The Arc of the Moral Universe

Hi everyone,

I've found myself so much more irritable, emotional, and ill-at-ease as the election draws forebodingly nearer.  Despite dramatically reducing my consumption of the news and how much I'm even talking about it in recent months, even when it isn't in my conscious awareness it is a hulking omnipresence.

Honestly, we've lived through too much in the past decade or so.  From the nauseating and terrifying results of the 2016 election, to the endless indignities, abuses, and outrages of the years of Trump's presidency, to the unimaginable surreality, fear, and isolation of a years-long pandemic, to a now year-old US-funded social media-streamed genocide, all mercilessly back to back to back, it's too much.  It feels like we're all entitled to a bloodcurdling, lung-emptying existential scream no one has made space for.  It feels like that scream would never end if it ever started.

I used to be so comforted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s statement about the arc of the moral universe.  It articulated my worldview for years, encapsulating my optimism and willingness to engage in ongoing, persistent struggle.

The trouble is, I was so naive about how long that struggle would take.  I thought Obama's election in 2008 and 2012 would naturally lead to the immediate election of our first woman President, that liberal political leadership would become more or less the norm in this country, and that steady progress would continue for the rest of my lifetime and beyond--with considerable labor, but also with heartening consistency.  It was so encouraging, so inspiring to imagine I would get to see the elegant unspooling of the moral universe toward a justice that would shine its light on everyone.  It seemed like such an easy roadmap to follow, just a gentle slope climbing ever upward.

In retrospect, I realize I almost felt a sense of unwitting entitlement to things just continuing in what seemed like a logical, relatively orderly direction.

At first, I saw the outcome of the 2016 election as an albeit gigantic bump in the road, or perhaps like the messiness and agony of childbirth; something beautiful and new coming into the world often necessitates pain, effort, strength, and a period of recovery.  I thought a bunch of dinosaurs were throwing one last racist, sexist, ableist, xenophobic temper tantrum before finally succumbing to their powerless irrelevancy, after which we could return to our steady progression toward a better world, perhaps further strengthened and emboldened because of what we'd just endured.

As time went on, however, it got harder and harder to hold onto my original assumptions about the world and the future.  The more horrific bullshit Trump did, and the more impunity with which he did that horrific bullshit--the more court cases and impeachments he evaded essentially scot-free, the more judges he appointed, the more people he got killed with his unconscionable anti-science nonsense, the more ugliness he said and did and thereby empowered his followers to say and do--the more my belief that the world was moving toward something better shriveled.  

By the time his followers faced hardly any commensurate consequences for launching an attempted coup and Trump himself fully evaded accountability for overtly attempting to upend American democracy, not to mention as people lost federal protection for abortion rights and the bloodthirsty war against trans people continued to escalate unabated despite having a Democrat for a President, I'd numbly accepted defeat.  Maybe pessimists are right: maybe history simply repeats itself, over and over, until the end of time.  Maybe what looks like "progress" is just a fleeting, ephemeral period of relief, an eye in the unending storm of inherently self-destructive human cruelty.  Maybe the moral universe isn't traveling on an arc at all, but instead it's simply stuck in place, spinning in a circle we're doomed to always be rotating around.

I don't want this to be the truth.  I don't really know how to make sense of living in a world in which that's the truth.  I certainly don't understand how to parent--like, big picture parent--in a world that's just going to get worse for my children and everyone around them.  I don't know how to square the deep joy I get from caring for my children and my home with the despair I feel for the world around us.  The dissonance feels impossible to resolve.  It's miserable.

In trying to work through all this, I've had conversations with people I trust, I've sought guidance through the words of thought leaders I respect, and I've done a lot of thinking.  I don't want to sacrifice my innate optimism for people and the world at large.  I don't want to give up on my belief in people's inherent goodness.  I also refuse to blind myself to the realities of what horrors people are capable of inflicting on others, and the evil that people perpetrate because they think no one will care or intervene.  I refuse to choose the narrow view of my little, happy life to the exclusion of the rest of the world, primarily because that is simply wrong and selfish, but also because one of the things I love most about humanity is our interdependence, and something that harms my neighbor will one day harm me, too.  There has to be a way to hold all these truths at once without becoming paralyzed by despair or denial.

