Every generation differs from the one before, especially in the workplace — as media reports never stop telling us. Millennials were famously “lazy,” Boomers are (according to younger workers) pretty much stick-in-the-muds, and Gen-Z? Well, they’re a completely different kettle of fish, even at work. They’re reportedly quick to quit, sensitive to mental health matters and keen to shun boring office traditions.
A new report highlights a subtly different aspect of working with Gen-Z staff, which may help you understand some of the difficulties managers report when wrangling Gen-Z workers through the day. Gen-Z won’t just hop to it when you “order” them to work. It may not be so much a case of generational entitlement, nor disrespect for their elders. Gen-Z may just need to be told why a task is important before they agree to tackle it.
Writing for Psychology Today, Georgia-based executive coaching expert Tim Elmore points out that sports brand Nike has tried a new campaign to appeal to younger customers: the new “Why Do It?” push, a play on the famous “Just Do It” motto, is all about “igniting that spark for a new generation, daring them to step forward” according to Nike’s chief marketing officer Nicole Graham.
He says the trick to motivating and training Gen-Z workers rests on presenting the “why” reasons behind tasks right from the beginning. It helps younger workers “see the big picture,” which motivates them “to invest more time and energy,” Elmore explains. Allowing workers to peep behind the curtain is also a powerful motivational maneuver, he notes, since it can foster better decision-making, creativity and problem-soling, because people may make “wiser choices” if they know a project’s overall context. It can even increase employee ownership. This could be the most important aspect of telling workers why, he says, since once they “buy into both ‘what” and “why,’ they ‘own’ their job instead of ‘renting’ it.”
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
As to why Gen-Z needs this kind of support, which older managers may easily dismiss as young, inexperienced workers making demands above their station, Elmore suggests it’s partly due to the way Gen-Z voraciously consumes social media—a system that sometimes allows them to “see everything” about parts of the world in ways that just weren’t possible before. This may be driving the high anxiety Gen-Z suffers, as well as their frustration with what they may perceive to be a lack of transparency from management or company cultures that simply encourage a “do it because I said so” mentality. Gen-Z may need more “whys” than older workers because some “know too much and need to be convinced it’s worth it to step into action and become involved,” he writes, while others need an explanation “because they know too little,” since they’ve never had a full-time job before and need a leadership figure to walk them through the process.
In a Reddit discussion on the way Gen-Z behaves at work, some commenters wrote opinions that showed conflict with the way Gen-Z workers behave. “I won’t go as far as labeling Gen Z as lazy, but the entitlement is real,” one person wrote, arguing that “they would rather quit rather than work through challenges because they think they work isn’t supposed to be hard or stressful.”
But another Reddit user explained things in a way that chimes with Elmore’s thinking. Gen-Z workers are “largely immature in my experience,” they said, adding “but they’ll grow out of it.” The reasons may be because “they missed out on a lot of the social aspects of college,” the user wrote, noting that they think “they just need the number of years they spent in online college to get to the maturity level that previous generations had when they finished regular college. Not their fault, of course.” The user also added they’ve had to do a “lot more coaching for Gen Z people than others seem to have needed,” which chimes with explaining more “whys,” as Elmore suggests. But they concluded with a sentiment that may appeal to savvy business leaders: “I just like to help them learn.”
This aligns with other reports that say Gen-Z really wants more on-the job training than their older colleagues.
All of this may play into they way you manage your youngest workers. If they seem slow to get going on freshly set tasks, it might not be because they’re lazy: it’s just that they need to see the reasoning behind the tasks before they commit to them.
It may seem strange that as we approach the summer months, a TV show titled Baby Reindeer is one of the most watched, most talked-about shows in the country, but there’s a reason for that.
Currently boasting a 97 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, and more than 52.8 million viewing hours, Netflix’s binge model continues to dominate the way television is made, even as the two most important parts of storytelling—media literacy and narrative nuance—find themselves facing extinction.
At its core, Baby Reindeer delves into the complexities of power dynamics, identity, and the blurred lines between reality and fiction. In the dramatized Netflix series, which began as a stage production at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019, writer/creator Richard Gadd stars as Donny, a comedian with a unique sense of humor, desperate to break into showbiz, who becomes the victim of stalking and sexual assault. The series recounts Gadd’s real-life encounter with a female stalker, exploring the psychological impact of being pursued and harassed. This intertwining of reality and fiction has allowed Gadd’s experience to intersect with larger conversations being held about those same power dynamics, consent, male sexual assault, and the myth of the “perfect victim.” These are nuanced topics rarely explored, but similarly perfected, in Michaela Coel’s Emmy-winning HBO limited series I May Destroy You.
From the moment we meet Donny, Gadd presents him as a weirdo whose jokes never quite land. Similar to compartmentalizing trauma, Donny keeps disparate elements of his personal life (being a barman and a comedian and a man who dates trans women) separate, much like the characters of the show who become catalysts to his breakdown, and the eventual unpacking of his long-buried trauma.
Donny, like many comedians (no offense), is enthralled with the attention of strangers, but what cements this story in a different category is that Donny’s encounters aren’t a series of things that happen to him, they are acts that he is a part of. In moments of self-reflection, Gadd’s voice-overs at the climax of several of the later episodes often remark, “I would love to tell you that’s as far as it went,” or recounting what he could have, or should have done. As the story develops, every occurrence seemingly reinforces the old adage of “no good deed goes unpunished.” Each string of events starts with an act of kindness, with each of the characters wanting to be seen for who they are, and how they present, when in their normal lives they’re used to being ignored, or othered. Yet each character—when they finally are seen—is viewed with a skewed lens and taken advantage of.
With Martha, played by the fantastic Jessica Gunning—who is not Scottish, but whose accent work deserves an Oscar, Grammy, Tony, BAFTA, and a Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Award—a chance meeting at a bar and a free cup of tea sets into motion a series of events and a push-and-pull of power dynamics. As Donny, Gadd realizes when all of his red flags should have shot up simultaneously, but instead he becomes both predator and prey in her deranged reality and obsessive half-truths, even stating “I felt sorry for her.” It’s important to remember Martha’s claims aren’t simply fabrications plucked out of thin air—most of them are based in reality, wrapped in self-important grandiosity and topped with a lot of delusion. She is a lawyer who worked for an important politician (who she then stalked, but that’s not the point until later!), but much to her chagrin, and to the detriment of her famous variants of “sent from my iPhone” email signature, she does not in fact have an iPhone. Another half-truth is her many mentions of being too busy to stay for a drink because of her work schedule. She ends up staying for Donny’s entire shift and, despite supposedly being a girlboss rubbing elbows with high-powered clients, when asked to pay for a cup of tea or a pint, she simply replies: “Can’t afford it.”
With Teri (Nava Mau), the first meeting is different. It isn’t by chance; Donny actively seeks her out. From the beginning, he lies to Teri—a trans woman he met on a trans dating app—telling her his name is Tony and that he’s a construction worker. Donny only agrees to meet her at a specific bar, at night, under the guise that it’s the best bar in the city—fast trickery for an unsuspecting American living abroad. Donny is preying on her vulnerability and marginalized identity. His inability to consummate a relationship with Teri is partly rooted in his shame and incapacity to understand his newfound sexual identity, which we uncover in Episode 4.
What happens in Episode 4 could be categorized as the real turning point, shown in heartbreaking honesty when Donny meets Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill), a successful writer of one of his favorite TV shows, who says he sees promise in Donny and agrees to help him in his career. Darrien then coerces Donny to do drugs, and then gropes and rapes him repeatedly—what’s worse, Donny acknowledges he has been raped after the first instance, yet still goes back. Gadd positions himself—er, Donny—in such a lonely state of just wanting to be seen by someone, and while Donny knows that what he’s feeling and experiencing is wrong, Darrien’s praise is what keeps him coming back. For Donny, the idea that someone believes in him and is willing to give him constructive criticism is stronger than any of the drugs he takes, or the shame that he feels.
Later, everything comes to a head. After months of stalking and even being groped by Martha, Donny goes to the police to report Martha’s behavior—but not until six months later, and even when he does, he fails to mention Martha’s racist, transphobic, and verbally and physically abusive behavior during an event with Teri that Donny could have prevented; nor does he mention being assaulted by Darrien. In the aftermath of the series, viewers have removed the nuance from Gadd’s account and taken to searching for the identity of “Martha” and “Darrien” and others in the show, speculating on people in Gadd’s life even after he pleaded with them not to on social media.
True crime enthusiasts, while passionate about unraveling mysteries and the fascinating, darker aspects of human nature, can ignore nuanced storytelling by fixating on sensationalism. In their quest for thrilling revelations and shocking twists, some have speculated and made accusations about people in Gadd’s life, completely missing the point of the story. The allure of a sensational headline often takes precedence over the deeper exploration of the social, psychological, and ethical dimensions of storytelling as a catharsis, and, as a result, can lead some to come away with a shallow understanding of complex issues while reinforcing simplistic stereotypes.
Baby Reindeer became a hit because its nuanced storytelling enraptured the audience and transcended the confines of black-and-white narratives. The series existed in a gray area where complex truths and accountability intertwine. In its embrace, characters like Martha and Donny never became mere caricatures; they became mirrors reflecting complex issues, all while navigating moral ambiguity and fostering empathy and compassion.
Meecham Whitson Meriweather is a culture writer based in Brooklyn, whose work has appeared in Granta, Vulture, New York magazine, InStyle, The Daily Beast, and his newsletter Now That I Mention It, which you should already be subscribed to!
On Thursday, Conor Oberst will complete his latest attempt to shake up the routines that develop when you’ve been making music for over 30 years. Every week throughout March and April, the prolific, Omaha-born songwriter assembled a new band, spent four days rehearsing with them, and then performed a distinct, career-spanning show with a set list filled with his lesser-known songs. Billed as “Conor Oberst and Friends,” the run was split into two locations: The first four installments happened at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles, while the following New York appearances took place at the Bowery Ballroom.
Oberst estimates he’s written about 500 songs in his lifetime, and at these eight shows, he’s played over 100 of them, plus a smattering of covers by the likes of the Replacements and Daniel Johnston. He’s had to relearn tracks he’s released both under his own name and as Bright Eyes, his pseudonymous solo endeavor that developed into a group with Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. Some of his albums got more love than others (lots of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and his self-titled, full-length album from 2008; not so much Cassadaga or anything from Desaparecidos, unfortunately). Each assembled band had its own musical director and its own flavor, from the turn-of-the-millennium New York cool of Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to the rootsy approach of James Felice of the Felice Brothers, to the ramshackle, early Saddle Creek vibes of Maria Taylor of Azure Ray—all of which correlate to a sonic element of Oberst’s music.
Oberst has been a key influence on younger artists including Hurray for the Riff Raff, Waxahatchee, and Phoebe Bridgers, his Better Oblivion Community Center partner who joined him for three songs at the third Los Angeles date. In turn, those artists’ fans have started discovering Oberst’s music, and these residencies were their first chance to see him attempt some of these rarer songs live.
