#Kathryn VanArendonk

[scullysflannel]

do you know of any other critics who are (even slightly!) skeptical about succession? really interested to hear a variety of thoughts because i've mostly heard universal praise

they've all been sniped. no jk. they do exist! there were people who soured on season 3 because they thought the show felt stuck (like Sophie Gilbert at The Atlantic and Cassie da Costa at Vanity Fair). I think being stuck is the whole point of Succession (because it's a comedy) but they're not turning that into anything dramatically satisfying. Lili Loofbourow's take on this in Slate is my favorite; it's a good look at how repetitiveness might be "the point" but it's still draining the show of any real stakes.

what I really want to read is a good article on what it means that this supposedly pointed eat-the-rich satire is so beloved by so many rich people. shouldn't it comfort them less? I liked this piece in Vanity Fair by Richard Lawson, whose review of Season 1 was also skeptical, but Succession isn't the focus of that piece. but I agree with the idea that nobody's succeeded at going for the kill. honestly, I think Succession is closer to getting it right than any other eat-the-rich satire airing right now. (it's no Veep though.) I loved this feature from Alison Herman at The Ringer about how the designers and cinematographers make wealth look miserable. 

but if the idea is "rich people are miserable," the pity kind of dulls the satire. but it's SO hard not to make that argument sound media illiterate!! this article in The Week is technically asking the question I want to read about (does Succession hate wealth as much as it wants you to think), but most of the argument boils down to "it's hard not to sympathize with characters as you watch them suffer." which is annoying because it treats audiences like they don't have brains and feels dangerously close to "Breaking Bad glorifies meth" levels of not getting it. of course saying wealth is a trap for the wealthy doesn’t cancel out their horribleness. but artistically, yeah, as some reviews have pointed out (like Mike Hale at the New York Times and Darren Franich at EW), Succession has had a hard time balancing mockery and sympathy. it feels like two shows in one, and it’s better at being the funny one.

anyway, this one isn't remotely negative, but I think it sums it up: here's Kathryn VanArendonk at Vulture on why Succession is a great comedy.

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

[Image ID: Tweet from verified user Kathryn VanArendonk (@/ kVanAren) on 2022-06-28 reading: shoutout to the grandma in this target at 9am walking a kid down to the toy aisle and whispering "okay show me the thing you want that you're not supposed to have" /End ID]

[denimbex1986]

'...Jen Chaney’s Top 10 Shows

...2. Ripley

Most remakes are rehashes or retellings that change certain details but ultimately leave their audience with the same thoughts and feelings they had the first time they heard this story. The Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley has been adapted numerous times, most notably as a 1999 Anthony Minghella film, but Ripley is not a remake; it’s more of a reframing. Shot in rich black and white by director and writer Steven Zaillian alongside Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit, Ripley’s eight episodes take their exquisite time, both with character development and, crucially, the moments Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) commits his crimes and goes through the grueling work of attempting to cover them up. In this Ripley, you see and feel the weight of what he’s done — the labor that comes with hiding a body, the blood that has to be scrubbed away — much more intensely, which makes his lack of concern and ability to blithely lie all the more shocking. Scott delivers a phenomenally restrained performance; the look in his eyes is constantly blank, as if he’s inviting others to fill in the emotions and authenticity he’s incapable of producing himself. Much like the cat that lurks in the lobby of Ripley’s apartment building in Rome, you can’t stop staring at this fraud of a man and wondering how long he can go until someone finally figures him out...

Roxana Hadadi’s Top 10 Shows

...2. Ripley

No television show this year looked this good or felt this ugly. With a magnetically dreary allure, Steven Zaillian’s Ripley embraced paranoia, meanness, and bad vibes, chasing all memories of Anthony Minghella’s sun-soaked 1999 film away. With chilly black-and-white cinematography and sparse dialogue, Zaillian magnified the vein of cruelty running through Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, while Andrew Scott used every muscle in his body to render his scamming, murderous Ripley unreadable, the living embodiment of want and coveting clever enough to never let anyone catch on to the depths of his desire. (Except for Dakota Fanning’s Marge, giving a skeptical performance here just as delicious as her work in The Perfect Couple.) Tom dragging his latest victim’s body down the stairs of his beautiful Italian apartment building, then getting increasingly irritated at having to clean up all the blood he has tracked around, all while getting judgmental glares from Lucio the cat? Most grimly hilarious sequence of the year...

Kathryn VanArendonk’s Top 10 Shows

...7. Ripley

Yes, it has an impeccable lead performance from Andrew Scott, and, yes, it has a perfect TV cat, and, yes, Dakota Fanning pulls off a tricky role, and, yes, it has one of the most gruesome boat-based murder sequences filmed in a long while, and, yes, its pretensions may occasionally get the better of it. But beyond all that, was there a more visually astounding series on TV this year? No, and it’s not a close contest. At first glance, Ripley’s black-and-white cinematography might look like a bug rather than a feature, a snooty approach to Patricia Highsmith’s con-man story. But the look of Ripley is not a superficial layer — it’s the foundation that makes the entire thing work, a visual version of the same language of class-based posturing and brutal striving that drives its whole worldview. All that Italian art drained of color, reduced to light and shadows, so much starker, sharper, and crueler than if it were seen in warm, human tones … that’s the good stuff...'

