We are in couples therapy, have been for many years now. The current cadence is once a month. In this season of my 30s, dry and lacking direction like I’m in the deep desert of Arrakis, a month can feel like a year. So much effort but no change. All pain and no gain.

Powerless, like many men tell us they feel.

Not long ago, after hours of writing classes on Zoom, I sat down for our telehealth session needing to talk about how the two of us can be in the same room, refilling the Brita, emptying the dryer, and I can feel totally alone. It’s made worse that we feel like soulmates when my childhood wounds aren’t inflamed.

Our therapist started by asking if there was anything either of us wanted to discuss. I rubbed my eyes, fake-smiled, and said no.

Lying, as dudes do about height, dick size, drugging wives.

The couples therapist asked how it’s going with my writing career. This annoyed me, the need to download him on the bad news, to re-process what I’d processed to pieces with his colleague, my individual therapist Matthew. As I replied about agent this, editors that, and he asked questions that I thought would lead to validation, I closed my eyes, tired from screen time. I knew I was being rude, but I had the excuse of the classes, self-improvement—I was being a good man. He asked if I was okay, said that something felt off with me.

Annoyed with the line of questioning, feeling like he wanted me to blink, I said, “Are you prompting me to talk about the suicide stuff? I’ve talked to Matthew about it. He said he’d pass it on to you. I had to sign a form and everything.”

 “Oh! No,” he said, likely shocked but acting composed. “It’s the first time I’m hearing about it.”

So I talked about the weeks of suicide ideation. I used the phrase “end of my rope,” which felt macabre, on the nose, I don’t know. I’d told my other therapist and my partner on separate occasions, but this time, in a Zoom room of three, I was both more detailed about those weeks in the hole (when I was alone, disassociating in traffic, I’d imagine crashing into the divider) and more keen on assuring them that I was okay (our therapist asked me to imagine what would cross my mind the second before impact and I said how foreign the thought experiment felt—more proof that I hadn’t gone farther than thinking about it; then I said I don’t know, maybe that I’d die and it wouldn’t really matter).

Those weeks when the thoughts flitted like flies, I felt out of hope and cut off from purpose. I’d done everything I was supposed to do to publish a book. I’d put in the work, paid my dues. I had tried to make a difference, be great. Was I not good enough or was this injustice? Is it a liability to be an Asian man? I thought society didn’t care about people like me. I believed it was easier for Asian women to publish. I had a hard time telling up from down.

Every time I reach the next rung of the ladder, it breaks and I fall to the ground. Rejection’s broken my back a few times. With the help of my therapists and partner of 10 years, I’ve pieced my spine together straighter and sturdier. I no longer doubt the quality of my writing, the value of what I have to say. I believe in the merit of my work. What hurts most this time is the lesson that merit doesn’t matter. At least it doesn’t guarantee a book. Nice sentences and a message don’t count when “the market” wants “easy” and “light.” Can you blame anybody? Things are heavy and hard. My friends tell me to keep going, but I’m not strong enough to hang in there much longer.

That’s the fear, at least. After all, am I really a man? I like dicks and quads and pecs. I love a good handbag. Once in a blue moon, I wear skirts and dresses. I’m often in designer, always stylish. “[F]or a man to dress too fashionably,” writes critic Julian Randall in GQ, “to be so fluent in fashionspeak that he can correctly pronounce Loewe and Jacquemus is to diminish his romantic prospects, apparently”—with women, implicitly, of course.

When this nation panics about masculinity, hand-wringing about isolation, radicalization, my gay ass receives no compassion. If the term “heteronormative” has ever felt abstract to the point of alienation, look no further for examples than the coverage about masculinity in every magazine with “New York” in the title. You’d think from reading these articles that only straight men want to be swole. No one else embodies masculinity. At the risk of sounding like a lib, it hurts to consume media that pretends like I don’t exist.

Because I have shoulder-length hair, when I sit with my back to the room, waiters greet the table with “ladies.” I don’t use “they/them” pronouns, but the way I move through the world says the same thing. I learned that gender is more performance than biology my first semester at elitist Brown. I epitomize the manosphere’s problem with America. Well, I would except I am Asian, which disqualifies me from the whole “man” conversation. Case in point, K-pop stars are one of the few subsets of Asian men that some Americans find desirable. At the same time, in the comments, trolls ask, “Why are Asian guys all always pretty like girls?” We’re the last people who’d be called “masculine.”

So I don’t worry about “acting like a man.” I sang along to a love song at the Florence + The Machine concert and I cried in my car playing back Everybody Scream. GQ tells me that “if you truly are cool, you don’t care about a magazine’s cookie-cutter mold of masculinity.” Thanks, sis.

But let me not lie by omission. I put creatine in my shakes. I have the best legs in the gym though it’s partly cuz I grew up fat. Even though I drink too much to have a six-pack, I run shirtless whenever I can.

Notice me! Want me. I am a man after all, demanding everyone’s attention.

There’s been so much content about men. “You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex,” writes Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Even coastal elites’ glossy magazines are cashing in, making readers feel bad for men, many subscribers likely liberal women.

This essay started out as a defense of the witches in the lambasted Wicked: For Good. I didn’t want to write about masculinity. I thought we were polarized enough. But a new friend and my long-standing editor encouraged me to zoom out.

Defined by Lewis as “a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men . . . masculinism has become the single most force uniting the American right.” In GQ’s special report on “the state of the American male,” there’s a roundtable of “8 voices spanning the great masculinity divide,” from a family therapist who calls Trump “a celebration of shamelessness” to a venture capitalist who says Donald has “a lot of balls.” I resonated most with Jerrod Carmichael, the Emmy-winning comedian, a Black man who came out as gay in an HBO special. “[I]f I say something violent, that is motivated by fear, wanting to be seen, to feel brave, to not acknowledge the fear—it’s not truthful. Trying to make work about my biggest fears actually feels more dangerous than the dangerous stuff,” a reference perhaps to transphobic rants, straight-comic fodder. In the course of revising this essay, it became about my biggest fears. Trying my best and failing. Feeling like I’ll never be enough. These are the “genuine feelings of ennui experienced by many young American men.” The manosphere, in Lewis’s words, “lays the blame at the feet of the elites.” In particular, these men believe “[i]t’s the women who took their status,” says Laura Fields, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Some of these men are so impotent, they work at the White House.

People whose belonging is actually up for debate—queer men of color like Carmichael, like myself—hold the power to lay bare a community to outsiders as well as the in-group. I want to talk here with men, especially those of us who feel different, and I want to do it without pointing fingers. If there really is a crisis among men, let us talk through it intimately.

The headlines run the gamut. Men in overalls, pink sweaters, and Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel all spawned so much coverage. Speaking of clothes, the “I’m elegant, I’m classy” TikTok by @whois.jason, the Black man who made quarter zips viral, sounds a lot like @joolieannie’s “very demure, very mindful.” It’s a clear example of how culture originates with trans women. Then there’s the obsession with the male-loneliness epidemic. NPR complicates this, noting “there’s only a 1% difference in reported loneliness between men and women” but flagging that “men made up nearly 80% of the suicide rate in 2022.” Men also go to dangerous lengths for a square jaw and broad shoulders. The New York Times Magazine calls this the “Testosterone Moment.” It’s authorized by the worst Kennedy, amplified by bad podcasts, and put into action by average Joes on Reddit. Libtards, ofc, have low T, which is “synonymous with low status, weakness and sexual inadequacy.” Even the abandoned monkey who didn’t know how to make friends carried around a “stuffed orangutan toy to build muscle strength,” says the Times.

These stories fill the paper of record even though most of them come out of TikTok. I didn’t see the same rampant interest in the killings of three Black women by their male partners, all in the span of four weeks. During this time, a man killed eight children and shot two women, including his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh. This was “[t]he deadliest mass shooting our country has witnessed in two years,” notes scholar Brittney Cooper. Black femicide was not all over my feed. Neither was CNN’s investigation of “a hidden, online world” where “men encourage one another to drug and assault their wives – and swap tips on getting away with it.”

When the “grab ‘em by the pussy” president rage-baits by tweeting policy, it’s hard to tell which crises are real and what’s just algorithm and vibes. Contributing to the confusion is liberal media’s endless reporting on the far right’s male influencers. I learned about “AWFULs” in The Atlantic and “mogging” in The New Yorker. ICYMI, “AWFUL” is an acronym for “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal” and “mog” derives from “AMOG,” which is short for “alpha male of the group.” Platforming the extreme makes it mainstream.

As alarming as the headlines is the collective shift they reveal: an undoing of painfully earned gains, a rewriting of what defines worthiness. After Time’s Up and summer uprisings, all that reckoning with systemic injustice, men are rewriting the story, this time emphasizing effort and how we deserve to be at the top. As though wanting something badly, hungering and hunting, justified every kill. 

Men are using the scripts of meritocracy—I worked hard for this so I deserve it—to reinstate patriarchy. They’ve internalized the language of identity and grievance, which had made them feel like the enemy, and rebranded themselves the real victims. The right has taken the tools of the left. They’re beating us at our own game.

This switchback in common sense has shown up all over culture. New York Magazine ran a piece about “penis anxiety” in which a guy who runs a “girth-enhancement clinic” says his clients “leave his clinic emotionally healed.” Pumped with scrotum filler, they gain what he calls a “more natural way of perpetuating dominance, this dominant alpha-male persona that begins to come from within.”

A grievance-lacquered sense of entitlement also clouds my judgment. I’m the wrong kind of minority, not one whose suffering matters. What can I put on or take off so that people see me, choose me, read me?

I’m getting ahead of myself. Now that we’ve seen the lay of the land, let’s take a step back and ask how we got here.

By the time of #MeToo, certain feminist critiques were part of everyday chatter. Think “male privilege,” “manspreading,” and “rape culture,” all ways of naming entitlement that fell under “toxic masculinity.” As nonbinary author Jacob Tobia puts it, “We went from proclaiming men as sometimes wielding a toxic substance to proclaim[ing] men as a toxic substance.”

Once “men” was synonymous with “problem,” the rehabilitation project began: reading lists and earnest how-tos about being a good man. Except the internet had no time for articles like “The Reality That All Women Experience That Men Don’t Know About” or “I Won’t Tell My 4-Year-Old Son to ‘Man Up.’ Not Now. Not Ever.” In mockery of the defensive “But not all men,” it became standard to insist “Yes, all men,” to double down on the systemic over the individual, the view that all men were puppets of patriarchy.

I went out of my way to be the exception. Whenever I ended up behind a woman on the sidewalk, I slowed down enough to increase our distance or got off the curb and sped ahead. On dates, I’d ask guys question after question. The next day, between sets of deadlifts, I’d complain to my trainer Rachel about self-centered men, not knowing I was closed off, emotionally unavailable.

Even now, there are efforts to rebrand masculinity. In the UK last year, Esquire relaunched under a new editor and introduced the “Better Men Project.” On all three covers, the messaging’s the same: “Not perfect, just better.” In contrast to the sincerity of print media, the “performative male” popped out of TikTok like a jack in the box. To be “the antithesis of the toxic man,” says the Times, these Gen Z men acted out what they thought would appeal to liberal women, sporting “on-trend markers for softness, stylishness and a feminist leaning that he may or may not actually possess.” These props included matcha and a tote bag and the bell hooks bestseller All About Love. At the same time, “[a]lmost a third of generation Z men and boys think a wife should obey her husband,” according to a survey of 23,000 people conducted by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. Compared to 44 percent of Baby Boomers, 57 percent of Gen Z men agree that “we have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men.” It tracks, then, that in a survey conducted by a Manhattan surgeon specializing in men’s sexual health, “Gen Z reported the lowest confidence in their penises.”

The trend of reading in public to court women gave rise to the term “performative reading,” a phenomenon as old as Infinite Jest, the thousand-page novel that turned 30 this year. David Foster Wallace, my first favorite writer, killed himself on my birthday my first semester of college. 18, wanting to be great, but far from calling myself a writer, I took the coincidence as a sign from the universe that I’d inherit his status as a genius one day. People would study my every word, just as I was idolizing his.

Fast forward to adulthood. Writing workshops, publications, a PhD. Yet it still feels impossible to publish a book. So I started a Substack read-along of Wallace’s 1996 compendium of loneliness and addiction. I e-mailed writing friends and mentors about it, even my two therapists. One kind friend said she was excited about my book club while reminding me, because I had known, that Wallace was a known abuser of Mary Karr, a professor and bestselling writer. I proceeded with the Substack, setting out to examine the man’s magnum opus.

In 2018, Karr tweeted that Wallace “tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son age 5 home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on[.]” This was not new information at the time. “The horror stories had simply been subsumed into the broader story . . . of Wallace’s personal genius,” writes Megan Garber in The Atlantic, “as evidence of his uncontainable passion, of the singular depth of his wanting.” 

My post-Wallace literary favorite was another code-switching, MacArthur-winning nerd. Junot Díaz is a brown immigrant, a self-professed intersectional feminist. Díaz was a role model during my 20s. I was teaching high-school English in LA, creating a safe space in my classroom. Everything was new for this kid from the suburbs. Díaz showed me a way to be down beyond the male bravado of the ’60s, raised fists and tests of endurance. He seemed so at ease in vulnerability. In his image, with my friends, I organized to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement. After championing my students’ right to learn their own history, I left my job to pursue writing.

In January of 2018, fresh off of grad school applications, seeking guidance on becoming a writer, I drove early from LA to San Diego to get a good seat at one of Díaz’s talks. After, signing my copies of his books, he complimented my outfit, like he’d done at the last talk I went to. In March, fans filled my local indie bookstore to celebrate Díaz’s new children’s book. I spotted his partner and friends off to the side. In April, he wrote an essay in The New Yorker “detailing the sexual assault he experienced as an 8-year-old boy.” In May, the New York Times published an article. “The Writer Zinzi Clemmons Accuses Junot Díaz of Forcibly Kissing Her.” Since then, on the rare occasion I see his byline or blurb, I look away, curious but ashamed. 

This spring, in light of well-documented allegations, the founding chef of Noma, once the top restaurant in the world, stepped down from a Los Angeles residency. In the same month, after the Times’s delicate and harrowing investigation, California announced plans to rename Cesar Chavez Day to Farmworkers Day. To echo Garber, the “dangerous romance of male genius” unravels seasonally, but it always seems to re-form.

It’s hard to care about “the state of the American male” when monsters’ heads always rear.

It’s hard to valorize greatness when skeletons fall out of closets.

We’ve talked about where things stand and how we got here. The big question is, what’s the problem? 

From the darkness of the manosphere to the lights of movies’ biggest night, something pernicious is happening in culture. Fuck goodness. Men are doing whatever it takes to be great.

In what already feels like the worst timeline, everything seems to start and end with Joe Rogan and his disciples, men with expensive equipment and costly opinions. They interview looksmaxxers, weirdos dignified as a movement by liberal media. An offshoot of “involuntary celibates,” these guys “accept the premise that appearance is destiny but reject the incels’ resignation to congenital ugliness.” Instead, The New Yorker reports, they break their face with a hammer and take testosterone until they’re infertile. They do so to “ascend” to “Chad” status, the highest on an eight-point scale that “sorts men into three tiers.” Clavicular, the nom de guerre of the figurehead, an AI-looking white guy that Armie Hammer might enjoy as a snack, says the scale is “all very objective . . . all very well researched.” Armed with outlandish jargon, looksmaxxers insist that beauty is scientific. They’re just cracking the code. In reality, Wired reports, their judgment is far from neutral. Harassing Black looksmaxxers, trolls post in the comments “Jbw,” an acronym for “just be white.”

In this corner of the internet, it’s accepted that the world is unfair, but men are the victims of injustice. “One of masculinism’s central claims,” Lewis observes, “is that no one is talking about men.” The fervor of this grievance burns through any arguments about privilege and patriarchy. There but for the grace of God go I.

In another moment and milieu, maybe “looksmaxxers” could have “called folx in” about “pretty privilege.” But nowadays, new norms dictate that anybody can look good. The New Yorker reports the options: “Rhinoplasties, jaw surgeries, ab implants, limb-lengthening, whatever.” Appearance is everything in an age of optimization, screenshots, and Zoom. If you want to look better, you’ll do what it takes—and actually, it might not take all that much. Just ask Chat. In the permission structure created by GLP-1 pills and protein lattes, which make the unattainable seem within reach, people who don’t get what they want, with their outdated talk of injustice, are just losers who won’t go the distance.

Rob Rausch went all the way. He’s the latest winner of The Traitors and “a preeminent internet boyfriend.” Alan Cumming, the host of the campiest game of Mafia streaming on Peacock, called Rob one of the best Traitors in the history of the show.

People kept bringing up Rob’s appearance. Interview Magazine says he’s “blessed with devastatingly good looks.” Honestly, guys, he’s just white, which is how he got away with dressing so badly on what’s functionally a show about style. Asked if he ever got “the sense you’d sort of cast a spell over everyone,” Rob insists he won because he made “strategic decisions.” A stable genius, “I’d get home from my Traitor duties and I would lay in bed and close my eyes . . . I would say, ‘What if this happens?’” Rob’s saying he outworked and outthought. He won cuz he mastered the craft. It’s not because he’s straight and from a red state. It’s got nothing to do with the minorities he played to claim the $220,800 jackpot all for himself.

