Cries from the Cafeteria
And a little film criticism
While scrolling before bed, unable to sleep, I came across a snippet that resonated: “Oh ok! So it turns out I’ve been borrowing grief from the future! It turns out I’ve been preparing to lose the things I love rather than basking in the light of them while they last! Maybe I should not do that.” I love how this profound observation is couched in flippancy—like oh yea, that little subconscious thing I’ve been doing incessantly, that’s in the background of every moment, impinging upon my hope, maybe I should be more aware of that and actively resist it because it’s detracting from my life.
During my years as a climate reporter, I trafficked in both real and anticipatory grief: “hundreds dead in unprecedented flood” and also “coral reefs will disintegrate in the next decade;” “indigenous land activist murdered by mining company” and also “the Amazon rainforest will soon enter a death spiral;” “heat waves, droughts, extreme storms—they’re bad now and are going to get worse!” It was meant as warning, a sounding of the alarm. The clickbaity nature of online journalism meant I didn’t have time to fully absorb the gravity of these heavy facts. It was like I swallowed the poison, the harsh truth, then puked it up, again and again, as hourly deadlines approached like blades of grass before the scythe. Whenever I felt destabilized, I returned to what felt like solace: the passion of the scientists and community activists I interviewed. Their resolve proved, in some energistic, love-based way, that we would prevail, that we would muster the political will to transition to a better world, to a circular economy that put the wellbeing of humans, communities, and wildlife first. But it’s increasingly clear that’s not going to happen, that when the “Utopia/Dystopia” crossroads was put before us, those with power chose the dystopia route. And that’s hard to accept. I find myself living in an existential flinch waiting for the floor to collapse, afraid of what’s at the bottom. And I should stop doing that.
Hope is a discipline, as Mariame Kaba says, and small saplings of hope are everywhere. It’s in the frog protests and naked bike rides of Portland, the collective stands against fascism in Chicago, and the country-wide No Kings March. It’s in live music and art shows, dance classes and night clubs. It’s in Zohran Mamdani’s confidence, and the tens of thousands of volunteers knocking on doors to get him elected. It’s in my Ridgewood neighbors who started a food co-op in their garage. It’s in Charlie, a local guy who hands out flyers for a barbershop and a pharmacy and gives me a Spanish lesson and a hug every time I see him, and the cashier at Billy’s who radiates joy and tells everyone he encounters that he loves them. It’s in every moment of kindness and joy, every action that resists the slide into cynicism and selfishness, the burrow into isolation. Hope is collective alchemy. The fire starts within, but it needs the oxygen of you, you, you.
This list of “collapse-aware” things to do is a beautiful resource.
Gap Tooth Film Corner
Brothers Benny and Josh Safdie used to make movies together, their intuitive mindmeld creating such propulsive films as Good Time and Uncut Gems. This year, each brother is releasing their own big film: Smashing Machine by the younger Benny and Marty McFly by the older Josh. They’re both sports films, interestingly, and they concern two very different sports: MMA and competitive ping pong. Benny Safdie’s Smashing Machine follows MMA pioneer Mark Kerr, movingly played by Dwayne Johnson, a disarmingly gentle giant who dominated the underground fight circuit of the late 90s and early 2000s, often traveling to Brazil and Japan to headbutt people into unconsciousness, batter ribcages with his knee, and “open wounds” with his thumbs to compel submission. This is grisly stuff, for sure, and the movie deploys the physical sounds of flesh and bone being pounded to powerful effect. I think if MMA fans could fully hear the sounds made by the human body during these fights, it would become too nauseating to watch. But maybe I’m just a pacifist. Safdie contrasts Kerr’s brute heroics with a soundtrack by Jazz instrumentalist Nala Sinephro, who creates soft, enveloping sounds to mirror the film’s ambient melancholy and the gauzy dissociation of opioid addiction. The film is deeply empathetic, exploring the gentle friendships and aspirations of early MMA fighters, and the lonely and thrashing romantic yearnings of Kerr’s partner Dawn Staples, played by Emily Blunt, who finds herself reduced to little more than household decor amid Kerr’s fighting career. This is a much slower and more ruminative film than Good Time, and I have a feeling that Josh Safdie may be the brother with chaotic energy, while Benny brings the pathos. The trailer for Marty McFly looks like a wild ride. The most powerful images in Smashing Machine, on the other hand, are long pauses: Mark Kerr, sitting with a towel over his eyes after a tough loss; Mark Coleman exhausted on some out-of-the-way sofa; Dawn Staples reminding Kerr, lost in a stupor, to eat his food.
I’ve been on an extended Leonardo DiCaprio bashing tour, claiming whenever I can that he’s an overrated and limited actor. But I think he’s found his niche as the crank. He’s brilliant as the crank, when he can flail his body and mope and screech and croak. He practiced the crank in Don’t Look Up and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and has perfected it in One Battle After Another. When he tries to get the secret rendezvous point from an underground rebel hotline and forgets the passwords, his flustered efforts to convince them of his legitimacy is peak crank.
One Battle After Another is a raucous and often hilarious ride with some solid performances, but it contains harrowing depictions of how power works both out-in-the-open and clandestinely, where capricious men bend rules and norms to fulfill violent fantasies. Colonel Steve Lockjaw’s (brilliantly played by Sean Penn) quest to join the ranks of the White Supremacist C-Suite was eerie in its parallels to the current moment. One of the most disturbing sequences involves a rogue army unit invading a town under the guise of an immigration raid. When local citizens begin protesting, the army calls in a planted “agitator.” Masked and wearing shades, the brute exits a car and hulks through the peaceful crowd to hurl a Molotov cocktail, creating the pretense for violent crackdown.