Through all of this, I've come to the conclusion that neither of those two preceding worldviews are accurate, and neither of them are wrong.  Instead, I think we're on a circular path, but moving through space in a slow yet inexorable course toward justice.  There are still going to be periods where things get worse, but that doesn't determine our overall trajectory.  The journey is more circuitous than I wish it was, yet the destination remains the same.

Key in consolidating this view for me was a recent metaphor using the Shepard tone discussed in one of my favorite podcasts (around minute 6 of this episode, if you're curious to hear it for yourself).  The host used this tone to illustrate the reality that there are things that are getting better and worse all the time.  The getting-better and the getting-worse are always there, a part of the overall song of our world.  What comes through the loudest is what you focus on.

The message I hear in that metaphor is to recognize the combined realities of our world, and to choose your focus intentionally depending on what the moment requires.  If you find yourself lapsing into despair, as I very often have in the past few years, then focusing on the good in the world could bring you back from the brink.  If you instead lull yourself into an inaccurate sense of comfort and passivity, then focusing on where your energy and attention is still needed and taking action is necessary to avoid complicity in the cruelty and oppression that still exists in the world.

All that to say, I've found it's heartbreakingly easy to lose sight of the arc of the moral universe, because it's so very long.  Yet I believe Dr. King was, ultimately, right: it bends, ceaselessly, toward the light.  Because it has to.  Because we can make it so.

So that brings us to today, two days before the next election.  I don't pretend to be able to predict the outcome.  A lot of bad things may still happen.  But we've got each other and a future to fight for.  To reference another leader for justice, we must mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.  At the end of the day, there's simply no other choice.

{Heart}

A (Mini) Halloween Sampler for All Souls: 2024 Edition!

Happy Halloween, dear friends!

Given this year's reduced movie-watching goal, it perhaps follows that I have fewer scary movies to review for this year's spooky sampler.  Nevertheless, I'm excited to share a few films that might be fitting if you're in the mood to enhance this scary season with some cinematic creepiness.

As always, each of the movies below will be rated with the usual overall 1 - 5 rating scale, as well as a scary/intense rating of 1 - 5 exclamation points, to be interpreted as follows:

! = not at all scary

!!!!! = so scary!

Let's get to it!

"A Haunting in Venice" (2023)

Rating: 3.5  Scary Rating: !!!!

Having seen at least one of the campy previous generation of Detective Poirot movies, I didn't expect "A Haunting in Venice" to be as scary as it was.  The film uses its dark, foreboding setting in a decaying Venetian mansion with a hellish history to very strong effect, and is further enhanced by its willingness to toy with the line between the natural and supernatural world, especially because that seems to run counter to Poirot's typical refusal to believe that anything other than living human beings can be responsible for murder.  This detective-film-turned-ghost-story is definitely perfect for Halloween!

"Twisters" (2024)

Rating: 4  Scary Rating: !!!

Long-term readers of the blog know how much I love the original "Twister" (1996), so it should come as no surprise that I was PUMPED for this long, long-overdue sequel.  AND IT DID NOT DISAPPOINT.  It packs all the heart-pounding tornado-y action you know and love from the original with added themes of climate change, social media celebrity, grassroots mutual aid, and predatory capitalism to bring it into the future.  

Is it the most scientifically rigorous movie in the world?  No.  Are the characters super well-developed?  No.  Is it the universe's best script?  No.  We cannot demand the world from "Twisters", but we can sure as hell can demand a good time, and it absolutely delivers.  So if you're in the mood for something intense that is firmly rooted in the natural world, this is your movie.

I hope you enjoy a wonderful and optimally spooky Halloween!

{Heart}

Getting to the "Bottoms" of "Wicked Little Letters": A Women Behaving Badly Double-Header

Hey everyone,

I am DELIGHTED to share two absolutely excellent movies I watched recently.  While by pure coincidence these films share some major thematic similarities, they also differ dramatically aesthetically.  Yet both fully deliver in enjoyment and emotional uplift.

The two movies are: 

"Bottoms" (2023) tells the story of Josie (played by Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (played by Rachel Sennott), high school best friends who are both gay.  They hatch an elaborate plan to start a girls-only fight club, which they tout as a self-defense/feminist self-empowerment group, with the ulterior motive of climbing their school's social hierarchy from the bottom of the barrel (hence the movie's title), and to thereby gain greater access and appeal to the two popular cheerleaders on whom they have crushes.