Thankfully, not every man gets his way. My friends, it’s time to talk Chalamet, who’s generated so much discourse. I use that word not just in the colloquial sense of online chatter. I also mean the ingredients in the making of common sense. Everything that we’re tracking, down to Punch the Monkey, reshapes social norms: what’s permissible, what’s thinkable. By paying attention to discourse, we see where society’s headed. We decide when to step in.

The Atlantic calls Chalamet “the movie star for this social-media-obsessed, parasocial-relationship-building moment.” He’s been playing on a loop. Citing the writer Hunter Harris, Vulture points out that Chalamet’s “essentially been on a never-ending publicity tour” since Wonka opened on Christmas in 2023. Even his courtside appearances at Knicks games were a reset before the third Dune. 

What a hard-working man. From the queer-coded confectionary eccentric to the fiercely straight table-tennis player, he’s played “characters defined by otherworldly gifts, monomaniacal drive, and a cold-blooded disregard for the concerns of others.” So, he’s been playing himself. One performance gave the internet pause. In his 2025 acceptance speech for Best Actor at the SAG Awards, he said, “I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats.” 

Then his loud ambition turned all the way up doing press for Marty Supreme. In case orange blimps and throwback windbreakers didn’t get this across, the movie’s about a little guy who’ll do whatever it takes for the world to recognize his—wait for it—supremacy.

Orange and ego-driven. Sound familiar?

All of Chalamet’s publicity stunts, from staging a marketing meeting on Zoom to shouting at the top of the Sphere, formed what Vulture calls a “I Am My Character” campaign for the Oscars. Chalamet was talking his shit even before the movie’s Christmas release. (We get it, Timmy, your work is a gift.) In a posted-then-deleted YouTube interview, he said, “[I]t’s been like seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances . . . The discipline and the work ethic I’m bringing to these things,” key terms when talking meritocracy, “I don’t want people to take for granted. I don’t want to take for granted.” I talk this way to myself, but I’d never say it aloud. He told Good Morning America, “I’m confident I know what it’s gonna be by next summer.”

Less than a month before the Oscars, he took “shots” at ballet and opera, calling them “things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive.’” He triggered a backlash.

The week after Chalamet lost, it was spring and hotter than summer. I have a hard time believing that slighting pursuits of greatness associated with women was the silver bullet at his once-foregone golden statue. He’d already forsaken the gays, the ones lured with Call Me By Your Name, catching a Chanel contract along the way. Then he was “getting overly familiar with the trappings of inner-city Blackness,” says the critic Craig Jenkins. “But in dialing his tastes and mannerisms back,” swapping streetwear for Givenchy suits, “he exhibits a luxury not available to the people whose culture he champions.”

Betraying sexual and racial minorities didn’t stop Chalamet’s ascent. I don’t have reason to think the Oscars were holding him accountable for belittling women.

It wasn’t just him. While Chalamet was building his grindset, film critics were tearing women down.

Consider the uncanny parallels of these three films’ trajectories. Disney’s live-action Snow White remake seemed doomed from the casting announcement. Rachel Zegler, the Colombian American star of West Side Story, would play the titular heroine. This made MAGA see red cuz Snow White had to be white. Then the internet left got blue in the face because former Miss Israel Gal Gadot was playing the Evil Queen. By the time that I saw the trailer, including the seven CGI companions excised from the title, skipping the movie was a no-brainer. I’d forgotten all about it until talking with a friend about this essay. He said Snow White was actually pretty good. Alison Whitmore at Vulture said it’s “totally about lefty infighting”—would watch. 

When I saw the first trailer for The Bride!, I took it as yet another take on Frankenstein, this one directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, featuring actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. I didn’t recognize the actress in the lead role. Then my partner and I watched another movie that I knew little about, only that it’d somehow connect to Shakespeare. For most of Hamnet, I expected a movie about a male genius and his canonical play even as he kept leaving behind Agnes, his wife, played by Jessie Buckley, the star of The Bride!. She’s why we ended up seeing Gyllenhaal’s movie. 

In the theater, I got so fed up, I thought about walking out, but that would’ve embarrassed my partner. After the credits, driving to the bar, we had a hard time finding the words. Gyllenhaal’s feminism, with a reference to #MeToo, got the best of the movie. She felt too strongly about the material to make edits. Why didn’t a reasonable person take the wheel? It’s not smart to work with your brother and husband. Pinpointing the flaws of the movie, we heard our misogyny loud and clear. When critics posted their reviews, I was relieved that we weren’t alone. “I Have No Idea What The Bride! Is Trying to Say,” Whitmore wrote, “But It Sure Is Loud About It.” The movie’s at 57 percent on the Tomatometer.

The last time I came across a Rotten Tomatoes score that low for a movie I’d watched, it was Wicked: For Good in the mid-60s. That’s a D and not the fun kind.

Leading up to opening weekend, I came across mean headlines on Insta, squirming as I scrolled past. The New Yorker posted a picture of Glinda in her new Good Witch gown for the sequel, frowning amidst piles of propaganda painting Elphaba as the Wicked Witch. The title? “Wicked: For Good Is Very, Very Bad.”

This insult got in my head. Part one of the musical-turned-film was deftly satirical, the laughs many, the tone wonderfully strange. I grew attached to Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. I wanted the sequel to do well, be great, so the bad reviews worried me. Their schadenfreude made me defensive. This bad weather followed me into the theater for the adaptation of Act II. I kept looking for problems like I was squinting to pass an eye test.

After the movie ended, adjusting to the bright hallway, I told my partner what I thought might be wrong with the movie.

 “I mean, I guess she was doing a lot? And the whole thing has soap-opera beats.”

When I finished, he said he was surprised. “I thought it was great. What do you mean?”

I told him about the reviews, the little I knew.

 “I’m so glad I’m not online like that,” his social media usage limited to academic LinkedIn and a YouTube that’s equal parts Ts Madison and Dune.

The rest of the way home, we went back and forth about the sequel, concluding it was even better than the first.

As awards season unfurled, Hollywood turned out to be as confused as I was. After the blitzkrieg of negativity, the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review both recognized For Good as one of the top films of the year. The Golden Globes nominated both leading ladies for the second time. When the Oscars released its shortlists, For Good was on eight of the twelve, a feat matched only by Sinners.

In a final reversal, For Good received no Oscars nominations. The Hollywood Reporter called it completely shut out, an outcome that masculinism explains. By the end of For Good, the green witch turns the ginger beta into tin and the mogging heartthrob into straw. Talk about dehumanizing. And who ends up on top but the pink witch, the AWFUL who deposes the Wizard. For Good is the manosphere’s bogeywoman. F1, the Brad Pitt vehicle, was nominated for Best Picture. 

While many of the reviews talk about the Wicked sequel as the lesser of the two films, they disagree on where things went wrong, which layer of the palimpsest is cracked. The 2003 musical that the movies are based on. The 1995 novel that the musical adapted. The 1939 classic that the novel complicated. The 1900 novel that the film brought to the screen. Could any adaptation of Act II have soared or is the source material that shaky? This archaeology resembles the question of the times. Where did the US go wrong? How did the country once again become the home of the Wizard?

The industry’s flip-flopping about Wicked is consistent with the ongoing struggle over myths. Which origin story is valid? Can anyone’s telling be just? Trump is dismantling the education department over these questions about history and narrative. Storytelling relies on heroes and villains, a binary that’s gendered and racialized. Changing a character’s race inverts the gravity. That’s why Hamilton still moves me. When people of color fill the cast list and when Black people take center stage, white audiences predictably lash out.

Revision is no simple matter. It determines who belongs.

Snow White, The Bride!, and For Good all contend with the canon. Updating narratives that are practically myths, the trio is intimately aware of stories’ influence on culture. What the Wall Street Journal says about the Disney remake is true for all three. There’s a “tension . . . when remaking beloved movies made at a different time with different social norms,” whether that’s changing Snow White’s lore so her name’s no longer about the whiteness of her skin to casting a queer Black woman alongside a white pop star to examine the construction of American morality, the tension between goodness and greatness.

These are all stories about power. They center women and care about justice.

Critics berated these movies. Meanwhile, lauded as “a movie of our moment” by The New Yorker, directed by a man whose white-male “films are studies of American loneliness,” One Battle After Another won Best Picture. Weird connection: OBAA director PTA studied creative writing with DFW. Are initial bros a thing? Idk. Jbw.

A culture with limitless grace for “great” men and endless content about bad ones has no patience for stories about women. Contributing to this climate, Vanity Fair dedicated a whole issue last year to “our new class of leading men.” In “The People’s Princes,” writer Ottessa Moshfegh says men ranging from Jonathan Bailey to LaKeith Stanfield represent “the almost approachable, appealingly authentic modern actor.” They are all Internet boyfriends—so many boyfriends!—“accessible, kind, vulnerable, and recognizably human,” the same qualities that drew me to Wallace and Díaz. I took after Dave’s long hair and Junot’s speech patterns. “The true internet boyfriend doesn’t want to be mothered. He already has a mother, and he loves her.”

It’s a good thing that Chalamet didn’t win the Oscar—this child who diminished the artistic communities his mother and sister belong to for the sake of appealing to men. Even better, Chalamet lost to a man who brought his mother to every award show.

The story of celebrity pageantry may seem distant to the point of irrelevance. To me, they’re a statement of values. Whether a receipt or a budget, I’m not sure—how things should be versus how they are—but Michael B Jordan’s recognition matters. He who played monster and men.

There’s an Internet theory about Sinners. Before Jonathan Majors attacked his then-girlfriend and was found guilty of harassment and assault, the former Marvel villain might have played Jordan’s twin in the vampire movie.

As I remember Majors’ rise, there was a point that crystallized his image as an artist, an actor’s actor—a good man rocketing to greatness. The Times published a photo shoot of Majors and Jordan side by side, in embrace. As publicity for Creed III, they showed a form of male friendship that was tender and unguarded. I revisit the portrait now. Majors’ arms slung around Jordan, their cheeks pressed. Their gaze directed at mine. Jordan’s brows arched like a wave. I see an intimacy that I long for. I wish I held onto men with such ease instead of thinking I’m unworthy of touch. In couples therapy last week, I said aloud for the first time something I’ve believed most of my life. If there’s a man I find attractive, he would never look my way. Since saying this, I’m coming to realize that my assumption may not be true.

A friend told me about the Sinners theory. Rasheed Newson, a showrunner with a new novel called There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, traced the images of Jordan and Majors to the closeness of their predecessors, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. Jordan thanked Poitier in his acceptance speech for Best Actor. Meanwhile, Majors’ next movie is produced by manosphere mobster Ben Shapiro. In another Choose Your Own Adventure, Timothée Chalamet will return in one of the biggest movies of the year. Armie Hammer appeared in one thing last year. There weren’t enough reviews of it for Rotten Tomatoes to give a score.

These splits in the road are stories about good guys and bad. It’d be easy to say I’m on the right side of history, disidentify from the “geniuses” whose violence gets folded into creativity. The men whose ambition writes a permission slip for carelessness and exploitation. Whose “loneliness” is cover for societal sabotage. But if I’ve learned anything from the discourse about men, it’s that I’m not so different from them. I fear I have no place in society. It got so bad, I imagined my death.

With that said, so do men who do the unthinkable. The father who killed his own children had told family members about suicidal thoughts, reports the Times. But, as Dr. Cooper argues, mental illness is a spurious cover for “a patriarchal reset, in which men are heads of household and women and children are their willing and devoted subordinates.” To get in the way where we can, I hope the left takes more seriously how our excesses and hypocrisies brought these nightmares to life. To echo Julia Gillard, the chair of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, how do we “dispel the idea of a zero-sum game in which women are the only beneficiaries of a gender-equal world”? What’s a rhetoric that’s got more meat on its bones than the skeletal logic of grievance? This discursive work is urgent because, as Lewis reports, masculinism “is a movement with real policy goals,” including “affirmative action for men.”

The other day, at the end of a long week, my partner and I went to the bar to reconnect. Hoping it’d go well, I chose a seat in the middle of the house. Then we had our version of a fight. We sat side by side, unable to speak, making our bartender friends uneasy, maybe. I was sick of pouring my heart out only to find a blank slate. He was sick of doing his best only to hear it wasn’t enough.

We chose to meet each other where he was at. I explained that my unease with silence had more to do with my parents than it did with him. He said that if I ever felt neglected, bring it up in a light way on the spot. Then we closed out and made it to the theater in time for Project Hail Mary, a heartwarming sci-fi blockbuster that shows Ryan Gosling, no longer Ken, is not only redeemable but fundamentally good. Two incompatible men can learn to be close, even a hunky scientist who wears chunky cardigans and an alien rock that speaks in animal sounds.

Other standout movies this year include Is God Is and The Drama. Young women, twins and a bride, navigate what’s good and what’s wicked in the wake of male violence. Both films are formally inventive and tonally expansive, as entertaining as they are smart. In a year of too-big-to-fail tentpoles like The Odyssey and Avengers: Doomsday, let’s keep an eye out and our minds open to women’s ambivalence and ambition.

Personally, I’m letting go of wanting to be great. I’m learning more tender reasons to live. I fail and find I’m still worthy.

A man who is not a man, I peel myself open again and again, hoping for my other’s touch.

At night I rest my hand on his side. In the dark we write our own story.

The post We’ve Made a Mess of Masculinity, but I Believe It Can Change appeared first on Electric Literature.

It may seem silly, but I prefer to read books that are much more explicitly transphobic and a few decades old. You’d be forgiven for not knowing how broadly blasé people were even 10 years ago about transness. In 2014, Rush Limbaugh, never a paragon of wokeness, actually apologized to a trans caller to his show for using the slur “tranny.” Famously, when Christine Jorgensen returned from abroad with her gender newly affirmed, it was treated more with intrigue than with anger. “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” the papers reported in 1952.

Don’t get me wrong: Even with all the attacks against trans people now, it is better to be trans in America in 2026 than at almost any other time or place. But I do get a real enjoyment from, say, reading Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge and seeing both how much and how little Vidal understands about trans women.

In this complicated space of retro transphobia, it’s hard to think of a book that has had a greater impact on the representation and public imagination of trans people than Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs. Most of you have probably seen the movie; maybe you’re even trans and you really adore it—the canon of trans villains provokes diverse and complex responses from their transsexual audiences. I am not one of the trans people who has an easy time watching the film adaptation of Lambs, though I acknowledge that it is in most respects a perfect film. 

In case you don’t know, or have forgotten, Lambs is about a person the press call Buffalo Bill (“because he skins his humps,” girl detective Clarice Starling explains) who is killing women in order to make a suit out of their skin for himself. The novel was inspired by the press coverage of Ed Gein, a man who, in 1957, was found to have killed two women and robbed the graves of many more. Among the many handicrafts he made with these bodies were a “corset made from a female torso” and “masks made from the skin of female heads,” which, along with some leading questions by investigators, led to him being branded as gender-deviant. (This coverage also gave rise to Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.) The film version of Lambs is generally regarded as pretty transphobic, and even prompted director Jonathan Demme to make Philadelphia as an apology to the queer community. (Which was of course unnecessary; Demme was still at queer net-zero in my books for directing Stop Making Sense.)

Both film and book go out of their way to clarify that Buffalo Bill (who I will henceforth call by their government name, Jame Gumb) is not a transsexual. In the novel, Clarice tells Hannibal Lecter (a cannibal and more acceptable monster) there is “no correlation I ever saw between transsexualism and violence.”

“Billy’s not a real transsexual,” Lecter replies, “but he thinks he is” (emphasis mine). “He tries to be. He’s tried to be a lot of things, I expect.”

There is a long history of breaking trans people into categories that boil down to “real” and “fake.” Most famously, if you wanted to transition into a straight woman (“heterosexual transsexual” or HSTS) you were allowed to; if you wanted to become some kind of degenerate lesbian freak, you were an “autogynephile”—a man turned on by the idea of being a woman.

So how, in the imagination of Lambs and the late 1980s, are we to distinguish between these categories?

Lecter instructs Clarice to check the three extant gender clinics for people who have been rejected from transition. In particular, he suggests she look at a test called “House-Tree-Person,” in which a subject is asked to draw the titular trio. “Look for someone who didn’t draw the female figure first,” Lecter says. “Look for a house drawing without the rosy-future embellishments” like baby carriages and flowers and curtains. “You get two kinds of trees with real transsexuals: flowing, copious willows and castration themes . . . [but] Billy’s tree will be frightful.”

This is the sort of detail that is, understandably, missing from the Best Picture-winning film adaptation. But it’s what allows me to enjoy the book. Instead of distinguishing Jame as a fake, it exposes how absurd this entire taxonomic enterprise is.

Jame is “not a transsexual, he just thinks he is, and he’s puzzled and angry because [the gender clinic] won’t help him.” Early on, a doctor at Johns Hopkins says, “To even mention Buffalo Bill in the same breath with the problems we treat is ignorant and unfair and dangerous . . . it’s taken years . . . showing the public that transsexuals aren’t crazy, they aren’t perverts, they aren’t ‘queers,’ whatever that is . . . these are decent people with a real problem, a famously intransigent problem. They deserve help.” 

