walk the line

TAS RIGHTS MANAGEMENT

I bow down to you, Swifties, and the beauty of fandom — a grateful phenomenon, where we find humans who drive us wild, and so we follow them in-in. My experience with Ms. Swift is this: every song I hear of hers, I love instantly. Here are ten ways that “The Life of a Showgirl” gets me grinning and mentally gurgling.

1. Ending an album with the putative lead track — “The Life of a Showgirl,” featuring her girl, the lovely Sabrina Carpenter — is genius. Why? She reminds you that what you just heard continues to exist once you leave the track and move on to your next.

2. The album is called “The Life of a Showgirl,” not “The Life of the Showgirl,” right? Using “a” versus “the” rejects hubris, another way of saying that experience is for everyone. Glory—in all its flecks and speeds—as birthright.

3. “Wood” needs to exist because it speaks the motherf*cking truth: No one stokes their pheromones over a softie downstairs. It delivers a second gem: True love opens up thighs. Yup! Praise Ms. Swift for saying it simply and swiftly (puns intended).

4. The beauty of “Honey” is in its seminal line, “You can call me honey if you want / Because I’m the one you want.” Ms. Swift says we deserve hearing, receiving, being the real thing — also, this is how we heal.

5. “Ruin The Friendship” hits, not because it says being with someone’s sig other is okay, but because Ms. Swift knows how to yearn. What will we say, staring down at our beloveds? “But I whispered at the grave / ‘Should’ve kissed you anyway.’”

6. “Wi$h Li$t” holds no bars, laughing! “They want a contract with Real Madrid / They want that spring break that was fuckin’ lit / And then that video taken off the internet.” When she sings, “I just want you, huh,” the heart hears: When you got your person, it's that simple.

7. “CANCELLED!” talks alignment and kinship: “They’re the ones with matching scars.” If we don’t use our scars to apply Vitamin E to others, what’s the purpose of our surviving incisions?

Disney Plus

I have missed seeing the hilarious, empathetic parts of Chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) as she tries to stay sane amidst Chefs Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Carmen (Jeremy Allen White) taking jabs at each other. In The Bear’s Season Four, Episode Five, “The Replicants,” the sibling dynamic of the trio is back on display. Richie isn’t wrong when he tells his found-sister Sugar’s (Abby Elliott) newborn that being around Carm might induce “a refrigerator complex.” “Don’t talk shit to me through the baby,” Carm says, to which Syd rolls her eyes. Carm is a whole mood, but so are Richie and Syd, and heck, the whole Bear crew are fiery, funny personalities.

“Replicants” gives them to us straight: These kitchen fools love each other, and The Bear, but have enough individual and collective foibles that keep them (and The Bear) from reaching their goals. As evidenced in Sugar’s exasperation, “Hey Richie, stop fucking hiring people!”

The crew’s mix of love and judgment perfected Seasons One and Two, flustered the third, and is back with “Replicants” in Season Four. The episode’s soundtrack crosses genres, from Jackson Browne to Doris Day, but each song offers a feeling of nostalgia. Is it nostalgia for better times when The Beef was becoming The Bear and everything seemed in reach? Or maybe it’s more of a crosshair nostalgia because the team is legitimately talented. Their capabilities can be remembered, and summoned, but more than this, they could be featured in Alice Waters’s next book, if they can get it together.

The episode opens with a contemplative Carm exploring Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, now a museum. Following Carm offers third-party insight into who he “really is,” an invitation The Bear often gives us to see more of each character. (Queque Syd spending the day getting her hair done).

As Carm gets inspired, caressing Wright’s smooth shelves, we follow the other crew members waking up with their synchronous 6:00am alarms. Seeing their actual alarm clocks puts us in sync with the stressball lodged in everyone’s brain: The huge countdown timer Computer (Brian Koppelman) installed in The Bear’s kitchen. When it reaches zero, if the restaurant hasn’t recovered its losses, their investor, a family friend known as Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), will close the restaurant.

Even with this stress looming, the team’s devotion shines through, evoking the heart of the characters, who give the show its heart. At home, Chef Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) makes The Bear’s scallop dish and asks her husband what he thinks. The team lives, dreams, eats (obviously), and sleeps The Bear.

We see Chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) and his realtor roommate debating the good ole’ half glass empty or full? In this case, they’re talking about moving: When you change homes, does that mean you have succeeded, or failed? It is a good question for the team to ask, because they tend to be hard on themselves. (Syd’s obsession over losing her cleaver — and Carm later assuring her a new one, stat — gets some lighthearted context from this conversation, too.)

Everyone in “Replicants” has a reckoning. Richie mentally panics about the restaurant and his home life; Syd shoots three pointers to help her decide between staying at The Bear or joining Chef Adam’s (Adam Shapiro) new place, and Chef Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) is hot on the idea that he could franchise The Beef.

The showdown moment comes when Tina tells Carm The Truth: He is the shit and doesn’t need to prove anything, to anyone. Tina’s directness, delivered with love, gets through to him, and Carm makes a menu change that will provide major relief to the staff. More levity comes when Copenhagen cutie Chef Luca (Will Poulter) arrives to support Marcus’s dessert station brilliance. Luca’s return underscores Carm’s respect for his team, since Marcus has been asking for help for a long time. Richie and restaurant consultant Jessica (Sarah Ramos) finally flirt: It all puts icing back on The Bear’s jovial cake, baked up by Hard Kitchen Work. This is the vibe that made the show’s debut season so good.

At the close of the episode, Syd finds out her dad had a heart attack and is in the hospital. Carm doesn’t skip a beat, says he will go with her, and when she says she will be OK on her own, assures her in equal regard that her potatoes — and everything in the kitchen — will be fine; to take the restaurant’s car, and focus on her dad. Their tenderness, raw because they are similar so apt to get thorny — Syd reflects earlier they are both not good at being “consistent” — underscores The Bear’s heart.

The Bear’s teamwork, and therefore, what they can produce for their customers, has always shined the brightest when they make the choice to flow, admitting to their shortcomings and listening to each other. At their core, they hold each other’s wellbeing, and that of the restaurant, deeply. The success of The Bear is their shared destiny.

2025_░_░_06:17AM.mov. COURTESY OF WARNER BROS.

Spoilers ahead for Weapons (2025)

I have always been interested in rage.

A five-second clip from Zach Cregger’s written and directed Weapons on my Instagram feed featured Auntie Gladys (Amy Madigan) — there is life before and after seeing her, IYKYK — and that was enough for me. But my boyfriend, a horror lover, made a convincing case, and see it we did.

The young women of Blink Twice break from their flower juice as a god awakening, and Big Little Lies’ Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz) attacks Perry (Alexander Skarsgård) as her soul vendetta — a primeval scream from the inside, making one do. Rage is a response to someone realizing they have been raged upon. Filmic rage has all the trimmings and tastings of the real life one, when done right.

The premise of Weapons is simple enough. A bunch of 8ish year-olds, entranced, run out of their suburban homes towards who knows where, except for one child, Alex (Cary Christopher), introduced as a depleted, disturbed shell of what a third grader should look like. From the film’s trailer, maybe something more troublesome than Alex’s Aunt Gladys’s crooked smiling and hot red hair is causing all this creepy.

Surprise! The entire villain is Gladys, and the witchcraft she practices, and the horror of the film is both circumvented and expelled by her. Gladys’s villianhood is interesting. That Weapons’s wicked person is an older, dying woman, played by a 72 year-old actor, age-ness on display is a wonderful twist on the brawny, villainous man-body. Unlike villains with soft spots or a peek of a conscience, though, Gladys serves sadism only.

Sometimes, the rage she causes feels haphazard. Gladys is a double-down-hurter, making Alex’s parents (Callie Schuttera, Whitmer Thomas) stab themselves with forks, coolly telling Alex that, if she wants, she can make them “eat each other.” Recalling Jessica Jones’s Kilgrave (David Tennant) making Jeri (Carrie-Ann Moss) kill her ex-wife with bare hands, kind-natured principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) is instructed, via Gladys’s hair potioning, to kill his partner — by head butts, it goes down like a bloody bowl of Sugar Smacks. Not only does Gladys invert love to hatred, but she invokes in her victims a wrath that stops at nothing save vicious death (either theirs or the other person).