What follows feels like "Booksmart" (2019) meets "Kill Bill" (2003) with a hit of acid.  The world PJ and Josie live in is just surreal enough to feel like a weird parallel universe version of ours, in which rivalries between high schools turn literally bloodthirsty and hero worship of the football team's histrionic and entitled quarterback is unabashedly and in equal measures zealous and thirsty in an altogether different way.  The movie only barely acknowledges its own strangeness, which feels like a massive compliment to its audience; you feel cool for being along for the ride without needing it explained to you why Marshawn Lynch's history class is only 5 minutes long.

Thankfully, another way in which "Bottoms" leans into its surreality is through the relative cartoonishness of its violence.  While people do get bloodied and bruised--it needs to be clear that the blows these girls land hurt--the movie isn't all that graphic, which makes it easier to watch and also to not miss the point of the movie.

"Wicked Little Letters" (2023), on the other hand, is set in post-World War I suffragette-era England and centers on an opposites attract friendship gone awry in the wake of particularly vulgar poison pen letters.  Edith (played by Olivia Coleman) is an unmarried woman living with her elderly parents under extremely strict religious and gender role expectations imposed by her domineering, sexist, and humorless father.  Rose (played by Jessie Buckley) could not be more her opposite: she is an unrestrained and loud single mother who is fully at ease with a range of profanity and prioritizes playing darts, drinking, and sleeping with her devoted boyfriend over wasting her time with tedious housework and maintaining propriety simply to appease her nosy and uptight neighbors.  The trouble is, her neighbors are Edith and her parents.

When Edith receives the latest in a parade of libelous anonymous letters, her father finally decides to involve the police in pursuing Rose as their suspected author.  While at first she attempts to refuse to participate in the investigation for fear of taking the judging role she attributes only to her god, Edith eventually relents under her father's pressure and suddenly becomes the unintended victim-heroine in a highly publicized and swiftly escalating poison pen scandal.  As the stakes quickly rise for all concerned, it becomes increasingly clear that Rose might not be the actual culprit.

"Wicked Little Letters" matches the surreality of "Bottoms" with a comparative realism, down to the outhouses and shared washbasins that were typical of the era in the UK.  It is nevertheless leavened with a heightened silliness, often telegraphed through the highly communicative facial expressions of the group of women that form the heart of the film.

Taken together, these superficially different movies center on the same powerful core themes, including friendship and solidarity between women, the power and protection that can be drawn from found family, and the revelatory liberation that follows when women openly, even violently when necessary, flout restrictive gender and sexuality norms.  They're also both extremely funny, well-acted, and well-constructed movies that move along briskly and thrive in no small part because of their excellent scripts--and they're both directed by women: Emma Seligman directed "Bottoms", while Thea Sharrock directed "Wicked Little Letters".

I loved both of these movies so much, and I highly recommend them to anyone looking for a good time and affirmation for being a misbehaving woman.  I gave them both a 5.

{Heart}

New Car

We got a new car today.

Despite the misdirect of that opening line and title, I want to talk about my old car.

My old car, an 11-year-old sedan, was tired.  It traded in for a pathetic $1500, dwarfed by the evidently over $10,000 it would have cost to restore it to true roadworthiness.  Among its many ailments, one of its headlights had water trapped in it, and one of the inner door panels--the rear driver's side door, of all options--had started to fully separate from the frame, making the door stick every time it was opened.  If it was a smart car, it was smart in the sense that single-celled organisms are smart: no futuristic amenities like a back-up camera or blind spot sensors, instead the most it could muster was the damn voice commands to get my bluetooth to play that had an almost 100% failure rate (oh lord the horrific names I called that poor robot voice when she told me, "You can say USB" when BITCH I *DID* SAY USB).

But my old car, named Little Car, was a good car.  He (because he was a boy, unlike my girl car before him) was a work horse.  We put over 100,000 miles on him, which means he could have driven around the world over 4 times.  He had good pick-up, and excellent maneuverability--he could do the tightest u-turns and squeeze into tiny parallel parking spots with just a bit of finesse.  He kept me safe in multiple (thankfully minor) accidents and weathered countless mild to moderate repairs.  His penchant for flat tires for a stretch while I lived in Massachusetts got me skilled up quickly in changing them, even in work clothes, even on work trips.  I liked the little song he played to remind you to take the keys out of the ignition or buckle your seatbelt, and the anxiety with which he alerted you on the rare occasion his trunk was ever open while he was in motion.

