What should we make of this three-page tangent, one that neither develops into a real argument nor develops any real consequences for any of the novel’s admittedly smudgy plot-lines? Perhaps Houellebecq sees a parallel of his own oeuvre in that of the Wachowskis’: between the decade-defining original Matrix (1999) and the Molotov cocktail Houellebecq threw with his Nineties debuts, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) and Les particules élémentaries (1998).

Those first two novels were literary sensations, mixing fire-tongued dissection of l’après-68 with science fiction, evoking the dead-end of the everyday and imaging the dead-end of the species. On the newest tome, critics have been more divided.

They agree, however, that with this one, there’s a newer, calmer, more optimistic Houellebecq: finally, “Houellebecq makes room for love”. With this clumsy ode to the least philosophical Matrix, is Houellebecq perhaps telling us that though it might not look like it, this novel — this sentimental, mushy-penned final novel — is his true masterpiece?

He seems to believe so. As he told Le Monde, “contrary to what a famous formula claims, I think that it is with good feelings that we make good literature”. The murderous misogynists of his earlier books are gone, replaced with a pretty reasonable technocrat who’s nice to his wife (Paul “Raison” — clever!). Indeed, most of the characters are pretty nice. That’s by design: as Houellebecq continued, “the ultimate achievement would be if there were no bad guys at all!”

How can this be the Houellebecq we know and love, the Houellebecq who complained that female readers found it “difficult to accept pure negativity”?

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

Houellebecq has never been known as the greatest of stylists or the fairest of psychologists. When I studied him for an aborted PhD, there were, of course, the requisite titters: he was sexist, he was racist, and what’s more, he was populaire. It’s clear that Houellebecq is an important writer — the most interesting, the most provocative, the most of our time, for better or worse.

Fan as I am, though, his “badness” occasionally frustrated me: could it escape Houellebecq’s attention, I wondered as I read, say, La Possibilité d’une île (2005), that it’s a little unconvincing for a perfectly harmonious couple to calmly and spontaneously dissolve at the very first appearance of ageing on the wife’s previously perfect body?

I don’t know. But now, annihilated by Houellebecq’s 735-page attempt at a less Manichaeian narrative, I mourn the venom. I mourn the badness. I mourn the bad guys.

In the acknowledgments of Anéantir, Houellebecq announces that this will be his last novel. As the title predicts, of course, this is a novel about annihilation. Radical ecologists are attacking Europe, targeting immigrants and artificial reproduction, the only bulwark against the population collapse of the West. Paul’s father is dying. Paul, ultimately, dies. And Houellebecq writes his last book.

On such an occasion, with this strange and sentimental swan song, should we recall what made Houellebecq so wonderful? In a recent defence of Anéantir published in The Spectator, Houellebecq is compared with Balzac, in both his “comparable ambition” and his “tireless work”. This is, of course, familiar to any reader of Houellebecq; not only has he ceaselessly praised Balzac for two decades, but his novels have been peppered with allusions to him.

But Balzac’s ambition wasn’t primarily the psychological complexity of individual characters: his devouring ambition, the one that kept him writing for 15-hour days, on 50 cups of coffee, was to write the complete Comédie humaine of France, the one that would depict in narrative, like a map in lines, French reality from the Restoration to the July Monarchy. These 91 novels, furiously written by a man who had tried to be a respectable, bourgeois lawyer, and ended up wearing Middle Eastern robes and writing through chronic illness, are a capsule of a time of dizzying social and economic change. They are not about people; they are about people in a society. Many of his novels, indeed, were designated “studies”.

So, too, in Houellebecq: like his hero, he gives his characters, at his best, birthplaces, birthdates, and parents. Like his hero, he has an encyclopaedic bent, a desire to explain, a will to knowledge. Like his hero, he wants to understand what on Earth is going on. The laziest critics of Houellebecq dismiss him as a novelist of the patriarchal white male, who doesn’t “recognise that it is societal structures such as poverty, racism, colonialism and inequality that are the source of men’s suffering”. But this is precisely where Houellebecq succeeds: he does recognise that society is making us miserable.

That’s what is so special about him today. Almost no modern writer seems interested in the society we live in. Here in America, at least, there’s plenty of slumming-it, reheated-Carver poverty porn and box-checking census-opera; but ultimately, these currents are more cynical attempts to avoid criticism than criticism themselves.

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How France lost her dignity

By Michel Houellebecq

As literature has become an increasingly hard way to make a living, aspiring writers would do best to be born wealthy. Otherwise, they might choose to write Young Adult fiction (far more lucrative than grown-up fiction, and therefore dominant). Or they might choose to take a creative writing program; on this workshop-based path, the entire incentive structure is a risk-averse one aimed at pleasing one’s elders and avoiding attention from one’s peers. Under these conditions, whoever is writing literature is a coddled rich kid and/or person who has largely interacted with the sorts of individuals who can tolerate creative writing workshops. The longer they stay in this bell jar, the less and less they know about what society even is.

Houellebecq, of course, wins here. Balzac was a would-be lawyer, Flaubert was a would-be lawyer, every writer on the “recommended” table at my local bookstore is a graduate of one of 12 college prep schools. But Houellebecq was a computer programmer: a code monkey, a cubicle rat. And so when Extension du domaine de la lutte came out — a novel about a programmer so miserable he drives his hideous virgin colleague to suicide — it was a cri de coeur for an entire, degraded society. It was catharsis.

In La Nausée (1938), Houellebecq’s clear predecessor Sartre evoked a man in existential crisis, in a world without God in which the structures of city, family, and religion no longer have any transcendental meaning. In Houellebecq’s novels, there is nausea enough: the first act of a Houellebecqian hero is to vomit in the middle of an office party, at the end of the first chapter of Extension. But the despair has reached the point of near-numbness, and God is no longer a real possibility (even if a Muslim takeover of the Sorbonne, as in Soumission, is).

In Sartre, the structures have become meaningless; in Houellebecq, they have ceased to exist. The frames that gave comfort, stability, and meaning to life have been destroyed in the name of freedom. To borrow Houellebecq’s description of this novel’s miserable couple, we live in “une sorte de désespoir standardisé”. Miserable white-collar Everyman that he is, he wonders why.

Houellebecq was not, of course, the first person to criticise 1968. Foucault denounced sexual liberation (though this seems to elude many of his most enthusiastic advocates); so did Michel Clouscard; even Marcuse himself admitted that the sexual revolution had been coopted by consumerism. But Houellebecq’s critique of sexual liberation wasn’t theoretical; it wasn’t a Semiotext(e) book, and you didn’t have to know Hegel, and you didn’t have to take notes.

You read those books, and you recognised it: how it felt to shop alone and read the over-enthusiastic copywriting on a pre-made meal for one; how it felt to feel that every conversation you had with a work colleague was an excruciating effort to appear happy and convivial with a terrifying alien; how it felt to feel like the basic elements of life you had been promised — a more or less kind spouse who loved you, a child, a little home you could plant bushes in front of — were merely plot points in silly tales for little kids.

And, importantly, he talked about feeling ugly: a surprisingly rare topic. For Houellebecq, the modern environment is one of sterility and predictability, punctuated by occasional violence; it is one of quiet humiliations wrapped in consumer packaging; it is one of forced enjoyment and unbelievable exhaustion.

Houellebecq’s novels are so tantalising because they actually analyse our dysfunction. As was the subject of Sérotonine (2019), we live in a society in which a schizophrenic mixture of chemical determinism and trauma discourse has turned almost every feeling into an aggressively-treated and individual one. We have developed a world in which antidepressants — and, often, both amphetamines and anti-anxiety medication — are considered a completely normal, almost essential, supplement. This is, obviously, a nightmare. And some people, occasionally, want an alternative.

That’s why we need Houellebecq’s pauvres types. That’s why they need to be miserable. That’s why they need to be completely out of their minds. Houellebecq has never been a great psychologist; he has never been a great stylist. But his mal du siècle is more sickening than anybody else’s, and his analytical drive is, at its best, in a league of its own. Other writers of bureaucratic hell (see Halle Butler) don’t have Houellebecq’s Balzacian side, which is his triumph: he hates everything, and yet he wants to understand why. He persists, even though critical thought itself has come to seem obsolete. As his stand-in in La Possibilité d’une île, a controversial comedian, reflects, “I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality; it was just that everything now seemed so elementary to me, it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality.”

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Bewilderingly, much of that has disappeared in this last volume. It’s far too long, and shockingly boring; entire transcribed conversations serve virtually no purpose, and every scene starts earlier and ends later than it should, as though he wrote the book on stimulants or perhaps under hypnosis. Maybe Houellebecq’s editor (accurately enough) figured it wasn’t that important to edit. Or maybe Houellebecq is the victim of his own success: his early books are so iconically masterful at capturing the malaise of a pleasure-driven and unpleasant society that even his clever observations seem a little old hat. As Houellebecq himself recognised, “in opening my literature to theoretical conceptions one might develop about the world, I am constantly vulnerable to cliché and, in truth, I’m doomed, my only chance at originality consisting of (to borrow Baudelaire’s intuition) developing new clichés”.

There are highlights; I teared up towards the end, when Paul’s wife gets emotional remembering when the two of them were teenagers, going through the loneliest period of their lives, and hadn’t yet met. As the protagonist of Extension whispers to his coworker, as the protagonist of Particules tells us, we are haunted by the teenage loves we didn’t have. And how sad to have wanted, at death’s door, to have been there.

All told, this much-noted turn to love leaves much to be satisfied: essentially, the protagonist and his wife, two énarque bureaucrats, have not been sleeping together, but she develops a mild interest in paganism and therefore feels a little more feminine and since her ass is still firm, then they do. Once he is dying of cancer she starts wearing thongs.

The same goes for the other plots. The political one is so predictable in its observations — yes, Macron is like a made-for-TV president; yes, the Right is popular in France; yes, cyberterrorism is a threat — that it seems almost AI-generated. The protagonist’s father is in a coma, and while Houellebecq does not support euthanasia, this parental loss somehow carries almost no emotional weight.

The protagonist’s brother is married to a journalist, and she is very annoying and evil. The protagonist’s sister is very Catholic and not evil at all, her husband is poor, she has a black son, and at one point her daughter inadvertently gives the protagonist fellatio. But somehow, every plot simply fizzles out to leave us to contemplate the character’s relatively sudden cancer diagnosis. On the one hand, that diagnosis elicits the very fine observation that modern life revolves around the dissimulation of “l’agonie”; but on the other hand, even this death plot falls into elegies to knickers and blowjobs.

Perhaps Houellebecq, in his novel about two men declining through no fault of their own (unlike, say, the wheelchair-bound swinger of Particules), couldn’t bear to go into full-on nihilism. Perhaps it seemed too dark to have these men die in sadness, without meaning, without redemption, to say their lives had ceased to have meaning long before their strokes or cancers.

In its breathless review, Le Monde said that “one feels, above all, that his writing seeks more than ever to fuel, if not hope, at least values”. But what values? Our hero observes that his Catholic sister seems happy, but he still can’t believe; he observes that politicians should have real values, almost like kings, but no such hero arrives.

Ultimately, the only real lesson is to try to have sex with your wife again before you die, which thankfully seems pretty simple. So, sure, this book’s less dark. But having turned on the lights, there’s not much to see: annihilation, indeed.

***

This article was first published in January 2022, when the French edition of Annihilation was released. 

They ended up exchanging numbers, and texted constantly for the next few weeks. She was surprised at how funny he was. Eventually, he asked her out, but on the date he was quiet and she was a little worried he wasn’t into her. Abruptly, she asked to go home with him. Grabbing his hand, she was excited to feel it get clammy, to feel how excited he was. He said she was probably drunk and offered to drive her home, but once in the car, she started to make out with him desperately, pawing him all over. He took her back to his.

When she saw him awkwardly perched on the side of his bed, half undressed, his belly looked like a “fat hairy shelf”. She noticed his “fat old man’s finger”. She was grossed out. But she couldn’t think of a way to not sleep with him that wouldn’t be awkward, so she ended up doing it. Was it good? Yes and no. He was a clumsy kisser, and kind of porn-y in bed, and, well, just fat! Still, your friend explains, it was nice that he seemed so into her. She kept imagining how hot she seemed to him — how young and flawless and out-of-his-league. In a way, your friend explains to you, she liked that he was a little gross.

Afterward, he was sweet. He covered her arms with little kisses; he wanted to make her eggs in the morning. But your friend asked him to drive her home. He texted her hearts before she even made it to her door. The next day, she wanted nothing more than “that he would disappear without her having to do anything, that she could just wish him away”. To ghost him, in short. But he sent her messages, “each one more earnest than the last”. She responded with nothing, complaining constantly to her friends. She acted like he was much worse than he was. She admits that to you. She admits that he hadn’t done anything wrong, except like her too much and be bad at sex.

Eventually, her roommate grabbed her phone and texted him: “Hi im not interested in you stop texting me.” He responded: “O.K., Margot, I am sorry to hear that. I hope I did not do anything to upset you.” A month later, she saw him in a bar, and made a speedy, conspicuous exit. He got in touch, first apologising for texting her, then saying she looked pretty and that he hoped she was well. She didn’t respond. Then he sent a few messages asking what had happened between them. No response. Then the texts got grosser: when he had asked, in bed, if she was a virgin, had she laughed because she was actually so experienced? Eventually, he just sent: “whore”.

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Who’s the bad guy?

This was the question posed by Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person”; when it was published during the heady heights of MeToo, the answer was unequivocal: the guy was a borderline rapist, Margot a vulnerable everywoman. Fanatically hailed as a portrait of the ambiguities of consent, it launched over 10,000 tweets and think pieces in which women said: it happened to me too. Per the Guardian, it “sent the Internet into a meltdown”, and is still the only short story to ever legitimately go viral. Seemingly overnight, “Cat Person” became water-cooler talk, a seeming skeleton key to a universal female experience: where an earlier generation of feminism said, “No means no!”, this one was saying “Yes might mean no!” Or, as the Financial Times glossed it: “Robert and Margot presented emblems of the murkier grey zones of relationships. Sex that was ostensibly consensual, but still felt really bad. Weinstein was easy to label as a villain, but what about Robert?”

Today, “Cat Person” reads like a satire of 2017: Margot’s friends anxiously escorting her out the bar where Rob calmly sits drinking a beer; Margot’s own admissions that he’s done nothing wrong and she’s exaggerated everything to her friends; Margot’s casual insults about his fatness, ugliness, and clumsiness, as if being unattractive automatically means being a “creep”. Nobody but the feminist of the moment, Roxane Gay, dared ask why the story was so full of fat-shaming. And just about the only response that recognised anything wrong with the story’s interpretation was a condescending National Review piece titled “Dear ‘Cat Person’ Girl”, which seized on the fact that Rob was Margot’s seventh partner to harp about the evils of casual sex.

Indeed, Margot seems like a caricature of female narcissism: she treats Rob with icy cruelty, any affection explicitly described as attempts to push him into further submission and herself, consequently, into victory. By contrast, Rob is funny, sweet and unrealistically polite. And what does he do that’s bad, apart from that final, half-page crescendo of text messages, by far the weakest part of the story and a cheap attempt to stick the landing? In 2021, the real-life “Margot” revealed that the story’s character was based on her, a younger ex-girlfriend of a man Roupenian had also dated (and who had no such negative feelings about him). One almost wonders if Roupenian’s depiction of a callous and calculating Margot is motivated more by intrasexual competition than feminism.

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Looking back, it’s strange that the story was read as a straightforward cautionary tale of fragile masculinity, more an educational tool than a work of the imagination. For me, what is compelling in “Cat Person” — what drew me in, five years ago — was that a certain ugly female feeling had been put on the page. It was the feeling of having sex not out of desire, but instead out of desire to be desired, to be validated in one’s beauty and allure.