The people she hurts suffer endlessly, because she has no intent to stop it. What would become of the seventeen children she lured and cursed to a basement, standing comatose, presumably forever? And, of Alex’s parents — would they be eternal, self-harming doormats for Gladys to play house with — and Alex, her evermore soup servant and abettor? These are static hells Gladys creates. Conversely, the effects of her cruelty stoke the darkest darks of those she maims.

She does, in fact, create killers. It is riveting — terrifying — to watch the children, in the film’s denouement, once broken from their comas and charged to get Gladys, run like they’ve never known possible, after her, through homes and yards, crashing doors and windows, the marathon energy of Twilight’s vampire and wolf crews put into one. Their pursuit is dogged, the prefrontal cortex flipped so hard that it backvaults. Kill her, rip into her they do, screaming, in Weapons’s most graphic scene. She comes apart like a cheap, pharmacy store doll, the recipient of a rage that knows someone has tried to destroy you.

Little (aged) Ghostface resting off an empty shelf.

On September 2, a hot Labor Day, my 6 year old and I were heading to the last pool day at our gym, after running an errand at the mall. On our way out, we drove by the nondescript building entrance where our Spirit Halloween has been the past two years. (You feel something special for your homefront Spirit Halloween, amirite?)

We found Jack, flexing as usual, on his whimsical, orange signage, robed and one-red-eyed, his large skeletal hands looming over his spooky self. Obviously, we nixed the pool and spent the next two hours there.

Fast forward to two months later — in the meantime, we went to parties dressed as Ghostface and Scream’s movie trailer — when I returned to see if they had my tiny, silver sequin skirt in a tiny, sequin black version. Spirit Halloween’s glam aesthetic is perennially on point.

Some shinies on the raked through racks.

I found my skirt in pink, amidst a commingling of horror and festive fan-humans going beyond buying and selling discount into building All Hallows’ Eve chillest after-party.

Fifty percent off was happy hour (Love you, guys! Got four pairs of Boudoir Tights and a black bodysuit, in addition to the mini.) Discounts mean clear-outs, but clear-outs do not necessarily mean joy-outs — but at Spirit Halloween, joy queened the space.

Two women next to me in the sparkle section chatted about accessories and costumes coming together. I asked if they were going to a party. No: This was for next year, getting ahead on their Halloween shopping.

Her cart filled for next year’s Halloween celebrations.

Easy camaraderie carried on between teenagers by the wigs and masks. A mom and her toddler looked around, the little girl with a distinct glee that comes from being in places that feel like a personal playground.

A social scene in the back.

The days following a holiday fall into a new-old-new posture, and, in the case of Halloween, these are days still relating to fantasy. The urgency of finding a mask leading up to Halloween leans into a more passive, vacation flavor, inviting you to sift through what is left, toss a wig on your head casually, to see, casually, to laugh, casually, to scare, casually. Without the pressure of crowds, a lax experimentation seemed to fill the store, adding a new level of creep.

Ringmaster of sorts and Chucky.

As in, the Halloween type, where horror bares itself, half-open, half-closed, happening alongside everyday activities, like walking home from school, or, on this day, the careful, artistic work of the Skeleton Crew, breaking down the store’s performance platforms.

Beautiful members of the Skeleton Crew, Marty (R) and Nick (L).

It feels safe and fun to be scared at Spirit Halloween, in large part because of the community of scare-lovers and the kind people who work there, in large part because of the curiosity and joy people bring to the store as observers and buyers, and in large part because it is so damn creative. The store is like an annual theme park, horror-fantasy, but fantasy, nonetheless. It is comforting to know where to go that gets you close to a thing that brings you joy.

The emptiness of the store by November 2 is, of course, the point of Spirit Halloween. The empty shelves are symbols of desire, the one that selected and wore those costumes, then engaged with others and in fiesta through them. After all, a holiday is not a holiday because a calendar says it is, but because of people deciding to celebrate. Is there an official end to glee? Not here.

Note: All photos were taken on November 2, 2024 at the Lawrenceville, New Jersey location of Spirit Halloween, in Quakerbridge Mall.

Actor and millennial heartthrob Josh Hartnett (yes, Josh Hartnett) is on smash as Cooper, the sick, sweet protagonist of writer and director M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, Trap (2024), streaming this week.

Sick: Cooper is a serial killer known as “The Butcher” because, well, imagine. Sweet: he defends his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue) perfectly — ire in check — against mama and daughter bullies in her class and delivers pitch-perfect dad goofiness. We find out early on — at a pop singer’s concert doubling as a sting operation for the Feds to catch “The Butcher” — that, bubbling alongside Riley, is he! Grinning at his daughter’s joy, Cooper side-eye checks the black-and-white video feed on his phone of a teenage boy, wrists tied, frantic and crying, in a small, empty room.

The juxtaposition of Cooper’s latest victim to the free-bodied, lyric-belting Riley is stark, but this tension is less a division meant to shock and more an invitation to be a part of this cracked family fairy tale, Cooper headlining.For this is not the film we thought it would be — a dad joke, *eye roll,* as they hurry into the arena for a fun-filled night. Trap is under- and over-skin creepy, offering little of why Cooper is the way he is, putting focus on who he is, at present: a loving girl-dad, slicing youths on the side.

Chewing stadium pretzels together and taking videos of Riley and other Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) fans dancing, it would be easy (for me) to watch them, heart beat at his devotion and attention — love. As Riley says, walking to their stage-level seats, “Dad, this is literally the best day of my life.” I was rooting hard for his parenthood, the kind that joins your child in something she loves, while giving her space to feel into experience. As deftly as he snaps their selfies, he pushes a girl teenage concertgoer down the lobby stairs. Why? No reason, other than he knows commotion helps him because he will be damned if he gets caught on his daughter’s best day of her life. That push, by the way — if the Feds are paying attention — matches the footage of his grabbing up a victim like a viper into a van.

Because the film is about catching Cooper, he is in almost every frame, so we watch how he gets away from getting made, until he finally does. The trailer focuses on Cooper’s face to tell the story of what we will see — doting dad, gorgeous charmer, killer, blank-face, arrogant, an expert criminal freak. Hartnett’s animation of these personas, and interchange second to second, is what makes watching him merge Cooper’s two lives, as the character calls them, so compelling. Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), an arena merch employee fallen under Cooper’s spell, after a tee Riley wants is sold-out, and he compliments their “good values” of patience, tells him, “This dude is next-level insane.” Hartnett crooks Cooper’s rakish smile in response, playing akin to the audacity and barely hiding — because once we know, we know — his pride.

Cooper is a goner for sensing someone’s loneliness and standing up for his daughter. Nothing less than freedom seems to be his mental payday.

The film title hints this dynamic along: a trap is set for Cooper, Cooper traps (others), and we are set to be (en)trapped by this charismatic killer. But, here’s the pivot of Hartnett’s Cooper: He is not just a charismatic killer, as, say, Ted Bundy is referenced, or multiples of The Sopranos, one of TV’s sociopathic crews. Cooper is charismatic, in strict definition. He is charming and funny and physically beautiful, the latter adding heavy eye flutter and disarmament to his charm. Cooper is also something (someone) non-sexual. In his Riley universe, he is a safe, protective parent-man, never raising his voice nor showing anything, in the slightest, of the coldness and cruelty he carries out in his crime life.

There is stuff for straight-up serial killer film aficionados in Trap. The limousine Cooper rides in leaving the stadium, with Riley and Lady Raven, is the one he commandeers later, a one over on the police. He is Emmett Myers in dad drag, smarter than nearly everyone and has a cleaver, his salivation for chopping up body parts palpable in his neatly lined canine smile and eyes, shifty as google doc. bullet points, drawing you in and on the next line taking you out. As for the sexy aesthetic, serial killer dynamic, Hartnett’s Cooper is. Besides being generally gorgeous, close-ups of his face and tracking shots that follow his long, limber body through the arena highlight his appeal.

Cooper lets us in chiseled, shirtless, tight-fitting jeans, in an end scene with his wife in their kitchen. The latter deserves mention — Hartnett is fine, yes, while nodding at the asynchronous amount of female versus male nudity in Hollywood films (I appreciated it both as a cinephile and carnivore). And last, a cardinal rule from early horror — to see a bit and imagine the rest — activates well when we see footage of four bags of body parts, aka Cooper’s work.

