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THE STYLE ISSUE SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

13 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

41 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Amy Davidson on the Syrian refugee crisis; papal traffic; Ryan Reynolds; adapting “Tom Sawyer”; James Surowiecki on boomerang C.E.O.s.

Evan Osnos 50 THE IMAM’S CURSE Was a Florida family financing terrorism? john kenney 59 WHY THE LONG FACE? lizzie Widdicombe 60 PERFECT PITCHING From reality star to celebrity entrepreneur. john Lahr 66 WILD AT HEART The paradox of Julianne Moore. Leanne Shapton 71 “RECENTLY FAVORITED” rebecca Mead 76 THE COUTURE CLUB The world’s wealthiest shoppers. Photographs by Luca Locatelli.

FICTION AMos oz 88 “MY CURLS HAVE BLOWN ALL THE WAY TO CHINA”

THE CRITICS A CRITIC AT LARGE PATRICK RADDEN Keefe 94 When Whitey Bulger became an informant for the F.B.I., who was in control?

BOOKS Adam Gopnik 100 “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.” 105 Briefly Noted

Continued on page 6

4 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

ON TELEVISION emily nussbaum 106 The rise of the small-screen rom-com. THE ART WORLD Peter schjeldahl 108 Picasso’s sculptures.

THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 110 “Sicario.”

POEM Frieda Hughes 91 “Selfie”

greg foley COVER “Crosswalk”

DRAWINGS Michael Crawford, Tom Chitty, Roz Chast, Barbara Smaller, Kaamran Hafeez, David Sipress, Farley Katz, P. C. Vey, Michael Maslin, Paul Noth, Drew Dernavich, Will McPhail SPOTS Olimpia Zagnoli

6 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

CONTRIBUTORS rebecca mead (“THE COUTURE CLUB,” P. 76) has been writing for The john lahr (“WILD AT HEART,” P. 66), a former senior theatre critic for New Yorker since 1997. “My Life in Middlemarch” is her latest book. the magazine, won this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the luca Locatelli (PHOTOGRAPHS, PP. 76-86) is a photographer and Flesh,” which comes out in paperback later this month, along with filmmaker based in Milan. He is currently working on two photo- a new book, “Joy Ride: Show People and Their Shows.” graphic projects: “United Colors of War,” about the business of war since 9/11, and “Global Energy,” which documents the different amos oz (FICTION, P. 88) has written more than thirty books, includ- ways to produce energy. ing “Judas,” which won the 2015 Internationale Literaturpreis, given by Haus der Kulturen der Welt for excellence in translated amy davidson (COMMENT, P. 41) contributes regularly to Comment contemporary literature, and which will be published in the U.S. in and writes a column for newyorker.com. the fall of 2016. A film of his 2002 novel, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” has just been released in Israel. evan osnos (“THE IMAM’S CURSE,” P. 50), a staff writer, is the author of “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in Frieda Hughes (POEM, P. 91) is an English poet, painter, and chil- the New China,” for which he won the 2014 National Book Award dren’s-book author. Her new book, “Alternative Values: Poems & for nonfiction. Paintings,” comes out in October. john kenney (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 59) is the author of the novel adam gopnik (BOOKS, P. 100) has published several books, includ- “Truth in Advertising.” ing “Paris to the Moon” and “The Table Comes First.” tad friend (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 44) has been a staff writer emily nussbaum (ON TELEVISION, P. 106), a National Magazine since 1998. His most recent book is “Cheerful Money: Me, My Award winner for columns and commentary, has been the maga- Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor.” zine’s television critic since 2011. lizzie widdicombe (“PERFECT PITCHING,” P. 60), an editor of The anthony lane (THE CURRENT CINEMA, P. 110) is a staff writer and the Talk of the Town, writes frequently for the magazine. author of “Nobody’s Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker.”

Leanne Shapton (SKETCHBOOK, P. 71) is an artist, author, and pub- greg foley (COVER) is an award-winning designer and the creative lisher. Her books include “Swimming Studies,” which won the director of Visionaire. He is the author and illustrator of eight chil- 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and dren’s books, including the “Thank You Bear” series, and his work “Women in Clothes,” written with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits. has been exhibited at MOMA and at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris.

NEWYORKER.COM Everything in the magazine, and more than fifteen original stories a day.

ALSO:

DAILY COMMENT / CULTURAL COMMENT: Opinions and analysis by NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS: Exclusive announcements of the long Alex Ross, James Carroll, and others. lists for young people’s literature, poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.

VIDEO: The latest episode of “The Cartoon Lounge.” Plus, Richard HUMOR: A Daily Cartoon on the news, by Kaamran Hafeez. Brody on Terence Nance’s “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” from 2012. PODCASTS: On the Political Scene, Philip Gourevitch and Mattathias Schwartz join Dorothy Wickenden for a discussion SLIDE SHOWS: Photographs of Picasso sculptures from a new of the Syrian refugee crisis. On Out Loud, Louis Menand and exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Plus, photographs from Thessaly La Force talk with Amelia Lester and David Haglund Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda show, held in Portofino. about Joan Didion.

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8 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

THE MAIL

SAVING THE PLANET be greatly ameliorated if we were able to reduce population, and this notion should Elizabeth Kolbert, in her article on Chris- be discussed. The earth provides finite tiana Figueres and the urgency for ac- resources and we cannot grow in num- tion at the Paris Convention on Climate ber indefinitely. Change, mentions the need for “negative Joseph Friedman emissions” (“The Weight of the World,” 1Ashland, Ore. August 24th). Kolbert writes that CO2 levels are already so grave that the world SAVING THE ART

has to start “sucking CO2 out of the air and storing it underground—something As someone who has written extensively no one, at this point, knows how to do.” about the artist Jack Smith, I was pleased As the co-founder and chair of the Car- to learn from Emma Allen’s article that bon Underground, I would point out that Barbara Gladstone, the gallerist who there is a natural system for this: photo- purchased his archive in 2008, donated synthesis. Plants already process tens of his papers to the Fales Library, at N.Y.U.

billions of tons of CO2 every year in the (The Talk of the Town, August 31st). natural cycling of carbon. We must figure Smith was no longer living in a Greene out how to optimize this process; many Street loft when he died (of AIDS- scientists agree that the natural carbon related causes), in 1989. His last apart- sink of the soil could be an indispensable ment was a squalid sixth-floor walkup tool for reversing climate change. France on First Avenue. Smith, who was intes- recently announced a project to increase tate, sold virtually nothing; much of his soil organic matter (carbon) by 0.4 per work survives because he gave it to cent a year, which the country’s agricul- friends. At the time of his death, his ar- tural minister said would “stock the equiv- chive was found crammed into a room alent of the anthropogenic carbon gas covered with what he would have called produced by humanity today.” Rattan Lal, “roach crust” and perfumed with cat a professor at the Ohio State University urine. That Smith’s art survives at all is who has advised the French agricultural largely thanks to his friend the artist ministry, has long written about the ca- Penny Arcade. She held on to his apart-

pacity of the planet to take CO2 out of ment as best she could; she packed his the atmosphere and store it in the soil. pieces and preserved his legacy. I joined As we seek methods to “decarbonize” our her in approaching institutions and fossil- fuel economy, we should not min- foundations, hoping that some of them imize the power of forests, farms, and would take Smith’s work. Only two were fields to “recarbonize” the soil and help interested: Anthology Film Archives, reverse climate change. which provided facilities to restore one Tom Newmark of Smith’s movies, and P.S.1, where ma- San Isidro de Peñas Blancas, Costa Rica terial was stored in advance of the 1997 exhibition that reopened the museum. I found it telling that Kolbert’s piece Smith’s work remained in legal limbo omitted one key variable that seems to for nearly two decades. Around 2000, always be off the table in conversations his papers were organized by a profes- about anthropogenic climate change: sional archivist with a donation to Fales global population. The article takes it as in mind. a given that the population will increase J. Hoberman by two billion people in the near term, New York City which would mean that the economy would also have to grow, while at the • same time carbon emissions would have Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to be reduced. It is unlikely that both of to [email protected]. Letters may be those essential needs will be met in tan- edited for length and clarity, and may be pub- lished in any medium. We regret that owing to dem, as Kolbert’s article makes clear. The the volume of correspondence we cannot reply world’s most difficult problems would to every letter or return letters.

10 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

SEPTEMBER WEDNESDAY • THURSDAY • FRIDAY • SATURDAY • SUNDAY • MONDAY • TUESDAY 2015 16TH 17TH 18TH 19TH 20TH 21ST 22ND

The dauntless German sculptor Isa Genzken is back in New York, poised to knock our socks THE THEATRE | NIGHT LIFE off again, after a star turn at MOMA, in 2013. That forty-year retrospective earned rave reviews and art | classical music introduced a wide audience to Genzken’s mercurial eye for materials (X-rays, suitcases, spray paint). DANCE movies Her new show, at the Zwirner gallery, which opens on Sept. 16, includes the latest in her ongoing | series of “Schauspieler (Actors),” mannequins in sizes ranging from grade school to grownup, ABOVE & BEYOND styled with a jaunty eccentricity that jolts sculptural realism into the twenty-first century. FOOD & DRINK

photograph by Eric Helgas THETHEATRE

accompanying him to unnamed dark places from which he may or may not bring them back. He’s also blessed with one of the screen’s more attractive voices, which is deep and slow, like Robert Mitchum’s. It feels slightly weird when his sonorous tone turns to a laugh; for the most part, Owen’s best characters wouldn’t put themselves out to chuckle. On the exciting and complex Steven Soderbergh- helmed series “The Knick,” Owen is believable and magnetic as a surgeon who seems to be addicted to everything but love. This September marks Owen’s Broadway début, in Harold Pinter’s 1971 drama, “Old Times” (beginning previews on Sept. 17, at the American Airlines Theatre). The play is about social talk as a kind of poison—the cordials that couples and old Kelly Reilly, Clive Owen, and Eve Best star in Harold Pinter’s “Old Times.” friends offer one another in the hope that they’ll get drunk on a shared memory, Social studies or social vision. Remember when we had fun? Of course, Clive Owen makes his Broadway début. no memory can be truly shared—the past, to say i first became aware of Clive Owen in 1998, when he starred in Mike Hodges’s film nothing of the present, makes “Croupier.” The thin actor, who bore a certain resemblance to a young Lucian Freud, played a writer each of us different. Owen who could not get on with his work; one area in which he could exercise some control, though, was knows that, and makes us feel in the gambling hall, where he had a job as a card dealer. Whenever his hand grazed the table to deal it, too. You can see his isolation cards or to gather up someone else’s losings, Owen looked as if he were handling a piece of exquisite when he stares us down from art—something he was mesmerized by—but then quickly ashamed, too, as if he didn’t measure the distance of his character’s up to the moment. His intense gaze made everything seem erotic, or maybe on the verge of being internal reality. You can hear it defeated. Striding past all those losers who didn’t know when to stop, Owen’s character could not when he doesn’t say what his stop, either—he was compelled by some unidentifiable force to live in a kind of spiritual purgatory, characters won’t say, for fear not unlike a character in a Robert Bresson film. that the words won’t matter Owen, who is now fifty, grew up in Coventry, in a family of men—he has four brothers—and at all. is brilliant at playing characters who say nothing while others, generally women, get excited about —Hilton Als

14 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY TOMER HANUKA

Openings and Previews A Midsummer Night’s Dream bits, as several of the adaptations are Barbecue A five-person cast plays all the roles merely workmanlike. At least one, Kent Gash directs a new play by in Shakespeare’s fantasia, in a staging Marcus Gardley’s “Desire Quenched Robert O’Hara (“Bootycandy”), in first seen at the Hudson Valley Shake- by Touch,” is simply silly, though, Also Notable which a group of siblings gather in a speare Festival, directed by Bedlam to be fair, so is its Southern Gothic The Absolute Brightness of park to confront their sister about her Theatre’s Eric Tucker. In previews. source material. The choicest plays Leonard Pelkey drug abuse. Previews begin Sept. 22. Opens Sept. 20. (Pearl, 555 W. 42nd are those that the authors make their Westside (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.) St. 212-563-9261.) own, such as John Guare’s “You Lied Aladdin to Me About Centralia,” a response to New Amsterdam The Christians Nufonia Must Fall “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” the story Amazing Grace In Lucas Hnath’s play, directed by Les For the Next Wave Festival, the that Williams transformed into “The Nederlander Waters, the pastor at a megachurch Montreal-based d.j., graphic artist, Glass Menagerie.” Guare takes up its plans to give a sermon that will unsettle and musician Kid Koala created this minor characters, treating them with An American in Paris Palace his congregation. In previews. Opens multimedia piece, directed by K. K. his gentle absurdism. And Rebecca Sept. 17. (Playwrights Horizons, 416 Barrett, in which a robot falls in love Gilman effectively updates “The Field Beautiful—The Carole King Musical W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.) with an office worker. Sept. 17-20. of Blue Children,” a bittersweet college Stephen Sondheim (BAM’s Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton romance between a sorority girl and Clever Little Lies St., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100.) a poetry geek. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th The Book of Mormon Eugene O’Neill Marlo Thomas stars in Joe DiPietro’s St. 212-279-4200.) comedy, directed by David Saint, as Sommerfugl The Curious Incident of the Dog in the a woman trying to figure out what Bixby Elliot’s play was inspired by the Empire Travel Agency Night-Time went wrong during a tennis match life of Lili Elbe, who, in the nineteen- In this free, immersive show from Ethel Barrymore between her husband and her son. thirties, became the first known the Woodshed Collective, a series of Drop Dead Perfect Previews begin Sept. 18. (Westside, recipient of gender-reassignment unreliable narrators (from an over- Theatre at St. Clement’s 407 W. 43rd St. 212-239-6200.) surgery. Stephen Brackett directs. all cast of twenty-five) shepherds an Finding Neverland Previews begin Sept. 19. (4th Street audience of four up, down, under, Lunt-Fontanne Cloud Nine Theatre, at 83 E. 4th St. 866-811-4111.) and across the streets and buildings James Macdonald directs Caryl Chur- of lower Manhattan on a preposterous The Flick Spring Awakening Barrow Street Theatre chill’s political drama from 1979, set in and ever-shifting quest. The experience colonial Africa during the Victorian Deaf West Theatre revives the 2006 is like finding yourself a participant in Fun Home era and in contemporary London. In indie-rock musical, by Duncan Sheik a live production of a Harry Mathews Circle in the Square previews. (Atlantic Theatre Company, and Steven Sater, based on the Frank novel with the structure of Richard Genet Porno 336 W. 20th St. 866-811-4111.) Wedekind drama of teen-age sexual Linklater’s “Waking Life.” Do some HERE discovery. Directed by Michael Arden segments work better than others? Sure. A Gentleman’s Guide to Fondly, Collette Richland and performed in sign language and Is it possible to follow the plot? God, Love and Murder Elevator Repair Service stages a play spoken English. In previews. (Brooks no. (It seems to center on competing Walter Kerr by Sibyl Kempson, about a couple who Atkinson, 256 W. 47th St. 877-250-2929.) American-Canadian interests in an Hamilton travel to a mysterious hotel through a ancient drug called Ambros.) But, as Richard Rodgers tiny door in their living room. In pre- Ugly Lies the Bone long as you don’t mind a high degree Hamlet in Bed views. (New York Theatre Workshop, Mamie Gummer stars in Lindsey of interaction, two car rides driven by Rattlestick 79 E. 4th St. 212-460-5475.) Ferrentino’s drama, directed by Pa- actors in character, and several flights Hand to God tricia McGregor, about a burn victim of stairs, the joyful impracticality, Booth Fool for Love returning home from a military tour open-air unpredictability, and sheer The King and I In Sam Shepard’s play, directed by in Afghanistan. In previews. (Round- generosity of the whole crazy thing Vivian Beaumont Daniel Aukin for Manhattan Theatre about Underground, 111 W. 46th St. are irresistible. (For more information, Kinky Boots Club, Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell 212-719-1300.) visit empiretravelagency.com.) Hirschfeld play brawling ex-lovers at a motel 3 Love & Money in the Mojave Desert. In previews. Judy Pershing Square Signature (Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th Now Playing This smart, disturbing comedy, the Center St. 212-239-6200.) Desire professional première of Max Posner, Matilda the Musical Tom Wingfield does not appear in is set in 2040, just far enough in the Shubert Fulfillment this Acting Company production. future to be intriguingly weird but The New Morality Ethan McSweeny directs Thomas Neither does Maggie the Cat. But close enough to the present to be Mint Bradshaw’s play, about a black New you can hear Tennessee Williams’s distressingly familiar. Three siblings York lawyer who suspects that he’s been dramatis personae echoing through this (in expert performances by Danny Old Times American Airlines Theatre passed over for partnership because evening of one-acts based on his short Wolohan, Birgit Huppuch, and of his race. In previews. Opens Sept. stories, directed by Michael Wilson. Deirdre O’Connell) exhibit varying Sleep No More 21. (Flea, 41 White St. 212-352-3101.) Sometimes these echoes are the best degrees of sorrow, anger, and insanity, McKittrick Hotel Something Rotten! How to Live on Earth of note Isolde St. James Colt Coeur presents a play by MJ The 39 Steps Kaufman, inspired by the Mars One In Richard Maxwell’s riveting drama, staged last year at Abrons Union Square Theatre project, about applicants for a one- Arts Center and remounted by Theatre for a New Audience, a Whorl Inside a Loop way mission to outer space. Adrienne famous actress, Isolde (Tory Vazquez), is losing her memory, so, Second Stage. Through Campbell-Holt directs. In previews. to cheer her up, her husband (Jim Fletcher), who’s a contractor, Sept. 20. Opens Sept. 17. (HERE, 145 Sixth gives her carte blanche to build her dream house. She hires a Ave., near Spring St. 212-352-3101.) vain and self-involved “artist-architect” (Gary Wilmes) to design Iphigenia in Aulis it, but once they start having sex he’s unable to put his vision As part of Classic Stage Company’s for her house on paper. Under Maxwell’s inspired direction, Greek Festival, Rachel Chavkin the actors are almost entirely affectless—looking out into the directs Anne Washburn’s adaptation audience and saying their lines stiffly, as if they were reading of the Euripides tragedy, in which them—as they enact a drama that is full of deep emotion. Agamemnon must decide whether Maxwell’s writing is beautiful, and sometimes very funny, and to sacrifice his daughter to Artemis. In previews. Opens Sept. 17. (Classic the acting style seems wonderfully true: as a species, we may Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. well be that disembodied. (Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 866-811-4111.) Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 866-811-4111.)

16 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 reaching out both from their computer paths. But it’s an undigested insight. drag sequences sparkle, and McGrath, Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. stations and in visits to one another’s The action abounds in clunky metaphors delivering his lines in a withering croak, 212-279-4200.) apartments. Posner’s revelations about disguised as madcap plot diversions: gives a performance of forbearance this brave new world, touching on restaurants with blank menus (free and droll humor. (Lucille Lortel, 121 Our Last Game the linguistic, the sociological, and will); a lost-and-found baby (blind Christopher St. 212-352-3101.) Ed Schmidt is a playwright who the theological, waver between the chance); a cockney burglar with a gun presses the home-court advantage. explicit and the mysterious, and each (mortality). To conclude, a convenient Mercury Fur He set “The Last Supper” in his scene, as directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, deluge arrives, leaving the play, quite Philip Ridley’s controversial play own Windsor Terrace kitchen, “My gives us something funny and scary to literally, adrift. (Cherry Lane, 38 caused a theatrical brouhaha when Last Play” in his living room. In ponder. One encouraging thing about Commerce St. 866-811-4111.) it débuted, in England, in 2005. In “Our Last Game,” he again returns the future here: the music is a very the New Group’s unrewarding revival, to familiar territory: the high-school cool brand of retro-pop. (New Ohio, The Legend of Georgia McBride it’s difficult to see just what the fuss locker room. (Schmidt coaches the 154 Christopher St. 866-811-4111.) Casey (the fresh-faced Dave Thomas was about. The script crams a house boys’ basketball team at Trinity.) Only Brown) works as an Elvis impersonator of horrors into the living room of fifteen audience members can attend Laugh It Up, Stare It Down at a Florida dive bar, leaving his preg- a ruined apartment somewhere each performance, crowding onto narrow Relentlessly gabby, this brittle farce nant wife (Afton Williamson, off-key downtown, after a series of violent benches and gulping bottled water as with philosophical pretensions fol- in an underwritten role) to fret over upheavals have ravaged New York. Schmidt’s nameless coach struts and lows the meandering married life of the bills. Enter a pair of drag queens A troupe of orphaned teens bands frets and occasionally throws a chair. Joe (Jayce Bartok) and Cleo (Katya calling themselves Tracy Mills (Matt together to throw parties at which The spectators become characters, too. Campbell), a pair of glib white people McGrath) and Anorexia Nervosa paying clients can enact their most Schmidt casts them as young athletes, with large vocabularies and first-world (Keith Nobbs), who push Casey off the debauched and decadent fantasies. typically underperforming, whom the problems, from a sidewalk meet-sweet lineup. Their act is a cash cow (why drag During tonight’s soirée, a polo-shirted coach scolds, prods, and peps. The to middle-aged ennui (alleviated by is so much more popular than Elvis banker plans to torture and kill a jargon is semi- incomprehensible, international tourism). Despite much in Panama City is never explained), child for libidinal thrills. This would though the arc of the speeches is bloviating about ecstatic experience and then a backstage accident forces be deeply upsetting if it were more familiar. But Schmidt effectively and a slew of odd mishaps, their Casey to don a wig and lip-synch to involving. But, under Scott Elliott’s involves the audience in the coach’s trajectory remains fiercely, archaically Edith Piaf. Matthew Lopez’s comedy, direction, few in the cast have a drama. “Do you feel guilty?” a man conventional. Joe gets effortlessly directed by Mike Donahue for MCC, knack for Ridley’s ghastly, fantastic asked his wife during intermission rich; Cleo tags along. That might be has all the contrivances of a high-con- language—a figurative whirligig at a recent show. “We should have the playwright Alan Hruska’s point: cept Hollywood screenplay—“Magic of crocodiles, kittens, and napalm. tried harder,” she said. (Nord Anglia contrary urges notwithstanding, we’re Mike” meets “The Birdcage”—and the Fewer still can deliver it with any International School, 44 E. 2nd St. often content to tread predetermined domestic scenes are leaden. But the credible feeling. (Pershing Square ourlastgame.com.)

NIGHT LIFE

Rock and Pop Other Music, on Sept. 20: 15 E. 4th Barclays Center, 620 Atlantic Ave., that includes the former Sonic Youth Musicians and night-club proprietors St. coldbeatsf.tumblr.com.) Brooklyn. barclayscenter.com.) drummer Steve Shelley; My Bloody lead complicated lives; it’s advisable Valentine’s bassist, Deb Googe; and to check in advance to confirm Madonna Martin Rev the guitarist James Sedwards. Moore’s engagements. Of the triumvirate of transcendent In the mid-seventies, the keyboardist group delivers long, laid-back songs superstars who ruled the pop charts Rev teamed up with the vocalist Alan that manage to be both cool and irony Cold Beat in the nineteen-eighties (along with Vega to form Suicide, stripping away free. Intricate, unusual guitar textures The bassist and vocalist Hannah Prince and Michael Jackson), Ma- what little ornamentation early punk introduce many of the tunes, which Lew is a holdover from a time when donna was the most difficult to pin had by composing spare, synthesizer- also include occasional folk-tinged artists could live cheaply in San down. Calculated in her provocations, heavy slabs of radical music. If guitar picking and Moore’s relaxed, Francisco. She cut her teeth there, shrewd about making an asset of punk’s aim was to be controversial, heartfelt singing. (Monty Hall, 43 as a third of the all-female art-punk her limitations, it was unclear how this stuff did the trick, as evidenced Montgomery St., Jersey City, N.J. trio Grass Widow, and when that exactly she’d change in coming de- by “23 Minutes Over Brussels,” a montyhall.ticketfly.com. Sept. 17.) band quietly dissipated, in 2013, cades. Thirty years later, she’s been 1978 live recording, on which the she began releasing material with through a series of evolutions, some duo’s performance is overwhelmed Superhuman Happiness this quartet, bringing her indie-pop (like the spiritual techno goddess of by the audience’s jeers, which turn Few musicians have a cooler rock-and- and post-punk sensibilities into “Ray of Light”) more successful than violent as a riot ensues. It was the roll résumé than Stuart Bogie, the darker, icier territory. Two weeks others (the trend-jumper of “Hard punk-rock equivalent of Dylan going creative mastermind behind this band. ago, the group put out its second Candy”). Madonna’s most recent electric. Rev comes to Saint Vitus, He’s played saxophone with many of long player on Lew’s homegrown album, “Rebel Heart,” showcases all of in Greenpoint, for a solo show. the modern greats, including Arcade label, Crime on the Moon Records, her best traits—her intelligence, her (1120 Manhattan Ave., Brooklyn. Fire, Iron & Wine, TV on the Radio, and it’s in town for a weekend of defiance, and her tireless dedication saintvitusbar.com. Sept. 20.) and David Byrne. The songs on the performances at cozy Brooklyn to the venerable Madonna industry. group’s new album, “Escape Velocity,” venues. (Sept. 18: Union Pool, 484 Opening for her at her New York The Thurston Moore Band are pop perfection, with uplifting Union Ave. Sept. 19: Live @ Shea shows is another groundbreaking The former Sonic Youth guitarist, male and female vocal harmonies Stadium BK, 20 Meadow St. Sept. female provocateur, the comedian and an American alternative-rock icon and extended disco beats laced with 20: Silent Barn, 603 Bushwick Ave. actress Amy Schumer. (Sept. 16-17: now based in London, is touring electronic nuances. The band’s live For a quick Manhattan show, catch Madison Square Garden, Seventh Ave. behind a persuasive, optimistic new performances are energetic, and with the 7 P.M. in-store performance at at 33rd St. 800-745-3000. Sept. 19: album, “The Best Day,” with a band each show Bogie and his crew come

18 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

The bassist Hannah Lew’s band Cold Beat brings indie pop and post-punk into darker, icier territory; the quartet plays venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn. closer to the sonic power of the lu- the Aussie bassist and keyboard player Jazz and Standards from 1957, and “Porgy and Bess,” minaries whom he has backed up for Mikey Goldsworthy over shared Uri Caine and Mark Helias from 1958. Terell Stafford, a gifted so long. People’s Champs provides musical interests. The act’s front The joy in hearing veteran players horn player, will take on Davis’s an opening set in the same wheel- man, Olly Alexander, an established like the pianist Caine and the bassist role. (Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th house, with fun seventies-inflected actor who has appeared in a number Helias lies in not knowing what St. 212-576-2232.) Afrobeat-inspired songs. (Knitting of films and TV shows, joined the musical direction they will take, Factory, 361 Metropolitan Ave., pair after Goldsworthy overheard since their extraordinary capabilities Eddie Henderson Brooklyn. 347-529-6696. Sept. 19.) him singing in the shower and was allow them to tackle anything from This adroit and elegant trumpeter presumably impressed. Alexander’s the historical to the avant-garde. first came to prominence with Herbie Um voice soars on each track of the out- (Mezzrow, 163 W. 10th St. mezzrow. Hancock’s avant-fusion band, Mwan- This new offshoot of the New York fit’s highly danceable début album, com. Sept. 16-17.) dishi, and has since embraced the psychedelic-punk band Alice Donut “Communion,” which combines pleasures of the post-bop mainstream. headlines a strong bill at Saint Vitus. crisp beats and chilly synths with Bill Charlap Trio At Smoke, Henderson is joined by Um’s best songs are defined by the tender melodies and vulnerable The premier mainstream piano the still edgy septuagenarian saxo- vocal intensity of the group’s singer, lyrics. (Terminal 5, 610 W. 56th St. trio of its day hasn’t released a phonist Gary Bartz, with whom he Joey Truman, and by a rhythmic 212-582-6600. Sept. 16.) new recording in some time, but has been crossing paths since the fervor that recalls early Fugazi. The the suave interplay between the seventies. The pianist Kevin Hays, legendary musician-engineer Martin Youth Lagoon group’s leader and his longtime the bassist Doug Weiss, and the Bisi will be playing tunes from his Trevor Powers, who records and partners—Kenny Washington, on drummer Billy Drummond fill out latest release, the captivatingly dark performs under this name, enraptured drums, and Peter Washington the quintet’s rhythm section. (2751 and weird “Ex Nihilo,” which he critics with his 2011 début, “The (no relation), on bass—is always a Broadway, between 105th and 106th rounds out with noise-driven impro- Year of Hibernation,” a collection pleasure to hear. A connoisseur of Sts. 212-864-6662. Sept. 18-20.) visational interludes. Another seminal of home-recorded dream-pop that is American song, Charlap finds unique New York musician-engineer, the intensely intimate and euphorically beauty in the works of such masters “The Royal Bopsters Project” drummer Wharton Tiers, brings his sad. The Boise, Idaho, native climbed as Gershwin, Sondheim, Bernstein, The new vocal quartet of Amy large ensemble of four guitars, bass, even higher two years later, with his and Carmichael. (Village Vanguard, London, Darmon Meader, Dylan and drums, along with a penchant follow-up, “Wondrous Bughouse,” a 178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. 212- Pramuk, and Holli Ross celebrates for ecstatic instrumental indie-rock work that built on his minimalist 255-4037. Sept. 15-20.) the release of its first album, “The that evokes his former clients Glenn sound, adding abstract effects and Royal Bopsters Project,” honoring the Branca and Sonic Youth. Also on the bombastic orchestrations. Later this The Gil Evans Project art of vocalese, the classic form that bill will be the raucous No Wave- month, the singer-songwriter releases Ryan Truesdell has been obsessed grafts lyrics to bop-based improvisa- tinged outfit Escape by Ostrich. his third LP, “Savage Hills Ballroom,” with the work of the legendary ar- tions. Five original masters—Sheila (1120 Manhattan Ave., Brooklyn. for which he’s issued a promising ranger Evans for the better part of Jordan, Annie Ross, Bob Dorough, saintvitusbar.com. Sept. 16.) single, “The Knower,” a horn-filled his career. On Sept. 17, his ambitious Andy Bey, and Jon Hendricks (who track that puts his falsetto on bold Gil Evans Project orchestra sets celebrates his ninety-fourth birthday Years & Years display, and has a groovier vibe than its sights on two of the recordings on Sept. 16)—join the ensemble This electro-pop trio formed in 2010, anything he’s put out to date. (Rough that joined Evans’s imaginative throughout the week, at Birdland. after the London-based synth player Trade NYC, 64 N. 9th St., Brooklyn. charts with Miles Davis’s expressive (315 W. 44th St. 212-581-3080. Emre Turkmen bonded online with roughtradenyc.com. Sept. 21.) trumpet playing: “Miles Ahead,” Sept. 15-19.)

20 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY SAM D’ORAZIO

ART

example, from 2011, is the sculptor Rachel Harrison’s hilarious morphing assemblage, “Rump Steak with Onions.”) As the deputy editor Sam Frank wrote during the founders’ heated e-mail exchange on the decision, “For people who don’t bother to Google it, it’s a lovely name that conjures up a number of associations. For those who do, it will make them uncomfortable. It lends itself to overthinking. That’s good.” A dense jungle remains a fine emblem for the sprawl of the magazine’s non-hierarchical, disruptive spirit. With projects from more than seven hundred contributors (including such downtown heavy hitters as the choreographer Yvonne Rainer and the writer Lynne Tillman), Triple threat a visit to Triple Canopy can feel A magazine for the twenty-first century thrives online and in print. like stumbling into Borges’s “indefinite, perhaps infinite” library of Babel. To slow down in recent years, a bumper crop of smart small magazines have taken seed in New York, the Internet, Triple Canopy both online and off. There’sPaper Monument (the art-specific sibling of n+1), the deliciously has periodically reverted to feminist The New Inquiry, the one-issue-old Even, and the post-Internet rabbit hole Dis. But if I print, and has published three could spend hours alone with just one it would be the genre-defying Triple Canopy. I’m not alone anthologies with the title in my ardor: in July, New York University’s Fales Library acquired the magazine’s archive, which it “Invalid Formats,” a nod to the will use as a case study of sorts to develop standards for the preservation of digital media. With its constant threat of obsolescence extensive collection of downtown ephemera, Fales protects the collective memory of New York’s that haunts any online experimentalist past—by partnering with Triple Canopy, it remembers the future. endeavor. Triple Canopy was founded in 2007, when a loose coalition of young intellectuals—writers, Next month, the magazine editors, artists, academics—scattered from Wisconsin to Bosnia-Herzegovina to Mozambique, releases a new book, received an e-mail from Alexander Provan, now the co-editor, soliciting their help in hatching a “Speculations (‘The Future new model of magazine. He signed off, “If you feel you have received this message in error, please Is ____’),” which documents reconsider your feelings.” A month later, some thirty people were crammed into Provan’s living a fifty-day series of talks room, in Brooklyn, and a few ground rules were set. The magazine would publish online but resist organized at MOMA PS1 on the medium’s pitfalls (glibness, brevity, trolls). Its quixotic goal: to slow down the Internet. When the an absurdly wide range of first issue rolled out, in 2008, its contents included a short story in the form of a transcript, by Sheila topics. The cover is also the Heti, and a project in which the artist James Sham swept a pile of debris from poor neighborhoods index: from “Art & Literature in Richmond, Virginia, to the gated confines of a country club. (What Are They For?)” to What’s with the name Triple Canopy? It refers to dense foliage in a rain forest, and it’s also a “Guaranteed Basic Income” to private security company, founded by ex-Green Berets. That scrap of found poetry sums up an “Zombies.” agenda that entwines art, politics, and belle lettres, with a soft spot for the oblique. (A noteworthy —Andrea K. Scott

22 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY NIV BAVARSKY

Museums and Libraries standing contrapposto in asymmet- Galleries—Uptown Metropolitan Museum rical pants, with a garland looping Dave Heath “In and Out of the Studio: from shoulders to ankles. Pilgrims The octogenarian photographer is Photographic Portraits from the western Himalayas collected a veteran of the Korean War who Museums Short List from West Africa” art in the region, and later Tibetan joined the American counterculture Metropolitan Museum Images from Ghana, Senegal, Gabon, paintings on view owe an obvious in his thirties, and is still working “Kongo: Power and and other countries, almost eighty in debt to the Kashmiri tradition. today. This welcome show draws Majesty.” Opens Sept. 18. all, span a hundred years of little-seen Perhaps the most impressive of fresh attention to Heath’s output Museum of Modern Art work in the museum’s collection, these, which dates from the fifteenth in the fifties and sixties, including “Picasso Sculpture.” many of them taken by photographers century, depicts the blue-skinned images from his 1965 book of Through Feb. 7. whose identities remain unknown. protector Mahakala with three eyes, black-and-white photographs, “A Guggenheim Museum Early-twentieth- century portraits four arms, and eyebrows on fire. Dialogue with Solitude,” which “Doris Salcedo.” Through created for postcards—exotica for Kashmir had long since embraced is dedicated to W. Eugene Smith Oct. 12. the tourist trade—look all the more Islam, but its Buddhist traditions and peppered with texts by W. B. Whitney Museum artificial next to a contemporaneous were still flowering elsewhere. Yeats, Herman Hesse, and James “America Is Hard to See.” group of amateur snapshots of Af- Through Oct. 19. Baldwin. His pictures of young Through Sept. 27. ricans at home, lounging on a bed people in Washington Square Park, Brooklyn Museum or perched on a sofa. Formal and Studio Museum in Harlem lovers on the subway, and children “The Rise of Sneaker informal approaches run together “Everything, Everyday” at play in back alleys recall Walker Culture.” Through Oct. 4. in later work from African-run Lauren Halsey of Los Angeles Evans and anticipate Diane Arbus. galleries Short List portrait studios, where even the steals this showcase of art created But Heath’s eye is darker, more Chelsea most elaborately dressed sitters by the museum’s artist-in-residence conflicted, and more soulful than Matthew Brannon appear comfortable and confident program, a training ground, in either of theirs. Through Oct. Kaplan 121 W. 27th St. 212-645-7335. in front of the camera, like the two recent years, for breakout talents 24. (Greenberg, 41 E. 57th St. Through Oct. 24. women sprawled, heads touching, like Sanford Biggers, Kevin Beas- 212-334-0010.) Keltie Ferris on the floor, in Mama Casset’s ley, and Ndijeka Akunyili Crosby. Charles Swedlund Mitchell-Innes & Nash charming photograph from the Halsey’s wild, immersive walk-in 534 W. 26th St. 212-744-7400. fifties. Malick Sidibe and Seydou installation, spanning three rooms, The Chicago-born photographer, Through Oct. 17. Keita, both from Mali, are the most mashes up Afrofuturism and My who turned eighty this year, made Maureen Gallace famous of this modern group, and Little Pony. The walls are covered his mark in the sixties and seventies, 303 Gallery Sidibe’s work looks especially sharp in mirrored tarpaulins and linoleum with back-to-the-garden nudes and 507 W. 24th St. 212-255-1121. here, with portraits from the sixties blocks scarred with graffiti; black trippy double exposures that found Opens Sept. 17. and seventies that are at once mar- blobs à la Lynda Benglis confront a common ground between the Isa Genzken vellously descriptive and as casual Nefertiti busts and statuettes of avant-garde and the countercultural. Zwirner as snapshots taken by a friend at a gospel singers. There are subtler Between 1970 and 1975, he also created 519 W. 19th St. 212-517-8677. party. Through Jan. 3. charms to the work of Eric Mack, toys, games, and the other playful Opens Sept. 16. whose abstract draped cloths and photographic ephemera gathered Mark Grotjahn Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian grommet-studded quilt jackets turn here, nearly all of which are sly Kern Design Museum painting unmonumental, and to delivery systems for his images 532 W. 20th St. 212-367-9663. “How Posters Work” Sadie Barnette’s moody photographic of long-haired Eves wandering in Through Oct. 31. More than a hundred posters are prints of racehorses and Hello Kitty. the woods. Swedlund pasted his Dana Schutz organized by categories that esteem Through Oct. 25. pictures on wooden coins available Petzel thinking like a designer rather than in gumball machines. He made 456 W. 18th St. 212-680-9467. thinking about design. “Overwhelm New York Botanical Garden flip-books (one of his pregnant wife), Through Oct. 24. the Eye,” to name one directive, pairs “Frida Kahlo: buttons, stickers, and a zoetrope, but Josh Smith psychedelic concert posters from the Art, Garden, Life” the best way to see his work is on Luhring Augustine Woodstock era with a recent promo- In this luxuriant installation in the stereo cards. A stereoscopic viewer 531 W. 24th St. 212-206-9100. tion for an African film festival, all institution’s grand old Conservatory, allows visitors to appreciate his mul- Through Oct. 31. topography lines and digital effluvia. a long walkway is flanked by jaca- tilayered images in hallucinogenic Sarah Sze Under the category “Simplify,” fan- randa, oleander, philodendron, roses, 3-D. Through Oct. 3. (Higher Bonakdar tastic movie posters from the golden sunflowers, fuchsia, marigolds, palms, Pictures, 980 Madison Ave., at 76th 521 W. 21st St. 212-414-4144. age of Polish graphic design (the ferns, fruit trees, and many varieties St. 212-249-6100.) Through Oct. 17. nineteen-fifties and sixties) hang of cacti and succulents associated Downtown Sue de Beer alongside an ersatz-sixties poster with the Mexican artist and La Casa “Light and Space of the Void” Boesky East for the television show “The Wire.” Azul, her stunning home in Mexico While the kabalistic inclinations of 20 Clinton St. 212-680-9889. There are numerous landmarks of City. Other plants are depicted in a this group show can wear thin, it Through Oct. 25. graphic design here—Gustav Klutsis’s small exhibition of Kahlo’s paintings, does contain a few appealing works Jackie Saccoccio astounding Constructivist postcards drawings, and prints, which combines of art perched between presence Eleven Rivington of Soviet athletes, Fritz Siebel’s Allied scholarly integrity, aesthetic flair, and nothingness. A Kenneth No- 195 Chrystie St. 212-982-1930. propaganda, Daniel Buren’s striped and a calculated occasion, as if any land painting of pale concentric Through Oct. 18. exhibition posters, M/M Paris’s foray should be needed, for a visit to the circles finds an unlikely analogue Emily Mae Smith into a digital baroque—but they two hundred and fifty acres of Eden in a recent cloth work by Daniel Gitlen accompany a surfeit of procedural in the Bronx. This is the first Kahlo Buren, which features the French 122 Norfolk St. 212-274-0761. dross. Through Jan. 24. show in New York in more than a artist’s signature stripes printed on Through Oct. 25. decade—too long, for an artist whose a halo-emitting fibre-optic fabric. Rubin Museum of Art prestige and influence, worldwide, There are also evocations of two “Collecting Paradise: have ballooned in that time. Today, of Berlin’s most important Jewish Buddhist Art of Kashmir she inhabits international culture at sites: Peter Eisenman’s abstract, and Its Legacies” variable points on a sliding scale topographic Holocaust memorial is Today, the name Kashmir immedi- between sainthood and a brand. as mute in a wood-and-cardboard ately brings to mind a long-running The cyclone of Kahlo’s life and model as it is by Brandenburg Gate, territorial conflict, but for centuries legend, not to speak of present-day but Daniel Libeskind’s shadowy, it was a trading hub whose artists Fridamania, gives way to dead still- haunted charcoal sketches for the were famed for their naturalistic ness when you stand face to face city’s Jewish Museum have the representations of the Buddha and with her best paintings, including kind of fraught beauty that Orson his disciples, as evidenced here by “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace Welles brought to Kafka. Through ivories, paintings, and a breathtaking and Hummingbird” (1940), the Sept. 24. (Gering, 14 E. 63rd St. sculpture of Bodhisattva Manjushri, masterpiece here. Through Nov. 1. 646-336-7183.)