I knew one girl who said that during sex all she imagined was the view of herself from above; another, who said she usually avoided attractive guys, bewildered everyone by cheating on her boyfriend with a socially-stunted virgin; and countless girls, of course, find something both intoxicating and terrifying in cat calls, compliments, and, in that ever more capacious term: creeps. I recently saw a short film by model Taylor Jeanne, the title of which put it succinctly enough: I Love Creepy Guys. But these are all shameful, whispered-about feelings, whereas “Cat Person” was frank about the rarely acknowledged narcissism in female desire, and abjection’s strange relationship to it: “her revulsion turned to self-disgust and a humiliation that was a kind of perverse cousin to arousal.” You wanted to seduce, but not exactly to cash in. If you do, you hate him a little bit, and hate yourself more.

“Cat Person” should have opened up truly difficult questions about our sexual culture. As the million think pieces stated, it did upturn any simple idea of consent, especially the one, increasingly popular in the 2010s, of “affirmative consent”: that “Yes means yes”, and therefore must mean everyone’s happy. And yet, pieces in The Atlantic and The New York Times entirely missed the boat, with dull think-pieces about how “Cat Person” showed the importance of “enthusiastic consent”. The Washington Post translated Roupenian’s twisted portrayal of a young woman’s power over an older man — and her deeply conflicted feelings about that power — into a nice, neat tale of misogyny: “Robert is older than Margot, as is the custom in heterosexual relationships, calling most of the shots in their interactions, and therefore has the power in their fledgling relationship”.

But the whole terror of the story is that she does beg him to have sex with her; that he does check in with her; that she does enjoy much of it — and yet still, at the end of it, is sickened. The question wasn’t why Margot didn’t say yes — it was why she did. Our problem was, and remains, a culture in which women are so alienated from their own bodies that sex, for them, is mostly autoerotic, imbued with a violent need for validation, and cut with deep self-loathing. Rob didn’t pressure Margot — if anything, she pressured him — but they were interacting in a culture where, without the excuse of virginity or religion, immediate sex is the default. And Rob wasn’t evil for being “bad in bed”; it’s just that, usually, men want and enjoy casual sex more than women do. Roupenian’s story got at this hard, painful dilemma — at the way our culture provokes both men and women to both hate and despair. But the publicity machine of literature, at the height of MeToo, had to flatten “Cat Person” into a tale of a spotless victim and evil perpetrator.

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Roupenian certainly benefitted. She received a $1.3 million advance for a hastily-commissioned collection of short stories. It performed terribly, even after it was renamed Cat Person, perhaps disappointing because critics had gotten Roupenian wrong from the start. She has always been a horror writer, and the stories in her debut are gruesome tales of mutilation and sadism, set in a bleak landscape with fear on all fronts.

Yet those frenzied first months of MeToo coincided with the tail end of the personal essay era. Women writers were beginning to demur from divulging their darkest experiences for $150. The media machine was starving for content and needed a viral “piece” — something not-too-challenging, not-too-long, and above all, relatable. For “Cat Person” to sky-rocket beyond the fiction pages of The New Yorker into the clickbait realm of the “MeToo piece”, the protagonist needed to be bland enough for any reader to self-insert and realistic enough to believe.

But what about that inconvenient cruelty of hers? What about her delight in Rob’s nervousness? What about her arousal, imagining her own inappropriate youth? By 2019, the New Yorker would be ready to touch those tensions, publishing Mary Gaitskill’s “This is Pleasure”, a provocative piece shifting between the perspectives of a MeToo’d editor and one of his “victims”. But in 2017, it was taboo to challenge the roles MeToo had firmly delineated. And editor, author, and reader were all ready to play along — even if, later, we came to confess the contradictions.

Julian is the protagonist of Paul Schrader’s 1980 masterpiece American Gigolo, made in the golden age of the erotic thriller. He’s played, and overshadowed, by Richard Gere, who made history as the first leading man to get full-frontally nude in an American studio film. This was another golden age, after all — of sexual freedom — between the invention of the Pill and the horrors of the AIDS crisis.

Why was Julian like this? Why was he so talented at languages, and suave, and erudite; and why was he so into making older ladies feel good? Why was he selling sex, anyway? And what about that murder he was framed for? Nobody cared. The plot was always secondary to the style, merely a support structure for a case study in early Eighties seduction. The point of Julian, if there was one, was his narcissism: he’s a shiny shell draped in Armani suits, who may well have absolutely nothing inside. Later, Schrader actually disavowed Julian a bit, calling him “really just a thin guy”, superficial without knowing it. In that way, maybe, he represents that brief, proto-Reagan paradise: a little stupid, a little evil, but kind of cool.

He was a man of his time, but now, Julian is back. Showtime has created an American Gigolo miniseries, out last week. A hodge-podge of sequel, prequel and remake, the show seems so singularly hellbent on destroying its source material that one wonders: why on Earth was it made? Schrader is apparently wondering, too: though credited as a “corporate consultant” on the final product (his salary was $50,000), he has called the show a “terrible idea” and vowed not to watch it.

A wise choice. Julian has been reimagined as a generic, pitiable, weeping loser, a superannuated sad sack in disgusting hoodies with greasy hair. He’s 45 years old. He’s played by Jon Bernthal. And he shares nothing but a profession with the original character. Julian’s sexiness, it seems, doesn’t work with the archetypal protagonist of prestige television: the sensitive man obsessed with his childhood.

Viewers of the original American Gigolo didn’t care why Julian did what he did. But the new show insists on providing us with a hackneyed backstory, in the form of shot-for-shot flashbacks. Sometimes, there’s the same footage twice in the same episode. Here’s the post-prison Julian grabbing a fence; here’s him doing so as a poor boy in a generic Dust Bowl setting, with his extremely simple mother. Oh, there he goes sleeping with her friend. Fetish understood. And then we find out why he sells sex: a mysterious French-speaking brunette named Olga shows up to the family shack in an extraordinarily short tweed skirt suit, asks to look in his mouth, hands his mother an envelope, and tells him she’ll be waiting in the car. Julian asks his mom: “What?” She sobs: “You’re gonna go to Hollywood and you’re gonna be a big star!” He again asks: “What, Mom?” She screams: “You need to get the fuck out of here right now!” He’s then sent to, it would appear, a high-class gigolo camp.

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To ensure that the audience can congratulate itself on watching virtuous prestige television attuned to the havoc wrought by toxic masculinity — not the reality shows that their less successful cousins watch — Julian must now have “feelings”, “trauma”, and “pain”. To ensure the creators have ten hours of material, in a business model premised on streaming audiences no longer leaving their homes, or even their beds, to consume “content”, he must also have an incessantly — and very slowly — rehashed “past”.

It is difficult not to see the new American Gigolo as the latest absurd iteration of the media’s anxious, obsessive search for trauma, victimhood, and injury in what, until now, have been recognised as happier chapters in the American story. As Mike Hale has aptly put it in the New York Times, it “remakes an era-defining film for the current age of victimisation”. The whole point of the original Julian was that he was young, confident, and the sexiest man imaginable, a man so alluring that the gorgeous wife of a prominent politician would risk literal death to be with him. But the new Julian is a bundle of pathetic clichés of the repentant male: “I’ve done dumb things.” “I’ve hurt people.” “If I sat on your feet, would you feed me?”

Low-effort psychology, apparently, is a key tenet of prestige television these days — as is box-ticking political lip service. American Gigolo has been reinvented to conform to our current sexual mores: all the sex in this tragic remake are more ferarum and a little rough. In the original, the only BDSM scene, which completely turns off Julian, is orchestrated by a disgusting creep who murders his wife. The whole film revolves around Julian’s sexual tenderness and care toward his love-hungry customers. But whatever! Now it’s hot for a traumatised male to “explore” kink and subsequently cry about how he’s caused “pain”.

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And perhaps it’s impossible to emulate the sexiness of the original American Gigolo at a time when sex is regarded as suspect, and “sex workers” themselves embody an inscrutable mixture of saintly victimhood and feminist triumph. Plus, the day-to-day of today’s young escort is a lot more mundane: see Pacho Velez’s performatively boring portrayal of sugar babies in his recent film Searchers, just staring at their iPhones as they scroll through options. That’s a lot less compelling than the original Julian Kay sliding into fancy lounges and waiting for a lady with big earrings to walk over with her cocktail.

The new American Gigolo is, then, as representative of its moment as the first one was. The late critic Mark Fisher wrote about the cultural exhaustion of the 2000s, of the inability to create new artistic forms. In the decades since the Reagan era, he argued, with crash after crash punctuated by booms of ever more inequality and precarity, society became increasingly fearful of the future and ambivalent about the present. Culture, therefore, could be nothing more than a tranquilising and unchallenging rehash of stale nostalgia. American Gigolo is a case in point: its creators, I suppose, vaguely remembered American Gigolo as cool, thought other middle-aged people would, and most importantly, couldn’t think of anything better to make.

The series is part of a larger and more depressing trend toward anodyne, cookie-cutter, sad-sensitive-male remakes. Most cynically, perhaps, is the tendency — part of streaming services’ “microtargeting” strategies based on harvesting demographic data — toward clumsy, politically correct updates of exciting black media. Amazon’s 2021 Coming 2 America, a sequel to Eddie Murphy’s beloved 1988 film, is so lazy it de-ages the actors using CGI to recreate scenes from the original; but for contemporary audiences, it inserts unwieldy references to women’s rights. The 2019 Netflix film Dolemite is My Name likewise stars the now 61-year-old Murphy. Here he portrays Rudy Ray Moore, stand-up and Blaxploitation director best known for Dolemite (1975). In both films, Murphy’s lines are far less shocking than in his Eighties triumphs.

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What made the originals funny would never be acceptable today: the humour of Coming to America largely rode on Eddie Murphy’s “African voice”; the humour of Dolemite rode on the Blaxploitation genre’s radical redeployment of Black stereotypes. Today, they have been revised to cleanse the edginess, anger, and discomfort of their originals, in the relentless march to neutralise everything that could possibly risk controversy. Like the woke-washed American Gigolo, the rehash of Dolemite includes absurdly stiff, laundered dialogue. A toothless liquor store haunt says: “Hotel Dunbar: that used to be the centre of Black arts and entertainment.” Snoop Dog, as a Rasta, turns down Murphy’s music: “Sometimes our dreams don’t work out, brother.” The original Dolemite is pretty much known for his catchphrase “Do-lo-mite!” (like “Dy-na-mite!”); now we must suffer Murphy saying things like: “I don’t have a lot of good memories of back home.”

Not even the Classics are safe. In fact, they offer the most absurd example of this bleak trend. Robert Icke, who has been described as the “great hope of British theatre”, has decided to turn the earliest extant work of Greek tragedy, set approximately 3,000 years before the invention of psychology, into another struggle session about trauma. In his adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, during a sold-out West End run, Icke had Orestes recount what he experienced after the end of the Trojan War to a therapist, in a move so inappropriate that even the Guardian called it “neurotic”. In the adaptation’s New York run this summer, Agamemnon was a selfish politician making cynical remarks to a television journalist about how difficult democracy is — despite the fact that the play was set in a pre-democratic era. The adaptation has been dubbed a “masterpiece”.

Most astonishingly, every reference to Greek gods was gone: in their place, Agamemnon, the infamously selfish and infinitely brave antihero of Greek epic, was talking about how his religion “helped” him cope and how he wished he could spend more time with his family. At his trial, Orestes protested that people who’ve been hurt in turn harm others. Yes: the leading British theatrical talent of our day has taken Aeschylus’s timeless and unsurpassed poetry about divine prophecy and replaced it with pabulum about how “hurt people hurt people”.

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Taken together, these terrible cultural offerings reveal the unrestricted seepage of cut-rate therapy and its wooden jargon into the very furthest reaches of history. The past has been terrorised and defused, and audiences no longer, apparently, are considered adult enough to consider events without a pre-packaged trauma narrative to delineate who’s good and who’s bad. The gigolo must be sad; Dolemite must be wounded; and even the House of Atreus must be analysed with all the subtlety of an Instagram self-care post explaining “PTSD”.

The impact is palpable: in a major way, the purpose of art is to show that a past existed, and that it was different from the present. These bowlderised and ham-fisted revisits brainwash viewers into a terribly misleading idea: art has always been one way, as has psychology, as has politics, as has religion, as has everything. “Source material” is less marshalled into new interpretations, more colonised into uniformity. It is a sad day when Julian Kay, Dolemite and Agamemnon somehow all have precisely the same thing to say: “I’m in a lot of pain, and I’m sorry!”

To be clear: there has not been a mass return to traditional Catholicism among New Yorkers. Downtown bars have not grown dusty as their former patrons marry, have children and stay in; their denizens have not renounced their stuporous ways. A few microcelebrities are going to Mass and confession; a few thousand fans of theirs post insular memes with half-remembered phrases from the Gospels; and a few brands sell things like “GOD WON’T LET ME DIE” booty shorts and the Praying “Trinity” bikini.

The aesthetics employed are tired and unremarkable: plaid schoolgirl skirts and altarpieces, bedroom photo shoots with Edwardian corseting, photos with nymphet eyes peering up from the kneeler. “Young Catholics” today, long after organised religion fell from centrality in American life, are scraping its remains; they are reviving the Catholic revival of Eighties Madonna, down to the intermammary rosary. The difference is that back then, Catholics weren’t pleased. Madonna started every “Blonde Ambition” performance with a prayer — and Pope John Paul II issued an official statement condemning it as “Satanic”, urging Catholics not to attend. Italian broadcasters refused to play the “Like a Prayer” video, and Pepsi dropped the singer from its ad campaigns.

Compare that to the Met Gala’s 2018 “Heavenly Bodies” theme: Rihanna wore a bedazzled minidress and mitre, while Cardinal and Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan gave an enthusiastic press conference. Are Catholics so desperate for religion to have relevance that they’ll take anything, even what seems almost too superficial to even be sacrilegious?

Apparently so. According to a recent New York Times guest essay, “New York’s Hottest Club is the Catholic Church”. What is shocking about this piece is not, primarily, its subjects’ half-hearted prostitution of Catholic imagery. Rather, it is the seeming guilelessness with which its author Julia Yost, editor of the established conservative journal First Things, seems to take them at their word. Though not intimately familiar with Catholic doxa, I suppose her mission faces a challenge: how can one be a public-facing Catholic in a world almost too stupid to evangelise to? 

This is not to say there are no Catholics in New York: there are, and their folkways are quite identifiable. Most strikingly, they tend to abstain from fornication, believing this is necessary to avoid eternal damnation. They generally marry and have children at relatively young ages. They generally marry, therefore, one another. I have a friend who is a recently un-lapsed Catholic. As such, his romantic life, formerly abuzz with tantalising young heathens, primarily consists of a dreary, desperate succession of false starts and mutually embarrassing denouements. He suffers, and his sojourn in Purgatory may very well be shortened for it.

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To those for whom “Catholicism” has provided spiritual comfort and guidance, and introduced useful restraints, we should be encouraging. As famous convert Evelyn Waugh said when Nancy Mitford asked how he reconciled his awful character and his Catholicism, “were I not a Christian I would be even more horrible”.

We should be less encouraging, however, of those who use Catholicism in pursuit of attention and in the exercise of branding: that is, as pure spectacle, exactly like everything else online. The evolution of Catholic Twitter illustrates this. At least the Weird Catholic Twitter that the New York Times profiled in 2020 presented the intriguing oddity of anonymous Ignatius Reilly types, fuming about “dumbed-down doctrine” from the rooks they’d erected in their mothers’ basements. Today, it’s bigger and more banal: young women, unequipped for Instagram stardom, post selfies outside churches they don’t venture inside, and swarms of priapic men lose their minds. Both factions have the dove and fire emojis in their handles.

In these cases, rather than a cure for vanity, Catholicism is a veneer that makes their trespasses more palatable, even giving them cause for sanctimony. The harsh prescriptions of Catholicism could well be a respite from the modern world, but one’s hardly “not of this world” when she claims it to be so before thousands of Patreon subscribers, or Twitter followers, or Instagram voyeurs. Part of the Christian message, in my enfeebled understanding, is to not parade one’s piety (“when thou prayest, enter into thy closet” — Matthew 6:6). Early in Jude the Obscure, Jude recites the Nicene creed in Latin at a pub and is met with thunderous applause, which makes him furious. Repentant and ashamed, he storms off. Can we imagine any Twitter Catholic today feeling bad about making a spectacle of their faith?