[juliiwrites]

My favourite monologue of all time? Jane the Virgin, season 5 episode 1.

It is the most breathtaking monologue I've ever seen. From the raw emotions, the way Gina Rodriguez delivered it (perfection) and how the scene was shot... It is a work of art. It shows just how much talent Rodriguez has, and it shows that the people who wrote, directed and produced this scene are incredibly talented as well.

Unsurprisingly, this this not a singular opinion. I was googling "Jane the Virgin That monologue" and found many great articles on the greatness that it is. For example, this one by Kathryn VanArendonk and Maria Elena Fernandez for Vulture, or this one, by Linda Maleh for Forbes. All three authors captured the magnificent essence of the monologue and give a lot of background information. And: both articles are soooo amazingly well written!! (Almost as if the people who wrote it get paid for writing...)

[robosucka]

The Rehearsal is impressive simply from a production standpoint: There is a shock in seeing someone’s entire world rebuilt in perfect detail on a soundstage solely so they can playact one short conversation[...]That disorientation is more than a little horrifying[...]Fielder, as he says himself at one point in the show, holds much more power than any of the participants. Yes, they’ve consented to have their lives turned upside down, consented to be portrayed on camera, agreed to play along with scenarios designed to manipulate them. But can they really say no? They can control their own behavior, but they have no say in how that behavior is eventually edited. Even if they think they’re playing along — as Fielder’s bar-trivia man does — the process seems destined to betray them. Fielder toys with the idea that this man will end up shaken and disgusted when he realizes Fielder has prodded him toward a certain outcome, but The Rehearsal never lets us see how he truly feels after that revelation. In another rehearsal, the participant simply leaves, apparently opting out of the process. But The Rehearsal uses all his earlier footage anyhow.

But there is at least one level on which The Rehearsal is unquestionably commenting on something beyond the strange recesses of Fielder’s mind. Everything Fielder does is an unadorned version of how all reality TV works. We’re uncomfortable because we can see the mechanics of it, but nothing is actually different. People consent to play along with a production, often built as a “social experiment” for their possible gain[...]And once you strip it all down, isn’t The Rehearsal doing what all television does? Some of its most discomfiting elements involve that rehearsal for Angela, who wants to rehearse motherhood. Child actors, including infants and toddlers, become part of Fielder’s process, answering to different names and pretending Angela is their real parent. It’s nightmarish; you wonder if it damages them; it’s exactly what any child actor does for a more conventional television show. Sets built to look like a real home, lines prepared in advance, participation without a final say into what shows up onscreen — it’s not that different from a standard TV production, but it’s so much more unnerving when Fielder lets us see how it all works.

Kathryn VanArendonk, for VULTURE mag , in "Nathan Fielder's Dazzling, Horrifying Trial Run of Reality", writes compellingly about having seen all six episodes of The Rehearsal in an essay I am sure will become my earnest opinion about the show forever

[momentsinreading]

“I think female audiences are trained to not take their own stories as seriously. Stuff men were obsessed with when they were 9 is treated like Hamlet. How many Spider-Man movies are there? How many Star Wars? They tell it over and over again from different perspectives. That’s all fine, obviously. But what if someone treated something for girls that seriously? Even with a fraction of the money.” -Kathryn VanArendonk

[purficklyclean]

As I sat contemplating the beauty and disappointment of the first four episodes of HBO’s new His Dark Materials series, I arrived at the kind of bong-rip question that fuels many a junior-level English seminar: What is adaptation for? It is for money, of course, and ostensibly for the love of a story that a creator wants to inhabit so fully that the only thing they can do is tell it again themselves. Adaptations can be for ownership — there are adaptations that claim or reclaim characters and narratives. Adaptations can also be for improvement; the recent Looking for Alaska miniseries is a great example of how adapting a work can make it even more of what it should’ve been from the jump.

Whether an adaptation goes in with a sense of its own purpose is one of those things you can feel as a viewer. You can feel it even if you’re not sure what the purpose is, or if the purpose is nothing more than “I truly love this story and I want to tell it again.” You can also tell when an adaptation’s reason for being has been so sanded down and defanged and jumbled and depressurized that it now feels a little empty. This, sadly, is what’s happened to His Dark Materials.