In the scene with his wife — Cooper is all The Shining vibes — as he moves closer, casually discussing his killer-dom, removed emotionally from her, and really also, their son, he becomes when Riley, Riley, Riley. She sees the police take him away and runs over, hug attack on both sides. If you are here for dissonance, Hartnett has it for you. When they embrace, do not tell me it is not real. How it can be so does not concern Shyamalan, and that tracks. The raw emotion between the two packs up my pathos.

During the concert, recalling the way Cooper stares at Riley’s face, after telling her he needs to go to the bathroom, where he will check on his scary life: She urges him to go, saying she is fine on her own. The linger locks in Hartnett’s mastery of Cooper. Willing to trust her in the crowd, being proud of her, letting go and allowing her to be, taking extra seconds to make sure she is extra safe.

“The Gift.” Image from RogerEbert.com. (From left to right: Rebecca Hall as Robyn, Jason Bateman as Simon, and Joel Edgerton as Gordo.

Eight years ago, actor Joel Edgerton released The Gift—his debut film as a writer-director. This disturbing film missed my radar, but thanks to a spot-on recommendation from a friend I finally saw it.

Disturbing may not be an evocative enough descriptor. The film’s events, enclosed in a tight hour-and-forty-eight minutes with fade-outs that feel like acts in a play and set in source music, deliver plenty to disturb. The Gift is among those films focused on human unfurling, which become a horror house of mirrors as you consider the work.

Even the trailer is layered. The skeletals of a stalker story led by Gordo (Joel Edgerton) shift, as the camera turns its focus on affable, handsome Simon (Jason Bateman) becoming something determinedly not charm or good looks. This switch, or uncovering, is the film’s epicenter. Jason Bateman’s Simon is the revelation of The Gift: He is a lifetime bully, and there is an expiration date on the reign of a bully in the world.

The film is tagged as a drama, mystery, and thriller; it lives in all of these categories, but queered.

The background to the drama: Simon and his wife, Robyn (a perfect Rebecca Hall), move from Chicago to Los Angeles. In Chicago, they live through Simon making a mess of their home[life] (an easily missed line Robyn delivers, as Simon tries to paint her as a pill-popping depressive responsible for the ill-will swing of their relationship), and an unspecified tragedy of losing a child. Then, they run into Gordo. The drama is not the instance of running into Gordo, whom Simon has not seen since high school, a 20 years or so timespan, nor the range of emotions Gordo’s gifts elicit in the couple, as they show up one day to the next at their doorstep. The drama is held in the amount of time it takes for the audience to perceive Gordo as some kind of a threat, only to realize that Simon is the threat.

There is a lot we do not know about Gordo, sure — pedigree information, for example, where he lives, how he makes money, if he has any close relationships in his life. The film highlights the complexity of the past — what really, inarguably happened? — and subjective, by definition, partial, takes on those pasts. We learn high school-aged Simon and his friends made fun of Gordo, bullying him because they thought he was gay and fabricated a story about him being sexually assaulted by an older man. What we learn later is Gordo’s torment at the hand of this bullying and that Gordo’s father tried to kill him when he believed his son might be gay. These are facts: Neither Simon, his friend who co-led the bullying, nor Gordo, deny this is what happened. There is no mystery to the anguish and devastation Gordo experienced, nor to its genesis.

What is the mystery then, that is, the burrowed forehead, of the film? Well — take your pick.

How has Gordo lived his life since high school and kept himself alive? The National Library of Medicine reports on bullying being closely associated with suicide, a study that researches bullies, victims of bullying, those uninvolved, and bully-victims, those who bully and are bullied.

In one of Simon’s and Robyn’s clashes over Gordo — Robyn identifies with Gordo’s socially awkward manner because she, too, can be this way — where Robyn defends and Simon abhors him, Simon shrills that his father was cruel to him, but he survived and does not go around crying about it. Could Simon be a bully-victim?

When Simon’s exterior pulls back, his colleagues and wife see inside. He scribbles down the name of his competitor for a promotion, so he can send an email of lies about their background, ensuring he gets the promotion. That person tries to hurt Simon, exposing what he did, and Simon is fired. He goes to Gordo to apologize, unclear for what, and ends up bashing his face in, kicking his work supplies everywhere, and pinning him to the ground. Robyn learning about Simon’s high school past becomes Robyn learning about Simon at present; she and Gordo share the experience of being bullied by Simon. She gets pregnant again, and after she gives birth, she tells Simon in so many words their marriage is over. How did it take Robyn years to see Simon fully, which also means, how was Robyn living her life, so that she did not see?

The thrill of the film takes some from schadenfreude. At last, Gordo hits Simon, mentally and emotionally, where it hurts him the most. He has been filming the two of them at home and was alone there with Robyn after she fainted. He suggests he may have sexually assaulted her (and so the film’s end appeals to conventional intrigue, asking, who fathered Robyn’s child?). In the scene with Robyn unconscious, Gordo wears a monkey’s head mask, an animal that gives Simon the heebie-jeebies. This could be relief, in the form of payback delivered, for Gordo. Gordo quotes words Simon once said to him, about the power of putting “belief” in peoples’ heads.

Yet, the definition of a thriller is “a work of fiction or drama designed to hold the interest by the use of a high degree of intrigue, adventure, or suspense.” As I went on in my watching experience with The Gift, I realized I was not on the edge of my seat for resolution. Instead, as I watched, I grew sicker with my understanding of the fuller story — of Simon, of Robyn, of Gordo, and why they intersected each other exactly the way they did.

Is “doom” a film tag?

Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde (Warren Beaty), of true story Bonnie And Clyde (1967), start the film as aspiring, subconscious criminals. They catch each other’s eyes from a sidewalk and a window, when Bonnie sees Clyde likely trying to steal her mother’s car. The scene is a stylistic, emotive stand-out, quiet in movement and maximalist at showing their shared ennui.

Bonnie and Clyde - Opening Scene: YouTube

They feed off of each other’s criminality at once. Their complex intimacy that arrives is wrapped around their robbing spree and feels authentic. (I still remember that sting of sensitivity for Bonnie, when Clyde gently turns her down early on.) The stories of feeling and crime path reinforce each other. We can practically taste who they are soon to become — hot stuff, busting to take— just from the film’s opening minutes.

© AF ARCHIVE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Emily the Criminal (2022) could be like Bonnie & Clyde because there is a character set-up for two interesting people. But, Emily (Aubrey Plaza as Emily Benetto), hardened and gloriously steadfast in her hardness, is the star here.

© ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS/EVERETT COLLECTION

She and Youcef (Theo Rossi), at first her teacher, then a quasi colleague, are both adept at credit card fraud, with a critical difference. Emily is strident, personally and professionally, and Youcef is soft (personally and professionally), or, to speak frankly in terms of business: Emily is a boss, while Youcef lets things happen. They have chemistry, a strong, physical one and a desire for much more in their lives, and disastrous LTR implications (hello, equilibrium of any sort). A story of them evolving into crime partners could be messy and compelling.

© Emily the Criminal via AMC Theatres

But, crime duo making is not this film’s canon. A film’s naming offers a framework, so the focus of Emily the Criminal is Emily — and that she is going to become, or is already, a criminal. In the final scenes in Mexico, she dives into the ocean, ponders the beach, wanders the streets, makes her art, and runs a credit card fraud ring — solo. So, the beauty of Emily the Criminal is ultimately in its rough revelation that solitude has astonishing power, for grounding a type of joy making and serenity in accomplishment.

© Emily the Criminal 2022: Review, Flickering Myth

As for Bonnie and Clyde: They are in it together, the it a dissociative thing of lust and togetherness that defies conventional filmic inevitability of coupling and a portmanteau neatness of crime goaling. As the two skate a cauldron of manners, melding, ambitious for anti, they grow that thing between them, adrenalized from the get-go through the long run, until.