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In a striking turn, Yost’s essay doesn’t seem to question a “fake it till you make it” view of Catholicism; the idea that you should believe before performing the rituals is deemed Protestant nonsense. This might make sense in the context of a “dark night of the soul”, but it’s bizarre when applied to conversion. Historically, it doesn’t hold up: the overwhelmingly dominant account of an internal conversion is St. Augustine’s (“there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away”). And while it’s true that Protestants prioritise internal change over external sacrifice (as Luther said, “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly”), it’s not like the Catholic-adjacent, in the main, make any changes in their habits. One of the most vocal young converts I know — he’s told me, with a terrifying conviction in his large eyes, that even married men and women shouldn’t have non-procreative sex — shows up to every party with a different Tinder girl. He says they overwhelm him.

Why convert, if you don’t believe it? This is a distinctly postmodern attitude to appropriating the premodern. Sincere belief is hardly even conceivable these days. So, it seems impossible to imagine actually believing Mass and prayers and chastity are a matter of eternal life or death (as do countless Catholics to this day), or to believe it without compulsive ironising. The solution to that problem of imperfect faith could be submission to readily available religious authority. And yet, many of the loudest in this crowd espouse sedevacantism, the view that there has been no valid Pope since Vatican II, and even no valid ordinations — a theology so bespoke it would rattle the bones even of the most traditionalist Catholics. Spending their days engaged in arcane and unconvincing debates in which they copy stuff from Reddit and paste it onto Twitter, they bear an uncanny resemblance to the DSA cretins for whom they bear such scorn. 

I suppose this is how we do politics now that politics is dead: the near entire retreat to the imaginary, a casual contrarianism committed to nothing besides its own ability to shock. Yost claims that “members of a small but significant scene are turning to the ancient faith in defiance of liberal pieties”. The choice of Catholicism is, of course, not random. Pretending to embrace that rapidly dying faith, led by an octogenarian Argentine with one lung, is an expression of antipathy towards the mainstream status quo and its sacred cows. There is apathy here, too. The vague conservatism of the “Catholic revival” does not reflect commitment to improving society or even their own souls; instead, it is merely confused agitation born of obsession with a liberal class they imagine to be composed solely of Jezebel writers — a politics, faith, and worldview with all the conviction and all the consistency of one impetuous toddler angry at another.

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It may be true, for the more sincere among them, that the draw of Catholicism comes from a painful and desperate place. Young people, particularly in the post-Covid years, feel adrift and alone, and may well feel, as Waugh did a century before them, that the choice is between “Christianity or chaos”. The draw is half a longing for rules of any sort. (Is it any coincidence that many of these new Catholics espouse Ray Peat’s Eighties nutritional code, with its inane admonitions against pineapple and paeans to hypnagogic ice cream?) But this so-called traditionalism betokens little more than a hysterical obsession with ever more arcane, ever more irrelevant concerns.

Another part of the draw, I suppose, is general dissatisfaction with the fuzzy, listless conformism of the post-Obama years; it’s almost too banal to observe that the milestones of adult life are gone, the union job, marriage, family home, children, all so easily available to an earlier generation. As one young Catholic podcaster tells the author of the New York Times essay: she didn’t like how everyone told her to get a job when what she really wanted was a family.

But wait: “get a job” is pretty reasonable advice for aspiring mothers. If you don’t have a trust fund, a job with health insurance is probably the single biggest facilitator of having children in America. You don’t have to become a provocatively Right-wing traditionalist to breed. A single stroll through Park Slope makes very clear that the liberal elites, in fact, love children. Throw a stone, and you’ll find a secular, Dem-voting female professional with a husband, children, and a life far more similar to that of any given parishioner than any on-trend “Catholic”. It’s not “choosing the better part” to be an unemployed podcaster, nor does self-marketing through semi-nude photography on social platforms compare to sitting at the feet of Christ.

Young New Yorkers are reacting to modernity via a touristic experiment with the American Right. But, with rare exceptions, they haven’t stopped fornicating; they haven’t started forgoing coke so they can wake up for Mass on Sunday. Instead, the fixation with “post-liberalism” or “post-feminism” or “Catholicism” is superficial: it reveals little more than a narcissism of small differences. Endlessly rejecting “liberal pieties” is easy; what’s difficult is taking a cold and curdling look at one’s own life.

When the first antidepressants were developed in the Fifties, the condition was considered so rare that the drug research seemed like a waste of money. But in a 2017 survey, 12.7% of Americans had taken antidepressants in the past month (and nearly twice as many women as men). It is not to deny the existence of catatonic states of despair to suggest that there may have been a definitional leak.

One might retort that “depression” was simply “under-diagnosed”, but equally present in every earlier stage of human history. Consider, though, the discovery of SSRIs, a class of drugs that combined lifetime use with a better safety profile than earlier antidepressants (just weight gain, sexual dysfunction, and the occasional suicide upon withdrawal). And consider the context of that discovery: a world where pharmaceutical companies fund much of the research used in their own regulation, and that research is easy to skew. In short, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a pharmaceutical company in possession of a new drug shall be in want of an endemic illness. As the GlaxoSmithKline slogan bluntly went: “Does your soul have a cold?”

Still, it would be sophomoric to think that depression was wholly and solely constructed by Big Pharma. Until recently, it was understood that “no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of” melancholy. So wrote Robert Burton, a reclusive life-long fellow of Oxford, four centuries ago, in his freewheeling account of sadness, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Burton was writing in one of the last periods where the role of the writer wasn’t to express an individual thesis, but instead to summarise everything. As such, his Anatomy has little in the way of synthetic thought. As Burton says, “I have read many Bookes, but to little purpose, for want of good method, I have confusedly tumbled over divers Authors in our Libraries, with small profit, for want of Art, Order, Memory, Judgment.” He can’t even settle on a definition of melancholy — “whether it be a cause or an effect, a disease or symptom … I will not contend about it” — but he does examine some potential causes. Black bread, melons, hot air, cold air, excessive exercise, defective exercise, the stars, God, hot baths, a hot brain, Calvinism, Catholicism, excessive studying, excessive merrymaking, excessive “chamber-making”.

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As for melancholy’s symptoms, “the tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms”. Indeed, it’s sometimes difficult to separate cause from symptom, as in the glorious description “lascivious by reason of much wind”. Burton’s aim is to “adventure yet in such vast confusion and generality to bring them into some order; and so descend into particulars”. Many of these loopy excursions come to a familiar enough conclusion: melancholy’s cause is sin, and its cure is God: “We ought to fear our own fickle estates, remember our miseries and vanities, examine and humiliate ourselves, seek to God, and call to Him for mercy.”

But Burton does not deny the importance of strategies to combat melancholia. These include behavioural changes — drink a glass of water upon waking; seek hills or mountains; “be not solitary, be not idle” — and mental ones — avoid prolonging passionate thoughts; avoid believing in predestination; “be meek, merciful, and patient”. There is comfort here, for the post-modern reader. Thanks to the rapid rise of neuroscience and the branding of depression as a “brain disease”, many third-party carriers reimburse doctors for medication management only, and many depressed people are simply handed a prescription by a general practitioner and told to check in in six weeks. In Burton’s day, the old Galenic system of humours did emphasise the physical. But these days depression is treated like heartburn; in more exploring reaches, it’s treated by impersonal, one-size-fits-all cognitive behavioural therapy, now the province of therapy apps advertised by Instagram scroll.

At the extremes, the “chemical imbalance” theory raises troubling questions about human character; and its Brave New World-style treatment can make the human being feel like an unruly dog. No matter how many analogies one can make to infectious disease or broken legs, depression is experienced at a complicated level inextricable from one’s most virtuous traits — sensitivity, self-criticism, ambition — and to think of oneself as merely a malfunctioning machine or a bundle of “trauma reactions” can impoverish the self.

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The experience of The Anatomy is one of overload, and perhaps it is best to read it with the desperation and joy of Samuel Johnson, who “frequently resorted to [The Anatomy] for the purpose of exhilaration” while running his tiny, failing school at Edial Hall. Its very eclecticism and capaciousness is its virtue. Perhaps reading anecdotes about ancient kings won’t cure you: but given that depression rarely is “curable” at all, there’s something beautiful about feeling this continuity of human experience, across time and space, to feel one’s sadness as part of a world history full of delight and variety. Compare the experience of the sad person today, asking their doctor for Prozac or maybe playing with an adult colouring book, to the experience of a Samuel Johnson. The first is made to feel small and simple; the second is made to feel himself more intelligent, more dignified, more ambitious. Moreover, as any reader of Shakespeare’s tragedies will know, the early Moderns had a way of laughing about despair, solitude, even suicide — a kind of manic sad clowning found absent from the way most people talk about mental health now, both infantilising and deadly serious. Burton, after all, wrote The Anatomy under the name Democritus Junior: the laughing philosopher.

I read The Anatomy the winter after my first law school exams, ambivalent about a course of study that was beginning, nonetheless, to gel into inevitability. I was staying on the couch of a family member in Florida, in a condo surrounded by red and orange tropical plants and buzzing constantly with the exertions of a leaking air conditioner. Through the screen door, at any hour of the day or night, I could see the recently discharged woman next door swaying silently in front of a blue-fuzz TV. Against her state, obviously, The Anatomy is of little use. But for the sort of low-grade malaise I found myself in — the sense that my fears would never disappear but my possibilities, one by one, would — The Anatomy made me feel a little bit better. I read it on the beach, I read it over diner milkshakes, I read it on hot and sleepless nights, on that orange leather sofa that congealed to my skin.

The Anatomy clocks in at 1,392 pages — my paperback quickly broke in half — and any paragraph swims through a dizzying array of references, Homeric through Renaissance; medical, theological, and philosophical. On the one hand, its difficulty made me feel accomplished; and on the other hand, it made me feel, basically, that it was fine to be scared, to still be doubting. I could try cabbage one day, clear water another, oranges, opening windows, perfume, walking in fields, sweet-scented baths, confessing to a friend, faith in God, eating earlier, fasting, seeing sunlight upon waking, reading Herodotus, reading Elizabethans. And above all, as Burton’s last section of course requires, truly and steadfastly resisting despair.

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Small consolations, it’s true, but ones that fit into a life well lived — unlike antidepressants, with their dubious efficacy and their near-certain, unpleasant side effects; and unlike so much of self-help, with its individualism, and its transactional focus on convenience and utility. Burton’s salves are enriching, not subtracting. They make the reader feel, in some small way, in control of their condition, an active agent. As the habit makes the monk, the medicine makes the patient, and against the pop psychology and medical cocktails more commonly on offer, there’s something to be said for the demanding and delightful sublimations of The Anatomy. That the book is often baffling only further recommends it. It feels good to do something difficult; and it feels good to get out of one’s own time, to defamiliarise one’s own condition: though people may have always felt sad, they felt differently about feeling sad.

The Anatomy of Melancholy won’t cure depression. But there’s something comforting about this futility: if sadness has always existed and always will, even for those, like Burton, of exemplary learning and unparalleled discipline, even in the most foreign reaches of time and place, even after 13,000 pieces of advice and 400 years, then we might try to make something generative of some of the pain, to “write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy”.

What has happened to Lena? That is one of the questions that rushed through my head when, after two attempts, I made it through Sharp Stick, her first feature since 2011. Others included: what is wrong with this film? Is it a test of the inanity of contemporary critics? Or is she baiting us to cancel her? Or has she, all along, been just as idiotic, just as narcissistic, just as myopic as her crudest haters insisted?

I feel insane even describing the film’s plot. The protagonist Sarah Jo, a 26-year-old caretaker for a child with Down’s Syndrome, begs his man-child father to take her virginity (she had an emergency hysterectomy at age 17, which sexually stunted her). This causes her to instantly transform into an infantile nymphomaniac. Soon enough into the sometimes mushrooms-fuelled, sometimes porn-fuelled, affair, the mother — a sharp-tongued and overbearing businesswoman portrayed by Lena herself, in some strange self-hating gesture — finds out. (Actually, she finds out on the floor of the kitchen after she slips in a pool of her own amniotic fluid.) Sarah Jo is fired — and finds solace in an ethical porn star who resembles her ex-lover. (He addresses the camera with words like “I feel so connected to you” and “I admire your commitment to women’s personal expression”.)

Worried she’s bad at sex, Sarah Jo embarks on a journey of self-discovery that involves hanging elementary-school arts-and-craftsy checklists of extreme sexual acts around her room and soliciting men on fetish apps to participate in them. At one point she jumps out of the bushes and screams at the family she used to work for, “I did bukkake!” The disabled child and newborn react with distress.

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The film has received some praise, which has appeared in Instagram ads featuring suggestive photos of the film’s completely conventionally attractive star, Kristine Froseth, who has modelled for Chanel, Armani and Prada. Vanity Fair called it “Supremely Funny”; Rolling Stone claimed it was “both absurd and enlightening” (in fairness, they were running an interview with Lena; to be honest might have been impolitic). But, in a refreshing show of lucidity in the face of a star-studded film that was very diverse — perhaps to clumsily rebuke critics of Girls’s whiteness — most outlets have panned it. To quote The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis: “There’s no point in enumerating all the reasons I dislike it”. 

Perhaps critics feel unusually free to be honest about this awful film because of a perplexing controversy around its creation. Apparently Forseth, who plays Sarah Jo, reached out to Amy Gravino, the autism activist — known for her “Why Autism is Sexier Than You Think” TedTalk — about consulting on the film. Then the creators suddenly decided that Forseth’s character would not be autistic. According to Gravino, though, the character is “clearly” coded as autistic, and the “dehumanising” film participates in the “infantilisation of people on the spectrum”.

Sarah Jo is certainly childish: she’s constantly smearing yoghurt all over her mouth, and a baby-talking bartender has to teach her how to drink as she holds a wine cup with two hands like a sippy-cup. She dresses in the kind of upmarket baby clothes that are now so often found draped on the underweight and affluent. When her sister asks her to stop openly scratching her genitals, her mother asks: “Is it a wiping issue?” And it goes beyond credulity, into broad comedy, for this 26-year-old — adoring daughter of a potty-mouthed, aged-out tart and loyal sister of a viral TikToker who can’t identify the father of her child — to respond to “Can I go down on you?” with (bug-eyed smile, high-pitched squeal): “Down where?!”

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Along with a screener, the film’s marketers sent me Lena’s “Director’s Statement”: it was, I was told, “worth reading”. The last three films I’ve written about have brandished a similar exegesis: is this phenomenon an expression of condescension toward audiences, or fear of their wrath? Appropriately, the Statement revealed that this is an ideologically unimpeachable film: during the pandemic, the chronically ill Dunham came to reflect on her life. In Sarah Jo, she developed a character who experienced her physical challenges — a complete hysterectomy due to chronic endometriosis — and emotional challenges — “often feeling as if life and romance, and womanhood on the whole, are a secret that everyone is in on except for me.”

Contemplating the portrayal of sexually active women in film, Lena thought about how they so often end up either murdered or at least subjected to “a torture of judgment, of questioning, of self-doubt and loneliness and regret over choices that should ultimately just be part of the fabric of self-actualisation in that same way it can be for their male counterparts”. So, she “began to imagine a character whose sexual journey would be totally unique, unmarred by shame or self-hate or the projections of others. She would use sex not to destroy her body but to heal it from a history of medicalised trauma and cultural projection”. Hence, Sarah Jo’s “private and judgment free sexual journey”.

How to portray that? As Lena concludes: “I pushed myself to write this script with honesty and a certain demented purity. When I asked this story what it needed from me, I simply heard Sarah Jo telling me ‘Please don’t try and make me cute.’ And so, I let her rage.”

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I suppose there is a certain “demented purity” to Sarah Jo — but is it truly countercultural to show a woman empowering herself through watching porn and speedrunning through the “categories” with faceless strangers? In a world where yonic prosthetics are advertised on public transport, do contemporary media narratives actually discount female pleasure? Is it all that subversive to show a Scandinavian model begging for another go in up-to-the-minute fashions? Girls, by contrast, was brave enough to show Lena Dunham naked — naked and dismayed.