24 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

Orchestras and Choruses purview in a choral concert cele- New York Philharmonic: brating the arrival of Pope Francis “The Art of the Score” in New York. Honoring the spirit Since its inception, in 2013, “Film of tolerance that emerged from the Week at the Philharmonic,” a season- Second Vatican Council, Steven Fox prelude series that combines showings conducts a modern work by a major of renowned films with performances Jewish composer, Aaron Copland (“In of live soundtracks by the orchestra, the Beginning”), as well as two short cLASSical MUSIC has provided both delight (such as pieces by the Jewish-Italian Baroque a revelatory screening of “2001: A master Salamone Rossi, in a concert Space Odyssey”) and disappointment that concludes with a work beloved (a rather cheesy tribute to postwar by Francis, Mozart’s “Grand Mass” Opera cardo Muti; and Željko Lučić, the Italian cinema, last year). The third in C Minor. The soloists include the Metropolitan Opera Met’s go-to singer for Verdi’s most season promises excellence, offering soprano Lauren Snouffer and the The Met raises the curtain on its taxing baritone roles. (Metropolitan presentations of two hardboiled baritone Philip Cutlip. (Church of new season doing what it does Opera House. 212-362-6000. Sept. Hollywood classics, each of them St. Jean Baptiste, Lexington Ave. best: a grand staging of one of 21 at 6:30.) an Oscar winner for Best Picture: at 76th St. clarionsociety.org. Sept. the most demanding lyric dramas “On the Waterfront,” with David 17 at 7:30.) ever written. The opening scene Utopia Opera Newman conducting the Philhar- of Verdi’s “Otello”—in which the The company, which selects its op- monic in Leonard Bernstein’s first- Moving Sounds Festival: orchestra and chorus fire on all eras in part through public voting rate Americana score (a one-night Argento Ensemble cylinders, the production team on Facebook, opens its season with presentation, hosted by Robert The adventurous chamber orchestra, simulates a storm, and the tenor Benjamin Britten’s first chamber Osborne, of Turner Classic Movies under the baton of Michel Galante, makes his star entrance with thir- opera, “The Rape of Lucretia.” fame), and “The Godfather,” with offers the final performance (at teen voice-shredding measures—is With its concise, graphic story and Nino Rota’s overwhelmingly melodic the Bohemian National Hall) of enough to scare off many otherwise expressive economy—the score calls soundtrack, redolent of verismo the Austrian Cultural Forum’s enterprising companies. The Met has for only thirteen instruments—the opera, led by Justin Freer, in his annual festival, with a stirring and assembled a team of proven Verdians opera allows a group with modest Philharmonic début. (Avery Fisher provocative concert of fearlessly for Bartlett Sher’s new staging: the resources to deliver a startling Hall. 212-875-5656. Sept 18 at 7:30, modernist works by Tristan Murail conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, emotional punch. Utopia’s artistic Sept. 19 at 8, and Sept. 21 at 7:30.) and Giacinto Scelsi (his gloriously who has demonstrated a knack for director, William Remmers, conducts; maddening violin concerto “Anahit”) the composer’s large-scale scores; Gary Slavin directs. (Ida K. Lang Clarion Music Society and the American première of an the tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko, Recital Hall, Hunter College. Park The Society, New York’s long-standing electronic work by the Columbia who was all but anointed the next Ave. at 68th St. utopiaopera.org. period-instrument orchestra, goes professor Georg Friedrich Haas, great Otello by the eminent Ric- Sept. 18-19 at 7:30.) beyond its historical-performance “Introduktion und Transsonation.” (321 E. 73rd St. For a complete 116th St. millertheatre.com. Sept. of Jean Sibelius, offering an early Out of Town schedule of events, see acfny.org. 17 at 8.) Piano Trio in C Major (“Lovisa”), Music Mountain Sept. 18 at 7.) before moving on to classic trios by Boston’s Borromeo String Quartet 3 Brooklyn Art Song Society Mozart (in C Major, K. 548) and brings its richly layered sound and The upstart organization, now in its Schubert (the magnificent Trio in thoughtful interpretations to northwest Recitals sixth season, is earning its place as a B-Flat Major, Op. 99). The violinist Connecticut’s chamber-music shrine Miller Theatre: group uncompromisingly dedicated Mark Peskanov, the soprano Jane this Sunday. The program is powerful: “Run Time Error” to continuing the traditions of Leibel, and the pianist Maureen major quartets by Shostakovich (No. 12 It is difficult to imagine a more classical art song, both old and new. Volk headline the Sunday-afternoon in D-Flat Major) and Beethoven (in innovative and up-for-anything pair- This season takes “Britannica” as its program, devoted exclusively to the B-Flat Major, Op. 130, including the ing of venue and ensemble than the theme; the first concert, at Brook- German masters: sonatas for violin “Grosse Fuge”), with a little Bach prominent uptown new-music hub lyn’s Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian and keyboard by Handel and Beetho- (an arrangement of the Fugue in and the unflappable JACK Quartet. Church, offers a selection of lute ven (in D Major, Op. 12, No. 1, and C-Sharp Minor from Book I of “The So it comes as little surprise that songs by John Dowland, as well as in G Major, Op. 30, No. 3), along Well-Tempered Clavier”) beforehand. these combined forces occasion a group of solos and duets by his with a clutch of songs by Schubert (Falls Village, Conn. 860-824-7126. immersive, cutting-edge work that glorious successor, the Baroque master (including “Ständchen,” “Gretchen Sept. 20 at 3.) sets the bar high—in this instance, Henry Purcell (in arrangements by am Spinnrade,” and “Die Forelle”). with an especially self-reflective another lyrical genius, Benjamin (Fulton Ferry Landing, Brooklyn. South Mountain Concerts and theatrical season opener. It’s Britten). The performers include bargemusic.org. Sept. 18-19 at 8; As autumn looms, this ninety-seven- the world première of the Danish the mezzo-soprano Kate Maroney, Sept. 20 at 4.) year-old Berkshires series invites a composer Simon Steen-Andersen’s the baritone Jesse Blumberg, the small group of blue-chip ensembles unconventional piece, fashioned to lutenist Charles Weaver, and the Christopher Houlihan to entertain its devoted audience. the specifics of Miller Theatre; the pianist Michael Brofman (the Houlihan, a brilliant former student The mini-season continues with work combines pre-recorded and series’ director). (85 S. Oxford St. of Paul Jacobs, at Juilliard, returns a distinguished impromptu piano live electronics (as well as video brooklynartsongsociety.org. Sept. to Brooklyn (at a grand space, the trio: the pianist Wu Han and the projections), produced and helmed 18 at 7:30.) Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph) to cellist David Finckel (the directors by the composer, which turn all perform a solo recital that includes of the Chamber Music Society of parts of the space (including the Bargemusic not only repertory favorites—Bach’s Lincoln Center) and the violinist plumbing) into instruments, and The floating chamber-music series Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, Philip Setzer (of the Emerson String require JACK’s string players to hugs the shore of tradition this BWV 542, and works by Saint-Saëns Quartet). Beethoven dominates the use specially fashioned bows and weekend. The opening pair of con- and Vierne—but also a new piece by program: the Trios in E-Flat Major, guitar-style whammy bars. It’s a certs, offered by the violinist Andy the young composer Patrick Greene, Op. 1, No. 1; in D Major, Op. 70, fluid combination of concert work, Simionescu, the cellist Paul Wiancko, “Steel Symphony.” (856 Pacific St., No. 1 (“Ghost”); and in E-Flat installation, and performance art. and the pianist Olga Vinokur, honor Prospect Heights. Sept. 20 at 3. No Major, Op. 70, No. 2. (Pittsfield, (Columbia University, Broadway at the sesquicentennial of the birth tickets required.) Mass. 413-442-2106. Sept. 20 at 3.)

DANCE

whether either of them thinks it’s right or good, but at least the ball is rolling. Later in the film, Amy Young, the female lead, describes how Taylor, in the middle of rehearsal, changed something important. Originally, she was supposed to come upon the two men dancing together and, realizing that she had been betrayed, bury her face in her hands. But then Taylor told her to forget the face in the hands and instead just do a sort of strange, unemphatic head roll. This anecdote is a wonderful peek into Taylor-land, how he will often create what seems to be a readable emotional situation and then make it less readable—more ambiguous, and thereby more eloquent. At the end of the film, as the dance is about to be premièred, we see Taylor talking glumly cold comfort with his longtime set and A rare glimpse into Paul Taylor’s process. costume designer Santo Loquasto. Taylor is not pleased with his piece. “I’ve missed there are very few commercial documentaries about choreographers creating their something,” he says. “I don’t work, and it’s not hard to see why. Choreographers are among the very few artists who have to know what it is.” You can produce an artifact while its materials—the dancers, in their case—are standing there looking judge for yourself—the film at them. That’s bad enough, without having us looking at them, too. But such a choreographer- ends with a near-complete in-action film, “Paul Taylor: Creative Domain,” directed by Kate Geis, is playing a limited performance of the dance—but engagement at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe theatre, through if Taylor is right that’s actually Sept. 17. In it, we see Taylor, in 2010, putting together his “Three Dubious Memories,” a better for us. It’s easier to see “Rashomon”-like piece in which the parties in a love triangle remember, in different ways, what the true lineaments of an artist’s happened. Your heart goes out to Taylor as, eighty years old and making his hundred-and-thirty- style when the piece isn’t too third dance, he rather dubiously assembles the opening phrase. “Kneel,” he tells James Samson, dazzling. In any case, Taylor’s the leader of the ensemble. Then he says, “‘The Thinker,’ ” and Samson, copying Rodin’s famous candor, his willingness to voice statue, brings a fist to his forehead. Taylor: “O.K., now bring this foot around. Flat, way flat.” his misgivings, is one of his Samson seems to struggle. “None of this is comfortable,” Taylor comments unsympathetically. lineaments. As he said, none of Then, “Yeah, lift the elbows, rise up, open the palms.” Before, Samson was starting to look a little this is comfortable: the dance, like a monster. Now everything changes. With his arms raised and his palms open, he turns into the job, the life. a nice herald of this new dance. “That’s right,” Taylor says. “Good,” Samson says. Who knows —Joan Acocella

28 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY ANGIE WANG

New York City Ballet oeuvre; the planting and harvesting (New York Live Arts, 219 W. 19th St. “Works & Process” / The fall season features new bal- of rice, in particular, often serves as 212-924-0077. Sept. 16-20. Through “Balanchine’s Harlequinade” lets by two familiar names: Justin a metaphor for life and regeneration. Sept. 26.) Doug Fullington, a dance scholar Peck, the company’s dynamic new Here, before a backdrop of lush and ballet reconstructor based at dance-maker-in-residence, and Troy videos of verdant rice paddies, the Joanna Kotze Pacific Northwest Ballet, will lead this Schumacher, a choreographer with ensemble’s beautiful dancers move For her terrific new dance, “FIND exploration of commedia dell’arte in a quieter, more poetic bent. There in lithe, fluid patterns, accompanied YOURSELF HERE,” Kotze has not ballet, with a focus on Balanchine’s are also two newcomers, Myles by traditional folk songs, chants, just collaborated with three visual charming “Harlequinade,” from Thatcher, from San Francisco and even “Casta Diva.” (BAM’s artists (Jonathan Allen, Zachary 1965. Dancers from New York City Ballet, and Robert Binet, from Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Fabri, and Asuka Goto); she has made Ballet and P.N.B. will demonstrate the National Ballet of Canada. On Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. 718-636- them cast members. They turn out passages from that work, and from Oct. 8, the company reveals yet 4100. Sept. 16-19.) to be as intriguing as the stork-like the ballet that inspired it, Petipa’s another première, with music by choreographer herself, well suited to 1900 “Les Millions d’Arlequin,” in Debussy, by the Danish-born Kim Miguel Gutierrez her themes of order and eccentricity which Balanchine performed as a Brandstrup, a veteran choreographer Now forty-four, Gutierrez has been in the making of art. They arrange young student in St. Petersburg. with a penchant for heightened thinking about the stresses of middle colored tiles as in a game of Tetris, (Guggenheim Museum, Fifth Ave. theatricality. Lovers of Balanchine age. The first two parts of “Age or scatter them like air-hockey pucks. at 89th St. 212-423-3575. Sept. 20-21.) will be heartened by the return of & Beauty,” his three-part suite of The dancing is mock-heroic: at once “Liebeslieder Walzer,” an exploration performance works, have addressed absurd and seriously good. It’s a pity Queer New York International of formalized intimacy, shaped by these concerns, first by pairing that the fun doesn’t last quite as Arts Festival the songs of Johannes Brahms. Peter Gutierrez with a male dancer nearly long as the piece. (Baryshnikov Arts The Croatian choreographer Bruno Martins’s rather cool rendition of half his age, then by re-creating Center, 450 W. 37th St. 866-811-4111. Isakovic returns, still preoccupied “Swan Lake,” from 1999, opens the conversations with his manager. Sept. 17-19.) with nakedness. His solo “Denuded,” season. • Sept. 22 at 7:30: “Swan What’s mundane and navel-gazing in seen here in 2013 and 2014, is a nearly Lake.” (David H. Koch, Lincoln the subject has remained so, though “Traditional Dance from stationary study in breath, corporeal Center. 212-721-6500. Through it has also been transfigured into Okinawa” tension, and the relationship between Oct. 18.) affecting song and dance. Now, as Before the Okinawa archipelago a nude performer and his spectators. part of the French Institute Alliance became incorporated into Japan, its His new work, “Disclosures” (Sept. Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Française’s “Crossing the Line” people developed their own distinctive 22-26), increases the number of un- Taiwan festival, repeats of the first two forms of dance. This presentation clothed people to seven and asks them The prominent Taiwanese mod- parts join the première of the third, draws from both the rarefied court to reveal themselves also in words. ern-dance company opens BAM’s “DANCER or You can make whatever tradition and more raucous folk “Shades of a Queen” (Sept. 21), by “Next Wave” series with “Rice,” an the fuck you want but you’ll only dance. Seven musicians provide the South African soloist Mmakgosi evening-length work by its artistic tour solos.” It’s a group piece, with accompaniment with chanting, drum, Kgabi, is a tale of coming out and of director, Lin Hwai-min. The cycles of a cast that includes the sixty-four- flute, and the Okinawan snakeskin the construction of identity in public time and the meditative rhythms of year-old Ishmael Houston-Jones and banjo. (Japan Society, 333 E. 47th St. spaces. (Abrons Arts Center, 466 nature are common themes in Lin’s Gutierrez’s eight-year-old godchild. 212-715-1258. Sept. 18-19.) Grand St. 212-352-3101. Sept. 21-22.

story, but the film’s real charge lies milks the melodrama for intimate elsewhere—in Preminger’s view of a emotion, conjuring the bad old days jolting, disoriented age of rock and with varnished surfaces that give roll. The mental chaos of the time unspeakable suffering a halcyon glow. MOVIES is reflected in the behavior of the The drama of Feng’s failing memory local solipsistic eccentrics (including involves a bitter twist of corruption a randy raconteur, played by Noël and hypocrisy, but the Party’s ultimate Coward), the nightmarish images, benevolence remains unquestioned. the backdrop of student protest Zhang’s rueful sentiment bears a whiff Now Playing accounts, but fieriness is part of its and political crisis, and the frenzied of the official. In Mandarin.—R.B. The Black Panthers: Vanguard appeal, stoked by the songs on the soundtrack, which features the music (In limited release.) of the Revolution soundtrack and sustained by a belief of the Zombies.—Richard Brody This documentary, directed by Stanley that the grievances aired at the time (Film Forum; Sept. 20.) Grandma Nelson, will be a useful primer for remain unresolved.—Anthony Lane Lily Tomlin shines as the cantanker- anyone unschooled in the story of (Reviewed in our issue of 9/7/15.) Coming Home ous, combative, brutally frank poet the Black Panthers, although their (In limited release.) The director Zhang Yimou’s calcula- Elle Reid, now fallen into literary look, their impact, and their raison tedly poignant drama depicts a Chinese silence after the death of her partner d’être remain lodged with surprising Bunny Lake Is Missing family torn apart in the Anti-Rightist of thirty- eight years. Elle breaks up tenacity in the public mind. We Upon contact with an electric guitar, Campaign of the late fifties, driven with a new, much younger girlfriend hear of the birth of the movement Otto Preminger, born in 1906, got deeper into despair by the Cultural named Olivia (Judy Greer), but her in Oakland, California, and of the a shock, which he conveys in this Revolution, and uneasily reassembled uncreative solitude is disturbed by the speed with which its militant message jangled psychological thriller from in the late-seventies thaw. Lu (Chen arrival of her teen-age granddaughter, spread to the North, in contrast with 1965, set in swinging London. A Daoming), a former professor sent to Sage (Julia Garner), who is pregnant the more equable, church-grounded young American woman, Ann Lake a labor camp for “rightism,” escapes and has an appointment for an abortion toil for civil rights in the Southern (Carol Lynley), has just arrived with from custody and makes his way that very day, but no money to pay states. We are presented with the her journalist brother, Steven (Keir back to the family home that he for it. Neither does Elle, who, as a leading players, including Huey P. Dullea), and her four-year-old daugh- shared with his wife, Feng (Gong result, packs Sage into her old car Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge ter, Bunny. On her first day at her Li), a teacher; and their daughter, and goes on a local odyssey through Cleaver, and with the disputes that new school, young Bunny vanishes, Dandan (Zhang Huiweng), whom he her circle of acquaintances, past and would, later on, so bitterly divide although nobody—neither teachers hasn’t seen since she was three. But present, in quest of the funds. The them. (At the F.B.I., as the film nor students nor, for that matter, Dandan, a ballet dancer imbued with tightly constructed small-scale comic shows, J. Edgar Hoover, who viewed viewers—have seen her. The dapper, Communist Party doctrine, rejects him, drama, written and directed by Paul the Panthers as a menace to society, ironic Superintendent Newhouse leading to his recapture. When he’s Weitz, puts Elle face to face with a noted this dissent with satisfaction and (Laurence Olivier) takes over the ultimately freed, he returns to Feng lifetime of bittersweet memories, let them tear each other apart.) The investigation. His imputations re- but finds her afflicted with dementia. involving the transgender tattoo movie is hardly the most objective of garding Ann’s sanity take over the Zhang’s smoothly efficient direction artist Deathy (Laverne Cox) and Karl

30 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

(Sam Elliott), the man whom Elle left when she (Sean Harris) and dedicated to global disarray. came out as a lesbian. But Weitz leaches the tough But Ethan’s own team, too, is forced to go rogue, situations of emotional difficulty; the sentimental disowned by the C.I.A. The movie subsides toward drama is a superhero movie for liberals. Elle’s faux the end, but not before delivering its payload of crustiness gleams with her heart of gold, and the thrills. With Alec Baldwin.—A.L. (8/10 & 17/15) movie’s heroes and villains line up as obviously (In wide release.) as in a blockbuster.—R.B. (In limited release.) Mistress America The Iron Horse The new Noah Baumbach movie is about Tracy John Ford’s mammoth, rambunctious frontier (Lola Kirke), a freshman at Barnard, and her romance, from 1924, sets the building of the fragile friendship with Brooke (Greta Gerwig), transcontinental railway around the murder of a twelve years her senior. They are linked though visionary surveyor by a white man posing as an not yet related, since Tracy’s mother is betrothed Indian. The victim’s son (George O’Brien) gets to Brooke’s father. Brooke does a heap of things, to avenge his father’s death, win his sweetheart none of which endure; she runs an exercise class, (Madge Bellamy), and save the railroad simultane- she plans to open a restaurant, and her eagerness ously. The picture is absurd—and enjoyable. Ford both captivates and vexes the younger woman, who came up with so many spectacular or spirited bits seems wiser and more guarded, and who doesn’t of business, including appearances by the likes scruple to write a story based on the figure of of Wild Bill Hickock (Jack Padjan) and Buffalo Brooke, much to the latter’s distress. Baumbach, Bill Cody (George Waggner), that he created as a student of screwball, knows how the lunges the celluloid equivalent of a Wild West show. of action, in pursuit of love or money, can veer Many hallmarks of Ford’s later career appear toward a kind of madness, yet he also displays great here in vaudevillian form: the belief in Manifest coolness and care throughout the second half of Destiny, the love of the Irish (at the expense of the film, as he stages an elaborate set piece inside shirking Italian co-workers), the idealization of a fancy house in Connecticut—introducing one Abraham Lincoln, and the balance of fear and fresh character after another, without cluttering respect for the Indians (the baddest bad guy is the frame or letting the energy drop. That is why that white fellow in redface). Silent.—Michael some of the sharpest contributions come from Sragow (MOMA; Sept. 16.) supporting players: Michael Chernus, as Brooke’s former beau, now chunky and rich; Matthew Shear, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as a classmate of Tracy’s; and Jasmine Cephas Another old television show is put through the Jones, as his seething girlfriend.—A.L. (8/24/15) remake mill. The unlucky candidate, this time, is (In limited release.) the light and frolicsome spy drama that ran from 1964 to 1968 and starred Robert Vaughn and David Nashville McCallum. (It was clearly an elixir, too, since both The funniest epic vision of America ever to reach men are still hard at work.) Their respective roles, the screen. Robert Altman’s 1975 movie is at once of Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, now pass to a “Grand Hotel”-style narrative, with twenty-four Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer, neither of whom linked characters; a country-and-Western musical; looks a fraction as comfortable as his predecessor. a documentary essay on Nashville and American Indeed, the whole production, directed by Guy life; and a meditation on the love affair between Ritchie, feels tense and unrelaxed, desperately performers and audiences. In the opening sequences, stacking up the period details—for we are still when Altman’s people start arriving, piling up in in the lap of the nineteen-sixties—while falling a traffic jam on the way from the airport to the far short of the suavity that is required. The plot city, the movie suggests the circus procession at ferries our heroes from a shadowy chase in Berlin the non-ending of Fellini’s “8½.” But Altman’s (the best thing in the film) to the gloss of Roman clowns are far more autonomous; they move and high society, thus turning Cold War enemies intermingle freely, and the whole movie is their into uneasy chums. Caught between them is a procession. The basic script is by Joan Tewkes- young German named Gaby—played by Alicia bury, but the actors were encouraged to work up Vikander, who is laden with dresses and gewgaws material for their roles, and not only do they do yet denuded of any chance to shine. With Hugh their own singing but most of them wrote their Grant, who dons a pair of shades not to fend off own songs—and wrote them in character. The the sun but as if hoping to sidle through the whole songs distill the singers’ lives, as the pantomimes thing incognito.—A.L. (8/24/15) (In wide release.) and theatrical performances did for the actors in “Children of Paradise.” With Ronee Blakley, as a Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation true folk artist and the one tragic character.—Pauline A franchise that was starting to sag has recovered Kael (Anthology Film Archives; Sept. 19.) its buoyancy and zip, thanks to the writer and director Christopher McQuarrie. As a plotter, Pawn Sacrifice he is finicky to a fault, and this tale is a tangle A flawed yet entertaining docudrama about an of uncertain loyalties; as a filmmaker, he adheres irresistible subject: the 1972 world-championship firmly to the primacy of the set piece and the chess match between Bobby Fischer (played preternatural stamina of his star. Notable sights by Tobey Maguire) and Boris Spassky (Liev include Tom Cruise clinging to the outside of Schreiber). The movie starts with a dramatic mo- an airplane, Tom Cruise holding his breath for ment at the tournament site in Reykjavik—Fischer’s an underwater theft, and Tom Cruise, devoid non-appearance for the second game. The ensuing of both fear and helmet, gunning his motorbike flashbacks show Fischer’s childhood in Brooklyn, around hairpin bends. His character, Ethan Hunt, where he was raised by a single mother (Robin is pursuing Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), deter- Weigert) who was an active Communist and aroused mined to find out if she is with him or against McCarthyite snooping, and his subsequent rise him. Ferguson, amused and unbreakable, is more through a chess establishment that treated him than a match for Cruise, and a fine addition to the with indifference and even hostility. Obsessed with ranks; she outpaces Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and wresting the championship from Soviet players, Jeremy Renner, all of whom return as Ethan’s pals. Fischer fears K.G.B. plots; ultimately, psychotic The roguery of the title refers to the Syndicate, delusions take hold of his personality, but not a near-mythical outfit headed by Solomon Lane before he wins the championship. The lawyer

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 33

Opening About Ray A drama about a teen-ager transitioning from female to male. Directed by Gaby Dellal; starring Elle Fanning. Opening Sept. 18. (In limited release.) Black Mass A bio-pic about the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, starring Johnny Depp. Directed by Scott Cooper; co-starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Dakota Johnson, and Joel Edgerton. Opening Sept. 18. (In wide release.) Captive A thriller, based on a true story, starring Kate Mara as a drug addict who is held hostage by a criminal (David Oyelowo) whom she tries to convert by way of an inspirational book. Directed by Jerry Jameson. Opening Sept. 18. (In wide release.) Everest A drama, based on a true story about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, in which a group of mountain climbers attempted to survive a blizzard and avalanches. Directed by Baltasar Kormákur; starring Jason Carol Lynley stars in Otto Preminger’s “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” a Gothic thriller from 1965, set in swinging England. Clarke, Josh Brolin, and John Hawkes. Opening Sept. 18. (In limited release.) Paul Marshall (Michael Stuhlbarg) extends to his characters as well. Bergman, not least in its remorseless The New Girlfriend works behind the scenes to get covert His pristine academicism merely closeups, but even Perry’s admirers In this comic drama, a government aid for Fischer; the illustrates the story. Dialogue takes may find the result too brittle and widower (Romain Duris) chess-master-turned-priest William the place of visual conception and neurasthenic for its own good. The takes on the identity of Lombardy (Peter Sarsgaard) helps symbolic resonance; the lack of mischievous comedy that brightened his late wife. Directed by Fischer prepare for the match while directorial style renders the story his previous work, “Listen Up Philip,” François Ozon. In French. abhorring his caprices and admiring all the less plausible. Nonetheless, is dangerously absent.—A.L. (9/7/15) Opening Sept. 16. (In his artistry with a connoisseur’s eye. the plot tautly builds suspense, and (In limited release.) limited release.) The drama, directed by Edward Zwick the ending is a legitimate corker. In Pawn Sacrifice and written by Steven Knight, takes German.—R.B. (In limited release.) The Second Mother Reviewed in Now Playing. liberties with the story and shears off In this carefully observed but sche- Opening Sept. 16. (In wide some fascinating details; despite the Queen of Earth matic drama, the housekeeper in a release.) rigid yet slapdash filmmaking, the Alex Ross Perry wrote and directed prosperous São Paulo household, Val Prophet’s Prey movie conveys the outsized fascination this claustrophobic tale of two (Regina Casé), is the stereotypical Amy Berg directed this and mystery of a tormented genius women. Elisabeth Moss, who weeps rock of the family. She provides documentary, about the Fundamentalist Church at work.—R.B. (In wide release.) in the opening shot and laughs in the warmth and stability amid the of Latter-Day Saints and final frame, dominates the action as neurotic egotism of her employers, its former leader, Warren Phoenix Catherine—either a soul in torment Bárbara (Karine Teles), a TV per- Jeffs, who was convicted The German director Christian or a spoiled rich girl, depending on sonality, and her husband, Carlos of sexual assault. Opening Petzold’s drama, a historical twist on your point of view. She has recently (Lourenço Mutarelli), a former artist Sept. 18. (In limited release.) Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” stars Nina lost her father, who was an artist in who spends most of his time in bed. Sicario Hoss as Nelly Lenz, a Jewish survivor New York. She has also been dumped They’re both too distracted to pay Reviewed this week in The of Auschwitz, who suffers gunshot by her boyfriend, James (Kentucker much attention to their spoiled teen- Current Cinema. Opening wounds to the face in the last days Audley), and has come to lick her age son, Fabinho (Michel Joelsas), Sept. 18. (In limited release.) of the war. After facial-reconstruction wounds at a lakeside retreat in the who is virtually raised by Val. But surgery, she returns home to Berlin company of Virginia (Katherine when Jessica (Camila Mardína), Val’s and finds her husband, Johannes Waterston), who is described as her ambitious, audacious, and intellec- (Johnny) Lenz (Ronald Zehrfeld), a best friend, although that’s hard to tual daughter, arrives from a rural pianist, working at a night club in the believe. They bicker, freeze each province to take a college entrance American sector. She doesn’t identify other out, and fight for mastery; exam, Val’s employers welcome her herself, and he doesn’t recognize her; never do they feel at ease, and the as a guest. Jessica quickly overturns rather, he thinks that she resembles rest of the movie takes its cue from the well-to-do family’s routines and Nelly to the extent that, with a little their distress. A party assumes the pierces its façade of contentment. effort, she could impersonate his late air of a witch hunt, with Catherine The writer and director, Anna movie OF THE WEEK wife and claim her inheritance (since, left crawling from the room; a boat Muylaert, lets Casé ham it up as A video discussion of Terence as he knows, her entire family was ride finds her clinging to the thwart Val, who bustles about the house in Nance’s “An Oversimplification killed by the Nazis). Petzold achieves in a life jacket while Virginia and a a tumult of emotionalism without of Her Beauty,” from 2012, in our a narrow but evocative realism on a neighbor (Patrick Fugit) paddle cheer- any hidden impulses or desires to

digital edition and online. slender budget, but the narrowness fully along. The film owes plenty to fuel it; the characters’ pigeonholed SCREEN COLLECTION/GETTY SILVER ABOVE:

36 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 social roles display Muylaert’s intentions from Gibney’s concluding monologue is a sermon-like call the start and render the drama superfluous. In for us all to look at ourselves and wonder why we Portuguese.—R.B. (In limited release.) so admire Jobs’s inventions. The worldly filmmaker comes off as a scold.—R.B. (In limited release.) 7 Chinese Brothers The quiet, dour whimsy of the director Bob By- Straight Outta Compton ington’s world meshes almost too perfectly with This bio-pic, about the rise, breakup, and legacy of the fanciful performance of Jason Schwartzman, the Los Angeles hip-hop group N.W.A., reveals the who shines in this comedy about money and love. machinations that brought the ensemble together Schwartzman plays Larry, who’s stuck in a round of in the nineteen-eighties, and soon drove it apart. low-paying jobs that he contemptuously endures. The movie also highlights, with justified outrage, Fired from one, he gets another, at an automotive the abuses inflicted by the police against black shop that’s graced with a boss, Lupe (Eleanore Pi- people—and, in particular, on N.W.A.’s mem- enta), whom he not so secretly loves, and burdened bers—that gave rise to the famous song “Fuck tha with a bullying colleague, Jimmy (Jimmy Gonzales). Police.” The director, F. Gary Gray, emphasizes the Larry spends most of his free time at home with hit’s importance by filming a performance of it in his stolid pug, Arrow (Schwartzman’s own dog), Detroit as a bravura showpiece. The cast—headed and a little of it at a nursing home, visiting his by Corey Hawkins, as the musical mastermind Dr. grandmother (Olympia Dukakis), who dispenses Dre; O’Shea Jackson, Jr., as the ingenious lyricist bitter wisdom and tough love, and Major Norwood Ice Cube (who is also Jackson’s real-life father); (Tunde Adebimpe), an orderly who is his friend, and Jason Mitchell, as Eazy-E, the entrepreneurial pill dealer, and rival in love. Schwartzman brings drug dealer who financed the group’s record label a sardonic swing to Larry’s anomie but, overall, and starred on its first hit—maintains an energized, this feast of performance is served in very small conversational rapidity. But the personal lives of dishes. Byington’s spare visual and narrative style, the musicians are mere backdrop. The core of though authentic, sacrifices the story’s deeper the story is business, the object is power, and the echoes, and much of the sweetness is artificial. But quirks of desire and twists of the unconscious are the sharpest moments cast mundane struggles in given no place in the struggle—which the movie a nearly spiritual light.—R.B. (In limited release.) sharply carries ahead to the present day.—R.B. (In wide release.) Sleeping with Other People This romantic comedy delivers bland and familiar Time Out of Mind substance in a peculiar package. In college, the Despite Richard Gere’s fiercely committed near-strangers Lainey (Alison Brie) and Jake performance as George Hammond, a formerly (Jason Sudeikis) lose their virginity to each other prosperous and now homeless man scraping by in and then fall quickly out of touch. Twelve years New York’s streets and shelters, this drama is less later, they live in New York; she’s a kindergarten than the sum of its parts. The writer and director, teacher, he’s a tech-startup guy, and they reconnect Oren Moverman, builds the film around George’s by chance while leaving a group meeting for sex daily agonies—the lack of a decent place to sleep, addicts. Lainey and Jake become close friends, the violence and mockery of gawkers, bureaucratic supporting each other’s efforts to avoid sex, even tangles, trouble with hygiene, the need for food— while it’s obvious to viewers that they’re falling in and his personal demons, including alcohol, grief, love. What Lainey and Jake think is never made and broken family ties. But Moverman’s strained clear; the director and writer, Leslye Headland effort to squeeze George’s activities into a series (“Bachelorette”), doesn’t get close enough to of plot lines is matched by an arch and portentous find out. The premise prompts much talk about visual style. Filming through doors and windows sex, most of which is written in screenwriter-ese, with off-balance framings and eerie reflections, the awaiting punctuation by a laugh track. Yet there’s director suggests a world and a life out of whack. pathos in Lainey’s disastrous long-term affair Subsisting in public spaces, George endures both a with a gynecologist (Adam Scott), and a scene in lack of privacy and oppressive solitude, yet glimmers which Jake teaches Lainey to masturbate suggests of friendship between George and a former jazz a psychodramatic intensity that Headland doesn’t musician, Dixon Turner (Ben Vereen), veer uneasily reach elsewhere.—R.B. (In limited release.) between “Odd Couple” comedy and overwrought melodrama. The filmmaker’s good intentions and Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine great ambitions go unrealized. With Jena Malone, Alex Gibney’s documentary about Apple’s co-founder as George’s daughter.—R.B. (In limited release.) accentuates the negative. The movie begins with Gibney’s bewilderment at the public outpouring Trainwreck of grief that followed Jobs’s death. The filmmaker In her first leading role in a movie, Amy Schumer interviews Jobs’s former associates and adversaries, plays Amy—a romantically reckless, dirty-mouthed, intimates and observers, to portray him as a selfish and alcohol-laced writer living, working, and and insensitive person, a ruthless and unprincipled sleeping around in New York. Aghast at the executive. Gibney unfolds stories of Jobs scam- idea of seeing a guy more than once, let alone ming his main collaborator, Steve Wozniak, out settling down, she is shocked to find herself fall- of thousands of dollars following their primordial ing for a sports surgeon (Bill Hader) whom she work for Atari in the early nineteen- seventies; Jobs interviews for a magazine. Anyone hoping that suing Chrisann Brennan, the mother of his first the movie, written by Schumer and directed by child, to avoid child-support payments; Jobs driving Judd Apatow, would have the courage of its own his employees relentlessly and criticizing them waywardness, or that Amy might push her lonely harshly; Jobs parking in his company’s spots for transgressions to the limit, will be disappointed the handicapped, colluding to keep salaries down, to watch the plot acquire the softness of a regular manipulating his stock options, and ignoring the rom-com, and even Schumer’s fiercest fans may grievances of laborers at Apple’s subcontractors wonder if they are still watching a bunch of funny in China. But when citing Jobs’s creative genius, sketches being strung together, as opposed to a Gibney has little to say about it. Despite the movie’s feature film. There are sprightly supporting turns journalistic substance, the pleasure-free banality of from Tilda Swinton, scarcely recognizable as an its style gets in the way of a view of Jobs himself, editor with a heart of flint, and from John Cena, whose work is as much aesthetic as it is industrial. as Amy’s muscular squeeze; on the other hand,

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 37 Apatow seems to have issued an open invitation to a sentimental streak, pulls a floundering drunk, a random celebrities—LeBron James, Chris Evert, former attorney he nicknames Rolls Royce (Clive Amar’e Stoudemire, Matthew Broderick, and Brook), off the sidewalk, gets him cleaned up Marv Albert—to join the film and make it into a and dried out, and unwittingly turns him into a party. Nice try.—A.L. (7/20/15) (In wide release.) suave and witty heartthrob who appeals to Bull’s moll, Feathers (Evelyn Brent). Sternberg’s richly Underworld ornamental compositions—which are dense with This frenzied silent drama, from 1927, directed shadows and objects that separate viewers from by Josef von Sternberg, may have launched the the action—suggest a willful distance from his great round of Prohibition-era gangster films, but characters. A poet of solitude and shame, he Sternberg’s approach to the genre has little to framed the story’s rounds of recriminations and do with the specifics of organized crime. Rather, repentance with starkly frontal shots, which serve he presents a story of confidence and betrayal, as striking visual correlates for a shy and solitary in which the brazenly violent robber Bull Weed director’s revulsion at human contact.—R.B. (George Bancroft), a sanguine hunk of meat with (MOMA; Sept. 17.)

above beyond

The Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival presented: a group of decorative display stands Now in its eighth year, this four-day affair features from the Ming and Qing dynasties, rendered shows in Brooklyn and Manhattan, including “Comics in lacquer, zitan (a kind of red sandalwood), We Think Ruth Bader Ginsburg Would Enjoy,” with and enamel. Another auction on the same day Maeve Higgins, Aparna Nancherla, Michelle Wolf, shifts attention away from China and toward Kate Berlant, and Mehran Khaghani; “An Evening India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, with a particular of Entertainment from People with Black Glasses,” emphasis on the Indian modernism of Francis featuring Eugene Mirman, Ira Glass, John Hodg- Newton Souza, Maqbool Fida Husain, and Syed man, and Janeane Garofalo; “You’re the Expert,” Haider Raza. (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St. with Chris Duffy, Jo Firestone, and Scott Adsit; 212-636-2000.) • The final three days of Sotheby’s “From the Basement of Union Hall to Network Asian week (Sept. 16-17 and Sept. 19) offer a mix Television in the Next 2-3 Years,” with Firestone, of Himalayan devotional art and Chinese painting, Josh Sharp, Chris Gethard, Kyle Ayers, and Janelle ending with a mix-and-match sale, “Saturday at James; “Pretty Good Friends,” with Mirman and Sotheby’s,” that includes a little bit of everything, the record-production duo Elegant Too; and “The from relatively inexpensive vases and calligraphic Fake Emmys,” with Starlee Kine, Stephin Merritt, scrolls to a tiger painting by the nineteenth-century Cintra Wilson, and others. The feat ends on a Japanese master Kishi Ganku. (York Ave. at 72nd cosmic note, with a “Star Talk” between Mirman St. 212-606-7000.) • The recently rebranded “New and Neil Degrasse Tyson. (For more information, Now” sale (formerly titled “Under the Influence”), visit prettygoodfriends.com. Sept. 18-21.) at Phillips on Sept. 17, offers the usual combination of the new and the not quite so new, at various Brooklyn Book Festival price points, the better to lure new collectors. The A place to show off cool small-press tote bags artists represented include veterans like Jonas Wood and Warby Parker eyeglasses, this annual event and Ed Ruscha, as well as first-timers like the was founded by the former Brooklyn borough Michigan-born painter Leif Ritchey and the San president Marty Markowitz in 2006, and it Francisco-based Margo Wolowiec, who painstak- has grown into the city’s largest free literary ingly weaves together strands culled from digital festival. An estimated forty thousand attendees images. (450 Park Ave. 212-940-1200.) are expected to stroll the downtown-Brooklyn labyrinth of publishing booths and attend nearly Readings and Talks a hundred programs, featuring an all-star lineup “Intelligence Squared U.S.” of more than three hundred authors, including This series of live Oxford-style debates presents Salman Rushdie, Margo Jefferson, Jonathan the topic “Courts, Not Campuses, Should Decide Lethem, Nick Flynn, Adrian Tomine, and John Sexual Assault Cases.” Four law professors who are Leguizamo. The so-called Bookend events run authorities on college sexual assault will debate Sept. 14-21, with screenings, readings, parties, and the issue. Arguing for the motion are Jed Ruben- literary games at venues throughout the borough. feld (Yale) and Jeannie Suk (Harvard). Arguing Sept. 19 is the festival’s first Children’s Day, and against are Michelle Anderson (CUNY) and Sept. 20 is the culminating fourteen-stage event. Stephen Schulhofer (N.Y.U.). (Kaufman Center, (brooklynbookfestival.org.) 129 W. 67th St. Sept. 16 at 6:45, with a reception starting an hour earlier. For more information, Auctions and Antiques visit iq2us.org.) China’s financial troubles will surely be on everyone’s mind as the auction houses roll out sale after sale KGB Bar of Asian fineries. At Christie’s, Chinese paintings, The poet Deborah Landau reads from her new snuff bottles, and decorative pieces—cloisonné, book, “The Uses of the Body.” She is joined by jades, ceramics, and the like—go under the gavel David Lehman, who will read from his poetry, on Sept. 16, led by a selection of delicate paintings and from his forthcoming nonfiction book, dating back to the fifteenth century. A curious “Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the sale on Sept. 17 focusses not on the art works but Man and His World.” (85 E. 4th St. kgbbar.com. on the often ornate structures on which they are Sept. 21 at 7:30.)