© Warner Bros-Seven Arts

Image from the Instagram of Daniel Kwan, Co-Writer and Co-Director, Everything Everywhere All At Once

A crazed auditor winning awards for said auditing, who regularly downs dubious-looking calcium drinks. A psychopath with an expertise in wrenching out common office supplies and turning them into deadly weapons in 0.2 seconds. A partner to Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) in a lifetime, with sweetness in her face and hot dogs as fingers. Also kind-hearted, when she, as the auditor, taps into benevolence, giving Evelyn and her family another chance at extricating themselves from debt.

This is Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) and she exists, well, because she does. The question for all of the characters in Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) is where they exist; each moment in their lives, as Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) tells Evelyn, his wife, determines the direction of their next moment, and so on. While Evelyn discovers the shocks and delights of dereistic living, and ramifications of these versified moments, vis-a-vis a form of AR that doesn’t quite look like anything we have created yet, Deirdre is introduced as a character who has been living in this variegated state for some time. Multimodality is how she canters through living.

The film, firmedly Sci-Fi, also a family drama, and ultimately, an individual existential crisis story, centralizes on concepts of personhood in a continuous loop of what-if scenarios. Sure, films have done this before (Sliding Doors made a small, albeit significant, cultural splash in the 90s) and, by creative extension, there are films that delve into multiple worlds creepily and seamlessly (Jordan Peele is a master, ahem, Get Out, Us), but Everything Everywhere All At Once does something different by combining a searing mother-daughter pathos with the extraordinary — truly, extra ordinary — world of re-making world that magnifies the shifting priorities that come when we shuffle around our cognizant leanings into life.

Evelyn, for all of her adaptations, remains basically the same persona throughout the film, which appears to be one of its lessons: even through cataclysmic anachronisms, one pretty much is who one is. Then, the film throws a wrench in this theory, because Deirdre is a complete shape-shifter in her elemental realities. We see her lovingly at home with Evelyn, embracing, evocative of the picture perfect domesticity of Revolutionary Road. We experience Deirdre with flowing contempt and abject boredom, an image of authentic The Office caricature, as she first meets with Evelyn and Waymond. There is also Deirdre who seems to want Evelyn dead, so another theory creeps up. The same way it is possible that our past experiences can fortify us in facing current ones, are any of our sour grape moments just so damn sour that they lurk beneath the surface, waiting for their memoir to be triggered?

With all the deserved kudos for Yeoh, who is phenomenal and anchors the film in her worried, spastic, time journeying as Evelyn, Curtis’s role as Deirdre stands out due to its plethoric switch in body temperature, and her precision in each of these states. She embodies the wily, unhinged, maximalist potentials of AI, integrated into life scene-shifting so fully that the metaverse seems like a baby step compared to what — and who — Deirdre lives through. Even suggesting the film’s conceptual mise-en-scène could be a multiverse is short-changed. What Deirdre shows us in Everything Everywhere All At Once are the emotional potentials of physically reinstantiating ourselves to wreck an unimaginable havoc and support an equally unimaginable healing.

Killing Eve's Villanelle (Jodie Comer), the young, hilarious, cheeky, brilliant, soft, sharp, stunning, presumed-psychopathic assassin who longs for a normal life involving “someone to watch movies with,” is gloriously complete and vivid, with an agency that is always hers. Villanelle is a woman working in man’s world, as a hired-hand murderer, and also queer. Though Villanelle has a grisly career, she is not the villain of the series, per se, in the sense of being heartless and focused only on her own gain. The series follows two tracks for Villanelle — first, her individual exploration of selfhood, aka her impassioned query if she can be somebody other than a killer, and second, her exploration of self in a beloved relationship with former MI5 agent Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh). The heart of Killing Eve is the bold, graceful strength of Villanelle’s aliveness, so her death in the show’s Season 4 finale burns even more, like a massive, engulfing fire.

If we accept the experience of Villanelle’s floating body riddled with bullet wounds from a sniper in the Thames River as Eve tries to reach her in the last two minutes of the episode, it means we are saying goodbye not only to Villanelle but to the range of possibilities of what living can do, be, and feel like, which her character shows us throughout the series. Hers is an aliveness in all of its forms, especially those that are dissatisfied with parts of what one is or has become and crave to make changes to ameliorate the self. This is what Villanelle has embodied and aspired towards — by going to see her birth family, tracking down the Twelve, and so on. Her impetus for a positive bildungsroman is also part of what she represents.

While she's alive in the series, Villanelle lives with everything she has, whether completing her kills or picking out perfect clothes for Eve or orchestrating a birthday party for Konstantin (Kim Bodnia), her handler and a familial love of sorts. Even through her gusto at eating, she is careful and wild; in other words, she is completely herself. What she is, and so, how she does, sparks the same intensity as do glimpses at a future Villanelle in a grounded partnership with Eve. These are moments that can exist only through their convergence, what Eve brings out in Villanelle, the places where Villanelle spills, softens, lets in, wants, cares. When Villanelle tells Eve, in response to Eve saying she always thinks about Villanelle, that she too thinks about Eve, or when she later kisses Eve on the cheek, she is as full in her desire for Eve as she is respectful of her space.

Villanelle is open and comfortable about her queerness and also recognizes that Eve has never been with a woman before. There is an opening for Eve, in her innate attraction to Villanelle, to feel into the being-ness of sexuality as flow. The authenticity of their bond, as Villanelle and Eve experience it from the beginning and come to express with each other, successfully dismisses any discounting or exploiting what is between them. Theirs is a full experience of love and connection; it is also true that these are two women who are in love. It is their linkage, based on honesty, mutual understanding and still wanting the other, through all their displays of violence and betrayal, that prompts Villanelle to hold less that Eve has never been with a woman and more that Eve has never allowed herself to love and be loved, to let herself live with someone in the way that their longing makes them unable to hide from each other. Villanelle never does anything half-full, and the end of a character so alive, with a future to look forward to, is a pain that cannot be minimized.

The other part of what Villanelle represents comes from her remarkable attunement to the present and showing what paying attention to our lives, the world, and the people around us can achieve. Indeed, it is that fullness of life coursing through Villanelle as she embraces and kisses Eve, sharing mutually appreciated space at last, in the finale, that makes her death, a matter of minutes after we see Villanelle in this apex of grounded contentment, so gut-wrenching. Villanelle is, in part, a killer, and excellent at it, and so is her love; yet, Eve exists in ways Villanelle does not, which means that in Eve, Villanelle finds a partner who will challenge her growth while accepting her for all that she is. By the end of the series, Villanelle knows Eve is in her corner, devotedly, without an ulterior motive.

When you experience someone at their maximum self, life bursting from their orifices, and their experience is cut short, we feel not only the death of that individual but the death of infinite possibility. Even though Villanelle’s life was severed in canon and her vulnerable, joyful union with Eve was only beginning, we see in what becomes Villanelle’s final actions — from her swift rigor as she kills the Twelve to how she watches her lover on the dance floor — that she has found a kind of freedom. She trembles with the emotion of knowing herself, knowing Eve, thus knowing why she is living.

And Villanelle lives for all of it: the rage, the beauty, the incandescent streaming that separates the two, all while holding an acceptance of herself. Having found someone who orients as she does, she is ready to step forward in new, supported alignment. This is what it means to unionize in souls, to be in the world braver, and kinder, because of being loved and seen. Villanelle’s death — a brutal murder, at that — rakes over us as the death of hope and a rupture of age-old processes and potentials of the self and the heart becoming something more sound and giving. We mourn the beauty who is Villanelle, as we mourn the possibilities her life gave range to, how she and Eve could be together now, but also the versions and imaginations of living she provoked and challenged us with. We had the honor to watch Villanelle live, make sense of it all while owning the room, and clear herself out, so she could let herself love and be loved.

PHOTO CREDIT: NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX — © 2021 Netflix, Inc.

Don’t Look Up (2021, Netflix) presumes the planet is worth saving. The film’s plot exists because of this idea; moveover, the fear, disbelief, rioting, media clamoring, and cultural profiteering that make up the anarchistic, ecstatic response to the news that the planet will be destroyed in six months involves a feeling of indignation around life ending and everyone dying. It’s like people heard the comet was coming, skipped processing, and went straight into reacting, in various stages of SOS and denial.

I want to pull back a moment to examine the missing processing piece. Adam McKay, who wrote the screenplay, directed, and co-produced, is a deliberate auteur, so there are no existential riffs on purpose. Instead, a range of inane, horrific moments push the idea that life is a construct being lived and paid no attention to, yet we (eventually, if not initially) freak out if it’s taken from us. We see this behavior in U.S President Janie Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) position to assess, when astronomer Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) tell her about the comet, and in the panicking “don’t look up” crowd when they finally see it.