Just before the last Conor Oberst and Friends show, The Ringer spoke to him about how the whole thing came together and how he feels now that it’s almost done. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Why did you decide to do this now?
This guy Eric [Dimenstein], who’s been my booking agent for like 20 years, we’ve on and off talked about the idea, but the timing was never right. There’s always a record or something else to do. So, yeah, it kind of worked out timing-wise. And New York and L.A. are the most obvious spots, but they’re also two places where I have lived in my life and have a lot of friends, so there’s a lot of musicians and people to draw from, as far as the bands.
Why did this idea intrigue you in the first place?
It was honestly just trying something new. Sometimes when you go on tour, it’s great and you get really close with the people you’re with, but after a while, it becomes routine, unfortunately. I’m not really in a jam band, so you end up doing similar sets. You might change a couple songs a night, but for the most part, once you get the show up and running, that’s the show and that’s what you present in every town you go to. It seemed fun to just change that dynamic, where it’s just once a week, but every week I don’t really know what’s going to happen. That’s exciting because I’ve been doing this a long time. And then it’s just a chance to revisit a lot of past material and random songs I haven’t played in a long time.
Each week, one of the people in the band acted as the musical director and helped pick the songs and organize the band. Even with Bright Eyes, besides Mike and Nate, we always had different people on tour with us, so I’m used to playing with a lot of different people, but I’m not used to doing it so consecutively and quickly. It’s the closest I feel like I’ve had to a real job for a long time. Because it’s rehearse Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, play the show Thursday, and then Friday and Saturday are my days off. But even those days, I have to try and listen to the next week’s songs and remember stuff.
Are the bands practicing together beforehand without you, or is it really that week when you all start playing together for the first time?
Maybe some of them were practicing on their own, but no, not really. Another thing was, I didn’t want any songs to repeat in New York or L.A. The ones we played in L.A., we could play in New York, but that was the rule: For the city, don’t repeat any songs. That’s a lot of songs. Once I figured out who was going to be the band leader for all the weeks, we had to get square with the set list because some people wanted to do the same song.
Some negotiating had to happen.
Yeah, exactly. But I’m a natural-born diplomat, so it’s fine.
Were there songs that they would pitch that you were particularly excited about revisiting?
Nick Zinner from Yeah Yeah Yeahs was last week. We made the Digital Ash [in a Digital Urn] record, and he was in the band for that tour. So I knew we were going to do a bunch of those songs, or I assumed that would be the case. He picked this song “True Blue,” which I wrote for my nephew when he was, like, 4 years old. It’s just the weirdest song for Nick to pick. He’s like a vampire, so I just think he’s going to pick the darkest ones, but he picked this. It just made me laugh. I was like, “You really want to do that one?” So there was stuff like that along the way that was surprising.
Were there songs that you had never played live that came up?
I don’t know about that, but there’s definitely ones where it had been years [since I had revisited them]. There were some covers that were brand new to me. I’m pretty sure I played all the songs of mine at some point in my life, but like I said, I’ve been doing this a long time, and I don’t have the greatest memory.
Were there any songs where you were like, “I’m not doing that one?”
I really shied away from the ones that I’ve played so much, like “First Day of My Life” and “Lua.” Those didn’t feel as exciting. I guess we did play “First Day” on Maria’s week. [Editor’s note: He also played “Lua” that night as a duet with Phoebe Bridgers.] I was definitely leaning a little bit away from the ones that we’ve done in the last couple years.
Some of these songs are over 20 years old. When you revisit a song like that, do you still relate to the person who wrote it?
To be honest, sometimes not really at all. But I do have memories connected with them. There’s this song that we’ve actually played quite a bit over the years called “Falling Out of Love at This Volume,” which is on the very first Bright Eyes record, and I was literally 15 years old when I wrote it. So yeah, I’m not at all the same person, but I do connect it with the memories of that time in my life. It’s not like doing a cover song. There’s an aspect of it I can relate to, but it’s a very distant memory. What I was feeling when I wrote it or whatever, that’s long gone.
I’ve been a journalist for a while, and sometimes I’ll read articles I wrote when I was just starting, and I’m like, “What was that guy thinking?” And sometimes I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s pretty smart, kid. Good job.”
Right. This is actually weirdly connected to this whole thing in a way, which is Bright Eyes did this whole set of EPs that were companion pieces for all the records. I don’t know why I put myself through these fucking challenges, but we rerecorded a bunch of our old songs in new ways. I was very particular about which ones I wanted to sing, and they were the ones obviously that I still felt held up and that I felt some connection to, emotionally or mentally. You want that to be there or else it can feel like you’re just doing karaoke or something.
Why do you put yourself through these complicated challenges?
It’s like when people get older and they want to stave off early-onset dementia so they do a lot of crossword puzzles or something. I do shit like this, try to keep what brain cells I have left active.
Have the shows felt different between L.A. and New York?
New York, this has been really a real trip down memory lane because I lived in the East Village. I paid rent in New York for like 13 years, although I was on tour a lot of that time and in Omaha and stuff. I had probably five different apartments over the years, but they were all in the East Village. And now I got this apartment sublet thing for the month, so I’m really deep in. Obviously, some things have changed, but there’s ghosts everywhere. I can walk from the apartment to the practice space to the Bowery [Ballroom]. I don’t know if I’ve even gotten in a car here at all. It’s a trip because I have things I had forgotten about.
I still live in L.A., and there we were just rehearsing at my house. So that was very comfortable and cool, but it was a little closer to my actual current life.
As far as crowds and stuff, I don’t know, I don’t think they’re that different. All the crowds have been super gracious and nice and excited. We’ve made a point of not letting people know ahead of time what was up each week. Of course there are some diehards that are trying to go to every show, but a lot of people, they just pick the show and that’s what they got. I hope they had a good time though. I’m sure there’s some people that are like, “Aww, I wish I would’ve gone to that week.” But that’s the nature of the experiment.
For these shows, are you reinterpreting songs in a different way than how you recorded them?
Not really vastly reinterpreting, but we’ve extended a lot of parts. Like Miwi [La Lupa]’s week, we had a four-piece horn section, so there were parts that we extended to make room for that. Nick’s week, Lee Ranaldo [of Sonic Youth] was in the band, so you’ve got to make some time for him to solo and stuff. And then Nate Walcott’s week, which was the second week in L.A., was with Jeff Parker, the guitar player. It was all jazz musicians. I would say that week was the furthest from the way I would normally perform a song.
How do you feel about playing live these days?
You and me and everyone that follows music knows that it’s much harder to make a living off of record sales, so playing live is part of the job in that sense. I don’t have kids, but the guys in my band have kids and bills. It’s like, you got to keep making money. That’s the unromantic part about it, but there is truth to that. But I still like playing live. Honestly, I feel like when you’re on tour, you’re getting paid for all the bullshit you have to do, like check into the hotels and go to the airport and get on the bus and find food and do this and whatever. Actually being onstage performing music, for the most part, not always, that’s the best part of the day. Unless the show is total trash.
Has this experience made you more or less excited to go on tour?
It’s been so interesting and different, just because that stuff I’m talking about is gone. I don’t have to get on a bus or a plane or a hotel, but I have to rehearse all the time. The only thing I’ve been stressing on is just my voice holding up. People think, Well, it’s once a week; that should be easy. But the truth is, if you’re on tour, you’re singing maybe two hours a day. I’m singing eight hours a day for four days in a row [at rehearsals] and then doing the show. So I’ve been trying to be careful. I barely smoked cigarettes for these past couple months. I’m trying my best. Lots of tea, lots of Throat Coat, lots of Halls, whatever, all the tricks. From a physical standpoint, that’s the biggest difference. But on the other hand, you don’t have all the stress of travel. You’re in the same city and with your friends, so it’s great.
Would you ever do this again?
I don’t know. I guess it depends how long I live. Maybe it’ll sound fun in five years or something. One of our guitar techs and good friends, even when we’re having a shitty day, he’s like, “Beats sweeping the floor.” I’m like, “That’s true.” It has been a lot of work. I knew it was going to be a lot, but it’s been more than I thought it would be. I would have to be very rejuvenated to want to do this thing again.
Eric Ducker is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.
In the hours leading up to several gaming news events — like an indie event or a Nintendo Direct — you can see the rumblings of people online discussing a game called Hollow Knight: Silksong. Some share digital summoning circles constructed with emojis and dedicate them to the game in the hopes it will make an appearance at a showcase; others simply express their excitement by sharing memes prior to the event. During a digital event itself, you’ll see viewers spam the live chat with messages like “SKONG [with four airhorn emojis],” or “WHERE SILKSONG????!!??” Sometimes, the phrase “Silksong” will even trend online before one of these events because so many people are sharing their excitement.
All of this ruckus, just because fans just really want to hear a sliver of news about Hollow Knight: Silksong. The game — which fans shorten to Silksong — is the planned sequel to a game called Hollow Knight. Developer Team Cherry first announced the follow-up to its beloved Metroidvania in 2019; since then, it got a splashy trailer in 2022, but no concrete release date. And by now, its dedicated fan base has turned waiting for the game into one giant viral meme.
What is Hollow Knight: Silksong?
To understand the lasting popularity of Silksong, we need to look back at the game that preceded it: Hollow Knight. Developer Team Cherry first released the popular Metroidvania in 2017. At the time, the game stunned fans with its fantastical insectoid world and precise combat. Those elements, paired with its rich method of environmental storytelling, resulted in a gem of a game. Polygon hailed it as “unquestionably the finest Metroidvania ever made.”
Image: Team Cherry
Hollow Knight has racked up more than its fair share of devoted fans, so when Team Cherry surprised players with the announcement of a full-on sequel called Silksong, it drummed up plenty of buzz. The developers promised an original story, new bugs to meet, and new worlds to explore. What’s more is that fans would get to play as Hornet, a mysterious but beloved side character from the main game.
Fans excitedly awaited more news about the upcoming game, but none came. Years passed, and Team Cherry didn’t release any more trailers or news. With each passing gaming news event, it seemed all the more inevitable that players would get a release date, or a new trailer, or at least another peek at the project.
Finally, in 2022, the developer shared a new look at the game at an Xbox Showcase, but even then, the game had no stated release date. According to Xbox, however, the games in that showcase were going to be released in the next 12 months — meaning Silksong should have come out in 2023. But it didn’t. On May 9, 2023, Matthew Griffin from Team Cherry broke the news on X (formerly Twitter) that the game was not yet ready to be released and that fans should “expect more details from [Team Cherry] once we get closer to release.”
That was the last major update from the team, and since then, fans have been left in limbo — while still repeatedly expressing their hearts’ desires for the game online.
Why do fans shout about Silksong online?