38 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 FOOD& DRINK

BAR TAB Nitehawk Cinema and lo-res 136 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn (718-782-8370) Tables for Two Certain activities can be improved by the addition of alcohol—blind dates, Mulino a vino golf. Others are inevitably made worse—e-mailing your boss, trimming 337 W. 14th St. (855-343-4513) your bangs. Then there are those, such as cinema-going, that can swing either way. On a recent evening at Nitehawk, usually, when a waiter offers to “take you through the menu,” it’s to explain in Williamsburg, one patron’s wait for something that doesn’t need explaining. Like family style. Or small plates. But Mulino a her date to see “The Parallax View” Vino is actually complicated, beginning with the name, which is an Italian pun. (Mulino (a 1974 Alan J. Pakula political thriller, with Warren Beatty as a huge-haired a vento is a windmill, and the place runs on wine.) Ordering involves mastering the muckraker) was improved by a chilled menu’s taxonomy of food and wine (“Bright & Lively,” “Big & Luscious”), and, within Tecate. When the lights dimmed, she each category, a shaded spectrum measuring intensity of flavor. Each dish is available in handed a scrap of paper to a waitress three sizes. You may wind up creating your own gradation, from madcap (spiced truffle (job requirements: crouching, night popcorn) to misguided (anise-and-red-pepper-spiked ice cream). vision, experience as a ball girl a plus) The restaurant’s founding chef, Davide Scabin, is best known for encasing an egg that read, “Tequila tonic, please.” Her yolk and caviar in a bubble of plastic wrap, at his avant-garde restaurant Combal.Zero, in neighbors ordered queso, a kale salad, and fried pickles—a smorgasbord Piedmont. Though the dishes at Mulino a Vino tend toward the creative end of Italian— generating smells and sounds that cacio e pepe ravioli, wasabi mayo on the salmon confit—there is nothing quite as adventurous made one long for the days of Junior as a plastic-wrapped egg. Nor does there seem to be much sign of Scabin, who has gone Mints. Onscreen, an actress playing a back to Italy. Buy-in to his scheme varies among the waitstaff. What’s your favorite thing waitress said, “They say that a Martini here, one was asked. He thought for a bit. “Victoria’s Secret models come in sometimes.” is like a woman’s breast: one ain’t They drink a lot, he said, and at the end of the night they hug everyone. Looking around, enough and three is too many.” Bang! the scene was hard to imagine. The dungeon-like space, gloomy and gilded, like Christian Bang! Fin. People filed down to the Lo- Res bar, where cocktails allude to cult Grey’s guest room, was full of bowed heads—guests deciphering their menus in the dim movies (Buckaroo Banzai, Five Deadly light. In the corner, a man explained the concept of gravity to his date. Later, in what must Venoms) and oddball VHS tapes play have been a Verdicchio-fuelled pique, she asked him if he was a mommy’s boy. on crappy TVs. Across the street, a The waiter who mentioned the models could tell that the couple on the date were in family could be observed, through a need; he poured them what he described as a surefire lady pleaser, a Montepulciano with a window, having their own screening. A pink pony on the label. Everyone at the restaurant had their wine brought out on a special cartoon savant noted, “That’s ‘Mickey’s tray and strained through a cheesecloth, even if they weren’t buying the most expensive Christmas Carol.’ But Christmas, in August?” No better way to process a bottle, which cost four hundred and eighty dollars. (The big spenders never tip, the waiter paradox than to have another drink. told another diner.) Is it any surprise that the food can get lost in the mix, with so much —Emma Allen going on? Many dishes suffer from one ingredient too many—usually black truffle or Gorgonzola, or sometimes both. As in life, it’s best to follow Mamma: the tennis-ball- size meatball is her recipe, and it sits in a bath of tomato sauce the color of persimmons. The three-meat blend is so juicy that it barely needs any sauce. There are plenty more well-handled tomatoes, and a bunch of homemade pastas that are the right kind of chewy. They’re all in different categories of the menu, but each one’s a lady pleaser. —Amelia Lester

ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW HOLLISTER MATTHEW BY ILLUSTRATION Open daily for dinner. Plates $14-$24.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVIDE LUCIANO THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 39

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT UNOPEN DOORS

ast Tuesday, a group of refugees, many of them Syrians, months or years in crowded camps in Turkey, Jordan, or Leb- L walked quickly through a field outside the Hungarian anon, countries that have, together, taken in almost four mil- village of Röszke. They had broken out of what amounted to lion Syrians, putting stress on their political systems as well a holding pen, where the authorities had kept them, in in- as on basic utilities. And yet the refugees’ presence seemed to creasingly desperate conditions, for days. They were going to strike Europeans as a sudden apparition, a late-summer storm. Budapest and then, they hoped, on to Austria, Germany, or Harrowing images of a truck filled with bodies and of a tod- Sweden. When the police tried to bring them back, they dler drowned on a Turkish beach were followed by scenes at started to run. Reporters were there, too, and, as a man car- Budapest’s central Keleti station, where thousands of refu- rying a preschooler raced past a camerawoman, she tripped gees were kept from boarding trains to Western Europe. After him, and he and the child tumbled to the ground. Her move many of them tried to head to Austria on foot, they were al- was caught on video; another clip shows her kicking a small lowed for a time to proceed on buses and trains. On Septem- girl, wearing green pants, her hair in a ponytail, as she runs ber 5th, they began arriving at Munich’s main station, where by. (The camerawoman has reportedly been fired.) What may they were met by local volunteers bearing food, water, and, be most remarkable about the scene is that the girl maintains for the children, stuffed animals. her balance and doesn’t look back. She keeps going. Under what’s known as the Dublin System, the E.U. coun- “Everything which is now taking place before our eyes try responsible for a given refugee is generally the one in threatens to have explosive consequences for the whole of which he or she first arrives. But differences in geography and Europe,” Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, wrote generosity have created imbalances. Germany and Sweden in an op-ed earlier this month, and that is true, even if Orbán— have said that they will effectively put aside the Dublin re- who warns of Europeans becoming a minority in their own strictions in the case of Syrian refugees, and many migrants continent, their countries “overrun” and no longer Christian— try to avoid registering until they can reach one of those na- is far from a reliable framer of the principles at stake. Many tions. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has surprised many of the refugees are from Eritrea, Libya, Iraq, and Afghani- with her emotional appeals to Europe’s conscience, has an- stan, but a growing proportion are Syr- nounced that Germany expects eight ian, and the sense of hopelessness about hundred thousand applicants for ref- the civil war there is a key reason that ugee status this year, and her govern- their numbers are rising. At transit ment said that the country can absorb points like the Greek island of Kos, up to half a million applicants a year people are sleeping in the open, but the for a period after that. Last week, Jean- tensions are not restricted to Europe’s Claude Juncker, the European Com- less wealthy margins. The Danish mission President, presented a plan government took out ads in Lebanese for redistributing a hundred and sixty newspapers telling potential refugees thousand refugees now in Italy, Greece, that it planned to make life harder for and Hungary according to a quota de- them, and briefly cut off its rail con- termined by members’ population and nections to Germany, in order to cur- wealth. (France would take thirty-two tail their movement. thousand; Poland thirteen thousand.) For some refugees, the journey to But Hungarians say that if refugees Europe began four years ago, when had no prospect of going farther—if

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL TOM BY ILLUSTRATIONS war broke out in Syria. They have spent they knew that they would be stuck in

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 41 Hungary—they wouldn’t come to Europe at all. In this cramped number, has suggested “an emergency global gathering.” The view, Germany has precipitated the crisis. Orbán called the discussion, predictably, has become entangled in election-sea- E.U.’s policy “madness.” son posturing and alarmism. Jeb Bush, while acknowledging Perhaps there is a sort of madness at work, if that is what America’s historic status as a refuge, said that the President’s one calls the belief that a certain idea of Europe—democratic real job was to “take out Assad” and “take out ISIS.” Ted Cruz and at peace, chastened by the last century’s disasters, and said that the refugees were better off in places closer to Syria, without internal-border controls—is realizable. If so, it is a and Marco Rubio worried about terrorist infiltrators who madness worthy of respect. (As well as improvement; the might “sneak in.” Yet refugees seeking admittance to this na- plight of Africans drowning in the Mediterranean has not tion are subjected to background checks and interviews far mobilized public opinion in the way that the Syrians’ situa- more thorough than those for ordinary immigrants. (The tion has.) But what about the idea of America? The best solu- process, which can take years, should be speeded up.) Don- tion to the Syrian refugee crisis is an end to the Syrian war, ald Trump, after going back and forth, arrived at the consid- but the elusiveness of that goal seems to have paralyzed the ered view that America has its “own problems.” United States. Since the war started, this country has accepted And yet America’s triumphs have come, and we have just fifteen hundred Syrian refugees, not much more than ar- been most ourselves, when we have opened our doors, and rived on a single train in Munich last week. Last Thursday, we have been most ashamed when we closed them. We have Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said that Presi- managed to respond quickly before—for instance, in 1956, dent Obama had told his staff that he wanted to “make prepa- when tens of thousands of refugees from a failed revolution rations to accept at least ten thousand” Syrian refugees in the were camping in Europe’s train stations. President Eisen- next fiscal year, which would count as a modest start. hower ordered the airlift of fifteen thousand of them from The International Rescue Committee has proposed that Vienna and Munich to start new lives here. A young girl in the U.S. take sixty-five thousand Syrians, and some Senate those crowds who kept going, even when she was kicked, Democrats, led by Amy Klobuchar and Dick Durbin, have would have spoken Hungarian. supported that figure. Hillary Clinton, without naming a —Amy Davidson

DEPT. OF PREPAREDNESS cis, who has attracted enormous crowds sit”?—Cowan said, “It’s one of many PAPAL JAM in several world capitals, will visit both things that are still under discussion.” cities later this month. Time for some Starting on September 22nd, when traffic problems in Cherry Hill. “I’d Francis lands, the T.O.C. will be open equate it to a Super Bowl and Hurri- around the clock. The staff will be aug- cane Sandy rolled into one,” Cowan mented with agents from the state po- said. “I told my wife, ‘Don’t expect to lice, New Jersey Transit, the Delaware see me for a week.’ ” River Joint Toll Bridge Commission, emember Bridgegate, the local During a recent afternoon shift at and the Turnpike Authority. “It’s bet- R traffic scandal that continues to the T.O.C., four engineering techni- ter to have everyone in the same room affect national politics? Sal Cowan, the cians were on duty, each sitting in front in case something goes wrong, which director of traffic operations at the of four computer monitors. Some something inevitably will,” Cowan said. New Jersey Department of Transpor- screens showed real-time traffic maps; “If 95 is backed up as far as the Quaker tation, does, but barely. “We heard one was empty except for its desktop Bridge Mall, which some computer about it on the news, like everyone background, a cast photo from “Good- models are predicting, and I start plan- else,” he said last week. “It affected Fellas.” A wall was devoted to twenty- ning a detour route to get people to, say, people in Fort Lee, but, honestly, for four more screens—one tuned to Wolf 130, I want someone from Bridges in the rest of the state it was business as Blitzer on mute, the others rotating my face, going, ‘You can’t send ’em that usual. Now, a blizzard? Closing the through live feeds from bridges and way—that bridge is gonna collapse!’ ” Pulaski Skyway for repairs? That’s intersections. A call came over the Cowan pulled out a binder—“Mon- when I’m pulling all-nighters.” He ges- radio: debris on I-295, near Exit 29. mouth County Traffic Incident Diver- tured around a room full of computer One of the technicians, John Tronco, sion Plan”—and ran through a few screens—the Traffic Operations Cen- dispatched a Safety Service Patrol doomsday scenarios. He mentioned ter, in Cherry Hill. He added, “In this truck. Then, toggling between screens, Betsy Ross, Ben Franklin, and Walt line of work, you keep a sleeping bag he selected a message for the digital Whitman (the bridges, not the peo- and a food supply in your truck at all sign a few miles up the road. He ple) and used phrases like “avalanche times.” From the T.O.C., technicians scrolled through a menu—“Downed of cars.” When the Pope visited Ma- oversee state roads throughout South Tree,” “Disabled Bus”—and chose “De- nila, in January, six million people Jersey; a larger facility, in Woodbridge, bris Spill.” “That’s a fairly common showed up, despite torrential rain. This focusses on the northern half of the one,” he said. “God help me if I ever will be the first Papal visit to Phila- state. New Jersey is a two-headed beast, have to use ‘Earthquake.’ ” As for what delphia since 1979. The Popemobile traffic-wise, with delays clustering near the boards will say during the Pope’s will be a modified Jeep Wrangler. New York and Philadelphia. Pope Fran- visit—“Papal Jam”? “High Mass Tran- One to two million people are

42 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 expected, but who knows? A priest will here!’ And Baxter jumped in the car in Santa Fe that had a sharing circle.” lead twenty parishioners on a hun- and sat with his paw around my neck.” He made a face. “I would rather have dred-mile walk from Baltimore to Phil- He laughed. “It was like a very brief spent the week punching myself in the adelphia. “If it were me, I’d watch it rom-com: boy walks dog, boy loses penis. But it helped—that, and read- on TV, where the view is better,” Cowan dog, boy makes public declaration of ing every book I could get my hands said. “These people are pilgrims, and love, sincere music swells, and off we on about conflict resolution. There’s a God bless ’em for trying. Still, at a cer- go into the wild blue yonder.” part of me that still thinks, How do I tain point, you just go, ‘If you’re in a Reynolds’s new film, “Mississippi annihilate this person verbally, turn car, there’s only so close I can get you.’ ” Grind,” which opens next week, is them into a liquid, and then watch If roads clog, Cowan can issue creative much less pat. A meditative travel- that liquid evaporate in the summer detour instructions. He can send sup- ogue, written and directed by Ryan sun?” He scratched Baxter’s ears. “But ply trucks to fix flat tires, or tow trucks Fleck and Anna Boden, it follows two I learned the Jungian idea that what- to clear abandoned cars. “Or I can flush gamblers, Reynolds’s raffish Curtis and ever you think you hate in the other a road”—keep the traffic lights green, Ben Mendelsohn’s self-defeating person is something you actually can’t allowing traffic to thin out—“although Gerry, as they drive from Iowa to New stand in yourself.” that is just robbing Peter to pay Paul, Orleans, trying to win enough to enter Curtis, in “Mississippi Grind,” is because a green light is a red light a high-stakes poker game. “I’ve been drawn to Gerry, Reynolds said, because somewhere else.” doing this for twenty years, and I’ve “there’s something about that face I The Department of Transportation made my share of conventional films,” is running radio ads encouraging peo- Reynolds, who is thirty-eight, said. ple to use public transit or to stay home. “So I kept saying to Ryan and Anna, It has also set up a Web site, popenj.com, ‘Doesn’t something explosive need to with disaster-movie-style taglines happen?’ When I saw the screenings, (“Roads will be saturated.” “Bridge I realized I was thirty-one flavors of closings could create paralyzing grid- wrong. I realized the explosions are lock”) and maps covered in red. “Look, small and many, and the spectacle can I hope I’m wrong,” Cowan said. “I hope be just words.” we’re sitting here bored and eating A granite shelf by the trail reminded pizza and feeling stupid. But it’s bet- Reynolds of the time he’d parked his ter to hope for the best and prepare motorcycle near Jackson Hole, Wyo- for the worst.” ming, and climbed such a shelf, look- —Andrew Marantz ing for a sheltered spot to relieve him- 1 self. Jumping from it into a pile of THE PICTURES leaves, “I sunk up to my knees in what CHOICES I quickly realized was a dead horse,” Ryan Reynolds and Baxter he said. “I behaved like a dying koi fish, flailing around and dry-heaving. want to help—a dying animal I want It was the worst, most awful thing to give a bit of peace. Curtis’s pile of ever!” coke is other people. He projects an The park is fifteen minutes from air of extraordinary confidence, the Reynolds’s house, and he often runs wise owl of humanity—but it’s all bull- yan Reynolds’s dog, Baxter, pad- its five-mile loop, but today he was shit.” Channelling a character’s bull- R ded through the woods, turning easing into reacquaintance; he and his shit gets easier after you shed your often to check on his master. The trail, wife, the actress Blake Lively, and their own. In Reynolds’s early comedies, he at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, an young daughter had just returned from said, “I was just aping Chevy Chase. hour north of New York City, was cool four months on his film set, in Van- If I saw a supercut of my tricks from and quiet. The actor said that he’d couver, and three months on Lively’s that period—the wry eyebrow raise, found the dog, a golden-retriever mix, set, in Bangkok. The actor, who was followed by the slow, deadpan turn . . . at an S.P.C.A. in Houston. “I was look- previously married to Scarlett Johans- Ugh! Mortifying.” ing for a rescue dog for a friend who son and engaged to Alanis Morissette, Reynolds’s body is spackled with wanted a chocolate lab, which they said, “I’ve experienced what it was like tattoos from his youth. “I hate them didn’t have,” he recalled, clipping Bax- not to prioritize that, being together all,” he said, turning his left wrist in- ter’s leash across his own chest like a while you’re working, and it doesn’t ward, then joking that the inky mes- bandolier. “I saw this guy and took him end well.” sage he’d concealed “says, ‘Cut here.’ ” for a walk, then got in my car. Forty- He works on himself, tinkering. In It takes three hours in makeup to mask five minutes later, I turned the car his twenties, he said, “I was explosive them: “You do see one in ‘Mississippi around—it was the way he’d looked and pissed off all the time—a brawl Grind,’ a six of hearts on my leg, which going back into the cage. I went back with a friend of mine got out of con- makes sense for the role,” he said. “Still, in and said, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of trol. So I took a weeklong workshop I’d get them all lasered off if it wasn’t

44 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 hours and hours of brutal pain.” He Twain, Altshuler grew up in Cambridge, ary blessing.” Altshuler is well aware clucked at Baxter: time to move on. Massachusetts, and began his playwrit- that Twain himself tried to adapt “Tom “But my wife says I should keep them, ing career in the seventh grade, with a Sawyer” for the stage, without success. keep a record of the choices I’ve made.” “brutally terrible” play about Cotton “The great lesson I learned from my He made another face. Mather. During his junior year at Cotton Mather failure is that you have —Tad Friend Groton, he wrote a twenty-minute to write either what you know or what 1 comedy called “Making the Move,” you are deeply curious about,” he said. UP LIFE’S LADDER about a teen-ager’s first kiss. The play Altshuler had been given the run YOUNGEST EVER went up at the Edinburgh festival, and of the Hartford house, where Twain Altshuler licensed it to some fifty high lived from 1874 to 1891. “It’s almost schools. “At a certain point, I stopped like Twain’s around the corner, but in licensing it, because I didn’t want to another sense it’s hauntingly empty,” deal with it anymore,” he said, over a he said, despite the sound of tour groups bottle of the museum’s house-blend shuffling upstairs, as he opened the “Huckleberry Fizz” soda. “That sounds front door. Altshuler removed a rope hen Samuel Clemens was eigh- sort of flippant, but I wanted to see how to the master bedroom (“They let me W teen, he was working as an itin- it went and then try something new.” go wherever I want”) and stood beside erant typesetter and sending money back His father had read him “Tom Saw- Twain’s ornately carved headboard. “He to his mother and brother, in Hannibal, yer” as a boy, but his connection to would sleep in this direction, because Missouri. He was ten years away from Twain stretches back to his paternal he loved the headboard so much that becoming Mark Twain, and twenty-three grandfather, the author Frederick he wanted to look at it,” Altshuler ex- years away from publishing “The Ad- Buechner, who kept a bust of Twain plained. “He used to come in with all ventures of Tom Sawyer.” He dreamed in his library. Altshuler reread the book his papers and books around and smoke of running off to South America to work in eleventh grade, he said, “and that’s a cigar in bed.” in the coca industry, and met a steam- when I got the idea that I’d like to do Up in the billiard room, where Gar- boat pilot who taught him the river for something with it.” He graduated from rison Keillor once broke a cue ball, and five hundred dollars. “At Noah’s age, he high school in May, and is now taking which a tour guide described as “the was not telling his mom anything—he a gap year to work on the play and to original man cave,” Altshuler had laid was just off and on his own,” Cindy visit Twain sites, including Hannibal out items from the archives, including Lovell, the executive director of the Mark and Elmira, New York, where Twain a letter from Twain to his daughter Susy. Twain House & Museum, in Hartford, kept a summer cottage and is buried. He read aloud: “ ‘Keep the squirrel sup- Connecticut, said the other day. A number of celebrity “Twainiacs” have plied with nuts, if he comes around. If Noah is Noah Altshuler, who turned offered their support, among them Hal you have a very fine sunset, put a blan- eighteen in June, and is writing a stage Holbrook, Roy Blount, Jr., and Sheryl ket over it & keep it till I come.’ ” The adaptation of “Tom Sawyer” which pro- Crow. Altshuler reached into a fleece night before, Altshuler had been in the ducers hope to bring to Broadway. He pocket and pulled out a silver dollar house alone, playing a century-old man- is the museum’s first playwright-in-res- from 1876, the year that “Tom Saw- dolin he inherited from his grandmother. idence. Blond and six feet five, with yer” was published—it was a gift from “Check this out,” he said, picking up the wide eyes that get wider when he talks his grandfather, a token of “his liter- instrument, and plucked out some Bach. Then he stood in the stairwell and played a bluegrass tune, letting the sound waft down to the tourists. In the drawing room, Altshuler sat at a period Steinway (not Twain’s) and told a visitor to stand in the hall as he played “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” just to hear how it echoed. Altshuler is less Tom Sawyer the rapscallion than Tom Sawyer the romantic: he is focus- sing his adaptation on Tom’s “pure, in- nocent love” for Becky Thatcher. “Look, I’m only eighteen, so I’m not out of the adolescent rough patch yet,” he said. He opened his paperback edition to page 122 and recited a favorite line: “ ‘Tom de- cided that he could be independent of Becky Thatcher now. Glory was sufficient. He would live for glory.’ ” —Michael Schulman

THE FINANCIAL PAGE ership of the person at the top but also on factors—chang- THE COMEBACK CONUNDRUM ing consumer tastes, demographic shifts, the broader state of the economy—over which the C.E.O. has little control. “Of course, the C.E.O. makes a difference,” Sydney Finkel- stein, a professor of management at Dartmouth, told me. “But luck also plays a much bigger role than anyone wants to talk about.” It doesn’t help that C.E.O.s are generally n the spring of 2013, the consumer-products giant Proc- called back in times of crisis. “The fact that a company is I ter & Gamble asked its former C.E.O. A. G. Lafley to rehiring a C.E.O. is a sign of real weakness,” Finkelstein come out of retirement and bail the company out of trou- said. “So it’s often just a much tougher job the second time ble. When Lafley stepped down, back in 2009, P. & G. seemed around.” Good C.E.O.s can adjust, but whether the wind in fine shape, but his successor had floundered. Sales were is at their backs or in their faces makes a big difference. Even falling short of expectations, and the company was losing successful boomerangers rely on luck as well as on talent. market share to nimbler competitors. Lafley’s return seemed Charles Schwab did a fine job turning around the company like just what was needed. During his first tour at P. & G., that bears his name when he returned, in 2004. But it’s no he turned the company into a consumer powerhouse and, accident that his success coincided with a booming market. in the process, became one of the most acclaimed C.E.O.s Boomerang C.E.O.s typically face business conditions of his day, earning a reputation as a strategic visionary and dramatically different from the ones in which they originally an innovation guru. The day his return succeeded. Unfortunately, as the busi- was announced, the company’s stock ness professors Donald Hambrick and price jumped four per cent. A Bloom- Guoli Chen have written, “an executive berg headline said that, in hiring Lafley, who is well suited to lead a firm during P. & G. was looking for a “STEVE JOBS- one period may be ill-suited for the LIKE SEQUEL.” next period.” The classic example here That sequel never got filmed. This is Henry Ford, who was an ideal leader fall, Lafley will step down for the when the crucial competitive issue was sec ond time, and no one will be men- efficiency. But when the car market ma- tioning Steve Jobs’s legendary return tured, and appealing to consumer taste to Apple. Lafley hasn’t been bad— became more important, Ford found he slimmed the company down, selling himself at sea. “Any color . . . so long as off parts and getting out of less profitable it’s black” was hardly a recipe for win- businesses—but there’s been no dra- ning consumers’ hearts and minds. The matic turnaround. Sales are growing real problem, as Finkelstein points out, very slowly; the stock price has signi- is that successful companies often flour- ficantly underperformed the market; ish because they perfectly fit their cur- and there have been no major product rent environment. “But those compa- launches. P. & G. is still facing largely nies are the ones most vulnerable to the same problems it was when Lafley came back. In other trouble when conditions change,” he says. Lafley, for instance, words, he’s been just O.K. was brilliant at running P. & G. during the boom times of How could someone who, according to Fortune, was the two-thousands, emphasizing a premium-price strategy known as “an all-time C.E.O. hero” end up being just O.K.? and expanding the company through acquisitions. Now, with Well, if commentators had looked at the track record of re- post-recession consumers still frugal and P. & G.’s size look- turning C.E.O.s—boomerang C.E.O.s, as they’re some- ing more like a cost than like a benefit, Lafley has been forced times called—that’s precisely what they’d have predicted. A to dismantle the empire he built. But he never managed to 2014 study found that profitability at companies run by boo- come up with a strategy to get P. & G. growing again. merang C.E.O.s fell slightly, and an earlier study detected When acclaimed C.E.O.s muddle through their second no significant difference in long-term performance between tours of duty, it doesn’t mean that they were mediocre all firms that reappointed a former C.E.O. and ones that hired along. But so much of what we call greatness is attributable someone new. We like triumphant comeback narratives— to factors that we generally ignore. Besides, it’s hard to stay Jobs and, to a lesser extent, Howard Schultz, at Starbucks. on top forever. This is a problem not just for boomerang But history tells us that Lafley’s rather ordinary second tour C.E.O.s but for all C.E.O.s. A widely cited study found of duty is the way most of these stories end. that a C.E.O. who wins a major award is likely to under- The idea that someone hailed as a business hero can pro- perform afterward. In this light, the smartest thing a C.E.O. duce wildly inconsistent results challenges our conception with a sterling reputation can do when asked to come back of the C.E.O. as what the Harvard Business School profes- is to remember the old showbiz maxim: Always leave them sor Rakesh Khurana has called a “corporate savior.” In fact, wanting more. corporate success depends not just on the insight and lead- —James Surowiecki CHRISTOPH NIEMANN CHRISTOPH

48 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

city of Margate. They surrounded Ja- A REPORTER AT LARGE maat Al-Mu’mineen, a large mosque presided over by Hafiz’s youngest son, Izhar Khan. Izhar, who was twenty-four, THE IMAM’S CURSE was about to lead the morning prayer when agents in F.B.I. windbreakers con- A family accused of financing terrorists. fronted him in the parking lot. Izhar had moved to Florida when he was eight BY EVAN OSNOS years old, and he spoke barely accented English. He wore a long dark beard, a black cotton robe, and a skullcap. The agents examined the computers in his office, and when they searched his cell phone they noticed that many of his text messages were about the Miami Heat and other teams. Meanwhile, a third maneuver in the F.B.I.’s operation against the Khans was unfolding in Los Angeles, where it was 3 A.M. and Izhar’s brother Irfan, a thirty- seven-year-old software programmer, was asleep in his room at the Homestead Studio Suites, an inexpensive business hotel in El Segundo. Married, with two kids, Irfan was a sitcom buff who made hammy jokes about his waistline. (“This won’t be good for my diet!”) He lived in Miami and worked for American Unit, an I.T. company. For the past three months, he had been commuting every two weeks to an assignment in El Se- gundo. He was awakened by a phone call from the police, advising him to go to the door. He was handcuffed and led to a waiting car, past bomb-sniffing dogs and helmeted men in camouflage. After the arrests, federal authorities announced that, in all, six people in Flor- ida and abroad had been charged with Did the “thing” mentioned on the wiretaps really refer to money for the Taliban? funnelling tens of thousands of dollars into a conspiracy to “murder, kidnap, or t dawn on May 14, 2011, more imam, Hafiz Khan, an émigré from a maim persons overseas,” orchestrated by than two dozen federal agents mountainous corner of Pakistan near the the Pakistani Taliban, an ally of Al Qaeda. A and local police officers con- Afghan border. Khan was in his late sev- The group was known for having trained verged on a working-class enties, an albino with thick glasses and Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani- American neighborhood near the Miami airport a long colorless rush of beard. He had who, in May, 2010, tried to set off a car and surrounded a small green-and-white moved to America, with members of his bomb in Times Square. In 2012, Paki- stucco building—Masjid Miami, one of family, in 1994, at the encouragement of stani Taliban gunmen boarded a bus in the city’s oldest mosques. Police sealed a younger brother in Alabama. They be- northwest Pakistan and shot Malala off a two-block radius, and F.B.I. agents, came citizens, but Khan spoke no En- Yousafzai, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl some armed with AR-15 rifles, assem- glish and rarely left the mosque or a one- who had called for the education of bled outside the door. room apartment across the street, which women. Inside, eight men were kneeling for he shared with his wife, Fatima. He was The F.B.I. had been secretly tracking the first prayer of the day. When agents known to some of the locals as el viejito the Khans for at least a year, monitoring called for them to open up, one of the barbón—the old bearded man. Kids re- their finances and recording thousands worshippers, a former police officer, went ferred to him as the Santa Claus imam. of hours of conversation, in person and out and asked them to wait until the While the F.B.I. was arresting Khan, on the phone. Two other members of prayer was finished. The agents com- another team of federal agents and po- the family were also indicted—a daugh- plied, and then they arrested the mosque’s lice assembled forty miles away, in the ter and a seventeen-year-old grandson,

50 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE who live in Pakistan—along with a Pa- plosives at two synagogues in the Bronx. kistani shopkeeper, who had served as a They joined the plot. The judge called middleman. In the indictment, they were their actions “beyond despicable,” but, accused of conspiring to buy guns, shel- referring to the ringleader, she said that ter the Taliban, and send students “to the bureau had manufactured a terrorist learn to kill Americans in Afghanistan.” out of a former Walmart employee whose The indictment described phone calls “buffoonery is positively Shakespearean from Miami, in which the father “called in its scope.” (She rejected the prosecu- for an attack on the Pakistani Assem- tor’s request for life sentences, and sent bly” and “called for the death of Paki- the accused to prison for twenty-five stan’s President.” The U.S. Attorney years, the statutory minimum.) Wifredo A. Ferrer told the Sun Sentinel The case against the Khans rested on that a list of cash transfers totalling fifty the two most frequently used tools in thousand dollars was “just the tip of the the legal battle against terrorism: con- iceberg,” and declared, “We will be able spiracy and “material support.” Under to prove that there is more than fifty material-support laws, it is a felony to thousand dollars that went to the Tali- knowingly provide money, shelter, or ban.” Each of the accused faced between technical advice to anyone involved with forty- five and sixty years in prison. terrorism. Before 2001, the Justice De- partment had used that charge on only he process that landed the Khans six occasions; in the first three years after Tin court began, in effect, shortly after 9/11, the department filed the charge the September 11, 2001, attacks, when nearly a hundred times, but then its use John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, subsided. Recently, the pace has acceler- sent a memo to senior law-enforcement ated again. This year, the Justice Depart- officials declaring a new focus: “proac- ment has filed material-support charges tive prevention and disruption.” It marked against at least fifty-seven defendants a fundamental shift, from pursuing ter- who are accused of allying with the Is- rorists after the fact to preëmpting them, lamic State. The Khan-family case bore by arresting their supporters as early as many hallmarks of America’s legal battle possible, often with the help of infor- with terrorism, but counterterrorism offi- mants. In a 2003 bulletin to U.S. Attor- cials rarely set out to capture what a pros- neys, a Department of Justice official ecutor called “an entire family that has identified laws that allow “strategic over- participated in extreme violence.” Rarer inclusiveness.” In those cases, the con- still does a case evolve in such a way that, nections to violence can be attenuated: once it’s over, the family tells its story. in the Khan case, prosecutors charged the defendants with, among other things, he Khans came from the Swat Val- conspiring to conspire—intending to Tley, a fertile corridor amid the moun- support others who, in theory, intended tains of the Hindu Kush. Since the So- to engage in terrorism. viet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1979, The growing use of informants in the Swat has seen a series of conflicts among campaign against terrorism has drawn governments, Islamic radicals, and local criticism from lawyers and activists, and residents. Pashtuns, the dominant eth- even from some judges; they say that the nic group in Swat, have been embroiled F.B.I. has used informants to manipu- in the violence: in Pakistan and Afghan- late people who are vulnerable because istan, more than a million have been of mental illness or financial desperation. killed, and millions have been displaced. In a terrorism case in 2011, known as Hafiz Khan was descended from a the Newburgh Four, Judge Colleen Mc- landowning Pashtun family. Like other Mahon faulted the F.B.I. for “trolling albino or blind children in the country- among the citizens of a troubled com- side, he was considered unfit for work in munity, offering very poor people money the fields, and was sent to an Islamic if they will play some role, any role, in school, where he became a cleric. He criminal activity.” In that case, an infor- married Fatima, and they had eleven mant in Newburgh, New York, offered children. Six survived to adulthood. four men a quarter of a million dollars, Eventually, his two daughters settled a BMW, and other rewards to shoot down near their husbands’ families in Pak- down military planes, and to set off ex- istan, and he encouraged his four sons to

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 51 pursue greater opportunities in America. “May God just make her dead.” When missiles, it does whatever you want.” After Even after moving to Florida, Hafiz his son left his daughter-in-law at home he moved to Florida, Irfan studied En- acquired few of the trappings of Amer- to cook, Hafiz told her, in sympathy, “May glish, mowed lawns, and worked as a ican life. His friend Anwar Ansari, a reg- he be run over by a truck.” (Hafiz Khan handyman, a job that a fellow Pakistani istered nurse who served as a translator was later asked if he actually wished his immigrant told him to cherish. Irfan for Hafiz at the mosque, once accompa- son to be run over by a truck, and he re- helped the two other brothers come to nied him on a pilgrimage to Saudi Ara- plied, “It looks like a curse word, but I Florida: Ikram became a cabdriver; Izaz bia and noticed that all of Hafiz’s be- didn’t mean for God to have him under managed an ice-cream shop. But Irfan longings fit in two plastic grocery bags. the truck. This is something just to alarm was the most ambitious. He told others, Hafiz’s eyesight was poor, and he relied him.”) Other common khairey include “I’m going to go to school, I’m going to heavily on the phone to stay “May you be riddled by bul- get a decent job, I’m going to work in an informed about life back home. lets” and “May you be destroyed office somewhere.” In 1994, he took the When his wife got fed up with beyond recognition into the taxi exam, and later leased a Suburban calls in the middle of the night, abyss of oblivion.” Zeeya Pash- and started a one-man limo business. He she removed the phone from toon, the author of an author- wore chinos and Greg Norman golf shirts, the house. He spent many itative Pashto-English dictio- took programming classes at night, and hours sitting on the floor of nary, told me that dramatic got the job at American Unit. The com- the mosque, talking on the curses are a common relief valve pany brought him out to Los Angeles phone—even, sometimes, in Pashtun conversation, par- to install software at International Rec- when worshippers were trying ticularly among women and tifier, a technology manufacturer. If things to pray. Between February, elderly men. For those who feel went well, he hoped to stay on there, and 2009, and October, 2010, the powerless, “these phrases and resettle his family in California. F.B.I. collected thirty-five thousand calls, terms are the only weapons to get it off an average of three or four every waking their chests,” he said. hile life was improving for mem- hour. That number did not surprise his In time, the family tuned out Hafiz’s Wbers of the Khan family in Amer- children. Irfan said, “He calls somebody rages. “He cannot speak English, he can- ica, it was collapsing for its members in and says, ‘What happened in Pakistan, not go outside and do things on his own. Pakistan. Residents of the Swat Valley what happened today?’ And they would So he’s totally dependent on somebody had grown frustrated. They wanted in- tell him, and then he would try to call else,” Irfan said. Hafiz routinely described vestment in schools and roads, and they somebody else and say, ‘Hey, did you hear Pakistan’s leaders as pimps, pigs, sons of reviled Pakistani courts as corrupt and about this?’ ” When Hafiz was dissatisfied donkeys, huge bastards, and dumb-asses. slow. People talked fondly of legal codes with something, he sent letters. After his He begged God to punch them, cut them based on Islam and local tradition, and daughter Husna was unable to enter the into pieces, and make them so scared ideologues capitalized on their discon- United States, in October, 2010, he ad- that “when they sit down to shit their tent. Beginning in the nineteen-nineties, dressed a letter to the Secretary of State, guts start to spill out.” a local forerunner of the Pakistani Tali- Hillary Clinton. “I humbly request your His sons inhabited a different world. ban gained support by preaching justice, intervention into the unjust revocation Where the father was a fierce, inveter- fairness, and virtue. of the visa for my daughter and her chil- ate talker, Izhar, the youngest, was genial But after the Pakistani Taliban formed, dren,” he wrote. Beneath his name and and laconic. A jogger and a gym buff, he in 2007, the group proved vicious. It blew signature, he identified himself as “Con- wore basketball shorts beneath his robe up more than a hundred girls’ schools, cerned U.S. Citizen & Petitioner.” (He so that he could shoot hoops between and hanged the bodies of its enemies received no response.) prayer sessions. He had graduated, in from traffic lights. In the spring of 2009, Hafiz urged his children to send 2008, from Darul-Uloom Al-Madania, the Army set out to destroy the group money home to relatives or to the needy, a prominent high school in Buffalo, which by attacking the Swat Valley with heli- in the Muslim tradition of charity known combines Islamic education with New copters, tanks, and artillery. Civilians were as zakat. Since he lived simply, over the York State’s public-school curriculum. trapped in the crossfire. Some 1.5 mil- years he had sent thousands of dollars At the mosque, members joked that he lion people—eighty per cent of Swat’s to Pakistan—mostly to support a mosque resembled the actor Patrick Dempsey population—fled their homes, including and an Islamic school, the Madrassa Ara- and nicknamed him Mufti McDreamy. many members of the Khan family. bia Ahya-al-Aloom, in Swat, which he The older son, Irfan, had less inter- Hafiz’s elder daughter, Amina, a mother had founded in 1971. He had ambitions est in Islam. Growing up in Swat, he of eight, joined the exodus. She called to expand, and when the complex needed loved broadcasts of “Knight Rider,” the her father in Miami. He was distraught. repairs he told a friend that the school action series starring David Hasselhoff In a call on July 8, 2009, in which he was was “dearer to me than my children.” as a private investigator who drives a told that the Army had “shot up the old Among friends, Hafiz was known to talking car. A relative, on a visit to Pa- places with tanks,” Khan unleashed a have a short temper and a harrowing rep- kistan, told him it was fake, but Irfan barrage of Pashto curses on the Pakistani ertoire of khairey—the distinctive Pashto kept his hopes up, saying, “You live in President, Asif Zardari, and his backers. prayers for misfortune. When a grand- America but you don’t know anything. “May Allah destroy them,” he said, and daughter wouldn’t stop crying, he said, That car is real. It talks, it flies, it fires wished that God would “hit them with

52 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 his shells of wrath.” He went on, “May sari, the mosque assistant, for private les- vaguely. “Oh, Allah,” he said. After more they be broken into pieces, and may peo- sons in the Koran, but after a couple of back-and-forth, Hafiz said, “So now you ple respect a dog more than them.” sessions he seemed more eager to talk have told me, so now I am getting happy.” Hafiz urged Irfan to send five hun- about politics, Pakistan, and jihad. An- On another occasion, Siddiqui talked dred dollars to his sister. He dispatched sari recalled, “I said, ‘Look, man, in the about American soldiers fighting Islamic Izhar to pick up a three-hundred-dollar masjid, when you come in the masjid, militants in Afghanistan, and noted that donation from a local doctor. His son- when I come in the masjid, all we talk the Taliban had killed several soldiers in-law Anayat Ullah was trying to start about is religion.” In May, 2010, Siddiqui that morning, when it downed their he- a potato-chip factory in the town of offered Hafiz five thousand dollars to licopter. “Allah, Allah. Where?” Hafiz Shaidu, and he wanted tens of thousands help repair his school in Swat. Hafiz was asked. They talked about the details, and of dollars. The F.B.I. was listening to all elated. He made calls to arrange for the Hafiz said, “The Americans must have these conversations. The previous fall, purchase of iron and cement, and he de- been heartbroken. . . . Because their heart the bureau had taken note of Hafiz’s scribed Siddiqui as his “best friend.” is broken even at the death of one man money transfers and opened a case. Siddiqui was an informant, paid by and because their wives worry a lot, In early 2010, a stranger began at- the F.B.I. to wear a wire and record Hafiz. too. . . . But may Allah bring death to tending prayers at Hafiz’s mosque. David The lead agent on the case later said, in fifty thousand of them.” Mahmood Siddiqui was a Pakistani émi- court, that Siddiqui was “playing the role Siddiqui gradually escalated his praise gré in his mid-fifties, with a prominent of a Taliban sympathizer,” in the hope for violent militants. On July 19, 2010, nose and a thin sweep of dark hair. He that Hafiz would say things to him that he urged Hafiz to support the Pakistani introduced himself as a successful busi- he would be wary of saying to others. Taliban. He asked, “So why don’t you nessman, a chef who had owned several Siddiqui taped his conversations with send them money from here, from Mus- companies. He mentioned that one of Hafiz as they ran errands in his car. In lim people here . . . so that the Taliban his businesses had earned him two mil- one exchange, Siddiqui said that he had can buy guns?” lion dollars. He befriended the imam, “very big news”—that the Taliban had Hafiz was noncommittal. He said, driving him to doctor’s appointments killed ten Christians—and asked, “You “People give—they give a lot.” and bringing food. Siddiqui asked An- must be very happy?” Hafiz replied Siddiqui persisted: “We should send

them money from here so that they can your tongue, say “Ahh,” spread your legs, different ways. Izhar watched an elevated buy guns.” turn around, squat, cough. train that was visible from his window; Hafiz replied, “Huh. Huh.” Once a week, the Khans were per- he read, and reread, the graffiti on his Siddiqui tried again: “Don’t they send mitted a fifteen-minute phone call with walls, and he did pushups until he could or not?” family. After six months, they gained the perform fifteen hundred a day. Irfan was “They do send,” Hafiz said. “But not right to receive weekly visits. Irfan and denied a request to attend the jail’s in this way that you send it in the name his wife agreed to tell their children, aged job-training courses but was eventually of the Taliban. There will be a certain five and four, that their father was on as- granted a radio. He looked forward to person of yours over there. . . . You will signment in a high-tech lab, which ex- Saturday, when National Public Radio send it to him.” Then, later in that con- plained why they would see him in a broadcast “Car Talk” and “Wait Wait . . . versation, Hafiz uttered a fateful state- jumpsuit, behind a plexiglass partition. Don’t Tell Me.” Their father, who was ment: “People have given me in small The story held until his daughter, watch- often disoriented, spent much of his time amounts. I added some from my side.” ing television, saw a man in jail wearing in bed. At night, the sons were awak- Siddiqui asked for confirmation: “And a jumpsuit. She told her mother gently, ened by the sound of their father pray- all the money is for Taliban?” “I don’t think Papa is working in a lab.” ing in his cell. “Yes, it’s for Taliban.” On days when the Khans did not go to the courthouse, each spent twenty- s Irfan Khan and his attorneys ex- t Miami’s Federal Detention Cen- three hours alone in his cell, an increas- A amined the case in preparation for A ter, the Khans were placed in sol- ingly routine, and controversial, arrange- trial, they noticed inconsistencies. During itary confinement, in the Special Hous- ment for defendants who have yet to be Irfan’s first visit to court, Assistant U.S. ing Unit, or S.H.U. In their cells, the tried. In October, 2011, five months Attorney Chris Gregg had said that father and the two sons were not per- after the Khans were placed in the Western Union records “plainly stated” mitted to communicate with one an- S.H.U., Juan Méndez, the United Na- that Irfan sent money to Akbar Hussein, other. As months passed, they moved tions Special Rapporteur on Torture, whom Gregg described as the Taliban mainly between two locations: their cells presented a study in which he concluded commander in Kaboswat, Pakistan. At and a room where they were allowed to that the United States and other coun- the time, Irfan was mystified, but now, meet lawyers and see court documents. tries were using pretrial solitary confine- months later, he examined the Western Whenever they entered or left the doc- ment to pressure defendants into ac- Union record and noticed that it made ument room, they were strip-searched cepting plea bargains. Hafiz and Izhar no mention of Hussein the Taliban com- side by side, separated by curtains. Since Khan were offered a plea, but they re- mander. It listed the name and govern- the father didn’t speak English, Irfan jected it. ment-I.D. number of his wife’s uncle, translated the guards’ instructions through After nine months in solitary, the Akbar Hussain, a retired biology profes- the curtain: Raise your arms, stick out Khans had responded to isolation in sor, who had taught at local universities. There were other elementary mis- takes. The F.B.I. cited a phone call in which Irfan said he would send his fa- ther the “thing.” Investigators alleged that “thing” referred to a list of money transfers to the Taliban, although the F.B.I. had taped a phone call explaining that it was a list of nursing schools for a friend hoping to study in the U.S. To argue that Irfan took steps to “conceal” money transfers, a prosecutor had said that they were “structured to be just under one thousand dollars to avoid suspicion.” But prosecutors had a recorded phone call in which Irfan told his father that he kept transfers under a thousand dol- lars in order to avoid higher Western Union fees. Irfan’s lawyer, Michael Caruso, who has since become the fed- eral public defender for the Southern District of Florida, told me, “This case was stunningly weak.” For months, Caruso and another pub- lic defender, Sowmya Bharathi, argued that Irfan should be allowed out on bail. In April, 2012, the court agreed. After more than ten months in solitary confine- Izhar’s case: a “judgment of acquittal,” ment, Irfan was released to await trial, the determination that the evidence with an electronic monitor on his ankle. against a defendant is so lacking that no (He and his wife told the kids that it reasonable jury could convict. That ac- was measuring his blood pressure.) On tion occurs in fewer than one in every June 13, 2012, shortly before the trial thousand federal cases. The judge said, was to begin, prosecutors abruptly “I do not believe in good conscience that dropped all the charges against him. They I can allow the case to go forward against provided no explanation, and they de- Izhar Khan.” After sixteen months in clined to comment for this article. solitary confinement, and four in the jail’s Irfan tried to re-start his life. He had general population, Izhar was released. lost his job as a programmer, and he On his first day back at the mosque, he couldn’t make the payments on the Sub- addressed four hundred worshippers; he urban, so he had to give up the limo believed that he had been charged “be- service. While he was in jail, his wife cause of the way I look, my scary-look- found a note on their front door, in En- ing beard.” He made brief comments to glish: “We don’t want to see any Tali- the press—he joked that he had a lot of ban in this apartment.” (She asked me basketball to catch up on—and then he not to publish her name or the names dropped out of sight. of the children, for fear of retaliation.) This spring, I visited Izhar at the They found a new place to live, a quiet mosque. To help pay for his defense, he house, shaded by a banyan tree, but some had sold his house and his car. He now friends still worry about being associ- sleeps in the office, or in a converted stor- ated with her. “They blocked my num- age room in an unused bowling alley ber, and then they came to the house next door. Shortly after the arrests, a and they told me—not all of them, but group of men and women carrying Amer- some—that we are scared, so please do ican flags had picketed the mosque; one not call us,” she said. man wore a T-shirt that said “No Jihad When I asked Irfan how he made in Our Backyard.” But now the protest- sense of the experience of being accused ers were gone, and Izhar said that he had and released, he said, “Did you ever see been touched by the support of his neigh- the ‘Seinfeld’ finale?” He reminded me bors. I was struck by his calmness. “They that Jerry Seinfeld and his friends were are doing their job,” he said of the F.B.I., put on trial. “It was such a baloney case,” but it had changed his view of law en- he said. “Mine was very similar.” forcement. “I was always confident, doing After the charges against Irfan were whatever I’m doing, because I’m not dismissed, attention shifted to his father doing anything wrong,” he said. “There’s and his brother. But as soon as Izhar’s nothing I have to worry about, because trial began, on January 4, 2013, the case I knew that they knew everything. But against him showed signs of overreach after the case I realized that is not really as well. Although Assistant U.S. Attor- true.” He excused himself to lead the af- ney John Shipley described the Khans, ternoon prayer. Then we went to a strip in court, as “an entire family that has par- mall in Coral Springs for hamburgers. ticipated in extreme violence,” there were He told me, “They were suspicious and no charges or evidence suggesting that they arrested us. Up to that point, I have any of them had participated in violence. no problem. But then, once they real- In all the recorded calls, Izhar never men- ized, and they knew that I wasn’t send- tioned the Taliban or militant activity. ing millions of dollars, like I told them, His lawyer, Joseph Rosenbaum, noted and everything was clear, why did they that, when the father and son were se- decide to continue with that? Just to save cretly recorded after their arrests, Izhar their reputations?” was heard encouraging his father to coöperate with investigators, saying, “You hat left only the trial of the father. just tell them everything.” Rosenbaum TKhan was charged with two counts compared the case to a car with “no bolts of conspiracy and two counts of provid- in it” and said, “When you drive it, it ing material support. The government falls apart.” conceded that it had no evidence that On January 17th, Judge Robert Scola any money had reached the Taliban, but agreed. He issued an unusual ruling in if a jury concluded that Hafiz “intended”