Life in Don’t Look Up assumes we deserve saving, but the problem is that obliviousness; we don’t see wonder in life anymore, so we can’t feel full devastation about its ending. That rush from losing touch with our lives to an assaultive fear for them looks like, at best, vulnerable, understandable, and workable, with introspection and effort, and, at worst, self-serving with our heads up our asses. There is a pitch for gratitude here, not the kind you momentarily experience on a meditation App but the kind that infuses then directs your life, so you are living for the planet, not for yourself.

Ignorance leads to these freaky llama creatures at the film’s end, who evolve 20,000 plus years after the destruction of every thing, body, and place. The eukaryotic creativity and karmic horror is on point: the rich, nearly all white survivors, who escape on President Orlean’s plane when the comet hits earth, are eaten alive by them nearly as soon as they disembark. The rest of the world, minus, somehow, Chief-of-Staff Jason Orlean (Jonah Hill), is decimated when the comet hits. Vignettes of a baby’s bath, hippos canoodling, cafes, and solitude show earth’s magnitude; we are big in our cells and tundras but also minutiae, fleeting, yet special.

Dr. Mindy, his wife, June (Melanie Lynskey), their sons, Evan (Robert Radochia) and Marshall (Conor Sweeney), Kate, her dude, Yule (Timothée Chalamet) and scientist Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) — all sub- or grande-culture fighters for earth and science justice — carry this message home by cutting carrots and tasting string beans in the Mindy kitchen, holding hands in prayer over their meal, and discussing the beauty of store bought apple pie, as the comet hits them. From dust to dust, right? At the end, we hold in our mouths what we love the most. President Orlean calls as the comet strikes to offer her plane; Dr. Mindy declines, turning back to his beloveds.

It’s a more obvious angle that, in Dr. Mindy, Kate, and the other earth advocates, the film offers a version of humanity that believes in science and an imperative to be better. But, McKay is more concerned with the texture of thinking than pushing overtly blue and red messaging — if the film feels political, though, it’s doing good work. Politics are a way of revealing the things people actually care about. McKay may be suggesting we don’t deserve to keep living because we destroy the earth in so many ways. If the planet isn’t worth saving, the film, then, is a joke, joking with us as much as its characters, who are, by the way, also us. The question is ours: are people worth saving?

ART CREDIT @claieart

The thirty-minute marbles game in Episode Six of Squid Game (Netflix) killed me emotionally. (In millennial terms, I paused to tweet #wtf once I heard the rules). The episode has its own hashtag there and is destroying people. “Squid game ep 6 reaction mashup” is a whole thing on YouTube.

For quick review, until episode six, where marbles are featured as the fourth game, none of the games are played in pairs. When the players are asked to choose partners, their instinct is to choose someone they trust, or, if that’s not possible, because trusting in the games is like quicksand, then to find someone who seems like they could win. In other words, the players are looking for their plus ones. Then, the rules are revealed. Each player is pitted against their partner and the losers will be eliminated; we know by now what that means.

We’ve felt plenty of emotional and cognitive cruelty from the Front Man and his higher ups until this point, but this specific perversion of trust, trusting already a pipe dream for the players, is venomous. The games bet on the players knowing they’ll be tricked, but the house always wins. Still, the players try to outsmart what they think will happen but end up more compromised before they even start playing. No pair approaches the lump-in-your-throat Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Hoyeon) and Ji-yeong (Lee Yoo-mi) make in their marble game pairing. Here are seven places Kang and Ji-yeong ache; wrestle through humanity’s fundamentals with their compact, emotive prose, and show us that love is raw, beaming against odds, time irrelevant.

1. One Is the Loneliest Number

Solitude doesn’t imply loneliness, but they could be kissing cousins. Kang and Ji-yeong’s first interaction is before the last game of tug-of-war, when Kang recruits Ji-yeong, hanging out by herself in the barracks, to join her team. Instinct compels Kang to Ji-yeong; they speak the same body language, tight, not trusting or giving, aware of everything. Ji-yeong is attracted to Kang for the same reasons, so, in Episode Six, she tells her they should be marbles partners. Two self-reliant people could form a duo, or maybe what results instead is a loose alliance of distinct souls, each knowing what survival is and dancing to survivalism together.

2. Dialogue

Interpersonal growth gets a leg up by putting aside distraction, shifting focus from obstacles, and talking one-on-one, honest and direct. Ji-yeong will protect Kang at all costs (she tells her that), so, for her, evaluating the potentials of their time is a no-brainer. Why don’t they just hang out, she tells Kang, because the result of their time is pre-determined. Kang agrees. Theirs is no-nonsense commitment, without an agenda, tenuous but somehow freeing, and a delicate one. Conversation is a stand-in for lengthening their lives, a little, or, in other words, allowing the time they have to fill with what connection can bring.

3. Focus

…is how anything gets dissected, created, made a whole. The other players, most of whom are in shock knowing they are sending their allies to their deaths, immediately start playing. Their approach, deer-in-headlights, makes sense. Yet, Ji-yeong and Kang demonstrate another possibility: their concentration is simultaneously present and forward-thinking. They understand the stakes implicitly, because they’re both intense and exacting as hell, so, they make the present count. They don’t avoid the future so much as comply with it, but make it theirs, determine themselves how they will get there.

4. Pull Off the Band-Aid Fast

Let’s circle back to Ji-yeong’s pitch to Kang, that they play their game of marbles at minute twenty nine and get to know each other until then — it’s brilliant. They know, cerebrally, those thirty minutes end with Ji-yeong being shot by a red suit guard. But, look at what Ji-yeong’s idea refines around the concept of endurance. With the game’s outcome set, the two women have the possibility to inhabit a space removed from the pressure of circumstance, while holding their devastation that this experience is their last together; moreover, these are the final minutes of Ji-yeong’s life. There is no space to wallow in inevitability, neither is there space to prolong it.

5. (Taking People at) Face Value

Ji-yeong and Kang are cut from the same soul cloth. Their stamina, and resolve to achieve, is a response to their early traumas at home, when they weren’t in control. They recognize a toughness in each other, a defense that plays like offense, which is both true and untrue. No one, at least, not me, was prepared for Kang’s hysterical insistence that Ji-yeong roll her dice again, even though Kang wants to win, even though she knows Ji-yeong is throwing the game for her. So, there is something underneath these exteriors, in Ji-yeong’s cracked voice, seconds before she is shot, when she thanks Kang for choosing her; experiencing what it feels like to be chosen.

6. Fantasy

Ji-yeong’s word is bond, as she chides Kang with saucy, sad eyes to let her lose in style (for Ji-yeong, that means carefully dropping her marble at her feet, nowhere near Kang’s, and no, she will not roll it again). Ji-yeong swore her life away to protect Kang’s, by some sort of soul impulse, but gets even more affected by Kang hearing her goals to bring her mother over from North Korea and get a home for her mother, her brother, and herself in South Korea. Moreover, Ji-yeong feels a verve in Kang’s motivation that she can’t locate in herself. Ji-yeong fantasizes about an island, which lights up Kang’s eyes for the first time. The women need fantasies, dreams of accomplishment, to have a chance at survival in the games. But, for Ji-yeong, Kang’s fantasy is the one worth putting everything on the line for.

7. Love

It’s the age-old, gold state of being, threading Ji-yeong and Kang’s thirty minutes together. Love is an elasticity, also a causation, something your body writes that your mind receives, that says, I must be here for this person because. The question is not, does Ji-yeong value Kang’s life over hers? That inquiry reduces conversational chemistry, how they heal and enlarge each other by listening, their profound convergence of thirty minutes proposing that individual life does, and doesn’t, have value that can be compared. So, there are gradients to loving, and to its scarred sibling, sacrifice, or maybe love is only gradients. It is, for sure, not measured in minutes. Love is a position.

Outside our patio in Princeton, New Jersey, July 2021

Reflective/reflexive note on the italicized statements: These are literary visualizations based on feelings I expressed or heard neighbors or friends say or that I read online and in social media.