The book does not want to be sympathetic to Jame, but it is so interested in spending time with her that, in contrast to the (excellently acted, very upsetting) performance in the film by Ted Levine, I can’t help but see myself in Jame (or “Mr. Gumb,” as the narration insists on calling her). Jame has gotten electrolysis, started HRT. As she goes about her day, she notes that her “hands and feet [are] a little stubbly,” but she decides that “they would do.” She loves her dog Precious, coos frequently that “Mommy’s going to be so beautiful.” The first time I read Lambs, I had just adopted a cat; I was eight months on hormones—just past the edge of the most uncomfortably in-between period—and I remember thinking: This is exactly how I talk to my beloved pet. I, too, move between attempts at eradicating all hair from my torso and legs and thinking, eh, what’s a little stubble? The narration calls this an “earnest inept attempt . . . or hateful mocking” of womanhood, but to me, for better and worse, it just looks like womanhood.

What the book fails to ask or answer is what the difference is between being trans and merely thinking you are. What is the source of Jame’s apparent gender euphoria when she tries on her in-progress woman suit? Some post-Freudian obsession with her beauty queen mother, the book suggests, but we get no clearer answer than that. 

Like Jame, I have also been puzzled and angry that a gender clinic won’t help me (and they didn’t even ask me to draw a tree!). I know from experience that insisting all the more that no, really, I am really trans, and I can tell you a thousand truths and lies that confirm that fact if you will just give me some fucking estrogen doesn’t work when the system really wants you to stay where you are. I haven’t killed anyone over it, but it is easier to understand, in the context of Harris trying, again and again, to assuage any concerns you might have about the nature of Jame’s identity, why Jame might have.

It is far more pleasant to have an understandable trans villain than the ones Oyeyemi or Yuknavitch gave us. Their books have little interest in the psychologies of their trans characters or the arbitrary systems that aim to define what makes someone a “true transsexual.” How delightful, in contrast, to see the absurd system break down in Harris’s Lambs. Because despite occasional claims to the contrary, the only people who care these days about distinctions between “real” and “fake” transsexuals tend to be other transsexuals—crabs kicking and screaming to stay at the top of our particular barrel. J.K. Rowling and Pamela Paul and Graham Linehan do not care how you embellish your tree or decorate the female figures you draw. They would rather I and all my friends and perhaps you, too, reading this be immiserated if not outright dead. They look at the taxonomic absurdity and decide we are all monsters. Reading Lambs, you could conclude something similar: that trans women are freaks who would kill and skin a woman if that was the only way to be one; but you can as easily—and more accurately, I think—look at it and ask: What is the rational response to an irrational stricture? 

Taking after Lambs, this became one of the chief questions I asked while writing my own novel, All Us Saints—in which a closeted, abused trans girl sees, like Jame, no future for herself, and decides maybe it is better to kill and to die than to go on feeling the deep horror of living. She doesn’t die, and fails to kill her sister (taking out only her sister’s three best friends). 

Early in the writing process, I went back to the accounts of Ed Gein to see how those initial murders were described; as with Gein’s murders, my trans murderer can only be understood by the sensationalist true crime media complex as a freak of nature. In Harold Schechter’s account of Gein’s killings, he writes that Gein’s “transvestism” was a consequence of an Oedipal obsession with his mother, leaving Gein wishing he had been “a woman instead of a man,” wondering “whether it would be possible to change his sex.” But as scholar K.E. Sullivan points out in the seminal essay “Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer,” there is little evidence of this beyond words that police put into Gein’s mouth, asking “Would you ever put on a pair of women’s panties over your body and then put some of these vaginas over your penis?” To which Gein responded, “That could be.” 

That could be. That’s more or less the basis for decades of transphobic slasher stories.

But having been, as Jame Gumb is, blocked from medical transition, and having lived, as Gein did, deep in repressive territory where if I hadn’t known a handful of trans people, I might not have understood I was one, the false story—the idea that Gein might have been someone like me—has always filled me with an indescribable melancholy. Every trans slasher movie—Lambs, Sleepaway Camp, Texas Chain Saw—has its trans defenders. I think this sort of melancholy is one of the reasons why. We see something of ourselves in these stories, even if they make us out to be monsters. To paraphrase Norman Bates, we all feel a little monstrous sometimes. It was this melancholy—this desire to look past the dominant narrative, not only of Gein’s gender identity but the killings themselves, and understand what it might be like to feel so confused and alone—that gave rise to my novel’s killer.

Unlike Harris’s depiction of Jame, I don’t try to quarrel about real or fake or identity at all; my trans killer doesn’t even know enough to call herself trans. But as with Jame, I wanted to take the abuses, the roadblocks, the violence that trans people face every day, and turn it back against the cisnormative nuclear family that is so often responsible for those horrors. I do not wring my hands, like the Johns Hopkins doctors of Lambs; instead I say, Okay. You’ve made us into monsters. Now what?

The post Revisiting “Silence of the Lambs” in the Age of Trans Backlash appeared first on Electric Literature.

As is usually the case with television, when oversight intensifies and budgets increase, writing tends to worsen. Previous seasons were already showing signs of decline, so I suspected going into season five that the ending would suffer from the same formulaic-slop-syndrome that now plagues most streaming platforms. Unfortunately, I was not far off. What started out 10 years ago as an insightful, character-driven story about friendship, trauma, and nostalgia devolved into an action-packed wannabe Marvel movie by the end. Writers and producers sacrificed depth for flashiness and wound up with over 10 hours of redundant dialogue and expensive action shots. 

The $500 million budget of the final season is proof that you can’t buy a good story. But, sitting by a pile of bunched up tissues as the final credits rolled on January 1, I could not shake the sense that what I was feeling was not just the disappointed goodbye blues. I felt like something precious had just been gutted, and its carcass made to dance for entertainment. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the Duffer Brothers had betrayed the heart of their own story, a transgression worse than bad writing. Some days later, my suspicions were confirmed. In an interview with Variety, the Duffers explained that Eleven had to die in the final episode because she represented “the magic of childhood. And we knew for our kids to be able to grow up, the magic had to leave Hawkins.” I was floored. Had not the whole story been about keeping the magic alive? And what does growing up even look like? For the Duffers, it looks like conforming and forgetting. 

I had always admired Stranger Things for its insistence on imagination and nonconformity as keys to seeing the world for what it is, demogorgons and all. For years, we followed along as nightmarish creatures and state agents threatened the town of Hawkins. Characters attuned to this reality were often dismissed for being delusional or infantile, but the story consistently told us that the real heroes were the ones detached enough from social conventions to risk believing what might seem outlandish. Nerds and outcasts, queers and misfits, trailer park kids and single parents were the ones at a vantage point to believe in magic. From the margins, they could see and fight monsters. We are not just talking about demogorgons here. The story was a blueprint to struggle with the monsters of everyday life; the ones we fight alone and the ones we fight together. 

The power of friendship can be an overused trope, but in its early seasons, Stranger Things did it well. Love was the show’s engine—the reason Will’s friends and family went looking for him, that Mike took Eleven into his home and Eleven saved Mike in return, the reason Bob died for Joyce and Eddie for Dustin, that Lucas could pull Max from Vecna’s curse, and that Hopper raised Eleven as his own. It was significant to see attachments on mainstream media premised on friendship not as a noun but as a verb. Friends in our story were rarely able to spare each other suffering—on the contrary, they were at times inadvertently causing it. But they chose to be together through it. And as external and internal forces ripped them away from one another, they refused to let each other go. In insisting that friendship was not an accessory but a potent part of the magic, the writers invited us to think about bonds as necessary rather than bound to dissolve with age. 

In this regard, one of the most meaningful moments of the show for me was when Will destroys Castle Byers. The scene represents the very real pain that comes from change, but it does so without presenting childhood as something we permanently leave behind. Yes, the symbol of Will’s childhood is damaged, but it’s there that his friends come looking for him. Even after the destruction of Castle Byers, the kids know exactly where to find Will; their affection for each other is grounded in their histories, and by way of those histories they continue on their journey together. Things change, but they don’t have to end.

But by the show’s final season, the Duffers had departed drastically from this messaging. In the final shot of the saga, a new generation of kids takes over the Wheeler basement to begin their own D&D campaign, and Mike shuts the door behind him, leaving them with a bittersweet smile. The closed door is the last thing we see before the screen fades to black. We get it, they want us to grow up. Indeed, they beat us over the head with it. And growing up this time is rendered with isolated finality. While the remains of Castle Byers were a place for Will and his friends to embrace their next chapter together, the closed door of season five creates a barrier between childhood and adulthood. The message is clear: There is no going back, and the rest of life, you must do alone. Beyond this door? A set of sad tropes. In antithesis to everything the writers had expressed as important, magic is now a setback, and adulthood is a milestone that cannot be achieved without forgetting the past and conforming to a normative idea of life. 

It is a familiar norm our society feeds its children, a tired American dream, and Stranger Things ultimately caved to it. Eleven dies, and the magic dies with her. As for the rest of our heroes, monster hunting ends and real life begins, which entails leaving community, creativity, and nonconformity behind in favor of “real” dreams like college, mortgages, marriage, and promotions. They barely speak of what happened to them and talk, instead, of moving on and not getting stuck in the past. In the end, the only characters who maintain meaningful relationships with each other do so in romantic partnerships, and almost everyone’s happy ending involves becoming a productive member of society and embarking on a solo identity building project: Jonathan, Robin, and Dustin are off to university; Will is finding himself in the city; Nancy is out girlbossing; and Steve is looking to settle down and start a family. 

With the finale, the Duffers’ coming-of-age narrative becomes about manufacturing absorption into an idea of adulthood. I say idea here because, just like childhood, adulthood as a category has come to signal more than just an age range, but a standardized, socially acceptable set of attributes. In early seasons, a grown-up’s proximity to childhood was seen as an asset. Characters like Joyce, Hopper, or Murray had not really grown up yet, by societal standards: Joyce was a chain-smoking single mom, Hopper was a divorcee living in a trailer, and Murray a conspiracy theorist. But their failure (voluntary or not) to be disciplined into adulthood enabled them to believe what other adults dismissed and save Hawkins because of it. 

By the end, even the adults are made to properly “grow up.” This is most obvious in the treatment of Hopper. When Eleven disappears in a storm of debris, I was sure he would never recover. He had, after all, spent the entire show fearing this would happen. Instead, he bounces back faster than I did. In their last heart-to-heart, Hopper encourages Mike to accept Eleven’s choice and move on, lest he make the same mistake Hopper had made after Sarah’s death. While there is nothing healthy about dwelling in the past, and Hopper had dealt with the trauma of Sarah in ways that hurt him and those around him, her memory also enabled him to sympathize with Joyce, help her save Will, and open his heart to Eleven, even at great cost to himself. There is a difference between healing and forgetting. Hopper deserved the former but got the latter. The Duffers wrote him a future at the cost of his past. To move on, he must cut ties with most everything that binds him to his own story—namely his friends, his town, and his cabin in the woods—in favor of an ending that mirrors all the others: marriage, a promotion, and a real house in a different city.

There are many reasons why youth are often at the forefront of struggles for justice—sure, they have more time and energy, but they also dare demand what the adult world has declared impossible. We saw this in the Black liberation and anti-war movements of the ’60s, in the early 2000s Occupy Wall Street, and more recently in efforts to abolish ICE and the movement against the genocide in Gaza. In Solidarity with Children, Madeline Lane-McKinley writes that progressive attributes and liberatory demands are often dismissed as childish in a society that wants to blunt their potential. “Language of infantilization,” she writes, “is consistently employed to demarcate what and who has gone too far, too often for the sake of defending the status quo, if not to moralize reformism.” Qualities like hope, creativity, and communal struggle, at the core of early Stranger Things, were ultimately relegated to kid things by what Lane-McKinley would call the “disciplinary horizon of adulthood.” Was Stranger Things ever telling us to be radical? Maybe not exactly. But it was telling us to be curious and imaginative, to embrace our singularities and use them in service of others, to love in concrete ways, to remember the dead, to play, and to keep the magic alive. These are small seeds for potentially big change if cultivated in earnest. 

Instead, the Duffers presented the traits above as childish pelts to shed. The kids are all grown up now—time to put the toys away and settle down. But the reality is that we need more people who are not done imagining better worlds and fighting monsters. Stranger Things started off in praise of the underdogs who dare to believe their own eyes and take risks accordingly. In the end, it parroted a societal dismissal of what it had originally set out to praise: collective life, the courage to take risks, and the belief that things could be different. In so doing, it joined the catalog of texts that present the ideals of childhood as something to leave behind. This not only made for a poorly crafted ending; it was harmful to its audience. The writers encouraged generations of children and young adults to put their play away and leave their communities behind in favor of an individualist, cookie-cutter life. In the footsteps of our protagonists, we are to desire the ostensibly happy endings of well-adjusted adults—that is, nothing that rocks the boat or that exists beyond the parameters of “normal.” 

This is why the only tragic ending in Stranger Things is also the only honest one: Mike, in love with Eleven, refuses to let go entirely. Their story, of course, should be read literally, as one of two young people learning how to be together. But if we run with the Duffers’ allegory, we also learn something important—that the only character who keeps the memory of childhood alive becomes a writer. Mike is not stuck in the past, he just lives life with continuity. Unlike the others who show no signs of being tethered to what happened, his life remains grounded in his story—he keeps a picture of Eleven on his desk and Will’s painting hangs on his wall. And so he writes, to make memory where the others won’t. It’s not a comfortable ending. But it is the one that shows that it is possible to exist in the world without succumbing to the death of being in awe of everything. Because losing the magic of childhood is not inevitable; we are just made to accept adulthood as life without wonder. The spark should be passed along as much as we should carry it with us. After all, it’s not just up to the kids—it’s up to you too. 

The post Growing Up Shouldn’t Mean Conforming and Forgetting appeared first on Electric Literature.

I became a fan of Stranger Things around the time I became, in my own way, Joyce Byers. To certain people in my life, I had recently morphed into a neurotic, monomaniacal woman. Not because I thought my child had been kidnapped by supernatural beings, but because I was convinced I was sick even though no tests could prove it. At 34, during my first year of a doctoral program in literature, I began to experience an electric-shock like pain in my pelvis. Sitting exacerbated the pain, so I bought a standing desk. Exercise beyond walking hurt, so I gave up biking, yoga, and rock climbing. Through regular physical therapy and rest, I managed the pain for several years. Then, in early 2020, my symptoms mysteriously worsened.

By the end of 2020, simply getting out of bed was excruciating. I left my graduate program with my dissertation halfway done. From bed, I booked appointments with a new round of doctors: radiologists, pain specialists, pelvic specialists. Everywhere I turned, practitioners doubted me when I said walking and standing were excruciating. A psychologist whom I was required to see as part of my treatment at a pain clinic asked if my parents had treated me well, hinting the source of my symptoms resided in childhood trauma. In her assessment, she concluded, “Ms. Cutchin has some symptoms and behaviors known to be unhelpful for pain including: some fear, avoidant behavior, pain anxiety.” 

When a physical therapist saw me limping, she said, “Ask yourself, ‘Why do I feel I have to walk like this?’”

Worst of all, someone close to me hinted I was unconsciously refusing to walk because I “liked the bed and the bath.”

Holed up in bed—a bed that had become for some a symbol of my mental instability—I began watching science fiction. I’ve long been a fan of murder shows and spy thrillers, series in which the culprits are certifiably human and logic more or less carries the day. I binged The Americans, The Bureau, and Bosch, along with some less illustrious procedurals. Then, for want of new programming—it appeared my pain could outlast even Peak TV’s flood of content—I began to watch sci-fi

Not only did sci-fi keep me entertained; it gave me strength. A recurrent trope of sci-fi is the woman who is not believed. There’s Joyce Byers and her can of paint. Iconically, there’s Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2, locked away in a mental institution because she claims—accurately—that cyborgs from the future want to kill her son. In Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 film Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) tells a senate committee she traveled through wormholes to meet an alien disguised as her father. The (male) chairman points out that video evidence contradicts her account and accuses her of suffering from a “self-reinforcing delusion.”

Also delusional, or so a male colleague insists, is DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) in the excellent near-future dystopian series The Capture. When DCI Carey confronts a superior, Commander Danny Hart (Ben Miles), with her suspicion the UK government is altering CCTV footage in real time using deep-fake AI technology, he wastes no time gaslighting her. “You’ve had a shock tonight, Rachel. Why don’t you get some rest.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a male character tell a woman she needs some rest, I’d be able to upgrade every streaming subscription to premium. In the German limited series The Signal, it’s a case of “space sickness” that plagues astronaut Paula (Peri Baumeister), or so a dismissive colleague would have her believe. Aboard a space shuttle, Paula hears a signal she knows can only come from aliens. She records the signal, but when she plays the recording for the rest of her team, there’s nothing on the tape. Her (once again, male) colleague, Hadi (Hadi Khanjanpour), who initially heard the signal, too, tells Paula she’s unwell. “Go lie down.”