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 55 ing, “May God destroy them whoever it is, whether they are mischievous or if they are the Taliban or if they are from the government.” Judge Scola had agreed to allow witnesses to testify under oath from Pakistan, on a live video feed, but shortly after it began the video cut off and could not be restored. Scola said that he could not allow further delays, and the trial continued. The defense had lost eleven of its eighteen witnesses. In the end, despite the U.S. Attor- ney’s earlier statement to the press that the fifty thousand dollars was only the “tip of the iceberg,” there were no addi- tional revelations. One of the prosecu- tors, Sivashree Sundaram, told the jury that it was more than enough to convict. “We only need one—one example of “Remember, education pays, unless you end up an adjunct—like me.” even just conspiring,” she said. “The de- fendant attempted to get his money to •• the Taliban in this case, and that’s it.” She went on, “The ‘why’ of his actions is completely irrelevant.” for his money to reach the Taliban that adding, “I don’t even know if he still has In his closing argument, Hafiz’s law- would be enough to convict. To prove, the foot intact or not.” She said that Jamil yer, Khurrum Wahid, asked the jury to as the indictment put it, that Hafiz had was “hit along with Shah Dauran.” The see the imam as a man more likely to “called for an attack on the Pakistani As- name was crucial: Shah Dauran is also write a letter than to pick up a gun. “That sembly,” prosecutors introduced a phone the name of a senior Taliban leader, and is an old guy running a scam—but got call in which Hafiz cursed members of prosecutors held up the call as proof that scammed,” he said. The federal govern- the legislature and said, “These mother- Jamil was fighting for the Taliban. In an- ment had accused the Khans of a hei- fuckers in the Assemblies . . . may Allah other call about the wounded nephew, nous crime: supporting a conspiracy to cut them into small portions.” To argue Hafiz said that he would “arrange ten “murder, kidnap, or maim persons over- that he “called for the death of Pakistan’s thousand rupees for him”—about a hun- seas.” After two months in court, Wahid President,” they cited his references to dred and twenty dollars. Hafiz’s lawyers asked, “Where on any of these calls is the “gangster Zardari” and his curse “May described the money as help for an in- there a plot?” Allah hit them with his shells of wrath.” jured relative, but Shipley, the prosecu- On the fifth day of deliberations, the In Hafiz’s conversations with Siddiqui, tor, said that that was irrelevant: “It doesn’t jury in Hafiz Khan’s case returned with the informant, he had not only agreed matter whether they are family or not.” a verdict of guilty on all counts. He was to help get money to the Taliban but In his defense, Hafiz told the jury, sentenced to twenty-five years without boasted that his grandson was “associ- through a translator, that he had been parole. He is scheduled for release on ated with the Taliban.” He had said that dishonest with Siddiqui all along—about February 21, 2033, when he will be his daughter was a “devout follower,” and supporting the Taliban, about his daugh- ninety- eight. that the Taliban trained students at the ter and his grandson, about sending stu- Not long ago, I called a member of school in “fighting Americans.” (Away dents to be militants. He said, “There the jury, Carlos Dubon-Gutierrez, and from the informant, Hafiz was recorded are many times that I am agreeing with asked if it had been an easy decision. He warning his grandson that Siddiqui “talks him, but that does not mean that I mean said, “It wasn’t just clear-cut. We went nonsense” and should be indulged only it. I didn’t want to harm anyone.” His back and forth.” For him, the decisive because he planned to give money to the lawyers accused prosecutors of cherry- factor was the defense. “Very weak. They school. “He is a very nice person, but he picking words to create a sinister por- couldn’t prove that he didn’t do it,” he is also stupid,” Hafiz said.) trait, and brought up calls in which Hafiz said. The judge instructed the jury, “The Prosecutors focussed, most of all, on spoke warmly of America and against defendant does not have to prove his one of Hafiz’s relatives: a nephew named the Taliban. “We say here that it would innocence,” but Dubon-Gutierrez re- Abdul Jamil. At the height of the fight- be really good if America takes over the called that Hafiz’s lawyer “kept say- ing in Swat, Hafiz spent much of his whole of Pakistan,” he told a friend. He ing he was going to bring people in. time trying to find out who was safe and called Taliban leaders the “biggest bas- Never happened.” I reminded him that who was in danger. In a call with Jamil’s tards,” and wished that they would sur- the video transmission had failed. “What- sister, in July, 2009, he asked after her render. On another occasion, he wished ever it was that happened, it never came brother. “Jamil was badly shot,” she said, a pox on anyone harming civilians, say- through.” Regarding the jury’s decision

56 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 to convict, Dubon-Gutierrez said, “I think A Pakistani intelligence bureau searched Hanna, claims that the authorities de- if the defense had, maybe, played their for militant ties to Zeb, but “did not have tained Irfan for ten months based on “in- part, it would have been a lot harder.” anything against him,” according to a U.S. tentional or reckless disregard for the prosecutor’s report of the inquiry. Zeb, truth.” Government lawyers have replied afiz is in a federal medical center who was seventeen when he was indicted, that Irfan was properly arrested on the H in Butner, North Carolina, where is now in his second year of medical school. basis of probable cause, but they rejected he has been treated for several medical He had been scheduled to testify when Hanna’s requests to hand over documents, conditions, including asthma and skin in- the video link went down. By phone from citing national-security concerns. Two fed- fections. He communicates mostly by find- Peshawar, with the help of a translator, eral judges have faulted the government ing other prisoners who speak Urdu or Ar- he told me, “I heard the whole complaint for unnecessary delays. A senior F.B.I. abic. When I spoke to him recently, with against us, and I thought, This is just bi- official told me recently that the bureau the help of a Pashto translator, I asked if zarre. America is such a big country with considers the Khan case a success: “Now, he believed that he had broken the law. such big cities, and while there are all it wasn’t the success we wanted to get. We He rejected the question: “If sending these big terrorists in Pakistan, they’re would have liked to have gotten all three.” money is a crime, then people all around leaving them alone and going after us?” He went on, “I would argue that the Khan the world are committing a crime! They He suspects that American prosecu- case was a successful use of resources. We proved that I sent money, not that I sent tors didn’t understand the context of did what we had to do. We took it as far money to bad guys. I believe the Amer- what they were hearing on the wiretaps, as the evidence would allow us to take it, ican legal system will do justice in my when the Khans cursed the Army. Zeb both from a deterrent factor, as well as en- case. I believe that the United States was said, “If you go back to 2008 and ask any forcing the law.” built on the basis of equality and justice Swati, anyone from Swat, you’d have I asked Irfan why he stayed in Amer- and it will always be against unfairness.” found that they were all upset with the ica. Why not go back to Pakistan? He I asked him why he had said awful Army. The way they were carrying on, laughed. After his stint in custody, peo- things about Americans—about the lots of ordinary people were dying, were ple there would assume that he had struck Army helicopter crash and “fifty thou- being destroyed, were being damaged. a deal, he said. “Whether it’s your fam- sand” more deaths. Their conflict was with the Taliban, but ily or the police or the military or just “When Americans died, I talked about the Taliban weren’t the ones dying—the the local people, they’ll assume that you’re it, but I never spoke against them,” he common people were dying. So we were working for either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I.” said. That was spin, and he didn’t try to distraught—‘Why are you killing us?’ ” Besides, his son, who was born in Flor- defend it much. He wanted me to un- I asked if Zeb thought he would ever ida, visited Pakistan before kindergarten derstand that his real focus was the Pa- be able to come to the U.S. “Sir, if you and declared that he is never going back. kistani government. “I was angry at the look at all my phone calls, I had told my “He said, ‘There’s a lot of dust.’ ” Pakistani Army, because it doesn’t get grandfather over and over that I want to Irfan is driving a taxi again. He is proper information before it starts shoot- come to America,” he said. “I want to working the day shift, 5 A.M. to 5 P. M ., ing people on their missions,” he said. study there. I want to become a good for Super Yellow Cab, driving a Crown “You will cry if you do your own research doctor. I had said that. But I didn’t un- Victoria that used to be a police car and and find out what they have done to in- derstand that America could put together still has a chrome spotlight on the left nocent civilians.” a case like this against us. What kind of side of the windshield. If you don’t know I asked if he could have done any- people would do that?” his story, it’s difficult to distinguish Khan thing to avoid where he is today. from his peers. To a passenger in the “I have done nothing wrong,” he said. ate at night, after his wife and kids back seat, he is black hair, ear buds, and “The only thing that I might have done L have gone to bed, Irfan Khan lis- the collar of a golf shirt. wrong was saying things in anger.” tens to wiretapped phone calls from the From behind the wheel, Irfan marks Last fall, Hafiz’s lawyers appealed the case. Since his release, he has stopped time by noting changes in the cityscape— verdict to the Eleventh Circuit Court of watching movies and sitcoms and started what’s going up, what’s coming down. Appeals, arguing that the failure of the analyzing the evidence and sorting an- Now and then, he passes the old federal video link and disputes about translation notated transcripts into color-coded Excel building on Brickell Avenue, where he prevented them from mounting a full files. The more that Irfan thought about became a citizen, sixteen years ago. defense. In July, a three-judge panel up- his experience—the career interrupted, “Somebody told me that they want to held the conviction. The case remains the hundreds of strip searches, the iso- knock down that building. I was kind of on appeal. lation of his wife—the more he felt sad,” he said. He remembers taking the With so much attention on Hafiz and wronged. Searching for his name online oath for citizenship. “I held up my end his sons, it was easy to forget that two still brings up articles about terrorism. of the bargain, but they didn’t hold up other members of the family—Hafiz’s A bank had recently closed savings ac- theirs.” He went on, “You advertise it to daughter Amina and his grandson Alam counts that he had opened for himself the whole world: Hey, we’re the best Zeb—remain under indictment, as does and his children, and it declined to ex- country, we’re the best nation, we’re the the shopkeeper. They are unlikely to see plain why. best justice system. If you think about it, an American courtroom. Pakistani au- Irfan has sued the government for ma- the whole purpose of this country was thorities interrogated and released them. licious prosecution; his lawyer, Michael to protect people like us.” 

58 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ties of fewer than fifty thousand peo- SHOUTS & MURMURS ple. Let’s help horse owners protect what may be the quintessential American an- imal. And let’s not let bartenders—or WHY THE LONG FACE? anyone—demean the shape of their faces. (Silence.) BY JOHN KENNEY CLINTON: So far, we have a guy walk- ing into a bar. It’s funny. But it could be funnier. C’mon, guys. Be funny. punch line. We don’t say “punch line.” STAFFER 1: Does it have to be a guy CLINTON: I’m lost. walking into a bar? Could it be a woman? STAFFER 1: Same here. STAFFER 2: A transgender woman? CLINTON: A man is walking down STAFFER 1: We need to speak to that the street and bumps into a bar . . . a demographic. metal bar . . . hits his head . . . he’s O.K. STAFFER 3: Maybe it’s a woman. She And I’ll tell you why he’s O.K. He’s O.K. sees her friends, and they say, “Hey, because we passed the most significant Steve!” And she says, “It’s Stephanie now.” health-care reform in our nation’s his- STAFFER 1: That’s beautiful. tory. Should it have been single-payer? STAFFER 4: But, is it funny? Last week, Mrs. Clinton’s strategists acknowl- I think so. But thirty million Americans CLINTON: There’s nothing funny edged missteps . . . and promised that this fall the public would see the sides of Mrs. Clinton who never before had health insurance about discrimination. I will fight for the that are often obscured by the noise and dis- now have coverage for issues like a head rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people everywhere. tractions of modern campaigning. They want contusion from walking into a bar. (Silence.) to show her humor. —The Times. (Long silence.) STAFFER 1: What if the guy— STAFFER 3: I don’t think it’s a guy STAFFER 2: I’m sorry, but I really think Clinton campaign H.Q., Brooklyn. walking into a metal bar. we should be careful with pronouns. Hillary Clinton sits with several staffers. CLINTON: What? STAFFER 1: My bad. What if the in- STAFFER 1: Here’s something. Lots STAFFER 3: I think it’s a man walk- dividual walking into the bar—and this of jokes start with the line “A guy walks ing into a bar that serves alcohol. gets back to the idea of a punch line into a barn.” CLINTON: I don’t get it. which we spoke about earlier—what if CLINTON: I like that. That’s funny. STAFFER 2: Is there a metal bar in the individual sees Roseanne Barr? STAFFER 2: Bar. I think it’s “A guy this alcohol bar? STAFFER 2: Funny. Because of the walks into a bar.” STAFFER 3: I don’t think there’s a metal bar thing. It’s almost a homonym, I think. CLINTON: Bar? Why is that funny? bar anywhere in the story. It’s just a bar. STAFFER 1: What if he or she sees Are bars funny? CLINTON: So I just say, “A man walks Barbara Bush, whom people call Bar? STAFFER 3: I thought it was barn, too. into an alcohol-serving bar”? CLINTON: Why is Barbara Bush sit- STAFFER 4: What if a guy walks into STAFFER 1: I worry that it’s going to ting alone in an alcohol bar? a barn and sees a bar? seem like she’s urging people to drink. STAFFER 2: Are we sending the wrong CLINTON: That makes no sense. STAFFER 2: Agreed. I think we had signal about a revered former First Lady? STAFFER 2: Is that funny, though? something really strong with the barn. STAFFER 1: What if she’s sitting with Walking into a barn? STAFFER 3: Maybe add a punch line? Roseanne, and they’re drinking coffee? CLINTON: Barns are hilarious. It de- CLINTON: Right. Let’s circle back to STAFFER 2: And praying. pends on the barn, of course, as well as that. What is it, exactly? STAFFER 3: Is praying funny, though? the time of year. Barns can also be sad. STAFFER 3: I think it could be any STAFFER 2: There was that funny I’ve walked into barns in the heartland number of things. Like wordplay. Jim Carrey movie “Bruce Almighty.” of this great country, where jobs have STAFFER 1: I know: “A guy walks CLINTON: I like it. Get Jim Carrey. vanished and the American dream is into an alcohol bar and has a club soda.” STAFFER 1: Maybe it’s an A.A. meet- dead. CLINTON: Interesting. ing, and Roseanne fell off the wagon. (Long silence.) STAFFER 3: I think it’s more, like, “A Maybe Barbara Bush is leading a prayer. STAFFER 1 (Googling): It’s “bar.” Oops. horse walks into a bar, and the bartender CLINTON: With Jim Carrey. CLINTON: Let’s go with “bar.” says, ‘Why the long face?’ ” STAFFER 1: Yes. And maybe the bar STAFFER 3: Doesn’t something usu- STAFFER 1: Sorry, I’m really confused. is filled with recovering alcoholics. Im- ally come after that first line, though? STAFFER 2: Why is the bartender migrants. Mexicans. Everyone is Mex- Like, the . . . what’s it called . . . the punch? speaking to the horse? ican, except Barbara Bush and Rose- STAFFER 1 (Googling): Punch line. CLINTON: People. There are 9.2 mil- anne Barr and Jim Carrey. CLINTON: O.K. Well, let’s go with lion horses in America, according to the CLINTON: And I walk in and pour “A guy walks into a bar. Punch line.” Horse Council’s latest study on the U.S. them coffee and say, “Let’s stop building That’s funny. horse industry. More than seventy per walls. Let’s start building compassion.”  GARY TAXALI GARY STAFFER 3: No, no. I think we need a cent of horse owners live in communi- STAFFER 3: Funny stuff.

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 59 décor: “Jill’s apartment is Liberace, Ver- ANNALS OF MARKETING sace, like, la cucarachi. It’s like Ivana Trump. It’s got dangling things every- where. . . . If I were in Jill’s apartment PERFECT PITCHING for a weekend, by myself, I would feel like I’d taken a hit of acid.” Bethenny Frankel and the new breed of celebrity entrepreneur. According to Frankel, although her television career is her most visible pur- BY LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE suit, it’s not her most important one. “I went on the show single-handedly and exclusively for business,” she has said. During the first season of “The Real Housewives,” as the cameras rolled, she ordered a cocktail she’d come up with, which she called “the skinny girl’s mar- garita.” In 2011, she sold the Skinnygirl Margarita brand to the liquor conglom- erate Beam Suntory, the maker of Jim Beam, for a reported hundred and twenty million dollars. The sale made Frankel rich. It also ushered in an era in food marketing, inspiring female-focussed in- novations like Skinny Pop, Skinny Pizza, and the Skinny Flavored Latte. Frankel told me, “I turned a brand around in, like, a year on television and nobody even knew that I was doing it.” Since then, her life has had a bump- ier trajectory. She left “The Real House- wives” after three seasons to star in her own spinoff show, “Bethenny Ever After,” which chronicled her marriage to a phar- maceutical salesman and the birth of their child. She also hosted a daytime talk show, called “Bethenny.” The talk show failed. So did the marriage. This year, Frankel returned to “The Real Housewives of New York City,” which just ended its sev- enth season. “It was like the Hell Freezes he reality-television star Bethenny coholic drinks called Skinnygirl Cocktails. Over tour,” she told me. Frankel climbed into a black Frankel, who was wearing an em- As part of Frankel’s deal with Beam, T S.U.V. and addressed the driver. broidered green cocktail dress, stars on she retains the rights to use the Skinny- “Hi,” she said. “How are you? Can the Bravo reality show “The Real House- girl name for products other than booze. I have one of those candies?” wives of New York City,” part of a fran- (“I own Skinnygirl, but Beam paid me It was a Friday afternoon in SoHo, chise that includes iterations based in all this money to use her,” she told me. and Frankel and her director of business Orange County (the original), Atlanta, “I win.”) In the past five years, she has operations were on their way to a party. New Jersey, and Beverly Hills—each rolled out more than a hundred new prod- She unwrapped a hard candy and sucked one delivering a regional variation on ucts, or SKUs (pronounced “skews”)— on it thoughtfully. Though Frankel is the themes of friendship, intrigue, and mostly low-calorie foods, such as popcorn, forty- four, with a five-year-old daughter, occasional hair-pulling among a group chips, and salad dressing—in partner- she has the skinny-but-busty figure more of sometimes tipsy ladies of leisure. Fran- ship with national food conglomerates. commonly associated with lingerie mod- kel is something like the show’s screw- Her goals are imperial. “When Grey els and comic-book vamps than with ball heroine. She is a fast talker, and she Goose sold, they sold for two billion dol- middle- aged parents. As is often the case has a bit of Borscht Belt comedian in lars, but that’s it,” she said in the car. “You with Frankel, the party was not strictly her. Fans quote her “Bethenny-isms,” could never make a Grey Goose lip gloss for recreational purposes. She was pro- brassy sayings such as “Get off my jock!” or a hummus.” She went on, “I just got moting a line of premixed, low-calorie al- Her take on another Housewife’s home an e-mail today about the low-carb bread. ConAgra wants to do baked goods.” On “The Real Housewives,” Frankel promotes her Skinnygirl brand with zeal. Frankel’s deal with Beam requires her

60 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVIER GOKA to make promotional appearances for her ing Martinis using Skinnygirl’s Bare Honest Company, an online vender of liquor brand. In the car, she asked her Naked Vodka. “You girls have to decide toxin- free home products, which was re- employee, a polished blond twenty-six- if you want it dirty or clean. What do you cently valued at a billion dollars. year-old named Alexandra Cohen, “Is drink to go out?” Frankel’s day job will never bring the this for Spicy Lime or Pinot?” Cohen ex- The bloggers were prepared for this kind of status that comes with opening plained that it was for neither. Frankel question. One answered, “I’m a red-wine a tentpole movie. But it does allow her would be meeting a group of life-style girl, but when I go out I get white wine, to market her Skinnygirl products on bloggers who had been hired by Beam St. Germain, soda, and lemon juice.” camera. According to a Nielsen report, to act as “influencers” for Skinnygirl Cock- “I love that,” Frankel said. “You should reality shows are responsible for almost tails. “These are ten bloggers who are name it. It should be your signature drink.” sixty per cent of all product placement going to share with every single follower She lifted her glass. “We’re, like, at an on prime-time television. And that’s not that they met you, and that you’re inspi- A.A. meeting, but drinking,” she mused. counting informal product placement, of rational,” Cohen said. She added, firmly, “Cheers, everyone!” the kind pioneered by Frankel and the “It’s important that you message the right Kardashians. things to these people. Because these peo- rankel’s twin vocations are, in some Brian Dow, an agent at the Agency ple have a ton of followers.” F sense, the same. “I’m a marketer,” she for the Performing Arts, who has repre- “O.K.,” Frankel said. “Why did they told me, explaining her role in business sented both Frankel and Kim Kardashian, only pick ten, though?” She’s active and in television. “I know how to com- explained the genre’s magic: “Reality is on Twitter, but the nuances of social municate to people, and I think that’s an opportunity to bring someone into media sometimes escape her. (An what marketing really is.” It’s also an apt your life—to bring them on the journey agency called DM2 manages most of definition of celebrity. In 1944, the Ger- with you.” He gave a pop star as an ex- her social-media accounts.) man sociologist Leo Löwenthal coined ample. “Ashlee Simpson did a reality show “Because they’re the most influential.” the phrase “idols of consumption” to de- about cutting her first album. And, when “Influential of what?” scribe the burgeoning celebrity culture. it came out, that album did gangbusters. “Messaging of cocktails,” Cohen said. With their clear skin and fabulous ward- The audience went on the journey of “Like, if you tweet something about a robes, stars give us something to aspire making an album, and they completed cocktail, it goes to 1.4 million people. to—and an excuse to buy stuff we don’t the journey by buying the album.” One of these girls tonight—Lauryn really need. “The Real Housewives of New York Evarts, of the Skinny Confidential—she Famous people of various stripes have City” is an ensemble show, and Frankel’s has half a million followers. It’s a blog. moved product: Mark Twain sold flour; promotional strategy can ruffle feathers. And she worships you. She’s, like, ‘I want Babe Ruth sold Pinch Hit tobacco; Bette In the show’s third season, which aired in to be the next Bethenny Frankel.’ ” Davis sold shampoo. But, for the most 2010, Frankel has drinks with another The car pulled up outside the James part, these stars were shilling for other Housewife, LuAnn de Lesseps, a former Hotel, where the women were greeted people. Frankel’s career is an example of catalogue model who was married to a by a Beam marketing executive and the an increasingly common phenomenon, French count and is known on the show bloggers, who looked like younger ver- in which the pitchmen are starting their as the Countess. Frankel arrives driving a sions of Frankel. They wore brightly col- own businesses. Gossip blogs have a word car that says “Skinnygirl” in huge letters. ored cocktail dresses and had well-honed for these celebrity-C.E.O. types: “celeb- personal brands. Evarts said, “I’m all about preneurs.” Gwyneth Paltrow, who has re- DE LESSEPS: That’s hysterical. You drive that around town? having kale in one hand and champagne fashioned herself as a life-style guru, FRANKEL: Yeah. I mean, if you can wear in the other. Balance, balance, balance!” started Goop, which sends out an e-mail an Hermès belt, I can [drive] a Skinnygirl car. Looking around the party room in newsletter that combines shopping guides DE LESSEPS: They’re not paying me for the the hotel’s basement, Frankel delivered with health advice like “a combination Hermès belt, though. FRANKEL (as a talking head): Exactly, ya critiques in the form of a comic riff: “The of infrared and mugwort steam cleanses dumb drag queen! They’re not paying you! lighting in here! I feel like we should seal your uterus.” The company recently That’s the point! the windows and turn on the gas. It’s de- opened its first pop-up stores. Kate Hud- pressing! Jesus Christ. If we sell a couple son co-founded a line of workout cloth- Cultural norms have changed since more bottles, maybe we could get better ing called Fabletics, whose parent com- then, and Frankel’s Skinnygirl business lighting.” A Beam employee rushed to pany, JustFab, aims to take on the has been a part of that shift. In the most adjust the dimmer. yoga-wear behemoth Lululemon. “This recent season of “The Real Housewives,” Frankel can be difficult on “The Real is my life—wearing leggings,” Hud- product placement has become the rule, Housewives”—in one episode this past son told People. And, this spring, Reese and Frankel acts as a mentor to her fellow- season, she refused to eat sushi at a fellow- Witherspoon launched Draper James, a Housewives, helping with their fledgling Housewife’s dinner party, saying, “I only Southern- inspired Web site, whose motto nail-polish brands and fashion lines. eat shellfish”—but, when it comes to pro- is “You only get one life, so let’s make it The life-style bloggers at the James Hotel motional gigs, she has a rough-and-ready pretty.” (It sells things like sixty-five- were hoping for similar insights into attitude. She got behind the bar and began dollar cocktail-napkin sets.) The most how to monetize their more modest fame making drinks. “We’re starting off with successful celebpreneur to date is prob- on social media. Gaby Dalkin, a twenty- an old Hollywood cocktail,” she said, mix- ably Jessica Alba, who co-founded the nine-year-old from Los Angeles who

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 61 runs the blog What’s Gaby Cooking?, “Naturally Thin.” “I was hustling,” she the bloggers, “I made a decision: if I was said, “Our lives look super glamorous on told the bloggers. “I was at polo in going to do it, then I was just going to do Instagram, but they’re not.” She added, the Hamptons. I walked in, and Jill it.” She brings the cameras along when, “Bethenny was a huge inspiration. She’s Zarin”—one of the original New York in an apparent ambush, she demands that sassy and down to earth. And she’s a hus- Housewives—“who I knew only be- Colodne tell her when they’ll be moving tler.” Dalkin started out as a private chef, cause she’d come up to me at events in together. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they and she watched Frankel’s rise on “The and be, like, ‘You were on “The Ap- break up, and she is frank about being Real Housewives.” “I was, like, I can do prentice”! Oh, my Gawd!,’ she came single and desperate. In one scene, she that if she can.” up to me and said, ‘I’m doing a show, walks around tipsily at a party in the “Manhattan Moms.” You have to meet Hamptons, amusing her fellow-House- he bloggers finished their Martinis the producers.’ ” Despite not being a wives by shouting, “Is anyone remotely Tand sampled Tangerine Dreams, mom, Frankel auditioned. “I remem- interested in me here at all? Is anyone at- drinks made with Skinnygirl’s Tangerine tracted to me in this entire crowd?” Vodka, which had a medicinal aftertaste. The real source of Frankel’s needi- Then they formed a semicircle in front ness is deeper. She grew up around race- of Frankel, and she related the Skinny- tracks in upstate New York, Long Island, girl Margarita creation story. and Queens—in an environment less “I just never had a signature cock- Belmont Stakes than O.T.B. Her father tail,” Frankel said. “I wanted a go-to was a successful horse trainer, and he left drink. I’d have a terrible hangover after the family when she was four. He had drinking all the sugary margaritas I little contact with his daughter, and wanted. Or I would feel so deprived after ber the first casting tape of her,” Andy died in 2009. She no longer speaks to drinking, like, raspberry vodka on the Cohen, the executive producer of the her mother, an interior designer, who rocks. So I would just go out and tell “Real Housewives” franchise, told me. married another horse trainer. Frankel the bartenders to make a drink the way “She was so funny. She was a real New describes her childhood as dysfunctional, that I wanted it: clear tequila, fresh lime York woman trying to make it happen. marked by “gambling, drinking, drugs, juice, and a tiny splash of whatever— She ticked a lot of boxes for Bravo at eating disorders, and physical abuse.” Cointreau, triple sec.” the time. She was a natural-foods chef (Her mother says that Frankel was treated Officially, Frankel is a “natural-foods and into fashion.” well.) In an episode of “The Real House- chef,” a calling she arrived at after years Frankel was offered a part on the show wives,” she and Zarin visit the Aqueduct in the Hollywood servant class, juggling that became “The Real Housewives of racetrack, for a “birthday lunch” with jobs and acting auditions. She worked as New York City.” An agent warned her friends of Frankel’s father, who look like a personal assistant to the hotel doyenne that it would be a “train wreck, with peo- extras from “The Sopranos.” One of them Kathy Hilton, and her duties included ple being drunk—which is what it ended addresses an African-American racetrack chauffeuring Hilton’s daughters, Paris up being,” Frankel said. Nevertheless, she employee as “Black Joe.” The atmosphere and Nicky, home from school. Frankel came to a conclusion: “It’s not that easy is creepy, and you begin to understand told the bloggers, “We used to go to For- to get on television, and I’m writing this Frankel’s desperation. ever 21. That was our big trip, and we’d book, and I can use it as a platform.” The On “The Real Housewives,” she barely go to the pet store, because Paris loved bloggers nodded with approval. mentions “Naturally Thin,” but when the ferrets and animals.” “The Real Housewives of New York book was published, during the show’s Frankel got her first big break in 2005, City” was supposed to be about “the so- second season, it became a best-seller. as a contestant on “The Apprentice: Mar- ciology of the rich,” according to Cohen— The experience taught her something: tha Stewart.” On the show, Frankel is a a peek into the cloistered world of Upper marketing is personal. “People don’t just doe-eyed Martha wannabe with a Rhoda East Side privilege. Frankel didn’t exactly turn on the TV and start buying shit be- Morgenstern accent, who, in the course fit the bill. During the show’s first sea- cause you’re selling it,” Frankel told me. of a few weeks, proves herself to be a ca- son, she lives in a cluttered one- bedroom “I was honest about being broke and pable businessperson, creating an ad spot apartment, and has what appears to be being alone, and people connected to me. for an airline and organizing a charity an awkward relationship with a new boy- Which is why, in turn, they connected to event. In the show’s finale, she begs Stew- friend, a Wall Street executive named the books and products.” art to hire her: “I’m looking for a life,” Jason Colodne. She is presented as an The more Frankel reveals, the more she says. “Not just a job. Not just a step- aspiring Housewife. “I want to be mar- her star seems to rise. By the opening of ping stone. It’s different for me. It’s like ried to Jason, with one child,” she says at the third season, she’s posing nude for a I feel it.” Stewart passes. “Bethenny,” she one point. “But I can’t wait forever.” photo shoot on the terrace of a New York tells her, “you’re a showoff.” When the show started, Frankel said, skyscraper—the flashbulbs and her na- Frankel moved to New York and Colodne advised her to keep it profes- kedness forming a metaphor for her jour- began working as a private chef. She sional. “He was, like, ‘You’re a natural-foods ney. (The shoot is for PETA’s “I’d rather cooked for the actor Denis Leary, spent chef. You go on there, and you should be go naked than wear fur” campaign.) In a time on the party circuit, and started cooking.’ ” But the producers were more voice-over, she says, “I met someone and writing an anti-diet diet book, called interested in personal matters. She told I fell in love.” It’s another Jason—Jason

62 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 Hoppy, the pharmaceutical salesman. In spokesperson for a Skinnygirl line,” she in the liquor market. Because most li- a subsequent episode, the cameras are in- said. She had one hit—Frangelico paid quor is consumed by men, it has tradi- side Frankel’s apartment as she sits on her four hundred thousand dollars to cre- tionally been marketed to them. “There the toilet, pulls down her pants, and takes ate and market a drink called the Skin- has never been a spirit as successful of a pregnancy test. “Holy shit balls!” she nygirl Frangelini—but none of the major any major scale that’s low-calorie,” Bren- exclaims. “I’m pregnant!” tequila companies were interested in mak- dan Lynch, the Skinnygirl brand direc- ing the Skinnygirl Margarita. She cred- tor at Beam Suntory, told me. Sales of rguably, the best decision Frankel its Brian Dow, her former agent, with or- the Skinnygirl Margarita have dropped A made regarding the show was not chestrating her first deal. He put her in off since the initial rush, but Lynch her openness before the camera but the touch with David Kanbar, a former ex- said that Beam has made up for that by terms of her contract. For the entire first ecutive at Skyy, the vodka company, and expanding into low-calorie wines and season of “The Real Housewives,” Fran- Kanbar and Frankel went into business new cocktails, such as the Sweet’arita. kel was paid seventy-two hundred and together with the premixed cocktail— “Women found it empowering that they fifty dollars. But the contract included a you poured it straight from the bottle. Its could have a drink just for them.” clause—which later became known as label featured the silhouette of a pony- Cultivating a fan base takes legwork, the Bethenny Clause—saying that Bravo tailed woman who didn’t look like Fran- and Frankel spends a lot of time on the would receive a percentage of any busi- kel but seemed to embody all her envi- road, doing meet-and-greets, book sign- ness she promoted on the show. Frankel able contradictions: skinny but busty, ings, and “bottle signings.” Her fans have refused to sign it. “I said, ‘You can pay sexy but powerful, “healthy” but having a look, she told me: “Sensible, aspira- me seventy-two hundred and fifty dol- fun. In 2010, Skinnygirl was the fastest- tional. I’m always smelling perfumes. lars, but you’re not taking any of my busi- selling spirits brand in the U.S. The moms look nice. They aren’t par- ness!’ ” According to Frankel, Bravo gave Lasting businesses aren’t built from ticularly edgy and cool, but they like that in, a concession that, these days, networks mere curiosity—the product matters, too. the brand is fun and flirty. It’s girly, but rarely make, but Cohen told me that there Stone pointed out that, for a brand to in a cool way.” They usually demonstrate were not, as rumored, agreements stipu- succeed, there also has to be “white space” an up-to-date knowledge of Frankel’s lating that Frankel be allowed to pro- in the marketplace: “If I went to Kohl’s life, asking questions like “How’s your mote her products on the show’s recent right now and said, ‘I’ve got a line of ap- daughter?” or “How’s Cookie?” (Cookie season: “People are very cynical.” parel,’ they’d say, ‘I’ve got Daisy Fuentes, is her Lhasa Apso mix.) In the show’s sixth episode, Frankel and that’s doing well. I don’t need it.’ One day, I accompanied Frankel to has drinks with de Lesseps and orders There’s got to be some point of view, a bottle signing at a liquor store that is her signature tequila cocktail. She did an some need.” With the Skinnygirl Mar- part of a Stew Leonard’s supermarket impression of de Lesseps for the blog- garita, Frankel had found a white space in Yonkers, New York. When Frankel gers, putting on a husky voice: “She was, like, ‘Whoa, you’re getting tequila? What is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s a skinny girl’s margarita.’ ” She paused. “I remember, I just kind of knew it was a good name.” The concept caught on. “I would go into bars, and bartenders were, like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s the most popular thing! Every girl comes in and asks for it.’ ” According to Michael Stone, the C.E.O. of Beanstalk, a licensing agency, turning fame into sales is trickier than it seems: “There has to be a logical con- nection between celebrity and product.” He added, “I’ve often said to people, if Tom Hanks walked into my office and said, ‘I want to license my name for a line of product,’ I’d say, ‘What product makes sense?’ He’s one of the biggest stars out there, but I can’t think of one.” The Skin- nygirl Margarita meant that Frankel was associated with something concrete. She said, “I’m thinking, Sarah Jessica Parker could have done that with the cosmopolitan! They didn’t monetize it.” Frankel began calling around to te- quila companies. “I just wanted to be a “I find the balloons easier to grip when they’re slightly deflated.” I expressed enthusiasm about the calorie count. Another employee said, “You’re getting thinner as you’re eating them.” Visiting Frankel feels oddly famil- iar when you have already spent many virtual hours in her home. “Bethenny Ever After” examines her domestic life with excruciating intimacy. Cameras are present in the bedroom when Fran- kel’s water breaks, and in her sessions with her therapist when she discusses her relationship problems with Jason Hoppy—a man with a hollow-eyed ex- pression and an unsettling habit of call- ing her Mama. Frankel now describes the show as “a runaway train that be- “Honey, he’s our son. Now go and get some change.” came about my relationship.” Readers of Page Six are aware that her divorce •• from Hoppy got ugly, and that he has refused to move out of the gigantic apartment they shared in Tribeca; until arrived, there was a line of shoppers ern, girly aesthetic: a slate fireplace, recently, she has been living in corpo- waiting to meet her. A couple, Rob and chandeliers, a bowl full of decorative rate apartments and hotels. (A source Gina Cristino, were near the front of balls in a color that fans online refer to close to Hoppy says that Frankel vol- the line. “It’s been a lifelong dream to as “Skinnygirl red.” Much of the furni- unteered to move out.) “The last two meet her,” Gina said. “We’re excited to ture looks like it could have come from years have been the most difficult in try all the different flavors.” She added, a CB2 catalogue—and, Frankel told my life by far,” she told me. “I’ve always wanted to start my own me, it had. “Every single thing in this Frankel’s new problems don’t always business. She’s smart, how she took an entire house was purchased online,” she win her sympathy. In the season of “The idea and turned it into something.” said, with pride. Real Housewives” that just ended, fans Terry Bose and Jennifer Torsiello Frankel was at the head of a dark- objected to her comment that she is “the greeted Frankel as if she were a neigh- wood dining-room table, her hair wet, wealthiest homeless person in Manhat- bor. “Hi, ladies!” she said, signing their wearing a fluffy white bathrobe, an hour tan.” I asked Frankel if she was concerned margarita bottles. Bose, a middle-aged before a party. A makeup artist put the that her life might be less compelling woman with big sunglasses on her head, finishing touches on her face, while a now that she’s successful. “No,” she said. told her, “I’m not a skinny girl, but I like few young female assistants sat around “Because it’s still me, and I’m still crazy your stuff.” Afterward, Bose said that her, typing on MacBooks. Alexandra and obsessing about things. . . . And, if she appreciates Frankel’s salty language. Cohen had been waiting to ask her a you put me with crazy people, things “She’s got a mouth like me.” question about a new product: cucum- happen.” She considered. “And there is They listed Skinnygirl products ad- ber-dill pretzel thins. “O.K., tell me,” an arc now, because it’s, like, O.K., I’m miringly. “I like her Skinnygirl Stevia Frankel said. Cohen wanted to sell the the girl that did that Skinnygirl cocktail, in coffee,” Torsiello, who was wearing snacks in mini packages that said “100 but what else we got? And I’ve opened Uggs, said. “Those bars—snack bars. Calories” on the label. “I think the up all these cans. Let’s make all those She’s practically a billionaire.” smaller bags are commercially viable, things cook.” I asked Torsiello if she was a fan of because they’re more grab-and-go,” Cohen Frankel’s original agreement, for Skin- other celebrity brands. She mentioned said, as she handed Frankel a sample nygirl Cocktails, was an equity deal: she Kate Hudson’s athletic line. package. “Are you comfortable with the and Kanbar split ownership of the com- Bose scoffed. “She’s a fool. She’s phony. hundred-calorie button? Sometimes pany. But the new incarnation of Skin- Bethenny, she’s got a purpose.” people are averse.” nygirl is, for the most part, a brand- I asked what Frankel’s purpose was, Frankel thought the mini bags would licensing business, in the tradition of and Bose thought for a minute. Then she be good “in the aisle of Costco, for the Kathy Ireland and Martha Stewart. “I said, “Her purpose is less calories.” moms.” control the intellectual property,” Fran- Cohen nodded. “I think it’s cute,” kel says. Manufacturers create the prod- visited Frankel at her apartment, a she said. She handed the package to uct and pay a fixed royalty rate to license I two-bedroom in SoHo, where she me. The pretzels were round and thin— the Skinnygirl name—and the image of and her daughter, Bryn, had just moved, like Communion wafers covered with the skinny woman. In a typical con- post-divorce. While spacious, it does onion powder. tract, the licensee pays Frankel between not suggest moguldom. It has a mod- “Good, right?” Frankel said. eight and ten per cent of the wholesale

64 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 revenue. Her agent, Perry Wolfman, at does not exist in Middle America,” of protein bars. “Most of them are about C.A.A., manages her licenses and seeks he said. under forty years old,” Lau said. “They out new deals. Frankel took his point. But she have at least twenty-five thousand dol- Frankel said that this is the way she rejected his suggestion that the pro- lars in income.” likes it. Given her position as both C.E.O. spective drink be sold in sixteen-ounce Lau clicked to a slide labelled “Brand and “talent,” she doesn’t want to take on cans. “Women don’t want to hold a Awareness.” According to a survey, most management responsibilities. “I don’t want can like that.” people describe the Skinnygirl brand as two hundred employees, and a P.R. de- “aspirational” and are surprised to find partment in the corner, and people steal- here’s a difference between being a that its products’ prices are relatively low. ing office supplies.” For the most part, Tbrand and creating a brand. These They discussed the messaging behind she has partnered with corporate brands days, the thinking in celebpreneur cir- the various competitor brands. “Like, that have pull with retailers like Walmart cles seems to be that it’s wiser to do the what does ‘Luna’ mean?” Frankel said. “I and Target. As for her contribution, she latter. Martha Stewart Living Omnime- mean, I know what it means, but—” said, “I’m the marketing person.” So far, dia, once valued at two billion dollars, Lau said, “Luna is a very crunchy, out- she’s never launched a traditional ad cam- sold this year for a fraction of that, fol- doorsy, Patagonia kind of girl.” paign. “I single-handedly compete with lowing years of mismanagement and its “So is Clif,” Frankel said. multibillion-dollar companies and their namesake’s stint in prison. The compa- Atkins and South Beach, they decided, advertising budgets,” she said. “I’m com- ny’s fate shows how risky it can be to are dated—“what your aunt and your peting with Ogilvy.” link a business to a public figure. The grandmother eat.” For the first time, the business of goal for Skinnygirl is to transcend Fran- Frankel allowed that Special K is Skinnygirl is not conducted at Frankel’s kel’s tenuous grip on fame. “similar” to Skinnygirl, “just a little less home. She has rented another apart- One day this spring, Frankel had a aspirational.” ment, several blocks away, with chevron- meeting in the Manhattan offices of a “Skinnygirl is like the younger, patterned carpets in Skinnygirl red, a nutritional-supplement company called hipper sister—like the cool new mom,” silk-screened portrait of the New York Corr-Jensen, to discuss her line of Skin- Lau said. Housewives in the style of Andy War- nygirl protein supplements: bars and a Skinnygirl bars were at thirty-four- hol, and a bedroom in back, for watch- shake. Frankel looked polished, in a navy per-cent brand awareness, meaning that ing TV. She has six employees, who sit Alaïa dress and patent-leather heels. The thirty-four per cent of Walmart custom- facing one another at white IKEA desks, office walls were lined with containers of ers had already heard of the brand, even managing Frankel’s schedule and con- protein powder. In the conference room, though the store did not yet stock them. ducting frequent taste tests. My opin- she was joined by the company’s C.E.O., “It’s amazing,” Frankel said. “Balance ions of the products varied. I found the Matt Hesse, a fit man with a five-o’clock has been around easily ten years.” Sparklers—flavored water—to be nau- shadow, and an array of marketing peo- Hesse agreed. “I think this is very seating: full of artificial flavors that re- ple. They talked about trends in snack- profound,” he said. “Kind is a four-hun- minded me of gas-station fuzzy navels. ing, like the current interest dred-million-dollar brand, The candy products, on the other hand, in gluten-free options. “I think about, and Skinnygirl is with - were tasty. Frankel, a reformed sugar- it will be a fad,” Frankel said. in one percentage point.” free-candy addict, told me that the trick (They nevertheless decided to The meeting was success- is that they are made with real sugar, in put “gluten-free” on the pro- ful: in November, Walmart will low amounts. “I wanted to make a better- tein bars’ packaging.) begin selling the bars in its for-you candy that doesn’t have to be A pile of Skinnygirl protein “active nutrition” section. They gross and made with baby laxatives and bars was on the table. They had will join other Skinnygirl gives you the craps.” a red-and-white label, and the products: cocktails, “flavor en- Frankel dreams up products by draw- silhouetted woman was wear- hancers”—syrups that create ing on her own instincts and also think- ing gym clothes and holding fruit-flavored water—Spar- ing about the needs of “Costco moms.” an apple. Frankel selected a klers, popcorn, and salad dress- Beef jerky “is huge right now,” she told chocolate-chip-cookie- dough-flavored ing. Carmen Bauza, the vice-president at me. “I want to make it more tender, high bar, broke off a piece, and munched on Walmart who made the deal, hopes that end, and skewed to women, in packets.” it. “So they all have the crispy texture?” the protein bars will benefit from the same Her instincts are not infallible. At a meet- she asked. “Last time, it was that more gender dynamic that helped Frankel in ing with the Arizona Beverage Com- cookie-dough texture.” the liquor business. “The big companies pany, her partner in Skinnygirl Sparklers, “Kind of Quest Bar,” Hesse said, nam- that are part of health and wellness, they’re she pitched a “recovery” drink, which she ing a competitor. mostly run by men,” Bauza said. “Shakes described as “if the Master Cleanse, kom- “Yeah,” Frankel said. “People are ob- and proteins, if you look at that segment, bucha, Gatorade, and coconut water got sessed with those. Are some of them going I call it a testosterone segment.” Bauza married.” She added, “At my deli, the co- to be less crispy?” They were. told me that Frankel had said, “We’re conut waters, the kombucha, and all the A marketer named Jessica Lau queued missing a female angle here.” As for “The stuff are in their own section.” up a PowerPoint presentation. Skinny- Real Housewives,” Bauza said that she The Arizona executive balked. “That girl consumers are “medium to light users” hadn’t really watched it. 