In the years since its initial announcement, expressing a desire to see Silksong has become a viral bit online. At this point, you can’t watch a gaming news stream without people mentioning Silksong. People on social media will share fan art, memes, and reaction posts all in anticipation of the game, or making fun of the fact that there might not be more news about it. The avid fandom can spark the ire of other viewers in chats, and Silksong fans have inadvertently psyched up others excited for the game because they so regularly cause the game’s title to trend on X. All because people just want to express a desire to see this game.
Polygon reached out to Team Cherry to ask about what it’s been like to see fans talk about the game. We will update this article if we hear back.
Hollow Knight did sell in the millions, but that isn’t necessarily what seems to be causing this reaction to Silksong. It’s just that this game — which is genuinely a fantastic game to play — has inspired a super-dedicated cult following. The people who love the game just really adore it, and they want to see the next game released.
In this sense, Silksong does just come across as the next generation’s version of the entire “localize Mother 3” movement. Nintendo has never released an official English localization of Mother 3 in North America, but people have been asking for it for years. To this day, fans still beg Nintendo on social media to release the game, and several fans have regularly pulled IRL stunts to bring attention to the game. Being a Mother 3 fan is almost as much about wanting Mother 3 to come out officially in the U.S. as it is actually playing or enjoying the content of the game.
That all being said, Silksong has a much better chance of being released than the official English version of Mother 3. Team Cherry has assured fans that while the team might not have revealed too much, development is progressing. So I guess fans will have to rely on their summoning circles until then.
Let me describe a scenario. You’ve been looking forward to streaming the latest TV masterpiece everyone has been telling you to try. You finally find enough time to take in an hour-long episode and park yourself on the couch in front of the fancy 4K set in your living room. The screen gleams, you press play, and something looks a little … off. The top and bottom of the image seem sort of smeared.Are the edges of the frame out of focus? Did you screw something up in the settings? What’s happening here?
If any of this sounds familiar, don’t bother checking your warranty. As The Outer Limits used to say: There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. What you’re seeing is simply a hallmark of modern prestige TV. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, your screen is sharp. It’s the picture that got blurry. And that blur is by design. Welcome to TV’s era of the anamorphic lens.
Even if you somehow sidestepped every example of this trend until this year, you can’t ignore them now without suffering from FOMO. FX and Hulu’s Shogun is the most acclaimed show of 2024. It’s also one of the blurriest. And no, that’s not an accident. Like every other aspect of the meticulously plannedandproduced 10-episode miniseries, Shogun’s stylized visual language grew out of extensive consideration, conversation, and collaboration.
Early on, those three Cs involved cocreator and showrunner Justin Marks and the duo of director Jonathan van Tulleken and cinematographer Chris Ross, who would work on the first two episodes. When van Tulleken was pitching himself for the position of Shogun’s leadoff director, he put together a lookbook and mood reels that laid out his vision for the show. He took his cue from the scripts, which he says “had a texture … a strong visual voice.” On the page, Shogun “felt really bold and really like [it] had a strong point of view and a strong subjectivity.” Van Tulleken wanted to bring the same quality to the screen. And so, he says, “We started to settle on this idea of how to express this subjectivity, how to express [John] Blackthorne’s disorientation.”
While assembling the look book for Shogun, van Tulleken’s lodestars were movies that felt timeless and daring: The Godfather, Blade Runner, and, in particular, Apocalypse Now. Ross, who had teamed up with van Tulleken on previous projects dating back to Misfits, suggested several Asian influences—including Raise the Red Lantern and the work ofWong Kar-wai, Takashi Miike, and Yasujiro Ozu—as well as recent inspirations such as The Revenant and 2015’s Macbeth.
But both agree on the guiding light: Apocalypse Now, Ross says, was“a huge reference” for them. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Godfather follow-up “has a point of view in its look and a point of view in its lens choice and in its framing, and it’s driven by story,” van Tulleken says, adding, “We really wanted to take some of that and create a world that was sort of intoxicating and also felt dangerous and sometimes disorienting.”
In applying that ethos to Shogun,van Tulleken and Ross adhered to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi—essentially, that beauty and imperfection are inextricably linked and that one should seek to accept that tension. Shogun, van Tulleken says,is “a journey of acceptance,” particularly for the shipwrecked captive Blackthorne. “Everyone’s kind of a prisoner in the show, be it from culture, be it from their position in society, be it from politics, or literally a prisoner, in Blackthorne’s sense,” van Tulleken notes. The English sailor’s arc reflects “the acceptance of some of that and the acceptance of the things you can change and you can’t.”
Hence the evolution from the Blackthorne in Episode 4, who tramples on the moss in his house’s rock garden, to the Blackthorne at the end of Episode 5, who carefully smooths out the gravel surrounding a stone. Having heard Mariko’s message that “death can come for us at any moment,” and having learned the truth of that through an earthquake and the death of his gardener, he embraces the transience of beauty and life and learns to focus on the things he can control.
For the folks shooting Shogun, van Tulleken says, the challenge posed by wabi-sabi became “How do we take this very perfect thing in the digital cameras we use and also in these beautiful, austere sets and these incredible, rich costumes, and how do we break it so we’re not fetishizing it, we’re not turning it into a fantasy?”
Their answer: anamorphic lenses.
Anamorphiclenses were developed a century or so ago as a means of obtaining a wide-screen image from film and camera equipment with a non-wide-screen aspect ratio. (The lenses themselves horizontally squeeze the image, which is then stretched upon projection.) Compared to standard, spherical lenses, oval anamorphics enable a wider field of view, used in movie formats such as CinemaScope, which arose in the 1950s in response to the threat TV posed to the box office. Anamorphic lenses can capture the full sweep of stunning landscapes instead of lopping off a large part of the picture, but—for better or worse—in close-ups of characters, their shallow depth of field creates a stark contrast between the in-focus subject(s) at the center of the frame and the blurred background around them.
The anamorphic look came to be seen as “cinematic,” but the lenses fell out of favor in the 1990s thanks to the development of formats such as Super 35, which made up for some of the shortcomings of spherical lenses vis-à-vis anamorphics by offering additional horizontal film area. Not only did those newer spherical alternatives capture more of the upsides of anamorphic lenses, but they were also free of the downsides—the image artifacts and distortions that result from anamorphic compression and stretching: namely, elongated lens flare (see the prominent examples in the Playboy Bunny and Do Lung Bridge sequences of Apocalypse Now), an impressionistic, swirly bokeh (background blur), and obvious vignetting (darkened corners of the frame).
Assuming you see those as downsides, that is. In the digital era, van Tulleken says, cameras can be “very clean,” “pitiless,” and “ruthless.” That’s perfect for some projects—say, sports broadcasts—but with others, he says, “you’re trying to break that up” in order to “put an organic feel into that very digital realm.” In other words, wabi-sabi. Couple that desire with the enhanced light sensitivity of digital equipment, which has made it easier to meet the elevated lighting requirements of anamorphic lenses, and you have a recipe for a resurgence.
This impulse isn’t unique to Shogun’s creative team.The cinematographer Neil Oseman says that “ever since cinematography went mostly digital, filmmakers have looked for ways to undercut the clean precision of the images with some unpredictable characteristics. Introducing distortions, lens flares, [and] bowing in the horizontal lines, as many anamorphics do, is one way for cinematographers to achieve that.” Oseman, who blogged about the rise of anamorphic lenses on TV in 2020, says their use “has increased over the last five or 10 years” not only out of a desire for a more cinematic feel, but because “TV networks and streamers allow wider aspect ratios than they used to, so anamorphic lenses are an option where they weren’t before.” (Until about 20 years ago, most TVs weren’t wide-screen.) Anamorphic lenses are more expensive than spherical, but as Oseman notes, “TV budgets are high enough now for these expensive optics to be hired.”
Shogun’s budget was plenty big enough for the production to pair its Sony Venice cameras with Hawk V-Lite and class-X anamorphic lenses, whose bokeh boasts a “really interesting swirl,” according to van Tulleken. (V-Lites were used on the British crime drama Top Boy, an early small-screen anamorphic adopter that van Tulleken and Ross worked on.) As Shogun begins,Blackthorne arrives in a land that seems strange and somewhat barbaric to him. The Englishman seems just as strange and barbaric to those he meets. To capture that mutual alienation, the filmmakers leaned into their tools’ distortive effects. The aperture of a lens controls how open it is; the wider the aperture, the more light it lets in, and the more noticeable the bokeh. Early on, van Tulleken says, “We were wide open a lot on the [lenses] so that we could really have a natural, strong focus falloff behind our characters.”
See, for instance, Blackthorne’s wraithlike crewmates in the premiere:
Or a couple of Blackthorne’s captors looming behind him, before he breaks down the language barrier:
Some shots show basic barrel distortion. Others evince an even more exaggerated fish-eye effect. And then there’s the vignetting, which van Tulleken and Co. opted not to crop out in postproduction. “In some places, to show that Blackthorne alienation and that disorientation, we actually left those in,” the director says.
These choices suited the aesthetic the creators were crafting. Following the leads of Apocalypse Now, Macbeth, and The Revenant, Ross says,“We wanted to be more visceral and more first-person, wanted to put the audience in the protagonists’ shoes. So that led us to think that we would be jumping into their sphere of influence, within 3 feet of the characters’ space.” The background blur encourages the viewer to, well, focus on the foreground characters.
In theory, these anamorphic artifacts can convey character dynamics, too. In some scenes, van Tulleken says, “There was almost a wrestle for who was in control of them, whose scene it was.” Accentuating or masking anamorphic effects depending on the scene or the speaker was one way to “play with those shifting sands of power within a scene, and who thinks they have it and who doesn’t.” Ross adds, “Every scene has a surface story, a surface plot, but at the same time … deep levels of character development and then, in hindsight, some form of revelation, because of betrayal or whatever.” Rewatching Shogun withthat hindsight and dissecting it on a shot-by-shot level might produce epiphanies about why certain scenes were framed the way they were.
This all seems somewhat adventurous, stylistically, for a series FX was making a big bet on. Were there any network notes?
“There was nervousness,” Ross says. “There’s nervousness about everything, which is totally understandable. It’s huge sums of money to spend and an enormous leap into the unknown.” Ultimately, though, “Everyone was super supportive of this idea.” Van Tulleken acknowledges that “different streamers have a different appetite for boldness,” but at FX, he says, “No one ever said, ‘Ah, I think this thing is too much.’ … It was always a sense of: How can we push the show? How can we live up to the ambition of the show? … It was an astoundingly supportive environment to make something in.”
The internet, naturally, is not always so supportive. Shogun, on the whole, has been rapturously received by critics and the public alike. The unorthodox cinematography, specifically, has drawn some measure of praise but also some consternation, judging by various Reddit posts and comments. Some spectators seem to have been alienated (or just plain confused) by Shogun’s visual depiction of its characters’ alienation.
