishing sophistication and brilliance in season 3 of Orange Is the New Black. I'd like to say it's the most Marxist-feminist thing that has ever appeared on American television, except I'm not sure there's any actual competition in this category. The women's prison setting of OITNB has always allowed it to represent women's bodies in ways not seen elsewhere on television: an overwhelmingly female-majority cast, filled with an astonishing diversity of body types, all wearing formless prison scrubs and more tattoos than makeup. But season 3 takes this representation a step further by asking us to pay attention to these bodies as they work and to think about who owns the results of that labor, in all its (re)productive forms.

Reading like a Teenager and The Fault in Our Stars

It was my plan never to read The Fault in Our Stars, afraid that I would find it maudlin and contrived and unable to hide my cynical critique from the teenagers who populate my life and home and car. Teenagers love John Green's book, and they love it with an unreserved adulation, a wholeness of feeling, an uncritical embrace that seems by turns charmingly and irritatingly naive. It's also slightly surprising, especially in the light of media reports that the younger generation hardly reads anything much longer than a status update anymore, and as a result is in danger of losing the capacity for empathy that novelistic reading provides.

Game of Thrones in an Age of Greed

Read my analysis of the White Walkers, Native American windigo myths, and disability in Game of Thrones at Avidly.

The Wolf of Wall Street and Bodies-in-Greed

Over the past five years, the financial drama has emerged as a major subgenre. Films such as Margin Call (2011), Arbitrage (2012), and The International (2009)--together with their documentary counterparts like Too Big to Fail (2011), Inside Job (2010), and I.O.U.S.A. (2008)--expose for the American public the dangerous criminality of our post-regulatory economic environment. These films tell stories about great risks, baldfaced lies, gigantic profits, and precipitous falls. But the problem the genre repeatedly faces is how to explain (much less make exciting) arcane investment relations like credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, or naked shorts. White collar crime has all the visual and narrative appeal of an Excel spreadsheet, and hardly seems high-thrill movie material.

The new Martin Scorcese movie The Wolf of Wall Street solves this problem by deliberately replacing the cerebral with the corporeal. Jordan Belfort, the film's disreputable protagonist and unreliable narrator (played by Leonardo diCaprio), begins more than once to explain to the audience the financial details of his plots, only quickly to interrupt himself with a reminder that it doesn't matter how he made money, only that by making lots of it he was able to spend it on things that made him look and feel good--like helicopters, cocaine, or prostitutes.

Death and Substitution in Game of Thrones

I am probably the world's least likely Game of Thrones viewer. It took me five tries to get through the pilot episode, and I only succeeded the fifth time because my 13-year-old daughter agreed to watch it with me (turns out, she loves it). I imagine its ideal viewers to be the kind of folks who could play Dungeons and Dragons for months at a time, or who got lost in Lord of the Rings (a book I similarly failed to get more than 30 pages into, despite trying multiple times). Although I appreciate the genre's efforts at alternative worldmaking, I'm just not good at consuming what passes for fantasy--for me, it's too disconnected from history, and too exhausting to keep track of all the characters and plotlines.