The last few years of our time together, I'll admit I was always a bit ashamed of his state.  He was perpetually coated in a layer of smoothie packet crust, pretzel stick shards, granola bar bits, desiccated french fries, dust, and hair (HOW so much hair??).  The interior of his windshield was always accumulating an alarming film of unknown provenance that would at a minimum generally look crummy but at its worst seriously impact visibility when the sun was at just the right height in the sky, which was always when you were either driving to or from daycare with one or both children along for the ride.  Random spots or splotches of food or drinks would remain, punctuating the upholstery, for a deeply undignified amount of time.  All of this high level of baseline mess persisted because, with two very small children, truly who has the time, energy, and delusion to waste on the Sisyphean task of cleaning it up?  And maybe it doesn't hurt to have a little daily humbling in your life, especially such a low-stakes humbling as a dirty car.

And yet, Little Car was a refuge.  After getting over a normative amount of anxiety while learning to drive as a teenager, I have always loved driving (except in Boston).  I love being in motion, I love being in my agency.  I love being sequestered, contained, yet still out in the world.  I love listening to what I choose.  I love going exactly where I want to go.  I love reflecting.  I love dangling my hand out the window when the air outside is hot.  During the pandemic, our only outlet was to drive, and we would flee north up a long, winding road into the county where houses got farther apart and the trees at times were dense and green, or through a state park to our southwest, or through a nearby historic smaller city.  At least that way we could be out in the world without risk of getting sick.  At least that way we didn't feel so trapped, and we could be reminded that the world was still big.

Over the decade he was my car, Little Car was an escape.  I drove as far north as Ogunquit and as far south as Raleigh-Durham.  I drove to Sylvan Beach, Long Beach, Cape Cod, tiny cabins, covered in cream cheese and bagels crumbs on my way postdoc, over bridges and onto ferries, back and forth from the city where I trained to the city in which I was destined to live to plan my wedding, then back again and again to the city where I trained after we moved away because I still loved it.  

Little Car empowered us at major life turning points.  He helped us move 3 times across 3 different states.  He drove us on a 3-hour round trip to get our then-pathetic-and-meek little mutt, and now majestic, beautiful, good-most-of-the-time medium-sized mutt.  He took the unnecessarily long way to the hospital the second time around, and he drove both our babies safely home from the hospital.  He drove me to interviews and first days of work, to weddings and baby showers, and then always home.

When I got Little Car, almost exactly 11 years ago, I was nearing the end of my 20s and the end of graduate school.  I was about to start my internship, which would require 3 hours of commuting by public transit every day.  Having done that commute 3 days a week during my third year of grad school, I knew doing it 5 days a week with a 40+ hour work week while trying to finish my dissertation would break me.  It was time and energy I simply did not have to spare.

Thankfully, my Mom and Stepdad came to visit, and spent one day of the weekend they were in town at a Ford dealership negotiating a lease for me.  My Stepdad took advantage of the salesman stepping away for a moment to dip behind his desk to verify that they were, in fact, giving me a good deal.  In the midst of these negotiations, I called my Dad to let him know how things were going and tell him the terms of the lease.  I'd previously told him I'd be getting a car and why, and now that we had numbers, I asked if he might be able to help me with part of the cost of the down payment.  I'd been living off tiny grad student stipends and student loans for the past 4 years and my internship stipend was on trend: not generous.  Any little bit would help.

I don't remember what he said, but I remember that he was so relentless in berating me for asking that, sobbing in front of the dealership where I'd fled when it was clear the call would not go well, I simply begged him to say no.  "Dad, you can just say no.  Please, just say no."  But something in him just needed to punish me for asking.

As we were trading in Little Car, with my kids' handprints still on the rear windows and the indentations of their carseats still pressed into the fabric of the seats, with the air of over a decade of conversations, singing, laughter, and also tears and silence still dissipating, I thought about the photo that was taken of me and Little Car when that lease was finalized.  In it, I've draped myself along the top of the driver's side door with a huge, showy smile on my face, telegraphing jubilance at suddenly being a lady with a car, stuffing down the heartwrenching, sick, confused, bombed out feeling that still managed to catch me by surprise back then.  I was really good--although definitely not perfect--at blotting out that feeling when it was called for.  