The anamorphic backlash to Shogun and its ilk could be akin to two common complaints about TV: Shows are too hard to hear, and shows are too dark to see. Each of those gripes stems in part from the fact that the conditions under which TV is created differ from the conditions under which it’s consumed. In this case, it’s not that viewers lack the high-end speakers or screens to render a director’s vision faithfully; it might be that the audience lacks the visual vocabulary to grok what the auteur intended. Perhaps this fancy stuff slays with cinephiles, but it leaves the average viewer cold.
One of the problems with Hollywood today is that all the movie editors are now using HDR screens with 1000 nits brightness, and they don’t realize that they are making every movie and TV show way too dark to see.
Van Tulleken is not the kind of creator who claims not to read the comments. “I’ve read all the Reddit,” he admits. And he’s thought a lot about the balance between challenging and distracting viewers.
“You just have to go where you feel the visuals tell you to go,” he says. On Shogun, these decisions were“led by the story” and “came from a very, very well-thought-out philosophy. … And I think if you’re trying to go out there and make something interesting and make something that captures people’s attention, it is impossible to please everyone.” Every viewer “has the right to their point of view,” van Tulleken continues, but “there’s a world where we make the clean show and you shoot it very clinically, and you wouldn’t get the praise.”
Nor would a director like van Tulleken feel fulfilled if he shied away from following his anamorphic muse. “Anything, frankly, that makes people sit up and lean forward and pay attention to their screen, I’m all in favor of,” he says. In his view, it’s better to conduct an experiment that might make some viewers annoyed than to hew so closely to convention that no one feels anything. “Sometimes on set, you feel a little scared doing something, and you don’t know whether that’s failing or succeeding,” van Tulleken says. “But I’m always quite a fan of that feeling of going, ‘God, I don’t know.’ I think it’s better to feel a little bit scared when you’re trying to make some art than the reverse of feeling like, ‘Ah, I know this will work because I’ve seen it a million times.’”
Ross’s sentiments are similar. “Sometimes some people won’t agree with you and they don’t like the aesthetic,” he says. “But if you try to create an aesthetic that everybody loved, then you’d effectively create the image equivalent of Walmart. And although it’s a great shop where you can buy everything you need, you don’t get your bespoke suit from Walmart, you get it from Jermyn Street. You’ve got to fight the fight you feel you need to win in order to create the aesthetic that all of you believe in so strongly.”
Darcy Touhey, a director, producer, and camera assistant who worked as a film loader on Shogun, responded to some Redditors to defend the visuals from accusations of sloppiness—though he does share some viewers’ reservations. Via private message, he says, “It is 100 percent supposed to look like this. It’s incredibly intentional and had to go through a lot of channels in [preproduction] to get approved. So people thinking it’s a mistake are just wrong. Artistically, you could say maybe it’s a mistake. Practically? Absolutely not. … We had like 10-14 monitors at any given time on set. Everyone was seeing what the audience is seeing.”
Lens-wise, however, he has some notes. “I don’t necessarily agree with the decision,” he says. “I think the breathing and the vignetting is very distracting. … Those lenses just looked better when slightly longer, in my opinion.” Touhey believes that on some series, filmmakers may be shooting wide open more than they need to and under-lighting due to digital dependency and inexperience with vintage glass. Van Tulleken confirms that to make anamorphic magic, “You need a great crew, you need a great cinematographer, you need people who really understand those lenses. … You need a great focus-puller. You need a great [camera assistant]. The lenses break, they fall apart. … I don’t think it’s for the casual hand.”
But Touhey also asserts that “people are focused on the lenses way too much when considering the cinematography of [Shogun]. The cinematography shines in this show because of the intense commitment from every department towards realism and authenticity. The sets, both studio and location, were unbelievable. The attention to detail was astounding. … A good show looks good because of every aspect of production.”
Like Blackthorne, Mariko, and most other Shogun characters, I’m torn between competing preferences and loyalties. On the one hand, I admire the audacity and distinctiveness of Shogun’s visuals and the care that clearly went into them. On the other hand, I do find the heavy anamorphic effects distracting, in the sense that some part of my brain fixates on the fluctuations in focus, possibly at the expense of some immersion in the show. (This tendency is probably exacerbated by Shogun’s reliance on subtitles: The text draws the eye to—and, in my mind, kind of clashes with—an often out-of-focus segment of the screen.) Also: I want to see those costumes, sets, and scenery! There are ways to make a series’ cinematography stand out without making some subset of the audience want to pound the tops of their TVs, Fonzie style.
I’m most amenable to the out-of-focus, swirly look when it serves the story, as it does on Shogun. The Gilded Age uses anamorphic effects to draw a distinction between the milieus of “old” New York and “new” New York. Severance does the same to separate the characters’ “severed” lives at Lumon Industries from their outside existence. Homecomingused anamorphics to underline the off-balance nature of the narrative.
Not every series seems to have such clear reasons for straying from TV tradition. Even on streaming series less thoughtful than Shogun, though, directors don’t end up with anamorphic effects by accident. “I think it’s always very considered and deliberate,” Touhey says. “Shows in those budget ranges are doing camera tests well before shooting. They are doing lens projection, etc., to make sure everything is working as intended.” Some series are steering away from sterility; others are pursuing a “cinematic” signifier. “People want TV to be more like cinema now,” Touhey says, “so the use of anamorphic is becoming more prevalent because people associate that with cinema. … I wouldn’t agree again that it’s best for the medium, but it is an easy way to visually say, ‘This TV is more like a movie than TV.’”
In effect, television has adopted a technique that moviemakers pioneered to differentiate film from TV. One wonders whether the anamorphic lens’s association with cinema will last now that this look is becoming ubiquitous on TV. “Part of my job is to make sure that we’re trying to do things that are not just being repeated everywhere,” van Tulleken says. “I’m always taking note of the cinematographers and what is being done in the space and who is making bold directorial decisions. And you’re always [hoping] you’re not aping and [that you’re] progressing the medium.”
The good news is that the more familiar anamorphic effects are, the less off-putting they’ll be. For directors who want to reset the status quo, though, that’s also the bad news. At this rate, a sharp, pristine picture might go back to being the bolder choice. Alternatively, directors could keep cranking the anamorphic meter higher to top previous stunts.
“Arguably, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina took it too far,” Oseman says. “They used Panavision Ultra [Speed Golds] anamorphics for scenes involving magic, which put a Salvador Dalí–esque blur on the sides of the frame. I thought it was a daring choice, but it was very noticeable, and I know it took some viewers out of the story.”
Perhaps that’s happened in Shogun at times, too. Then again, the slight discomfort and disorientation I’ve felt while watching Shogun are what its creators intended. Maybe it’s made me identify with the characters and enriched the experience in ways of which I’m not completely conscious. It’s tough to say: We can’t compare the Shogun we got to a version of the show that’s the same except for flawless footage shot with spherical lenses. What we can say is that the Shogun we got is good. And if the blur bothers some viewers, it can’t be a big impediment: Whether partly because of or partly in spite of the lens selection, people are watching (and largely loving) the show.
If your reaction to the initial lens look was closer to tolerance than love, you’ve probably been relieved to see those effects fade across the season. That, too, was part of the plan. The choices van Tulleken, Ross, and Marks made early on “set up a sandbox that everyone could then play in,” van Tulleken says; inside that structure, subsequent cinematographers and directors have had a lot of freedom to do their own thing. As van Tulleken concludes, “This show has an evolution, it has an arc, and I really believe in the grammar of shots, that they should show the escalating arc of a scene and of a story and a series. … We kept the same anamorphic lenses, we kept the same cameras, but not every scene needed what we were doing.” As Blackthorne learns the language and the lay of the land in later episodes, the disorientation is dialed down.
If you or someone you love is still struggling with the symptoms of TV’s anamorphic phase, at least you know now that you haven’t been hallucinating. Focus (so to speak) on the positive, and practice the eightfold fence. Maybe you’ll suddenly see the wisdom in this wabi-sabi of the screen. And if you still want to break up with blurry shows, don’t feel bad about it. It’s not you, it’s TV.
We used to be a proper country. With the stress of flying already at an all-time high, the last thing we should be worried about is someone’s stanky leg all up in our armrest. We should be concerned about real problems. Like “Will the plane fall apart in mid-air?”, “Is our pilot drunk?”, “Will my luggage make it to my destination?” Not “When was the last time this stranger washed their socks.”
Unfortunately that’s what happened to Redditor, Top_Particular_741. We’re not entirely sure which airline this occurred on, but it’s safe to say even Spirit wouldn’t allow this bush league behavior. After posting a photo of the limb, the internet went full mob-mentality.
With the possible exceptions of trauma surgeons, firefighters, and garbage collectors, nearly everyone has at one point or another been plagued by the ambient sense that their job is pointless. This is true even within professions that we’d consider essential: If you know any nurses or teachers, you’ve heard about the hopelessness and boredom that snake their way through hospitals and schools. When you abstract work further and further, away from producing shoes and chairs and toward producing “shareholder value,” you are forced to confront one fundamental question, again and again: What the fuck are we doing here?
Last week, it became clear that Warner Bros. Discovery (a conglomerate formed when AT&T spun off Warner Media, itself the by-product of a 1990 merger between Time Inc. and Warner Communications that was designed to stave off a hostile takeover by Gulf+Western, which is now Paramount) planned to permanently shelve Coyote Vs. Acme, a live action–animation hybrid film that was completed sometime in 2022. Based on a New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier (published a month after the Time-Warner merger) that imagined Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme Co. over “defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labelling” of the various items he purchased to help capture the Road Runner, the film stars Will Forte and John Cena, is directed by Dave Green, and is written by Samy Burch, whose May December script is up for Best Original Screenplay at next month’s Oscars.
It is now overwhelmingly likely that no member of the public will ever be able to see Coyote Vs. Acme. In fact, The Wrap reports that after outcry from filmmakers and onlookers over initial reports about plans to shelf the film, which was budgeted around $70 million, Warner allowed it to be screened for interested parties. But Warner did not inform Netflix, Amazon, or Paramount—all of which are said to have made “handsome” offers—ahead of time that there would be no budging from its initial asking price, which was somewhere between $75 million and $80 million.
There is precedent for Warner, under CEO and president David Zaslav, canceling a filmed and nearly finished feature film. In 2022, the conglomerate shelved Batgirl and something called Scoob! Holiday Haunt, each of which was slated to go directly to the company’s paid streaming service, then known as HBO Max. (You imagine a team of men in suits: “Sir, the exclamation point actually goes in the middle.”) But while Coyote Vs. Acme is not the first property to be left flattened, as if by a falling anvil on the side of a highway, it’s the first one whose very premise is a tidy metaphor for the way the industry has become an impassable web of complementary and competing corporate interests that wraps itself around cultural objects until they are completely mummified. Put another way, Coyote Vs. Acme—if we’re to take the Frazier piece as its basis—is a movie that is about the very dynamic that killed it: capital’s use of the law not as an arena for fair adjudication but as a blunt instrument.