Indeed, Lena’s brilliance has always been her attention to the disappointments of sexual liberation. I remember seeing her first film, Tiny Furniture, at the local arthouse theatre when I was 17;  amid so many EU-funded multinational WWI dramas and mumblecores about dumpy Portlanders with regrettable tattoos, it was shockingly relevant. Its last scene is one of the greatest portraits, today, of the false promise of hook-up culture: Lena’s character finally seduces the hot guy, which means him pulling down her pants and using her for a few moments in an abandoned drain pipe. 

What happened to that Lena? Of course, she’s always seemed like a terrible person — but her early work portrayed her failures with a clear-eyed precision that cut through the noise. She seemed to know that all her characters were awful. Why is she now saying, “I think we have enough messaging in society, and probably in my 20s I contributed to it, that said, like, ‘porn is ruining sex, and it’s making it so hard for people’”?

Sharp Stick is entertaining in the sense that it offers the rubbernecking fascination of the worst trainwrecks. But the coming-of-age via kink here is so devoid of any plausibility, let alone subtlety, that this seems almost like a dystopian send-up of a 2010s sex romp. If this bizarre, borderline paedophilic fantasy is a failure, though, it’s not a vindication because Lena has always been so awful; it’s a shame because she used to be so exceptional. Either Lena is truly the most brilliant performance artist of a generation, or one of its biggest casualties. 

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Wherefore this fantasy of frictionless sex, of anonymous encounters with randy internet strangers? Why on Earth would this be the way to heal from sexual injury? I suppose the director of Sharp Stick couldn’t really convince herself either: the film concludes in textbook white knight fashion. Sarah Jo’s saviour is a handsome porn-industry PA who won’t have sex with her without getting to know her (which she’s not interested in). Instead, he goes to epic lengths to “heal her trauma”. In a gesture of saintliness, he shares her fan mail with the ethical porn star she’s obsessed with, who tells her to be “proud of your fucking scars”. Finally, she accepts his love: going off-checklist and allowing him to gently caress her. 

I suppose this is a familiar problem with feminist art: do female characters really want the hyper-efficient, attachment-free anti-intimacy of their masculine counterparts? As Lena bemoaned in her Director’s Statement, women don’t get an Alfie — but do they want one? Even Carrie Bradshaw ended up with Mr. Big, and in Sally Rooney’s latest, a few hundred pages of light BDSM neatly tie up in two couples, plus a baby on the way. The marriage plot certainly originates in a world of primogeniture and patriarchy; but perhaps abandoning all sentiment and sensitivity is a patriarchal fantasy as well.

I don’t believe Lena could resist a little nuance: the free-wheeling mother here is a cautionary tale, as is the sister who, as her mother callously acknowledges at what appears to be an abortion party, can’t bring a baby into the “living realm”. The (lazily repetitive) montage of Sarah Jo and her multitudinous partners is far from alluring; the film’s only erotic scene is the final, tender, vanilla one. 

Perhaps the title, here, is a giveaway: as Sarah Jo says of her sexual quest, it will be like “When I was a kid and the doctor was taking blood and the doctor said ‘This will just be a sharp stick’, and I knew it would hurt more than they said, so I beat them to it in my mind and that was my power”.

“I knew it would hurt more than they said”: this, I think, is Lena’s final assessment of so-called sexual freedom.

But the days when feminists were largely against porn are a distant memory. With the rise of the Christian Right in the Eighties — and the rise of home video — so-called “sex-positive feminism” won the day. As a popular Ellen Willis line went: “In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to ‘What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic.’” In this view, pornography wasn’t about social issues such as the eroticisation of violence against women or their submission, economic and physical. It was just about, well, “what turns you on”.

This view is a pretty simplistic one. As Amia Srinivasan observes in The Right to Sex, it’s not like our desires come inborn, just waiting for their validation and release by streaming. Instead, porn sites — algorithmically overdetermined, like everything else dependent on online ad sales — push site-goers to eroticise whatever’s getting the most hits in their area. Most often, it’s pretty harrowing stuff.

One might object to this state of affairs. The porn industry is worth almost $100 billion worldwide; it is the way most boys and many girls are first exposed to sex in the developed world, and often at preteen ages. Performers are rampantly abused, and women mostly age out by their twenties. Many posit a connection between porn consumption and sexual dysfunction and body dysmorphia. Only the most naive would deny that women feel pressured to accommodate an androcentric ideal of behaviour, and that pornography partakes of and amplifies that pressure.

But despite a recent spate of critiques of “sex-positive” liberal feminism, few today really condemn porn. Co-opted and defanged like so many countercultural movements of the Sixties, feminism has now generally settled into uncritical embrace of choice, wary to articulate any theory of good, bad, or even fair sex beyond the presence of “consent”. This liberal, legalistic framework is something of a fiction, of course; much as the underdogs in capitalism are treated as giving free and informed consent even under the most dire economic duress, women today are treated as giving consent even when their wishes are as minimised and obscured as ever. But the imperative of sex-positive feminism is to not question women’s desires, but instead take them at their word.

Hence the strange case of Pleasure, the feature debut of Swedish director Ninja Thyberg, for which I had high hopes: it is perhaps the most widely released film about porn to actually go “behind the scenes”, hand sanitiser and all. By delving into the actual production of all those mountains of mysterious videos, Thyberg handles a subject ripe for a critical perspective. As lead Sofia Kappel told the Guardian, “I think the porn industry as a subject is very interesting since it’s very present in our lives but we don’t talk about it. We act like it doesn’t exist.”

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She’s right. But a promising subject is no guarantee of artistic success. Pleasure, praised to the sky by major critics, is less a work of art than a piece of self-defeating propaganda. It is an attempt at a pro-porn feminist flick that is so violent, so thin, and so degrading for creators and viewers alike, that Thyberg may have inadvertently created one of the greatest arguments yet against so-called sex-positive feminism.

Thyberg is a former anti-porn activist, and Pleasure is an adaptation of her 2013 Cannes short portraying the violent pressuring of a woman performer into an extreme act. As one might expect, its plot reads like an after-school special. Bella Cherry, an attractive 19-year-old Swede with virtually no backstory, personality, or desires, comes to California to enter the porn industry. In short order, she’s pressured into BDSM and then an even more extreme act before, in her own words, being “raped for hours” and finally quasi-assaulting a more attractive rival. She ends up so sickened with herself she crawls out of her limo onto a crowded LA freeway.

But as she has exhaustingly demonstrated on the press circuit, Thyberg has squarely imbibed the dogma of non-judgment. Explaining to the Guardian that she’s changed from anti-porn to judgment-free, she says, “The things that [Bella’s] going through that are bad in the film don’t have anything to do with having sex on camera.” In a New York Times profile, Thyberg declares that “Bad things happen, but it’s not because people are having sex on camera… Abuses of power exist in all workplaces.” To HuffPost: “[Bella is] sometimes the victim or in the bottom of some kind of hierarchy, but sometimes she’s also the one in the top.”

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Reviewers have praised Pleasure as a triumph of even-handedness. In its glowing piece, titled “She’s a Go-Getter”, the New York Times tells us that “women make porn and women watch it, and for different reasons, including because they like it. Because it’s their choice.” The LA Times similarly observes that “Thyberg does well to withhold judgment, approaching the porn industry not as an evil.” Mechanically drawing on the word bank of liberal feminism (“affirming”, “sex-positive”, “consent”, “non-judgmental”), NPR praises a scene where a female director has the lead tied up in rope, ball-gagged, and beaten by her easy-going male costar.

But no one unfitted with blinders could see this as anything other than an anti-porn film. Pleasure’s script is a string of feminist clichés set against scenes of violence, exploitation, and entrapment that collapse the shaky, pro-porn myth of free choice they rest on. Indeed, one wonders whether Thyberg may have been pressured to market the film for a sex-positive age.

In Bella’s first shoot, she meets the counterpart to her “teen” role — a fat, much older man, in what’s essentially a babysitter scene — and while preparing in the bathroom, has a panic attack. The director and crew tell her that she simply has “stage fright” and that “when you’re doing anything for the first time, it’s normal to feel nervous”. They successfully pressure her back on stage. Her final, post-coital triumph involves smearing the desideratum all over her face and posting selfies to Instagram with the hashtag #proudslut. Driving her back to her model house, a male porn star asks her how she got into this industry. “Well, my dad raped me…” she begins to joke in remarkably bad taste, before he tells her to shut up. Then she provides the right answer: “I just want to fuck!”

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But for all her claims to concupiscence, neither she nor any other character in this film has any amorous or even amicable relationships: they have sex on camera, in scenes that, from that first one on, are consistently horrifying, and none of which seems entirely “voluntary”. If Bella really just wants to have sex, as she repeats again and again, why does she freeze up before every scene? And why does her vision go fuzzy during every shoot, even the “feminist” one? How, after she is “raped for hours”, can she possibly be saying to her agent that she does porn because “it’s a lot of fun”? How does her triumph over a prettier rival consist of sexually brutalising her? How can the conclusion of a pro-porn film involve the protagonist jumping out a limo in shame?

How is this not satire?

Despite herself, Thyberg has made an allegory for the central contradiction of “sex work is work”: it may be work, but sex is also the main human conduit for intimacy and mutual desire, and its alienation in a free market makes it all the more difficult for one to say what they really feel or desire. Bella’s only consolation is the hope of online stardom, which doesn’t seem to be coming. All she’s done is become a monster.

In her interviews, Thyberg has said that the film was about how abuses in porn stem from capitalism and patriarchy. But is a heterosexual BDSM scene with a female tied up and gagged, so long as it’s filmed by a woman, really all feminism can aspire to?

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To Thyberg’s credit, she does emphasise the more craven side of the industry: the pressure to go extreme to get bookings, the pressure to follow through to get paid, the way Bella’s darker-skinned roommate is dismissed as “trailer trash” and abused on set. But in her attempts to withhold judgment, Thyberg has landed in unsettling and unsatisfying territory: there are clearly attempts to make porn seem fun — that Instagram post, that nice female director, that pool party — but the bits of economic reality she allows in reveal those touches as the hollow ornaments they are. “Abuses of power happen in all workplaces”, but in no other industry but prostitution do people’s rent cheques depend on a woman submitting to violent sex acts with strangers, driven by the ever-more-extreme tastes of audiences at home.

Bella Cherry doesn’t have any trauma, apparently. But nor does she have any joy, any desire, or, after the first few minutes, much of any hope. Ultimately, Pleasure is unable or unwilling to develop a positive theory of why she wants any of this, or why anyone wants any of this. Thyberg has said that she wanted to show what Bella “gets out” of porn; to show the moments where she’s on “top”. But even at her highest moment, she is merely a blank face, insecure and overwhelmed, sticking her tongue out at her iPhone as strangers wash up a few feet away. And that is its own judgment.

Much has been lost in this cinematic adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s autofiction L’événément (2000). However, one mourns little. That slim book largely consists of self-indulgent and painfully predictable reflections on l’événement of l’écriture. Across her curiously prolific output of almost identical autofictions — punctuated by a few, mostly early, highlights — the author’s 1963 abortion holds especial place as the subject of not one but two texts: her début Les Armoires vides (1974) and its tedious reprisal, the source material for the present adaptation.

In brief, Ernaux, the daughter of a Normand grocer, the first person in her family to attend university, is a few months from graduation when she becomes pregnant by a bourgeois student from Bordeaux. Having the child will, she believes, doom her dreams of finishing her education and becoming a writer. In the months that follow, and with no help from the father, she desperately pursues a back-alley abortion; she finally ends up finding a marmish hospital nurse who performs such operations—for 400 francs—in her Batignolles apartment. Her procedure lands her in a hospital after dangerous haemorrhaging, a near-death experience without which, she tells us in the last pages, she wouldn’t have wanted to ever be a mother. 

One can safely guess why Happening is considered good: it is “urgent” and “timely,” as we have been helpfully informed by critics everywhere. The film received its US release by IFC films on May 6, three days after the release of a draft ruling penned by Justice Alito, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, which would overrule Roe v. Wade. One could not have prayed for better timing.

Before that leak, director Diwan was questioned — particularly, by potential financiers — as to whether her film had any real social urgency. Indeed, in February, the French parliament extended the legality of abortion from 12 to 14 weeks after conception, despite fleeting opposition from Emmanuel Macron. Whatever timeliness might have been lacking in the French release, the stateside one has now been ensured a rapturous reception, a felicity not lost on the director: the screening I attended was preceded by a brief recording of Diwan and lead actress Anamaria Vartolomei stating that the film was of imperative importance, given these times we find ourselves in, that if we did not understand what illegal abortion was like, it would be impossible to preserve the right to legal abortion, et cetera.

It’s as simple as that: the point of this film is to show an illegal abortion, so that one might be convinced to support the right to legal abortion. This is of a piece with a pretty popular middlebrow idea of the role of art (see this much-cited study demonstrating fiction’s power to create “empathy”.) And yet, it’s hard to imagine this film convincing anyone who is currently against, say, the legacy of Roe to really change their tune; as I understand it, most of those who want Roe repealed subscribe to a contestable but fairly simple chain of inference: life begins at conception, therefore killing a foetus at any point is murder. Murder is immoral, and immoral things must be illegal. Thus, killing a foetus at any point must be illegal. 

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This calculus doesn’t provide much room for manoeuvre, and the presumed Dobbs opinion, for example, doesn’t partake of the harm reductionist logic behind this sort of scare-tactic filmmaking. The only person for whom a film such as Happening could move the needle is, I guess, an anti-Roe person who hasn’t realised that back-alley abortions direly endanger the lives of the women who receive them (does such a person exist?). And is that exceptionally sheltered pro-life person, if she does, going to be watching a French art film? 

More likely, Happening is an example of preaching to the choir, and there, I wonder whether it might defeat its own purpose. After all, many rallying cries to Americans around abortion rights relate to incursions on the right to end pregnancy in the second trimester; for example, the Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs bans abortion after the 15th week, i.e. almost four months into pregnancy, and, one might note, after well over 90% of abortions are actually performed.

In Ernaux’s memoir, when the foetus is finally expunged after the insertion of two illegal probes, the narrator recounts that “a baby doll” falls out of her; the film is just as gruesome, showing the lead actress hunched over a toilet, red-faced and sweaty as what is visibly a child dangles from her and she breathlessly begs her bourgeois hallmate to cut the umbilical cord. 

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Your casual abortion advocate might not tend to think, when she contemplates laws like that Mississippi one, about the fact that a late-second trimester foetus has foetus has fingernails, limbs, etc. Is this scene actually going to make anyone support abortion rights more? This is one problem of the illegal abortion genre — the harder to procure an abortion, and the riskier it is, the more awful the actual act appears.

What about that scene in the notable 2007 Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (a far more original work) in which the abortionist warns the woman not to throw the foetus, “whole or in pieces” in the toilet, which it’ll clog up, or outside, where dogs might eat it? Perversely, some might leave the movies newly doubting the trimester-viability-undue burden framework of Roe v. Wade (as modified by Planned Parenthood v. Casey). And perhaps they might not come out supporting, say, the Democratic bill enshrining Roe and Casey, a bill so expansive that, say opponents like Sen. Susan Collins, it might preempt state bans on even sex-selective abortions.

Happening isn’t a film to change minds — it’s about rallying the troops to protest, vote, or at least make some targeted political donations — but one should wish for more from their art than a Pavlovian bell. One might wish to experience the uniqueness of a human experience, or something of the sort. Instead, despite what Indiewire may have protested in its Sundance review, this film is squarely didactic, with dialogue so implausible and condescending as to almost insult the audience: Girl to doctor who refuses to perform abortion: “I want to continue my studies; that’s the most important thing for me.” Doctor to Girl: “No scandals in my office!”; Girl: “I would like to have a child one day, but not instead of a life; I would hate the child for that!”; Proud teacher to student, after she has an abortion and resumes performing well in class: “Have you been sick?”; Student to proud teacher: “Yes, with that illness that only affects women, and turns them into housewives!”