When will they die?

Find someone who engages your paralyzing fears as much as your rational ones and they are a friend for a mirrored life. They were, though—dying. Fewer rambling, intentioned bodies flew around Princeton, New Jersey, their breeding center of the state. My toddler and I live there, in a meadow, his never giving them a second or an unnerved thought. Our woods welcomed Brood X into the concert hall and bedroom of their dreams.

I do not want them near me.

Of their imaginable dreams, I do not know them, not really, not their insides nor their minds. I know the graphs of their life cycle from articles I read. I judged them from the outside—what I saw, but really how I felt, how seeing them made me feel.

I block their sound with my headphones.

Some musicians went into the woods and played music, saluting their gentle, perseverant nature. They stood with open arms, beckoning them to mistake the human body for a tree trunk. Selfies poured into national news outlets—these were predominantly children, gleeful, calm, sometimes covered in them. Community, acceptance, harmony.

“They are dying,” I told my friend, feeling immense relief but also queasy because I was rooting for death. I thought about Pharaoh’s hatred of the Jews. My toddler was onto something when he commented that the cicadas reminded him of the locusts we study at Passover. The cicadas swarmed the air and trees in our complex, but, I admit, there were pockets of air. In BC Egypt, Plague eight of ten, if you breathed, you breathed in a locust. God’s vicious messaging meant to cause Pharaoh to say, This is too hard, unlivable, please stop, yes, I will let the Jews go.

The image that fills my mind comes from one of my earliest Haggadahs. There was a man crouching at the bottom right nook of the page, a look of desperation and terror, the rest scrawled in green, black, and red, swirls of locusts choking out air. This is hatred, in the form of Pharaoh, that enslaved the Jews to make cities for Egyptians for 400 years. This is hatred that believes you are the best of everybody. This is hatred that says yes to all kinds of cruelty for their people because being a slave master is too good to pass up. How many examples are there of this hatred in history and present day?

One ran into me, so I screamed.

About the queasiness they caused me—maybe cause is not the right word. A cause can be re-worked, maybe, but there was no possibility to upcycle my experience of them. My reaction was fixed, impermeable to sense.

I wished, waited, and wanted for them to die.

They are everywhere.

Males screeched their bodies and females clacked in response (if anyone studies queerness in cicadas, send over your tymbal song). Five of them crawled into my son’s Jack-o-lantern basket to mate (that scene became particularly macabre). They smashed into my windshield like apocalyptic furors as I fled what used to be my home and was now also their home.

I was impressed in my heart chambers at their resolute showing up, yet fantasizing about my space being mine again, eventually looking at what my sense of space, and safety, meant—the ability to walk without coming into contact with anything to make me uneasy or harm me?

Is that crazy...or is that every creature’s birthright?

In the early part of their cycle, I visualized an ecstatic notion: my running outside, singing in interdependent joy with their thickest air at noon while they created everywhere.

I said, what problem?

My ease erased and unnervingly immediately put in place a frigidizing, boiling fear after one smacked into my face and, in a slow-mo horror movie way, as my peace got broken, I realized they were all around me.

One got into his house, and he fell apart trying to get it out.

The emotion—this is emotion, calling it a belief becomes something else—of being anti-them is ridiculous. At the least, taking a scientific approach (they are uninterested in harming the human body), feeling fear is unsubstantiated. Yet, that fear ruled my life for those next three weeks. When my toddler was with his other parent, I only went out at night, their quietest time. Against all advice in the what-not-to-do article—do not change your routine, do not assign them an obsessive center in your brain—I made my discomfort my world.

I will go outside protected head-to-toe.

After their dying, clumps of burnt brown autumn form on the trees. The females lay their eggs there to protect their babies from predators, taking in the nutrients they need for that life process. Tell me there isn’t something beautiful about green leaves in the swelter heat of summer punctuated by crunchy bunches. When my toddler and I again circle our complex midday, him on the scooter, me speed walking, he passes me a dried branch, curious and joyful.

He calls it a stick for energy.

Photo: Disney * Spoilers for Cruella (2021)

Cruella (2021) director Craig Gillepsie made a (sort-of) Disney film, the latest live-action remake from the media giant. Returning to the theater for the first time in over a year, my goosebumps flexed extra seeing Disney’s Cinderella castle drained to greys and punctuated by thunder and lightning in the film’s opening credits. I always want disturbing, but this pivot from determinedly cheerful to ominously insecure felt particularly gorgeous and provocative. Maybe because coming out of COVID is still coming out of COVID. The halves and wholes of everything seem markedly halfsy and whole-y.

Cruella bit me slowly. The morning after seeing it, after dreaming of parasites, rodents, and multi-tasking creative projects (a 20/10 for effecting a vivid and scary as hell dream-state), the pistons of Cruella started crystallizing.

1. “Discover the Origin of Cruel.” - the awesome Cruella IG

I read that as “Discover the Origin of Cool.” Not because cruel is cool, but Cruella (Emma Stone) is (also) pretty cool. She is an inventor, a fashion visionary, exploding art beyond her skin—there might be a beauty, transcendence, freaky coolness, to this type of cruelty.

2. Becoming

Estella starts sketching Cruella in her childhood. In her early years, Estella embraces Cruella as an alter-ego. In later years, Estella sees Cruella as a unique, complete person, separate from herself. For such a provocative story—Estella’s transition into Cruella is frightening, magical, and soul-ripping—Cruella does something interesting to invert a typical rags-to-riches origin story. Estella’s evolution into Cruella is rags to birthright riches, vis-à-vis discovering her mother is sociopathic and a murderer.

3. “The villains are always kind of the fun ones.” - Emma Stone, “Becoming Cruella Featurette”

I only saw Joker (2019) three times in the theater, convinced my closest friends to see it, and recreated the stair dancing scene with my toddler. Villains are everything.

4. Power never apologies for power

I think Cruella was my women empowerment TED talk for the year. If Cruella is the ultimate villain of the film, Baroness Von Hellman (Emma Thompson), London’s fashion design king, is its initial one. She destroys the careers, at the least, of anyone who threatens her empire. The Baroness is intelligent, empowered, and an egomaniac, ruthless with men who try to belittle her. She is impressed by Cruella in her competitive magic. This makes the Baroness also human—affected—while angling. My favorite is when she cuts Estella’s hand with her knife as she edits her design, then asks the fabrics department to make her the red of Estella’s blood.

5. The sixth stage of grief: revenge - Cruella

Vanity Fair and my fellow divorcees, we get this, right? (Slight) Disclaimer: Self-growth and showing self-growth are not necessarily the same, but when that growth is real, it pays back your former life. It pays-up who you are becoming.

6. No lovers

I love that neither the Baroness nor Estella/Cruella have male paramours, not because this neatly provides a pass-by-flying colors of the Bechdel Test in all of their scenes but because Cruella did not need to also be a story of a powerful woman with a partner who respects her power. That is a good story to tell, and important, but Cruella focuses on the relationship between two powerful women understanding power to become more powerful, without anyone else influencing their frightful dance.

7. Are dalmatians the villains?

A villain origin story is doing good work when that story makes you reconsider at least two times who that villain is.

8. The Runaways

As an ambient spectacle of 70s punk rock London, Cruella stuns, situated in the city’s West End fashion scene and scored with 37 songs during its two hours plus running time. I was reminded of Floria Sigismondi’s 2019 film, The Runaways, focusing on Joan Jett and Cherie Currie in 70s punk rock America. I am not saying I saw The Runaways in the theater seven times, wrote my graduate thesis to punk rock, or followed Joan Jett on tour that summer.

9. Artie

Artie (John McCrea) is big-hearted, sharp-witted, hilarious, and a fashion maven in his own right. He owns a vintage shop and becomes a part of Cruella’s crew. In an initial script, Artie was written as a drag queen. McCrea says he played Artie as queer, adding, "But we don't see him falling in love; there's no social aspect to the character. It's not beating you on the head with a stick. But his lifestyle is fabulous, he loves his life and it was so fun to play him." Artie and Cruella are soulmates of sorts. He tells her, “Normal is the harshest insult of all.”