“His Dark Materials Is a Gorgeous Adaptation In Need Of a Purpose” by Kathryn VanArendonk

[reactingtosomething]

It’s amazing to see popular, buzzy, successful reality shows where the experts are queer people, women, and people of color. It is good that positions of expertise are held by people who aren’t typically recognized in those roles. It’s especially nice when the host and participants represent a broadly envisioned, inclusive image of the world. Kondo’s show and Queer Eye both feature queer participants and nonwhite families. The food guides in Salt Fat Acid Heat are almost exclusively women. The image of humanity in these three series is lots of different kinds of people, unified by their readiness to tackle hard things and come out the other side feeling better about themselves.

But the real world is not an episode of Queer Eye. Marie Kondo will never be able to tidy away racism with the same calm insistence that she does your socks. Though this genre focuses on a full-spectrum representation of human existence, the flip side is that these shows can also mirror exoticizing culture tropes in culture: Kondo is not just a woman who’s here to help you organize, but a tiny Japanese fairy godmother, a Miyagi-esque character whose identity is mined to help upper-middle-class white people improve their lives. [...] When the Fab Five help queer people, they are warm mentors; when they are Queer Eye-ing straight people (especially men), long-standing cultural baggage turns them into gay best friend characters, marginalized in their own stories and existing solely to help straight people. [...] Neither Tidying Up nor Queer Eye are deliberately recreating these tropes. But it’s still a feature of these shows, a cultural echo they cannot fully shake, something too snarled and historically laden to be coiled away in an eight-episode box of diverse colors and styles.

[...] 

But I still enjoy them. I spent the winter break organizing my home, and it was satisfying to haul bags of things I no longer needed out of my front door. I made a very good roast chicken. I snapped at my children sometimes, and I did not Take Lots of Time for Me, but I will try again tomorrow. Joy takes effort, the experts tell us. You can always try again.

by Kathryn VanArendonk

Click through above for the rest.

[postguiltypleasures]

JANE THE VIRGIN Finale Articles Links Round Up

Jane the Virgin, a show I never missed and affected my emotions on surprising ways wrapped up last week. It did well by plots that I feel like I’ve only ever seen done badly. The finale was pretty perfect in that it highlight what was special about the show and giving us the viewers a loving goodbye. I don’t know where the show will ultimately fit in with the direction in which television is moving, it kind of feels like an end of something and the beginning of something. Going through these fair wells might be a first step.

I’m actually starting with a couple of articles that really weren’t about the show’s finale. The first is technically a review of Emily Nussbaum’s I Like to Watch, as she has been a great champion of the show, as well as generally insisting that the what is considered “serious” vs “frivolous” be reconsidered. This response to Nussbaum’s book starts in particular about her essay “Jane the Virgin isn’t a Guilty Pleasure”. Nussbaum’s essay does a great job at praising what the show does well as connecting it to earlier television shows. (Interestingly she doesn’t associate Jane with camp the way she did with Ugly Betty, nor does she list that as one of Jane’s predecessors despite the fact that both are US primetime networks adapting Latin American telenovelas. I’ll get more into why I think that is interesting and probably for the best later.) The article about her book does more to talk about how it’s been frequently overlooked for shows that seem created for men. In a lot of her book tour Nussbaum has spoken about how the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos were discussed around the time that they debuted drove her into tv criticism. If I were to pick something to be The Sopranos to Jane’s Buffy I’d probably go with Breaking Bad, as it had a notoriously difficult time getting its fans to care about/not hate Walt’s home life. Walt’s home life was about the slow consequences of his drug dealing and gangster activity. There was always a fair amount of gangster activity on Jane, but from watching Breaking Bad could leave you with the impression that there’s no way to make caring for an infant as exciting as the chaos of organized crime. Jane proved that isn’t true.

Also before the finale, The Ringer published this article that is sort of half praise/ half interview with the creator. It gets into the ways it played with the crime drama story types but never really treated it like that’s what it was about. It also gets into the writer’s room, and I was happy to learn that some people there have worked on telenovela’s in the past. It also has some quote’s from Jaime Camil who plays Jane’s father Rogelio de la Vega, which I thought were an interesting contrast to an interview he gave earlier in the show’s run. The Ringer article misleadingly identifies Camil as having starred in the “Spanish language version of Ugly Betty.” There were three Spanish language versions of Ugly Betty, or rather there were three Spanish language versions of the Colombian telenovela Yo Soy Betty La Fea which was the source material for Ugly Betty. Camil starred it the Mexican one, La Fea Más Bella, which debuted around the same time as Ugly Betty. (Fun fact, between LFMB and the later Por Ella Soy Eva, Camil has twice starred in Mexican remakes of Colombian telenovela’s in roles originated by Jorge Enrique Abello) I was at one point obsessed with the whole constant remaking of YSBLF phenomena and Ugly Betty in particular. It was taking on one of the most popular IPs of all time and had to do it in a very different format than the original. (Producing one episode a week for an indefinite number of years is very different than five episodes a week for approximately a year. For starters, there’s going to be a much smaller ensemble.) I never watched the original Venezuelan telenovela Juana la Virgen. It wasn’t remade internationally with anything like the regularity as Betty, and ultimately that may have been in the American show’s favor. Part of me wants to say that Jane learned from some things Betty tried but didn’t necessarily execute so well. And another part of me thinks that not having the burden of massive international popularity allowed them to jettison some of the things that made it a harder to adapt for a different audience. In the original YSBLF, Betty’s family life and work life have this great tension where some of her more questionable decisions (specifically, choosing to help her boss commit fraud to the board of the company) are partially based in some disillusioning parts of her home life (namely, her father loosing his job due to the boss selling the company and never paying out his pension). Ugly Betty never played those two aspects of Betty’s life against her like that. In some ways it was much better to the character. (American Betty had professional ambition in a way that the original didn’t.) But in this not knowing how to connect her family and professional lives, it often felt like it was struggling to make the family life stories matter. Jane the Virgin never had this problem. Partially because it was much more interested in emotional reactions than plot twists, but also, because it didn’t need to follow an original’s example of making the work place drama the engine of the show. Between the different relationships they had with their source materials and how they mined the work/life balances of their character’s they were different shows, from different times. Too much comparison is just counterproductive.