Riddled with pain, facing disbelief from those around me, the stories of Joyce, Paula, DCI Carey, Ellie Arroway, and Sarah Connor brought me solace, and a shred of hope. I belonged to a genre of female characters who had to fight to be believed. In the worlds these narratives portray, women’s claims are outlandish, otherworldly, weird, and also true. Eventually, each character finds someone who believes her. Sometimes it’s a man, like Jim Hopper (David Harbour) in Stranger Things, who learns to trust Joyce. Sometimes it’s a woman or girl: Paula’s most steadfast advocate in The Signal is her disabled nine-year-old daughter, Charlie (Yuna Bennett), who, working with her father, figures out the time and place of the aliens’ arrival and proves her mother right.

Watching these films and shows between visits to doctors bent on dismissing me, I grasped sci-fi’s genius: It taps into our culture’s deepest anxieties about the trustworthiness of women. In our real-world political climate, when a woman speaks her experience, whether she’s talking about sexual abuse, harassment, or illness, we wonder, Where’s the proof? And yet, our standards of proof are devised by the same systems—legal, educational, medical—built by men to protect male interests. In the medical system, imaging and other tests count as “proof” of illness or pain, but such tests screen only for well-researched diseases, and what we know about those diseases largely comes from research on male subjects. No definitive tests exist for a host of conditions that predominately affect those assigned female at birth, like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. A woman with this kind of disease might as well be telling her doctors: Cyborgs are coming. Aliens have made contact.

By exploring whose testimony counts as reliable, and on what terms, sci-fi provides a template for what ethical philosophers call epistemic justice. “Epistemic” refers to knowledge. In our everyday lives, we convey knowledge to others by sharing our expertise, by relating our experience, and so forth. When a speaker offering knowledge is dismissed because of who they are—a woman, a trans person, a Black or Brown person—they are wronged in their “capacity as a giver of knowledge,” as philosopher Miranda Fricker puts it in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. The one who speaks loses out, but so does a community of hearers who would benefit from the information the speaker seeks to convey. Sci-fi dramatizes epistemic injustice and proposes a different way: We must practice epistemic humility by taking stock of our prejudices and admitting that someone who looks and sounds different than us might be right. 

In the eyes of Western medicine, there is little stranger than a malfunctioning female or gender nonconforming body. According to The New York Times, “Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men in a variety of situations.” A stunning 72% of millennial women report feeling gaslit by medical professionals, a Mira survey found. If you’re nonwhite, it gets worse. Black women are less likely to develop breast cancer than white women—but 40% more likely to die from the disease due to delays in diagnosis and care. Delays in diagnosis stem partly from lack of research into women’s health. Until recently, women were considered inferior subjects to men in basically all research. “There are parts of your body less known than the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of mars,” Rachel E. Gross writes in Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. On top of it all, there’s medicine’s age-old tendency to see women’s maladies as psychogenic in nature—think of the prevalence of the hysteria diagnosis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Today, women are less likely to be told our pain or fatigue is “in our heads.” Instead, in a sophistry-laden twist, we are told our symptoms stem from a “brain” gone haywire. According to the brain-based model of chronic pain, when symptoms persist more than three to six months with no obvious organic cause, the brain is at fault, or more precisely, a “maladaptive plastic reorganization in central pain processing circuits.” A spate of recent self-help books and pain reeducation programs promise to teach your brain to unlearn pain via cognitive-behavioral interventions. The problem with these treatments is they fail to account for the instances when pain persists because doctors and tests miss its underlying cause. Around 70% of chronic pain patients are female. Women are more likely to suffer from underreached conditions like fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, pelvic pain, Long Covid, Lyme disease, and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Telling a woman her pain stems from a “maladaptive” brain is today’s version of “it’s just hysteria.” 

Given sci-fi’s uncanny ability to channel and critique these medical biases, I’ve put together a quiz: Can you tell the difference between a real-life sick woman and science fiction? The following statements were uttered either in a science fiction film or TV show, or in a real-life medical setting where a female patient came in complaining of physical symptoms. Circle the correct answer:

Answer key: B, D, F, H and J are from science fiction—The OA, Manifest, Stranger Things, Terminator 2, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, respectively. A, C and I are from medical records shared with me by a female patient with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome; E was uttered by the doctor of an Instagram user living with ME/CFS and POTS. G is from my own life. A noted Bay Area pelvic pain practitioner insisted I download a pain therapy app that could, he said, “re-wire” my brain so I no longer felt pain. “The app will teach you that you can’t use the word ‘pain’ any longer if you want to heal,” he told me.

I’m not saying mind-body tools aren’t helpful in managing symptoms. In the early years of my pain, I did quite a lot of psychotherapy and embodied meditation. These tools helped, especially when it came to managing the stress of illness. By the time I became bedridden, I knew I’d gone as far as I could with mind-body modalities. I told anyone who would listen I believed my symptoms had a biomechanical source, but, as time went on, I doubted that source would ever be found. After all, I’d had an MRI, the gold standard for diagnosis of pelvic disorders, and it had revealed nothing. 

Still, I kept searching. For years, I’d been hearing about a world-famous pelvic pain specialist in Arizona. Seeing him would mean traveling seven hundred miles and paying for the visit out of pocket. By early 2022, I was out of other options. A friend and I rented a van and drove seven hundred miles from our home in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Arizona desert listening to crime podcasts. Actually, my friend drove; I laid on a mattress in the back.

The Arizona doctor took by far the most careful, thorough patient history of any provider I’d seen. He recommended a round of pelvic floor botox, and, when that didn’t work, he offered a diagnosis. 

“All the signs point to pudendal nerve entrapment.” 

The pudendal nerve runs through the lower pelvis and innervates urinary, bowel, and sexual function. I’d long known my nerve was irritated. But none of the pelvic specialists I’d seen had raised the possibility it might be compressed. Compression, the Arizona doctor explained, doesn’t show up on an MRI; the nerve is too small, too hidden. Compression typically arises from a traumatic injury, or repetitive stress. The year before the onset of my symptoms, I’d biked one thousand miles down the California coast. The pressure of the bike seat against my pelvis caused scar tissue to build up around the nerve. To protect the nerve, paradoxically. 

It took 11 years from the onset of symptoms to receive the diagnosis. The treatment: a fairly straightforward decompression surgery.

Pudendal nerve entrapment is an underresearched condition that affects—you guessed it—women more often than men at a rate of seven to three. Childbirth is a common trigger. Diagnostic criteria do exist, but none of the chronic pain or pelvic disorder specialists I’d previously seen were familiar with those criteria. Pudendal entrapment isn’t common, but it’s not as rare as one might think, either. Studies indicate it affects up to one percent of the general population. Because pudendal entrapment lacks an ICD-code—such codes are used globally to classify medical diagnosess—insurance companies view decompression surgery as experimental and refuse to reimburse it. (In contrast, ICD-codes exist for “Sucked into jet engine V97.33X” and “Struck by turkey W61.42XA.”)

Four months after surgery, I began to see improvement. Within 15 months, I was leading a normal life again: walking, sitting, and traveling—without a van and mattress. I made plans to return to the PhD program. 

Today, I’m grateful to the Arizona doctor who took the time to listen and believe my story. I’m also, frankly, enraged when I think about the time, energy, and pain I would have been spared if the medical system had the patience and trust to take my symptoms seriously. If it had, I wouldn’t have become Joyce Beyers and spent years getting others to see the writing on the wall.

The post My Undiagnosed Chronic Illness Taught Me to Love Sci-Fi appeared first on Electric Literature.

Though Chu couldn’t have known that his adaptation would coincide with a second Trump presidency, the timing of Wicked: For Good and the media coverage it has garnered is highly culturally significant, given the United States’ own worrying rise of authoritarianism. Especially in our own era, the changes made by this film are not frivolous—they are dangerously out of touch and speak to a growing habit of downplaying the stickiness of fascism’s harm. The Broadway musical is certainly a more hopeful story than Maguire’s original novel, but its ending is still somber, as Elphaba fails to rescue the Animals and flees Oz, likely never to return. Changing Wicked’s ending to an unfettered triumph of overthrowing a dictatorial regime, Wicked: For Good occupies a problematic cultural perspective, one that blissfully forgets fascism’s lingering pain and permanent damage. 

As others have pointed out, Wicked and the extensive literary history of Oz itself have long been considered political. L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been suspected of being a commentary on the McKinley administration. And Maguire’s 1995, decidedly adult novel Wicked is undeniably political, with visible threads throughout of propaganda, anti-intellectualism, systemic oppression, and even state-sanctioned murder gesturing towards fascism in general, and specifically, the crimes of Nazi Germany. And at its debut in 2003, the Wicked musical cemented its own continuation of such political commentary, especially in relation to the George W. Bush presidency. 

So when Chu’s Wicked premiered last year, we had no reason to doubt that this political narrative would remain, if not strengthen. Indeed, in comparison to the musical, part one of Chu’s adaptation saw a marked increase in the narrative time for the talking Animals—the population targeted and oppressed by the Wizard—no doubt due to the affordances of CGI in comparison to the limited abilities of stage productions. The film maintains the Broadway musical’s inclusion of the Cowardly Lion, the flying monkeys, and Dr. Dillamond, the Shiz University goat professor whose violent removal from his classroom as a result of anti-Animal legislation radicalizes Elphaba, who, in the film, keeps the professor’s glasses, broken during his arrest. In addition to these mainstay characters, the film adds Dulcibear, a talking bear who serves as Elphaba and her sister Nessa’s childhood nanny, alongside many other new Animal faces to strengthen their place in the narrative, and, in turn, their political significance to the overarching story.

It isn’t difficult to read the novel or see the stage musical or film adaptations of Wicked without taking notice of Maguire’s intended allegory for Nazi Germany. The oppression and silencing of the Animals, including Dr. Dillamond, reflects the oppression and genocide of Jewish people and other “undesirables” during the Holocaust, including the ousting of Jewish professors and “politically unreliable” people from German universities and state positions with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. More recently, though, Dr. Dillamond’s removal compares with the removal of a Texas A&M University professor for teaching about gender identity, as well as the University of Oklahoma’s suspension and eventual firing of a graduate teaching assistant for failing a student’s paper on gender identity that cited the Bible and referred to trans people as “demonic.” 

Compounding this, the second installment of Chu’s adaptation opens to a starkly different scene than audiences experienced in the first film, released in 2024. Wicked began with the Broadway musical’s well-known number “No One Mourns the Wicked,” but Chu’s Wicked: For Good opens with a scene unfamiliar to fans of the stage musical—the exacerbated state of the oppression of Oz’s Animals, set into motion during the events of the first film. In our return to the theater and Oz, audiences witness the continued construction of the yellow brick road, being built by the forced labor of Animals. We watch as an overseer whips two chained bison to keep them moving, snapping at them not to speak, as the Animals groan in pain, struggling to keep up. 

It seemed, then, that Wicked: For Good was intent on creating a more visceral representation of oppression, including Wicked’s inevitable bad ending for the Animals that Elphaba tries to liberate. Yet shortly after the hard-hitting opening, this vision begins to falter. Elphaba encounters a group of Animals, including Dulcibear, hurriedly escaping through a tunnel dug into the yellow brick road and willingly venturing into the “Place Beyond Oz,” understood as a wasteland, to escape persecution.

As Dillamond’s removal from his position reflects contemporary attacks on American educators, the flight of the Animals evokes the real-world increase in “self-deportations” after the Trump administration’s threat to undocumented immigrants to “leave now” or be removed by force. Especially with the increase in ICE raids, it’s an option that was once unthinkable for those building lives in the United States, but one that many are now considering to avoid being taken from court houses, sidewalks, and schools, being held in detention centers, and being separated from their families. 

When Elphaba finds the Animals escaping through the tunnel, she implores them to stay. Here, with the addition of the original song “No Place Like Home,” Wicked: For Good veers into confusing, even, dare I say, corny, territory.

In the song, Elphaba insists that “Oz is more than just a place / It’s a promise, an idea,” espousing a view similar to the “American Dream,” and, as others have noted, a liberal nationalistic perspective that prioritizes an “idea” over an actual place where the Animals are currently unable to live safely. Elphaba continues to sing, “When you feel you can’t fight anymore / just tell yourself there’s no place like home,” and “When you want to leave / discouraged and resigned / that’s what they want you to do / But think of how you will grieve / for all you leave behind / Oz belongs to you, too.” 

On one hand, “No Place Like Home” can be accepted as a cheeky callback to Dorothy’s famous line in The Wizard of Oz and a musical addition to the film meant to galvanize the fleeing Animals into fighting back for their freedom. On the other hand, though it’s possible to see the sentiment behind the lyrics, “No Place Like Home” ultimately comes across as trite, even tone-deaf, given the high stakes that the Animals face. The insistence that the Animals shouldn’t be forced from their homes is a correct one, but the lyrics betray Elphaba’s idealism and feel patronizing.

Elphaba doesn’t offer supplies, routes to safehouses, or support of any kind. Rather, she asks the Animals to stay in an unsafe land with no other avenues or options for protection or shelter. While Elphaba has her magic, her undiscovered hideaway, and her mode of quick transportation when she’s in danger thanks to her broomstick, the Animals have none of this, on top of being quite easy to spot. Without real substance or promise, her words ring hollow.

Though I cringed at the lyricism of “No Place Like Home,” I was initially willing to write it off as a musical misstep, especially given the film’s apt attention to the many tools employed by authoritarian and fascist governments. Specifically, I was taken by the film’s focus on how easily orders fly off of desks and into enforceable law. Signs declaring “NO ANIMALS” go up around Oz, and travel bans are enforced for both Animals and Munchkins on the whim of Elphaba’s sister, Nessa, now mayor of Munchkinland. 

Further into the film, like the stage musical, Elphaba eventually finds Dr. Dillamond again, kept in a cage and having lost the ability to speak. But unlike the stage musical, Elphaba finds far more Animals caged alongside Dillamond, driving home how widespread and systematic their disappearances have become. The Wizard, trying to win back Elphaba’s favor, tells her, “Some animals just can’t be trusted.” However, Chu’s film refuses to let us linger in this horror, undercutting the seriousness of Elphaba’s discovery by playing what comes next for comic relief.

In her anger, Elphaba’s magic releases the Animals from their cages as she tells the Wizard: “Run.” The Animals give chase, barging through the doors and stampeding through the wedding of Glinda and Fiyero. Guests scream, scramble for cover in their over-the-top wedding guest attire and hairstyles, which adds to the absurdity. Madame Morrible, screaming, “This is the work of the Wicked Witch,” is drowned out by the noise caused by the Animals. By the end of the chaos, Morrible is launched, face-first, into the towering wedding cake, landing on the ground with a satisfying thwomp.

The Animal imprisonment quickly unravels from dark horror to a victory, and a funny one. It revises itself in real time into something lighthearted and whimsical, a distraction from the horrors of Oz’s fascist regime. The stage musical, while fun and colorful, is still meant to make audiences think hard about the pain they are witnessing. In this sense, the played-for-laughs fun of this scene arguably becomes reflective of the bubbly, fun nature of the massive marketing campaign and franchising of the Wicked films, which has developed into a narrative all its own. 

Courtesy of 400+ brand partnerships, Wicked’s colorful, glittering aesthetic has been inescapable for over a year. The film’s marketing strategy and brand deals, suspected to have cost as much as the first film, have produced everything from nail polish, limited edition eye shadow pallettes, and Barbie dolls to Dawn dish spray, cereal, and even mac and cheese cups. Admittedly, I was not strong enough to resist the siren call of a Glinda-pink collapsible Swiffer sweeper, telling myself it was a practical purchase as I loaded it into my Amazon cart.

That isn’t to say this vibrant and Glinda-fied merchandising doesn’t have a connection to the story itself. Wicked has canonically had its fair share of whimsy, from elaborate set design to quirky language. But its ending has always maintained a somber tone. In the stage musical and Maguire’s novel, though the future for Animal liberation remains possible, Elphaba herself fails in her quest, and those she sought to save continue to be scapegoated by the Wizard’s administration, have their rights stripped, are silenced through cages, and even murdered. It’s a grim finality, but one that maintains a foothold in the reality of systematic oppression. 

Yet Wicked: For Good takes a decidedly different approach. After Elphaba and Glinda have their emotional goodbye in “For Good,” Glinda returns to the Emerald City, demands that the Wizard remove himself from Oz via the hot air balloon he arrived in, and imprisons Madam Morrible in one of the cages she had built for Animals. The ending, like the original stage musical, returns us to the beginning with “No One Mourns the Wicked.” However, in this version, Glinda pauses the reprise, telling the crowd, “I have something more to say.”

Glinda motions for the Animals to emerge from the crowd of Ozians, gently imploring, “Come out. Wherever you are, come out.” Her prodding is akin to that of an adult encouraging children to return from a game of hide and seek, not to return from being hunted down. And given that we have, until this point, understood the Animals to have mostly been imprisoned or having fled from Oz entirely, it’s surprising to see them suddenly in the middle of the crowd, smiling up at Glinda. 

Glinda continues her speech, clarifying, “I don’t see any enemies here. We’ve been through a frightening time. And there will be other times and other things that frighten us. But if you’ll let me, I’d like to try to help, to change things. I’d like to try to be… Glinda the Good.” The scene shifts quickly, showing Animals regaining their place in society, being greeted by the suddenly de-prejudiced Ozians. A wand wave, and years of persecution and fear evaporate.