10. I Wanna Be Your Dog

Written by The Stooges and released in 1969, I Wanna Be Your Dog electrifies poetic lowkey S&M. Artie sings the song at Cruella’s pop-up, street fashion show. I Wanna Be Your Dog is not about a literal dog but wanting to be treated as one. Cruella is about Estella beginning Cruella. She is not a dalmatian killer yet, as she is known through the 1956 novel and 1961 film (there are dalmatians in Cruella who explain the hatred she develops for them). The irony is a lovable dog relationship exists in Cruella: Estella’s dog. She finds him in a garbage bin when she is young and pushed in by boys at her school. Buddy grows up with her, Horace (Paul Walter Hauser), and Jasper (Joel Fry), alongside Wink, Horace’s dog.

11. Bonus: Being

Cruella upstages the Baroness walking a red carpet by arriving in a garbage truck. Garbage spills onto the ground and she rises out of its heap. Cruella laughs, maniacal, holding onto the side of the truck as it pulls away, revealing the garbage as her dress, a billowing glory. The point is not that Cruella can make garbage fashion—the point is Cruella IS fashion. IS garbage. IS risen. IS future.

Photo: Jason Leung

Photo: Praewthida K

Mexican-American actor Manny Montana invokes the pulse of his bone-tingling, sexcar-driving, laser-grinning, intelligent Detroit crime boss Rio in NBCUniversal’s crime comedy-drama Good Girls, airing its fourth season. Montana’s Rio smashes any potential of stereotyping a Latinx man, a gang member, a Latinx man gang member, or portraying a one-tone human.

Rio is the series’ villain in classic character terms. A criminal and bad boy, with the bald eagle, American freedom, tattooing his svelte neck. The tattoo signifies his gang — Rio is the boss. He gets involved with Beth (Christina Hendricks, the series’ protagonist), her sister, Annie (Mae Whitman), and Ruby (Retta), when the women rob a grocery store involved in his business. Good Girls is described as Breaking Bad meets Thelma and Louise: the women live in Detroit’s suburbs and are “mothers first” entering crime life.

In episode one, Rio waits for Beth on her kitchen counter, casually gorgeous and threatening. He moves nimbly towards her when she arrives, flirting from feet away. In early scenes with Beth, Annie, and Ruby, he lopes through humor, charm, and intimidation, as Annie and Ruby are, at turns, direct, hilarious, and fearful, knowing the reward in working with Rio. His ability to get wealth is the womens’ mutual turn-on.

The lynch pin drops in the second episode in Rio’s money laundering warehouse. The women, seeing the money rolls, are mind blown. Recalling gangster film energy (Donnie Brasco, GoodFellas) and scored by the riveting “La Ciudad” by ODESZA, the scene thrills for the magnitude of Rio’s enterprise. We overhear him with a crooked DEA-type. Rio is measured, explaining what he needs done. He talks firmly with his workers but is kind and encouraging, letting through a smile.

After settling their debt, Beth wants back in. As a housewife and mom of four, with little help from her husband, she is an expert organizer and operates in a triage mindset. These skills could benefit Rio’s high stake operation, also in selling drugs. The three women begin working for him. Beth thrives off the crime and grows her attachment to Rio, parts fear, lust, and intrigue. She wants to learn from him, be like him, earn his affirmation. Rio sees her, challenging and exalting her bravery and limitations. Rio is not unaffected by Beth. Their pairing, or perhaps collision, becomes “Brio” in the Good Girls fandom.

The traditional responsibility for minor, supporting characters is supporting the central narrative and main characters responsible for carrying it forward. It may seem unlikely for Rio to become a villain-but-also, someone to root for and have an emotional experience with, but Montana cares about him. He goes into Rio’s skin and blows him up.

Empathy is different than compelling interest, but Rio does both, making us feel and fascinate for him. Schitt’s Creek is a good example of a series whose storyline reconceptualizes when a minor character shows up with surprising depth. Once Patrick (Noah Reid), serenades David (Dan Levy), the showrunner (also Levy) realizes Patrick would be a force in David’s life. They develop as the series’ central love story and marry in its finale.

The song that scores their scene in Beth’s kitchen to close the third episode, when Rio asks her, “So, what do you want to talk to me about?,” after she leaves her pearls in his warehouse, is the haunting “Strange Game” by Jess Ribeiro.

It’s a strange, strange game Love will never be the same I wonder, will I be sane again

And later:

Even though, I know I know, everything Thought I knew, I saw you Now I know, I know nothing at all

Montana and Hendricks’ chemistry as Rio and Beth was undeniable to fans and production. Showrunner Jenna Bans made changes to develop their relationship, also introducing sex. Rio can be read as a supporting character from the standpoint of screen time and technical designation, but his resounding effect on the protagonist and fandom is clear. A significant portion of the online fandom supports Beth and Rio exploring some sort of relationship. Rio becomes half of what nearly immediately is the show’s central tension and interpersonal (love) story.

More than a “romantic influence” on Beth—their connection is also parts chemical, emotional, and intellectual—Rio is the impetus that drives her series’ arc. Each part of Beth’s experience with Rio crazies her sense of self. The rearranging and potentials of rebuilding for the protagonist’s moral and existential identity happen because of Rio’s insightfulness—the way he is and the way he is with her. While this does not assure our empathy for Rio, it gives us reason to study him. Rio is self-understood and controlled. His stability shows through his organized home and sharp, understated black attire appreciating time in the late Steve Jobs vein. We rarely see him lose his temper nor be menacing (for too long), yet the world plays in his hand.

Barry Jenkins’ precious Moonlight builds empathy for his protagonist, Chiron, by structuring the film in three eras to show his bildungsroman (respectively, Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes). In the film’s last epoch, Chiron is a gangster, similar to the one who influenced him growing up, Juan (Mahershala Ali). Backstories, if done well, fill up pathos, but a character’s present needs to compel us towards their future. In season four, episode six, we meet Rio’s family for the first time. The empathy work Rio carries to get us here is a tour de force.

As a multifaceted person — with magnetic energy who knows himself — Rio reveals a depth of possibility for individual and social experience. We want for Rio’s being and bossing and his interacting with anyone, specifically, loving his son, Marcus (David Miranda), bantering with Ruby, Annie, and his comrade, Mick (Carlos Aviles), and anything with Beth. Talking to Beth, listening to Beth, perceiving Beth, consenting to Beth, ravishing Beth, intimidating Beth, testing Beth, supporting Beth, gifting Beth, teaching Beth. And yes, smashing Beth’s artdec and mirror with a crowbar, while she masturbates to him in her mind.

In this excerpt from a 2018 interview on The Angie Martinez Show between Montana and Martinez, they address hood and gang member stereotypification on screen, and how Montana pivots with Rio:

Martinez: …You’re not really a gang member, you’re more like a crime boss [kind of guy]—but anybody in that way, sometimes people overplay it, and it’s like, they’re over being, like, over-tough—

Montana: That’s what I mean—

Martinez: —over street, and you were like so easy with it, it’s just really, really good.

Montana: Thank you, and that’s what I mean, I’m from Long Beach, and I’m sure you guys are from everywhere around here. Like, any hood dude you know, are they mean all the time? Every hood dude I knew was funny, laughing…

Martinez: Yea—Charming—

Montana: Cuz’ nothing was serious to them—

Martinez: Right—

Montana: Right?…Yea, it was fun. So, that’s what I wanted to bring to him, and I was wondering if people were going to get it because I’m always assuming people are like, no, you gotta like…We’ll have certain directors or writers…Can you be a little tougher, can you like, like, you know, like grrummm, I’m like, what does that mean? Why do I have to be, like, just growling all the time?

Martinez: Cuz’ that’s not really how it is—

Montana: Right.

Martinez: Yea, no I get that. So good.

Rio’s screen time is around five minutes, on average, per each forty-five minute, on average, episode, expectedly less than the main characters but often less than other supporting characters. Montana becomes Rio completely, his improvisation moving Rio’s individual and shared storylines forward. Zaldivar at En Fuego writes, “He [Montana] pours himself into his craft of creativity. It all stems from growing up bearing a shield, one he doesn’t mind taking down now.”