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 65 Moore is fond of quoting Flaubert’s dictum “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

66 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC PROFILES WILD AT HEART

Julianne Moore and her imagination.

BY JOHN LAHR

ne day in mid-March, ment chairmanship at Columbia. “When sight is how she tries to negotiate her with patches of snow still am I ever going to get any writing public life. “I try to make myself small,” O mottling Brooklyn’s side done?” Georgette asked her husband. she told me. “I try not to call attention streets, I went to meet Ju- “Look—I’m already breaking out in a to myself. ” The novelist Michael Cun- lianne Moore on the set of “Maggie’s rash.” The line wasn’t surprising, but ningham remembers going out for a Plan,” a comedy written and directed Moore’s pitch- perfect accent—Geor- coffee with Moore, who had starred by Rebecca Miller, in a town house on gette is Danish—was. in the 2002 Stephen Daldry movie Vanderbilt Avenue. Arriving exactly “You want to call Caleb to discuss based on his novel “The Hours.” As on time for the 8 A.M. call, I picked my the pros and cons of taking the chair- they stepped outside, he noticed that way past gaffers and gofers slouched manship,” John said. “Justine wants to she changed. “You just did something, on the stoop, working their phones and finish texting her friend. Am I right? didn’t you?” he asked. “She said, ‘No.’ I sucking on their morning Starbucks. Paul would love to play Ninja Revinja said, ‘You retracted your beauty, didn’t Inside, Moore was already shooting a on the iPad. And, believe it or not, I you?’ She said, ‘Oh, yeah, kind of,’ ” Cun- scene in the farmhouse kitchen, which even have a minor text I’d like to write ningham said. “She pulled something was sealed from view by a wall of ca- myself. What do you say we all stop pre- in. There was a glow that she’d ema- bles, cameras, and technicians. In the tending to have this close-knit family nated in the living room that she could crepuscular hubbub, Rachael Horovitz, dinner and be honest for five minutes? retract in the street.” one of the film’s producers, introduced Then we can go back to the bullshit.” Moore may have a star on the Hol- herself and ushered me downstairs to The scene, it turned out, was the mov- lywood Walk of Fame, but she exhib- a basement bedroom, where the pro- ie’s inciting incident, which would send its none of the imperialism of celebrity; duction team was hunched around a Georgette on a new career path and John she has no desire to make a spectacle video monitor wedged among ballet on a new romantic path. of her separation from others. “I don’t trophies, karate belts, and a turquoise- The choreography of ordinariness understand why that would serve you and-pink four-poster canopy bed. requires time as well as timing. The as a person or as an actor,” she said. Three weeks earlier, Moore had won scene was played, stopped, then played She is contained but not reserved; an Academy Award for her performance again, until even the onlookers had mem- her good manners are a form of non- in “Still Alice,” a movie about a high-fly- orized the lines, the moves, and the de- friction, intended to preëmpt envy while ing middle-aged linguistics professor livery, which got tighter with each take. inviting contact. “I don’t like playing who is in the process of losing her mem- When Miller stepped into the scene to antagonism,” Moore said to Miller, ory. In “Maggie’s Plan,” which premièred discuss adjustments with the actors, the after shooting a scene in which she this month at the Toronto International sound on the video monitor went sud- had to be aggressive with the title char- Film Festival, she was playing Geor- denly mute, taking away any prospect acter, Maggie (Greta Gerwig), a mar- gette, a high-flying middle-aged an- of overhearing Moore’s thoughts. As ital carpetbagger. “I feel I’m really like thropology professor who is in the the shoot wore on, a sort of soporific a Labrador—‘I mean no harm. I mean process of losing her family. On the haze settled over the spectators; around no harm,’ ” she told me. “I lead with monitor, Moore and Ethan Hawke, as midday, I momentarily lost track of friendliness. I feel that works for me. Georgette’s husband, John, an adjunct Moore on the monitor. As I tried to lo- I don’t want to be aggressive. I don’t professor of “ficto-critical anthropol- cate her, there was a rustling on the stairs want to push to be in a dominant sit- ogy” at the New School (“Nobody un- leading to the production office. When uation.” At the same time, she doesn’t packs commodity fetishism like you do,” I looked up, Moore was making her way retreat into herself. She’s present. She Georgette tells him at one point), were toward me, her thick red hair knotted listens. “She works by being completely serving up dinner to their two children: into a high bun that flapped like a squir- open to what’s outside her,” Miller said. Justine (Mina Sundwall), a bumptious rel’s tail. She thrust her cheek forward “When she’s with another actor, she’s thirteen-year-old, and Paul ( Jackson to be kissed. “You’re here. How are you? not closing him off so she can listen Frazer), a dreamy seven-year-old. This So nice to see you,” she said. It was the to what’s going on inside herself. She’s very contemporary family tableau— first time we’d laid eyes on each other. actually awake.” all four were conversing while working Although Moore, at fifty-four, is a As Moore stood chatting in the their digital devices—was interrupted current face of L’Oréal, she is no con- cramped production office—about Uber, by a call offering Georgette a depart- ventional glamour-puss. Hiding in plain the death of Mike Nichols, Wallace

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 67 ories of her legendary actress mother—a bravura performance, which won her the Best Actress Award at Cannes— Moore approached Cronenberg. “‘I love how you’re isolating us in the frame,’ ” Cronenberg recalled her telling him. “‘It really works for suggesting that all these characters are in a kind of isolated bub- ble and are so self-obsessed.’ ” “It was nothing that I’d talked to her about,” he said. “She could just see that I wasn’t doing over-the-shoulder shots. Every- body was isolated in their closeup. She saw that immediately, knew what it meant, knew why I was doing it. She’s totally aware of everything.”

oore may be aware of everything M that happens in the process of filmmaking, but she prefers to keep her own process a mystery. When, for in- stance, Cronenberg offered to show me her e-mails about her role in “Maps to “You think this is cool? I also don’t pay my taxes!” the Stars,” she asked him not to. “Much of it was about the ins and outs of phys- •• ical stuff . . . whether or not I should dye my hair blond, or if the production had enough money to make a wig, etc. etc.,” Shawn, who was returning from a va- After she left, the video-playback op- she e-mailed me. “I just felt that the ex- cation in Spain to be in the film—the erator, Max Frankston, explained that I change demystifies the process a little.” conversation turned to the Birkenstock had witnessed something that was es- Moore doesn’t like to rehearse. She sandals she was wearing. Horovitz pro- sential to Moore’s process. “Indepen- wants to be taken by surprise, and feels fessed to being a fan of that particular dent films are shot like television shows, that repetition can deaden the experi- style. “What size are your feet?” Moore with just a live monitor,” he said. But, ence. “She is protecting something ex- asked. “These probably would fit you. for this shoot, Moore had requested the tremely vital and untamed that she can You could take these. I have a pair playback operator: she preferred watch- unleash on camera,” Todd Haynes, in at home. So—you take these.” After ing video playback in the moment to whose films “Safe” (1995) and “Far from some back-and-forth, Horovitz accepted sitting through dailies at the end of the Heaven” (2002) Moore has given two Moore’s shoes. Before handing them day. “I feel like then you can do some- of her greatest performances, said. “She over, Moore took out her phone to show thing about it,” she told me later. “At doesn’t want to overthink, overplan, off the profile picture for her Twitter that time, I can figure it out. Dailies? overanticipate.” “I prepare very strin- account (she has more than six hundred Who cares. I’ve done it.” gently,” Moore told me. “I really know and forty thousand followers): an image Moore has a visual imagination as my lines. I really think about what I’m of her Birkenstock-sandalled feet. well as a mimetic one. It’s important for gonna do. Sometimes people think that Then she turned abruptly to the video her to see herself not just in the role but means I’ve already played the part in monitor. “I’m just going to look at play- also in the frame. “Acting is not all about my head. That’s not true. I know the back on the scene to get an idea of this feeling,” she said. “It’s not all about what’s parameters. Then, when the camera goes thing we just shot,” she said. With a on the inside. There’s a physicality to on, I’m ready to have an experience. I fierce, unsmiling focus she scrutinized what the frame is. Sometimes you want don’t want it to happen in my living the screen, like a pitcher watching for to see what story it’s telling.” Moore’s room. I want it to happen on camera.” the catcher’s sign. After a while, she performances, at once penetrating and A character exists for Moore only pivoted away from the monitor. “I just succinct, come from a calibration of once she exists on paper. “I hate it when wanted to see the rhythm,” she said. “It’s the character with the scale and pro- people pitch stuff,” she said. “That doesn’t O.K. It’ll be better when it’s cut.” The portion of what the camera is show- help me. Let me see the words.” Ac- scene was over, and so was Moore’s day. ing. Not long into the shoot of David cording to Bruce Wagner, who wrote She was off to take her then twelve- Cronenberg’s “Maps to the Stars” (2014), the screenplay for “Maps to the Stars,” year-old daughter, Liv, to the orthodon- a coruscating satire about Hollywood, Moore, who never reads stage direc- tist. (She also has a seventeen-year-old in which Moore played Havana Seg- tions, is “a brutal parser of the text.” To son, Caleb.) rand, a movie star persecuted by mem- generate emotion, she doesn’t call on

68 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 sense memory from her own life, as ac- Freckleface tales, which have sold more her in Louis Malle’s 1994 film “Vanya tors are often taught to do; instead, she than a hundred and fifty thousand on 42nd Street,” said. “She takes a mil- immerses herself in the circumstances copies in eight languages), her freckled itary approach to her very unusual job. of the character. “I have to find the place young alter ego “practices her monster,” Her orders are to turn into a complete where the character cries; I have to find a shadowy, horned, benign purple giant maniac on Tuesday at three o’clock in the place where she’s hurt,” Moore said. that is visible only to her and gives the afternoon. And so she guiltlessly (“Julianne Moore Loves to Cry,” a three- her the power to defeat whatever is does that.” André Gregory directed her minute YouTube montage from twenty weighing her down. Moore also cre- in the intermittent five-year workshop of her films, bears lachrymose witness ated two Freckleface Strawberry apps, of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” that led to to her claim.) which teach children how to take con- the Malle film. “What I loved—and what Even in the most fraught scenes, trol of their imagination—how to give was even intimidating at times—is that Moore’s work is highly technical. their inner monsters shape, color, and she’s like a roller coaster,” he said. “She’s “There’s nothing more awkward than sound. She can be similarly controlling talking about something like decorat- scenes that deal with sexuality,” Hawke with her own creativity. For instance, ing at rehearsal in one moment. The said. “Because if you have a fight scene when she was filming “The Myth of next moment, she’s careening into some you have a choreographer come in and Fingerprints” (1997), a movie about a territory you’ve never seen before. It’s do it. But if people want sexuality they’re dysfunctional New England family’s not that she acts the beast, but she has just, like, ‘O.K., let the actors go,’ like Thanksgiving gathering, the twenty- access to it.” “The nicest thing André you’re wild animals that are supposed six-year-old director, Bart Freundlich, ever said about me was ‘She’s Beauty to just do this stuff on call. And it’s very who had also written the screenplay, and the Beast,’ ” Moore told me. “I like difficult to do anything that has feel- made the rookie mistake of trying to the idea that nobody’s one or the other. ing to it that reads on camera.” But, for block a scene by telling Moore, then You can be the regular girl and you can a sex scene in “Maggie’s Plan,” he said, thirty-five, her motivation for the ac- be the monster at the same time. They’re “Julie had a distinct sense of ‘This needs tion. “I’ll move over there,” she snapped. one and the same. The beast doesn’t to be a two-shot, this needs to be a sin- “But don’t tell me why.” (“The director have to be an evil or a destructive thing. gle. It cuts here.’ She had very specific can tell you that you do it. Your job is to It’s about possibility and feeling and demands about where the scene ended figure out how to do it,” she said to me.) emotion and all of that stuff.” and where it would begin. And ‘No, In time, Freundlich not only came That duality is actually built into that’s not sexy, that’s not funny. That’s to understand Moore’s protective feroc- Moore’s face. “She’s more angular from gross.’ And she was dead right. And ity; he married her. “She’s one of those the profile and softer from the full on,” what is normally difficult became really, people for whom the portal to up there Cronenberg said. “So, just by turning really easy. There’s a math to everything is open, so you guard it the same way you her head, she can go from hard to soft. we do, to how emotions read, and she’s would guard your family, by being very She knows how to use that, too.” Al- acutely aware of it.” careful with your boundaries,” Freund- though Moore can be physically trans- Moore is fond of quoting Flaubert’s lich told me. “I pictured it like a pilot formed—as she was by her red bob wig dictum “Be regular and orderly in your light—this little flame that’s inside her. in “The Big Lebowski” (1998) and by life, so that you may be violent and orig- If she doesn’t let it get blown out by all a blond one in “Far from Heaven”— inal in your work.” And she insists on the talking and ideas that get expressed most of her shape-shifting is emotional. that regularity. “I’m incredibly bour- on a set, then she can ignite it at any Watch her in Paul Thomas Anderson’s geois,” she said. “And I don’t care. I’m time. Her No. 1 job is to pro- “Magnolia” (1999), as Linda, not wild. There’s nothing outrageous tect that, even if it means the faithless, drug-addicted about me. I’m really a pretty nice per- being prickly with you as a wife of a dying husband son. I am not erratic in my behavior. director.” Mark Ruffalo, who whom she’s come to love. As You know the kind of people who are co-starred with Moore in Linda waits at a pharmacy really irregular—they keep people off “The Kids Are All Right” for the prescription with balance that way. I’m not that kind of (2010), described her acting which she intends to kill her- person.” “Julie’s great adventure is her as “one hand in a boxing self, the young pharmacist imagination,” her younger brother, the glove and the other in an el- prattles on, “What exactly novelist Peter Smith, said. (Moore was bow-high velvet glove.” He you have wrong, you need born Julie Anne Smith; Anne is her added, “She has something pretty damn all this stuff?” Moore’s face goes from mother’s name, and Moore is her fa- fierce about her, forward-leaning and cold to stormy. “You motherfucker! You ther’s middle name.) “She understands aggressive. At the same time, she is filled motherfucker! You fucking asshole! Who the force and wildness of it. It’s a bless- with exquisite poise.” the fuck are you? Who the fuck do you think ing and a warning. It’s this big crazy Even to her fellow-actors, the emo- you are?” she snarls. “Where is your fuck- thing. It’s something that makes her feel tional volte-face between Moore’s off- ing decency? And then I’m asked fuck- really confident.” screen ordinariness and her onscreen ing questions . . . what’s wrong? You suck In a children’s book that Moore wrote extraordinariness can be confounding. my dick, that’s what’s wrong, and you, in 2009, “Freckleface Strawberry and “She comes from a military background,” you fucking call me ‘lady.’ Shame on you! the Dodgeball Bully” (one of a trio of Wallace Shawn, who co-starred with Shame on you! ” This blistering moment,

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 69 in which Linda forces her own shame Army helicopter pilot and paratrooper face of the marriage. “My mother felt onto someone else, shows Moore’s al- in the 182nd Airborne Division (he won thwarted by the world and oppressed, most extrasensory balance between in- a Purple Heart for his service in Viet- rightly,” Peter Smith said. “She had am- tensity and restraint. In a scene in “The nam) to lawyer and, finally, to judge on bitions that she was never able to real- Hours,” in which she plays a suicidal the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed ize. She communicated powerfully to housewife named Laura Brown, Laura Forces at the Pentagon. Moore attended both my sisters that in order for them is in the bathroom, fighting a harrow- nine different schools. (She recently to achieve success they had to be bet- ing battle with her desperation. Her started a petition to have her Virginia ter than anybody. They couldn’t just be credulous husband ( John C. Reilly) calls high school—which was named for a good. They had to be excellent.” The to her, asking her to come to bed. “I’m Confederate general—renamed for the children grew up in this ozone of ex- brushing my teeth,” she says chirpily, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Mar- pectation. (Moore’s sister, Valerie Wells, pretending normality. When her hus- shall.) But every week, no matter where is now a business executive.) “She didn’t band asks again, “Are you coming?” a they were, Anne took her brood to the want us to marry or have children young,” mask of resignation falls over her face library to check out books; in the shift- Moore said. “She wanted us to have an and freezes there. In a barely audible ing ground of their peripatetic life, lit- education and a career.” Still, the news voice, she forms the word “Yes.” erature was a comfort. “We were mov- of Moore’s career choice was about as ing all the time. I had a lot to adjust to,” welcome to her mother as a returning oore doesn’t consider herself a Moore said. “But you pick up a book, kamikaze pilot. “Oh, Julie,” she said. M theatre actress. To her, the stage and you know you’re going to get a story. “Why waste your brain?” experience feels too “externalized,” and You know how it’s going to make you “I think it was a surprise even to me she wants what she’s doing to be inter- feel. The constancy of storytelling is a that I became an actor,” Moore said. nal. “I like to pretend no one’s watch- great thing.” When she made her decision, she had ing,” she said. “The thing that was so The continual uprooting made Moore never met an actor or seen a professional wonderful for me about film acting, adaptable and as adept at reading peo- play. “I liked television and movies, but when I finally discovered it, was that it ple as she was at reading words. When I didn’t even know there was an indus- felt like walking into a book you wanted starting at a new school, she said, she try,” she said. The person who planted to be in.” For Moore, learning to read studied the social behavior of those the notion that Moore could act for a was a watershed event: she was six and around her. “I didn’t want to distinguish living was Robie Taylor, her theatre sitting in a wing chair in her family’s myself. My interest was in fitting in— teacher at Frankfurt American High living room, in Omaha, Nebraska, with seeing how do they walk, how do they School, in Germany, from 1977 to 1979. her red-haired Scottish-born mother, talk, what do they do, what are the rules Moore was a junior when Taylor first whom she strongly resembles, when she here?” In her narrative of growing up, saw her perform. “She opened her mouth read her first sentence. “And then I just Moore accentuates her nerdiness: she in her first solo, and it was kind of prim- read,” she said. “I read everything. I read was bad at sports, a failed cheerleader, itive but it was there,” Taylor said. “She whatever I could get my hands on.” a drill-team reject, a smart kid in glasses, was just so stable within herself. She Moore’s parents, according to her, and so on. “All actresses love that out- could walk into a room, assess what was “liked the life of the mind” and preached sider thing,” her brother said, laughing. going on, and move right in. She knew the gospel of education. They were as- “She was Homecoming Queen. She was who she was.” In her senior year, Moore pirational, the first in each of their fam- beautiful. She was a straight-A student. went to Taylor’s classroom to ask for ca- ilies to earn a university degree. Anne She was popular.” (“I wasn’t Homecom- reer advice. “I said, ‘Julie, you’re bullet- Love, who had emigrated with her fam- ing Queen. I was runner-up,” Moore proof,’ ” Taylor recalled. “ ‘You can ac- ily from Greenock, Scotland, at the age insisted.) One thing, however, was in- cept rejection and keep going. You need of ten, was twelve when she met Peter controvertible: from sixth grade on, she to go to New York, check into the Y, Moore Smith, at their Presbyterian was the star of all her school plays. find a job that you can work at night, church in Burlington, New Jersey; they By the time Moore decided to be- and audition all day.’ ” A few days later, married when she was nineteen and come a professional actress, at eighteen, according to Taylor, there was another he was twenty. By the time Anne was her mother, who had briefly trained as knock on the classroom door: this time, twenty-five, she had had three chil- a nurse before marriage, had finally man- it was Moore’s parents. “They were dren—Julie was the first—whom she aged to cobble together a degree in so- aghast. ‘She can’t do that—she’s got to struggled to care for alone while Peter cial work. (When she graduated from go to college.’ I said, ‘Julie has the tal- was on a tour of duty in Vietnam. Briarcliff College, in New York, she was ent. It’s ready to go. If you make her go The Smith family was a tight unit, the only summa cum laude in her class.) to college, you will put her five years be- because it had to be. In the course of Anne went on to get master’s degrees hind her peers.’ ” The compromise that Moore’s childhood, they moved twenty in psychology and social work. Despite the family worked out was that Moore times—North Carolina, Nebraska, Vir- her late-blooming achievements, the would apply to drama schools that also ginia, Alabama, Panama, Alaska, Geor- years she spent following behind her offered a liberal-arts degree, so that if gia, Texas, New York, Washington, Ger- husband’s career inevitably generated in she washed out as an actress she’d have many—following the trajectory of her her a sense of disappointment, a dissat- the credentials for graduate school. “My father’s career, as he transitioned from isfaction that rumbled under the sur- mother got on the plane with me, and

70 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 SKETCHBOOK BY LEANNE SHAPTON RECENTLY FAVORITED A gallery of hesitation: unpurchased items from my eBay and Etsy watch lists.

VINTAGE CLOTHES HANGERS GOSSARD “ANSWERETTE” GIRDLE SPAGHETTI-STRAP DRESS Their charm will only be concealed. My question is, how does fifty-year-old Saw a picture of Bardot in a dress shaped shapewear age? like this. I am not shaped like Bardot.

WWII SHEEPSKIN AVIATOR PANTS 1960s SWEATER DRESS 1970s SPEEDO I can’t spend $350 on Itches, probably itches. Nylon, XS, high risk. sheepskin aviator pants.

1950s TOTE BAG HAND-KNIT POM-POM HAT 1950s WIGGLE DRESS Looks heavy empty. Scans tea cozy. Enough said. I auditioned for three different schools,” Shawn went to see Moore in a produc- to me on the side and say, ‘I don’t know Moore said. In the end, she chose Bos- tion of Caryl Churchill’s double bill “Ice what to do, because I can’t hear her, so ton University, where she knew no one. Cream with Hot Fudge,” at the Public I don’t know when to give my cue.’ And In the next four years, she returned to Theatre. “There was one moment in I, being the weird director I am, said, Germany and her family only twice. her performance that was absolutely ‘Just let her do it.’ And I think what she “Our parents referred to it as ‘when staggering,” Gregory recalled. “She was was doing was creating the introvert. Julie ran away from home,’ ” Moore’s sitting on the floor reading a newspa- In a very subtle way.” sister, Valerie, said. per and doing absolutely nothing, say- Moore’s focus on her fellow-actors’ ing nothing. But whatever she had going performances could be intimidating. fter graduating, in 1983, Moore on inside was terrifying.” Afterward, “She’s like a tomb of truth. You can’t A moved to New York, where she Gregory took her to dinner. He asked fool her in any way,” Pine, who played waited tables—“I was an excellent wait- her, “Could you tell me what you were Astrov to Moore’s unhappily married ress. I’m very impatient with people who doing when you were sitting on the Yelena, said. “You had to be truthful be- tell me they’re not good at waiting ta- floor?” She said, “I was counting from fore she would respond. She’d just turn bles. I’m, like, ‘Well, you’re just not pay- one to sixty.” Gregory said, “It showed off. She would emotionally go away.” ing attention’ ”—and began her single- a very clever actress who understood He went on, “She reads you when you’re minded pursuit of her craft. In 1985, what she didn’t need to do to get the coming at her. She looks at you and de- after some work in regional theatre, she appropriate response.” cides whether she cares or not. She has landed a regular role as Frannie Hughes, “I owe a huge debt to André, because a magical quality, very slippery. You can’t and then as her evil half sister, Sabrina, that painstaking five-year process be crude.” In one rehearsal of the scene on the CBS soap opera “As the World changed how I thought about acting in which Astrov tries to seduce Yelena Turns.” (She won a Daytime Emmy and what I wanted to do,” Moore said. and she fends him off, Moore “got so Award for Outstanding Ingénue in 1988, “He encouraged us to play each mo- fed up with Larry—he’s the archetypal the year she left the show.) Although ment for action and reaction, to liter- male chauvinist pig—that she leaned Moore puts a happy face on this jour- ally respond to what an actor gave. He back against the wall, thrust her pelvis neyman period of her professional life, allowed me for the first time as an actor forward, and did the scene physically “she hated soap operas,” according to not to be result-oriented. What is in demonstrating ‘You want to fuck me? the actor Larry Pine, who worked with front of me? What is happening? What Go ahead,’ ” Gregory recalled. “I loved her on “As the World Turns.” could happen? What is different?” “I it. I thought it was great. She thought Moore began to understand what it think Julie learned over time not how it was vulgar and would never do it again. meant to inhabit a character when she to act but how to be,” Gregory said. He It broke my heart. Every time I see the joined André Gregory’s workshop for added, “For two or three weeks, in re- movie, I go to the bathroom. I can’t watch “Uncle Vanya,” in 1990. Tipped off by hearsals you could not hear a single word it. I know what I lost.” Pine, who had already been enlisted for that she said. She was just mumbling. In 1991, Gregory staged the play for the workshop, Gregory and Wallace Or whispering. And actors would come invited audiences at the dilapidated Vic- tory Theatre (where I saw it). On one of those evenings, the director Robert Altman, who was in the audience, de- cided that Moore was right for a part in his movie “Short Cuts,” which was inspired by Raymond Carver’s short sto- ries. “I called her,” Altman said in a 2004 Directors Guild interview. “I said, ‘Lis- ten, Julianne, I’ve got a part, but before I even discuss it with you . . . I have to tell you this character has to play a scene—about a five-minute scene— naked from the waist down with her husband. It’s not a sex scene, it’s not about sex, but she has to be there naked.’ ” Altman went on, “There was a little pause. She said, ‘I can do that.’ I said, ‘Great. I’ll send you the script, and see if you like it.’ She said, ‘Bob . . . I have a bonus for you—I really am a red- head.’ ” (Moore denies having said this.) The role was one of many that she was called “brave” for taking on, a notion “Oh, I do love a mystery.” she disputes. “To say that you’re ‘brave’ connotes that you’re afraid,” she said. addictive antidote to her symptoms of lack of information.” For the role, Moore “I’m not afraid of anything that’s imag- environmental sensitivity. The camera’s went beyond the kind of mimicry that inary. There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t shifting perspective is meant to sug- Tina Fey practiced in her scathing lam- do while acting, because it’s pretend. It’s gest Carol’s unsettling discomfort, but poon, capturing both Palin’s comedy a narrative.” Moore refuses to editorialize her char- and her pathos (and winning an Emmy “Short Cuts” (1993) was the first of acter’s feelings. As she swallows, she in the process). Moore said, of acting, a trio of outstanding Julianne Moore stares at the lens for some time, almost “It’s my responsibility to find the place performances that were released within without moving. Her ability to do noth- where I connect with that person. What twenty months of one another in the ing unleashes something active in the is most human, what is most extreme mid-nineties. “I went from somebody audience; her profound emptiness takes in human behavior, is interesting to me. no one knew about to this new hot on the force of a body blow. At the I like to mentally explore that.” thing,” Moore said. “Short Cuts” made finale, coaxed by the community to a spectacle of Moore’s daring, “Vanya speak at her birthday party, Carol de- n the drab West Village block on 42nd Street” showcased her plan- livers a halting soliloquy that is by turns O where Moore lives, her house—a gency, but the masterly “Safe” (1995), awful and heartbreaking. “I don’t Greek revival town house built in 1839, Moore’s first leading role, revealed her know what I’m saying, just . . . it’s true which Moore and her husband bought potential for greatness. The movie, writ- how much I . . . hated myself before I— in 2003 and restored over eighteen ten and directed by Todd Haynes, tells came here, so I’m . . . trying to . . . see months—is the only one with welcom- the story of Carol White, a woman strug- myself hopefully more as I am,” she ing plants outside. As you enter, the first gling with a mysterious disease that says, struggling to find breath. The very image that meets the eye is Thomas makes her allergic to her environment; act of speaking is, for Carol, a masquer- Struth’s “Paradise,” an enormous pho- she retreats, by degrees, to a New Age ade. She cannot pronounce a self be- tograph of dense jungle foliage: an im- desert community of the afflicted. A cause her vocabulary has no purchase manence of Moore’s wild imagination. brilliant study of negativity, Carol is the on her feelings. But beyond that—in a flower-filled Bartleby of American cinema. When “Safe” set the pattern for Moore’s ad- high-ceilinged living area with art- Moore was shown the script for “Safe” venturous, intelligent choice of scripts. covered walls, and an adjacent, superbly (Haynes had admired her work in “Short With the exception of a few Hollywood appointed kitchen dominated by three Cuts”), she said, “I was, like, ‘Holy cow, moneymakers—“Jurassic Park,” “Han- large tortoise shells on a wall—order what is this? Who is this guy? Isn’t this nibal,” “The Hunger Games: Mock- rules. (Moore, who has a way of being cast?’ I felt very strongly about how it ingjay” (Part 2 of which will be released soft and tough at the same time, has a should be played. How she should sound. this November)—over the years Moore particular fascination with turtles and I could hear it.” She paid her own way has followed her instinct for strong writ- tortoises. “I do believe that there’s a cor- back to New York from Pittsburgh, where ing and emotional complexity. She has relation to be drawn there, between that she was filming a Peter Yates comedy, mostly resisted positive, triumphant rep- shell protecting something that other- “Roommates,” to try out for Haynes. resentations of women in order to take wise would be totally unprotected and She auditioned in white jeans and a on roles whose ambivalence and ambi- what I refer to as her fiercely protective white T-shirt, with her hair tied back, guity stroke neither her audience nor exterior,” Freundlich told me.) because, Moore said, Carol is “someone her image. “She somehow understood Moore is, according to her brother, who won’t even take up space.” She also that she wasn’t going to be an emblem “absolutely neurotic about cleaning.” found a register in her voice, high in the of good values,” Haynes said. He wrote The fastidiousness, she explained, “gives diaphragm, basically cut off from the “Far from Heaven”—which tells the me a kind of mental clarity. If I’m try- throat. The sound had no desire in it; story of a fifties housewife who strays ing to think, and I have all this stuff in the words were spoken with an uplift from her bisexual husband into an affair front of me, visually, it’s confusing to that turned everything into a question. with the black gardener—specifically for me. I can’t stand it. I can’t bear it,” she “I would talk on the top of my vocal her. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boo- said. “If something doesn’t look right, it cords, so I never made any contact with gie Nights” (1997), Moore plays Amber makes me uncomfortable.” “She per- the bottom of my voice, my body, at all,” Waves, a drug-addicted porn star who sonally dragged a Chinese trunk that Moore said. “This is someone who is loses custody of her child (“Just cum on was my grandmother’s out of my living completely out of her body. Someone my tits if you can,” she tells Dirk Dig- room and told me I couldn’t have it in who is not present, who has this lack of gler sweetly, at their first shoot); in “Sav- there,” Evelyn O’Neill, her manager of connection to everything.” age Grace” (2007), directed by Tom twenty-five years, told me. “Safe” was the first demonstration Kalin, she’s the alcoholic sociopath Bar- As Moore sat at her kitchen table, of Moore’s sensational ability to vacate bara Baekeland, the Bakelite plastics drinking a green health concoction, herself on camera. “Julianne knows how heiress, who beds her schizophrenic son Freund lich, a rangy, good-looking man to stop signifying, how to let the viewer only to be murdered by him. The ap- with a beard, a full head of brindled hair, fill in,” Haynes said. “There are times peal of playing Sarah Palin, in the 2012 and an easy smile, appeared at the thresh- when she’s almost blank.” In one scene, HBO movie “Game Change,” Moore old of the dining room. He was wearing for instance, Carol stands in her kitchen said, was “the perfect storm” of Palin’s long black-and-silver basketball shorts drinking milk, which has become an paradoxical personality: “confidence and and carrying a knee brace. “This is my

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 73 husband,” Moore said. Until her mid- conversation, she led me into the living house; Moore’s small office, which over- thirties, when she and Freundlich got room to show off a large framed black- looks the street, is on the third floor, together, Moore said, she did not have and-white photograph of the Knicks by off their bathroom, which has a mar- “a personal life.” “I was a worrier, some- George Kalinsky, the official photogra- ble tub like a sarcophagus at its center. one who was always trying to get some- pher of Madison Square Garden, which Behind her desk chair, looking over her where,” she said. At twenty-three, she she’d given to Freundlich for his birth- shoulder, is her Oscar statuette, along met the actor-director John Gould Rubin, day. “And this is Willis, what’s his name?” with a baker’s dozen of other trophies. and they married two years later; it was Moore said, calling back to Freundlich, On the wall just above her computer an unhappy alliance that lasted nine years. who was making a smoothie. “They’re are photographs of the children and “I didn’t know what I was doing,” Moore about to win the championship. This is their notes of endearment; to the side, said. “I was lonely. My family was still a famous moment in Knicks history. on a bureau, are framed shots of her in Germany. I think I really wanted a What’s the name of this guy? The one with her parents and an Expressionist base.” Freundlich was her luck. I got you. Willie?” statue of a mother and child, which She was an hour late when she “That’s Willis Reed,” Freundlich said. used to sit on her mother’s desk. Anne rushed in for her first production meet- He added, “Those were the days when Smith died of septicemia, at the age of ing for “The Myth of Fingerprints,” in they wore long pants.” It was Freund- sixty-eight, in 2009, two months be- 1995. “I was looking for someone who lich’s wry way of telling his wife that in fore her retirement, a fact that still brings had a lot of complication, a lot of sad- the photo the Knicks were still warm- tears to Moore’s eyes. On the weekend ness under the surface, and betrayed ing up and were not yet playing a game. that she fell ill, instead of going to a very, very little of it in her face,” Freund- Over the years, Freundlich’s jokey ap- doctor Anne stayed in bed. “If she had lich said. Near the end of the meeting, proach to life seems to have relaxed gone to the doctor, she would have been Moore asked him why he wanted to Moore and made her more humorous fine,” Moore said. “Septic shock is one cast her. “Because you look completely herself. “She had that in her,” he said. of the top ten leading causes of death. different when you smile. I want that “I just brought it out.” Generally, you can catch it, so it was duality of character,” he said. “I was, At one point, their daughter, Liv, who infuriating.” The suddenness of the loss like, Huh! He’s a pretty insightful guy,” had been watching “Valentine’s Day” made it particularly traumatic for her. Moore said, adding, “That was proba- downstairs, came in. Moore introduced “I think a lot in narrative. I work in nar- bly the beginning.” her, then made the parental gaffe of try- rative. I always think of that shape,” she Freundlich recalled a moment, at the ing to brush fuzz out of her red hair, a said. “And what you learn from the loss end of the first week of shooting “Fin- gesture that earned her some severe ad- of someone like that is that life isn’t like gerprints,” when Moore was standing olescent blowback. Moore may be an that. We impose narrative on every- outside without a coat in the Maine idol to the public, but to her daughter, thing in order to understand it. Oth- chill. “I came up to her and stood with as Moore said afterward, “I’m an idiot, erwise, there’s nothing but chaos.” my back to the wind. I didn’t want her let’s put it that way.” She continued, to be cold, and I also didn’t want to put “The other morning, I was making her he next time I saw Moore, we had my arm around her, or smother her, be- waffles, and she got it on her sweater. Tbreakfast before a looping session cause I didn’t know her that well,” he She kind of went like this”—Moore for “Freeheld,” a movie directed by Peter said. “Even though I couldn’t have ar- flicked her hand. “I said, ‘No, no, let me Sollett, in which she plays Laurel Hes- ticulated it then, I understood that I ter, a lesbian police officer who is dying could keep her warm up to a point. But of cancer and fighting the Ocean County, then the rest was going to be for her to New Jersey, Board of Chosen Freehold- do. We connected in that moment on ers to allow her pension benefits to be an unspoken level, where she knew I transferred to her girlfriend. The film, saw that flame in her, and understood which will be released in October, is it, and was willing not to suffocate it based on a 2007 Oscar-winning docu- but to protect it.” mentary of the same title, and co-stars Freundlich was a week away from Ellen Page as Laurel’s lover. shooting his latest script, “Wolves,” a get that.’ She goes, ‘No.’ I said, ‘It’s gonna At first, Moore said, she couldn’t un- Lower East Side coming-of-age story bother you all day.’ And she goes, ‘No. derstand the character she was playing: involving basketball, which he himself It’s gonna bother you all day.’ ” She added, “I didn’t know who she was. I could see has played a couple of times a week for “I always feel that your job as a parent Laurel in the documentary. I could see the past fifteen years. At Knicks games, is just to be steady. In our family, my Laurel in the script. But there wasn’t any to which the couple have season tick- husband’s the fun one, the sporty one. corollary. I was having a hard time.” Her ets, Moore suffers courtside with Freund- I’m the mom that’s always asking them research led her to Ocean County and lich. (“I have a chronic belief that each to clean up, put your clothes in the laun- to the real Laurel’s girlfriend, Stacie An- year will be better,” he said. “I think dry basket, pick up those papers, just dree, who showed Moore photographs this’ll be the last year.”) “I like basket- trying to keep things clean. That’s very of Laurel that no one else had seen. ball because I like to watch the faces,” irritating about me, they think.” “Laurel had this beautiful blond hair, Moore told me. At one point in the Freundlich works at the top of the somewhat Farrah Fawcetty,” Moore said.