The Animals who fled during “No Place Like Home” emerge again from the tunnel, Dulcibear smiling in relief. And then the kicker: the camera lands squarely on Dr. Dillamond, back in his classroom, glasses fixed, ready to teach again. His fate is magically reversed from his murder in the novel and his permanent silencing and transformation into a “real animal” in the stage musical. Instead, he resumes his career, presumably alongside the very colleagues and students who did nothing to intervene as he was dragged from his classroom.

Many have noted their immense relief that Dillamond survives, and a part of me has to agree with them. The character has always been a fan favorite, and Peter Dinklage’s talent only adds to his charm. But I also couldn’t help but feel uneasy at this change—it feels too clean, and far too simple.

The primary rule of magic that Elphaba and others in Wicked consistently repeat is that you can’t uncast a spell. You can’t undo what has already been done. In many ways, this idea points to the irreversibility of harm inflicted by fascist regimes and their implementation of systematic violence. This major change to Wicked’s ending, which sees smiling Animals with speech restored and once again accepted without question by previously prejudiced, and even violent, Ozians, is not just improbable but may even be dangerous messaging, especially given the growing levels of suspicion, propaganda, state and interpersonal violence, and heightened oppression of marginalized groups in the United States. 

While injury is easily and hurriedly inflicted by powerful state entities, as we have been witnessing over the last year in particular, disentangling ourselves from that harm has been proven to be much, much more difficult. Wicked and Wicked: For Good both have a concrete understanding of how fascism operates, the delight it takes in violence, the tools it employs, and how it takes hold in the first place. What this film has trouble grappling with is how fascism is broken apart and what happens in the aftermath. Wicked: For Good’s finale shift is not merely an insistence on a happy ending for audience satisfaction. Rather, this small but significant change undercuts the real work that must be done to recover from fascist ideology. That recovery requires hope, certainly, but it must be a hope willing to hurt as it clambers after something better. It must be a hope that refuses to forget. 

Building a future in the wake of fascism is never simple. It isn’t a heel click or a wand wave away. It’s a hard reckoning. It’s the beginning of a long climb. And it’s in our best interest not to pretend otherwise.

The post You Can’t Uncast a Spell appeared first on Electric Literature.

That may be the million-dollar question. What sort of a book is Wuthering Heights? Like many, I first came across the novel in my teens; unlike many, I couldn’t get through it. If I was too impatient to make sense of Joseph’s Yorkshire accent, I was also too unformed as a reader to probe the work’s complex narrative structure. I was fourteen and had no inkling of puppy love, much less passion. And because I didn’t know passion, I couldn’t understand Heathcliff.

A friend once described me as a late bloomer’s late bloomer. In that long period of my life, spanning a little over three decades, in which I had never been in a relationship, I lived mostly in my own head. Fantasy seemed, at times, preferable to reality, not because I ever believed that what I imagined was real, but because, in being able to control every element of every story down to the most minute detail, I could play God. My mind’s eye gave birth to multiple new selves, all beautiful, rich, coveted, and bearing not the slightest resemblance to reality. That a fantasy frequently ended in tragedy (my make-believe death, usually from tuberculosis or being fatally shot by an arrow) rendered it no less delicious, for the following evening I would resurrect myself and a new story with a new lover would commence.

Perhaps this is why watching Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights felt so familiar. The landscape that Catherine and Heathcliff run through as children is a landscape that possesses an uncanny resemblance to the fantastical panoramas of my own lonely adolescence. And because fantasy owes very little, if anything, to history, this is a world governed solely by whim and the law of individual desire. Dresses can be anachronistic so long as they are beautiful. Feasts are laid out less for human consumption than for the delight of the eye. Few would be able to guess that Thrushcross Grange, which resembles in its exterior an iced sugar cookie, should contain a labyrinth of rooms with no unifying style beyond the ostentatious spectacle of wealth. There is a room for ribbons that is turned, for Mrs. Catherine Linton’s pleasure, into a room for the display of opulent gowns. Most memorably, there is a room the color and texture of flesh that lends new meaning to what it is to inhabit one’s own skin.

As several reviews have pointed out, Fennell’s adaptation of Brontë’s magnum opus significantly departs from its source material; to document these disparities when the differences are both numerous and flagrant seems a meaningless exercise. What’s more, I don’t see much wrong with the degree of departure, whether minimal or extreme. There are no set rules for how to treat the source material, and different mediums require different modes of expression. Suzy Davies, the movie’s production designer, puts it well: “This film was never about documenting the 1800s in a literal or academic way. Instead, it was about capturing the essence of a teenage fever dream—the sensation of first encountering the book.”

I can’t help but feel disappointed both at critics who have extolled Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” and those who have panned it. Reviews have run the gamut, from “sexy, dramatic, melodramatic, occasionally comic and often swoonily romantic” to simply “a dud.” Much of the problem seems to stem from the preconception that Brontë’s novel is a love story. In all the times I have failed or succeeded in reading the book, I have never been fully convinced that Wuthering Heights is a romance, or more accurately, that its most foundational element is the love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. We tend to look for what we want to see on the page, not what is actually there. In reading Wuthering Heights, it’s easy to discern how a combination of atmosphere and titillating storytelling can render the mind susceptible to extracting specific moments and specific lines at the expense of others. Who, after all, can finish Brontë’s work without remembering Catherine’s cry, “I am Heathcliff!”

This all boils down to a certain amount of delusion around love: its addictive nature, its inextinguishable flame. That is, the belief that love is not love if it isn’t immortal, if it fails to live beyond the grave. Love is not love if one is not willing to kill for it, to give up one’s life for it, to exercise violence and exact vengeance on its behalf and under its banner. Love is not love if you do not place someone’s well-being totally above your own, if you do not sacrifice yourself to it, if formerly two separate selves do not merge wholly and completely into one. This thinking may be why we remember Wuthering Heights more for Heathcliff’s extreme—and insane—devotion to Catherine’s memory than as a story about generational abuse, otherness, and redemption. It is also why, regrettably, we remember Wuthering Heights less as an exemplar of vicarious, vivid, and vivacious storytelling than for the love story that was never really the crux of what is, from first page to last, a passion project: a passion not for romance but for, above all, the act of creativity and the pure, unadulterated joy of playing God in ink.

This is how the novel has always struck me: as a gratuitous exercise in artistry and play, in the kind of explosive energy that will unfold on the page when, for better or worse, the imagination is loosed like a dog that has been liberated from its leash in a park. How else to explain the layers of narrative that remind me, at times, of a mille-feuille? Revisiting the work in my early thirties, I noticed as I didn’t before the delightful recklessness, the heedlessness and risk-taking of Brontë’s prose. I laughed at Lockwood’s ineptitude and buffoonery, his pomposity, his romantic nature that allows him to be so easily beguiled by a pretty face and to fancy himself in love. In the first pages alone, a comic scene unfolds that sends the whole household into uproar. If there is passion, then it is passion made vivid to the point of fluorescence with melodrama.

Wuthering Heights is, in a nutshell, a noisy affair, raucous with Joseph’s ear-splitting outbursts, with Nellie Dean’s sanctimonious need to be right, with Linton Heathcliff’s whining, with violence and kidnapping and elopement and death and ghosts. In its ingenuity, its surrender to the spirit of its diverse and strange cast of characters, Wuthering Heights is more instinct than strategy, more id than superego, more the splatter of ink that leaks from a broken nib than a smooth and unbroken line. Thomas Wolfe is reputed to have said, “Writing is easy. Just put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and start bleeding.” I feel something different at work with Brontë. Even when I disliked the book, I always sensed how fun and, more vitally, how free it was. So often do we harp on the struggle of writing that we forget that pleasure can and frequently does accompany the uphill battle to put words on the page.

Fennell’s film is a testament to the contagiousness of that energy and pleasure. For all its adult themes, it’s a fantasy of the kind that precedes actual experience of the realities of the world; its stunning aesthetics betray, at its heart, a cluelessness. The hodgepodge of erotic imagery scattered throughout scenes recollects the giggles that would inevitably spread like wildfire in a classroom whenever someone happened to mention boobs or dared to say the word “dick” or “fuck” aloud. Tellingly, even symbolically, there is no nudity in Fennell’s movie: no breasts or buttocks or penises. But there are plenty of pig’s feet; there is the underside of a snail leaving a trail of slime across a glass pane. There’s the slap of wet dough and the meticulously handcrafted book Isabella Linton presents Catherine, which highlights more than one erotic feature in its pages: a pop-up of a phallus-shaped mushroom, a flower that resembles vaginal lips. Sex is clean, and its participants are, most of the time, even formally dressed for the occasion.

In one revealing scene, Catherine screams at her good-for-nothing father, as she stamps across the courtyard of Wuthering Heights, “We’re all ill! We’re all ill because of you!” This line hits at what Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is about. None of the characters know what they’re doing or how to go about getting what they want. Everyone is suffering under some form of delusion. Except for, surprisingly, Zillah, who has left the service of Wuthering Heights, married, and become a mother of a little boy, no one really grows up or moves on. With guardians like Mr. Earnshaw and Edgar Linton, maybe they don’t know how.

If Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is meant, to quote Davies, to replicate “a teenage fever dream,” it also warns of the dangers of being caught in the stage of hormonally fueled fantasy for too long. There is a difference between the love we imagine and the love we practice, and “compromise,” so integral to real life and to navigating any relationship, is not a word recognized in the world of this film. No one surrenders, except to their own fantasy of what and how things should be. Everyone clings. Edgar Linton deceives himself that his wife is perfect. Isabella allows herself to be treated, literally, like a dog. Nelly guards the only thing that gives meaning to her life: her proximity to those in power. And Catherine and Heathcliff abjectly fail to grow out of an adolescent hedonism; their creed remains, we can do anything we want, so long as we are the ones doing it. Appropriately, the film concludes with flashbacks to Catherine and Heathcliff’s childhood. This move is sentimental, even predictable, a play for easy audience tears. But the bigger lesson may be that if one can’t look forward, one runs the risk of living forever in an idealized past. And lest we forget, the film ends in tragedy.

While watching Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” I thought a lot about my debut novel, a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I wrote it a few years out of college, having just been fired from a dead-end job I despised. I was twenty-five and had never had either a boyfriend or sex. My parents were filing for bankruptcy, and I was about to lose my childhood home. Some, or possibly most, of that pent-up frustration came out in the span of three months in a first draft of a novel that I composed while sweating in an airless basement I would very soon never have the privilege of sitting or typing in again. All of my fears and wishes for the future somehow found their expression in that first book. I had no idea what I was doing.

The end result was a fantasy. My protagonist not only gets her happy ending but also has a lot of fine, robust sex in between. I wondered that I could write about positions, about the sensation of lying naked beside a lover, without having experienced any of what I described. My inspiration came from what I had consumed in books, movies, and porn, from my introversion and isolation, from the buzz of sexual frustration and my despair at repetitive encounters with unrequited love. By and large, critics were much kinder to my first novel than readers were. Many were furious, outraged to the point of being almost comic. What I’d done to Austen was disgraceful, they declared; what right did I have to rewrite, to retell, to revise, to essentially destroy what had already attained the highest echelon of literary perfection. So, the litany of complaints went on and on—and on.

If I could, I’d inform the Janeite mob at my door that my treatment of Mr. Darcy and Lizzy, of Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins, of, notably, Mary Bennet, had nothing to do with them. I did not think of them. I didn’t want to think of them, not out of any disrespect, but because all that mattered as I was writing the novel was the absolute, all-consuming urgency I felt in transplanting my vision onto a preexisting world that had become so intimate to me that I had grown bold enough to wish to change the scenery and the weather, to shift the furniture and swap the curtains, and to rearrange characters as if they were my own playthings. You don’t do that out of hatred or scorn. You do that only when a book becomes so alive that you cannot remember who you were before you read it, when your tongue takes on the rhythm of its language and lines, and when the impulse to rummage around inside of its world becomes all but irresistible. In short, it is out of adulation—and out of love.

I sense the same impulse in Fennell’s adaptation. This is surely a personal vision, and because it is so personal, it will be, at times, moving, and, at times, ridiculous. The trailer for the film describes it as, “Inspired by the greatest love story of all time.” I don’t think, however, that this is accurate. Rather, I would say that Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is inspired simply by her love for a truly great—and truly strange—novel, that the passion which drove her to undertake such an ambitious project is the same that compelled Brontë to write the book. It’s a bold move, and it takes courage.

There’s a scene in the film where a shivering Catherine complains of the cold. Heathcliff offers to build a fire, but they cannot spare the firewood. After a brief exchange, Heathcliff stands up. He slams his chair against the floor, again, then again, until it breaks. With the remnants of the chair, he builds a fire; he will not see Catherine cold.

This scene doesn’t appear in the book. One could say it is cheesy, the stuff of which so many romances are made. But in its simple and unapologetic expression, it’s refreshing, too. We all wish that someone might break a chair to pieces if it meant we would not be cold. We all wish we could be loved so passionately. And who can say that such a moment or something very like it did not or could not happen in those gaps of the novel in which a reader’s imagination is given space to ferment? I recall one of my favorite lines from the book. In describing Heathcliff and Catherine’s final embrace, Brontë writes, “They were silent—their faces hid against each other, and washed by each other’s tears.” The edges of book and film begin to blur, and I wonder what memories these characters might have recalled, whether their youth came back to them, or whether they reveled, even fleetingly, in a glorious and unrealized future in which things had turned out different.

No one knows. That is the beauty of fiction.

The post “Wuthering Heights” Was Never a Love Story appeared first on Electric Literature.

It is a question I am asked frequently, and invariably respond to by narrating the same episode. It was 2023 and my Nanu was dying in the hospital: room 36, last one on the left. I remember the rain refusing to stop for days on end, a growing sense of suffocation as the greyness enveloped us. The silence in the car after Papa dropped Mamma to the hospital for the night. Nani and Chhoti Nani, who had spent the day with Nanu, sat in the car to be dropped back home. Slumped in the middle seat, I watched the rain forcefully hit the windshield. There was a vacantness in all our eyes, a veil between us and our immediate surroundings. None of us were really in that car at all. That morning, I’d finished Albert Camus’ The Stranger and was thinking abouthow it would likely be the last book I ever read with Nanu still alive. The book had made no sense to me;, when I googled its themes, meaninglessness of life had been the first one to come up.

In 1990, over a decade before I was even born, American singer Jeff Buckley discovered a qawwali by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: a sixteen minute-long composition of “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai,” the song that–he confessed to the Pakistani singer a year before both their untimely deaths–saved his life. “If you let yourself listen with the whole of yourself, you will have the pure feeling of flight while firmly rooted to the ground,” Buckley wrote about Khan’s music. “Your soul can fly outward stringed to your ribcage like a shimmering kite in the shape of an open hand. Be still and listen to the evidence of your own holiness.”

In the years since Nanu’s passing, I have repeatedly failed to describe what exactly happened to me—to us—in that moment when the song on the car radio changed. Buckley’s words, written over three decades ago, best encapsulate the near-spiritual experience. I was lifted up, above myself, above everything, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang. Then, just as gently, I was returned to the world. I straightened up, looked around: had anyone else felt the shift? For one second, I thought I was alone—until I noticed the expression on my sister’s face slowly transform, my Chhoti Nani starting to hum softly. “What song is this?” Deeti asked, and Nani named the first qawwali Buckley had ever listened to, the one that had saved him, that was now proving to me that life was not in fact in fact meaningless despite what Camus said, that there was more to it all than just death, than hospital room 36, last one on the left. The veil had disappeared; through the greyness, a thin shaft of light had entered.

Two years after Nanu’s death, clearing up a spare room in his home, we found a tattered, yellowing piece of paper: a certificate of registration issued to him in July 1948 by the Government of Bombay. He must have been nine years old. “Name of refugee,” it demanded, followed by “address before evacuation,” “present address” and “name of head of family.” Under “identification marks,” someone had scrawled: “Left eye has.” I do not recall any marks by his left eye. I remember a small mole above his lip and the pale grey of his eyes, something I forever secretly hoped my own children would inherit. Even these details come to me now vaguely: I know as if by muscle memory that they were there but it feels almost like fiction. No image comes to mind when I think of them.

I’ve always believed I’ve done a good job of grieving Nanu, of leaving him behind like you’re meant to leave the dead. Of wringing the sadness out of me in the weeks following his passing, when I’d find myself lying drunk on the bedroom floor, desperately calling every number on my phone so I could talk to someone, anyone about the gaping hole in my chest. At parties, imitating Shalom Harlow’s catwalk would suddenly turn into sobbing on the bathroom floor after vomiting every sip of Old Monk I’d gulped down earlier. Friends would drop me to my doorstep. Once inside, I’d scream at my father about how Nanu had suffered, was suffering, would forever be suffering, and everyone who claimed he’d died peacefully was only lying to console themselves. I screamed over the red marks the oxygen mask had left on his forehead, over how the last thing he had ever said to me was that he couldn’t breathe. Alone in my bedroom, when all my incessant phone calls went unanswered because it was past two in the morning, I would dissolve into tears, then type “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai” onto Spotify.