Humanity is a spectrum, and, ironically, impartial. Rio at LegoLand. Rio threatening a money launderer. Rio biting his lip when Beth dumps him. Rio ordering a hit. How someone holds, is, disparate parts in one personhood is fascinating only if we care about that person in the sum of their parts. Montana comments, “Rio…is this gangsta but not really a street dude. He’s just all about his money.” He works for his son’s future, like Beth does for her kids. Industry formula wants our empathy with the protagonist, who operates from a different set of morals than the villain. Rio refutes this design.

His love for Marcus is profound, but Rio’s screen time centers on his story with Beth. Rio’s vulnerability for Beth is perhaps the biggest vehicle for his humanization, what creates empathy. Particularly striking is his ability to hold their complex, volatile relationship while, at his Achilles’ heel, lean into her with tenderness and respect. Rio is empathetic with Beth. Rio often shows his “love experiencing,” which opens space for off-screen conversation about men and vulnerable expression.

Rio with Beth offers a poignant perspective of a man in intimacy with a woman for the American screen. Rio orients his body towards Beth in a way that conveys he understands her and respects her boundaries. Their three sex scenes, each initiated by Beth, are a fascinating study in a man following a woman’s lead and prioritizing a woman’s pleasure. The profound conceptualization of these scenes and precise execution on Montana’s part are important for positive representation of consent in sex and the centering of women’s desire.

These sex scenes are particularly meaningful since Montana is a POC actor playing a POC character, who is also presented as a “criminal,” a “bad guy,” and a “gang member.” Replace your discriminations—all of them—with how Rio is with Beth. When he asks, “What am I doing here, Elizabeth?,” when she invites him to her house for sex, he indicates he is following her lead. That he calls her Elizabeth, a Montana improvisation, deepens their intimacy: nobody else uses her “full" name.

Of course, there are scenes where Rio threatens Beth. He is who he also is, a crime boss, and looks after business first. Rio’s love eyes for Beth in season four begin to suspend our belief in his priorities. A man in love is human — but a man who stands to lose his empire in that love? Unrequited love is an old-as-time tale. The cruelty that comes with it. The downfall it can bring.

In season one, Beth asks Rio if he is going to kill her. He strokes her hair out of her face, which he regularly does, and says, “I am going to teach you.” This moment pivots Rio threatening Beth with his gun before (he never hurts her with it). Here, he posits the gun as a passage to self-empowerment. In fact, Rio gives her a gun early on, initiation for the crime world, but she does not kill her “assignments.” The irony is Beth later shoots Rio.

Our capacity to empathize with Rio intensifies because he knows himself, allowing us to know him. This is an interesting form of empathetic provocation. It explains the judgement aimed at third season Beth in the online fandom, after she shoots Rio. She largely represses the shooting and never talks to him about it. We are challenged to empathize with Beth over her part of the experience while Rio pulls our empathy, even though he kidnaps her violently to start that scene. There are fans who say Beth is not good enough for Rio, pointing to her continual attempts to jail and kill him. A recent YouTube comment read that Rio should find “a nice gangster lady.”

The protagonist might not deserve the villain.

A Good Girls meme points to Beth’s cheating, patronizing husband, Dean (Matthew Lillard) as the “actual” series villain. Rio can be read as the “story villain” because of his crime, but is he a villain to Beth? The complex baddie or antihero is popular in television and film — Assane Diop in Lupin, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, also Nancy Botwin (Weeds) and Walter White (Breaking Bad) of the thematic predecessors to Good Girls. Could Rio be the antihero of Good Girls? His hero part could be catalyzing Beth’s existential crisis because isn’t that sort of a gift? Moreover, do villains and heroes get equal chances at becoming antiheroes? Diverse cast and production communities can expand the possibilities for telling these and other cross-genre stories.

Yet, “Only 5% of the speaking roles in last year’s [2019] top 100 movies went to Latino actors even though that demographic group represents 18% of the US population.” Montana tells Zaldivar, “We could be the doctor if you just put us in that position, make people see that we’re this way, too, and it’ll just kind of level out the playing field.” According to this year’s UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, “films with casts that were made up of 41% to 50% minorities took home the highest median gross at the box office [in 2020],” while noting among directors and film writers, people of color are still underrepresented. Zaldivar reports that Montana is writing “his own narrative for the screen, something that’s more indicative of the Mexican-American experience.”

In a season three money drop, Beth dresses up for Rio. Rio, by folding one hand behind his back and hinting at something between a smile and grimace, communicates respect, restraint, arousal, desire, regret, sadness, and acknowledgement of another. Experiencing empathy for someone imagines that person could also experience empathy, that empathy is a causal (multiplying) experience.

If understanding the complex living of someone means seeing their humanity—and this inspires empathy—racist narratives label groups of people “not human” to validate an argument of inhumanity. When people flood the internet with photographs of the late, murdered George Floyd with his younger daughter, Gianna, this matters. Blow-up racist narratives with truth. Montana breaks open a Latinx crime boss to show us who that person is. The result is one of the most compelling character studies on modern network television. Montana’s Rio represents what focused character work imparts for understanding human experience.

Note: When this article was written, the series’ first three seasons and its current season through episode six had aired.

In season four, episode eight of NBC's Good Girls, "Broken Toys," Rio (Manny Montana), a Latinx man and Detroit crime boss, is arrested when Beth (Christina Hendricks) sets him up. Beth is the series' protagonist, a white woman, mom, and housewife from the Detroit suburbs involved in Rio's crime world. If Beth turns in Rio, the Secret Service promises her that she, along with her sister and best friend, who are also involved in crime, and their families, can join the Witness Protection Program. Beth turns in Rio, and the women do not go to jail.

Rio, pushed facedown on a picnic table by a cop who is handcuffing him, his face contorting, keeps his eyes on Beth. She stares back, silent, on her feet, being handcuffed without force. Pride, losing pride, and betrayal scorch and slide over his face as his mouth slips, trying to hold it all, grasping at an experience of hurting so sharply it breaks me.

This is someone he thought chose him. Someone on his side. Someone he has been inside of. Someone he has kept alive and out of jail. Someone he almost irrefutably loves. Someone who, in moments, seems to meet him in that possibility. His face, seconds later, when he is pulled to his feet by the same cop and another cop takes Rio's other arm, turns into something terrifying. He burns off fury.

The scene is traumatic at an interpersonal but also a social level, the latter about police aggression in America, in particular towards Black people and POC. Rio is not resisting arrest when he is forced and pinned face down. This grotesque action is attempting to break something in someone. That there is scale to police violence is sick. The world knows how Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. In 2016, Will Smith commented, “Racism isn’t getting worse. It’s getting filmed.” The origin of the police force in America was to persecute Black and brown people and studies of police violence against Black and Latinx people are widespread.

The specific betrayal here for Rio—someone he cares about turning him into the police—is not a solitary experience for him. (He flees from police the first time he is arrested and we can imagine how that scene ends). This episode delivers, by way of flashback, how the order of his working relationship with his brother-cousin Nick (Ignacio Serricchio) begins in their adolescent-young adult years. Nick's approach to ripping off white, rich golfers at the country club where they work is building up their egos. Rio steals from one directly. Nick turns him in. When Rio gets out of jail six months later, hardened and changed, the eagle tattoo, American freedom, has appeared on his neck. When Nick visits him, Rio lets out his anger. Nick produces wads of cash. He tells Rio, "now they trust me." The idea is they, Nick and Rio, have the upper hand.

From this moment on, it is established that Nick will be in the uppity places and Rio will be the face of crime, or, more specifically, Rio will be the one who takes the fall.

The CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, referred to in practice as the ACEs test, surveys childhood experiences focusing on "abuse and neglect and household challenges" and correlates these experiences to "later-life health and well-being." The test consists of ten questions, each counting for one point. The higher the point tally, the higher the correlation to "chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance use problems in adulthood." In addition, ACEs can "negatively impact education, job opportunities, and earning potential." When someone scores a 4 or higher, risk correlation significantly increases.

I took the quiz, imagining Rio's early life. I got a 2 consistently, using information we have, but his score could easily be a 4+, depending on the situation with his birth parents. It seems likely Rio and Nick are blood cousins but were both raised by their grandmother, Rosa (Marlene Forte). On this point, an ACEs score is not a 'life sentence.' Written in the NPR article linked above, "Research suggests that just one caring, safe relationship early in life gives any child a much better shot at growing up healthy." For Rio, this is clearly his grandmother.