Created for Warner Bros. at the tail end of the 1940s by Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, Wile E. Coyote has spent the past 75 years in perpetual chase of the Road Runner, a similarly silent desert dweller. Across what, in Frazier’s piece, Coyote’s attorney calls “Arizona and contiguous states,” the predator deploys an endless array of Acme-supplied gadgets and contraptions to catch his prey—always to no avail. While Bugs Bunny is the unquestioned star of Looney Tunes, Coyote is a constant victim of the cartoon physics the franchise made famous: He scurries off cliffs but falls into the chasm below when he looks down and sees that the ground is gone; he’s frozen, statue-like, by the quick-drying cement Road Runner speeds through like a hydroplaning car; he collides “with a roadside billboard so violently as to leave a hole in the shape of his full silhouette.”
What Frazier’s piece captures so shrewdly is the way legalese can make the ordinary sound absurd and the absurd sound downright justifiable:
Unsuspecting, the prey stopped near Mr. Coyote, well within range of the springs at full extension. Mr. Coyote gauged the distance with care and proceeded to pull the lanyard release. … At this point, Defendant’s product should have thrust Mr. Coyote forward and away from the boulder. Instead, for reasons yet unknown, the Acme Spring-Powered Shoes thrust the boulder away from Mr. Coyote. As the intended prey looked on unharmed, Mr. Coyote hung suspended in air. Then the twin springs recoiled, bringing Mr. Coyote to a violent feet-first collision with the boulder, the full weight of his head and forequarters falling upon his lower extremities.
The lawsuit, like the cartoon itself, endears Wile E. Coyote to us: We want him to catch the Road Runner; we don’t want him to suffer a “fracture of the left ear at the stem, causing the ear to dangle in the aftershock with a creaking noise.” But underlying the catalog of injuries to body and reputation that Coyote’s lawyer offers is the claim that it is a predator’s inalienable right to pursue its prey. So where Acme is a clot of half-obscured “directors, officers, shareholders, successors, and assigns,” the plaintiff is himself hoping to normalize his crimes; the case is a Russian nesting doll of predation. It calls to mind the arch-American myths of the careless coffee drinkers suing restaurants for handing them hot drinks.
The entertainment industry, like all others, replicates this logic on a larger scale. Most analysts figure Warner will score at least a $30 million tax break for shelving Coyote Vs. Acme rather than releasing it. This is, on its face, immoral and anticompetitive whether you find morality and business competition to be one and the same or directly opposed: How can it be better to flush $70 million down the drain than to try to recoup at least some of it?
And still, in the immediate sense, it’s almost certainly good business; the balance sheets will be cleaner this year. But it closes off any possibility that the film would be a hit—or adapted into a hit spinoff, or heavily merchandised, or simply good enough that it makes Warner more attractive to filmmakers who could bring it hits in the future. It’s shortsighted by the most craven measures and simply gross by any others. Yet tax law—and precisely nothing else—incentivizes the conglomerate to do something that, in a sane world or in a more competitive industry landscape, would alienate it to writers, directors, and stars.
Speaking of American myths, it doesn’t take too many contortions to see Wile E. Coyote as our Sisyphus: alone in the unpopulated West, starving but eager to abstract his animal instincts with consumer goods and cheap schemes. Coyote Vs. Acme is not some bizarre, divisive, or difficult passion project. It’s an all-ages comedy about the most recognizable characters a studio has ever created that has a hook (Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Erin Brockovich or whatever) that could compel adults. But we have somehow arrived at a place where the production history of a Looney Tunes movie starring a former wrestler is now emblematic of art’s struggle against corporate greed.
In about 10 days, people—junior analysts, “institutional investors,” the wealthy and semiretired, senior analysts—will huddle around those arachnid conference call speakers or pace through airport gates on Airpods and listen to Warner Bros. Discovery’s fourth-quarter earnings call. It’s possible that the Coyote Vs. Acme debacle will be addressed simply due to the uproar it caused, but just as likely that the company will barrel ahead with what was likely the plan all along: to let it slip silently into the ether, a massive tax benefit “earned” by lighting years and tens of millions of dollars on fire. Zaslav will be rightly praised while those so inclined will sleep well knowing they can cash out whenever they please.
This is an extreme example, to be sure, yet still clarifies the precarity and seeming impermanence of art in the streaming era. To the extent that those streaming platforms have become the de facto media libraries for so many, individuals have ceded to rights holders and corporations control over their collections of movies and music, which can be shrunk or radically altered on the first of any given month. For decades, things have fallen out of print and become obscure, and axing something before its release, as Warner seems ready to do with Coyote Vs. Acme, is reminiscent of the way studios could control what was available in decades past. But today, Warner and its competitors are free to play this out over and over—able to yank things out of circulation at will. In the past, they never could have reached into your home and scooped up your DVD copy of The Spy Who Shagged Me.
I should correct something from earlier, when I said that Coyote never catches the Road Runner. This isn’t true—not exactly. In “Soup or Sonic,” a nine-minute segment in a 1980 special called, unfortunately, Bugs Bunny’s Bustin’ Out All Over, Coyote tries and fails to capture the bird using a pole vault that starts spinning like a propeller; a faulty rocket; a Frisbee fitted with a firecracker; a piece of “Acme Giant Flypaper” that captures, well, a giant fly; and a case of exploding tennis balls.
But in the short’s final two minutes, Coyote chases Road Runner through a series of pipes that turn each animal smaller as they pass from one end to the other. Discovering this, they pivot; running back the direction they came brings the Road Runner back to normal size, but leaves Coyote tiny. Nevertheless, he finally catches up. Wrapping his arms—just barely—around the Road Runner’s now giant ankle, Coyote licks his lips and pulls from his nonexistent pockets a bib, knife, and fork. But there’s nothing he can do: The thing he’s pursued forever is too immense, too threatening for him to bite, to cut, to finally eat. “OKAY, WISE GUYS, YOU ALWAYS WANTED ME TO CATCH HIM,” reads one sign Coyote holds up for the audience. The other: “NOW WHAT DO I DO?”
Paul Thompson is the senior editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and GQ.
Have you heard the story of Truman Capote’s downfall? That elaborate yarn about one of the 20th century’s literary lions double-crossing his closest friends, developing a terminal case of writer’s block, and slowly drinking himself to death? It’s the postscript in Capote, the 2005 film about the writing of In Cold Blood that’s drawn from Gerald Clarke’s biography about the writer. The 2006 movie Infamous, based on a dishy oral history by George Plimpton, ends with a similar summary. The saga was detailed in Sam Kashner’s Vanity Fair article from 2012, and again in Melanie Benjamin’s bestselling 2016 novel, The Swans of Fifth Avenue. It’s covered in the 2019 documentary The Capote Tapes, and it’s the central focus of Laurence Leamer’s 2021 book, Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, which is the source material for the new FX series Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans.
Forty years after Capote’s passing, pop culture is still fascinated with this sophisticated soap opera. Maybe that has to do with its Americanness: the gay arriviste who fled a troubled childhood in the Deep South and reinvented himself among New York high society, only to sink as spectacularly as he soared. Maybe it’s because Capote was tied to so many other beloved mid-century luminaries, from Audrey Hepburn and Marlon Brando to longtime friend Harper Lee, who based the crafty To Kill a Mockingbird character Dill on him. Whatever the cause, each Capote chronicle is rendered through contemporary concerns about authorship, fame, relationships, and the passage of time. As the marketing for Feud suggests, the socialites in Capote’s orbit were the “original” Real Housewives of New York City, making him a sort of highbrow Andy Cohen.
Many writers have left colossal footprints over the past 100 years—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer. But the Capote legend is the one that seems to enchant people the most. “It’s a testament to how he crafted his own celebrity,” Thomas Fahy, director of English graduate studies at Long Island University and the author of Understanding Truman Capote, tells The Ringer. “His wit, his charm, his talent, and his association with the ultra-wealthy were certainly part of that, and they reflect our own obsessions with access to celebrity culture. We got to watch the trajectory of his life, and that includes the darker side of our celebrity worship, which is relishing or taking some kind of pleasure in the decline of a celebrity.”
Feud explores that decline at length. By the end of its first episode, Capote (Tom Hollander) has already become persona non grata among his core social circle, the posh women whose catty secrets he spilled in a thinly veiled 1975 Esquire short story meant to be an excerpt from a novel he never published. Over lunch at Manhattan’s chic La Côte Basque, Capote’s cohort would exchange wicked gossip. Among the group was the favored Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), married to the mighty chairman of CBS; Slim Keith (Diane Lane), a stylish jet-setter who hobnobbed with Cary Grant and William Randolph Hearst; C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), commemorated in Diego Rivera paintings, Slim Aarons photographs, and the cover of Time magazine; and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), a blue blood forever stuck in her sister Jackie Kennedy’s shadow. Perhaps naively, none of them expected Capote to use their chitchat as material. They were furious when he did.
Tom Hollander as Truman Capote in Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans FX
Hopscotching across the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s, Feud recounts what drew Capote and the women to one another—and the toll it took when most of the group ostracized him in climactic fashion. Ryan Murphy, the anthology series’ originator, outlined the season, after which Jon Robin Baitz, the Pulitzer-nominated playwright who created the ABC drama Brothers & Sisters, wrote all eight episodes. “We have so few models of outrageousness amidst glamor,” Baitz says of his attraction to Capote’s pageantry. “He represents a kind of gay outsider, and some of that lives on. YouTube is filled with interviews where he’s a little bit worse for wear, to say the least.” Baitz and director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Milk) structured some of Feud according to whether they could pinpoint the right actresses opposite Hollander’s flowery dialogue. Other so-called swans, like Gloria Vanderbilt, Vogue darling Marella Agnelli, and Harper’s Bazaar contributing editor Gloria Guinness, were excised from the narrative.
Each Capote portrait allows its makers to project different hypotheses onto this treble-voiced smoothie whose outsized personality offset his diminutive frame—or, as Baitz puts it, the “ornately decorated, little gay elf.” Capote (which won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar) and Infamous (starring Toby Jones) dramatize the cost of In Cold Blood, the true-crime pacesetter about two brothers executed for murder in small-town Kansas. Both films present a vampiric Capote ingratiating himself with locals in exchange for access. A sensation that made Capote even more of a talk show perennial than he already was, the book saddled him with insurmountable pressure to produce another masterpiece. The Esquire story supplied an easy way to stay relevant in the face of such anticipation. It, too, was an act of vampirism. But unlike In Cold Blood, it was Capote’s undoing. After his friends abandoned him, he had something of a nervous breakdown, subsisting on a buffet of pills, vodka, and regret.