It was not rare for Khan to sing about alcoholism, lost love, a mohabbat so powerful it transforms into devotion. These themes were especially resonant in my life once Nanu was gone. It was, as Philippe Ariès wrote in his book Western Attitudes Towards Death: “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.” Except Khan did. In “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai,” he sings to his beloved in Urdu: “I blame your gaze for this perpetual intoxication / For teaching me to drink wine.” In “Intoxicated”—from his collaborative album Night Song (1996) with Canadian musician Michael Brook—he croons: “Why does the cloud sway? / Maybe it is a drunkard, too / With a carefree gait / and rose-coloured eyes.” 

What I found in Khan, thus, was not just the feeling of flight Buckley described but also compassion, an understanding of the agony it takes to drive one to addiction. Less than a month after Nanu’s death, I found myself in the hospital with two IV tubes jammed into the back of my hand to replenish my electrolytes. I had mild alcohol poisoning; I had a faint memory of kissing a stranger at a nightclub, then sobbing inconsolably as I told him I’d recently lost my grandfather. It was only two years later—by this point I’d grown used to sobriety—that I learnt that Khan’s references to alcoholism were metaphors, that qawwali lyrics are rife with these forbidden references as allegories for devotion.

Perhaps because I’ve let it all out but more likely because I cautiously avoid any thoughts of him, I can now discuss Nanu without displaying any emotion, so much so that I find myself surprised whenever my voice cracks or a previously unexplored regret formulates itself. I always tell people I found Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at the perfect time, that he assuaged the pain of losing my grandfather. Never before have I allowed myself to think about how his music could have been something we shared: a bridge between two generations in a time when we otherwise scrambled to find things in common to talk about. In his final months, Nanu would beckon my sister and I to sit next to him, then ask if we could play him some songs on our phone. With him peering into our screens to watch the accompanying music video on YouTube—usually from Baiju Bawra (1952) or Mughal-E-Azam (1960), black-and-white films he hadn’t fully watched in years—my sister Deeti and I listened to these tunes so much that we learnt the lyrics by heart. The night Nanu passed away, his body was taken home, laid out in the hall in a steel freezer. Seated next to it—on the same navy blue sofa-cum-bed Deeti and I had slept on as children exhilarated at the prospect of sleeping over at our grandparents’ home—I breathlessly created a playlist of all the songs he loved. It was on YouTube because many of the songs weren’t available on Spotify.

There was another thing Nanu longed to see on our smartphones, through which, he now realised, he had access to the entire world: the city of Dera Ghazi Khan in Pakistan. Again and again, he would ask us to look up this place that seemed to have reappeared in his memory now that he was an old man. On my web browser, I would pull up image after image of the dusty city; on YouTube, we’d watch travel vlogs with no more than a hundred thousand views of men there simply going about their daily routines, driving around or eating street food. The city was ordinary and unremarkable in almost every way if it wasn’t for the fact that my grandfather had once been a boy here.

In 1948—three months before Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born in Faisalabad and a year after the British initiated the Partition which split India and Pakistan into two separate states—Nanu and his family migrated to present-day India. It was here, in Mumbai, that he lived the majority of his life: here that he got married, had a daughter, saw his parents die, his two granddaughters excitedly pull open the navy blue sofa-cum-bed for sleepovers, the same sofa-cum-bed they would sit on the night of his death. Yet it was Dera Ghazi Khan he remembered as he slipped away. His childhood, his hometown, the winters in a country that would no longer permit him entry.

We lost Nanu’s refugee certificate the same day that we found it. Who had it last, who kept it where, in which folder; none of us could understand where it was gone. Kneeling on the concrete in the afternoon sun, Deeti and I spent an hour rummaging through two bags of trash from the residential complex, tearing open envelopes, rifling through spam mail, papers and cardboard, trying to find the tattered, yellowing document. When we failed, I tried to comfort myself by repeating that it was only a piece of paper, that I still had a photograph of it I’d sent to my friends, that a mere document could not sum up Nanu’s life; we had not killed him again. But the truth of it was that we had lost tangible evidence not only of Nanu’s existence but of his suffering, his displacement, the very memories that haunted him in his final years. The feelings from his life—the yearning for home, the way he tightly grasped my hand every time we watched vlogs of Dera Ghazi Khan—remained, but the facts were gone.

Ultimately, what this story comes down to is facts and feelings. I have all the facts of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s life, as I tell my therapist. I am aware that only this objective information is believed and taken seriously. Statistics, numbers, neutral, verified accounts are quoted in arguments, considered truer than the lived experiences of thousands. Yet it is my feelings that threaten to spill out: the many emotions surrounding Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and by extension, the death of my grandfather, that I am unable to confront and articulate. In her 1998 book The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia documents oral testimonies and personal chronicles from the 1947 Partition, placing people rather than high politics at the centre. “The ‘history’ of Partition seemed to lie only in the political developments that had led up to it,” she writes in reference to the books she had read so far on the subject. “These other aspects–what had happened to the millions of people who had to live through this time, what we might call the ‘human dimensions’ of this history–somehow seemed to have a ‘lesser’ status in it. Perhaps this was because they had to do with difficult things: loss and sharing, friendship and enmity, grief and joy, with a painful regret and nostalgia for loss of home, country and friends, and with an equally strong determination to create them afresh. These were difficult things to capture ‘factually.’”

On the 7th of May, 2025, India launched missile strikes against Pakistan in a military campaign codenamed Operation Sindoor. To write this, I had to look up the date on Wikipedia. The facts of the conflict–dates, month, who attacked whom first, when a ceasefire was declared, then violated–escape me entirely, no matter how much I try to remember. What I do remember is how it felt.

I remember the cold panic that washed over me when my sister burst into our bedroom with the news. The realisation that every mundane ritual we had taken for granted—a trip to the mall, a Friday night at the club, a simple plan made days in advance—was now a thing of the past. A sense of dread permanently stalked me; I felt as though I was walking through a haze. It was raining again, giving everything the quality of a bad dream, a repetition of the past, a nightmare we just couldn’t shake off. I flinched at every small sound: air strikes? Bombs? Near my father’s office, the police conducted a mock drill. There were rumours of a city-wide blackout scheduled for that afternoon. I remember repeatedly asking my parents, every stranger, every shopkeeper I met what they thought was going to happen despite knowing that they didn’t have any more information than I did. I refreshed the news frantically every few minutes. My main question was: could my sister and I still throw the house party we’d been planning for days?

At the party, I got drunk for the first time since Nanu’s death. Kept melting into tears the same way I had three years ago. It was inconceivable to me that every minute detail of our lives which had before seemed so fixed, could be transformed entirely by something so outside our control; worse, that our fates lay in the hands of a few powerful men with their own ulterior motives. In my first therapy session, I fretted over how helpless I felt, how intent I was on throwing this party because it was the only thing currently in my power. I panicked about Khan’s music being banned, despaired over the hopelessness that I was beginning to feel at the thought of not being able to hear his voice. What I really wanted was not to throw a house party or listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. What I really wanted was to know that I still had the freedom to.

Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson describes the nation as “an imagined community”, positing that the idea of this community is appealing to so many because “regardless of the inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.”

The 1947 Partition led to two such imagined communities: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, more manmade borders, the British’s parting gift. “Never before or since have so many people exchanged their homes and countries so quickly. In the space of a few months, about twelve million people moved between the new, truncated India and the two wings, East and West, of the newly created Pakistan,” notes Butalia. “Slaughter sometimes accompanied and sometimes prompted their movement; many others died from malnutrition and contagious disease. Estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted. As always there was widespread sexual savagery: about 75,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). Thousands of families were divided, homes were destroyed, crops left to rot, villages abandoned.”

This was the political landscape that Khan was born into, in the newly formed Pakistan. Watching his interviews, I am often surprised by his gentleness—so different from the emotional violence of his music—by the way he talks about India and Pakistan as if they never separated and continue to be singular. Because I was born over fifty years after the Partition, after the idea of these two dominion states had long seeped into public consciousness, India and Pakistan seemed, to me, two fixed entities, permanently divided, as if they had existed as separate nations since the dawn of time and would continue to eternally. But Khan—like my grandparents—seemed to speak of this division as a mere blip in many thousand years of history, a phenomenon he couldn’t quite understand, a fresh, temporary idea that at any time could be undone. In interviews, he frequently mentioned India alongside Pakistan, citing the shared cultural heritage of qawwali, which was created in 13th century Delhi by musician Amir Khusro. The purpose of qawwali is not just entertainment, he told The New York Times, but to spread “the universal message of love and understanding.”

In addition to other ritualistic practices like whirling and sama, qawwali is a part of Sufi tradition, which Khan followed. Sufism, which falls under the umbrella of Islam, is a mystic body of practice characterised by its values of spirituality, tolerance and peace. Khan epitomised these beliefs in his advocacy for a friendship between India and Pakistan. He spoke mournfully of his attempts and failures to persuade the government of his nation to launch diplomatic initiatives welcoming Indian musicians, of how there should never be restrictions on art (“An artist belongs to everyone”). Months before his death in August 1997, the 48 year-old singer gifted a song titled “Gurus of Peace” to Indian composer A.R. Rahman’s album Vande Mataram (1997) which celebrated fifty years of India’s independence. This was amongst his last recordings.

In the final days of the 2025 conflict between India and Pakistan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s official Instagram account became unavailable in India, as did the accounts of other Pakistani musicians such as Ali Sethi and Atif Aslam. “This is because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content,” the social media site states. Audio streaming platforms in India initiated the process of removing works by Pakistani artistes from their libraries. Television shows created in our neighbouring nation were pulled down across channels in India. The imagined community, I realised, is not just united for a cause but against one: a common enemy, the neighbour who becomes even more remote from us, more otherised and demonised, when we are unable to engage with their art, their stories, reckon with their humanity. “Sometimes,” Butalia writes. “State power can be called into the service of suppressing memory… The opening-up of the field of memory, the entry of artists, musicians and others into it, is not something that serves the interests of a right-wing government which would like to build  a majoritarian nation and therefore memory work that references Partition is now often labelled anti-national, and attempts to cross our borders are seen as betrayals and as anti-patriotic.” 

To censor is to kill—or at the least, to desensitise one group to the murder of another. On social media, I saw a cousin in his thirties celebrating missile strikes that had led to civilian casualties in Pakistan, writing on his Instagram story: “Take that, Porkies.” I received a video of another cousin, only five, euphorically chanting, “Death to Pakistanis.” Thousands of Indians called for war.

Three of my grandparents migrated across the border during the Partition, so I grew up on oral histories like the ones Butalia documents, on tales that seemed almost mythical, from a time and land far, far away. There was my Dadi’s cousin who was stabbed multiple times on her journey to India but survived, there was her family desperately hunting for food every time the train stopped at a railway station. Trains sped past piles of human bones. There was Chhote Dadu, whose voice still cracks when he remembers the years he was forced to spend away from his father and siblings because none of their relatives in India could afford to care for the entire family together, the years he pretended to dislike milk because he knew his family couldn’t afford it. There is Chhote Dadu, now in his eighties, perfectly drawing the layout of his Lahore home that he had to abandon at the age of five.

The truth is that no matter how many facts and statistics we hear–how many dead, raped, displaced, lynched–it is ultimately the stories, the art, the narratives that touch us, that let us understand another nation, another religion, another way of life. “What a ban does,” writes Anuradha Banerji, “is deny you the chance to weigh the record for yourself. It turns a citizen into an audience by severing your ability to compare accounts, test claims and decide where you stand… They train a public to prefer echo over argument.” If these narratives, this art, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s attempts to reach for peace, are censored, then the Partition is not just a tragic event that took place in 1947. It is something that has continued to happen ever since, that happens now, that will forever be happening. Because it is stories, feelings, memories, that make up a life, a generation, a history.

Growing up, I knew my Nanu to be the quietest, gentlest of us all. While my other grandparents’ personal histories poured out as I lay in their laps and listened intently, Nanu remained tight-lipped, only answering questions about his childhood upon our insistence. Consequently, I was cautious when I asked him these questions, framing them tentatively because it seemed as though his pain was always too close to the surface, that it would brim over if we poked or prodded too much. The few stories he told us were laced with an ache I could never understand the depth of, that I perhaps only felt a fraction of when I lost him.  Butalia stresses “the importance of remembering a violent history, for the sake of those who lived through it and died, and equally the sake of those who lived through it and survived.”  
Nanu came from a land I may never get a chance to see, spoke an Afghani dialect of Punjabi I never got to hear because only his parents and brother understood it, because his family suppressed, eliminated this language in an attempt to fit into what would be their new home for the rest of their lives. I never fully understood Nanu’s suffering, his isolation, which has perhaps made me even more sensitive to it, more apprehensive of writing this story, more fearful of what we lose when we lose art, music, stories from beyond borders. What we lose is not just a language, a culture, the potential of a more expansive brotherhood that goes beyond the limits of manmade boundaries. What we lose is something more intrinsic: our kindness, our empathy, our humanity. The memory that this was once a shared history and even today, continues to be. We lose the ability to look at someone, who may, at first glance, seem completely alien to us—a 48 year-old Muslim qawwali singer from a newly-created Pakistan, for instance—and realise: I see parts of myself in you.

Written at The Art Farm Residency in November 2025, Goa.

The post The Music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Pulled Me Through The Grief of Family Loss appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Even if you Beat Me,” appeared in 2015 in The Dublin Review, two years before Rooney’s debut novel. It traces the future author’s climb from an anonymous college debater to the number one competitive debater in Europe, followed by her disillusionment with the debate circuit altogether due to its “political frivolity” and disconnect from real-world issues. It’s considered the essay that launched Rooney’s fiction career, too, after catching the attention of the Wylie Agency. And while the specifics of the debate world and the essay’s significance in the arc of Rooney’s career are interesting, what I admire most about “Even if you Beat Me,” is Rooney’s unflinching portrayal of her own hard work, competitiveness, and ambition. 

Since we live in a moment where the self-conscious cultural elite both valorizes success but treats visible striving with distaste and even suspicion, owning one’s own voracious ambition is startlingly refreshing. In many of the circles I move in, peers deride institutional meritocracy even as they define themselves and their work by its standards. They hide their ambition and self-interest behind nonchalance or appeals to ethical and moral concerns. But not Rooney, at least not the Rooney in “Even if you Beat Me.” She straightforwardly admits her desires. She was a “nearly friendless teenager living away from home for the first time” when she stumbled into the debate hall and, to her delight, quickly identified the debate community as one where she could become “successful and popular.” 

That’s not to say the essay doesn’t grapple with what it means to desire acclaim and popularity within unfair systems. The opening scene depicts Rooney and her “privileged, English-speaking university students” riding past “dwellings made partly of cardboard advertisements” on the way to a debate competition in Chennai. She comments, “No one failed to notice this fact, but what was there to say about it?” echoing how many of us feel when confronted by an injustice so enormous we struggle to know what to say or how to make it a little bit better. And yet another strength of Rooney’s essay is that she does land on a way to make it a little bit better: by the end of the Chennai debate, Rooney quits debating. No more free international trips. No more “thrills from counterfactuals.” No more sycophantic fans. In other words, Rooney puts her money where her mouth is. 

Again, this kind of action feels like a breath of fresh air during a time—or, perhaps, all times—when it’s easier to say the right things than do the right things. Reading Rooney’s first novels through the lens of “Even if you Beat Me” can also clarify the intentional tension between personal drive and ethical awareness that underpins the inert, shallow politics of many of Rooney’s characters. 

In Conversations with Friends, for example, Frances identifies as a communist yet feels drawn to fame and affluence: “She was a big fan of seeing the insides of other people’s houses, especially people who were slightly famous like Melissa.” Bobbi, Frances’s ex-girlfriend, faces a similar predicament. She’s critical of capitalism while desiring the social and artistic opportunities that can come from proximity to capitalism’s victors. When Melissa suggests introducing Bobbi to Veronica, her “old money” friend who “was very helpful with getting her book published,” Bobbi responds, “Wealthy people sicken me…but yeah, I’m sure she’s great.” Knowing any of these characters, it’s not a stretch to imagine each might accept Veronica’s help while privately maintaining their critique of wealth and privilege.

But by quitting debate right when she’s at the top of her game, Rooney proves herself to be above her characters: a woman of convictions. She writes, “Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren’t any prizes.” On the one hand, this reflection, along with others like it, underscores the essay’s achievement as a rare piece of millennial writing that doesn’t downplay, ironize, or disguise raw ambition, but rather demonstrates it as a real meaning-making driver in many of our lives. On the other hand, it’s also a bit of a riddle when considered alongside Rooney’s later literary success and Marxism. Are we to believe so much success simply fell into her lap? Not necessarily. In her essay, Rooney acknowledges that she is “still working on that,” suggesting that her relationship with “prizes” is an ongoing process. 

“I don’t think I will ever again want something so meaningless so much,” Rooney confesses about her obsession with college debate. Another, more cynical version could go: I don’t think I will ever again show that I want something so meaningless so much. Performative modesty and what the Italians call sprezzatura (a kind of studied carelessness) are, after all, learned skills in elite social spaces that reward effort only when it appears effortless. Effortless is cool, credible.

Effort is for the pitiful, for the lesser gods. With that in mind, Rooney’s own trajectory offers an example of—take your pick—genuine growth or learned restraint. 