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The message here is that Anne is a “brilliant student” who must have an abortion to preserve that career. But her brilliance is alluded to by gestures so heavy-handed — a facile lunchtime conversation about Camus and Sartre (“Camus really pierces you — Sartre, it’s more complicated!”); watching her friend teach her how to masturbate (a scene not in the memoir) with a Sartre poster in the background; raising money for the abortion (a scene not in the memoir) by selling, inter alia, Sartre’s Le Mur for 3 francs — that one can do little more than laugh. Given that the price for Anne’s literary career is a dangerous abortion, one might wish the output to be a little more impressive. 

This cinematic Anne is far from a captivating character, far from a reflection of a complicated young woman, far from a figure to remind one of women’s need for self-determination and their infinite capabilities. She is simply a boring, paint-by-numbers “smart girl,” one among many predictable indicia that this is an “art film” (handheld camera, lens flare, and — it’s European — a lot of nudity). Despite all the laudatory reviews and Diwan’s discussion of her portrayal of “silence” in film, it unfortunately remains the fact that having a lead actress with large eyes, and a screenplay full of short lines and pauses does not a meaningful statement make. 

Instead, Diwan’s film is ultimately so withholding as to say, well, nothing. The AV Club has hailed this film as “life-affirming”; but one wonders what there is to affirm, since our lead does, well, nothing besides look for an abortion and go to bars to talk to pretty unappealing men. In comparison, the scenes of the horrible, claustrophobic fate awaiting her — her parents listening to the radio and eating and laughing together — don’t seem half-bad.

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I suppose this is a central failure of “the abortion film”. A director of any intelligence — and in this category, I include both Diwan and Eliza Hittman, whose Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) was something of a let-down after her earlier triumphs —  is attuned to the reality of sex for the very young and not-rich woman, to the ways her desire to have sex is far from the entirely free, unbounded, pleasure-driven free-for-all conservatives often imagine and vilify. Rather, fornication is often a quietly humiliating and disappointing compromise, whose pay-off for girls is far from clear. But the young women of these films have almost nothing to celebrate. Agit-prop can be exuberant; one watching an East German film, for example, might sober up into clarity, but at the time feel completely transported by the dream of worker solidarity. But despite online calls to “shout your abortion”, obtaining an abortion isn’t actually a moment of joy (indeed, the idea it is plays into reactionary fantasies of gleeful abortion-on-demand). Nor, in these films, does fornication seem worth fighting for. 

Art about sexually “immoral” young women can be profound; take Maurice Pialat’s A nos amours (1983), or Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), which Diwan told her actors to watch. In those films, we care about the constraints on the young women at their centre precisely because their lives are not mere suffering; these are lives full of the joy and chaos of sex and the ecstasy of dancing and the shock and wonder of becoming, with whatever infirmity, an adult. These films treat their audiences like adults deserving of characters, not mere symbols of good and bad, and worthy of art, not mere homages to the audience’s own virtue. 

No one may permit themselves to voice any of these misgivings. A film like this demands its accolades, assuming the right political boxes are ticked — and no one will seriously question whether that box-ticking achieves anything. For a film so uninventive and so empty, it’s astonishing that the most criticism it has had is a timid observation from the Washington Post that since we know this is a memoir by someone who, obviously, survived, “the nerve-racking nature of the events depicted is somewhat mitigated”.

That’s an understatement. The film develops no character, inhabits a gratingly artificial time capsule, and engages only in the most sophomoric political reflection. What does one really gain from seeing it? Neither entertainment nor edification. But by sitting through this and subsequently remarking on its “urgency” and “timeliness”, one gains a tidy bit of proof that they’re a very good person.

“In these times,” then, Happening’s critics are hamstrung. 

Those themes achieved astonishing proportions with the four Neapolitan novels, released in English from 2012 to 2015. The series was a rare work-in-translation to sell millions of copies in the Anglo world, in what was embarrassingly called “Ferrante fever”. Indeed, it achieved a kind of popularity rarely seen in books at all, where even writers at major publishers typically make zero royalties whatsoever.

But in 2016, Ferrante was revealed. Absolute disaster was avoided — she wasn’t, as rumour had suggested and feminists had dismissed, novelist Domenico Starnone, but, according to financial sleuthing, Starnone’s wife: Anita Raja.

In English, most outlets besides the New York Review of Books declined to sully their pages with the revelation. Ferrante’s anonymity was seen as feminist defiance, and her reveal a sexist attack. In The Guardian, Suzanne Moore proclaimed: “Who cares who Elena Ferrante really is? She owes us nothing”. Aaron Bady, in The New Inquiry, called it “a violation, and a desecration”. The New Republic dubbed the whole affair “The Sexist Big Reveal“. 

That autumn, her lengthy book of letters and interviews Frantumaglia appeared in English; in 2018, an HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend; in 2019, her disappointing novel The Lying Lives of Adults; in 2021, the star-studded adaptation of The Lost Daughter; and now, in 2022, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, a collection of Ferrante lectures. Indeed, she’s even had a weekend column in The Guardian — producing the iconic headline “Elena Ferrante: ‘I devote myself to plants. Is it because I am afraid of them?’ So much, then, for staying “in the margins”. So much for the threat made in a 2014 interview, that: “I remain Ferrante or I no longer publish”.

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Curiously, In the Margins doesn’t make a single reference to the author’s anonymity. This wouldn’t be remarkable under ordinary circumstances, but in a volume centred around a young woman’s journey to the writer’s life, it’s quite the dodge to duck her most shocking decision. It’s more remarkable still in a book which, though quietly disappointing like so many craft essays, raises fascinating questions about the relationship of the author to the work of art. 

Ferrante doesn’t have to acknowledge the reveal, since the rest of the educated world has chosen not to. Though the Raja theory has not been discredited, it’s been rejected as a violative and violent thrusting of a woman into the public against her will. In a 2018 retrospective, The Cut podcast remarked on how inspiring it was for a woman to stay anonymous, refusing the usual pressure on women to perform the emotional work of social harmony. Sensitive as I am to the pressures on women writers, this explanation, inflected by the Clinton-Trump election, doesn’t quite convince me, given that these critics never proffer a single example of another woman unveiled, or a man given privacy. Ferrante’s obvious comparator would be Karl Øve Knausgård, whose My Struggle six-part autobiography was published almost contemporaneously; but he didn’t even change the names of others, let alone his own. More importantly, these defences of Ferrante are a little over-tinged with projection, as if Ferrante putting her name on her novels were nothing different from the “emotional labor” of a woman with her social set.

I wonder if Ferrante could get away with it today, when even an Oprah’s Book Club pick like American Dirt could be trashed for “opportunistically” “appropriating” experiences foreign to the writer. Quaint as it seems now, “cultural appropriation” was a new and controversial concept back in 2016, and as a New York Times op-ed weakly pointed out, perhaps the bigger Ferrante scoop was an opportunity to discredit it. After all, Anita Raja wasn’t a working-class girl raised on the violent streets of Naples; she was born in Naples, sure, but moved to Rome at age three, and her father was a magistrate. As Gatti pointed out with disgust, ‘Ferrante’ had said her mother was a seamstress who spoke in the Neapolitan dialect, who had grown up in Naples until she “ran away”. “These crumbs of information,” he said, “seemed designed to satisfy her readers’ appetite for a personal story that might relate to the Neapolitan setting of the novels themselves”.

The Neapolitan novels even end with the narrator writing a novel about the girls’ friendship, before her best friend, to everyone’s torment, disappears. Few of us seem upset by what, almost undeniably, was a case of an upper-class woman passing herself off as lower-class in the marketing (yes, marketing) of best-selling novels almost universally received as autobiographical.

Obviously, Ferrante would never call this marketing. Explaining the anonymity, Ferrante’s most repeated refrain is that she wanted to avoid the machine of publicity, and to recentre criticism on the work produced by collective intelligence, not on her. In the media, she’s said, “the book functions like a pop star’s sweaty T-shirt, a garment that without the aura of the star is completely meaningless”. Who, though, treats her work as anything other than exceptional? Hasn’t her anonymity precisely forced the focus on the conspicuously, famously absent writer, rather than the books? And moreover, who sees writers like pop stars at all?

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As literature limps along to its final extinction, regarded as irrelevant, abrasive, and even suspect by its few remaining consumers, the author is no longer the mysterious and other-worldly celebrity of, say, the Art of Fiction heyday; the author is a somewhat pitiful creature, photographed in front of its bookcase in an unkind sweater in The Guardian. The last writer before Ferrante to have totemic status was perhaps David Foster Wallace, who only doubles as a “red flag” of the pretentious male; and as Jonathan Franzen described beautifully, even he had to die to become a saint.

For a woman, the problem is double. In In the Margins, Ferrante writes that when she was starting out, “It seemed to me that the voice of men came from the pages, and that voice preoccupied me, I tried in every way to imitate it… I imagined becoming male yet at the same time remaining female”. There’s something fascinating there: the idea that the voice of writing, in general, is a male voice, as if the female writer’s body is an albatross, and her transcendental part, her thinking part, male.

What could a woman like Elena Ferrante do? Her books are vociferously angry ones, screeds against the male sex and sex itself, bone-cuttingly dark. At one point, for example, a character says of the narrator’s brilliant, and now beautiful, young woman friend: “The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it.” It would have been too painful for those words to come from Anita Raja, a real, plump, unremarkable-looking older woman. This level of rage and authority had to come from a disembodied voice, not one with wrinkles and rolls.

That’s what’s missing from so many Ferrante think-pieces: the fact that she is not just a woman and not just a woman in public, but a woman artist. She talks often, in her interviews, of the space of freedom of anonymity. That space, for a woman, is one of not having a body, of being spirit. No one is more connected to their body than an older woman, for whom, with rare exception, there is not even a consolation of beauty. One knows this early on.

As she writes in In the Margins, as a young writer, “I also considered myself a lowly, abject woman. I was afraid, as I said, that it was precisely my female nature that kept me from bringing the pen as close as possible to the pain I wanted to express.” She ends up finding hope in Dante’s depiction of Beatrice as one of the “women with intelligence of love” who rise above the “vulgar daughters of Eve” to enter the realm of poetry. These pages, though, are often stunted and stiff, as if the author is avoiding the personal: that is, how did Ferrante cope with that feeling familiar to the young woman writer, that her femaleness is a chastising humiliation? Whatever feminist pride has been ascribed to her is far from the girl-power, choice-driven positivity familiar to the American scene; instead, her sense of femininity is cut with terror, anger, and a painful self-loathing. The paradox, here, is that her feminism is largely borne of hating being a woman.

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But her writing persona is emphatically female, so female that any rumours she might be male have provoked violent repudiation. It’s impossible, the line goes, for a man to write books like these. So what did she get, then, by being anonymous? Without betraying her sex–and straining credulity–by writing as a man, by being anonymous she was able to write as a disembodied mind, as a pure attention. I find it revealing that so much of In the Margins concentrates on the writing self as an abandonment of self, a rejection of any single identity. She reprints paragraphs of Woolf: “One must get out of life…One must become externalised…When I write, I’m merely a sensibility”; and Beckett: “I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place”.

Similar to how Beckett wrote in French to have no style, by writing as ‘Ferrante’, she could escape the worn-out and stifling limits of her given identity. For her, this depersonalisation is the beginning of art: she writes that “Dante’s capacity to situate himself in the other, pivoting on the autobiographical I, with its inherent limits, left me astonished”. Writing means to leave the self, to be pure voice, pure mind. And as a woman, still, one may not be that. Ferrante gets what so many women dream of: to be a woman without a body.

Though Ferrante fans alike treat the Neapolitan novels as autobiography — as “real” and “brave” — it’s telling that In the Margins celebrates Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Ultimately, I suppose that’s what the Neapolitan novels are: the autobiography of an imagined person dignified in her aloofness, grand in her disappearance, and so absent that the books read as if discovered in the desert. It’s not that her unveiling was all that awful an act: it’s that her fans, with all the magic gone out of art and replaced with exercises in mutual suspicion and mediocrity, have decided, albeit with a slightly inconsistent political justification, to remain studiously unaware of the truth. And who’s to blame them? And who’s to blame her?

These novels are an almost unparalleled feat in contemporary literature, more ambitious and more accomplished than is allowed in an age of diminished expectations, where the summit of contemporary literature is a naturalism stripped of coherence and navel-gazing justified as humility. With Ferrante revealed, one would have had to grapple with a question both tedious and unanswerable: can a rich woman write a poor woman’s experience? Well, yes, it would seem so. But only in secret.

The novel may be a release from a major press (Little, Brown), but its author isn’t famous; nor is his offering — a fragmented piece of autofiction about a 30-year-old named Sean Thor Conroe writing a book called Fuccboi — particularly mass-market. So why the histrionics? Well, Conroe received a six-figure advance for this first novel.

Yet while such a sum will always raise eyebrows, especially envious ones, Conroe has been subjected to levels of vitriol unusual even for the literary “community”. The dope on Conroe circulating among the disgruntled (no six-figure advance) is as follows: Conroe is nothing less than a privileged, wealthy, white-passing impostor, who, Barry Lyndon-style, has passed himself off as a dejected, pitiable, impoverished victim of white supremacy (he’s half Japanese) and capitalism (he’s a former delivery boy). That is to say, he is the kind of wretch who passes as a literary idol for the publishing world’s exacting commissars.

For a time, the indie winds were in Conroe’s favour, and praise was doled out. But since that cheque — some wager, because of it — the tides have turned. In a post entitled “Fuck, Boy!”, Sam Pink, a writer and painter of working-class extraction, put his allegations bluntly: “[I’ve had] my entire work stolen from me.” To wit, Pink accused Conroe of swiping his telegraphic, slangy style — a blend of Soundcloud rap (“side bae”, “ex bae”, “editor bae”, “peripheral bae”, “autonomous bae”) and leaden Instagram self-care argot (“This sharing permitted, even encouraged, me to consider my own patterns./To even recognize, in the first place, that patterns were created by tangible actions”). Pink is disgusted by this “offensively appropriated” “fake slang from an ivy league kid.”

Conroe, predictably, claims to be speaking in his real voice. In his acknowledgments, Conroe writes:

Ty ty ty to Giancarlo DiTrapano for not only letting me write how I talk, but encouraging me to. 
            That shit there.
            Man.
            I can’t even.

For what it’s worth, Conroe does talk like that. I briefly met him when he attended a reading at my apartment, though he seemed uncomfortable and often stepped outside to smoke in the cold. As I later learned, two other guests were the respective publisher and author of an essay accusing Conroe of, basically, slumming it. The battle, as always, is about stolen victimhood, and the writers, as always, respond by punching up their “trauma” and playing down their “privilege” to stake a claim to what is, after all, an unimpressive and even grating style.

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Authenticity aside, when Hanson O’Haver, in Gawker, dumps on Conroe’s use of “laundered rap slang” and Jonah Bromwich’s New York Times review includes a pro forma condemnation of the same as “cringeworthy”, one wonders: where have they been? Do they remember the Beatniks? Elvis? Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”? White and white-passing Americans appropriating African American slang is nothing new; what is new is skittishness to publish writing that does so. Surely, then, however unappealing you might find this hyper-contemporary style, his publisher deserves credit for taking on the political risk accompanying its use by a man not immediately identifiable as an oppressed racial minority (Conroe is, again, half Japanese).

Similarly, Fuccboi is admirably daring in its gestures toward political relevance: it’s easy to see why a publishing house would have thought this book relevant to today’s crisis of liberal masculinity. As our narrator puts it, “How tf was I privileged./I couldn’t do shit. Not only that, no one allowed me to show/admit I couldn’t.” He yearns to be “one of the good ones”; to seem “so woke and self-aware and self-deprecating about how dumb ideas of alpha-beta masculinity were”. Yet given the intense censoriousness of his “woke” circle, who accuse him of “getting lost in the men’s rights tunnel”, writing is his only “way to start tackling repression and shame” — to avoid becoming like a school shooter, or even Hitler.

Despite the title, he seems to be a pretty good guy (and pretty continent, too: only one act of fornication, in over 350 pages!). The worst things he does are listen to Joe Rogan, watch some “low-key red-pill videos”, very noncommittally question the reality of the gender pay gap, and equally casually say “bros over hoes”. The only slightly developed conservative thought is one regarding his relationship with his “ex bae”, where he reflects on her abortion: could anti-natalism perhaps be nihilistic? Could neoliberal feminism perhaps be careerist? Well, yeah. Ultimately, the “anti-woke” side of this book is so anodyne that one wonders whether Fuccboi, like the narrator’s pre-Fuccboi manuscript, may not have been a bit too edited-for-acceptability.