Those friendships, and their deterioration, are also the foundation of The Swans of Fifth Avenue. Baitz avoided reading Benjamin’s novel, assuming it would cover too much of the same ground. He wasn’t wrong: Swans begins the same way the inaugural episode of Capote Vs. the Swans ends, with the women gathering at La Côte Basque to rant about Capote’s recent treachery. The two depictions have ample overlap—including the starry Black and White Ball that Capote threw in 1966, which is also the subject of Deborah Davis’s 2006 nonfiction book, The Party of the Century,and a forthcoming stage musical—but some of their inventions differ. Feud imagines a tormented Capote communing with Paley’s ghost after she dies of lung cancer in 1978, while Swans of Fifth Avenue envisions a scene in which Capote stations himself outside her funeral, watching surreptitiously as the clique he once commanded convenes without him.
Benjamin says her book was optioned multiple times after its success. At one point, it was going to be a limited series featuring Bryce Dallas Howard. Rob Roth, a visual artist who wrote a 2022 play about the creative kinship between Capote and Andy Warhol, was interested in turning the novel into a musical. Various adaptations lingered in what Hollywood calls development hell. Benjamin was close to inking a final deal when Feud was announced, she says.
“This huge scandal had never really been fictionalized before,” Benjamin says of Swans. “Facts are for the historians, and emotions are what a novelist can do. To me, the relationship between Babe and Truman is the heart of the novel. She had an uninterested husband cheating on her all the time and not much purpose in her life. She was only known for her beauty, and then along comes this giant intellectual who seemed to see something in her. She’s a mother figure in a lot of ways. … She didn’t live long after the fallout. She wasn’t the same old Babe, and neither was Truman.”
Any novelist, screenwriter, or reporter probing the Capote mythology gets to interrogate the “why” of it all. Why did he sell out his friends, knowing how image conscious they were? Did he believe his charisma made him bulletproof? Had he known the whole time that he would use their words as literary grist? If they hadn’t dismissed him, would Capote have finished Answered Prayers, the novel the Esquire story teased? And how much did his own biography inform his decisions? As a boy in Alabama, Capote felt abandoned by his mother, who frequently locked him away while entertaining gentleman callers. She, too, wanted to ingratiate herself into elite Park Avenue circles, depositing Capote with relatives until she summoned him to New York years later. That early rejection haunted Capote throughout his life. Rebranding himself as a bon vivant was a way to overcome it. As that status faded, what did he have left? “He put himself in the position where he was again kind of orphaned,” says Kashner, the author of the Vanity Fair article. In The Capote Tapes, following a clip from one of Capote’s appearances on The Dick Cavett Show, Cavett says to the camera, “It almost was sort of suicide,” referring to his banishment from the swans’ inner circle.
There is, of course, a generous way to interpret Capote’s actions: He didn’t deceive his pals—he immortalized them in the pages of an influential magazine. Nothing Edith Wharton wouldn’t have done. “I don’t think his initial impulse was that this was going to be a betrayal,” Fahy says. “I think he thought that these were lifelong friends who were going to be happy for him and that he’d disguised their names well enough—no hurt, no foul, right? He was desperate to get this material out there as a way to inspire himself to get back to work. I don’t think he anticipated the depth of the controversy.”
Fahy and others cite Capote’s combustion as a precursor to reality television. (A recent Vanity Fair headline dubbed his former sidekicks “the original influencers.”) Capote’s late-’70s slump was documented on Dick Cavettand The Stanley Siegel Show, where he slurred his words and struggled to replicate the aplomb that had made him popular. Unlike certain celebrities who predated the modern media era or tried to hide their foibles from the public, Capote was willful about retaining his spotlight. Perhaps that is what makes him so contemporary. “Truman enjoyed it all, but I think that deep down he wished that he could have just gone to lunch with Babe Paley,” Warhol associate Bob Colacello told Kashner. During Capote’s final years, he contributed to Interview and Playboy, attempted to get sober so that he could finish Answered Prayers, published a handful of short stories, and reportedly planned a follow-up to the Black and White Ball that never materialized. Until alcoholism got the best of him in 1984, he often seemed one move away from a comeback. What happened in between those events remains, more or less, a mystery. And so we do what any captive audience would: We speculate.
“Especially in our age, he was somebody that cultivated celebrity,” says Infamous producer Christine Vachon. “There was a lot of drama around the way he lived his life, and I think all of that is very beguiling. I just have a tremendous amount of empathy for somebody who was as talented as he was, and as damaged. He was unable, ultimately, to bring his talents and the way that he wanted to live together in a way that was not dangerous for him.”
Matthew Jacobs is an Austin-based entertainment journalist who covers film and television. His work can be found at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, HuffPost, and beyond. Follow him on X @majacobs.
Host: Ben Lindbergh Guests: Matt James and Justin Charity Producer: Eduardo Ocampo Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal Photo Suggestions: Stills from Palworld
Rachel Lindsay and Jodi Walker begin today’s Morally Corrupt by sharing their mixed reactions to the recently released teaser for The Valley, Bravo’s latest Vanderpump Rules spinoff (1:02). Afterward, Rachel and Jodi move on to recap the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Season 4 reunion, Part 2 (10:45), before diving into The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Episode 12, Season 13 (35:58). Then, Rachel is joined by Callie Curry to break down The Real Housewives of Potomac, Episode 9, Season 8 (56:48).
This breakdown of the documentary A Disturbance in the Force was originally published when the movie debuted at the 2023 SXSW Conference. It has been updated for the movie’s digital release.
For a couple of decades after its one-time-only broadcast on Nov. 17, 1978, The Star Wars Holiday Special was a secret handshake among nerds.“Weird Al” Yankovic’s “White & Nerdy” video contains a scene where Al buys a bootleg VHS of the special in an alley next to a dumpster, winking at how much currency this infamous televised fiasco had among fans in the days before YouTube. Now, a quick search on that particular site will pull up multiple full-length uploads of the special — much to the presumed angst of George Lucas, who has publicly expressed his desire to destroy every copy of Star Wars’ first big misstep himself.
Just because The Star Wars Holiday Special is easier to find in 2023 doesn’t make it any less baffling, however. Once a fan discovers its existence and watches it, however they’re able to access it — Lucasfilm has never officially released The Star Wars Holiday Special, and probably never will — a series of questions inevitably follow. “What?!” comes first, followed by “Why?” and “How?” The documentaryA Disturbance in the Force seeks to answer these queries.
The film kicks off with the “WTF?” of it all, in a montage that includes sound bites from pop culture talking heads like Seth Green and Kevin Smith, both of whom have inextricably tied their personas to their love ofStar Wars. These are intercut with legacy clips of Star Wars actors, including Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, refusing to discuss the special, setting it up as a holy grail and appealing mystery: “The Star Wars oddity they don’t want you to see!”
This part of the film isfine. It’s fun and it’s lively, but it doesn’t really add anything to the legend. Then the film brings in people who can answer the questions raised by the special, rather than simply restating them in colorful ways, and A Disturbance in the Force becomes something far richer and more interesting.
Photo: Lucasfilm
The most surprising thing A Disturbance in the Force reveals about The Star Wars Holiday Special is the caliber of talent involved. The crew was the best 1978 television had to offer, and CBS called in its top stars to make appearances on the show. And yet, somewhere, somehow, everything went to hell. Here are a few questions that are actually addressed in A Disturbance in the Force:
Why does The Star Wars Holiday Special exist?
In short, because of a combination of conventional wisdom about movie promotion in the late ’70s and George Lucas’ spite toward 20th Century Fox. At the time, Star Warswas not embedded in our cultural consciousness the way it is now, and studio executives thought the enthusiasm about the movie would be temporary, in spite of its box-office success. An executive told Lucas that in a meeting in the summer of 1977, and Lucas began pushing to get Star Wars characters on TV as much as possible, to prove that exec wrong. (The fact that Star Warstoys were still being rolled out a year after the movie first hit theaters, and that Lucas had a personal financial stake in the sales of those toys, didn’t hurt.)
Why the song and dance numbers, though?
At the time, variety specials were TV staples — more common than rollicking sci-fi adventures told in the style of old-fashioned serials, which meant that Lucas’ new movie model got stuffed in an old box to sell it to the masses. A Disturbance in the Force argues that The Star Wars Holiday Special was not the worst of Star Wars’ late-’70s TV appearances: That honor goes to a 1977 episode of Donny & Marie in which Donny Osmond played Luke, Marie Osmond played Leia (who was, at the time, still Luke’s love interest, not his sister), and Kris Kristofferson played Han. The clips shown in the doc support this thesis.
Why does The Star Wars Holiday Specialfeel so disjointed?
A combination of factors comes into play here. First, the original director, David Acomba, was fired after three days for spending most of the show’s budget within those 72 hours. Steve Binder, a pro who had also directed the Elvis ’68 comeback special, stepped in to finish the job. But Binder had another commitment that prevented him from being involved with the editing of the special, so that job fell to a pair of producers named Ken and Mitzie Welch, who had made plenty of variety shows, but knew nothing about editing, Star Wars, or sci-fi in general.
Who designed all those wild costumes?
Bob Mackie, who was RuPaul’s and Whitney Houston’s favorite fashion designer, and the premiere costumer for film and TV in the late 1970s. Mackie, now 84, has a great sense of humor about the whole thing, and his interviews are a highlight of the film.
Photo: Lucasfilm
Why does Bea Arthur nuzzle up with a rat in the cantina?
Like the rest of the masks used in The Star Wars Holiday Special’s cantina scene — and the original Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars, for that matter — the rat was a leftover from another production that effects artist Rick Baker had worked on in the past. The rat was also featured in the 1976 creature feature The Food of the Gods.
Why do Chewbacca and his family speak in unsubtitled Shyriiwook for nine minutes?
More misguided conventional wisdom: CBS executives thought viewers would change the channel if they saw subtitles.
Why is Jefferson Starship in The Star Wars Holiday Special?
Because they had a song called “Hyperdrive,” and the band had “Starship” in its name. Really.
Was Lucasfilm embarrassed by the special after it aired?
Not really. TV was more ephemeral in the days before VCRs became commonplace, and interviewees in the doc who saw The Star Wars Holiday Special as kids say that they and their peers thought it was awesome — mostly because of its Boba Fett cartoon, which marks Fett’s first official appearance in the universe. Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni were two of those kids, which is why Mando’s rifle on The Mandalorianis modeled after Fett’s on the holiday special.
Is Disney embarrassed by the special now?
The company has started selling Life Day merchandise, and has declared Nov. 17 — the day the special aired on CBS — as an officialStar Wars holiday in its theme parks. So, as always with Disney: It’s fine with any ancillary product, so long as the company can make money off of it.
Why does Chewie’s dad Itchy celebrate Life Day by watching Wookiee porn?
Some mysteries are best left unsolved. All we know is that Cher was supposed to play the Diahann Carroll role, but dropped out at the last minute.