I took that photo again as we said goodbye to Little Car.  In some ways, it's the same photo: I made sure to pose exactly the same way, extending my arm along the curve of the front driver's side door as if I was slinging my arm around the shoulders of a friend and putting on a big smile.  In some ways, it's different: for one, it was pouring rain, and I am visibly soaked.  I'm also almost 40 now, and Little Car looks significantly less shiny and new.  But also, the smile isn't fake.  It's poignant, taking stock of how much this little car has seen and the end of its chapter, but it's sincere, and it's not covering up for anybody.  By design, I just don't have cause to do much smile-faking anymore.

I know the car is just a thing.  My mind keeps toying with seeing letting go of Little Car as if we're returning an old pet to the pound, but thankfully I have my wits about me enough to know that come on, it's not that.  But of course even objects have a bit of a life of their own in part because they sometimes accompany us through so much, and because of the meaning with which we imbue them.  Little Car was a talisman of so many things--independence, freedom, adulthood, excitement, adventure, efficacy, possibility, and love--but of course, like any complex thing, they weren't all good.  Sometimes, moving on to a new chapter, even if you're not completely sure you're ready to let go of the old one, is the strongest, bravest, healthiest, and most hopeful thing you can do.

{Heart}

"Babes" and "Brats"

Hi everyone,

I've continued to pick up the pace a bit on watching movies this month, which is a welcome change from the first third of the year.  Two of the three movies I saw in July (again, I emphasize I've been picking up the pace *a bit*) were:

 

"Brats" (2024) is a documentary directed by and starring Andrew McCarthy, who tediously makes the rounds of most of his fellow '80s teen movie stars to contemplate the ramifications of being labeled the "Brat Pack" by some jealous prick-y reporter and overblow the importance of the John Hughes suite of teensploitation movies that rocketed them to fame.  Those aforementioned ramifications were apparently to grievously and irrevocably derail McCarthy's career, a fate which he tries unsuccessfully to generalize to all of his Brat Pack brethren, the likes of which include Demi Moore and Rob Lowe (whatever happened to them, anyway?).  

And the impact of those films?  Look, I have a major soft spot for "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986) and "The Breakfast Club" (1985).  John Hughes clearly had a visionary impact on films for children and teenagers in the '80s and '90s, and as a child born and growing up during those years I don't know how I wouldn't have fondness for his work.  But here again "Brats" massively overreaches as it overdraws the boundaries while mapping the impact of what was ultimately only about a half-dozen films.  

(Also it will never cease to irk and confuse me that Matthew Broderick is never included as a member of the Brat Pack?  Just why??  It makes no sense!!)

#JusticeForFerris

Despite a short runtime of just 92 minutes, this film was so circular, repetitive, and preoccupied with vindicating its creator that it felt like it dragged on forever.  I gave this movie a 1.

I was excited to watch "Babes" (2024) given my deep and abiding love for Ilana Glazer and everything she does.  The film has a lot going for it, including a healthy dose of Glazer's unique comic delivery, a resonant contemplation of friendship between women in the context of adulthood and parenting, and some deep poignance about love and grief.

That said, "Babes" somehow doesn't achieve its full potential.  The comedy doesn't hit as hard as it could given the excellent core cast of Glazer, Michelle Buteau, and Hasan Minhaj, and some of the scenes feel a little stagey or under-finessed.  Perhaps "Babes" has the opposite problem to "Brats" in that it suffered from trying to stick to a typical comedy's solidly-under-two-hours runtime when instead it would have benefitted from a bit more room to breathe into the interpersonal and existential spaces it only just started to explore.

In any case, I gave it a 3.

In reflecting on these two films, in addition to every other film I've watched this year, I'm realizing that I've made it more than halfway through 2024 with barely any movies cracking a rating of 4 or higher.  I'm not completely sure what's going on here, although I think a part of it is definitely my overall emotional stamina being pretty depleted by the time I could, theoretically, sit down to watch a movie.  

The thing that really puts films at the top of my rating scale is that they pull a lot of emotional weight.  Lately, I'm just not in the market for more of that.  This is not to say I'm emotionally weighed down, but more accurately that I'm emotionally very full.  So while the movies I've been watching this year aren't exactly the most thrilling or satisfying things I've ever watched and there's definitely some disappointment that goes along with acknowledging that, I suppose this is also an opportunity to appreciate movies that tread lightly.

That said: I'll be looking for some chances to watch some real bangers before the year is done.

{Heart}