More than a decade after “Even if You Beat Me,” and its delightfully unflinching closing lines—“I was number one. Like Fast Eddie, I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best”—a New York Times piece about Rooney bore the headline “Sally Rooney Thinks Career Growth Is Overrated.” In the interview, she is portrayed in what has become her signature posture: one of ambivalence toward her effort, fame, and success.

It is impossible to determine whether this framing and adaptation to elite norms is Rooney’s own doing or the industry’s presentation of her. In contrast, recall the example of actor Jeremy Strong, who was mocked for being openly ambitious — à la “Even if You Beat Me”-style —in a 2021 New Yorker interview, “On ‘Succession,’ Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke.” Throughout the piece, the interviewer, a Yale graduate, implies that Strong’s hard work, seriousness, and ambition are uncool. Essentially, Strong is punished for violating the unspoken rule that true talent never tries too hard. 

But why is this so frequently the case in elite or creative spaces? Why must achievement often appear accidental or uncontrollable? You see this same treatment of achievement in Rooney’s first three novels, where her characters’ ambition and hard work are often muted or pushed to the margins of her stories. Many of her characters suffer from what I think of as latter-seasons Rory Gilmore Syndrome: things just come too damn easily for them. This is also true of her socially mobile characters, such as Connell from Normal People, the son of a house cleaner, who ascends to Trinity College Dublin and later, a prestigious M.F.A. program in New York. Rooney’s characters attend the best schools, write celebrated essays and books, win major scholarships, and maintain flawless physiques without breaking a sweat or counting calories. With few exceptions, they possess the right shibboleth, exert the right amount of effort, and easily forge connections with the right people: journalists, literary editors, film stars, scholarship committees, and graduate school admissions officers. There’s little trial and error amongst her successful, ambitious characters. Neither is there much aggression, jealousy, rage, or other neurotic behaviors associated with highly competitive people, except when concerning les affaires de cœur.

This is not the case for Rooney in her essay. At its start, she “suffers from intense nerves” yet submits to “the continual low-level humiliation of failure.” She admits to knowing “nothing about the outside world…when the war in Afghanistan had started, or what the Patriot Act was, or where exactly the Arab Spring was happening.” In fact, Rooney makes “disastrous attempts to fake [her] way through” her early debates until she finally “just starts to read the news.” Although this is a story about debate, not art, this kind of growth smells of a traditional Künstlerroman, a story of an artist’s development. Tellingly, when no longer a novice debater, Rooney learns “to hide [her] ambition behind concern.” Concern for what? For whatever topic of debate was on the table for the day.

Rooney explains that “competitive debating takes argument’s essential features and reimagines them as a game.” I read this now like a prophecy of our broader public discourse, where winning and losing can feel like everything, and the performance of conviction and concern often acts as a substitute for real action. In high school, I remember being drawn to Jaques’s famous monologue in As You Like It—“All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players…” I wondered how many of us understood ourselves as performers. Did I understand myself as one? How did this relate to free will? 

It seems to me that one’s understanding of oneself as a performer is closely tied to one’s idea of oneself as part of a narrative or within a narrative arc, and the more we adhere to a narrative about ourselves, the more we cling to performance. In other words, the more we live narratively, the more our lives resemble performances. Or the more we live narratively, the more we assemble our lives like performances. 

It’s commonly accepted today that the Internet, and particularly social media, has intensified this performance culture by giving every person the means to narrativize their lives constantly. There’s no more waiting for the holiday card or high school reunion to make narrative sense of your life. The public jury is always there waiting to see if you are sticking to script. Here, Rooney’s reflection resonates: “Success doesn’t come from within; it’s given to you by other people, and other people can take it away.” 

For a long time, I considered “Even If You Beat Me” a singular text within Rooney’s oeuvre. Of all her characters, Rooney, as a character in the essay, was the most legible to me as a striver surrounded by other strivers. Then Rooney released Intermezzo last fall, and once again I found the striver voice with fraternal protagonists Ivan, a chess champion, and Peter, a former successful college debater. Both brothers, like Rooney herself in her essay, hustle, and they aren’t afraid to admit it. In one conversation, the brothers discuss achievement. Peter remarks, “Well, there just wasn’t anyone good enough to beat us,” and “Ivan considers this, then answers: I wanted my life to be like that. Me too, says Peter.” 

“Even if you Beat Me” highlights how desire, ethics, and merit intersect, while—to use a common expression from where I’m from—showing us how the sausage gets made, a typically messy business, especially if someone is hailing from the working class or other marginalized backgrounds. It’s not until Ivan that we really see this sausage-making process again in her work. Ivan might be described as handsome, but he also wears braces, studies chess moves, and attempts a professional comeback, all while wearing his heart on his sleeve and battling the grief of losing his father. Ivan describes the “trapped knight” inside himself; it’s both an allusion to Ivan’s knights in the game of chess, making the right moves, and to the medieval knights of legend, those possessing the noble ideals that Ivan himself wants to possess: sacrifice, courage, and loyalty. Rooney in “Even If You Beat Me” also ultimately wants something more virtuous than what the debate circuit has to offer. However, it’s not so easy for strivers to kill the competitive beast inside us. Peter, who struggles with performance more than his younger brother, exemplifies this. At one point, he admits that he doesn’t need his rich friends to be poor, or even for himself to be rich, but rather, “To be right, to be once and for all proven right.” 

“Even if you Beat Me,” with its messy, authentic examination of ambition, is still my favorite text by Rooney, only now Intermezzo is a close second. Success never appears effortless in Rooney’s latest novel, nor are the main characters detached observers of the world around them, like the debaters Rooney once envied—“I wanted to be aloof and cerebral like the speakers I most admired.” The setting where Ivan meets Margaret, his future love interest, is a local community arts center, is different than any other Rooney setting. It buzzes with potential. It’s there that we witness Ivan teaching a ten-year-old girl how to correct a flawed move and encouraging her to practice. It melts Margaret’s heart (and mine too), while calling to my mind a moment in “Even If You Beat Me” when Rooney admits that despite all her ambition and awards, “I haven’t contributed to anyone’s understanding of anything, except maybe my own, and that only partially.” But that’s not the case with Ivan, as this scene shows, and it doesn’t have to be the case for the rest of us either.

The post I Love Sally Rooney’s Books but I Love Her Essay About Competitive College Debate Even More appeared first on Electric Literature.

“That drawing would be half good if we could actually see it,” he’d say. “Make it darker.” 

I tried, but my version of dark was featherlight. Exasperated, he gave me a Sharpie.

“You’re only allowed to draw with this,” he said. “Use some force. Tentativeness kills talent.” 

I was horrified. I didn’t know how to draw with something so blunt and bold. Somehow, I managed to be just as timid with the marker as I’d been with the pencil. Mr. Krezanosky sighed. “You’ll get there someday, kiddo.”

But have I? George Saunders’s new novel, Vigil, made me question how far I’ve come. Saunders’s protagonist, Jill Blaine, is a distinctly unforceful person intent on rankling no one. In other words, she’s me. A people-pleasing, Buddhist-leaning, born-and-bred conflict-avoider, I immediately recognized myself in Jill’s delicate approach. If she’s got a writing instrument in her little tan purse, I’d wager it’s a Number 2 pencil. 

When I interviewed Saunders for my podcast, he confessed that he likewise relates to Jill’s kindly outlook on the world, experiencing a “generalized fondness” for strangers that makes it hard to fathom our transgressions as a species. Yet in Saunders’s case, a soft heart does not translate to a light line. Tentative he is not.    

Jill is a ghost—literally. Her mission in the afterlife is to comfort the dying, a job at which she is highly successful until she meets oil company CEO K.J. Boone, a man who spurns solace. He has spent his life funding and spreading false narratives to discredit scientific findings on climate change. The book takes place at his deathbed during his final moments. Unrepentant, he believes he has contributed to human progress and is leaving the world a safer, more efficient place. He has lived a big, bold life free of pesky reflection. Force is the blood in his veins.

Jill uses her secret weapon—gentleness—to try to penetrate Boone’s haughty veneer to reach the lost little boy within, a kid teased for his shortness and backwater origins. Her outlook on the human condition is reflected in this passage about Bowman, a character from her past:

“He had left his mother’s womb with a particular predisposed mind and started living, and immediately that predisposed mind had run up against various events, and had been altered in exactly the way such a mind, buffeted by those exact events, would be altered, and all the while he, Bowman, trapped inside Bowman, had believed he was making choices, but what looked to him like choices had been so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon him that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.”

I nearly tore the page underlining this passage, exhilarated to find a character who so blatantly embodied my worldview. According to neuroscientists, over 95% of our thoughts and actions stem from subconscious conditioning. We operate out of familial, cultural, and epigenetic downloads that cause us to live on autopilot. Some scientists argue that any degree of free will is an illusion. The view that this whole human game amounts to a “lavish jailing” makes room for infinite compassion, even for behavior like Boone’s, who is merely a product of his upbringing. Jill perceives that anyone born into Boone’s particular body and circumstances would have made the same choices. And so, she brings to his bedside only comfort. 

I adored her. Felt validated by her. Somehow my pale drawings of childhood felt vindicated. Yes, I thought, there’s a time and place—a deathbed, for example—when judgment must be relinquished and soft lines are called for. Yet, as in so much of Saunders’s work, as soon as my mind fixed on this conclusion, the novel stealthily toppled it over. A second psychopomp pops into the story, a furious Frenchman with a loaded backstory who comes to confront Boone with a mile-high list of his crimes against humanity and the planet. The Frenchman rebukes Jill’s soft approach, equating her sympathy to complicity. If she’s a Number 2 pencil, Frenchie is black spray paint. The two death doulas square off for Boone’s last breath, and the novel is off to the races.

The initial comfort I felt in my alliance with Jill turned to creeping unease—the kind of holy cognitive dissonance that lets me know I’m in the deep waters of living, breathing art. As a meditation teacher, I, like Jill, have come to see everyone as an “inevitable occurrence” shaped by forces beyond our control. Participating in Saunders’s Substack, “Story Club,” and reading his book on craft, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, have bolstered my inclination to “revise toward kindness,” to ask, “who in this scene needs more love?” His novel Lincoln in the Bardo lends compassion to victims and perpetrators, each tangled in an unbidden destiny. Saunders is a Buddhist; dependent origination is a fundamental Buddhist belief that phenomena arise in dependence upon other phenomena, leaving us all interconnected.

In my own novels, I’ve savored writing unsavory characters—an abusive boyfriend in April and Oliver and a hard drinking philanderer in Dawnland. I worked to understand the roots of their particular “jailings”—not to satisfy some Buddhist precept, but because the substrate layers are what make a villain, or any character for that matter, compelling. When a narrative signals from the get-go who I’m supposed to love or hate, my engagement tanks and the fun stops. A villain who maps too closely onto a stereotype does nothing to expand the consciousness of the reader or the writer. I believe I generally succeed in humanizing my characters, but do I sufficiently take them to task? Are the two mutually exclusive? 

Jill and the Frenchman remind me of benevolent and wrathful Buddhist deities. As Jill tries to console Boone, the Frenchman reads from his towering stack of accusations: “The cardinal, he shouted, feeds on bits of plastic piping. In a ballroom filling with mud, chairs squeak in objection. A groggy hippo (What hippo, I wondered, why speak of hippos in this fearful place, this somber moment?) rolls yellow eyes up at a hunter seeking its ivory canines. A juvenile jaguar creeps forward, dismembers a poodle in a bright pink jacket.” 

Jill concludes the Frenchman is unhinged, yet I hear sanity in his madness. He asserts that Boone had power, knowledge, and choice. He was not a victim of conditioning, but an architect of climate catastrophe.

The Frenchman has his facts straight. In the 1970s, ExxonMobil executives had access to detailed climate data proving that burning fossil fuels would lead to global warming, yet the company publicly denied the link for decades. Just as tobacco companies refuted the health risks of smoking, oil companies deliberately sowed doubts about climate science to boost their bottom lines. Billionaires such as the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer heavily funded climate change denial. The misinformation they promoted impacted governmental policy decisions around the globe, and a disaster that could have been averted was instead accelerated. Like Boone, many of these men and women knew the truth. For the Frenchman, these decisions were not “inevitable occurrences,” but greed-driven choices made by people with extraordinary power.

“Rather than comforting him,” the Frenchman tells Jill, “I advise you to lead him as quickly as possible to contrition, shame, and self-loathing.”

Jill doesn’t buy it. But if what Boone needs most is redemption before death, isn’t leading him to contrition as forcefully as possible the most compassionate response? After all, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—a text which Vigil is deeply in conversation with—Marley doesn’t pat Scrooge’s hand. 

In his Substack, Saunders often quotes Chekhov: “A work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem; it just has to formulate it correctly.” In Vigil, he sharpens his long held personal inquiries into free will, identity, and corporate greed, and as always, trusts us to draw our own conclusions. Tragicomic and morally lucid, the book is at once signature Saunders—you can pluck out any paragraph and know that it’s his—and wholly groundbreaking. On the Richter scale, he’s made an exponential leap.

Much of this ferocity comes from Boone himself. No sooner do I begin shifting my allegiance from Jill to the Frenchman than the story presents a third argument—classic Saunders—through Boone, who responds to the Frenchman with a scorching counter:

“You know one thing you rarely heard about in the good old U.S.A. anymore? Monsieur Frog? A young fellow dying of appendicitis. At twenty-eight. Like Grandpa’s brother had. Because a road got washed out. And the horse-drawn cart couldn’t make it through. Imagine you go back in time and drop that young guy into the backseat of a big old SUV, fly him over a perfect four-lane to some gleaming modern hospital, save his life.”

Boone asks if the Frenchman would prefer to die in the horse cart or go “zinging toward help, air-con blasting? / Anyone with a lick of sense would choose the latter. / We had. / The world had.”

Boone isn’t wrong about the benefits of modern technology. But he’s also not addressing the Frenchman’s accusation: that he knew the cost and chose profit anyway. Novels about our current Dark Age that don’t challenge or deepen our understanding lack punch. Vigil is a boxing match.

The act of writing (and reading) invites us to abide more closely within another’s consciousness than is possible even with our loved ones. It’s the ultimate intimacy. How then to embody a character as reviled as Boone, whose very smile is a grimace “shot through with a measure of forced goodwill”? Saunders told me that in order to render Boone fully, he had to give himself over to his perspective, feel the certitude of his convictions, and express them as passionately as Boone himself would. Yet, Saunders conceded, Boone is not a real-life oil executive but Saunders’s image of one. Did he get it right? There’s no way to know, but the effort is a noble one that lies at the heart of all fiction writing. 

As Boone’s life wanes, Jill nudges him toward a softer outlook on himself and those he harmed, trying her best to “revise” him toward kindness. In our interview, Saunders confessed to getting impatient with her in his early drafts. Her comforting style, successful with her previous charges, had no effect on this man. And so, it seems to me, Saunders revised not toward kindness, but fierceness—that is, fierce attention to what the story was telling him. Jill’s old bag of tricks didn’t cut it anymore. She had to come up with a bolder approach. In doing so, she becomes less wispy and tentative, more distinctly herself. 

As we spoke, I felt my case for my Number 2 pencil—in writing, in life—further eroding. Yet, would I rather be Boone, a man who drilled bold lines in the world and left wreckage in his wake, or Jill, who lived and died without leaving a trace? A pencil, after all, is low impact and erasable. In writing and in living, I’ve chosen—or inherited—the softer tool. I may not have managed to draw with a Sharpie, but at least I didn’t clearcut a rain forest. 

“Oh no?” asks the Boone in my head. “What about all the times you’ve driven your SUV—hybrid to assuage your guilt—while sipping from a throwaway coffee cup? How many goddam trees did that cost?” 

“Fine,” I say, “but passive participation is not the same as deliberate orchestration.”

“Passive?” he says. “Does the car pump its own fricking gas? Is your air travel an inevitable occurrence?”

Oof. Nailed. 

Boone points out that big actors rely on small actors. If I believe I had no part in “the world” deciding on progress, I’m a fool. Not leaving a bold mark doesn’t mean I’m innocent; it means I’m afraid of owning my power—and I have been for a long time. But I can’t hide behind pencil lines anymore. There’s no such thing as a passive participant when the house is burning down. I’ve walled myself off, but smoke is seeping through the doorjamb. Faced with the Frenchman’s accusations, Boone becomes aware of “the wall that must be continually maintained between himself and certain complicating admissions.” You and me both, Boonie.

One night while writing this, I dreamed of smoldering drones attacking protesters on a college campus. Caught in the chaos, there was no way for me to fight back. I did what seemed the most radical choice available. I sat on the pavement and meditated. Not to “pray away” the evil, but to invoke a fiery sword of inquiry: What walls have I built between myself and certain inconvenient admissions? What delusions do I maintain to fuel my personal bubble? If dependent origination is as true as modern science suggests and we are all intimately connected, the best thing I can do to abate our collective unconsciousness is to nudge my percentage of autopilot down a point or two, become slightly more intentional than inevitable.

Not so easy, it turns out—for me or for Jill.