Kathryn VanArendonk wrote beautifully about how the fantastical elements of the story made the more mundane plots like finding a good school for Mateo, and balancing child care and a burgeoning writing career, really work. VanArendonk doesn’t focus on how badly many other shows do on making the housekeeping side of life interesting. The fact that as a tv watcher you’ve been through so many examples of shows that feel like the drag or are just aimless when it comes to the personal life side of the work life divide does contribute towards the sort of miraculous feeling Jane sometimes created, but it’s probably for the best not to focus on the negative examples.

I also want to highlight this great personal essay about how the show dealt with both being an adult and having anxiety around sex, mostly because of cultural baggage. The show didn’t so much reject the things that we associate with the baggage (ie no one abandoned the Church. (Also not discussed was the fact that all three of the Villanueva women had anxiety about sex at some point in their stories, but as Xiomara’s was more about the aftermath of cancer and chemotherapy than culture created anxiety, so it doesn’t fit with Mariya Karimjee’s larger theme. Just bringing it up to say, I liked how Xiomara’s post-cancer story worked out.)

A final one from Vulture about the reveal that the narrator is the adult version of Jane’s son Mateo. I’m highlighting it because the Mateo has ADHD plot was one of the most moving stories the show did during the final season. ADHD is so misunderstood and there were so many ways that this could have gotten a too pat, wrong message of an ending. I’m glad voice over actor Anthony Mendez talks about how even as an adult it’s something with which he struggles.

I cheered for Petra for most of the series. However, due to things in my real life, I currently have a pretty low tolerance for stories about bad bosses. Petra’s worst quality was she was a terrible boss, mercurial and abusive. Inkoo Kang’s tribute to the character is good, and gets at why I’ve been interested in her, and her relationship with Jane, for so long. Despite finding Petra less likable in the final seasons than in earlier ones when she was more villainous, one of my favorite moments of hers did come this season. At one point she says that her “worst nightmare” is turning into her mother.  It could have been just a throwaway one, but then the narrator tells us it’s true and shows us what it looks like, and it manages to be hilarious, heartbreaking a you get why this would be Petra’s worst nightmare.

(The Toast once dedicated a “Femslash Friday” to the Jane and Petra dynamic. Here’s the link if interested.)

After the finale aired Slate also published an article about how the Michael is not dead plot didn’t work and was a disservice to the way love works. I mostly agree. I never really cared with whom Jane ended up.  The show was always more about figuring out haw to build and maintain relationships than proving who was more right for each other. And I did kind of like the “each in their own time” resolution to the love triangle. (I felt similarly to the one in Lost Girl.) I get why the show did it. I do agree it was why the final season dragged in some parts. I do think Michael coming back from the dead reinvigorated the Sin Rostro story just in time to climax on the penultimate episode. Whether or not that was worth it is up to you.

I do want to take this moment to point out that while watching Jane walk down the aisle in the final episode, I realized that there never really wasn’t a moment in the entire where I felt doubt that Jane was loved, or felt unlovable. The closest it ever got to that’s in its depictions of how growing up without a father affected her. But, as connecting with her biological father Rogelio and developing a very deep bond was such an important part of the show, that anxiety was never really felt for Jane. (Petra, on the other hand…) This makes her kind of an outlier of most of the series I watch, whether the was the point of the series (You’re the Worst, Crazy Ex Girlfriend) or kind of a side affect of the surreal and chaotic universe in which it’s set (Broad City, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). I’m not sure what to make of this. Is it part of why it would be more likely to be misidentified as a guilty pleasure? Is it a sign about changes in what makes a heroine “relatable”?