A Disturbance in the Force is now available for digital rental via Amazon, Vudu, and Apple.
They were at the movies seeing Greta Gerwig’s $1.44 billion blockbuster, Barbie, the ode to one of the defining avatars of American girlhood and the highest-grossing film of the year. They were at The Eras Tour, listening to Taylor Swift preach the stories of their inner lives as part of a tour that, while not yet even halfway complete, is the first in history to surpass the $1 billion threshold. They walked down runways and into fast fashion retailers in bows and ballet slippers, in pink and in pleats. Girls with every interest imaginable were trending online—clean girls and snail girls and rat girls. They had tomato girl summers and feral girl falls, they went on hot girl walks and ate their girl dinners. They listened to the new Olivia Rodrigo album, full of songs “for teenage girls in their twenties” or 30s or—gasp!—beyond. Maybe they even rewatched Girls.
Girls weren’t just young women, but anyone who could relate. All around culture, this was the Year of the Girl. Why “girl,” and why now? One explanation is that online, where more and more of life takes place, there is nothing better one can be.
In her book Girl Online: A User Manual, author Joanna Walsh argues that “a girl online is an avatar for everyone.” The on-screen attention economy encourages what is youthful and fun, playful and carefree. If “girl” is a character observed across culture, that character is always indulging her interests and enjoying life—her attitude and her activities are calibrated for attractiveness. It seems awfully fun to be her.
Take girl dinner, the trend started in May by Olivia Maher, who at the time was an assistant to a showrunner in Los Angeles who went viral for posting her thrown-together meal of bread, cheese, grapes and pickles out of the fridge. “This is my dinner,” Maher says in the original video. “I call this ‘girl dinner.’”
It’s satisfying—one joy of girl dinner is having a little bit of everything one might want—but requires very little effort. Maher told me there’s no hard-and-fast rule for what counts as a girl dinner, but an important part of her definition is that it’s “a low-maintenance meal.” The stove usually remains off, though a close cousin of girl dinner might be shortcut food like Annie’s White Cheddar Mac & Cheese—something termed in a viral post as “wet food for girls.”
Whatever is on the plate, girl dinner is typically enjoyed solo. Part of its pleasure is that it’s a meal constructed completely for oneself. Perhaps that’s why girl dinner went unacknowledged for so long, though based on the response to Maher’s original post, it was a common habit. The video now has more than a million views and inspired a trend with more than 30 million followers. On Maher’s TikTok page, comments rolled in from users who’d long enjoyed their “rat girl” dinners or “French peasant” meals but hadn’t considered that others might do, and even delight in doing, the same thing.
“It wasn’t a shameful act, but it was a very solo act where it was like, ‘Oh, I’m not being a functioning member of society tonight,’” Maher told me.
This kind of revelation of a shared experience is possible only when it has previously gone unspoken; another explanation for the Year of the Girl is that traditionally, feminine interests have been underserved in culture, and 2023 represented an overdue course correction. The Los Angeles Timesreported that 60 percent of the audience for Barbie was female and that theaters had a significant number of repeat customers, some who went over and over again just to be in a place where they felt understood.
In an interview with TIME magazine, which named her Person of the Year, Swift supported this market-driven thesis.
“What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, flow of revenue, the economy,” she said. “So actually, if we’re going to look at this in the most cynical way possible, feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It’s extremely heartening.”
The most purely optimistic read of these depictions of girlhood is complicated, though, by the fact that the opposite of “girl” in these contexts isn’t “boy”—it’s “woman.”
The inherent pleasure of girl dinner comes less from what makes up the meal than from what isn’t part of it—cooking or cleaning up, providing in the traditional way women are asked to. Girl dinner isn’t something one makes for kids or a partner. It’s a celebration of a lack of responsibility typically associated with being a grown woman.
M.G. Lord, the author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, a social history of the toy, saw Gerwig’s movie as one about the loss of girlish innocence. “It’s about leaving the idealized world of girlhood when you play with Barbie, where there are no limitations on what you can do,” Lord told me. “And then suddenly you enter adulthood or you hit puberty, and your choices are very circumscribed.”
The wisest characters in Barbie are the girls: both Sasha, a literal girl, and Kate McKinnon’s “Weird Barbie,” the film’s purest expression of how little girls play with dolls—roughly, creatively, and blissfully ignorant, at least at first, about society’s pressures to be perfect and cellulite-free. It’s Weird Barbie who knows what to do when the fabric between Barbieland and the Real World gets ripped, and it’s Sasha who prompts the Barbies not to give up and to devise the plan that takes back Barbie Land from the Kens. Though they succeed in winning it back, Barbie has no solution to the problems it identifies; when the Barbies take back Barbie Land, all they can offer the Kens is as much influence there “as women have in the real world.” The movie is a Pepto-Bismol-pink celebration of girlhood, but when it comes to its treatment of womanhood, the more apt word might be commiseration.
“In the movie, the doll was just a way in to explore what it means to be an adult woman,” Lord said. “All I can say is, if I had been Stereotypical Barbie, I sure as hell would have stayed in Barbie Land.”
Lord told me that Barbie’s relative popularity has often reflected the state of the world around her. In the 1970s, for instance, a strong anti-materialistic strain in culture coincided with a dip in sales. In the 1980s, when Reaganomics promoted competition and commercialism, Barbie was popular again. A day-to-night Barbie in particular took off as more and more women entered the workforce out of necessity during that decade’s recession.
So why does Barbie resonate now?
A recent New York Magazineessay posited that this cultural obsession with girls reflects the fact that mainstream feminism is a bit adrift. “The corporate girlbossery of the 2010s has proven to be vacuous at best,” the author, Isabel Cristo, wrote. Plus, that disappointment was followed up by a series of demoralizing cultural flash points for women: #MeToo, the election and presidency of Donald Trump, and the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade and dismantled abortion protections. No clear unifying coalition or agenda has yet emerged from these events. So we venerate a more carefree stage of life or comfort one another in the shared loss of innocence.
It seems both too cynical and too easy, though, to say that “girl” is popular only because we have nothing—or nothing good, at least—to say about “woman.” There are sheer delights in having women so centered in culture. And though many “girl” trends are, at their core, forms of marketing, it’s still meaningful that those trends, not superheroes or the trappings of Entourage-style bro comedies, are the most valued cultural currency. The last word of the biggest movie of the year was “gynecologist.” That has to count for something.
And femininity did exercise some raw power. Especially when channeled through Swift.
In August, she began dating NFL tight end Travis Kelce, a real-life Ken and a leading man in one of the world’s most masculine enterprises. But stacked next to each other, Swift’s power towered over that of a professional sports league that’s often described as owning a day of the week. Broadcast cameras were trained on her at games; the league’s official social media accounts put “Taylor was here” in their bios. The NFL swooned at the opportunity to be in Swift’s spotlight, not the other way around. When she attended a Sunday Night Football game between the Chiefs and the Jets in October, the broadcast drew one of the largest TV audiences of the season. As she entered the stadium that night, famous friends including Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, and Sabrina Carpenter in tow, it looked like she was saying, “It’s so quiet.” As in, this wasn’t an Eras crowd. Near the end of the game, NBC’s cameras filmed Swift playfully celebrating with Lively in their suite, imitating Kelce’s macho body language with his teammates. It was affectionate and endearing. But, maybe just a little bit, she was also making fun of the absurd machismo of the whole enterprise, of men in spandex outfits playing a violent game she was happy to take in but didn’t need to validate.
The most triumphant telling of girlhood in culture was The Eras Tour. When Lord saw the show in Los Angeles in August, she was struck by how much the concert, and the rapt audience, reminded her of a religious experience.
“I was fascinated because it reminded me—Mary Grace Lord, here—of the Catholic Mass, where there were certain cues that prompted certain behaviors,” she said.
And so The Eras Tour has turned football stadiums into cathedrals of girlhood, where the glittery woman on the pulpit celebrates her life’s work, a catalog wholly dedicated to the story of a girl growing into a woman. But if Swift’s view of girlhood is the most hopeful, it’s because it is rooted in the past and the present. The Eras Tour is inherently retrospective, but it doesn’t wear girlhood as a costume—the set list features songs about young love and high school, but also about business, identity, betrayal, and loss. Instead of burying its head in pink, sparkly sand, it gets its power from its perspective—a 34-year-old revisiting the stages of her life, which are the stages of her fans’ lives.
As with Barbie, there is a bittersweet element to revisiting the land mines of growing up and wishing you’d known better—wishing you’d known you were good enough, that you could speak up or eat what you wanted, or that you’d get over that person who broke your heart. As with Barbie, there is pure joy in doing it together, getting back a little bit of the girlish freedom to feel, deeply and visibly, by identifying the means by which that freedom is often taken away. It’s like Swift herself once wrote: “Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.”
In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, players didn’t just play through another story set in Hyrule. The sequel to Breath of the Wild took the previous game’s sandbox elements several steps further, allowing players to use a new set of powers to construct machines, weapons, and tools using items in the world. By introducing this, Tears of the Kingdom encouraged players to be truly creative and push the limits of building in the game.
Fans responded to this new level of freedom by devising awe-inspiring creations and sharing them online. In the time since Nintendo released the game, fans have made nifty items like skateboards to intricate machines like a mechanized kaiju that looks like Godzilla. Given the game’s emphasis on creativity, Polygon asked Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi about the possibility that fans would ever get a Zelda game that purely focused on building their own creations, like Super Mario Maker. From the sounds of their answers, it seems unlikely Nintendo will release a Zelda game that’s purely about creating levels or dungeons.
“When we’re creating games like Tears of the Kingdom, I think it’s important that we don’t make creativity a requirement. Instead, we put things into the game that encourage people to be creative, and give them the opportunity to be creative, without forcing them to,” Aonuma told Polygon through an interpreter in an in-person interview.
Image: Nintendo/Nintendo EDP
In Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2, players can design their own Mario levels from scratch using an in-game editor. This has allowed players to create custom levels of all sorts in Mario. Players can make ultra-difficult levels that challenge the most seasoned Mario players or zany creations where a Mario level becomes an homage to Splatoon. No matter the approach, a huge aspect of the Super Mario Maker games is thatthey rely on player creativity.
Now, it’s no secret that the developers of Tears of the Kingdom were inspired by fan responses to Breath of the Wild. Developers saw players stretch the creative limits of Breath of the Wild, and they later created a game that doubled down on these sandbox elements. Given this, Zelda fans have long wondered if a version of Zelda that works like Mario Maker — where players could create or design dungeons or worlds — could ever come out. But when asked directly about a Mario Maker-style game for Zelda, Aonuma had an interesting answer about the nature of Zelda games and what they offer to players.