And yet I think this book is earnest. If anything, its issue is not a lack of authenticity, but a surfeit thereof. It will be obvious to those who finish it that Fuccboi is the genuine stream of consciousness of the author, spilled with little self-censorship onto the page. All of this is presented with what one hopes is an at least slightly satirical sense of self-important militancy, as when the narrator explodes to a perfectly polite stranger: “I’m tryna write for people who don’t read. Who don’t give a shit about books.”

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The problem, then, isn’t that Conroe’s parents were rich (which I have no cause to believe is the case), or that he didn’t, as Pink claims, “earn” his audience by publishing online before getting the big deal. The problem is that this book, like so many others in its milieu, values “authenticity” and “realness” over more venerable criteria of literary value (depth, characterisation, plot). Fuccboi does accurately represent the cretinous depravity of the Millennial generation, as well as the self-aggrandising cult of martyrdom — increasingly by self-diagnosed mental or physical illness — with which my generation shirks the responsibilities historically incumbent upon the civilised mind. But though Fuccboi is playful and lively, often funny and sometimes moving, and certainly of its time, it does not fully succeed as a work of art.

The current crop of young writers is less ambitious and less accomplished even than the minimalists and dirty realists — Bret Easton Ellis, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel — they are (likely unknowingly) imitating. In that earlier generation’s writing, the chaotic hedonism of the everyday attains emotional depth and significance; characters are complex and differentiated, and struggling to form complex and differentiated relationships with each other. They have more than names, characteristics, and the occasional impulse; they have feelings, thoughts, and sometimes, even, ideas.

But where there once was narrative that made life seem complicated, moving, and significant, indie literature today primarily comprises trite, essentially ecological descriptions of an already familiar scene, devoid of any coherence or meaning. Men write “stories” about men with their demographic characteristics doing cocaine/Adderall and displaying traits of narcissistic personality disorder; women write “stories” about women with their demographic characteristics doing ketamine/Klonopin and displaying traits of borderline personality disorder.

Both contingents write in a mode of blasé detachment that has become achingly stale. They are averse to or incapable of subjectivity and depth. What little allowance is made for human feeling is exclusively of pharmaceutical origin. These are not works of art; they are simply unremarkable descriptions of unremarkable lives.

In the glib generational determinism so popular today, one excuses this shallowness of character and failure to depict any interpersonal conflict as a “real” and “relatable” mirror of the “autism” of the young generation (indeed, this self-serving self-ID is so common that forums for the autistic and their caretakers use the acronym AA for “actually autistic”). However, these writers, and the thinly disguised stand-ins that populate their autofiction, are not autistic. They are merely permanent adolescents, incapable of empathising with any experience outside of their own and comfortably withdrawn into a profound egotism.

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Similarly, one excuses their unambitious and unintelligible style by reference to the influence of “online” life on young minds. However, the more accurate explanation for this monotonous sea of uninspired cliché is that these writers do not read anyone except their friends, nor do they aspire to much readership beyond them. And that’s probably for the best: readers deserve better than for 20-somethings functionally addicted to psychotropics to describe their existence in turgid, unorganised prose. The generalised inability to execute the most basic fundamentals of modern narrative is not a product of an autistic or digital zeitgeist; it is a product of lazy and illiterate writers.

Does Fuccboi fall under this umbrella? For all its flaws, Conroe resists the suicidal renunciation of many of his peers. Perhaps this, in part, is why his coevals have so passionately denounced his novel as cringe: Conroe unapologetically does care about literature, in his own guileless and heartwarming way. Perhaps it sounds silly for him to talk about “That Art Life”; perhaps it feels awkward and uninformative to read his emails with Sheila Heti. But at least, unlike so many today, he believes that writing could serve a function beyond identity work or courtship, and at least expresses interest in authors outside of his immediate coterie.

In that sense, he is the exception. Of course, this nihilism is reflective of the current mood of the world. But its consequences are more severe: if our authors are as distracted and superficial as anybody else, and our literature as unnourishing as TikToks or memes or tweets, why on earth would anyone read? Much like the humanities’ wan retreat to the “digital humanities”, this attempt to stay relevant — I’m not a normal book, I’m a cool book! — will only doom the medium to total obsolescence.

It’s not that there hadn’t been things for Leftists to protest. But even as a war raged in Afghanistan and the economy nearly collapsed, in the days before Trump, one generally talked of other things at dinner: Mad Men and Breaking Bad, or sometimes Beyoncé. It was the Golden Age of Television, and it seemed that you only heard about the president at BDS meetings or in garages, where the late Rush Limbaugh was always playing from one radio or another.

Then things became very, very strange. Hillary Clinton was the Democratic frontrunner, even though she was the most hated woman in America (no woman is more disdained than the cuckquean that takes him back). The youth candidate was Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist from the state with the second smallest population.

The Republican field, meanwhile, was a rat-race-style menagerie of over a dozen buffoons, outcasts, and idiots: a Christian brain surgeon, a discount-pizza mogul, an office-supply executive, the producer of The Christmas Candle (21% on Rotten Tomatoes). Jeb Bush was giving out toy turtles at his rallies, calling himself a “joyful tortoise” who would “slow and steady win the race”. Rand Paul was advocating Medicare cuts, saying, “it’s your grandparents’ fault for having too many damn kids”.

And then there was Trump. He was a quintessential American huckster. He was a loud, cartoonish comedian. Obama had been good on TV too, but good for exactly the opposite reasons: he was handsome and charming, but ultimately, a level-headed technocrat following the facts.

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Trump was chaotic, intense, irreverent. It was hard to tell what was serious, or how seriously to take him. Of Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Of the refugee crisis: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” Of his own racism: “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” Of his own power: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

The election, of course, became about women. Obama had been an unequivocal, mainstream feminist; in the August of the election year, he was profiled in a Glamour article titled, “This is What A Feminist Looks Like.” It was a popular T-shirt slogan. And of course, Hillary was supposed to make history as the first female president, a job she’d been groomed for since her days as a Goldwater girl.

But rather than play up his feminist bona fides, Trump went all in: Of a woman who’d won Miss Universe while he owned it: “She was the winner and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.” Of Hillary Clinton: “Well, I think the only card she has is the woman’s card.” Also of Hillary Clinton: “Such a nasty woman.” Also of Hillary Clinton: “Lock her up.” Of women in general: “I cherish women. I want to help women. I’m going to be able to do things for women that no other candidate would be able to do.”

And of course, also of women, as revealed in the Access Hollywood tapes, gloating to Billy Bush in a bus on the way to set: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”.

But Trump won. It was against all efforts (the Clinton campaign flogged a $5 “Woman’s Card”) and against all predictions (the New York Times’s infamous “Hillary Clinton Has a 91% Chance to Win”). The Clinton campaign had been sure she would “break the glass ceiling”, but in the wee hours of November 9, her victory party under the transparent ceiling of the Javits Center in Manhattan turned into a scene of confused despair. The next few days felt surreal; there were calls for recounts. There were petitions for the Electoral College to revolt. My feminist mentors started warning me that a fascist coup was coming, and urging me to stock up on abortion pills.

And then there was the Women’s March.

The day after the election, a retired lawyer in Maui started a Facebook event inviting friends to march on Washington in protest. More pages popped up, for allied marches across the US. Within days, thousands had RSVP’d. Black, Latina, and Arab women were brought onto the leadership. Planned Parenthood became a partner. Indeed, hundreds of organisations became partners. Women coordinated marches in Norway, Canada, Australia, the UK, and France. There was even a march in the smaller European city I was living in at the time, though we were mostly drowned out by PKK protestors across the plaza. All told, half a million protestors descended on D.C. that January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, and three or four million across the country, and up to five million across the globe.

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But what was the Women’s March about? When the organisers released a policy platform on January 12, it wasn’t just about so-called women’s issues: it covered reproductive freedom (government-funded reproductive healthcare, HIV/AIDS care and prevention, medically accurate sexually education, and access to affordable abortion and birth control), but also immigration reform, healthcare reform, prison reform, Islamophobia, worker’s rights, and even environmental rights. Borrowing Hillary Clinton’s tagline, the “guiding vision” document for “#WHYWEMARCH” stated that “We believe that Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights”. It also stated that “Gender Justice is Racial Justice is Economic Justice” and that “LGBTQIA Rights are Human Rights”.

As many noted, though, the icon of the Women’s March was far less inclusive: it was the famous “Pussy Hat”. On the one side, there were the bright red MAGA hats; on the other side, there were the hot pink beanies with ears. Even today, you can find nearly a thousand Pussyhats on Etsy.

Every protest movement needs symbols, however cringe those symbols might be. And every protest movement, at an essential level, is symbolic. But perhaps the Women’s March, more than most, was a blurry call to action in pursuit of vague policy goals and in defence of a nebulous “democracy” that, as any reasonable political observer had noticed, had long been incapable, even under Obama, of achieving those aims. As speaker Gloria Steinem said, it was about “working for a democracy in which we are linked as human beings, not ranked by race or gender or class or any other label”. As the actress America Ferrera declaimed from the podium, it was about “saving the soul of our country”.

The Women’s March was supposed to set off a political movement. According to Scarlett Johansson, the tragedy of Trump’s election offered a chance “to get involved with and stay active in our communities. Let this weight not drag you down, but help to get your heels stuck in”. And in a sense, that happened. The next four years were ones of absolutely inescapable political divide. Holidays became unbelievably fraught; campuses were riven; social media became a fiery crucible of political memes, semi-accurate news, and open war. Protest movements were larger and more disruptive than ever — Kavanaugh was protested, George Floyd was avenged; it became normal, even de rigueur, to solicit donations to non-profits from your Instagram.

But did it work? The Trump Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stopped collecting pay data (which the Biden administration has stated it will resume). The Trump Department of Education narrowed the definition of campus sexual harassment and heightened the burden of proof in those cases (a move Biden is expected to undo in April). The Trump Department of Health and Human services implemented a domestic gag rule, preventing clinics receiving Title X family planning funding from offering or issuing referrals for abortions (which has since been reversed by the Biden administration). And in the largest, most enduring blow to the Women’s March agenda, Trump succeeded in installing a conservative majority on the Supreme Court – ironically, aided by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s much-celebrated refusal to retire under Obama. That last Trump achievement is harder to undo.

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But did the Women’s March work? Their greatest hope was with the Kavanaugh protests, in many ways a redux of January 21, but one whose failure was harder to deny and thus more painful to endure.

Five years on, those early days seem like a strange dream. The energy and vitriol of the early Trump years have been largely buried, replaced with fatigue and resignation. It’s hard to find a Hillary fan these days, and the word “girlboss” has travelled from the proud “#girlboss” to the caustic mantra “Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss”. The Red Scare podcast has popularised a certain insouciant anti-feminism among fashionable young women. “Trad” Twitter is bigger than ever. The new Sex and the City is more a punchline than a triumph. Kamala Harris, whose approval ratings plummeted to 28% last year, is far from the girl power icon many hoped her to be.

Perhaps the Women’s March was the forerunner to the January 6 insurrection, marking the beginning of a four-year insurrection against reality. The parade of pussyhats was a protest against as-yet imagined evils, and the January 6 insurrection was a coup by an opposition so bumbling as to be borderline imaginary. Ultimately, women’s access to abortion, at least, seems about as delicate as it’s always been; and Americans are surely still ranked by race, class, and gender. Sadly, it seems, the symbol was not enough.

What should we make of this three-page tangent, one that neither develops into a real argument nor develops any real consequences for any of the novel’s admittedly smudgy plot-lines? Perhaps Houellebecq sees a parallel of his own oeuvre in that of the Wachowskis’: between the decade-defining original Matrix (1999) and the Molotov cocktail Houellebecq threw with his Nineties debuts, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) and Les particules élémentaries (1998).

Those first two novels were literary sensations, mixing fire-tongued dissection of l’après-68 with science fiction, evoking the dead-end of the everyday and imaging the dead-end of the species. On the newest tome, critics have been more divided.

They agree, however, that with this one, there’s a newer, calmer, more optimistic Houellebecq: finally, “Houellebecq makes room for love”. With this clumsy ode to the least philosophical Matrix, is Houellebecq perhaps telling us that though it might not look like it, this novel — this sentimental, mushy-penned final novel — is his true masterpiece?

He seems to believe so. As he told Le Monde, “contrary to what a famous formula claims, I think that it is with good feelings that we make good literature”. The murderous misogynists of his earlier books are gone, replaced with a pretty reasonable technocrat who’s nice to his wife (Paul “Raison” — clever!). Indeed, most of the characters are pretty nice. That’s by design: as Houellebecq continued, “the ultimate achievement would be if there were no bad guys at all!”

How can this be the Houellebecq we know and love, the Houellebecq who complained that female readers found it “difficult to accept pure negativity”?

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Houellebecq has never been known as the greatest of stylists or the fairest of psychologists. When I studied him for an aborted PhD, there were, of course, the requisite titters: he was sexist, he was racist, and what’s more, he was populaire. It’s clear that Houellebecq is an important writer — the most interesting, the most provocative, the most of our time, for better or worse.

Fan as I am, though, his “badness” occasionally frustrated me: could it escape Houellebecq’s attention, I wondered as I read, say, La Possibilité d’une île (2005), that it’s a little unconvincing for a perfectly harmonious couple to calmly and spontaneously dissolve at the very first appearance of ageing on the wife’s previously perfect body?

I don’t know. But now, annihilated by Houellebecq’s 735-page attempt at a less Manichaeian narrative, I mourn the venom. I mourn the badness. I mourn the bad guys.

In the acknowledgments of Anéantir, Houellebecq announces that this will be his last novel. As the title predicts, of course, this is a novel about annihilation. Radical ecologists are attacking Europe, targeting immigrants and artificial reproduction, the only bulwark against the population collapse of the West. Paul’s father is dying. Paul, ultimately, dies. And Houellebecq writes his last book.

On such an occasion, with this strange and sentimental swan song, should we recall what made Houellebecq so wonderful? In a recent defence of Anéantir published in The Spectator, Houellebecq is compared with Balzac, in both his “comparable ambition” and his “tireless work”. This is, of course, familiar to any reader of Houellebecq; not only has he ceaselessly praised Balzac for two decades, but his novels have been peppered with allusions to him.

But Balzac’s ambition wasn’t primarily the psychological complexity of individual characters: his devouring ambition, the one that kept him writing for 15-hour days, on 50 cups of coffee, was to write the complete Comédie humaine of France, the one that would depict in narrative, like a map in lines, French reality from the Restoration to the July Monarchy. These 91 novels, furiously written by a man who had tried to be a respectable, bourgeois lawyer, and ended up wearing Middle Eastern robes and writing through chronic illness, are a capsule of a time of dizzying social and economic change. They are not about people; they are about people in a society. Many of his novels, indeed, were designated “studies”.

So, too, in Houellebecq: like his hero, he gives his characters, at his best, birthplaces, birthdates, and parents. Like his hero, he has an encyclopaedic bent, a desire to explain, a will to knowledge. Like his hero, he wants to understand what on Earth is going on. The laziest critics of Houellebecq dismiss him as a novelist of the patriarchal white male, who doesn’t “recognise that it is societal structures such as poverty, racism, colonialism and inequality that are the source of men’s suffering”. But this is precisely where Houellebecq succeeds: he does recognise that society is making us miserable.

That’s what is so special about him today. Almost no modern writer seems interested in the society we live in. Here in America, at least, there’s plenty of slumming-it, reheated-Carver poverty porn and box-checking census-opera; but ultimately, these currents are more cynical attempts to avoid criticism than criticism themselves.