I’ve repeatedly said here that I’m thinking about tapering the amount of tv I watch until it’s none. In Margaret Lyons’s review, she talks about how Jane was in some ways the show that replaced Mad Men in her heart, which reminded me that when Jane started I wasn’t sure I wanted to start any new tv shows. Also both show’s care about episode structure in a way that feels undervalued these days.  I do kind of have to agree with Lyons that some of the final season felt like treading water. (Something that seemed to affect the more character than plot driven shows I’ve watched that have ended this year. This runs counter to most of my theory of what’s going on with tv these days.)

“Have you ever loved something so deeply it was almost impossible to talk about?” Jade Budowski wrote over at The Decider. And yes, for a while now, the things I like the most are the things I have the hardest time trying o talk about. It’s satisfying enough that you kind of want to just point and say “go, experience it for yourself.” Even though that runs the risk of letting it be taken as froth.

Over at Vox, Constance Grady wrote about how the finale worked, despite the fact that most of the conflict was resolved on the previous episode. It’s a loving tribute to how the show knew how to work and give us the happiest of endings without being too saccharine.

Finally, I want to day thanks for making Jane and Rafael’s wedding song Ximena Sariñana’s “Todo En Mi Vida”. Sure, I’ve been following Sariñana since her debut, Mediocre, so this is likely to appeal to me personally, but it’s also a beautiful song about learning to love the unexpected and build a new life around it.

[shannon-jeanna]

Two voices seem to define the last several weeks in popular culture. On the one hand, we have Woody Allen’s warning that allegations of Harvey Weinstein’s pattern of sexual assault and harassment were creating a “witch hunt atmosphere”; on the other, Lindy West’s responding op-ed: “Yes, This Is a Witch Hunt. I’m a Witch, and I’m Hunting You.” Witches and witch hunts feel especially vital now, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a time when women are frequently barred from positions of power and endure daily attacks on their right to bodily independence. If you’re a man with a certain political outlook, these women are witches who want to abort their babies and subvert the natural reproductive process, who crave power and exert unnatural wiles. At the same time, many of those same women are marching in the streets and insisting that men can no longer harass and assault them with impunity. The witches are striking back.

These dueling portrayals of the witch have been brewing for some time, but they feel especially appropriate for this cultural moment. It’s a time when many truths seem to shift depending on where you stand, and it’s never more true than in stories about the witch. She is either a destabilizing, dangerous villain or a powerful protagonist, and the vision you choose depends entirely on your point of view.

Both versions of the witch are stories of harm. From the traditional perspective, the witch is a threat to the community. She ruins crops and steals penises, putting them in trees to keep as pets. This is the witch of Narnia, and The Wizard of Oz, of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and from much older tales, this is the witch of Baba Yaga and the Malleus Maleficarum. In Narnia, in Oz, and in the Dahl story, the witch threatens children, literally endangering the future. Baba Yaga lurks in the woods in a hut on chicken legs, hideous and alarming. This is the witch we learn about as children, the one who wants to hurt us. (To some, this is also Hillary Clinton, the Wicked Witch of the Left, come to haunt your home and steal away your rightful income in the form of higher taxes.)

But over the last several decades, witch stories in everything from Broad City to The Witches of Eastwick have reclaimed the witch as a powerful, admirable, and appealing figure. The harm is no longer something the witch inflicts on people; it’s a modern, feminist vision of witchcraft as a response to pain, as a way of seeking revenge, as a female reclamation of power. Witchiness, in Lindy West’s hands and in the cultural framing of so many recent witch stories, is resistance. It’s Wicked, which turns The Wizard of Oz into a fable about power, othering, and female friendship. It’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch using magic as a metaphor for teen girl awkwardness and teen girl power. When Bonnie Bennett became a powerful force on The Vampire Diaries, she was mostly just trying to keep herself safe. The same is true for The Craft and Practical Magic, two ’90s movies that intertwined feminism and witchcraft. Even Bewitched, a show that looks like it’s about a witch trying to fly under the radar as a 1950s housewife, is actually about Samantha Stephens flouting her dumb husband’s anti-witchcraft prejudices again and again and again. It’s a refusal to be cowed by patriarchal structures and toxic masculine power dynamics; it’s witchiness as selfhood, focused less on witchcraft as a practice and more on the witch as a feminist identity.

The magic of the witch in this particular moment is that both the traditional, villainous witch and her feminist, heroic opposite are equally alive in the cultural consciousness. Of course, the pervasiveness of the evil witch is what gives the newer interpretation its vigor: Even when we try to divorce the witch from any direct implication of injury — when a coven comes together as a self-contained group, a safe community apart from the rest of the world — the traditional vision of witchcraft still lurks in the air. Women gathering together to perform spells? Women gathering to share information in the dark of night? Women gathering? Whether you call it witchcraft or you call it a feminist book club, it will always feel a bit dangerous. Thinking of the witch as a protagonist rather than a villain feels subversive and gutsy when so few women, in fiction or in life, get to hold actual positions of power.