Image: Nintendo
“There are people who want the ability to create from scratch, but that’s not everyone,” Aonuma said. “I think everyone delights in the discovery of finding your own way through a game, and that is something we tried to make sure was included in Tears of the Kingdom; there isn’t one right way to play. If you are a creative person, you have the ability to go down that path. But that’s not what you have to do; you’re also able to proceed to the game in many other different ways. And so I don’t think that it would be a good fit for The Legend of Zelda to necessarily require people to build things from scratch and force them to be creative.”
Given Aonuma’s response, it seems unlikely that Zelda will ever get its Mario Maker equivalent. If we did get more creative elements, it seems they would have to be nestled into a larger game where players could proceed in multiple ways. So those holding out hope for a Zelda builder might be better off finding other games that currently offer similar options — which, luckily for us, already exist.
Saltburn has shaped up as one of 2023’s most divisive love-it-or-hate-it movies. Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to her 2020 writer-director debut, Promising Young Woman, is radically different from that movie in look and tone, but her talent for pushing boundaries and demanding a response is still front and center, and Saltburn is the kind of button-pusher that generally either thrills people or makes them angry. Critics have responded both ways: “Superficially smart and deeply stupid,” Mick LaSalle grumps in the San Francisco Chronicle, while Entertainment Weekly’s Maureen Lee Lenker calls it “a triumph of the cinema of excess, in all its orgiastic, unapologetic glory.”
And one of the most divisive elements is the ending, which can be read equally as sly art or rank titillation, depending on how you feel about full-frontal male nudity. Polygon dug into it in an interview with Fennell shortly before the movie’s release.
[Ed. note: End spoilers for Saltburn follow.]
Image: Prime
In the movie, hungry social climber Oliver (Barry Keoghan) gradually becomes close to his rich, popular Oxford classmate Felix Catton (Priscillaco-star Jacob Elordi), who brings Oliver to his immense family estate, Saltburn, and introduces him to his family. Felix’s elitist, removed parents, Sir James Catton (Richard E. Grant) and Elspeth Catton (Rosamund Pike), make a hollow show of welcoming Oliver. But Felix’s jaded sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), clearly sees him as a new toy, and Felix’s vicious, jealous cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) sees him as a rival and an unwelcome upstart.
As it happens, Farleigh is right — Oliver is lying about virtually everything that brought him together with Felix. He invented a family tragedy to make himself a tragic and dramatic figure. A series of flashbacks shows how Oliver engineered their early relationship by pretending to be penniless when he had plenty of money, and by sabotaging Felix’s bike in order to “help” when it broke down.
The later parts of their relationship are even darker: Felix appears to die in an unclear accident, and Venetia appears to kill herself out of grief. But further flashbacks show that Oliver murdered both of them, out of fear of being ejected from Saltburn, and resentment for the way they’ve both rejected him. It’s also clear that he sets Farleigh up to be disinherited, then poisons Elspeth after James dies, all in order to inherit Saltburn himself.
And in the final scene, Keoghan dances through the estate, stark naked and triumphant, waggling his ass to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor,” and presiding over a sad little row of memorial stones with the family members’ names on them, dredged up from the estate’s waterways to form a kind of ritual audience for his dance.
“The movie always ended with Oliver walking naked through the house,” Fennell tells Polygon. “It’s an act of desecration. It’s also an act of territory, taking on ownership, but it’s solitary.”
Photo: Chiabella James/Prime Video
As viewers watch the scene, Fennell wants them to notice Oliver’s path through the house, which is a reversal of his entry to the house earlier in the film. When Felix introduces Oliver to Saltburn with a small tour, it’s an invitation to a place that doesn’t belong to him. And when he does his dance, he’s following that same path in reverse, this time boldly claiming the space instead of shyly tiptoeing into it.
“The nudity is an act of ownership,” she says. “It wouldn’t be the same if he’s just walking through the house in his pajamas. It’s that he’s walking through his house. It’s his fucking house, and he can do whatever he wants to with it. And that’s what makes it thrilling and beautiful.”
The original script had Oliver symbolically claiming the house by walking through it, but Fennell says something about the scene as she’d planned it didn’t sit well with her. “It just became apparent as we were filming it that the naked walk was not really going to have the feeling of triumph and joy, elation and post-coital success [I wanted]. It felt lonely and sort of empty. It speaks to Barry that when I said to him, ‘I don’t think it can be a walk, I think it needs to be a dance,’ — that’s the thing about Barry as a performer. He profoundly understood and completely agreed, and knew it had to be that way. There really wasn’t another way we could do it, given the film we’d just seen. To me, it feels like the ultimate sympathy for the devil.”
Fennell has already talked about how Saltburn simultaneously has sympathy for everyone in the film, and for no one — there are no outright villains in the story, in her opinion, just people with understandably flawed ways of looking at the world. That perspective helped her sympathize with Oliver at the end, which she hopes the audience will do as well, even though he’s an unrepentant murderer.
“We have to be on his side at the end,” she says. “It’s crucial that the more violent he is, the more cruel, the more he plays them at their own game, the more we love him, even though we loved them, too. We have to feel at the end, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, get it.’ The way Oliver gets it is the way the Cattons would have got it in the first place. How do people build these houses? How do they make these houses? They’re built by violent means and got by violent means. So that’s where it ends as well.”
Still buzzing from last weekend’s UFC 295, Ariel, Chuck, and Petesy have a lot to get into on today’s show. First, the guys discuss this weekend’s final Bellator card and why the energy (or lack thereof) surrounding Bellator 301 is symbolic of the promotion’s entire existence. Then, the guys break down their latest pound-for-pound rankings before taking Discord questions about Alex Pereira’s legendary run, Ian Garry’s beef with Team Renegade, how the Saudis could convince Dana White to make the fight of the century, and more. Plus, a classic game of Buy or Sell.
To enter into our lovely Discord community, click this link.
TOPICS:
Intro (00:00)
The end of Bellator (03:07)
Why Bellator doesn’t invoke the same nostalgia Strikeforce does (08:49)
Saturday’s Paul Craig vs. Brendan Allen card at The Apex (21:02)
Ariel’s conundrum with getting Tom Aspinall into his November pound-for-pound rankings (24:19)
UFC fighters we feel most emotionally connected to (37:38)
How the Saudis could get Dana White to make Jon Jones vs. Francis Ngannou (57:30)
Buy or Sell (01:05:09)
Hosts: Ariel Helwani, Petesy Carroll, and Chuck Mindenhall Producer: Troy Farkas
It’s been two weeks since Alan Wake 2, the sequel to Remedy Entertainment’s 2010 cult action-horror game, was released, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Between the introduction of protagonist and FBI profiler Saga Anderson and the mystery-board storytelling mechanics of the game’s Mind Place system (not to mention a forthcoming new game plus feature and DLC slated for next year), I’m obsessed with Remedy Entertainment’s latest game — much in the same way I was with its last new release, 2019’s Control.
That obsession has only grown after puzzling over how the events of Alan Wake 2 might relate to the upcoming Control 2. I’ve even started a new playthrough of the original Control in my search for clues I might have overlooked. The Remedy Connected Universe has me excited for the possibility of intertextual storytelling in video games at a time where I otherwise feel fatigue over multi-franchise crossovers. Whether it’s the MCU, DCU, or Star Wars, I’m just over how labyrinthine most of these fictional interconnected universes have become. I don’t feel that way about the Remedy Connected Universe, though.
Image: Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing
I think I know why: An interconnected universe on this scale has never really been attempted before in video games. What’s more, Remedy’s games have so far been self-contained enough to be enjoyable as their own experiences. Finally, by virtue of being video games, which are extremely time-intensive and tricky to make, there’s not a new one to play every few months.
Shared-world storytelling, while compelling when done right, is approaching something of a nadir in popular culture. A recent report by Variety about the internal turmoil of Marvel Studios in 2023 paints a picture of a studio that, through a combination of several box-office disappointments and an oversaturation of streaming TV releases, has come to a crossroads in its otherwise unimpeded path of commercial success. There are, as of this writing, 33 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and nine streaming series recognized as canon.
Image: Remedy Entertainment/505 Games via Polygon
That’s a lot of “homework” for anyone who wants to stay up to date with the latest Marvel developments. Remedy Entertainment’s shared universe doesn’t suffer from this same level of fatigue-inducing scale — as of this moment, there are only three games (Alan Wake, Control, and Alan Wake 2) to play in order to be caught up with what’s going on (leaving aside the many subtle connections to and Easter eggs from Max Payne, Max Payne 2, and Quantum Break). And for those that really couldn’t give a toss about the interconnected plot threads between Control’s corner of the Remedy Connected Universe and Alan Wake’s, the two series are still distinct enough that you could easily enjoy one or the other on its own merit.
For instance: Did you know that Freya Anderson, the mother of Alan Wake 2 protagonist Saga Anderson and daughter of Old Gods of Asgard member Tor Anderson, was first name-dropped in a collectible FBC document in the AWE DLC for Control, three years before the release of Alan Wake 2? Or that Sheriff Tim Breaker and Jesse Faden, who are played by Shawn Ashmore and Courtney Hope, are implied to be alternate-reality versions of Jack Joyce and Beth Wilder, the protagonists of 2016’s Quantum Break, who are also played by Ashmore and Hope? Probably not. Could this be important to the future of the story of either Control or Alan Wake? Sure, maybe — but only for those who care. The point is to reward those players who like to dive a little deeper in order to draw out those lesser-known connections. Best of all, these kinds of Easter eggs don’t come at the expense of what’s unique or enjoyable about either Control or Alan Wake.
Image: Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing
Earlier this year, Remedy Entertainment announced its transition to a multi-project studio, with over five games currently in production, including a sequel to Control, a four-player player-versus-environment co-op game set in the world of Control, and a combined remake of Max Payne and Max Payne 2, each roughly scheduled to come out with a year between one another. Even if each of these releases were to be a touchstone in the Remedy Connected Universe going forward, audiences would only need to play one game a year, at most, in order to keep up with the evolving narrative of either Control or Alan Wake.
I totally get the trepidation at the prospect of following yet another shared-universe narrative, especially when there’s no real stated end goal at this early point in the Remedy Connected Universe. Will Saga Anderson cross paths with Jesse Faden at some point in the future? Maybe! Will Quantum Break at some point be retroactively acknowledged as a canon part of this shared fictional universe? Who knows? For now, I’m just along for the ride — and as long as Remedy continues to iterate on its past success, and continues to develop idiosyncratic games with interesting characters and compelling storylines, I’m more than happy to follow the developer down whichever narrative rabbit hole it goes down next.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25378460/Blackthorne2.png)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25378458/Blackthorne3.png)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25378461/Blackthorne4.png)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24510306/476459448.jpg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25166375/Switch_SuperMarioMaker_ND0515_screen_03.jpg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25126516/saltburn_SLTB_2024_UT_220901_JAMCHI_08830_R_rgb.jpg)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19103866/Control_Screenshot_06.png)
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25084292/AWII_Launch_052.jpg)