74 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 “When they did the documentary, she’d already lost it through chemo. Once I saw how she’d looked, I understood. It was just from the look. You don’t know when you start doing the work what you’re gonna find. Or how to find it. A very small thing can lead to a big thing.” Moore took out her iPhone and scrolled through photos of Stacie and Laurel and then her own startling transforma- tion for the role. In the photo, Moore, in a wig, had disappeared into the char- acter; she was unrecognizable. As we set off for the recording ses- sion, at the Harbor Picture Company, in the Village, Moore blushed and said, “I’m probably going to let you stay for, like, half an hour. I don’t want you to get in my way. Because you will. You’ll take up mental space, and I need to have focus.” In the recording studio, a lectern had been set up for Moore, facing the front wall, which was a movie screen. On it were neatly typed pages of the words and sounds to be re-voiced. Eliza Paley, the supervising dialogue editor, sat at a desk to the left. Peter Sollett and I took our seats on a beat-up, dun-colored sofa, just below the sound- booth window. “He’s only going to stay for a little while,” Moore said to Sollett. “Don’t say anything embarrassing.” Then she scrutinized the first page of lines— “My dad decided to make me more accessible.” “Funny,” “Damn it,” “Where’d they go?,” “Got it.” The scene in question was •• played on the screen. Amid a barrage of expletives, Laurel gave chase to a couple of villains. “I think it’s better as ‘Where’d “I think you need an impact. That’s “That’s why we kept it in,” Sollett said. they go?’ and then ‘Damn it.’ ‘Where’d what’s missing. I think it should be”— Watching the moment where Lau- they go. Shit. Damn it,’ ” Moore said. Moore grunted—“and you should hear rel points her gun at the thugs, Moore “That’s too many. Shit. Damn it.” the thump on the ground of the body. didn’t like the sound of her voice. “I “It seems like ‘Damn it’ should be I think it’s better to hear the body hit, want to bring my pitch down, be- the TV line,” Sollett said. “We don’t right? Don’t you? Let me give you an- cause it makes no sense for me to think that ‘Damn it’ will get us booted other. See, John,” she added. “It’s all fun keep yelling like an idiot. ‘Walk away. off of network TV?” and games.” Keep moving. Did you hear me? “It’s fine,” Bobby Johanson, the re- “This is the art,” Sollett said. Go!’ ” After a few more tries, Moore cording mixer, kicked in from the sound At one dramatic point onscreen, Lau- turned toward me. It was time for me booth. rel and Stacie, who recently met, kiss to go. “You know what? Let’s just take it for the first time and are set upon by She walked me out of the studio out,” Moore said. The line was replayed some local thugs. “You two a couple of and sent me on my way uptown. As a few times. “It’s a little raspy. Let me dykes?” one of them brays, and demands the car eased into traffic, I turned to try another one,” she said, finally nail- their money. Laurel draws her gun and see her hurrying back to her play world, ing it. backs them off. Afterward, she tells Sta- and I remembered something that the Then she addressed the issue of re- cie that she’s a detective. screenwriter Bruce Wagner had said cording the appropriate grunts for Lau- about Moore: “She’s got a secret, but rel as she is pushed to the ground in a STACIE: You always carry a gun? we’re never going to find out what it LAUREL: Most of the time. scuffle. After the first try, Paley said, STACIE: On a date? is. She’s so affable. She presents as the “That’s more like winded. It’d be good girl next door. But she’s the Sphinx to have a variation.” The line made me laugh out loud. next door.” ♦

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 75 LETTER FROM PORTOFINO THE COUTURE CLUB The world’s wealthiest clients gather by the Mediterranean to shop. BY REBECCA MEAD

This year’s Alta Moda collection—made-to-measure couture by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana—was inspired by Homer,

76 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 Dante, and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The show was held in a glade overlooking Portofino’s bay.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LUCA LOCATELLI Four days will quickly steep themselves event. Last summer, Alta Moda hosted the poet of Purgatory and Paradise, in night; a weekend in Capri. Guests gathered with Beatrice, la bellezza; and Shake- Four nights will quickly dream away on a rocky outcrop and watched as a speare, with the crazy humor.” the time. flotilla of gozzi, traditional Caprese This immodest undertaking would fishing boats, carried models wearing be set in a bosky area on the promon- tefano Gabbana, the fashion de- ball gowns with billowing skirts—some tory that is protected as a nature re- signer, leaned on the railing of of them hand-painted with broad re- serve. These woods are down the hill Shis yacht, the Regina d’Italia, gatta stripes in blue and red, others from Dolce’s house, a villa that he bought and smiled. His neighbors in richly patterned in the style of majol- about ten years ago. Fragments of an- the Portofino marina were enjoying an ica ceramics. cient pottery have been discovered on early-evening aperitivo on the deck of This year, Dolce and Gabbana de- the hill, including a chunk of marble the Ester III—an enormous vessel, cided to invite their clients to Portofino, engraved with a dolphin. (In Roman with a helipad on top and a transparent- a onetime village of fishermen that has times, the harbor was known as Porto frame swimming pool on the lower become a village of fancy people. The Delfino.) The villas, Gabbana noted, deck, that had drawn admiring stares designers own neighboring villas on overlook the water through pine trees from pedestrians on the quay all after- the secluded wooded promontory that and olive groves. He said of the view, noon. The neighbors waved; he waved forms the eastern border of the town’s “You feel like you are in Greece.” back. “A client,” he said, with the air harbor. These properties, and other sites That week, the real Greece was edg- of confiding an obvious secret. around town, were to serve as the set- ing toward economic collapse, and a It was a Wednesday evening in July, ting for the most ambitious Alta Moda deadline for establishing its terms of the week after most French and Ital- getaway yet: a four-day weekend of debt repayment to the European Union ian haute-couture houses had defied a fashion shows, dinners, and other fes- had been set for Sunday night—the heat wave in Paris to show their latest tivities, culminating in a dance party evening of the gold party. The Dolce & collections. Temperatures had reached with a dress code of gold. Gabbana store in Athens had been the mid-nineties in Milan, too, where, Nearly a year of preparation had closed. “To give respect,” Dolce said. at the air-conditioned atelier of Dolce & gone into readying the sites, and teams “We don’t pretend the people there can Gabbana, designers and seamstresses of workers were still laboring on the buy a pair of shoes,” Gabbana said. He had worked into the night completing hill above the marina. “I am in just one added that Alta Moda clients were un- the company’s version of haute couture, room of my house,” Dolce said. He was likely to be harmed much by the eco- the Alta Moda collection. Launched sitting with Gabbana at the Regina nomic tumult that was dominating the four years ago by Gabbana, fifty-two, d’Italia’s dining table, as a deckhand news. and his business partner of thirty years, poured refreshments into champagne “These people live in another world,” Domenico Dolce, fifty-seven, Alta flutes. Dolce and Gabbana, once a cou- Gabbana observed. “I don’t live in that Moda consists of one-of-a-kind, made- ple, ended their romantic relationship world.” He said he was sometimes sur- to-measure pieces: virtuoso demon- more than a decade ago, but they main- prised by the extravagances that Alta strations of what can be achieved sar- tain an affectionate bond that is aug- Moda clients took for granted. “Like torially when the imagination of a mented by the presence of handsome when a customer says, ‘Oh, next time, designer and the spending power of younger partners. A movie-night se- when you come back, I want to show his patron are given unconstrained lection made by Dolce’s boyfriend, a you my zoo,’ ” he said, his eyes widen- expression. gracious Brazilian advertising execu- ing. “My face was like marble,” he went The client on the neighboring yacht, tive named Guilherme Siqueira, had on. “I said, ‘Yes, why not?’ But—zoo? I a Russian woman who was relaxing provided the inspiration for this sea- live in an apartment, I have three dogs, with her family in the fading light, had son’s Alta Moda collection: the 1999 two cats—you know what I mean. For sailed into Portofino to see the results version of “A Midsummer Night’s me, it was very new.” of Alta Moda’s work. Since Alta Mo- Dream,” directed by Michael Hoffman Maintaining perspective was im- da’s inception, the fall/winter collec- and starring Michelle Pfeiffer, which portant. The Regina d’Italia—with its tion has been shown outside of Milan. was filmed in Italy. Dolce explained, black upholstered daybeds piled with The first was presented in Taormina, “When you see this movie, you go, lynx throws, and its Astrakhan carpets in Dolce’s native Sicily; the event was ‘This is like a dream in Portofino.’ ” underfoot—was a hundred and sixty- relatively modest, with a performance He and Gabbana had been struck four feet in length. But the Ester III of Bellini’s “Norma,” in the town’s by the film’s vision of an Italian coun- was almost fifty feet longer. Gabbana, ancient amphitheatre, followed by a tryside populated with characters drawn who is estimated by Forbes to be one fashion show held in a monastery from ancient Greek myth: Theseus, the of the thirty richest people in Italy, with turned luxury hotel. The next year, the mythological founder of Athens, and a net worth of $1.62 billion, said, “And party moved to Venice, where guests his betrothed, Hippolyta, the Amazo- out there”—a gesture toward the bay— were ferried along the Grand Canal in nian queen. The forthcoming fashion “is another one bigger, and another one gondolas to attend a ball in the Pa - show, Dolce said, was an attempt to bigger.” laz zo Pisani Moretta, wearing jewel- imagine the result of a triple collabo- Dolce, who is also estimated by encrusted masks commissioned for the ration: “Homer, the visionary; Dante, Forbes to be one of the thirty richest

78 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 people in Italy, with an equivalent for- on the walls were by Enzo Casillo, a suffered a disaster: her luggage had tune, nodded. “If you start compari- Neapolitan artist who specializes in been lost en route to Portofino. She had sons, you never finish,” he said. frankly touristic views of Portofino. wept all morning, until she arrived at Images like these had been the col- a solution: she just had to buy more I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee; lection’s inspiration. One could buy clothes. And they shall fetch thee jewels from the a cotton sundress cut from fabric printed “That’s my nightmare,” Helen Wil- deep. with crayon-bright images of quaint, son, a personable British client, said. clustered buildings against blue skies She and her husband had just driven y late morning the next day, Alta for seventeen hundred dollars—half from the South of France, where they B Moda clients were making their the price of the painting hanging have a house. Wilson was dressed ca- unmistakable presence felt in Portofi- above it. The sundress was a bargain sually, in cut-off jeans and a pretty no’s cobblestoned piazza. In an inspired compared to Alta Moda creations, rose-patterned blouse from Dolce & commercial calculation, Dolce & Gab- which start at about forty thousand Gabbana’s most recent ready-to-wear

Gabbana, holding a gold fan at a party whose dress code was gold. At the event, a guest posted “#nowords” on Instagram.

bana had established a pop-up store in dollars and can cost much, much more. collection. The Wilsons’ luggage con- the village selling ready-to-wear. It oc- Vases of blue and pink and purple sisted of seven suit carriers, in addition cupied what was usually a fine-art gal- hydrangeas were arrayed on display ta- to their suitcases, and Wilson super- lery. “They came to us in December bles, alongside pastel-colored bags, es- vised the porter unloading her bags to and said, ‘We have this idea,’ ” the gal- padrilles, and jewelled tiaras. The store make sure that nothing got creased. lery’s owner, Francesca Brusacà, ex- was bustling. A Japanese client named “They can get a bit careless,” she said. plained. “First, it was for four to five Eriko Yagi was handing out leaflets Wilson explained that she had grown days. Then it was for ten days. Then it featuring images of herself in a variety up loving fashion, and had wanted to was for the whole month.” Brusacà’s of high-fashion outfits—most of them pursue a career in it. But economic usual inventory—paintings and sculp- including short skirts and platform circumstances had demanded that she tures by international contemporary heels. Today’s outfit was from Dolce & take a less glamorous job: working as artists—had been moved to a back room Gabbana’s spring ready-to-wear col- an executive assistant at Fort Vale En- or to a warehouse. lection: scarlet matador-inspired short gineering, in Lancashire, which com- In the art works’ place were cloth- shorts and a crisp white shirt, which mands eighty per cent of the global ing racks filled with dresses, shirts, Yagi, in a Harajuku gesture, had paired market in stainless-steel valves of the rompers, and bathing suits, all from a with floral-patterned kneesocks. An- sort found on tanker trucks. Fourteen limited-edition “Portofino” collection, other client, overheard at one of the years ago, she had married her boss— made especially for this weekend. coffee tables that had been set up the co-owner of the company. The Wil-

INSTITUTE Many of the few remaining paintings under a canopy outside the gallery, had sons travel several months a year, and

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 79 Sonia Chekerdjian, of Beirut, looks in a mirror after a footman presents her with a necklace from the Alta Gioielleria collection. so far in 2015 they had visited Brazil, Wilson in the London boutique ap- a very visible pair of coördinating gold Israel, Jordan, Capri, Sicily, Milan, and proached her with deferential charm. hot pants, she locked eyes with her the South of France. He had selected some outfits for her husband. “It’s very me,” she said, with Wilson was a devoted Alta Moda to try from the Oro collection—yet delight. “When it’s right, I know it’s client, having attended the gatherings more ready-to-wear designed specifi- right, right away.” in Venice and Capri. “It’s a great time cally for Portofino, allowing guests to Like many of Alta Moda’s guests, to showcase what you’ve bought, and treat themselves to something new for the Wilsons were staying at the Hotel also to see what everyone else has the gold-themed party. Splendido, which is reached by a bought,” she said. She’d made friends In a dressing area set up at the rear dauntingly steep and winding road at the shows, and appreciated the chance of the gallery, Wilson slipped behind that climbs the hill overlooking the to establish a personal connection with a curtain with seven outfits on hang- town. Suites cost upward of three the designers. “They are so passionate ers, under the fond eye of her husband, thousand dollars a night. Portofino, about telling their story, and their her- Ian Wilson, who was tan, slim, and which covers less than a square mile, itage,” she said. “And for me they are silver- haired. She emerged in a swing- did not have enough hotel rooms to one of the few designers to actually de- ing baby-doll dress made from golden accommodate all four hundred of the sign with a woman’s body in mind: they lace. “Is that real gold?” he asked, with Dolce & Gabbana guests, and some understand her curves, and how she amusement. As she posed and turned had booked hotels in the neighbor- wants to look sexy, feminine, but with in front of the mirror, she caught sight ing town of Santa Margherita Ligure, classic glamour. To have something of another dress on a hanger: strapless, or in Rappallo—a ten-minute boat made perfectly to fit your body—be- with a balloon skirt, made from black ride away. A fleet of Mercedes mini- cause none of us have perfect propor- mesh. She ducked back into the chang- vans had been amassed from Milan tions—it’s a very special thing.” ing room. When she stepped out again, and Genoa, and two dozen boats had The sales associate who works with this time wearing the black dress, over been rented for the weekend.

80 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 rels nibbling on acorns with emerald with metallic-lace fabric, from the nine- leaves. A stunning necklace, wrought teen-fifties, that had been found on a with jewelled and enamelled flowers, bolt containing only enough material fruits, and butterflies, weighed heavily for a single dress. Equally rare cloth on its display stand. Under a crystal had been obtained from the supplier chandelier at the center of the pavil- of ecclesiastical finery to the Vatican. ion was a golden throne embellished Each outfit would be sold to the first with jewels. customer to lay claim to it after the “The sultan’s throne,” Dolce said show ended. with satisfaction, as he stood near the The clothes were being housed in open doorway, catching the breeze from the Casa San Giovanni, a ruined villa the peacock fans. The throne had been on Dolce’s property. It had been con- fabricated for the event by the makers trived to look even more picturesque, of the jewelry collection, as had a col- with brass candelabras suspended from lection of gilded jewel boxes clustered exposed rafters and ivy artfully trained around the throne on velvet- upholstered up the walls. Only a few hours before footstools. Guests were invited to sit guests were to start arriving, seamstresses by a satin-clad footman, who draped were still at work, stitching silk daisies them with jewels, or placed on their onto the voluminous skirt of a wed- head a tiara fit for Titania. Another ding gown. footman, bending at the waist, held up Dolce, who learned tailoring from an oval gilded mirror, like the one be- his father, in Sicily, likes to show off longing to Snow White’s stepmother, the inside of dresses: the hidden corse- while friends took iPhone pictures to try and ingenious structuring. Gab- post on Instagram. bana, a Milanese, focusses on the “Disney is the best teacher for life,” label’s taste, which is voluptuous, or- Dolce said. namental, and sexy. A silk ball gown The footman with the mirror, ele- was decorated with vibrant images of gant in brown satin with gold-braid plants and animals, including a squir- trim, had an English accent. He said rel and a faun. “It’s a bosco incantato— in a stage whisper, “There are a lot of an enchanted wood,” Gabbana said, princesses in Italy.” running his hand over the material. He was dressed in shorts and a tank top And I will purge thy mortal grossness so, that exposed his tattoos: a scorpion on That thou shalt like an aery spirit go. one biceps, his name on the other. Out- side, shirtless workers were still busy On Thursday evening, luxury speed- narrow cobblestone path rises from enchanting the wood, squatting to fill boats began transporting guests to a A the piazza in Portofino to Domen- garden borders with blooming plants dock, at the foot of the peninsula, that ico Dolce’s villa, which is surrounded that had just been carted up the cob- was manned by young men wearing by high stone walls. All day on Friday, blestone path. blue-and-white striped T-shirts, off- workmen made this fifteen-minute “We look forward to revealing the white pants, and white deck shoes. Doz- trek, portaging necessities for the eve- Alta Moda Summer Night’s Dream in ens of hurricane lanterns edged a flight ning: armfuls of peonies, sewing ma- our fairy garden under the moonlight,” of stone steps leading to Gabbana’s chines swathed in muslin, inscrutable read handwritten invitations that were property, a handsome octagonal house spiky objects in gold. It was swelter- delivered to clients’ rooms. A separate set into the hillside. The guests as- ing, and, with the workmen sweaty, sul- directive suggested that flat shoes were cended to a terrace, where a tented pa- len, and stripped to the waist, the scene desirable for the climb up the hill. Many vilion had been erected to display the evoked both Dolce & Gabbana’s sug- of the guests opted for jewelled thong Alta Gioielleria jewelry collection. Two gestive advertisements and the open- sandals from the pop-up boutique. But young men in satin frock coats and lace ing sequence of “Spartacus.” Xu Ping, a jewelry designer from Shen- ruffs flanked the pavilion’s entrance, A security guard manned the gate zhen, China, made her ascent in what gently beating the air with fans of pea- outside the villa. Inside, ninety-four looked like flip-flops. She lifted the cock feathers. models with crimson lips and balle- long silk skirt of her tiered, blue-and- In keeping with the Dolce & Gab- rina hair milled about on the patio and white gown as if she were a Regency bana aesthetic, the jewelry consisted of under tents. There would be none of heiress obliged to step onto the muddy lavishly colored, richly decorated, over- the hurried disrobing that often hap- forecourt of a mansion. A five-person stated finery. Some gold drop earrings pens backstage at fashion shows: each entourage accompanied her, including were shaped like lemons and studded model was to wear just one couture a photographer—who stayed several with diamonds; others depicted squir- outfit. One ensemble had been made paces ahead, ascending backward—and

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 81 an assistant, who carried a backpack. At bana’s signal contributions to fashion. the top of the hill, where ushers greeted But the designers’ appeal is interna- arriving guests, Xu Ping perched on a tional. “It doesn’t matter where you stone ledge while the assistant pulled come from—these guys are attractive out a replacement for the flip-flops: to everyone,” a client named Yvonne towering heels. Christensen remarked as she chose a An actor dressed as Dante, with a spot on a bench. Christensen, like many laurel wreath and a long red coat, signed Alta Moda clients, has a multinational programs and handed them to guests. identity. Reared in Britain, of Nigerian A harpist, installed in a walled over- descent, she now lives in St. Gallen, look, was dressed unseasonably in a Switzerland, with her husband, Lars velvet cloak. The eighty or so footmen Christensen—a Danish banker with from the previous night had been re- whom she has five daughters. She is purposed: now dressed as Roman cen- the chairman of Club Supercar, a com- turions and Renaissance swains, they pany that rents luxury cars to élite stood in two parallel lines, raising floral clients. Some of her daughters had bowers to form an entrance arcade of joined her at the Alta Moda show. pink and blue. This led to a glade whose “You know how it is—they are in freshly laid turf was only slightly boarding school, they are very into what browned from the heat. At the center to wear,” she said. was an upside-down oak tree fashioned To the strains of opera arias, mod- from fibreglass; its knotted roots, els wearing the collection emerged. decked with gourds, reached high into One gown had a skirt that was fash- the air. ioned from layered peacock feathers Nearby, three hoops had been sus- and was so wide in circumference that pended from branches in a grove of it snagged on the edge of the runway. trees. Three bare-chested acrobats (Xu Ping’s neighbor deftly detached wearing velvet bloomers and feath- it.) Another dress was decorated with ery wings clung to them—Maxfield images of flowers and pumpkins—the Parrish silhouettes against a dusky silk fabric printed rather than painted, sky. A string quintet played under the a technical feat. One model showed trees. Young women in glittery Greek off a patchwork fur jacket in which tunics and gladiator sandals scattered the pelts of various animals had been rose petals. Guests sat on benches dyed vivid colors to make a fantastical facing a raised runway. Those with new creature. foresight had brought fans. Helen At the show’s end, most of the guests Alta Moda dresses are one-of-a-kind, and Wilson looked glamorously nautical applauded, although a number were in a red-white-and-blue striped Alta busy recording the closing parade on of tiny white shorts. She’d started Moda dress that she had bought the their phones, in order to show their wearing couture only recently, she ex- previous summer on Capri; the dress choices to their respective sales asso- plained, as her boyfriend, a Russian had been delivered to her only a few ciates. Some had started texting orders businessman named Efim Rozenberg, weeks earlier, after repeated fittings, during the show itself. Shopping at an looked on. “I always thought that cou- and this was its first outing. Xu Ping Alta Moda show is intensely compet- ture was something that you wear once sat in the front row, amid a small group itive—the way it used to be at Loeh- in your lifetime, and then you put it of Chinese clients. Her neighbor, flush mann’s, but less combative. very far back in your closet,” she said. after the climb, discreetly lifted the A dinner followed the show, served “But then I realized that, in a mo- skirt of her pink kimono gown to let on a terrace where banquet tables had ment in your life where you have a lot in fresh air. been set with golden jacquard table- of everything already—jewelry, beau- Dolce and Gabbana have always been cloths and gold-edged dishes. During tiful bags, a nice house—then you assertively Italian in their aesthetic, in- the meal, the most important clients— start getting in the mood to buy more spired equally by the studied chic of those who have a tailor’s dummy in exclusive clothes.” In the dressing Cinecittà films and by the accidental Milan customized to replicate their room, she had tried on a three- quarter- stylishness of black-veiled widows in contours—were quietly invited up to length, high-necked lace dress with the south. Anna Magnani, the actress the Casa San Giovanni, where half a balloon sleeves, in crimson. It was beloved by Roberto Rossellini and dozen fitting rooms had been swathed Dolce & Gabbana’s Sicilian- widow Luchino Visconti, was an inspiration in velvet. look, evolved and mutated. The dress for the “Sicilian dress”—a black slip, Among these clients was Anna Jou- was lovely, but she was chagrined. from the company’s fourth collection, kova, a Russian, who was wearing an “One piece from today’s show I al- that is regarded as one of Dolce & Gab- embroidered opera jacket over a pair ready missed,” she said. “My neighbor

82 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 competition for them is fierce. Some clients start texting their orders even before the show is over.

was saying, ‘Oh, that is my dress.’ ” the tables, treating frequent buyers and had been eaten, and after footmen had Another Russian client, Nadia Obo- occasional ones with the same gra- handed out velvet purses with jew- lentseva, was more fortunate. She se- cious attention. “You inspire me!” Dolce elled chain handles, as party favors— lected a dress of antique lace with what said to Nayrouz Tatanaki, a quick-witted there was dancing to cheesy pop music. she described as “Marie Antoinette young Libyan woman, whom he Giorgio D’Alia, the mayor of Por- sleeves.” It was floor length, but she dressed for her wedding in Sardinia tofino, was sweaty and tie-less. Dolce planned to have it tailored to be shorter. last year. (The gown had a sixty-five- bounced surefootedly with a diminu- Obolentseva explained that she runs foot train, which Tatanaki detached tive client from Asia. Nadia Obolen- an “intellectual salon” in Moscow at for the reception. “I got two dresses tseva, who was wearing an abbrevi- which writers, directors, and diplomats for the price of two,” she observed.) ated gold-and-embroidery dress from have spoken. She first became a cou- Tatanaki, whose father is an oil mag- last summer’s collection, stood on a ture client last year, after commission- nate, lives in London, where she works chair to dance. ing two Alta Moda gowns for her wed- for the Lisson Gallery. She chided Anna Dello Russo, a fashion- ding, on Lake Como, to Ayrat Iskhakov, Dolce for the fact that the Portofino magazine veteran and a favorite of a natural-gas industrialist. “It was like event coincided with Ramadan. Many fashion bloggers, stripped to Dolce & a dream,” she said. “I had one dress that clients from the Middle East had been Gabbana underwear—a black bra and was very, very elegant—the veil was unable to attend. “Next time, I will high-waisted panties—and crowd- very long. And then I had a second check Ramadan,” he said. “And I will surfed. A waiter cradled a tub of pis- dress for the party, and it was all in organize something special in Milan, tachio gelato under one arm. Half a flowers, and very short. I was so happy just for everyone who could not come.” dozen professional dancers passed by, with that.” Around midnight—after the sea- on their way to gyrate omnivorously Dolce and Gabbana walked among bass tartare and the trofie with pesto among the guests. The waiter loaded

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 83 a spoon with the gelato, and each tender for the most ostentatious yacht ting rooms had been set up, with enor- dancer sucked from it in succession. currently at sea is the A, designed by mous mirrors imported from Milan. At two-thirty in the morning, the Philippe Starck, at a cost of more than Helen Wilson, of the steel-valve last clients were taking turns in the fit- three hundred million dollars. It is al- fortune, ordered a daytime outfit: a ting rooms. The red velvet carpet in most four hundred feet long, with a white peasant blouse paired with a the Casa San Giovanni was littered distinctive upside-down prow that gives high-waisted pink skirt that was dec- with torn petals. On a stone ledge, a it a sinister aspect, as if it were a sub- orated with ostrich feathers. Among dozen or more mannequin heads had marine only temporarily surfacing from the most coveted items was a needle- been lined up, each wearing one of the the depths. When it arrived in Portofi- point jacket edged with sable: four or extravagant headpieces that had been no’s bay, some onlookers confidently five clients expressed interest in it. fashioned for the show. Arrayed on the announced that it belonged to Roman Coco Brandolini D’Adda, an aristo- parapet, the heads suggested the after- Abramovich, the industrial tycoon and cratic Italian-Brazilian who serves as math of a particularly effective night the owner of the Chelsea soccer club. a brand ambassador for Alta Moda, of the Terror. Who else would name his yacht A? was on hand to help manage the cli- And so the actual owner—Andrey Mel- ents’ expectations. Later, she said that My Oberon, what visions have I seen! nichenko, another Russian billionaire, the jockeying among the women never Methought I was enamor’d of an ass. who made his fortune in coal and fer- rose to the level of a fight, adding, “If tilizers—remained unacknowledged. you buy this clothing, you already have f you are a Russian oligarch in search So did his wife, Aleksandra, a former a lot of clothing.” While the women I of privacy, an excellent strategy is model and pop star in Serbia, who is were busy making purchases, some to own a yacht so ostentatious that ev- a well-known couture client. spouses attended to business matters. eryone mistakes it for the yacht of a All day Saturday, clients were “These people—they work, they have better-known oligarch. A strong con- ferried to Gabbana’s house, where fit- a job,” Dolce said at one point. “Maybe

There was none of the hurried disrobing that often happens backstage at fashion shows: each model wore just one outfit.

84 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 the client is the wife of some impor- gesture soon supported by Madonna, tourists in advance of the show. A rest tant man, who is not in the spotlight. Victoria Beckham, and others. This, room had been freshly decorated with It is not like the actresses you find in in turn, led to Gabbana calling John colorful tiles, the grouting as unsullied every place—these people are very a “fascist” on Instagram. Gabbana also as whitened teeth. private.” posted an image that read “Je Suis A swing band began playing, and During the early days of Dolce & D & G,” in emulation of the slogan the castle’s gravel courtyard became a Gabbana, celebrities were important coined by supporters of Charlie Hebdo, dance floor. A long-standing female for the brand. In 1993, Madonna com- the satirical magazine that was tar- client from Hamburg danced with Ste- missioned the designers to make cos- geted by terrorists in January. (John fano Galli, the company’s director for tumes for her Girlie Show Tour. The rescinded the boycott after Dolce pub- V.I.P. clients and events. After retiring designers have not sought celebrity licly apologized.) to a chair near the battlements, the cli- endorsements for Alta Moda, and It appeared that few Alta Moda cli- ent estimated that her Dolce & Gab- don’t give the dresses away for red- ents had been deterred by the affair, bana collection took up twenty-six feet carpet premières. “We don’t want and on Saturday evening the guests of wardrobe space, with about the same movie actresses or models—no way,” climbed up the Portofino peninsula amount devoted to other vintage clothes. Dolce said. The feeling is, perhaps, once again. Their destination this time “I have a room,” she explained. She mutual. A few weeks before the was Castello Brown, a fortification started collecting Dolce & Gabbana Portofino event, an Italian magazine turned event space situated on the high- in 1995, after the last of her six chil- quoted Dolce as saying that children est point above the town, for a show dren was born. “1998 was my favorite born by I.V.F. or surrogacy were “syn- by Alta Sartoria, Dolce & Gabbana’s season,” she said. thetic.” Elton John, who has two chil- bespoke collection for men. Garbis Several clients were wearing dresses dren born through surrogacy, called Chekerdjian, a real-estate developer with majolica patterns, which figured for a celebrity boycott of the brand, a and construction-company owner from not only in last year’s Alta Moda Lebanon, sat with his wife, Sonia, and collection but also in this summer’s several compatriots at one of the ta- ready-to-wear. The German client bles on the castle’s bailey. He was rolled her eyes at the sight. “Of course, dressed from head to toe in Dolce & I have it at home,” she said. “In Ham- Gabbana: jeans, a checked shirt, and a burg, it’s O.K.—no one else has it. If white hat, like a cowboy in a spaghetti you see someone in Hamburg with Western. The weekend’s festivities were the same dress, it’s just fun. But here fun, he said, but there were parties like it’s awful.” She was wearing vintage this every night in Beirut. “Beirut is Dolce & Gabbana: a short sleeveless the Monte Carlo of the Middle East— shift covered with blue and silver se- all the journalists are in Beirut, all the quins. “I don’t choose the pieces that spies are in Beirut,” he said, cheerfully. are so extraordinary that you can’t When male models started to emerge, wear them,” she said. “This dress I Chekerdjian pointed to the sunglasses can wear anywhere.” he was wearing: a tiny camera was em- Gabbana, who was dressed in a bedded in the bridge. T-shirt and loose polka-dotted pants, The Alta Sartoria clothes were as circulated among his guests with a look flamboyant as those shown the pre- of relief and delight. The collections vious night. A baby-blue suit with were over, and now it was time to party. pants that were cropped at the mid- Pausing on the velvet-carpeted catwalk, calf and richly sequinned on the thigh, he scrolled through his Instagram feed. like an opulent tattoo, drew gasps. A A friend had posted a video clip of double-breasted coat, in gray croco- Anna Magnani. “She was our first icon,” dile, was worn over gray silk pajamas. Gabbana said, with nostalgia. There was a sequence of heavily em- The band was taking a break, and a broidered bathrobes: perfect for pad- d.j. was playing Beyoncé’s “Single La- ding around a multimillion-dollar yacht. dies (Put a Ring on It).” Gabbana raised After the show, waiters offered hors his phone to record the scene. Half a d’oeuvres. Prosciutto was sliced by an dozen female dancers were onstage, industrious fellow in a chef ’s toque dressed identically in glittering flapper who had been installed in one of the dresses and Louise Brooks wigs. At their castle’s smaller chambers; framed by a center was Eriko Yagi, the Japanese cli- burnished wooden doorway, the scene ent with the selfie leaflets, who was danc- evoked a Brueghel painting. Dolce and ing in a jewelled red minidress, knee- Gabbana had undertaken renovations socks, and a crown. Gabbana posted the of the castle, which had been closed to video to his Instagram account, and

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 85 A tented pavilion guarded by footmen suggested a fairy-tale atmosphere. “Disney is the best teacher for life,” Dolce said. captioned it with hearts and dancing crotch with gold-colored gems, like the twenty or so members of the press girls—two of his favorite emojis. beachwear commissioned for Aphrodite. who were being hosted by Dolce and Gab- The party started at 11 P.M., and was bana for the weekend were dressed in gold: What masque? What music? How shall held in the Covo di Nord-Est, a night female fashion journalists had found in we beguile club in a seaside villa just outside Por- their hotel wardrobes complimentary out- The lazy time, if not with some delight? tofino. The Covo has seen finer days— fits from the Oro collection, which were eighteen out of twenty-nine users of worn with varying degrees of sheepish- he invitation for the gold party listed Trip Advisor have rated it as “terrible”— ness. Alta Moda clients were less dis- Tattributes that would be welcome: but in the sixties and seventies Gianni comfited by the expectation of opulence. “eccentricity,” “ostentation,” “elegance.” Agnelli used to drop by, as did Brigitte Mara Polizzi, from Sicily—“I do noth- By Sunday afternoon, a few dozen out- Bardot and Aristotle Onassis. ing,” she said, with disarming frankness— fits from the Oro collection remained in Guests, arriving by water, entered the wore gold filigree shorts over a one-piece the pop-up shop. Still available was a club through a grotto at the bottom of bodysuit. A fair, fleshy man was dressed bodysuit costing more than ten thou- the rocky cliff. Up on the dance floor, eve- in a striped dishdasha from the men’s show. sand dollars, encrusted from bosom to ryone had followed the dress code. Even Tented cabanas had been set up with

86 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 “Love at First Sight,” huge cutout hearts, covered with gold glitter, were passed among the guests, who waved them aloft. A cannon shot thousands of scraps of metallic paper into the air, so that it seemed to be raining gold. Gabbana, in a gold tuxedo jacket, posed for selfies with an enormous gold fan behind his head. Nadia Obolentseva, who was wear- ing a gold lace dress with a brief bubble skirt, dropped to the floor and sat amid the fallen gold. A friend took a picture; Obolentseva posted the image to Insta- gram with the hashtag #nowords. As dawn drew nearer, Joseph Sitt, who had been dancing with his wife, Betty, took a break near the water. They had come from Brooklyn, where Sitt founded his own company, Thor Equities, almost thirty years ago. “You know the Burling- ton Arcade in London?” Sitt said, wip- ing his brow. “That’s ours.” He went on, “You remember the controversy over de- veloping Coney Island? We were the con- troversy.” (A few years ago, Sitt attempted to build a two-million-square-foot en- tertainment complex there.) He recently leased one of Thor’s New York properties, a former firehouse in SoHo, to Dolce & Gabbana. “I think Italy owes them a debt of gratitude,” he said, alluding to a government investi- gation of the designers that had only re- cently ended. (In 2013, both were found guilty of tax evasion, but last year Italy’s highest court overturned the convic- tions.) The Alta Moda weekend was “a celebration of Italy,” Sitt said, adding, “It’s vindicating them for their honesty and integrity. They would never want to hurt their country.” Sitt considers Dolce a friend. “He’s true to his brand,” he said warmly. “He eats, breathes, and—excuse the expression—shits his brand.” couches inside. Outside one of them, a morning till night,” she said. Before com- All around, the floor had grown tall man with cropped hair, who was ing to Italy, she had been staying at a re- treacherous from the slippery fallen gold, dressed in a black suit, eyed anyone who sort hotel in the Peloponnese. “It was gor- which eddied into corners, like piles of approached with unsmiling menace. He geous,” she said. “I brought cash with me.” leaves. On the dance floor, a few guests was a security guard: the cabanas were Late in the evening, as Greek minis- clutched the large golden hearts, seized the very important very important per- ters in Brussels negotiated the terms of as trophies. The hearts had started shed- sons’ area. Samar Hani Salha, a client from their country’s future, the revels esca- ding their glitter, which spread to the Lebanon, whose family is in real estate lated. Fireworks exploded over the water, hands of the guests, then gilded their and construction, hovered at the entrance culminating with the words “Dolce & sweat-streaked faces. In a strange vari- to one cabana. She was, she explained, a Gabbana Alta Moda” crackling gold ation on the Midas story, everyone was well-known figure at home. “I’m Miss against a black sky. Male burlesque per- turning to gold. Though the myth says Perfect in Beirut!” she shouted, over the formers in spike heels danced onstage, that greedy Midas begged Dionysus to thud of music. Like many guests, she wore and Kylie Minogue, in a gold mini and relieve him of his appalling power, this a golden tiara that she had bought at the a towering gold headdress, sang half a metamorphosis was painless and eu- pop-up store. “I’ve been shopping from dozen of her hits. When she broke into phoric. Everyone only wanted more. 

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 87 FICTION

88 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY RUTH MARTEN took a piece of paper from Moshe’s away, and where are they now? Proba- It’s best to leave him alone when he’s messy desk and made a list of winter bly blew across the border into Jordan. having problems at work, or pressure. I I clothes to buy: What foolishness, to go and get my hair didn’t even think about it when three or Pair of corduroy trousers. cut and take off three-quarters of my four times the phone rang at home, and, Two flannel shirts. curls. And on that very same morning. when I’d pick it up right away and say Undershirts—long sleeves. hello, whoever was calling would hang Long underwear. he day after he told me that he just up. I could at least have dialled *42 to Wool socks. had no choice, I asked him, “Moshe, see who it was, but it didn’t occur to me And maybe new pajamas, too. T maybe you could at least tell me what I then. I wasn’t looking for signs. Only All this for him. And for me: did? What’s wrong with me?” He got since he said to me, “Bracha, I’m leaving angry, but silently. He just picked up his you,” since then all day long I can’t stop Sweater. Winter skirt. fork and took out all his anger on the looking for signs. Even though, actually, Or maybe pants instead. Something not hard-boiled egg on his plate, until the where will it get me, looking for signs? too expensive. white was mush and the yellow inside What’s the point? Warm stockings. was flattened and striped from the fork. Flannel nightgown. I kept my eyes on his plate the whole very morning, I have a sink full of (And replace the wicks in the kerosene heaters and the light bulb that shows if the time, because I was afraid to look straight E dishes, some from the night before, boiler is working or isn’t working.) at him. But he didn’t say a thing. Maybe too, and instead of washing them I have he didn’t hear me, or maybe he happened another cup of coffee, and another one, During breakfast, I said to him, to be thinking about something else. and sometimes another, until my heart “Moshe, listen, the summer is over and Often he’s thinking of something else starts to pound, and then I sit myself in the end we didn’t take that organized when people are talking to him. I don’t down at his desk and tear off a sheet of tour to Spain, so instead maybe you could blame him for sometimes not hearing paper with the factory logo, and begin give me the three and a half thousand what I’m saying to him. Because he re- to plan what to make us for dinner and shekels to buy some things for winter.” ally does have a hard time at work. He what to get at the supermarket and what Moshe said, “O.K., fine. But, listen, first has too much on his shoulders, and that not to get at the supermarket, better to I have something to tell you. It’s like this. Alfred keeps him on a short leash. I tried buy at the greengrocer. As long as Moshe During the factory outing to Netanya, a again: I said to him, “Moshe, you owe is still home, I cook for him. As long as month ago—you remember—when you me at least this much, at least tell me he keeps most of his things here, I wash didn’t feel like going with me, I met this what I’ve done wrong.” I lifted my eyes and iron. When his things aren’t here woman there, and afterward it turned and saw that he was behind the Daily anymore, maybe I’ll take a little break out that we kept seeing each other, and News, but he made the effort and put from cooking. And ironing. A vacation. now, well, I’ve decided to leave you, even the paper down for a minute to answer I’ll eat standing up, straight from the though I’m very sorry about it. Honestly. me. “Now, you see, that’s precisely the Frigidaire, and that’s it. Fewer dishes. But what can I do, Bracha? I just have trouble with you—you’ll never learn to Anyway, in the morning I don’t feel no choice.” figure out for yourself when I’m busy much like doing anything. Except watch- And where was I that morning when and when I’m not in the mood and when ing television: I get up, put on a robe, they met for the first time at the factory not to bother me and to leave me alone sit in the kitchen, and watch through outing in Netanya? As far as I remem- in peace. And, besides that, Bracha, it’s the pass-through into the living room. ber, I was at the hairdresser. While Lu- not because of you—it’s because of her. Whatever is on—about Ninjas, about cien was cutting off three-quarters of my How come you don’t get that?” the leopards that used to live in the Ju- curls, Moshe and that woman were sneak- Now that I think about it calmly, I dean Desert and have almost completely ing out of the deputy director’s lecture can see that I really should have picked dis appeared, about how people survive and sitting next to each other in the a better time to talk to him about it. And, in earthquake zones, about rain forests lounge chairs on the terrace of the hotel now that I think about it calmly, I also and crocodiles in the land of Brazil. in Netanya, where you can probably see see that there were actually a lot of nights There was one program about two men, the promenade, the sea, and the clouds. over the past month when he didn’t come good friends from the Holocaust, Yos- For every one of my curls that fell to the home, or came home late, after I was al- sel the Painter and Yossel the Writer, floor, they exchanged a smile or some ready asleep. I didn’t pay attention to it. and you could see them standing to- knowing remark. By the time Lucien I thought, Maybe they’ve got a lot of gether in a room and sort of shoving turned off my hair dryer, they were al- shipments again, got some big order, and each other, but not hard, the way friends ready in love. When I was paying and Alfred’s keeping him there half the night. do, you know? Or maybe they were put- leaving, they were already holding hands. When I phoned the factory a few times ting on a show, pretending to be friends And my curls? A girl, Suzy, with purple late at night and there was no answer, I for the cameraman. lip gloss, who’s apprenticing with Lu- didn’t think anything of that, either. I At about noon, I turn off the televi- cien now and looks a little like some ac- thought, Maybe he’s down on the shop sion, take off my robe, and go back to tress, swept them out to the sidewalk, so floor or out at the loading dock, and has bed to sleep, and the dishes—well, they everybody stepped on them. Afterward, to stay there to supervise the night-shift can wait, what’s the hurry? a sea breeze came along and blew them shipments. I didn’t want to bother him. I didn’t remember at all that I’d made

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 89 myself an omelette first thing in the siere with two holes in the cups for him And I have to tell the boys and their morning, and I didn’t remember that anymore. wives what’s happened to us. I’d eaten it, but I remembered very well “Do to me like you did in Tiberias.” Why me? Let him tell them. that a fried egg, the longer it sticks to “Today I want you to do the Chalice But should I remind him to tell the frying pan the harder it is to scrape to me.” them? He’ll be annoyed with me if I off. And I remembered very well that And I don’t have to pretend to come remind him. if I stopped eating fried foods com- anymore. Baguettes. pletely and started a diet . . . but there’s Challah. Yogurts. really no point. I’m a metre sixty-six Eggs. Frozen chicken. and weigh sixty-six kilos, so I’m just Instant coffee. Eggplants. right, according to the charts, and don’t Garbage bags. Potatoes. need to lose weight. I don’t even know Soap for the dishwasher and detergent Avocado. for the washing machine. Olives. if my husband’s woman is thinner than Matches. Diseases. me. Maybe she’s the opposite—full, sort The grave. of rounded—and if I had any sense I’d In Sigalit’s advice column it says: make an effort to fill out a bit so as not I got dressed and went out to do some to have a figure like a broomstick. Age is in the mind. You are exactly as old shopping and errands. It will be winter In the end, I washed the dishes after as you feel. soon, and we still haven’t fixed the leak A man before sex and a man right after all, in case he came home to get some are entirely different creatures. from the balcony window. Also, the tech- more things and got angry at me for no The way to keep him from wandering is nician needs to come to adjust the tele- reason. to be an entire harem for him. Sexual variety: vision, even though Moshe sort of fixed On the fridge there is a little bulle- every woman has it. it on Purim, because on the cable chan- tin board with a plastic covering and Exposé: Kitty Kensington reveals nine nels there’s snow half the time. Who is ways to stay mysterious. But, above all, a special kind of pencil that you use to remember that a relationship is first and she, this woman he found for himself on write whatever you have to do today, foremost based on consideration and mu- the factory outing in Netanya? How old and afterward you lift the plastic and tual respect. is she? Is she married? Single? Maybe it erases everything and there’s no sign Danish experts analyze the mystery of she’s a divorcée or a widow? With chil- left, as though it had never been. love: is it a form of selfishness, or a form of dren or without? And what presents has generosity, or both? Exclusive: Pazit Linkowitz speaks out. he bought her already? Tomatoes. Talks for the first time about the crisis in her Now he’ll take her on the organized Carrots. relationship with Ziki Zentner: “How I turned Rolls. tour of Spain, instead of me. For two my frigidity into a lethal weapon in bed.” Cheeses. years, he’s been talking about Spain, Sex and candor: opposites? Spain, but it never worked out. First, we The in thing in the jet set: A mature And from now on we’re done with woman takes herself a novice as a lover. enclosed the balcony, and last year we the playacting in bed. New research: Life begins when the kids replaced the washing machine, instead Don’t need to wear that stiff bras- leave home! of going to Spain. Has he bought her clothes? For the winter? What did he buy? Where did he buy them? And what presents does she give him? Whatever you give him, he al- ways says, “Really? What for? For heav- en’s sake, what do you think I’m going to do with this?” And, in general, what does she get from him? With his belly and his flab and the hairs in his ears and the smell. He has a problem with his sweat glands. Because of that, and because of the smell from his mouth, I prefer that he do me from behind, with my face toward the mattress. Or that I sit on top of him, as far as possible from his mouth. What po- sition does he do her in? How does she manage with the smell? But what use is it to me to know if she has to wear a stiff brassiere with two holes in the cups in bed with him and pretend to come? Or if he says to her, “Whoa, don’t ask constitutional questions you don’t “Come do the Chalice to me”? And, re- want to know the answers to.” ally, it makes no difference to me what in clothes fit for a young girl? It could even be, by chance, the very salesgirl in SELFIE the boutique who’s lying to my face right now, saying that I look wonderful in these You want to fix yourself into that event white jeans, even though we both know that she’s lying, that they’re too big for With an image of the volcano, or street killing, me, because she doesn’t have my size? What a fool I am. With legs like mine Or house fire, or fornicating bullfrogs, I could also walk around in a mini. Even in shorts. Or maybe it’s Dahlia. After all, Or the centaur dancing, or the unicorn yesterday when I was leaving Maiman’s Deli I saw her from a distance waving Piercing balloons over a pond with a fountain at me strangely, and then she disappeared. Why did she run away from me? Or Shaped like an oak tree from the undiscovered torts maybe she didn’t and it just seemed that way to me. I followed her into the mid- That have scattered through office blocks and suburban homes, dle of the street and called out to her, “Dahlia, Dahlia,” but not loud enough, And which may be uncovered one day or maybe I was loud enough, but couldn’t be heard because the cars began to honk And be ripped from the sculpted foliage, becoming fact, at me from both directions, so I was stuck in the middle of the street, couldn’t cross Causing this accumulation of lies to fall like leaves and couldn’t go back to my side. In the end, I managed to get back to the side- Into the water below—and the unicorn to leap walk and even thought for a minute that I should phone her and ask her, “Dahlia, Into fiction while you what, did something happen?” But in- stead I sat down there on a bench in the Will be fixed in time to an image of crime, memorial park and started to comb my hair with a comb and a little mirror from Or joy, or wonder, or a unicorn, my handbag. Combed for a very long time, though I have hardly any hair left As a commitment for life on the Internet after what Lucien did to me, and I have no one to blame but my own stupid self. Repeated, retweeted, After all, it won’t be much help to me to know the truth, but I would like to But forever with your back to it. know, anyway, if he loves her or if it’s all about sex, and if he still loves me a little —Frieda Hughes bit, and if he ever loved me at all? At least in the very beginning? When he still called me sweetie pie? And if she she looks like. Though ever since he made bosom? He would always turn his head also likes to squeeze his blackheads, and his announcement I’ve begun to look to look at blondes in minis and at not- does he let her and not get annoyed at carefully at women. After all, she could blondes in not-minis if they had a big her? And, in general, what is it like when be anyone over the age of sixteen and bosom. And then he’d say to me, “Re- there’s genuine love? I’d like to see it under the age of fifty, because he prom- ally, what do you care, Bracha? So what once, just so I’d know. ised for my fiftieth birthday to take me if I turn my head? Barking dogs don’t on a second honeymoon to Spain, ex- bite, right?” f we’re talking about relationships, cept that instead we closed in the bal- Maybe it’s the girl who stood right I you could say that all in all I got from cony so he’d have a study. in front of me yesterday in line at the him thirty years of very good treatment, Maybe that’s her, the Russian cashier bank and kept turning around and look- consideration, gifts here and there, and at the supermarket? Those Russian ing at me? Or maybe it’s that tramp with sometimes he would even pay me a nice women really do have something very the shorts and the high heels over there compliment on my looks or my cook- sexy about them; they give the impres- in front of the boutique, with half her ing or how I took care of things: “You’re sion that they’ve done it all and they’d bosom hanging out, trying to hail a taxi- the best, Bracha. Bracha, today you’re do anything you ask in bed. Or maybe cab? Or it may be someone that I actu- tops.” And, every time we argued, in the it’s that blonde standing over there, ally know very well personally. Someone end we’d make up. Every trip he took squeezing the vegetables, in a miniskirt? from the factory—Alfred’s fat secretary, abroad for the factory, he would always Or that one over there, with the big or that bookkeeper who walks around bring something back for me and the

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 91 Cheeses and those little tomatoes and all kinds of snacks. Maybe ice cream also, two flavors. And, in the winter, when it’s wet outside and everything is empty, you’ll sit at home night after night by yourself, watching the Shopping Channel, and you’ll hear only the rain pounding in the gutter. Some fruit. Paper napkins. Good coffee. Assorted candies.