If power, femininity, and threat are at the root of the witch, the rest relies on the vantage point you choose. The pointy black hat is the symbol of a villainous woman who needs to be neutralized, or it’s a pointy black talisman against your enemies. The sexual preoccupation of the witch is to emasculate men, making them impotent or tools to sate her lust. Or their sexual preoccupation is a long-overdue overhaul of the patriarchy, one that deconstructs binary ideas of gender and dismantles toxic masculinity. (I’ve been referring to witches as female, but there’s an ancient and important tradition of witches as something other than strictly hetero cis female. Positive visions of the witch have also cast them as queer or third gender or trans.) The witch is wicked or she’s misunderstood. She’s powerful enough to protect herself or she’s too powerful for anyone’s safety.

Nowhere is the slippage between these meanings more apparent than in the recent use of the phrase “witch hunt.” As a metaphor for unprovoked attacks on the innocent, “witch hunt” calls to mind The Crucible, where Arthur Miller used the idea of the Salem witch trials to criticize Joseph McCarthy’s unjust efforts to root out supposed communism in the media. In this meaning of the phrase, there are no actual witches; the accused women are powerless innocents, waiting to be rescued by right-thinking citizens. This is the sense Woody Allen invokes in his “witch hunt atmosphere” comment, and it’s also the meaning Trump suggests in his own invocationsthat the Russia probe is a “witch hunt” against him. But given the gendered dynamics at play in the Harvey Weinstein scandal — with dozens of womenaccusing a powerful man of harassment and assault — you might hear a different implication as well. When Allen suggests that innocent men could be accused, there’s an echo of another charge: “These women, these witches, are on the hunt.”

It’s this exact capacity for slippage from one perspective to another that makes Lindy West’s op-ed so effective. Within the space of two short sentences, West deftly toggles between the witch as an innocent victim of persecution to the witch as a dark avenging sorceress, and she does it by swapping who holds the agency. West reclaims the power for herself with unapologetic righteousness. “The witches are coming,” she writes, “but not for your life. We’re coming for your legacy.”

Obviously, witchcraft and feminism are not synonymous. Witches require some form of belief — in witchcraft, in spells and hexes, in a mystical power that fuels their magical acts. It’s hard to imagine a witch who wouldn’t self-identify as a feminist, but the reverse is not true; certainly not all feminists believe in witchcraft. Whether or not witchcraft is real is beside the point, though. Either way, the full power of the witch is alive in the stories we tell. It’s right there in the slippery ambiguity of witches as powerful women or monstrous crones. The power comes from the fact that declaring “I’m a witch” is a pointed statement in a way that saying “I’m a woman” is not.

There’s also something about this gap — the belief gap, in which one could enjoy witches but not actually believe in them — that feels uncannily well-suited to this precise moment. If you set aside witchcraft as a practice, if you table the whole idea of magic potions and instead think about witches as people, the question of belief starts to look a lot different. It seems less like hokey fortune-telling and more like support for something outside of the status quo. It’s an argument about making room for voices that speak out against entrenched power, about making room for women’s beliefs, and about believing women. It’s about making women’s voices the default, rather than the exception. Bring on the witches.

[nedloveschuck]

Lee Pace Answers All Our Questions About Pushing Daisies | Vulture (MAR. 8, 2022)

by Kathryn VanArendonk

I really loved this interview, my heart fills with joy every time I read how excited & proud Lee, the whole cast & crew are of creating such a wonderful show (even 15 years later!).

[gregkinz]

Tom ‘Pierce The Veil’ Wambsgans and his emo divorce soundtrack

Succession (2018-) / ‘The Unbearable Sadness of Tom Wambsgans’ - Kathryn VanArendonk / Bulls In The Bronx - Pierce The Veil / Hell Above - Pierce the Veil / El Tango De Roxanne - Moulin Rouge! / I Don’t Care If You’re Contagious - Pierce The Veil / The Crane Wife - CJ Hauser / Besitos - Pierce The Veil

[marvelousmatt]

Matt Berry Has a Type

The actor is known for playing ridiculous characters with a straight face — the stupider the better.

By Kathryn VanArendonk OCT. 25, 2021

Matt Berry. Photo: Chris Buck for New York Magazine. Photographed at Pendry Manhattan West.

Matt Berry plays men who do not fit in this world, who are either too dumb to know that or too self-involved to care. He’s the cruel, fatuous hangman — also named Matt Berry — in Snuff Box and the witless, talentless actor Steven Toast in Toast of London. In FX’s What We Do in the Shadows, he’s a sex-obsessed, murderous Victorian vampire who is absolutely serious at all times, especially when he’s being very stupid. “Escapism is so important,” Berry tells me at a plush hotel bar in Manhattan, where he’s attending Comic Con to promote the third season of Shadows. “I’m more than happy to be part of something that is utterly pointless and stupid. With no sort of social hammer whatsoever. Nothing at all.”