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By Michel Houellebecq

As literature has become an increasingly hard way to make a living, aspiring writers would do best to be born wealthy. Otherwise, they might choose to write Young Adult fiction (far more lucrative than grown-up fiction, and therefore dominant). Or they might choose to take a creative writing program; on this workshop-based path, the entire incentive structure is a risk-averse one aimed at pleasing one’s elders and avoiding attention from one’s peers. Under these conditions, whoever is writing literature is a coddled rich kid and/or person who has largely interacted with the sorts of individuals who can tolerate creative writing workshops. The longer they stay in this bell jar, the less and less they know about what society even is.

Houellebecq, of course, wins here. Balzac was a would-be lawyer, Flaubert was a would-be lawyer, every writer on the “recommended” table at my local bookstore is a graduate of one of 12 college prep schools. But Houellebecq was a computer programmer: a code monkey, a cubicle rat. And so when Extension du domaine de la lutte came out — a novel about a programmer so miserable he drives his hideous virgin colleague to suicide — it was a cri de coeur for an entire, degraded society. It was catharsis.

In La Nausée (1938), Houellebecq’s clear predecessor Sartre evoked a man in existential crisis, in a world without God in which the structures of city, family, and religion no longer have any transcendental meaning. In Houellebecq’s novels, there is nausea enough: the first act of a Houellebecqian hero is to vomit in the middle of an office party, at the end of the first chapter of Extension. But the despair has reached the point of near-numbness, and God is no longer a real possibility (even if a Muslim takeover of the Sorbonne, as in Soumission, is).

In Sartre, the structures have become meaningless; in Houellebecq, they have ceased to exist. The frames that gave comfort, stability, and meaning to life have been destroyed in the name of freedom. To borrow Houellebecq’s description of this novel’s miserable couple, we live in “une sorte de désespoir standardisé”. Miserable white-collar Everyman that he is, he wonders why.

Houellebecq was not, of course, the first person to criticise 1968. Foucault denounced sexual liberation (though this seems to elude many of his most enthusiastic advocates); so did Michel Clouscard; even Marcuse himself admitted that the sexual revolution had been coopted by consumerism. But Houellebecq’s critique of sexual liberation wasn’t theoretical; it wasn’t a Semiotext(e) book, and you didn’t have to know Hegel, and you didn’t have to take notes.

You read those books, and you recognised it: how it felt to shop alone and read the over-enthusiastic copywriting on a pre-made meal for one; how it felt to feel that every conversation you had with a work colleague was an excruciating effort to appear happy and convivial with a terrifying alien; how it felt to feel like the basic elements of life you had been promised — a more or less kind spouse who loved you, a child, a little home you could plant bushes in front of — were merely plot points in silly tales for little kids.

And, importantly, he talked about feeling ugly: a surprisingly rare topic. For Houellebecq, the modern environment is one of sterility and predictability, punctuated by occasional violence; it is one of quiet humiliations wrapped in consumer packaging; it is one of forced enjoyment and unbelievable exhaustion.

Houellebecq’s novels are so tantalising because they actually analyse our dysfunction. As was the subject of Sérotonine (2019), we live in a society in which a schizophrenic mixture of chemical determinism and trauma discourse has turned almost every feeling into an aggressively-treated and individual one. We have developed a world in which antidepressants — and, often, both amphetamines and anti-anxiety medication — are considered a completely normal, almost essential, supplement. This is, obviously, a nightmare. And some people, occasionally, want an alternative.

That’s why we need Houellebecq’s pauvres types. That’s why they need to be miserable. That’s why they need to be completely out of their minds. Houellebecq has never been a great psychologist; he has never been a great stylist. But his mal du siècle is more sickening than anybody else’s, and his analytical drive is, at its best, in a league of its own. Other writers of bureaucratic hell (see Halle Butler) don’t have Houellebecq’s Balzacian side, which is his triumph: he hates everything, and yet he wants to understand why. He persists, even though critical thought itself has come to seem obsolete. As his stand-in in La Possibilité d’une île, a controversial comedian, reflects, “I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality; it was just that everything now seemed so elementary to me, it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality.”

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Bewilderingly, much of that has disappeared in this last volume. It’s far too long, and shockingly boring; entire transcribed conversations serve virtually no purpose, and every scene starts earlier and ends later than it should, as though he wrote the book on stimulants or perhaps under hypnosis. Maybe Houellebecq’s editor (accurately enough) figured it wasn’t that important to edit. Or maybe Houellebecq is the victim of his own success: his early books are so iconically masterful at capturing the malaise of a pleasure-driven and unpleasant society that even his clever observations seem a little old hat. As Houellebecq himself recognised, “in opening my literature to theoretical conceptions one might develop about the world, I am constantly vulnerable to cliché and, in truth, I’m doomed, my only chance at originality consisting of (to borrow Baudelaire’s intuition) developing new clichés.”

There are highlights; I teared up towards the end, when Paul’s wife gets emotional remembering when the two of them were teenagers, going through the loneliest period of their lives, and hadn’t yet met. As the protagonist of Extension whispers to his coworker, as the protagonist of Particules tells us, we are haunted by the teenage loves we didn’t have. And how sad to have wanted, at death’s door, to have been there.

All told, this much-noted turn to love leaves much to be satisfied: essentially, the protagonist and his wife, two énarque bureaucrats, have not been sleeping together, but she develops a mild interest in paganism and therefore feels a little more feminine and since her ass is still firm, then they do. Once he is dying of cancer she starts wearing thongs.

The same goes for the other plots. The political one is so predictable in its observations — yes, Macron is like a made-for-TV president; yes, the Right is popular in France; yes, cyberterrorism is a threat — that it seems almost AI-generated. The protagonist’s father is in a coma, and while Houellebecq does not support euthanasia, this parental loss somehow carries almost no emotional weight.

The protagonist’s brother is married to a journalist, and she is very annoying and evil. The protagonist’s sister is very Catholic and not evil at all, her husband is poor, she has a black son, and at one point her daughter inadvertently gives the protagonist fellatio. But somehow, every plot simply fizzles out to leave us to contemplate the character’s relatively sudden cancer diagnosis. On the one hand, that diagnosis elicits the very fine observation that modern life revolves around the dissimulation of “l’agonie”; but on the other hand, even this death plot falls into elegies to knickers and blowjobs.

Perhaps Houellebecq, in his novel about two men declining through no fault of their own (unlike, say, the wheelchair-bound swinger of Particules), couldn’t bear to go into full-on nihilism. Perhaps it seemed too dark to have these men die in sadness, without meaning, without redemption, to say their lives had ceased to have meaning long before their strokes or cancers.

In its breathless review, Le Monde said that “one feels, above all, that his writing seeks more than ever to fuel, if not hope, at least values”. But what values? Our hero observes that his Catholic sister seems happy, but he still can’t believe; he observes that politicians should have real values, almost like kings, but no such hero arrives.

Ultimately, the only real lesson is to try to have sex with your wife again before you die, which thankfully seems pretty simple. So, sure, this book’s less dark. But having turned on the lights, there’s not much to see: annihilation, indeed.

Someone recently described to me, vividly, the anhedonia of severe depression: of finding himself in sublime mountains, in champagne-service clubs, with gorgeous women who loved him, feeling nothing. And I guess somewhere on the depressed-neurotic axis there’s an overlap between “I don’t enjoy things anymore” and just wishing you were the type of person who likes Marvel movies and Ed Sheeran and doesn’t feel a bored yet self-satisfied despair as you attempt to chat with the median individual on a dating app.

There’s something bovine about cinema, which is also what is spectacular about both popular art and art in public: the confirmation that the individual spirit is also the shared spirit, that what is vulnerable and personal and redeemable about us, is in all of us. Art makes us feel realer and deeper, and to share that with others makes us feel less alone. But for the same reason, bad art can also seem like an insult to the human race itself: that’s all we are?

To play on David Foster Wallace: Licorice Pizza is a supposedly good movie I will never see again. Los Angeles, especially, is plastered with ads for the film; so is my demographically overcoded web browser. I am supposed to like the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, having seen quite a few of them already; yeah, I’ve listed “film” on the interests line of my résumé. And, seriously, how many art films are there today besides low-budget films intended for an audience of 100 individuals residing mostly in Bushwick, Israeli-Austrian dramas about the Holocaust, and slow cinema about outsider farmhands from low-GDP EU member states?

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Nonetheless, I was left asking myself: what were all those moviegoers so excited about? Why are critics so impressed? How was this moving?

Much as the film’s alleged anti-Asian racism is more shockingly unfunny than it is shocking, the romance in Licorice Pizza is neither revolting nor remarkable. Anderson can make touching films about characters struggling toward misguided intimacy. But Licorice Pizza isn’t even a cloying teen romance: Gary and Alana neither consummate their mutual attraction nor even mourn it, and instead simply bounce around for over two hours: cute, charming, and completely inconsequential.

The moment Gary asks out Alana, she cheerfully declines with, “That’s illegal!”, but it’s not like he tries that hard, anyway. At their first dinner, they tell each other they’re not going to forget each other, but they seem pretty happy to goof around with his more prepubescent-looking friends in zany, period-piece pursuits (waterbeds, pinballs, slightly unsavoury politics). There’s little narrative momentum, little impediment, and little sense of “the stakes”. The leads are affable, and Haim is astonishing; but these characters are as thin as the candy on an M&M.

Previous Anderson fare arguably went a little overboard on the downbeats: all that really degrading stuff at the end of Boogie Nights, all those dying men in Magnolia, all the violence in Punch Drunk Love. But at least that mattered. Here, the downbeats are basically that two people who’ve agreed not to date get a little bit jealous when the other one flirts with someone else. The tensest scene involves Alana driving an out-of-gas truck in reverse down the Hollywood Hills. To no one’s surprise, it works.

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But the scene after that, I think, holds the key to the movie. They’ve gotten the truck down the hill and collected some jerrycans from the gas station. The sun is rising, painting the quiet road in almost psychedelic purples and oranges. The younger boys are ecstatic silhouettes on the horizon, laughing and leaping and pretending to hump each other with the gas tanks. Meanwhile, Alana is crouched on the sidewalk, near trash and glass, head hunched over her knees — something good has happened, something fun is going on, but she can’t enjoy it.

I don’t know why Anderson made a film that was clearly going to be accused of paedophilia — he told Variety that while walking by his local middle school, he saw a teenager flirting with a girl taking school pictures, and instantly thought the premise was “ripe for humour”. And anyway, he says: “It’s not romantic in any consummation of things. That would be inappropriate.”

Regardless of whatever PTA was thinking, we live in the era of the “Mommy Girlfriend”. Infinitely affirming and infinitely caring, the Mommy GF is the ideal mate for a generation of men that commonly self-identifies as autistic or anxious, and who have no idea how (or whether) to be masculine or mature. With the Mommy GF, you can stay a kid. As an iconic 2013 4chan post went: “that face when you’ll never have a cute slightly older Mommy GF who cleans up after your loveable-fuckup-self, helps you do your taxes, brown-bags a lunch for you to take to work, wakes you up on time, and cuddles you to sleep.”

That’s not exactly the deal here; I doubt the phrase “Mommy GF” was thrown around Licorice Pizza brainstorms, and Gary, anyway, seems like a perfectly confident and competent young man. But for better or worse, the Mommy GF has graduated into end-of-year lists — and maybe even real life. A number of millennial girls in my circle have started dating Zoomer boys, and I’ve been wondering about these relationships.

They’re all around 30. They’re all, more or less, ambitious. It’s tried-and-true for the clout-chasing young woman, to date an older man. But why date a younger one? As Mariah Kreutter has pointed out, it’s hard to see why Alana’s “borderline incoherent character” has any interest whatsoever in dating a 15-year-old. What, after all, does the Mommy GF want?

Maybe this: to enjoy things, one last time. Very young people, especially boys, enjoy things with an unbridled, carefree insouciance that evaporates the second one becomes concerned with becoming an “adult”. And perhaps on the fringes of show business and in the afterglow of the Sixties — or in the youth-obsessed inertia of millennial life, screwed by 2008, scared of settling, mired in therapy-brained exploration of the unconstrained yet unfulfilled self — one can soak in that sweet, warm limbo for just a little longer.

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How we destroyed The Matrix

By Dorian Lynskey

But sooner or later, it has to end. As a young woman told me recently, for the educated millennial woman, it’s a bit odd to marry in your twenties; but once you hit 30, you’re suddenly “an unmarried 30-year-old woman”. Essentially, you’ve got one year. The clock starts ticking, and all time becomes time lost. Every joy contains its future loss. And for the archetypical millennial woman — with no savings, no house, and no children – ageing reaps no accomplishment and no satisfying narrative. It’s purely something that makes you look worse in photos.

If you date the younger guy, you can zip around the Valley plotting hare-brained schemes, or at least understand TikTok. But you’ll still feel old, even older than you are. Just 25, Alana is, as Gary calls her, the “old woman”. It’s unclear what her main worry is — material success, glory, being single — but she’s going to be worried for the rest of her life. And Gary doesn’t care about any of that, not really. He’s just having a good time. And seeing that good time — a band of boys, playing as the sun comes up — she wants to cry. Tellingly, from the next scene, she commits herself (rather unconvincingly) to “politics”.

But this breezy, sugar-dust cloud of a film doesn’t dwell in despair. At the end of it, Alana and Gary just run toward each other, with a condescending intercut of identical earlier sequences (they really could be walking, but I suppose running looks nice in trailers). They kiss. Music plays. Did you notice that this was shot on 35mm and the colours were very warm? Did you see that the characters had cool clothes, which included many prints? Yay! You’ve seen an art film. Nice.

Perhaps that’s what the Mommy GF wants: to be able to just enjoy a film like this. Maybe I’m just growing out of it.

They might be wearing Hugo Boss and driving Volkswagens, but Nazis don’t really seem to live on the same planet as us; and that’s why, maybe, Nazi content is sort of like True Crime or UFO stories. And, of course, there’s the taboo part of it: most of the Holocaust freaks I’ve known are either Jewish or anti-Semitic, all of them fascinated by this primal bloodlust that it’s more polite to ignore.

But where does Albert Speer fit into this narrative? Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and lead architect, known for his grandiose designs for the “Thousand Year Reich”, was one of the lucky Nazis. He was sent to prison for 20 years, but afterwards he was able to profit from his actions: in 1970, the man who had commanded an estimated 12 million slave labourers, about 2.5 million of whom died, wrote a best-selling memoir, Inside the Third Reich. He was later approached by Kubrick-protégé Andrew Birkin about a film adaptation, and, in conversations that Birkin recorded as they workshopped their screenplay in 1972, downplayed his relationship with Hitler and his knowledge of wartime atrocities. Fortunately, Paramount Pictures did not pick up the script, and it was not produced.

I couldn’t help asking myself, while watching Vanessa Lapa’s Speer Goes to Hollywood, composed of dramatisations of those Birkin recordings and footage from the Nuremberg trials: what is the point of Nazi documentaries, and why am I watching one? I suppose the straightforward answer is Holocaust Remembrance, as with Yom HaShoah and public memorials and the Holocaust Studies lessons that are mandatory in sixteen US states.

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But if Holocaust remembrance is really the point of Holocaust documentaries, I’m not sure these films are up to the task. The most Holocaust-conscious people I know have tended to be, let’s say, “Holocaust-critical independent researchers”, like the shaved-head kid with an Iron Cross ring that sat in the front of my college Holocaust Studies class and “asked a lot of questions”. I think he may have thought it was a workshop.

I’ve never met someone who doesn’t know the phrase “six million”, but I’ve known a number that would say “six million sounds like a lot”, and I’m not sure Speer Goes to Hollywood is going to make much of a difference for them. If these films are simply preaching to the choir, that’s fine; but does that mean Nazi films are just True Crime for boys?

That said, I suppose Nazi documentaries may still serve some salutary function in American society. In an era of increasing groupthink and hyperpoliticisation, we might consider that Nazi eugenicists were, actually, “following the science”, with the eager collaboration of leading American scientists funded by the Rockefellers. And with today’s poorly educated often decried as “Nazis”, we might do well to reflect that the German profession that voted for the Nazi party in the highest numbers was physicians. Speer might fit in there: reminding us that Nazis can be charming, well-spoken, and professional.