Like Boone, Jill maintains a wall between herself and particular memories that, if allowed to surface, would complicate her work. She and Boone each practice their own form of denial, neither able to “expunge some clinging last bit” of themselves because that “bit” has never been brought into the light of awareness. Nevertheless, fragments surface that our dear girl would rather not acknowledge, stirring a wrath she didn’t know she could muster. In Buddhism, wrathful deities use their swords to cut through delusion as a means of fierce compassion. When free of self-interest and guided by wisdom, rage can be a powerful tool for liberation. The Frenchman’s fury isn’t cruelty. It’s clarity.

In Vigil, the picture of compassion drawn in the opening pages transmutes into a truer version of itself. Such metamorphosis becomes possible when we abandon our preconception of our work in order to ruthlessly listen to it. Saunders calls writing “a species of meditation,” and when he quiets his mind, in walks hilarity. Boone is visited by a host of people and birds, living and spectral. We can almost feel Saunders’s surprise as each new arrival materializes. He’s a kid in a sandbox, shutting out any “shoulds” convention might impose on him. His wild imagination springs from playful curiosity. Vigil is as funny as it is dark. 

I’ve come a long way since Mr. Krezanosky’s class. I’ve learned that conflicts don’t get resolved by hiding under the bed. I still don’t like arguments, yet when they happen, I’m more able to stand in the fire with calm curiosity. But how about my writing? Have I outgrown my Number 2 pencil and learned to commit to a line? I’m working on a novel set in China, where I lived for several years before and after the Tiananmen massacre. I strive to understand my characters’ lavish jailing, to humanize without exonerating, to hold the paradox of conditioning and accountability. In Buddhist iconography, the blade is two-sided for a reason. One edge severs inner delusion, the other, outer. Are both edges of my sword equally sharp? Let’s just say after readingVigil, I’m investing in a whetstone.

Good stories, like suspension bridges, are held together by the tension of opposites. I’m learning slowly, tentatively (old habit), that this is true in life too. We need empathy as well as judgment. Understanding as well as rage. Literature in the age of the Anthropocene needs writers who can do what Saunders does in Vigil: keep us on the razor’s edge of paradox without collapsing us into facile conclusions. Because sometimes rage isn’t the opposite of compassion—it’s compassion with a spine. It’s what love looks like when it isn’t afraid to draw a bold line.

The post In “Vigil,” Rage Is a Tool for Compassion and Liberation appeared first on Electric Literature.

Afterwards, sifting through my response to the film, I wondered if my standards for Latines onscreen had been lowered too far by lackluster, tokenized representations and the political demonizations of Latin Americans. In a different political moment, would the sequence with Latine skateboarders have moved me less? After all, the film’s Latines are supporting characters and Paul Thomas Anderson is a white director. Yet, though they may play supporting roles, the Latines in One Battle After Another not only impact the narrative, they provide crucial meaning to the film’s visual language and themes. Their presence seems to be the genuine result of an artist creating powerful images rather than a product of representation’s stultifying logic. Was Steven Spielberg preoccupied with the “representation” of white children when he filmed E.T. making those bicycles fly? Or was he creating iconic imagery that takes extra meaning from those kids’ yearning for freedom from the adult world? This begs the question: When a white auteur gives nonwhite characters such sustained attention and we scrutinize the results, what does our scrutiny reveal about the political projects white artists can join? What is it that we want from our white art?

One Battle After Another’s first act follows the relationship between Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson and the machinations of their revolutionary group, the French 75. The spectacle of the French 75 blowing up buildings and freeing migrants from detention centers abruptly shifts when, in quick succession, Perfidia gives birth to a baby girl, Willa, rejects motherhood, is captured by the state, and rats out her comrades. From there, the plot revolves around Bob and Willa, who go into hiding in the town of Baktan Cross. There, Bob’s story is woven together with another organization in the film’s second act, an underground Latine resistance network whose tactics tend less towards spectacle, and more towards smuggling migrants to safety and quietly resisting oppression in the borderlands. This group has no official name nor any big speeches to codify their goals, yet they’re consistently shown outsmarting the government, resisting by whatever means necessary while remaining under the radar. 

These Latine aspects are encapsulated in Benicio del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a character who carries the second act of the film with his twin missions of rescuing Bob and a group of Latine migrants. This, what I’ve affectionately dubbed the movie’s “Latinocore” side, is crucial to understanding the whole of One Battle After Another’s complex racial and political messaging, which has provoked surprisingly harsh debate among critics. 

Latine activism is unusual subject matter for director Paul Thomas Anderson, in whose milk-pale oeuvre people of color are often sidelined and mined for stereotypical humor (Inherent Vice, Licorice Pizza); omitted because the films are “period pieces” (The Master, Phantom Thread); or, in the best of cases, narrowly escape narrative insignificance thanks to a specific actor’s charisma (Don Cheadle in Boogie Nights, April Grace in Magnolia). One Battle After Another breaks this decades-long pattern by prioritizing Black people and Latines with the idiosyncratic artistry Anderson previously reserved for white roles. Anderson, who has built a reputation for imaginative and powerful set pieces—think Daniel Day-Lewis shouting about milkshakes in There Will Be Blood or the frogs raining down on the cast of Magnolia—strides atop those same creative heights with nonwhite characters in One Battle After Another. In one of its many tour de forces, we follow Sensei Sergio as he leads Bob into his home, the roving camera winding around migrant families clustered in the hall and lingering on their faces before following Sergio and Bob through Sergio’s living room, kitchen, and bedroom in one shot—Bob’s frantic energy at odds with Sergio’s calm as he introduces Bob to his family as a “gringo Zapata.” This entrance into Sergio’s world, with fluid cinematography confidently navigating the chaos as the anxiously repeating piano notes of Johnny Greenwood’s score rise and fall, makes a sequence which stands up to the most intense moments from Anderson’s filmography. 

Rather than labeling the film a success or failure and joining the divisive online discourse it’s stirred up, I’m interested in what these reactions say about our critical orientation towards white auteurs telling less-white stories. If the complex racial politics of One Battle After Another are declared for posterity as a swing and a miss, what does that say about our greatest white auteurs’ ability to confront our present era? Do we want white filmmakers to steer clear of the risks inherent in telling nonwhite stories? 

I realize I’m defending a movie that may appear to need no defense. Grossing over $200 million worldwide, its revenue far exceeds Anderson’s previous films, it’s received predictable critical adoration and thirteen Oscar nominations.

Yet among the underrepresented audiences you might expect to love its subject matter—people of color, leftists—it’s been harshly criticized. In broad strokes, these critiques focus upon One Battle After Another’s sensationalistic treatment of its Black characters and on its allegedly-superficial politics, the French 75’s rhetorical shadow of the movements upon which it is modeled.

It’s true that One Battle After Another is more interested in failed revolutions, in activists who can’t get their shit together, than in illustrating social change. And I don’t detract from the Black critics who’ve rightly pointed out stereotypes and misogynoir, most evident in Perfidia, who, despite a masterful performance from Teyana Taylor, is a hypersexualized, delinquent mother who betrays her fellow revolutionaries. Still, I find in Perfidia more than a collection of harmful tropes. The film itself suspends judgment: Her “relationship” with Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw—the villain pursuing her, the French 75, and, later, Bob and Willa—is nonconsensual, post-partum depression complicates her actions, and we see other revolutionaries get captured, questioned, and, each time, cave. Complicity is not uniquely Perfidia’s sin. This universality, of saving oneself when crushed beneath the authoritarian jackboot, demonstrates the power wielded by states, and how, once separated from the collective, individuals struggle to resist it. 

However salient, both these lines of critique elide the Latinocore. When the federal government unleashes immigration raids on Baktan Cross, providing cover for their mission to apprehend Bob and Willa, the camera slows down to show us the Latines being detained, underlining the human cost of this assault. But Baktan Cross, a setting where Chicano culture infuses every set piece and shot, is not helpless. As Bob takes refuge with Sergio, it’s revealed that Sergio is a fulcrum in the town’s network of underground Latine resistance. While protesters confront the militarized police, Sergio repeatedly rescues Bob and simultaneously organizes the escape of multiple Latine families living in his building. None of the extensive spoken Spanish is subtitled, a decision which refuses to cater to non-Spanish speakers. These Latinocore scenes and details act as a fly in the ointment for those condemning the movie for illustrating racist tropes or being politically shallow—unsuprisingly, negative critiques ignore these elements. 

Positive reviews (largely penned by white critics, with some positive reviews from Latines appearing in Spanish) appreciate del Toro’s performance but seem less comfortable praising the film’s racial representation. Instead, most have analyzed its aesthetics or how it departs from Anderson’s previous work. Critics pointing out that the movie’s biggest departure is its surge in melanin have largely been nonwhite, and since many of them reacted negatively to this departure, there’s a growing critical consensus that while the movie might be well-made, the results are mixed at best concerning Anderson’s ability to tell stories beyond his own whiteness.

In contrast, Anderson has not come under widespread scrutiny for people of color’s absence or sidelining in his previous films. I won’t claim that Phantom Thread or The Master are racist because they tell white stories, but I question why we accept this absence while any significant nonwhite presence opens white auteurs to critique. This critical landscape tells us that the absence of people of color is more acceptable than our presence, and that white auteurs will be lauded for making Great Art across their saltine-tinted bodies of work while keeping people of color outside of the frame. The complaints when white artists do attempt to decenter whiteness send an additional, paradoxical message that our stories are too difficult for even Great (white) Artists to possibly attempt.

Do we want our white artists to solely center white people? Do we want them to do the more “woke” version of staying in their lane, making art about white people with a few inoffensively diverse characters thrown in as shields against racial critique? That seems to be what we, as a culture, are incentivizing, but we should ask our artists to do more than claim “inoffensive” as a virtue.

If artistic discourse and output accepts white artists moving beyond art that centers whiteness, collaboration with nonwhite artists strikes me as essential. That collaboration is evident in One Battle After Another, as Paul Thomas Anderson has vocally credited Benicio del Toro for his creative input to the Baktan Cross scenes. According to Anderson, these scenes went unwritten until del Toro wrote not only his character’s dialogue, but helped formulate the movie’s second act. Everything from the set decoration to the unsubtitled Spanish in these scenes feels connected to lived Latine experience, and this can’t be separated from del Toro’s collaboration. 

It’s hard to overstate how wonderful Benicio del Toro is as Sensei Sergio. Where Bob is frantic and paranoid, Sergio is serenely competent. He saves Bob, but never lets this white man derail his own objectives; he calls his activism a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation” and an “Underground Railroad,” one example of how this film links migrant struggles and Black liberation. He is characterized endearingly down to the last detail: He wears cowboy boots in a nod to Latino gauchos and corrido folk heroes; adorning his bedroom walls are paintings of tigers, and Eye of the Tiger is his ringtone; and he doesn’t let Bob trespass on his tatami mats even though Bob is running for his life. Sergio tries to share his Zen attitude, reminding Bob to be like “Ocean Waves,” a useful metaphor when confronting battles that won’t stop coming.

Sergio brings to mind Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea of “la facultad,” as expressed in her seminal work Borderlands/La Frontera: “La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities . . . an instant ‘sensing,’ a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning.” This “sensing” comes to those who’ve been marginalized, who can’t live safely in aboveground society, whose identities have been shaped by violent borders. La facultad starts as the adaptive quick thinking required to survive a hostile world and becomes deep counterknowledge to the ways and means of dominant society. 

When Sergio says to Bob, “We’ve been laid siege for hundreds of years,” this is la facultad. He follows up with a needed reminder to Bob, “Don’t get selfish.” The lessons Bob has taken from life in hiding enable him to escape Lockjaw’s first assault. But while Bob’s peril has granted him an inkling of la facultad, he’s still lived as a white man; his paranoia hasn’t become la facultad’s deeper knowing. We can read Bob’s flailing as a white director’s tacit admission that he needs help telling stories about people of color, with Sergio’s expertise standing in for the creative input and guidance of Latino collaborators.

In one example, Bob falls off a roof while following BeeGee and the skateboarders to safety and winds up in jail, where Latine resistance continues to save his ass: In jail, the Latina intake worker suggests that he’s diabetic, sending him to the hospital, where a Latina nurse frees Bob and instructs him to escape to Sergio’s waiting car. Sergio hands him a six-pack of Modelos and takes a selfie with Bob, declaring, “Let’s play offense,” as they drive off.

This escape sequence, with the Latinas’ smooth operation, Sergio’s selfie and seamless switch to offense, demonstrates Latine playfulness and what Anzaldúa calls “serpentine movement,” the movement of Latine political and spiritual activism. This is a reference to the Nahuatl snake goddess, Coatlicue, whom Anzaldúa reclaims as a force representing the path to self-acceptance and evading colonial authority. Embracing Coatlicue enables more than survival, empowering us and making art, playfulness, even the divine accessible through the identities created by life in the metaphoric-and-literal Borderlands. As Anzaldúa puts it, “[L]earning to live with la Coatlicue . . . transforms living in the Borderlands from a nightmare into a numinous experience.”

It seems unlikely that Paul Thomas Anderson and Benicio del Toro read Anzaldúa to prepare these scenes. Nonetheless, they turn the borderland of Baktan Cross into a numinous place, touched by the divine, in which activists move like Coatlicue and the community’s street smarts, its facultad, protects itself. 

While I see radical politics illustrated through the film’s Latinocore scenes, other readings suggest little discontinuity in Anderson’s pattern of centering white characters. When I watched the movie again with a friend of mine, she kept exasperatedly asking, “Why are they helping him?” It’s a good question: Why do these Latine activists go out of their way for Bob, who is useless at best and hindrance at worst?

The cynical answer is that they help him because One Battle After Another stars a white man, and therefore requires its nonwhite characters to serve him. We see this repeatedly from white directors, adjacent to if not reiterating White Savior tropes. It’s hard to argue against this metatextual reading, as Bob is the protagonist, and once his arc leaves the Latine characters, so does the narrative.

Yet, Bob is the Latines’ damsel in distress rather than their White Savior. From Bob’s first panicked arrival at his door, Sergio understands: this man needs help, and may not have much to offer in return.

A different reading of the film suggests that it would be out of character for Sergio and his allies to not help Bob. In-universe, the principles of solidarity and la facultad of his comrades save him, not his whiteness. When Bob reveals his link to the French 75, Sergio had already saved him once, regardless of revolutionary bona fides. He doesn’t privilege Bob over the migrants (“Don’t get selfish”) but Bob’s precarity is motivation enough. 

Another scene, not involving Sergio or his allies, illustrates similar principles. Pursuing Willa and Lockjaw by car, Bob arrives at an intersection with no clue which way they went. He stops to ask for directions at a roadside stand staffed by Latinos. The men point the way, he thanks them, and drives off in the right direction. This whole conversation is spoken in Spanish, clumsy on Bob’s part.

Anderson could have cut this without interrupting the plot, but it justifies its presence by underlining the principles of solidarity that enable Bob and Willa’s survival. Bob isn’t fluent in Spanish, but he can communicate; if he’d learned no Spanish, he’d never find Willa. The Latinos unhesitatingly help him. Anderson breaks with the film’s paranoid atmosphere to show that strangers (including foreigners) are not inherently hostile, they can be trusted, and that Bob—by extension, all revolutionary hopefuls—needs community support and solidarity. That Bob frequently seems undeserving of the help he receives, that it’s sometimes hard to imagine a more incompetent leading man, demonstrates how deep these principles go. Everything this movie has to say about how you keep fighting one battle after another is conveyed through this scene.

In a better world, multiple movies with One Battle After Another’s budget could come from directors of color and star nonwhite actors rather than Leonardo DiCaprio. In that world, I’d get my movie about Latino skateboarders from a Latine director; Perfidia would be explored by a Black woman director who’d give her dimensions beyond aggressive sexuality. But in this world, white artists get the bulk of industry permission and critical acclaim. I don’t want to see those artists lucky enough to be given permission and funding by gatekeepers avoid the risks inherent to writing across difference.

Writing across difference should be a risky endeavor: You risk causing offense and inviting blowback. But any artist worth their accolades should not fear. Artists take risks—different in extent, not in kind—to make any art of lasting value. This doesn’t let auteurs off the hook for risking and failing, nor does it exempt white artists from criticism, but in a white supremacist society, if we tell artists from the dominant racial category to only “write what they know,” we end up with reflections of society’s dominant values through the white faces and stories these artists already know. I prefer to see even flawed attempts to subvert the dominant paradigm. 

Gloria Anzaldúa chose not separatism between Latines and whites, but to give artistic direction: Through our art and literature, she wrote, “we must share our history with [whites] . . . They will come to see that they are not helping us but following our lead.” In One Battle After Another, Bob follows Sergio’s lead in all their shared scenes. When the camera briefly returns to Sergio once he’s left Bob’s story, we see Sergio exiting his vehicle by the side of the road, waiting to be arrested. His face relaxed as ever, he finishes his Modelo and doesn’t stand, but dances: hips swaying, feet shuffling and gracefully raising his arms. Is he dancing the Salsa? Samba? Unclear, but the sway of his hips channels Anzaldúa’s serpent movement, Latinocore to the end as he answers stern cop questions with jokes (“I’ve had a few.” “A few what?” “A few small beers”). Despite his circumstances, the film projects little suspense regarding his fate, his cool assuring us that he’ll evade authority’s grasp. Possessing la facultad, we know he’ll walk free.

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