It’s true — much of Berry’s work is superficially goofy, full of big silly gags and juvenile jokes about sex. Claiming that as his entire appeal doesn’t fully capture what makes Berry such a compelling performer, though. All of his roles, many of which he writes himself, have an instantly distinctive quality: the utter commitment of buffoonery played straight with the occasional flourish of strange, elongated vowels that can turn any word into a hilarious oddity. He plays these imbeciles with so much unblinking stolidity you can’t help but search for a hint of knowingness, some sign that he’s winking. You know there’s a smirk, but you’re not sure how you know it because Berry betrays nothing. He’s not trying to convince anyone he’s being funny.

Berry is not tall, and in life he is much quieter and more reserved than his noisy screen roles. But there is a familiar intensity, especially in his dark, deep-set eyes. He is sitting on a dusky-pink sofa and wearing a denim jacket, red bandanna, black T-shirt, and jeans. His fingernails are painted black; the polish is chipped. This bar has try-hard polka dots on the walls and gives the impression that it would love to be photographed. The actor creates the opposite feeling, and he tells me that if I look back on this interview and decide there’s nothing worth writing about, I should feel free to just skip the whole thing. “When actors, people that are an extension or an exaggeration of themselves in their performances, do a lot of interviews, you’re not left with much at the end of it,” he tells me with a shrug.

Berry is not a household name, especially in the U.S. In part, that’s because he is so reluctant to make the U.K. panel-show circuit, to participate in the fame shortcuts that would help launch him to leading-man stardom. In the U.K., he thinks, it is still possible to be a little standoffish if someone’s work doesn’t aim for broad appeal. If he were more ubiquitous, there would be more pressure to fit a particular mold. “And I wouldn’t be able to continue to do what I want,” he says.

His onscreen personae are funny, but they are people who rarely laugh. Berry does sometimes, in an almost giggly way. He is looser than his characters and more considerate. Director Yana Gorskaya says that when things go awry on the set of Shadows, Berry sends her silly voice memos to cheer her up. Susan Wokoma, his co-star in Year of the Rabbit, says his routine on set was singing Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name,” and is effusive about Berry as a colleague. “You know when you meet people who are fascinating, but who are actually just a knob-end? He’s not that,” Wokoma says. “God, he’s gonna love this,” Wokoma laughs, knowing that the very private Berry would find the praise slightly mortifying.

He is easy to talk with, yet even after a few hours in his company, it’s difficult to get used to the quality of his voice. It can sound so resonant it’s hard to believe there’s no microphone or instrument hidden somewhere on his person. The voice is part of why Jemaine Clement, who produced Shadows as a movie in 2014 and later adapted it into a TV series, created the character of Laszlo Cravensworth for Berry. “Some things I feel are only funny if he says it,” Clement says. Fred Armisen, who cast Berry in a 2013 Portlandia sketch as a children’s musician, describes the voice as “serious with something funny underneath.” Berry’s longtime friend and colleague Morgana Robinson says his voice belongs to “a thespian bear.” “Cigars, whiskey, open fire, Shakespeare, but all in the shape of a big hairy bear,” Robinson says. “It’s like a roast dinner.” Jon Hamm, whom Berry cast in a Toast of London episode in 2015, points to it as key to Berry’s persona. “It demands attention,” Hamm says. “And then a part of that is to then say, while I have everyone’s attention” — Hamm imitates Berry — “ ‘Well, I don’t care!’ ”

Berry grew up in a small English town called Bromham; his father drove a taxi, and his mother was a nurse. In school, as Berry puts it, he was “an underachiever.” He was only ever drawn to the arts. One Christmas, when he was around 12, his parents surprised him by putting a small old-fashioned organ in his bedroom. “That’s all I needed,” he says. “My whole world was this thing, singing along to it.”

He started writing music and has continued to write and perform throughout his career, recording nine studio albums and the soundtracks for many of the television shows he has produced. He got a degree in contemporary art from Nottingham Trent University, where he began painting and continued to study music. Not until he moved to London after college did he start acting — not on a traditional stage but as a performer in the London Dungeon, a tourist attraction where actors portray terrifying scenes from British history. His friend sold him on the job as an easy gig, something he could do even if he turned up hung-over in the morning. Makeup, after all, hides a lot. “You just had to convey this historical stuff to these people in the scariest way that you could in costume,” Berry says. “And you had free run. I used to try all sorts of things. And that’s where the timing and all that came from, because you had a show every 15 minutes all day, all week.” He spent two years in the Dungeon. “You learn so much by doing those kinds of jobs,” he says. “You learn that stillness can be your best weapon.”