Perhaps there’s some value in Hannah Arendt’s idea of “the banality of evil”: that evildoers aren’t scary, “perverted and sadistic” monsters, but instead thoughtless, “terrifyingly normal” joiners. Arendt’s thesis has since been criticised as more research shows that Adolf Eichmann did, actually, have some real ideological investment in the extermination of the Jews. However, as a general rule, there’s some truth there: people tend to think they’re doing the right thing, or at least not committing a crime against humanity — and they tend to do the easiest thing under the circumstances.

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But how do you show banality in film, a medium designed to hypnotise the masses with spectacle and splendour? The most obvious answer can be found in Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-long Shoah (1985); a 355-minute torrent of interviews about the most revolting atrocities, described through minute, twist-of-the-knife probing, but with almost nothing to see. There aren’t photographs; there aren’t newsreels; there aren’t, God forbid, animations. There’s mostly absence: the empty field of stones and grass where there was Treblinka, the grey pond, wide and boring, where thousands of Jews’ ashes were dumped. And, sometimes, that absence extends to the interviews, showing how the Final Solution was executed by commonplace acts and with, even, commonplace feeling: in one chilling interview, a few residents of the village of Auschwitz calmly, undramatically, say they’re happy the Jews are gone.

Speer Goes to Hollywood doesn’t have the visual subtlety of Shoah; it’s more or less what you’d expect, built on familiar black-and-white archival images of rallies, camps and propaganda. But I suppose it, actually, implicitly denies the banality of an evil thesis. Speer mythologised himself in two ways: first, that he was a great architect, and second, that he wasn’t interested in genocide, just in making some really impressive buildings. As he says, “I was just 29 and I would have sold my soul to Mephisto”.

Yet his explanations, an exercise in cognitive dissonance, are sometimes inadvertently absurd in their coldness: for example, when talking about the Jews in Weimar Berlin, he says: “I can’t really say [I had] an anti-Semitic feeling. It was a feeling of disgust when I saw it.” He later claims that though he knew Hitler was planning to annihilate the Jews, he had “no direct knowledge” of the camps since a friend had told him never to go to Auschwitz because “terrible things [were] happening there”.

But however hard he was trying to whitewash himself, he still comes across as narcissistic and deluded. When he emerges from prison, he cheerily says to excited journalists: “You see that after 20 years I’m still relatively good looking”. And when Birkin tells him that “Paramount and the Jewish Brigade associated with them” (wow!) have rejected the script, since only two out of its one-hundred-ten pages address the extermination of the Jews (wow!), Speer states, “That is their problem” (wow!).

Paramount didn’t produce the film, but ‘the Speer myth’ — this poor handsome man; he had no idea what they were doing at those funny places out East — did make him millions in book royalties. Still, I’m not sure how many Holocaust-heads today truly believe that he didn’t know about the camps, given that correspondence released in 2007 made it clear he was lying.

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And yet he still commands a unique fascination. Perhaps Speer seemed less obscene; perhaps, 15 years after the end of the war, his “poor-me” memoirs made mankind seem kinder. I don’t know. Speer was a weird figure. And he was neither a politician nor a military man; he was an architect and urbanist, a fairly influential pioneer of sustainable building and planning. He was also a moving writer, who wrote of Hitler’s unhappiness and Eva Braun’s loneliness in ways that are genuinely absorbing. He was almost respectable.

Here’s the thing, though: he was still an official in the Nazi Party, who, as his own book makes clear, was intimate with Hitler, Goebbels, and the whole gang. It’s clear why Speer lied, and not all that surprising how he lied: the real question, which this latest film and countless before fail to ask, is why anyone believed him.

Before our call, she’d emailed me explaining that she wanted to talk about incels, and I thought that Whatever was the best book about them ever written: the world is divided into ugly and hot people who compete in ruthless combat, with no relief in marriage and no reward but rot. It’s obviously depressing — when I first read it, I immediately made my first (and for many years, last) therapist appointment. I was a 21-year-old living with my brother on Gainesville, Florida’s Sorority Row. I had no romantic prospects.

A few years later, I was in graduate school further north, in a contrived relationship with a cheerful Connecticut lawyer. In a cold and sunny condo, on the smooth wooden flooring, I read Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior: it was one of the only books about ugly women I’d ever read. There it was, again, but Midwestern and dumpy, not French and brainy: the sick sad world, where you might get laid but you’ll never get better.

Reading Gaitskill’s fantastic latest book, the essay collection Oppositions, I began to see why she’d reacted so badly to Houellebecq: he sounded simple, scientific, and therefore stupid. And Gaitskill doesn’t brook stupidity. Her terror and her grace — alongside her disorientingly good looks — is her intelligence; an elegant and icy one that, in the end, is also merciful. Throughout these astonishing essays about literature, music and more, she seems to be circling the notion that curiosity—embracing the muddle —is the path to empathy for sick, sad creatures like us.

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Most of the essays in Oppositions are reprised from her 2017 collection Somebody With a Little Hammer. That title comes from her essay — included in both volumes — about teaching Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries, with its famous speech: “At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall — illness, poverty, loss — and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now.”

Gaitskill serves as the person with the little hammer, but she doesn’t just remind us of unhappiness: beyond that, her job is to remind us how complicated living is, how little we know, how much we have left to do. Her job is to make us be adults.

That maturity — sometimes painful, often bleak — can prove unpopular, especially when it comes to sex. But here, Gaitskill is in a class of her own: braver, ballsier—just smarter. Twelve pages into an essay defending Lolita as a book about love, about how lovers strive for heaven and dwell in hell, she starts talking about how she was molested at five — and says she felt empathy for the man; that she was even aroused. Wow!

Anyone rushing to dismiss Gaitskill as unempathetic or cold would be hard-pressed: she inserts herself into these questions with unflinching bravery, and she knows suffering herself. But her “story”, like everyone else’s, is up for debate, and she doesn’t make herself a martyr or a hero. And her goal isn’t to condemn — not to condemn Mailer or Nabokov or her assaulters or the pretentious boyfriend obsessed with The Talking Heads: her goal is to complicate. Her goal is to change her mind.

She brings the same remarkable mixture of clear thought and startling vulnerability to questions of sexual consent: her essay “The Trouble With Following the Rules” is, for me, just about the best analysis of date rape ever written. It begins with Gaitskill’s description of her date rape as a sixteen-year-old girl dropping acid with strangers in Detroit, before questioning whether it was really rape. In a stunning turn, she says that when she was “raped for real” by an attacker who threatened to kill her, she got over it pretty quickly. Then, she writes about when a casual friend and her get drunk and he became aggressive and seemed almost to force her into sex.

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In a move reminiscent of Amy Hempel’s The Harvest, Gaitskill writes: “In the original version of this essay I didn’t mention that when I woke up the next day I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and that when he called me I invited him over for dinner again. I didn’t mention that we became lovers for the next two years.” That first draft made the story simpler, but the messy version is braver and more true.

In Gaitskill’s vision, sexual partners have awkward, often painful, negotiations to make, often in the dark, often in a rush, often in confusion. And any decent, kind sex won’t come from rigid rules; it will come from, as she writes, “the kind of fluid emotional negotiation that I see as necessary for personal responsibility”. That negotiation may take years. By the end of the essay, she takes responsibility for pretending to consent, tripping in that apartment decades earlier, with that man who was poor and black and “high on acid and misunderstanding, just as I was”.

Gaitskill isn’t telling women to have lower standards for sex; in a sense, she’s telling them to have higher standards. In a remarkable piece on reading the Bible (“A Lot of Exploding Heads: On Reading the Book of Revelation”), she defines fornication not simply as sex outside of marriage, but as “sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one’s self or one’s partner, let alone any sense of real playfulness”. It is a “primitive attempt” to “give ballast to the most desperate human confusion”.

Lately, outlets including the New York Times have been chattering about the idiotically termed “sex negativity”, supposedly in vogue among young women. However, after reading Gaitskill’s essays, it seems they’re not opposed to sex, but rather to what Gaitskill calls fornication.

“The Trouble With Following the Rules” is probably the best articulation of what, I think, women my age are so unhappy about: in the old sexual regime, the rule was for women to have as little sex as possible, and now the rule is to have as much sex as possible. But neither world really cares what women actually want or need, and in the new, supposedly liberated world, even if you aren’t date raped, as she says: “sometimes I did find myself having sex with people I barely knew when I didn’t really want to all that much.” Sex can be unpleasant or regrettable or confusing without being assault; with women under so much pressure and in so much pain, it’s hard to imagine otherwise.

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As she writes, all people have a mixture of strong and delicate parts; part of them wants strange sex, while part of them flinches from it. Often, we want many things we can’t articulate at all: that’s what being human is. We all know that, and we all deny that as we tell students to fill out “consent forms” on their phones before sex.

Gaitskill is trying — alongside other books of this year, such as Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again and The Right to Sex — to make sex complicated again. Often, it’s neither pure, joyous, free-willed pleasure, nor felony rape. As Gaitskill writes in her sympathetic but clear-eyed essay on Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat who later became an anti-porn activist, “I imagined that Lovelace simply lacked the confidence to describe what she did and felt in a nuanced way, and that the thing was very, very nuanced and contradictory. So she went with either ‘I liked it’ or ‘I was raped.’”

So many experiences are in between; in another anecdote, a woman in her fifties described how she was furious when she thought about how in her twenties, a man in the East Village would grab her breasts. But back then, she was giggly and flirted and loved attention. “So which is true, the giggly girl who just laughed when the guy grabbed her, or the angry woman in her fifties?”

Then she amps it up: apparently, some women orgasm when they are raped. What are we to do with this information? We live in a world of pain and compromise, and we need new language for “the sometimes excruciating contradictions that many women experience in relation to sex”. Without it, to quote her essay on the adaptation of Secretary (“Victims and Losers”), “every American has been “telling his her ‘story’ and trying to get redress for the last 20 years. Whatever the suffering is, it’s not to be endured, for God’s sake, not felt and never, ever accepted.”

Gaitskill accepts suffering. Perhaps that’s why girls my age love her so much. Gaitskill can see that even when we behave badly, we’re not just bad people making bad choices; we often don’t have good choices. We’re not sluts or evil or victims. We’re lost and lied to by everyone that was supposed to give us answers.

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Too many of us, like the protagonist of Secretary, “yearn for contact in an autistic and ridiculous universe, and… wind up getting [our] butt spanked instead.” We know that sex won’t save us, that work won’t save us, we know that feminism won’t save us, and we don’t think the old rules will either. There’s a sense of doom.

The last thing Gaitskill said to me, as I was leaving her home last week, was that she thought she’d have been a very different person if she hadn’t been raised in Michigan. Perhaps that’s the Midwesterner in her — a sense that the world where safety and comfort were a promise, where if you made the right choices the right things happened, has already ended. We showed up late.

But there, too, she’s different from Houellebecq. She might be dark, but she isn’t mean. She sees that everybody is suffering, men and women, beautiful and ugly. We are all both villains and victims. Across these essays, she’s attuned to the way art and experiences people dismiss as upsetting or triggering are simply attuned to the complexity of life — to the way that love is a living nightmare.

On one of the last nights before the festival kicked off, I insisted on going to Film Forum to see Todd Haynes’s documentary The Velvet Underground. I was excited: it was the first film I’d see in weeks, as my life had gone from one of watching films to one of begging filmmakers to sign contracts — and the documentary had been praised far and wide as “exhilarating… experimental” (AV Club), “rapturous” (Slate), and “as radical, daring, and brilliant, as the band itself” (Rolling Stone).

And it’s true: I was exhilarated. I was sold when the first notes of Venus in Furs began to play, thumping almost painfully loudly in the butter-scented dark of the theatre. I was sold when Lou Reed’s beautiful young face appeared in Chelsea Girls-style split-screen, flickering with the slight human movements that Warhol couldn’t stamp out even with his commands not to move. I was sold on the hypnagogic, Brakhage-inspired collages splicing together 16mm film at that dizzying pace where impression exceeds memory. It made me think about how beautiful time is, how beautiful existence is, how beautiful youth is. As K. Austin Collins wrote in Rolling Stone, “[t]he movie makes you wish you were there”.

But I’m not sure it’s true that, as Collins continues, with the “lights darkened, [and the] dots and rays and Reed flickering before us, we nearly are”. When the lights lifted, I was there in a chair in a city overrun by private equity and a sense of impending collapse, waiting for people in their fifties to collect their bags and exit to the restrooms.

All the reviews talk about how the film isn’t a traditional narrative documentary, telling you the story of the band. Instead, it makes you “experience… feel… in your gut”. The film, then, is nothing more than a vibe. The only real impression it leaves you with is that The Velvet Underground was cool. And it was cool. They look cool, even today, in those videos with the polka dots projected on them, the hot people dancing in all the leather. Lou Reed and John Cale still look beautiful, young and sombre under Warhol’s camera. Unlike, say, The Pixies, they’re not lame at all.

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And yet this isn’t quite as radical a documentary as reviews would have it. As one reviewer put it, there are interviews that “offer commentary and insight, alternating between taking a detached ‘long view’ of things and plunging us into the middle of it all”. In other words, there are normal talking-head interviews, even though they’re in square aspect ratio and even though they’re projected in split-screen and even though they’re filmed by Ed Lachman.

And you know what? It’s not fun to see members of the Factory as 65 year olds. Cultural documentary, I’m starting to think, is always fundamentally sad. It’s always a memento mori. Music is about youth and beauty, but this film can’t escape a stultifying sense of impending death, even in a “fun” version that seems mostly to prove that Todd Haynes is familiar with structuralist film. The problem with documentary is that everyone hates documentary: that’s why all the truly original ones are affronts to the genre; they are anti-recreative and experimental (Shoah, The Killing Fields, etc.). Even usually brilliant and original directors fall flat when they turn to documentary, churning out depressingly normal, depressingly obvious work (see Jim Jarmusch’s Gimme Danger, an Iggy Pop documentary complete with titles in Creeper font).

The problem of documentary, its vampire problem, is worse with music. Music is about people between the ages of 15 and 30 being incredibly cool — and Sixties cool, especially, is about youth and freshness and limits. That’s why Haynes doesn’t continue past the break-up of the band: because it’s not cool that they didn’t die, because it was lame when Green Day came out with American Idiot in 2004, because no one wanted to see Billie Joel Armstrong wearing eyeliner in his thirties.

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As the film discusses, Warhol would project his work at 16 frames per second, a third slower than life. The people here seem ghostly, slowed down, plugged into a museum-like circuit, one where the individual is transformed from flesh to symbol, from transient to uncontainable. The same change makes a person cool. Coolness, celebrity, is all about some area halfway between presence and absence.

One of the highlights of the film is seeing Jonathan Richman meet the band as a 15 year old, and hearing the 2019 Richman exclaim that he thought “These people would understand me!” That’s how you always feel about your idols; like there’s someone a little far away, a few years old, a little bit skinnier, who knows.

So you don’t want to see them grow up. You don’t want them to get married and have kids and buy a house. You don’t want them to survive. You don’t want them to get normal.

At one point in the movie, Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian filmmaker, talks about the zeitgeist of the Sixties, the movie houses of Midtown, and the New York Film Festival, all bristling with avant-garde experiment and energy. It’s hard to imagine a time when the New York Film Festival was interesting. Today, an exciting NYFF film is The Velvet Underground, a film by an old person about old people for old people. And what’s left for us? For days after watching the film, I listened to ‘Heroin’ over and over again, struck again by the pain of it, by the screechiness and hurt.

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In comparison, all young people have today are Instagram memes and videos and a sense of irony so deep that until that film festival I was working on actually happened, most people thought it was all a joke. It was beautiful and triumphant, and two days after it ended, our creative director, a “meme lord”, an innocent child who had been working in an ice cream shop in Florida and living with his mom until he got scouted and brought to New York in July, overdosed, and I found out he was dead from seeing his dead body on my Instagram feed. His ex-boyfriend has posted the photo, announcing his death and asking if anyone knew how to contact his family.

Again, almost everyone thought it was a joke, and no one had his family’s address. No one knew if he had siblings. No one even knew how old he was; I could vaguely remember a conversation where he’d told me he was either one or two years older than he said he was, because even being 25 was terrifyingly old. Because to be cool, you have to die, you have to disappear. The heroin has to actually kill you.