Also, I need to call the technician so that the snow finally stops falling on us in the middle of the movie channels. And call Ilan’s Shirley and Yoav’s Orly, because the boys are both abroad on busi- ness, to tell them that we’re getting di- vorced. Yoav is coming back in a few •• days and Ilan will be away at least an- other month, but it’s a little hard for me children. Mostly he’d bring me perfume— this way. And on the very same morning. to remember when they each left, and, Poison, because he was afraid to pick out Maybe he brought her home while I in general, it’s a little hard for me now. anything else by himself. His lover also wasn’t there? And change the wicks in the kerosene has Poison; I smelled it on his clothes Once? Several times? heaters and the light that shows if the after he told me and, since then, I’ve Did she inspect our family pictures boiler is working or isn’t working. stopped wearing perfume altogether, but on the sideboard first? Run her fingers Buy a toy for Yaniv and fix the leak his clothes still smell of it. I once read over our wedding photo? from enclosing the balcony last winter in Sigalit’s advice column that a man’s And did Moshe undress her and lay and make two new keys for the mailbox, sexual attraction is driven primarily by her down on the sofa in the living room? to replace the ones that got lost, so that the sense of smell. That Sigalit woman On the rug? Or even in the bedroom on the mailbox isn’t open all day and all night is totally wrong, because if that were truly our bed? On top of the bedspread or first for our charming neighbors to look at all the case, and if the lover and I wear ex- taking off the bedspread? our bills and bank notices. And pay the actly the same perfume, then why would Did he ask her to do the Chalice to maintenance already—Moshe keeps put- he change women? him? Did she do it? Was she repulsed? ting it off, and it’s beginning to be un- I sat for a while on the bench in the Which of my towels did she use? pleasant. After all, it’s already October, park commemorating the fallen Navy Did she use my toothpaste afterward? nearly winter, and after that the Passover heroes and considered the question from My hairbrush? My cotton balls? Did she Seder—I need to plan the Seder meal all sides. Maybe Moshe gave her my per- take a little of the Poison that he brought and prepare everything tip-top, without fume on purpose, so that I wouldn’t smell me as a gift from Rome? Touch my skirts any favors this time from Yoav’s snooty the scent of another woman on him and in the closet? Peek in my drawers? In- wife, and without any favors from the suspect something? Or maybe, by coin- spect my underwear? Wonder about the other one, either, that nasty wife of Ilan’s. cidence, she also wore Poison even be- brassiere with two holes? This nice little notebook fell straight from fore he started up with her? Maybe he I sat a while longer on the bench, be- heaven with its little gold pen. didn’t start with her at all, and she was cause I didn’t have anywhere to rush off And what’s so bad about being an the one who started with him? Maybe to, and I needed for once to sit and think undependent woman living alone in a when he said to me, “Look, Bracha, I really hard about everything. Luckily, I house, without his yelling, without the have no choice now,” he meant to say had a little notebook in my handbag with weekend newspaper sections scattered that she was pregnant by him? Or, very the factory logo and pages that you can all over the house every week, without simply, right at the beginning, Moshe tear out and one of those little gold-col- drops of pee on the toilet seat, without told her that Poison was the perfume he ored pens that fits inside. I wrote: his crumpled socks under the bed and liked best, and, as soon as she heard under the easy chair, without doing the Laundry. that, she rushed out and bought herself Ironing. Chalice to him and then pretending that a bottle, because she had also read the Bring Moshe’s jacket to the dry cleaner. you’ve come because of it? article in that moron Sigalit’s column? On Friday, buy flowers for the living room After a while, I got up from the bench, That’s the only thing I would ask her for Shabbat—maybe people will come over. stood in front of the black boulder, and if we were to meet someday. The rest Liquor: check what’s left in the bar. read one by one the names of all the Nuts. doesn’t matter to me. And, come to Crackers. fallen Navy heroes, so young, just chil- think of it, that doesn’t really matter, ei- Pretzel sticks. dren, really, and each one with a ther. It’s such a shame I got my hair cut Black olives. mother—what’s my tragedy compared

92 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 with their tragedy? And I thought about wouldn’t have even thrown a glance in skirts or shorts, with or without panty- the fact that some of them probably the direction of that woman. Instead, on hose. I’ve never liked how women’s legs died before they had ever touched a that very same day, I went and let Lu- are thin below the knee and just above woman and what a pity, because now, cien shear everything off. Such a fool. I the knee get heavier and heavier. What’s in my new situation as an undependent slaughtered myself all by myself. sexy about that? Knees in general have woman, why not, I could put on a little Instead of going to Lucien that morn- always seemed really ugly to me, as Poison and so on, no problem, and every ing for a garçon cut, I should just have though someone had taken two sticks so often take fallen heroes to bed, to gone to Sandra for a permanent. Now and soldered them together and the sol- make them feel good and me, too, in it’s too late. The wind here usually blows der didn’t turn out well, sort of rough the time I have left before the diseases from west to east, so my curls have prob- and swollen. There were a few women set in and the grave. ably blown all the way to China by now. on the street with a strong smell of per- But why am I even sitting here and writ- fume, and I started to follow them and fterward, I left the memorial park ing everything that happened on Moshe’s tried to sniff—was it Poison? One girl A and wandered along the streets pad with the factory logo? Not for even got annoyed and turned around and and looked a bit in the store windows, Moshe to read, God forbid. Certainly said, “Excuse me, what exactly is your or, to be exact, I looked in the glass of not for the children. Maybe it will turn problem?” And I answered her, “Noth- the store windows to see how I looked. out to be a long letter to my friend, my ing. Nice to meet you. My name is Bra- Sometimes I appeared short and square, old classmate Behira? Except that no cha and I’m getting divorced soon.” It and sometimes I was tall and thin, like one has called her Behira for a while; was the first time I’d said those words a matchstick figure. With the money she’s Blanche now, and for quite some out loud, and when I heard them come for the vacation to Spain we didn’t take time she has lived not in this country out of my mouth I almost fell apart. It last summer for my fiftieth birthday, I but in Geneva, with her husband, the was only fear of embarrassment that held could have had a face-lift or a breast en- German engineer, who is younger than me together, because I couldn’t very well hancement. You can have anything done her by a good many years. Greetings, fall apart in front of total strangers and these days. Or, for about the same Behira, dear Blanche. How are you, and start crying in the middle of the street. amount, I could have gone to visit my how are things over there? Do you still So I held it in. good friend Behira, who’s been living remember our teacher Tzila Tzipkin, And, in the end, Behira, I went to in Geneva for the past twenty years. with the red boots? It must be thirty-five Yaniv’s nursery school anyway, right on She’s very wealthy, and once she wrote years since we saw each other, you and time, and took him to buy him a toy and, me a letter to say that I was invited to I, but no matter. You were almost al- on the way, I told him that Grandpa was visit her whenever I was in the area. She ways my best friend and you are still my leaving me. Yaniv asked if it was because isn’t called Behira there; she’s Blanche, best friend, so that’s why I’m sitting here of him, because he was a bad boy at our and her husband is a German engineer and writing to you about all this trag- house on Saturday afternoon? I said, who is much younger than her. Behira, edy that has befallen me. I wonder if “How should I know because of what? she was the first girl in our class at He- these days you still wear those gorgeous Maybe it’s best if you ask Grandpa your- roes Hill Public School to buy a see- undies and bras, with lace, sort self, Yaniv. Call him up at work through lace bra and undies, which was of see-through? To hold on to and promise him that you won’t a brand-new thing then, and they said your German engineer hus- have any tantrums or make a that boys went crazy for them, but the band, so he doesn’t run off? Or mess ever again. That you won’t girls also went a little crazy for them. maybe, just the opposite, you fool around with his video ma- The street was filled with all sorts of let him run off wherever he chine anymore. Maybe that will women. Suddenly, I had an urge to know wants, because you already have touch him?” Yaniv said, “O.K., exactly what brassiere and undies each a lover and you only wear the good,” and put one finger on one had on underneath. There were some fancy bras and see-through his heart and then touched me who walked down the street together in pink undies with lace trim for where my heart is. A girl in jeans pairs and laughed out loud. And there him? If only I had your address sat on the bench in front of the were lots of blondes, mostly with bleached in Geneva, we could start to post office with a little dog on hair, and probably they wore micro-string correspond, just the two of us. Or has her lap. Yaniv went over to pet the dog bikini pants underneath. Black. I could that husband of yours thrown you aside, for a minute, and when we left he said easily dye my hair blond—who’s to stop too, since you are already my age, and, that the dog had wanted to bite him. I me? Or buy underwear like that or see- actually, weren’t you two months older said, “Don’t be silly, the dog didn’t do through lacy lingerie, like Behira’s. So than me? anything to you,” and Yaniv said, “No, when Moshe asked me to go with him All the way home I walked and looked he didn’t actually bite, but he wanted to.” to the factory outing in Netanya, I should only at women. I didn’t see any men in I asked why he would say such a thing, have just said yes and even bought sexy the street at all, or maybe the men had how could he know what the dog wanted. underwear for the trip and those stock- become transparent to me, like glass, ex- And Yaniv began to pout and didn’t want ings with lace trim and a miniskirt and cept for the Navy heroes, who are already to talk to me anymore. ♦ dyed my hair blond. Moshe would have dead and lost. I took an especially close (Translated, from the Hebrew, by been completely crazy for me and look at women who were wearing mini- Maggie Goldberg Bar-Tura.)

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 93 was known, in the taxonomy of the THE CRITICS F.B.I., as a Top Echelon Informant. This defection amounted to a breach of street protocol, which was generally punishable by death. But Bulger had few worries about exposure. Even if the truth came out, he once explained to an F.B.I. official, his reputation as a ruthless but standup guy was such that nobody would believe it. “It would be too incredible,” he said. A CRITIC AT LARGE n 2000, the Boston Globe journal- I ists Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill ASSETS AND LIABILITIES published a book about Bulger’s years as an informant, “Black Mass: The The mobster Whitey Bulger secretly worked for the F.B.I. Or was it the other way around? Irish Mob, the F.B.I., and a Devil’s Deal.” Bulger was not wrong: it was BY PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE incredible. A film adaptation, directed by Scott Cooper and also called “Black oseph (the Animal) Barboza was Barboza in witness protection, relo- Mass,” has just been released; it dra- a murderer for hire from New cating him to California. But in his matizes the story as a lethal minuet JBedford, Massachusetts, who new identity he killed a man, and when between the wily criminal Bulger came by his nickname after an local prosecutors sought to try him for (played by Johnny Depp) and the altercation with a minor mafioso which the murder, the F.B.I. concocted a sec- flashy, jocular F.B.I. agent named John he elected to settle with his teeth. Bar- ond coverup, maintaining that the kill- Connolly ( Joel Edgerton), who han- boza ultimately confessed to seven mur- ing was an effort by the Mob to frame dles him. The film conveys the degree ders, and bragged to associates that he the Animal and dispatching federal to which the relationship between in- had committed many more, but he had agents to appear in court as witnesses formant and handler is indeed a rela- the good fortune to be employed by for the defense. After prosecutors tionship: bureaucrats can formalize the Mafia at a moment when author- agreed to reduce the charge, Barboza the transaction in a mountain of pa- ities were trying desperately to better served only four years. Upon his re- perwork, but in the end it hinges on understand organized crime. In 1961, lease, in 1975, he was promptly mur- two people binding their destinies to- J. Edgar Hoover stressed, in a memo, dered. But the Boston F.B.I. contin- gether, navigating treacherous terri- the imperative to develop “live sources ued to enjoy a relationship with one tory hand in hand. within the upper echelon of the orga- of his associates, Stephen Flemmi, a Depp’s fine-boned beauty might nized hoodlum element.” member of the Winter Hill Gang. seem ill-suited to the role, but he cap- Barboza became a prized informant: Flemmi had recently become affiliated tures, with chilling precision, Bul- he served as a government witness, with another up-and-coming gang- ger’s preening tough-guy narcissism. helping to convict members of the Pa- ster, a cunning and disciplined South With his mortuary pallor, ice-water triarca crime family. In fact, he was so Boston hood named James Bulger, who eyes, and swept-back yellow-white valuable that when authorities began was known, owing to his platinum hair, coiffure, Depp looks as if he’d climbed looking into a 1965 murder that Bar- as Whitey. Bulger was an armed rob- into the makeup chair each morning boza had participated in, his contacts ber who had done a stretch in Alca- and allowed himself to be struck by at the F.B.I. engineered a scheme to traz in the nineteen-fifties, which lightning. He performs Whitey’s lip protect him. Barboza was never pros- counted, in the underworld, as a badge service to gentility as the elaborate ecuted for this crime; instead, he took of achievement. Kevin Cullen, the pose that it was, assisting the old la- the stand as the government’s star wit- co-author, with Shelley Murphy, of the dies of Southie with their groceries, ness and implicated four innocent men excellent 2013 biography “Whitey while his squinty eyes and carnivo- in the murder. His F.B.I. handler, an Bulger,” once pointed out that whereas rous smile flash hints of the monster agent named H. Paul Rico, boasted af- in normal life we might be impressed underneath. terward about the ease with which the to learn that somebody had gone to John Connolly once said that, for bureau had set up four “pigeons” for a Harvard, “if you’re a wiseguy, you say, law enforcement, running criminal crime they did not commit. All four ‘Ooh, you went to Alcatraz.’ ” informants was a bit like the circus: men ended up with life sentences. (They Bulger exercised every day, lived with “You need to have a guy in there were cleared of the murder in 2001, by his elderly mother, and cultivated a with the lions and the tigers.” In which point two of them had died in mystique of righteous criminality. In a new book, “Where the Bodies prison.) 1975, he began coöperating with the Were Buried: Whitey Bulger and the

In 1969, the government placed government, joining Flemmi as what World That Made Him” (Morrow), SHOPSIN TAMARA ABOVE:

94 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 Snitching was reviled in Bulger’s Irish-American neighborhood. He thought of himself as a strategist or a liaison, not an informant.

ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 95 the journalist T. J. English makes clear tion about his rivals in the Italian reaucracy, confidential informants like that most F.B.I. agents do not excel Mafia—but not his friends. And he Headley or Bulger are often referred in the role. It takes a certain person- had another condition: his brother Billy to as “assets”—a term that implies not ality type: the garrulous, glad-hand- couldn’t know. just control of the source but outright ing street guy. These agents are often ownership. Yet, if the asset is going to indifferent to official protocol, En- magine you work at the Central persist in the behavior that you are os- glish points out, and their paperwork I Intelligence Agency. Your objective tensibly combatting, how much con- can be atrocious. But on a barstool right now is the fight against the so- trol do you really exert? With Bulger, they’re Mozart. In “Black Mass,” Ed- called Islamic State, or ISIS. In the past, as with Barboza, the asset came to seem gerton plays Connolly as a man who U.S. intelligence had a difficult time so valuable that the government did thrives on informality. His idiom con- penetrating jihadist groups, because more than tolerate his bad behavior; it sists exclusively of backslap and blus- they were bound by ideology, which is began to enable that behavior, even to ter. He’s the guy to see about Red stronger than a mutual interest in a engage in criminal activity itself. Sud- Sox tickets. shared criminal enterprise, and because denly, the government had lost con- The film plausibly depicts the bond they were careful about operational se- trol, and the asset had acquired it. that developed between Connolly and curity. But ISIS is different: it actively Whitey Bulger knew that his friend Bulger as predicated on neighborhood recruits young Westerners to join its Stephen Flemmi had coöperated with loyalty. Connolly grew up in Southie ranks. For the C.I.A., that is a critical the F.B.I. and was still committing and was childhood friends with Whit- opportunity. crimes with impunity. He also knew ey’s younger brother, Billy Bulger (Ben- In order to infiltrate ISIS, you hand- the story of Barboza. So his decision edict Cumberbatch, in the film), who pick the perfect operator, then game to coöperate makes a lot of sense. As by the nineteen-eighties had become out, in advance, how he should respond T. J. English puts it, “If you were will- the president of the Massachusetts State in a variety of situations. Suppose your ing to sign on as a player in this ongo- Senate. Vocational options were cir- infiltrator has crossed into Syria and ing conspiracy, you could not be cumscribed for men who came of age been accepted by ISIS as a new recruit. touched.” in Southie during the mid-twentieth He is taken to a house one day where century: if you couldn’t get a job at the somebody hands him a carving knife or John Connolly, Bulger and Gillette plant or a utility, your career and instructs him to behead a hostage. FFlemmi represented a lesser evil: choices were neatly captured by Con- Should he? If he refuses, his cover may the chief priority for the F.B.I. was to nolly (law enforcement), Billy (poli- be blown, and he could be taken hos- eradicate the Italian Mafia, and, Con- tics), and Whitey (crime). “Southie tage or killed himself. If he commits nolly claimed, his informants were in- kids, we went straight from playing murder, he will solidify his bona fides dispensable in that effort. Years later, cops and robbers on the playground to as a member of the group, which could he described the bargain in terms of doing it for real on the street,” one of have real intelligence value. What if return on investment. “We got forty- Whitey’s underlings says in the movie, beheading the hostage might save a two stone criminals by giving up two adding, “And, just like on the play- hundred lives? How about a thousand? stone criminals,” he says in the biog- ground, it wasn’t always easy to tell who How about just two? raphy “Whitey Bulger.” “Show me a was who.” Tribalism is a recurring theme This conjectural arithmetic of businessman who wouldn’t do that.” in the Bulger saga, but the film sug- means and ends is what makes the But, as Connolly and his colleagues gests that the tribe allegiance of scrappy handling of informants so fraught. An were dismantling La Cosa Nostra, neighborhood kids transcends any sub- effective inside man in a criminal or- Bulger and Flemmi were quietly con- sequent pledge they might make to a ganization is also, necessarily, a crim- solidating control of Boston’s criminal criminal gang, or to the feds. “I grew inal in good standing—and there- landscape. The F.B.I. never brought up with him in Southie,” Connolly says fore a dangerous person with whom cases against them, and when other of Whitey. “That is a bond that doesn’t to be in business. After the attacks of agencies, like the Massachusetts State get broken.” September 11th, the Drug Enforce- Police, tried to target them, the gang- Few activities were more reviled in ment Administration worked closely sters always seemed to get tipped off. this Irish-American milieu than snitch- with a confidential informant named In one terrifying sequence of events ing. “We loathed informers,” Billy David Headley, a Pakistani-American that is depicted in the film “Black Bulger wrote in a 1996 memoir. “Our who ran a video store in Manhattan. Mass,” Bulger and his gang were dis- folklore bled with the names of in- The agency sent him to Pakistan to mayed when World Jai Alai, a sports formers who had sold out their breth- gather intelligence on terrorism. But, betting operation, appointed a new ren to hangmen and worse in the lands when he arrived there, Headley be- C.E.O., Roger Wheeler. Several Bulger of our ancestors.” In deference to Whit- came a terrorist himself, training with cronies were employed by World Jai ey’s sensitivities on this point, Con- Lashkar-e-Taiba and eventually help- Alai, and they regularly skimmed nolly never referred to him as an in- ing to plan the 2008 Mumbai bomb- money from its huge gambling reve- formant. Whitey preferred terms like ing, in which a hundred and sixty-six nues. But Wheeler wanted to audit the “strategist” or “liaison.” He told Con- people were killed. books. In the film, when Whitey is nolly that he would furnish informa- In the reassuring argot of the bu- told that Wheeler cannot be persuaded

96 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 to sell the company, he announces his intentions with a question: “Would his widow sell?” To execute Wheeler, Bulger dis- patched a schlubby assassin named John Martorano. As Wheeler finished a round of golf at his country club, in Tulsa, Martorano approached his car and shot him in the face. The hit was coördinated with the assis- tance of World Jai Alai’s head of se- curity—H. Paul Rico, Barboza’s for- mer handler, who had retired from the F.B.I. so that he could devote more time to criminality. After the murder, a junior member of Bulger’s gang, Brian Halloran, ap- proached the F.B.I. in Boston and said “The pay is actually about the same.” that he had information about the ex- ecution of Roger Wheeler: it had been •• ordered by Whitey Bulger. The bureau responded by questioning Halloran’s credibility. Fearing for his life, Hallo- Bulger derived much of his income by ger’s and Flemmi’s criminal activities. ran insisted that the authorities place controlling bookies and vending ma- One reason is that Bulger compro- him in witness protection. They re- chines, and it was part of his mythol- mised his handlers. A case of wine. A fused. Instead, John Connolly informed ogy that he kept drugs out of South plane ticket. The gifts added up. Con- Bulger that Halloran had betrayed him, Boston (though in fact he was bring- nolly reportedly took a quarter of a and Bulger tracked Halloran down at ing them in). It’s useful to remember million dollars over a decade. But a a waterfront bar and shot him to death that he was also, effectively, a serial subtler power shift was also in play: in the parking lot. killer. when Connolly and Morris broke the For a 1999 study in the Fordham law to protect Bulger, they were fur- hen I was growing up in Bos- Law Review, Ellen Yaroshefsky inter- nishing him with grounds for black- W ton during the nineteen-nine- viewed former federal prosecutors mail. In 1994, despite the F.B.I.’s best ties, the myth of Whitey Bulger as a about the tendency to grow close to a efforts, a Massachusetts grand jury standup criminal, a “good bad guy,” was criminal informant and the perils of began to hear evidence about Bulger still remarkably strong. It was an ap- losing objectivity. It is possible, Yaro- and Flemmi. A furious Whitey later pealing idea, rooted in tribal solidarity, shefsky suggested, to “fall in love with telephoned Morris and said, “If I’m and you could see how it might have your rat.” Something like this hap- going to jail, you’re going to jail. I’m been a tempting archetype for Holly- pened not just with Connolly but also taking you with me.” Morris had a wood. But, to the credit of the film with Connolly’s F.B.I. supervisor, John major heart attack. It was a vivid snap- “Black Mass,” Johnny Depp plays Morris. Flemmi and Bulger would go shot of Bulger’s leverage. As Lehr and Bulger as a bloodless psychotic, and to Morris’s suburban house and in- O’Neill write, “Bulger had nearly killed does not stint on depicting his savagery. dulge in long evenings of bonding. him with a phone call.” The gangster Deborah Hussey was the daughter of Morris was from the Midwest and was finally indicted, but before he could Stephen Flemmi’s common-law wife. lacked Connolly’s common touch. (His be arrested he fled. Connolly had tipped A damaged young woman whom paperwork, T. J. English notes, “was him off. Flemmi had been molesting since she impeccable.”) He liked wine, so Bulger was a teen-ager, she fell into prostitu- gave him a case, and then another. On hat is where the movie ends, and tion to support a heroin addiction, and a separate occasion, the gangsters sup- Tthe Bulger story, too, might have Bulger worried that she might talk to plied a plane ticket so that Morris’s ended there, with the man vanishing, the police. So they took her to a small mistress could join him on a getaway forever untouchable. But in 2011, after house on East Third Street in South to Georgia. For security reasons, rela- a decade and a half on the lam, he was Boston. The property was just down tionships with informants are often finally apprehended. For years, the the street from the home of Billy Bulger, carried out in secret, with little over- F.B.I. had been unable to track him, but Whitey went there mainly to kill sight; the usual temptations become and many people speculated that offi- people. He called the house the Haunty. hard to resist. cials did not really want to find Whitey, There were bodies buried in the base- Much like the earlier F.B.I. agents for fear of the revelations about F.B.I. ment. Inside, Bulger choked Deborah who had handled Barboza, Connolly complicity that might emerge if he Hussey to death. She was twenty-six. and Morris continued to cover for Bul- ever stood trial. John Connolly had

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 97 eventually been prosecuted for his cor- Weeks, still on the witness stand, Justice ordered the F.B.I. to track any ruption, and for his involvement in yet responded, “Fuck you, O.K.?” crimes committed by its informants. In another murder committed by John “Fuck you, too,” Bulger shot back. a 2013 letter, the bureau disclosed that Martorano, on Bulger’s orders, in Flor- For all its drama, English argues, in the prior year it had authorized in- ida. Connolly is serving forty years in the trial was a sideshow. He begins his formants to break the law on 5,939 oc- prison; John Morris received immu- book not with Whitey but with Joseph casions. “Stone killers,” Connolly once nity and testified against him. Bulger Barboza, and he insists that any nar- remarked. “That’s who you’re trying to sightings were reported in Ireland, Italy, rative that hews too closely to the re- recruit. Then you’re supposed to tell and all over the United States. But lationship between Bulger and the them ‘You can’t do that anymore’? Are when Whitey was finally discovered, “rogue agent” John Connolly overlooks you shitting me?” To English, the cau- at the age of eighty-one, he was living a more systemic problem. It wasn’t just tionary tale of “one very crafty psycho- a quiet life with his girlfriend, Cath- that Connolly introduced Bulger to path who had corrupted the system” ob- erine Greig, a few blocks from the his boss, Morris; he eventually intro- scures the “preexisting corrupt system” boardwalk in Santa Monica. Their duced Bulger to Jeremiah O’Sullivan, that created him. apartment was modest and unremark- a senior official in the U.S. Attorney’s able, except for the eight hundred and office in Boston. (The two were, Con- ulger mounted a surprising de- twenty-two thousand dollars in cash nolly told English, “quite impressed B fense. His lawyers acknowledged that investigators found hidden in the with one another.”) When Brian Hal- that he had been a major organized- wall. Bulger had not shed his native loran walked into the F.B.I. and im- crime figure in Boston, and was guilty hauteur. When the agents told him to plicated Bulger in the Jai Alai hit, it of racketeering, loan sharking, gam- kneel, he said, “I ain’t getting down on was O’Sullivan who ultimately refused bling, drug dealing. What he had never my fucking knees.” He didn’t want to to put him in witness protection. been, however, was a rat. “James Bulger dirty his trousers. Federal law enforcement is no less a was of Irish descent, and the worst Bulger had been an avid reader as tribe than a Southie street gang is, and, thing an Irish person could consider far back as his years in Alcatraz, and English argues, it will always look after doing was becoming an informant,” his on his shelves in Santa Monica agents its own. This may simply be a lamen- lead lawyer, Jay Carney, explained. found a collection of true-crime table feature of institutional culture: the Whitey did not take the stand during books. Among them was “Paddy Catholic Church covered for the pred- the trial, but, in a documentary that Whacked,” a 2006 book by T. J. En- ators in its midst. But one oddity of the later aired on CNN, he elaborated. “I glish, about Irish-American gang- Bulger case is that the prosecutors who asked the questions, I got the answers,” sters. When Bul ger was prosecuted brought the thirty-two-count indict- he said. “I was the guy that did the di- in federal court in Boston, in 2013, ment worked in the very office that Jer- recting. They didn’t direct me.” In Bul- English attended the trial, and his emiah O’Sullivan used to occupy. Their ger’s telling, he never gave any infor- book offers a detailed account of the challenge, English argues, was how to mation to the feds; he only collected proceedings. Despite the “convict Bulger without information from them. Connolly may underworld prohibition on collaterally tarnishing the have thought he was the handler, but snitching, everybody seems reputation of the system in reality he was the informant. to snitch eventually. With they represented.” On its face, this claim was laughable, Bulger in exile, his former The notion that Whitey belied by numerous witnesses and cor- associates negotiated bar- Bulger’s pact with the F.B.I. roborating F.B.I. documents. Yet there gains of one sort or an- represented not a gross ab- is no disputing that the federal govern- other. Just as the F.B.I. gave erration but something like ment gave Whitey a great deal more a pass to Bulger in the in- business as usual is almost than it got in exchange. Indeed, one terest of prosecuting the too bleak to contemplate. It mystery of Bulger’s rapport with the Mafia, the Justice Depart- suggests, as English writes, F.B.I. had always been why the agents ment gave a pass to the killers from that “the entire criminal justice system were so devoted to him. Connolly Bulger’s gang in the interest of pros- was a grand illusion; a shell game pre- claimed that the bureau got “forty-two ecuting Bulger. Stephen Flemmi, who sided over by petty bureaucrats more stone criminals” because of Bulger, but avoided capital punishment by mak- concerned with promoting their careers Bulger’s actual contributions to the work ing a plea deal, testified about how and protecting their asses than any- of the bureau were often exaggerated. Bulger murdered Deborah Hussey. thing else.” Nobody knows how many Bulger’s defense pointed out that he A Bulger protégé named Kevin Weeks confidential informants are working for was never deeply tied to the Mafia. In testified about burying Hussey’s body. the F.B.I. at any time, but in a 2008 fact, in a bureaucratic sleight of hand “We killed people that were rats, and budget request the bureau put the num- that is dramatized in the film “Black I had the two biggest rats right next ber at fifteen thousand. After the de- Mass,” Connolly and Morris routinely to me,” Weeks said. gree of official complicity in Bulger’s padded Bulger’s official dossier by -ex “You suck!” Bulger hissed. crimes was revealed, the Department of tracting tidbits from the files of other

98 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 confidential informants and attributing from prison after thirty years. He sued them to Bulger. the F.B.I., and was awarded twenty- So why did the agents stick with nine million dollars. Many relatives of him? Once Connolly and Morris began Bulger’s victims (including David to bend the rules for Bulger and Wheeler) have launched similar suits, Flemmi, they became bound to their though a number of them have been sources. Part of the answer, too, is that thrown out on the ground that the the culture rewarded agents who landed statute of limitations has expired—a top informants; throughout the years cruel technicality, given that it was that Connolly was handling Bulger, he through the contrivance of govern- was promoted and given performance ment officials that Bulger’s informant bonuses. But relationships can become status remained secret for so long. pathological, and the more intimate On the day that Whitey was ar- the relationship the more it will as- raigned, a diminutive, fastidiously sume a logic of its own. groomed man appeared in the specta- Bureaucracies, like people, are also tors’ gallery. It was Billy Bulger, the for- given to path dependency. The origi- mer senate president. The original tribal nal rationale behind recruiting Whitey allegiance is blood, and Billy had never Bulger was that he would help take out abandoned his older brother. “I could the Italian Mob. But by the late nine- have tried to influence him,” Billy said, teen-eighties the Boston Mafia had in a rare interview on the subject, in more or less disappeared, and the new Boston in 2007. “But you know, you locus of criminal power was Whitey couldn’t get a conversation going.” Bulger and Steve Flemmi. A colleague After two decades in the state sen- of John Connolly, an F.B.I. supervisor ate, Bulger became president of the named Bob Fitzpatrick, met with University of Massachusetts, but he Bulger at one point and concluded that was forced to step down seven years he enjoyed too much of a free hand. later when it was revealed that he had Besides, Fitzpatrick argued, the whole lied to the F.B.I. Billy told investiga- logic of informants is that you flip crim- tors that he had not been in contact inals on the lower rungs of an enter- with his fugitive brother; in truth, they prise so that you can target the top of had spoken on the phone. “I told him the hierarchy. “You can never have the I cared about him deeply and that I top guy as an informant,” Fitzpatrick still do,” Billy later told a grand jury. said. “If you have the top guy, he’s mak- He made no suggestion that Whitey ing policy, and then he owns you.” Ac- should turn himself in. cording to Fitzpatrick, he said he rec- When John Connolly left the F.B.I., ommended that the bureau jettison he threw a retirement party in the Bulger as a source. He was overruled. North End. Billy Bulger had remained close to Connolly and helped him ar- hitey was convicted on thirty- range a cushy new appointment as di- Wone counts, including involve- rector of security at Boston Edison. ment in eleven murders, and received There were speeches, and Bulger said multiple life sentences. But T. J. En- a few words. He cited the philosopher glish is not alone in feeling that the Seneca, who held that loyalty is the system got away without scrutiny. In “holiest good” in the human heart. a statement, David Wheeler, the son “John Connolly is the personification of Roger Wheeler, the murdered Jai of loyalty,” Bulger said. “Not only to Alai executive, cautioned that the ver- his friends and not only to the job that dict should not overshadow the “gross he holds but also to the highest prin- institutional misconduct” of the F.B.I. ciples. He’s never forgotten them.”  If the word “asset” implies ownership, 1 then perhaps the government should neatest trick of the week bear some responsibility for the vio- From the Toronto Globe and Mail. lent actions of criminals whom it shel- Her slim legs are crossed elegantly at the ters and protects. One of the men Bar- knee and at her neck, a colourful scarf is boza fingered for murder was released arranged artfully over her shoulder.