By the early aughts (Berry prefers not to look back on his work and insists he has no memory of exact dates), the comedian Noel Fielding (“a friend of a friend”) invited Berry to perform at “a thing called The Boosh above a pub in North London.” The Mighty Boosh, which would later become a BBC-TV series and launch Fielding’s career, was a surrealist live comedy performance, and Berry was asked to be a warm-up musician before the show. He decided that straightforward didn’t fit the mood. “I sussed the night and the space,” he says. “Thought, Well, no, I’ve got to do something else. So I did one as a guy who was a young, earnest singer-songwriter who took enough pills to kill himself at the beginning of his song.” He had another bit in which the singer assumed a confessional mode, telling the audience where all his victims’ bodies were buried with lyrics taken verbatim from serial killers’ confessions. “The thing that attracted me was getting the audience to assume I would sing some songs and that would be it. And then I would fuck with it,” Berry says.

Berry as Laszlo Cravensworth in What We Do in the Shadows. Photo: Russ Martin/FX

Berry’s connection with the Boosh crowd was the launchpad for his career as an actor and a writer. He was cast in Matthew Holness and fellow Boosh collaborator Richard Ayoade’s 2004 series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, and he co-created the 2006 show Snuff Box with another Boosh participant, Rich Fulcher. He began doing voice-over work for animated series and commercials. (Voice-overs get old, Berry says, “but I’m not moaning about it. It’s paid for lots of things.”) He had a prominent, recurring role on the British show The IT Crowd, the most mainstream comedy Berry had appeared in up to that point. I ask about his feelings regarding a 2008 episode that has become a political flash point in the U.K., in which Berry’s character enjoys dating a woman, discovers she is trans, and breaks up with her because of it. At the end, they become involved in a violent fight, designed to ​depict the trans woman as masculine. Berry swiftly notes that he did not write the episode and was only a guest performer on it. The writer, Graham Linehan, has since become an outspoken member of a virulent anti-trans-rights movement in the U.K. (After publication, Linehan sent New York an email stating he is not “anti-trans” and that he is protecting “women’s rights and spaces.”) It is the only time in our conversation when Berry seems uncertain. The episode looks “ridiculous and dated” now, he says, and he hopes people can accept that it was a product of an earlier time. He comes back to the idea later as we’re getting ready to leave. It bothers him that he wasn’t clear: “I don’t condone anything that that comedy portrayed, you know? I don’t share any views that the writer has.”

This is the other risk of becoming too famous, though Berry doesn’t articulate it this way. How people read your past performances starts to matter, and some viewers may misinterpret your role as a clueless idiot and assume you are too. You start to be, as Berry puts it, “property of everyone,” accessible to both the fans who get it and the ones who deliberately or unintentionally misconstrue your work. He considers it with a touch of frustration. “If I play a part in something, that isn’t me,” he says. “In Snuff Box, I was a hangman, and I couldn’t be more anti–capital punishment.”

By 2012, Berry was well known enough in the U.K. to briefly appear in the London Olympics’ closing ceremonies and to sell a TV series called Toast of London to Channel 4. (He shot a six-episode spinoff this year called Toast of Tinseltown, which takes the show to Los Angeles.) He stars as Steven Toast, an actor who longs for national recognition, cannot understand why he’s not rich and famous, gets mired in petty rivalries, eventually burns down the Globe Theatre, and supports his faltering career with, yes, voice-over work. The show is full of absurd names: Clem Fandango, Varrity Map, Clancy Moped, Heathcote Pursuit. The names, Berry says, are owed to “quite a weird form of dyslexia” in which any word he doesn’t immediately recognize turns into something else. Many of them are his brain’s initial misreadings. Maybe, I suggest, having a weird form of dyslexia played some role in that early presumption that he was an academic underachiever? “Yeah,” he says, “but it’s worked in my favor. If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have come up with these names.”

Toast wallows in the precise outlook Berry abhors. “He says, ‘Why haven’t I got my own this, that, and the other? Why aren’t I more famous now? Why don’t I have that? Why am I so unlucky?’ ” Berry says. “It’s easy to write because I see it in other people.” What would happen, I wonder, if Berry were offered a part in a high-visibility project that actually appealed to him? “That would be a conundrum,” he says. “Because, then, shit.”

[louobedlam]

It is impossible for us, as imperfect, blinkered, flawed and fearful people, to embody Bourdain’s food travel ideology, just as impossible as it is for any other food TV host to pull it off. When we travel to new places and try our damnedest to look for an authentic meal rather than an easy, sad, familiar chain, we probably will not meet Bourdain’s standard. We probably won’t have a lengthy chat with the grandmother who has been making those dumplings all her life. We may well not find the fish monger at 5 a.m. and eat the oysters that just came in off the boat. But in every impulse to try something new, to see the person who made our food as a human being, to see new cultures and new dishes as someone’s home food rather than an exoticized other in our own mind, in every imperfect attempt to be open to new experiences rather than pivot toward safety, we do get to try to take on some of Bourdain’s legacy for ourselves.

Kathryn VanArendonk