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 99 like it from happening elsewhere next BOOKS year. He even argues, against the grain of the usual historian’s practice, that there are recurrent patterns in history and that BLOOD AND SOIL the bad ones can be identified and per- haps undone. A historian returns to the Holocaust. Though Snyder’s goal is to clarify history, he is certain (and here he is like BY ADAM GOPNIK most academic historians) that one can clarify history only by complicating it. As one might expect, an extremely com- plicated story, formed in the field of Holocaust studies, trails his new effort. His previous book, “Bloodlands,” was an effort to historicize the Holocaust— to remove it from the stock black-and- white imagery, accompanied by mi- nor-key cello music, in which it had come to reside, at least within the pop- ular imagination. In particular, he sought to re-center our attention on the “for- gotten” Holocaust, on the reality that at least as many Jews were killed in mass actions in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic states as were dispatched in the death factories of Birkenau and Tre- blinka. Soldiers machine-gunning peo- ple on the edge of a pit that they’d dug themselves and that already held the bodies of their families—that was the true image of the Holocaust, more so than trains running on time to indus- trialized gassings and burnings. Ausch- witz, in this view, is, to put it brutally, almost a tourist trap for historians. What distinguished the horror from other hor- rors was not lists on graph paper and bureaucratic requisitions for Zyklon B gas. It was a soldier writing home to his wife about killing Jewish babies in college student working on ourselves the appearance of moral se- Belarus: “During the first try, my hand a seminar paper about the riousness while immunizing us to the trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets Amechanics of the Rwandan urgencies of actual moral seriousness? used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly genocide of 1994 sees his Piety is the opposite of compassion, and shot surely at the many women, father reading “Black Earth” (Crown), which is better directed toward those children, and infants. . . . Infants flew in the Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s who need it now than toward those great arcs through the air, and we shot new book on the Holocaust, and asks who were denied it then. them to pieces in flight.” the unaskable question: Do we really The student turns away in exaspera- Historicizing anything risks dimin- need one more book on the Holocaust? tion before his father can reply that Sny- ishing it—history, after all, is what used The facts are in and clear, he says, while der has framed this book in order to re- to happen—and critics complained that so many other human horrors demand spond to that question. It’s why he has Snyder, by robbing the horror of its in- our historical understanding and get given it the subtitle “The Holocaust as dustrial modernity, had made it a folk- so much less: how many new books History and Warning.” Snyder’s point is loric and merely regional tragedy. Worse, have been published this year on the that if we really understood what hap- they complained, by blending the crimes Belgian genocide in the Congo? Doesn’t pened in Ukraine in 1941 we would begin of the war with Soviet crimes that began endlessly retelling the story of the mur- to understand what happened in Rwanda in the thirties—the Ukrainian famine, der of the Jews of Europe let us give in 1994—and might prevent something for instance—he was explaining away the enthusiastic participation in the mass Timothy Snyder treats Slavs, Balts, and Jews as victims together. killing of Jews by the locals, Ukrainians

100 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY YAREK WASZUL and Poles in particular. Instead of seeing Jews of Estonia died almost to a man, their states and their identity at a mo- crazed German fanatics who communi- the Jews of Denmark largely survived, ment of environmental crisis and pitted cated their pathogen to hardened and that this was not because Estonians against one another by a brutal colonial- Jew-haters, he asked us to see what hap- hated Jews and Danes did not but be- ism, you are likely to see in Rwanda a pened in the forties as a blind scything cause the Estonian state—though it had similar kind of tragedy, as Snyder does— through a harsh landscape, ignorant had only the briefest of existences be- and you are likely to be sympathetic, as armies clashing by night and killing mil- fore—was destroyed, and the Danish one Snyder is, to protecting small-state iden- lions in the darkness, a scene from Bosch left mostly intact. tities and encouraging their national- more than from Kafka. “Mass violence Snyder’s new book is meant, in part, isms. If, with the Israeli historian Alon of a sort never before seen in history was to respond to the criticisms of “Blood- Confino, whose recent “A World With- visited upon this region,” he wrote in lands,” and a reader familiar with the out Jews” is written in quiet opposition “Bloodlands.” “The victims were chiefly controversies will note in the text more to Snyder’s views, you see in the Shoah Jews, Belarusans, Ukrainians, Poles, Rus- sublimated anger than might at first the vengeance of atavistic tribalism on sians, and Balts, the peoples native to appear. Angry authors, even when their liberal modernity, you are likely to worry these lands.” By making the massacres books are not explicit replies, end up about all incantations of authenticity. part of a geographic tragedy of invasion incorporating unsent responses into the Far from being sympathetic to revived and counterinvasion, and of victimized web of the text, where the angry red nationalisms as bulwarks of the op- native populations who suffered in var- threads stand out. If the complaint about pressed, you are likely to be suspicious ious ways along with the Jews, Snyder “Bloodlands” was that Snyder made the of them (possibly even extending to the could be accused of playing down the Holocaust a local event, this book is renascent Jewish kind). role of ideological and indigenous an- meant to universalize it again, with the Snyder begins the new book with an ti-Semitism. “The gesture of a finger understanding that what is universal in unorthodox and provocative account of across the throat, remembered with loath- human experience is what is local and Hitler’s thinking. He stresses two ar- ing by a few Jewish survivors,” Snyder political. resting elements: Hitler’s skepticism wrote with great delicacy, “was meant to about using agricultural science for in- communicate to the Jews that they were hy do we need any new books on creased food production and (usefully going to die—though not necessarily Wthe extermination of the Jews? discomfiting for an American reader- that the Poles wished this upon them.” The Shoah, it seems, has come to be read ship) his dependence on an American It is certainly not the way that Claude for portents and interpretation as much model of development. Hitler, Snyder Lanz mann’s “Shoah” represents the ges- as for history itself. Yet one reason that tells us, was obsessed with the question ture. Elsewhere, Snyder wrote that the the small scholarly details matter is that of growing enough grain to feed the “victims of Auschwitz were more likely they provide an arsenal for whatever ar- German population and, for various to be bourgeois and thus suitable targets gument you want to make about the crackpot reasons, didn’t believe that of comfortable identification,” although present. If you believe that the mass ex- modern agronomy could make it hap- “comfortable” is surely the last feeling termination of the Jews was already im- pen on native soil. He saw himself doing anyone reading about their suffering plicit in the orders given for the June, in Eastern Europe, and in Ukraine es- would ever have. By treating Slavs, Balts, 1941 invasion of Russia, then you are pecially, what Americans had done in and Jews all as victims together, his crit- likely to see it as proceeding according the Great Plains: extinguish or exile the ics claim, he was obscuring a tragic core to a long-standing fixed plan of Hitler’s; natives while taking over the land to truth. Slavs and Balts died along with if you believe that the Final Solution, feed the metropolis. Lebensraum meant Jews, but Slavs and Balts killed Jews as properly so called, was a panicky, con- “living space,” but in a different sense well, in a way that Jews did not kill Slavs fused improvisation arrived at in De- from the way we normally understand and Balts. cember, 1941, after the German failure it: a place to grow grain rather than a Snyder maintains that too much em- at Moscow and the Russian counterat- place to put Germans. phasis has been placed on the ferocity of tack, then you will probably see it as a Snyder’s Hitler was not exactly con- indigenous anti-Semitism; that it was response made by a mostly disordered vinced that the Germans were a supe- instead the destruction of Eastern Eu- and dysfunctional evil. If June, you are rior race. He was convinced that they ropean states by the Nazis, and then the likely to believe that bad people do what might become a superior race, given their skillful “political” exploitation of their they say they will; if December, you be- bloodlines and their numbers, but they wretched recent history, which made lieve that the worst things happen when would have to prove it in competition their lands into killing grounds and a bad people get cornered by their own with other races on the world stage. Star- small number of their people into exe- bad behavior. How you feel about things tling as it is, this view explains many as- cutioners. Without the state apparatus as seemingly remote as Iranian deals and pects of Hitler’s character: his physical that had long accepted, however grudg- Putin’s aggressions is shaped by—or distance from the ideal he espoused (they ingly, ethnic coexistence, and with the shapes—your judgment of the histori- aren’t like me, but I will midwife a su- murder of Jews made into a sign of re- cal micro-details. perior race that I do not belong to); his nunciation of “Judeobolshevism,” intol- More broadly, if you believe, with unappeasable appetite for war; his rage erable pressure was placed on the native Snyder, that the Second World War was at his compatriots for losing his war; his population. He points out that, while the really about subject peoples robbed of readiness, at the end, to see German land

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 101 destroyed, German cities burned, Ger- Snyder’s regular invocation of “poli- der Jews; they could only be very quickly man women raped—his manifest de- tics” is meant to illuminate this devil’s motivated to do it. He seems to find sire for a bonfire of the Germans. He dance of impossibilities. The local Slavs more consolation in this distinction than had given them every chance to show or Baltic peoples, having previously col- it may possess. themselves a superior race, and, since laborated with the Communists, could they had failed the test of history, they reclaim their national inheritance by hat would be the opposite of Sny- must suffer the consequences. murdering Jews, and cleansing them- W der’s view? First, that the “blood- Snyder’s Hitler is no doubt made more selves of the stain of collaboration. Neat lands” was not a geopolitical ground that neatly uniform in purpose than he re- trick. By supplanting “ancient hatreds” generated its own events. The worst of ally was. Revolutionary ideas tend to be with contemporary politics, Snyder the killings happened there, certainly, but rigorous: if you are plotting a socialist wants to situate the massacres within there is no discernible difference in Nazi utopia, a blueprint, however unreal, is the specific logic of a time and place. or, for that matter, Soviet behavior else- called for. Reactionary ideas, forged in Ukrainians and Polish Catholics don’t where. An entire village was murdered rage, tend to be emotive and incoher- just hate Jews and kill them any chance in central France, Jews were slaughtered ent. We miss their appeal if we search they get. You have to put them in ex- en masse on the banks of the Danube. them for regularities they don’t possess. tremis first. The local populations got Numbers alone, not actions, made the It takes a purpose to illuminate a plan; caught up in the killing because it was bloodlands as bloody as they were. Sny- it takes only one high passion to set fire the prudent thing to do, given the con- der emphasizes that, where the state was to many more. text of the occupation. destroyed, the Nazis got at their victims As Snyder moves toward the specifics Yet if the concept of “politics” is to more easily. It’s certainly true that, the of the German invasion of the Soviet be explanatory it should show how power wider the moat, the harder it is for the Union, in 1941, he reveals again that, gets dispersed and rebalanced among tiger to get at its victims. In France, re- while no apologist for the indigenous contending groups. Politics is how peo- cently arrived eastern Jews, without murderers, he is, certainly, a partisan of ple adjust to one another’s needs and friends or history, were easier to get at the peoples of Eastern Europe. He hates potential for violence. In the circum- and deport than native French ones. But the way that the Ukrainians, the Latvi- stance where one party has all the power, plenty of those went to the ovens, too. ans, and the Poles have been made into though, the invocation of politics seems Picasso’s intimate friend, the poet and peasant demons, with Western sages unhelpful. The politics of a slaughter- Catholic convert Max Jacob, an orna- nodding and saying, well, the Nazis “un- house is not really politics, at least not ment of French culture and as French as leashed the old hatreds.” He writes: to the pigs; it is just a division of the any man could be, died on his way to labor. To coöperate or not is a political Auschwitz, and his brother and sister It is tempting to imagine that a simple idea in the minds of simple people decades past and choice, made every day in prisons; to were gassed on their arrival. The tiger’s thousands of miles away can explain a com- obey or die is not. appetite, not the width of the moat, is plex event. The notion that local east European The real end of Snyder’s relentless in- still the story. Denmark, the seeming antisemitism killed the Jews of eastern Europe vocation of “politics” is, one comes to counter-example, was the site of a rela- confers upon others a sense of superiority akin feel, not without its politics. Snyder does tively benign occupation, in Nazi terms, to that the Nazis once felt. These people are quite primitive, we can allow ourselves to not want the Putinists of 2015 to be able but the benignity was influenced by a think. Not only does this account fail as an to discredit Ukrainian nationalism by sense of racial affinity, the vast irrational explanation of the Holocaust; its racism pre- pointing to Ukrainian participation in forces of racial hallucination seeming as vents us from considering the possibility that the Holocaust: he wants to make it clear powerful as the local political forces. not only Germans and Jews but also local that the Ukrainian nationalists were, in Snyder is admirably relentless in mak- peoples were individual human agents with complex goals that were reflected in politics. the hackneyed phrase, “victims, too.” But ing the reader feel the horror of the So- they were victims of a peculiar kind, and viet mass killings, without waving them Ukrainians may have massacred their one can cheer their emancipation today away or moving them to the margins. Jewish neighbors. But this was not be- without looking past their history. Sny- We meet, or, rather, shudder to have heard cause the Ukrainians had always hated der asks us not to blame the Lithuanians of, Vasily Blokhin, the N.K.V.D. execu- Jews; it was because the famine of the and the Latvians for what they did to tioner—hard to credit as a real person thirties had led the Ukrainian people to the Jews without first blaming the So- and not an Ian Fleming invention—who fear Soviet power, and the Nazi invo- viets for what they did to the Lithua- in one night could murder two hundred cation of Judeobolshevism as the cause nians and the Latvians. Surely one can and fifty Polish military officers. This is of their miseries provided a pat and blame all the evil actors without having not being even-handed. It is being clear- plausible enemy. (The Soviet adminis- to take sides with any. Going state by eyed. But if Snyder’s thesis is that, with- tration did employ Jews “disproportion- state and people by people through the out the previous ten years of Soviet bru- ately to their numbers,” Snyder observes, Stalinist and Nazi destruction of local tality, the peoples of the “bloodlands” although most Soviet collaborators authority in all the occupied smaller na- would not have been complicit in the weren’t Jewish.) Some did terrible things, tions, Snyder certainly shows that those Nazi nightmare, then one would want but they did them out of political des- local populations, whether Poles or Lat- more evidence—a correlation between peration and misrouted nationalism, not vians or Ukrainians, could not be instan- Soviet brutality and genocidal eager- enduring hate. taneously motivated to rise up and mur- ness, a direct relation between the two,

102 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 something—to make the correspondence The explanation of the human ap- many others gleefully to perpetrate bes- more robust. In Hungary, the Arrow petite for mass murder obviously does tial cruelties on helpless Jews who had Cross killed with mad vengeance, and not lie in the peasant simplicity of the done them no harm.” the Béla Kun Communist period was far Eastern Europeans. (Is there a single And anti-Semitism was surely differ- in the past. Vichy passed anti-Jewish laws, historian or journalist who holds this ent in kind from the other ethnic ha- and hastened its Jews toward Drancy al- view?) But it does seem to lie in the en- treds of the time and place. The Jew was most before they were asked for, and in during power of old hatreds, and our doubly evil, as both an agent of moder- France the Soviets were only a spectre. capacity for turning group hatred into nity and the possessor of an occult mys- Snyder is certainly aware of all this, massacre, given opportune circumstance. tery. Jews were cosmopolitans, bankers, and thinks that his account explains it: Just as we can’t pretend that Stalinist merchants, middlemen; the same fam- “Where Germans obliterated conven- crimes were unrelated to absolutist En- ily passed at will, from day to day, as tional states, or annihilated Soviet insti- lightenment habits of mind in which German, French, or Russian. Jews were tutions that had just destroyed conven- class enemies easily become nonpersons, also possessors of an ancient text, a se- tional states, they created the abyss where we can’t pretend that the Hitlerian cret language, a lore kept hidden and racism and politics pulled together to- crimes can be released from an anti- unavailable; they welcomed no converts, wards nothingness.” But another view Semitism deeply rooted in European teaching their ancient language reluc- would see the obliteration as the auxil- Christianity. The great and sympathetic tantly. This compound suspicion helped iary act and the abyss as the central moral historian of Christianity Diarmaid Mac- make anti-Semitism so virulent. It was, landscape. Politics and procedures obvi- Culloch writes that it is still “necessary as Confino shows, reflected in the sa- ously enabled the killings; we owe Sny- to remind Christians of the centuries-old distic Jewish parades in which, in the der a debt for his realism about this. But heritage of anti-Semitism festering in thirties, helpless Jews were forced to the desire to maim and murder had its the memories of countless ordinary participate: the Torah was burned, with roots in a disease of the mind so pow- twentieth-century Christians on the eve the enthusiastic participation of Ger- erful and passionate that to call it polit- of the Nazi takeover. In the 1940’s, this man Christians. ical or procedural hardly seems to cap- poison led not just Christian Germans, Postwar people who fastened onto ture its nature, or its prevalence. but Christian Lithuanians, Poles and the story of Anne Frank, as has been

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 103 observed before, were not in any sense ters if we don’t do things that we wish sentimental to do so. That a modern we didn’t have to. state would send the police out to en- War makes ordinary people do hor- trap a fifteen-year-old girl and then send rible things. If there is a point that per- her across Europe to her death because haps Snyder does not underline she was a Jew was an evil genuinely new enough—it comes through vividly in in the world in a way that horrific mas- Antony Beevor’s books on the Battle sacres (and counter-massacres) were not. of Stalingrad and other campaigns—it For that matter, when Martin Amis re- is that the Germans who killed were turned to the question of Auschwitz in dying, too, in increasingly vast numbers last year’s novel “The Zone of Interest,” and in cold and fear of their own. Wars it was because he knows that it repre- make atrocities happen. Americans have sented something genuinely new in the still not come to terms with My Lai, a practice of evil: an institution set up Vietnam atrocity not unlike the acts of with all the normal domestic appurte- the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern nances of middle-class life whose es- Front, though thankfully more isolated. sential purpose is the mass murder of To engage in political or procedural or human beings. even geographic explanations of these histories misses their history. Once panic nyder offers his own view of the right sets in, for an army or an occupier, then S lessons to draw in a final chapter of the persecution—indeed, the slaugh- THE NEW YORKER “Black Earth,” ambitiously called “Con- ter—of the population seems a neces- Statement required by 39 U.S.C. 3685 showing the Ownership, Man- agement, and Circulation of THE NEW YORKER, published weekly, clusion: Our World.” The college stu- sity for survival. Frightened soldiers in except for five combined issues: 12/22 & 12/30/14; 2/23 & 3/1; 6/8 & 6/15; 7/6 & 7/13; 8/10 & 8/18 (47 issues). Date of filing: October 1, 2015. dent’s Rwanda arrives here rapidly: just foreign lands murder the locals with- Publication No. 873-140. Annual subscription price: $69.99. 1. Location of known office of Publication is One World Trade as Hitler’s world view derived from his out mercy or purpose. One wishes that Center, New York, N.Y. 10007. 2. Location of the Headquarters or General Business Offices of the bizarre response to an ecological crisis— this happened rarely. In truth, it hap- Publisher is One World Trade Center, New York, N.Y. 10007. 3. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, and manag- the threat to a Germany deprived of land pens all the time. ing editor are: publisher, Lisa Henriques Hughes, One World Trade Center, New York, N.Y. 10007; editor, David Remnick, One World for growing grain—what happened in Yet another truth also rises here. Hit- Trade Center, New York, N.Y. 10007; managing editor, Silvia Killings- worth, One World Trade Center, New York, N.Y. 10007. Rwanda happened, in part, because of ler ruled for twelve years. The worst of 4. The owner is: Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., published through its Condé Nast division, One World Trade Center, New York, the exhaustion of arable land. Africa, in the horrors occurred during four of N.Y. 10007. Stockholder: Directly or indirectly through intermediate corporations to the ultimate corporate parent, Advance Publications, Snyder’s view, may become the world’s them. Stalin’s reign was twenty-five- Inc., 950 Fingerboard Road, Staten Island, N.Y. 10305. 5. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders new bloodlands, where ecological crisis odd years. Hell on earth is possible to owning or holding one per cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: None. is capped by mass slaughter and where make but is hard to go on making. The 6. Extent and nature of circulation: Average no. Single ethnic explanations of killings (those human appetite for social peace, if not copies each issue issue during preceding nearest to Hutus always hated the Tutsis) conceal for social justice, eventually asserts it- twelve months filing date the political manipulation of power. self. This is of no comfort to the vic- A. Total no. copies 1 ,038,370 1 ,038,370 B. Paid circulation Surely Snyder is right when he im- tims. But it should be of some comfort 1. Mailed outside-county paid 855,491 835,918 subcriptions stated on PS form 3541 plies that the well-meant “Godwin’s law,” to the survivors, their inheritors, and 2. Mailed in-county paid 0 0 subcriptions stated on which, beginning as an observation about us. Those who think that the horrors PS form 3541 3. Paid distribution outside 79,536 76,970 Internet arguments, has come to be short- of the nineteen-thirties and forties were the mails including sales through dealers and carriers, hand for the rule that the Nazis should eclipses of the sun, rather than an eter- street venders, counter sales, and other paid distribution never be introduced into ordinary polit- nal darkness of the earth, are invariably outside USPS® 4. Paid distribution by other 0 0 ical arguments, is miscast. In fact, we mocked as Panglossian. But Dr. Pan- classes of mail through the USPS should keep the image of the Germans gloss, Voltaire’s fatuously optimistic C. Total paid distribution 935,027 912,888 D. Free or nominal-rate distribution and the Nazis in front of us—not to philosopher, is an unfairly reviled man. 1. Free or nominal-rate 38,716 42,945 outside-county copies show how close the people on the other The Enlightenment philosophers who included on PS form 3541 2. Free or nominal-rate 0 0 side of an argument are to unutterable insisted that the world could be im- in-county copies included on PS form 3541 evil but to remind ourselves that we, too, proved were right. Voltaire was one of 3. Free or nominal-rate copies 0 0 mailed at other classes can become that close in a shorter time them. The mistake was to think that, through the USPS 4. Free or nominal-rate 5,707 5,694 than we like to think. In a period of fear once improved, it couldn’t get worse distribution outside the mail E. Total free or nominal-rate 44,423 48,639 and panic, it is the easiest thing in the again. Voltaire’s point was not that op- distribution F. Total distribution 979,450 961,527 world to talk ourselves into the idea that timism about mankind’s fate is false. It (Sum of 15c and 15e) G. Copies not distributed 58,920 76,843 bad things we do are necessities of human was that, in the face of a Heaven known H. Total (Sum of 15f and g) 1 ,038,370 1,038,370 I. Per cent paid 95.46% 94.94% nature. The Germans listened to Mo- to be decidedly unbenevolent, it takes J. Paid Electronic Copies 93,367 89,730 K. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) 1 ,028,395 1,002,618 zart and Beethoven and then murdered unrelenting, thankless, and mostly ill- + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a) L. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) 1 ,072,818 1,051,257 children, and this was not a cognitive rewarded work to cultivate happiness + Paid Electronic Copies M. Per cent paid (Both Print & 95.86% 95.37% dislocation from which we couldn’t suffer here on earth, no matter what color the Electronic Copies) but the eternal rationale offered by the soil. That was the lesson Dr. Pangloss 7. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. (Signed) David Geithner, Chief Financial Officer terrified: we can’t protect what really mat- and his students had yet to learn. 

104 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 BRIEFLY NOTED

THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD, by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa). The final in- stallment of Ferrante’s engrossing and wildly popular Nea- politan tetralogy concludes the story of the childhood com- panions and competitors Elena and Lila. Elena, brought back to Naples by the disintegration of her marriage and the start of a new romance, contends with family disap- proval, the challenges of bringing up daughters as she ad- vances a literary career, and the pull of the charismatic Lila. The novel examines friendship, motherhood, politics, class conflict, and the project of writing, as Elena reflects, “I felt strong, no longer a victim of my origins but capable of dom- inating them, of giving them a shape, of taking revenge on them for myself, for Lila, whomever.”

THE INVADERS, by Karolina Waclawiak (Regan Arts). This novel of suburban Connecticut takes on the challenge not only of living up to forebears like Cheever and Updike but also of making its main characters—Cheryl, a trophy wife, and her entitled stepson, Teddy—likable. As the pair follow parallel paths to self-destruction, the book draws out the disjunction between a lush, decorous setting and the inner corruption of its inhabitants. An over-reliance on well-worn tropes of the genre—pill-popping housewives, lecherous neighbors—results in a picture that doesn’t feel entirely contemporary. Luckily, Cheryl is both devious and complicated enough to hold our attention. Her interloper perspective allows for bold reflec- tions— knowing that she “could have ended up somewhere where people had good reason to be unhappy.”

THE BILLION DOLLAR SPY, by David E. Hoffman (Doubleday). On October 14, 1980, in Moscow, a C.I.A. agent put on a wig and a fake beard to meet one of America’s most impor- tant sources, a quiet mid-level engineer named Adolf Geor- gievich Tolkachev. Tolkachev had given the U.S. thousands of pages of documents. He brought twenty-five rolls of film to this meeting, along with a list of requests: albums by Led Zeppelin, Genesis, and other Western bands for his teen- age son. Hoffman excels at conveying both the tradecraft and the human vulnerabilities involved in spying. For sev- eral days, Tolkachev, fearing arrest, put a suicide capsule under his tongue every time he was called into his boss’s office.

THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE, by James Rebanks (Flatiron). Rebanks’s family has farmed sheep in the hills of the Lake District, in northwestern England, for some six centuries. The work, detailed lovingly in this memoir, has changed little: from predawn roundups on the fells to the fairs where tups and ewes are still priced in guineas, it remains tied to and dic- tated by location. Rebanks is concerned with the survival of the landscape, of the life that it has fostered, and of its inhabitants’ view of the world. Away in a city, divorced from the shifting days and seasons, Rebanks laments that he sees only “big changes instead of the little ones I have al- ways lived with.”

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 105 drink for Sharon, an Irish schoolteacher. ON TELEVISION They’re both around forty. Their chem- istry is nuclear. Five minutes in, they’re tossing dinner plates into walls and BE MINE doing it in his hotel room—a scene that, like many of the sex scenes in these The rise of the bite-sized romantic comedy. shows, is at once daffy and unapolo- getically hot. Then they do it again, and BY EMILY NUSSBAUM again, with breaks for coffee and tour- ism, until he flies home. The next time o qualify as watchable, a roman- romanticism that is at once earnest and they speak, she’s pregnant. tic comedy, in the movies, doesn’t earned. They’re unphony about sex. It’s a simple premise, but the show T have to be much good. Do the They’re legitimately funny. They pro- is appealingly relaxed about seeing it friends have chemistry? Is there vide a helpful blueprint for any Amer- through. The non-couple decide to try a montage celebrating the joys of play- ican planning to sleep with a Brit. It to make things work. He moves to ing hooky in Los Angeles, New York, doesn’t hurt that they have short sea- England. He proposes, which she finds or London? Does Elvis Costello sing sons: you can binge-watch these shows ridiculous. She has medical complica- “She”? Fine, I’ll rent it. Much of my without losing your week. tions: one of the funniest scenes involves fondness for the inconsistent but very The standout is “Catastrophe,” whose a gynecologist who keeps saying “can- funny Fox sitcom “The cer,” over and over. Sharon Mindy Project” was that has a strange brother and is its creator and star, Mindy friends with a terrible mar- Kaling, clearly graded on ried couple. Rob has almost the same curve. In her net- no friends, other than a work-TV lab, Kaling sam- finance-guy acquaintance. pled rom-coms like a mas- That’s basically it, but each ter, splicing their rhythms episode intensifies, emotion- into sitcom beats, pumping ally, suggesting the long arc rude energy into Hollywood of a story that’s just begin- formula. The show got tiny ning. In an era when TV ratings, was axed by Fox, and comedies are often framed will now air its upcoming by voice-overs or mocku- season on Hulu. Truth is, mentary elements, “Ca- there should be public fund- tastrophe” is filmed like an ing for such valuable labors. independent movie: shaky- Kaling was a bit of a pi- cams, tinkly music over oneer: she took the soul- montages, overlapping ban- mate narrative—the subtle ter. This style can be its heart of ensemble friend- own coy conceit, but here ship sitcoms like her first it feels uncontrived, in large show, “The Office”—and part because the show’s made it brazen and up- crass, often filthy jokes are front. But “The Mindy Proj- delivered so adroitly they feel ect” is now one of a wave of elegant instead of juvenile. similar experiments, many Crucially, it’s impossible off the beaten track: Ama- not to have a crush on both zon’s lovely “Catastrophe”; members of the couple. the sleeper rom-com “Scro- He’s red-faced and hairy, tal Recall,” on Netflix; and but graceful, like an elk in the sparkling “You’re the “Catastrophe” ’s dirty jokes are told so gracefully they feel elegant. khakis. Eyes narrowed with Worst,” which is currently a reflexive suspicion, she entering its second season, on FXX, niftily compressed first season is six ep- spins her lines like batons, lending even after a near-perfect first. These shows isodes and out. (It’s been picked up for the coarsest remark—“I shouldn’t have are a sharp and likable crowd, unafraid a second season, which can’t arrive soon called her a cunt; she’s more of a bitch,” of fun and pleasure, like friends of enough.) Written by and starring Rob say—the bite of a Noël Coward witti- friends at a party you’re glad you showed Delaney and Sharon Horgan, “Catastro- cism. There hasn’t been such a grownup up for. In contrast to Hollywood’s rom- phe” is the story of an American adver- pair of lovers on television since the coms—whose pleasures often feel like tising executive, Rob, who goes on a busi- wonderful Canadian show “Slings and “settling”—their TV analogues have a ness trip to London, where he buys a Arrows”—these two make chagrin and

106 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR intelligence feel like secondary sexual Geere) is a British novelist who in- characteristics. sists on being honest, no matter how “Catastrophe” is a terrific title for the much it hurts people. Gretchen (Aya show, getting at the crushing disaster of Cash) is a callow L.A. music publi- unavoidable love. The same cannot be cist. In the first episode, they meet at said of “Scrotal Recall,” another six- his ex-girlfriend’s wedding, where he’s episode series. The title suggests “The taking dick-pics with the disposable Hangover” marinated in home-brew cameras and she’s stealing the bride’s backwash, but “Scrotal Recall” is in fact blender. Right away, like the couple the most delicate of these shows, a in “Catastrophe,” they do it. And, as chronological experiment about a group with “Catastrophe,” the beautifully of three friends in their twenties: the filmed, kinky sex makes the case for hapless Dylan, the hound-dog Luke, the show. “I like that,” Gretchen re- and the uncertain Evie. The show’s marks, when he pins her hand above surface premise is that Dylan ( Johnny her head. “All girls like that,” he says, Flynn) has been given a diagnosis of bluntly—but the scene keeps mov- chlamydia, which forces him to contact ing, the pair one-upping each other, (and contemplate) every woman he’s slept revealing fetishes and sordid confes- with. But the story isn’t about S.T.D. gags. sions, with the kind of freedom that It’s about regrets, which unfold, via flash- being with a stranger provides. “I’m backs, like a folded-paper fortune- teller glad this is a one-night thing, so we revealing someone’s fate. The flashback- can reveal all this awful shit about heavy structure echoes that of “How I ourselves,” he says. But he’s wrong: Met Your Mother,” another rueful mys- each holds the key to the other’s hid- tery about bad timing. den, better self. Oddly, the character that sticks the Unlike the loosey-goosey “Ca- hardest is Luke (Daniel Ings), who be- tastrophe,” “You’re the Worst” is a gins as a coarse cliché wingman, famil- rigorously structured sitcom, like a iar from every rom-com in existence. procedural about intimacy. In each He’s the womanizing best friend, a episode, the new couple resists some crude dummy there to make the main corny requirement for partners: to character look better. (Our hero is the share space, to be monogamous, to guy who laughs at his friend’s sexist listen when you’re bored. They re- jokes instead of making them.) But ject it, debate it with their best friends “Scrotal Recall” is constructed, clev- (his is a veteran with P.T.S.D., played erly, so that its crassest character moves by Desmin Borges; hers a trophy slowly inward. By the final episode, we wife, played by Kether Donahue), learn that Luke’s been damaged, too, face the consequences, and give in. with a lost-love revelation that fits And yet the show never gets preachy, with a click. Antonia Thomas, with her both because the performances are curly topknot, is adorable as Evie, a girl so rich—especially that of Cash, with caught in push-me, pull-you flirtation. her slovenly charm and flashing black For observers interested in television eyes—and because the creator, Ste- diversity, Evie is black, while the guys phen Falk, works hard to give their are white, without that being a major ugliest behavior emotional logic. The factor. The second episode is about first season’s penultimate episode was three white men entangled with three a brilliantly constructed cascade of black women, but race never comes up. flashbacks, as balanced as a Jenga There are pluses and minuses to this tower, clarifying the cruelty that approach—in real life, race does come comes later. The first two episodes up, even among friends—but it’s a of the new season struggle slightly, sweetly low-key aspect of a sweetly now that Gretchen and Jimmy are low-key show. living together—there’s a risk of tilting into hipsterism, like a sour t first glance, “You’re the Worst” West Coast riff on “Mad About You.” A looks like a different kind of com- And yet your fingers are crossed for edy: a sour satire about mean peo- the show to make the leap. In TV, ple—another nasty-funny slice from as in love, some things are worth the the Larry David cake. Jimmy (Chris commitment. 

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 107 wraparound relief. The piece is a paint- THE ART WORLD er’s folly, which Picasso did not repeat (except with the similarly hapless plas- ter “Apple,” of the same year), even as ANOTHER DIMENSION its style vastly influenced such subse- quent sculptors as the futurist Um- Reconsidering Picasso the sculptor. berto Boccioni. (No innovation of Pi- casso’s was too tangential to spawn a BY PETER SCHJELDAHL modern-art cliché.) Picasso put sculp- ture aside for a few years, then re- turned to it as an extension of his breakthroughs, with Georges Braque, in the revolutionary aesthetics of col- lage. Two versions of the large, wall- hung “Guitar” (1912-14)—the first in cardboard, paper, and string; the sec- ond in sheet metal and wire—did for sculpture something of what Picasso had already done for painting: they turned it inside out. The term “nega- tive space,” for the air that he let into the anatomized musical instrument, doesn’t suffice to describe the effect. The voids register as active forms, which the shapes passively accommo- date. No longer set apart from the world, forward-looking art after “Gui- tar” adds the world to its inventory. Then came the most talismanic of modern bibelots: “Glass of Absinthe” (1914), a small bronze of a cubisti- Picasso in 1939, in his Paris workshop, with “The Speaker” (1933-34). cally fissured, ridged, and whorled ves- sel with, atop it, a filigreed metal spoon “ icasso Sculpture,” a show at the medium of fired clay, noted that any bearing a bronze sugar cube. Picasso Museum of Modern Art of apprentice who went about things as created it the same year that the li- Pnearly a hundred and fifty the artist did would never be hired.) quor was banned in France, in the works by the definitive artist But, because Picasso was an amateur— mistaken belief that it made people of the twentieth century, always figured nearly a hobbyist—in sculpture, it re- crazy. (It was really just fancied by to impress. It turns out to astound. I vealed the core predilections of his ge- people who were prone to craziness.) came away from the exhibits, which nius starkly, without the dizzying All six casts of the work, from as many date from 1902 to 1964, convinced subtleties of his painting but true to collections, are convened here for the that Picasso was more naturally a its essence. At this magnificent show, first time since their creation. Each sculptor than a painter, though all his curated by Ann Temkin and Anne incorporates a differently designed training and early experience, and by Umland, I began to imagine the art- spoon and is differently slathered or far most of his prodigious energy, went ist’s pictures as steamrolled sculpture. dappled with paint. The brushwork, into painting. He made mere hun- Most of his paintings conjure space especially in sprightly dot patterns, dreds of three-dimensional works, in that is cunningly fitted to the images blurs the objects’ contours, rendering episodic bunches, amid a ceaseless tor- that inhabit it. When the space be- them approximate in ways that wit- rent of about four and a half thousand comes real, the dynamic jolts. tily invoke intoxication. But these paintings. When moved to mold, carve, The show’s first gallery features the are true sculptures, as judged by the or assemble, he sometimes borrowed best known and, instructively, the least essential test that they function in artist friends’ studios and tools and successful of Picasso’s early forays into the round. Circle them. Each shift in enlisted their collaboration—most the medium: “Head of a Woman” viewpoint discovers a distinct formal notably, starting in 1928, with Julio (1909), a bronze, cast from clay, which configuration and image. Picasso here González, who worked in iron. Pi- is complexly rumpled, in the manner steps into the history of the art that, casso could be feckless about the stan- of incipient Cubism. The work fails in order to move a viewer, requires a dards of the craft. (The director of the because the energetic surface articu- viewer to move. The best of his other ceramics workshop in Vallauris, where, lation bears no organic relation to the Cubism-related works, such as “Still

in the late forties, Picasso took up the head’s sullen mass; it amounts to a Life” (1914), which fringes a tipped RESOURCE LE MAGE/ART AND THIERRY BRASSAÏ/RMN-GRAND PALAIS ESTATE

108 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 shelf with upholstery tassels, run to “Woman with Her Throat Cut” (1932). assembled and painted reliefs, like Of the scores of pieces that merit pop-up pictures. Their dance of ev- lengthy discussion, I’ll cite one: eryday stuff with august form—real- “Woman with Vase” (1933), a bronze ity marrying representation—has never of a plaster sculpture that, cast in ce- ceased to inspire generations of visual ment, accompanied “Guernica” at the hybridists, from Kurt Schwitters to Spanish Pavilion of the World’s Fair Robert Rauschenberg and Rachel Har- in Paris, in 1937. She stands more rison, and it never will. But these works than seven feet tall, with a bulbous mainly harvested ideas from Picasso’s head, breasts, and belly, on spindly painting. His attention to sculpture legs. Her left arm is missing, as if lapsed again, until 1927. ripped off. Her right arm extends far Picasso’s creations in plaster, wood, forward, clutching a tall vase. Seen and metal between that banner year from the side, the gesture suggests a and the mid-thirties belong in the tender offering. Viewed head on, it first rank of sculpture since ancient delivers a startling, knockout punch. times. Most are massy: female forms What isn’t this work about? It con- that can seem swollen to the point of joins Iberian antiquity and Parisian bursting, or tumescent and writhing modernity, love and loss, hope and with sexual abandon. A glory of the anger, celebration and mourning. An- show is the number of works rendered other bronze cast of it stands at Pi- in fragile plaster, straight from the casso’s tomb, in the Château de Vau- artist’s hand; he rarely paid much at- venargues, as a memorial and, per- tention to the surface quality of the haps, as a master key to the secrets of final bronzes, which tend to be dull. his art. Certainly, it overshadows the His initial masterworks of the period, somewhat indulgent—and, now and made with González, are open net- then, plain silly—sculptural creations works of thin iron rods, vaguely sug- of his later years, such as the gewgaw- gesting jungle gyms, which gave rise elaborated bronze “Little Girl Jump- to the somewhat misleading catch- ing Rope” (1950). Exceptions from phrase “drawing in space,” coined by that time include a stunning selection Picasso’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahn- of his riffs on ceramic vessels, lively weiler. More truly, the rectangular bent-metal maquettes for public art, arrays encage space. They yield an and a group of six “Bathers” from 1956: image—coalescing into a kind of flat figures, one almost nine feet tall, drawing, of a geometrically abstracted made of scrap wood and standing in figure—when viewed from either end. a shared, beachlike bed of pebbles. Its That’s delightful. But the wonder of éclat might well sink the hearts of the works is their appearance from contemporary installation artists. other angles: the image pulled apart, The herky-jerky intermittence of accordion fashion, to drink in the am- Picasso’s involvement with sculpture bient air. Again, emptiness becomes might seem an obstacle to a reconsid- substance. eration of his achievement, but it Notice, incidentally, how the rods proves to be a boon. Each generation meet the bases. As always, when a Pi- looks at Picasso in its own way. This casso sculpture rests on more than one show gives us a Picasso for an age of point each footing conveys a specific cascading uncertainties. The story it weight and tension, like the precisely tells is messier than the period-by- gauged step of a ballerina. It presses period, not to mention mistress- by- down or strains upward in a way that mistress, narratives of the past. In- gives otherwise inexplicable animation stead, each piece finds the artist in a to the forms above. Few other sculp- moment of decision, adventuring be- tors play so acutely with gravity. David yond his absolute command of picto- Smith is one. Another is Alberto rial aesthetics into physical and social Gia cometti, whom Picasso befriended, space, where everything is in flux and admired, and mightily affected. Works in question. We are in Picasso’s stu- in this show directly anticipate Gia- dio, looking over his shoulder, and cometti’s skinny figures and even, by a wondering, along with him, What few months, his classic, harrowing about this? 

THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 109 with the surrounding cars: “Red Im- THE CURRENT CINEMA pala, two lanes left.” “Seven o’clock, green Civic.” Then you open fire at anything you don’t like the look of— DARK PLACES pretty much how most of us would behave at rush hour, in gridlock, if we “Sicario.” weren’t too busy fiddling with our cup holders. As for the guys who get shot, BY ANTHONY LANE Kate is told, “They won’t even make the paper in El Paso.” That may be the most troubling side of “Sicario”: a growing aware- ness that the currency of life is being devalued. Hence the convoy’s tour of Juárez, the town where Díaz’s brother is held, and where mutilated figures are hung as warning signs from an overpass. In dumber action films, we scarcely flinch as villains are wiped out; the wiping, indeed, viewed with a bois- terous crowd on a Friday night, be- comes a comic spree. That is not Ville- neuve’s way. The prospect of human cheapening nags at him, and the bur- den of his conscience is carried, in this movie, by Kate. “I want to follow some kind of process,” she says, only to learn that the rules are not just flouted but leached of meaning in the zone where Emily Blunt plays an agent fighting the drug cartels in Denis Villeneuve’s new film. the drug wars are waged. “Nothing will make sense to your American ears, hat does Denis Villeneuve their unmerciful trade across the fron- and you will doubt everything we do”: do for fun? Does he know tier. All that Kate can do, most of the those are the catechistic words of Ale- Wwhat fun is? Hard to say, time, is clean up the mess; far more jandro (Benicio del Toro), who is also but it’s not an aspect of satisfying would be a blow struck attached to the anti-cartel troupe. His life that looms large for the people in against its source, and her chance ar- record, his family, his current employer, his films. Sitting down to a triple bill rives when she is assigned to a new and and even his country of origin begin of “Incendies” (2010), “Prisoners” unusual outfit. It bears no official name, as mysteries, and gradually emerge as (2013), and “Enemy” (2013) is like put- but Kate finds herself moving in a mist the film slides by. By the end, we still ting yourself on a diet of Kafka and of initials: C.I.A., D.E.A., and SWAT can’t be sure to whom, or to what cause, late-period Thomas Hardy; Villeneuve’s teams at the ready. Her contact is Matt he answers. The code of him remains characters seem to proceed on the weary ( Josh Brolin), who grins a lot, wears uncracked. assumption that fate is stacked against flip-flops around the office, and can This is ideal for del Toro, who al- them. That holds true for his latest split an infinitive wide open. Asked his ways gets scarier when his gestures out- movie, “Sicario,” which barely raises its objective, he replies, “To dramatically number his lines, and when his lines hopes and, despite being set along the overreact.” have you leaning forward to listen. border between the United States and The plan is to lure a cartel bigwig, He dramatically underreacts. Late one Mexico, shows no inclination to lift its Manuel Díaz (Bernardo Saracino), out night, faced with busloads of Mexican face to the sun. of the shadows by transporting his immigrants held by the U.S. authori- Emily Blunt plays an F.B.I. agent brother, another ne’er-do-well, from a ties and patiently biding their time, named Kate Macer, who runs a kidnap- Mexican jail and onto U.S. soil: a quiet Alejandro squats down and softly response squad. In the opening scene, little affair, involving a fleet of black questions them in Spanish, hunting for she and her colleague Reggie (Daniel vehicles stiff with special forces. Ville- whispers of information. Even his vi- Kaluuya) lead an assault on a house in neuve’s coup is to prepare us for a car olence has a strange economy: he tor- Chandler, Arizona, hunting for hos- chase and then bring the whole thing ments one suspect not by punching tages but finding only bodies. Stacked to a juddering halt. If you ever get glued him but simply by wetting a finger and upright inside the wall cavities, like into a traffic jam, in hostile territory, worming it deep into the poor fellow’s corpses in an ancient catacomb, these this, according to “Sicario,” is what you ear. Likewise, although we don’t ac- are victims of the drug cartels that ply do. First, you play spot-the-hoodlum tually witness what he does to Díaz’s

110 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY DIEGO PATIÑO brother, in an interrogation room, the straight and stony face. Yet that is what with Kate and Reggie, her friend from ease with which del Toro comes in Blunt has undergone of late, first in the F.B.I., bringing up the rear. Aside swinging a full, multi-gallon bottle of “Edge of Tomorrow” and now in the from the pops and blasts of weaponry water, taken from the office cooler, sup- dauntingly humorless “Sicario.” She (described by Matt as “the Fourth of plies all the menace we require, and it makes a decent action heroine, never July on steroids”), the scene is so con- acts as a foil to the more genial tough- less than pained and strained, but for foundingly dark that, in a near-parody ness of Brolin’s Matt. her it’s like playing a single octave on of Villeneuve’s style, we observe it the piano. There is one sequence in through not one but two forms of night he only hitch here is Emily Blunt. which Kate drinks, dances, and lets her vision: a thermal blur of monochrome, TThe task of her character is to hair down, but it soon turns predict- plus a grainy green-and-white. The di- protest and to put questions, trying to ably sour, as though she were being pe- rector of photography is Roger Dea- work out why she was asked to string nalized for flirting with the mere pos- kins, who both refines and redeems along, and the truth, once revealed, is sibility of joy—a serious faux pas in a “Sicario” by unearthing a kind of diffi- no big deal. That isn’t enough, I think, place that Alejandro calls a “land of cult beauty in the most unpromising for an actress who seems constitution- wolves.” Orson Welles covered the same of locations and in the most desperate ally wiser than the folks around her. land, on the same porous border, in of straits. The landscape over which In her low-lidded gaze, and in the per- “Touch of Evil,” and the stink of cor- Kate flies, at the outset of her mission, manent rumor of a smile on her lips, ruption that rose from it was as rank could be an alien planet, with its swirl- we catch hints of someone determined as that of “Sicario”; yet he also found ing patterns of rock, were it not for the to be more amused than bored by the space for bitter comedy and even am- tiny shadow of the airplane passing world, though never so crass as to be orous regret, whereas Villeneuve dares across them like a bug. “Want to see wowed. Nobody writes leading roles not release his characters from their something cool?” a member of the team for such an actress any more, in the chains. Consider Silvio (Maximiliano asks, before taking her up on a roof, way that Ben Hecht (with help from Hernández), a Mexican citizen whose under an infuriated sky, and pointing Dorothy Parker, Moss Hart, and oth- fortunes we follow from the start. He out the explosions and crackles of ers) wrote “Nothing Sacred” for Car- talks to his young son, whom he clearly gunfire that signal the fall of night in ole Lombard; that’s why the best of loves, and promises to play soccer with Juárez. Best of all, as the American Blunt resides in her bit parts, in “The him soon, but we realize that Silvio has forces walk toward that fateful tunnel, Devil Wears Prada” and “Charlie Wil- something to contribute to the plot, the day is dying behind them, and they son’s War,” and in the astonishing scene and we fear—as Villeneuve invariably are silhouetted against its fiery orange from “The Adjustment Bureau,” in the wants us to fear—the worst. Do father and rose. They wear high-tech helmets, bathroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, in and son ever get to play that game to- with cameras mounted on them, yet which she goes from meeting Matt gether? You guess. we somehow expect to see cowboy hats Damon to smooching him in three If “Sicario” does not collapse under and the nodding head of a horse. At minutes and twenty seconds. Who else its own grimness, that is because of the such moments, “Sicario” feels like one could do that and get us to believe it? pulse: the care with which Villeneuve of the last Westerns: tense, forbidding, What do you do with a performer who keeps the story beating, like a drum, as and trapped on the fringes of the na- makes a kiss look as easy as a laugh, he steadies himself for the next set piece. tion, in a battle that cannot be won.  and vice versa? I especially liked the nocturnal raid on What you don’t do is give her a gun, a tunnel, used by the cartels to ferry erase the bloom from her cheeks, and narcotics and assailed by Matt, Alejan- newyorker.com command her, at all costs, to keep a dro, and a bunch of U.S. operatives, Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015 111 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Paul Noth, must be received by Sunday, September 20th. The finalists in the September 7th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the October 5th issue. The winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Any resident of the United States, Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland age eighteen or over can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THE WINNING CAPTION

THE FINALISTS

“This is prewar, you said?” Marna Walle, Pawling, N.Y.

“I don’t mind, but Harald’s allergic.” “Let’s give them another half hour.” Shannon Flood, Denver, Colo. Andrea Daniels, Toronto, Ont.

“They did say ocean views.” Rachel Perlman, New York City

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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