Hmmm?
The Summer I Turned Pretty is background television, sappy and trite, rich kids scampering on beaches and preparing for formal dances and ivy league schools. But it has some surprisingly good acting and poignant emotional moments, including this Pearl Jam rendition by the Conrad character.
Gap Tooth Sorrows
I was rereading a George Saunders story the other day when, as often happens with Saunders, I felt a deep pang of sorrow.
George Saunders has a way of writing these stream-of-conscious sentences that disarm your poise as a reader, plunging you into a memory, maybe a simple moment of happiness, maybe an awkward encounter, often a buried hurt. I was reading his story Tenth of December when I came upon this paragraph:
He might close his eyes for a bit. Sometimes in life one felt a feeling of wanting to quit. Then everyone would see. Everyone would see that teasing wasn’t nice. Sometimes with all the teasing his days were subtenable. Sometimes he felt he couldn’t take even one more lunchtime of meekly eating on that rolled-up wrestling mat in the cafeteria corner near the snapped parallel bars. He did not have to sit there. But preferred to. If he sat anywhere else, there was the chance of a comment or two. Upon which he would then have the rest of the day to reflect. Sometimes comments were made on the clutter of his home. Thanks to Bryce, who had once come over. Sometimes comments were made on his manner of speaking. Sometimes comments were made on the style faux pas of Mom. Who was, it must be said, a real eighties gal.
From the sixth grade to the time I graduated high school, I dreaded the social jungle of lunch period, when I would have to find a place to sit that could allow me to dissolve into the background like a caterpillar and exist unnoticed, as meek as possible as the wall clock inched along, each second bringing me closer to the bell that would let me blend into the mass of departing bodies. In high school, I initially went to the jock’s table to sit because I excelled at sports and figured my body’s prowess would give me cover for my mind’s absence. At first, the kids at this table would just leave me alone, let me eat in silence. I had a few friends in this circle who hadn’t yet fully moved on to a higher social standing, who I continued hanging out with and had sleepovers with, where we would play wiffle ball and backyard football during the day and video games at night. But our bonds were basically null at a table where the loud and arrogant kids reigned. There were only so many seats at each circular table and if you got there late, there was an option of taking a spare chair from the wall and pulling up behind two people and eating off of your lap. This was awkward, especially when you had nothing to add to the group conversation because you were just trying to survive the period. Day after day, their turned faces and practiced avoidance of my presence, of me taking up a seat or pulling up a chair, burned through my small social capital. Then the taunting began. One of the louder kids would shift their attention toward me, the table would go quiet, and then they’d say something or ask me a question designed to prod me like a lab animal and expose my ineptitude. Like the story, there were comments about the clutter of my home or my manner of speaking. One time, this kid Chris said to someone else, “he doesn’t know how to laugh, watch,” and then proceeded to tell me a throwaway joke from South Park to test his hypothesis. As usual, my freeze instinct went off and I shut down, inert as a stone. Afterwards, the scene played endlessly in my mind and I hated myself for being so defective. I think that was the last time I tried sitting at the jock table. (Related: I still regret the time when that same kid beat me in the mile run by a second, his 5:30 to my 5:31. Why didn’t I dig deeper, run faster? Anyways, it’s good running fuel.)
Not long after that incident, I scanned the lunch room and saw no feasible open chairs so I sat down at an empty table and tried to scarf down my food as fast as possible so I could leave. But then a table of theater kids decamped from their table and surrounded me because they felt bad. In the fear and shame feedback loops that fueled my childhood, this was the equivalent of finding a new oil reserve of shame. Not only was I embarrassed and on high alert because I was sitting alone, but then my pathetic situation was broadcasted to the whole cafeteria. All I could think of was how pity drove them to comfort me. My social isolation was now a spectacle; I was in a sunken place. I think if I was a healthy, well-functioning child, I would have cried in that moment from the sheer loneliness. From then on, I often wandered the halls during lunchtime, hiding out in the bathroom or the library.
Not long after this somber reflection, I found myself in a cafeteria reenactment. We went to a called-off wedding at a casino in Detroit. We arrived after the cocktail hour and it was a sit-where-you-want situation. Nearly all the 8-person tables were full except two. Scanning the room, we realized we only knew the bride-not-to-be (the wedding had been called off, but the venue deposit couldn’t be refunded, and we were the only New Yorkers to go). We chose the nearest table, which happened to include six people who traveled together, and beyond a greeting seemed pretty disinterested in chatting up strangers. The circular table meant we all faced each other and it was pretty awkward having no common ground with them beyond the dissolved relationship that brought us together, especially with the not-wedding DJ blaring radio tunes behind us, drowning out my conversation attempts. Back when I worked as a gas station cashier, a Virginia Slim-smoking woman with a Southern twang lingered on my face one evening and remarked that my blush showed I still had a pure soul, unlike the drunks she had to deal with at the bar by the lake. After reading Maggie Nelson’s defense of blushing, I no longer feel as embarrassed when my face heats up, which happened right away that night. I let the awkwardness wash over my Pure Soul and the energy at the table opened up after a while. I learned that the woman sitting next to me only knew New York through her Lenape heritage, and her partner in the next chair played basketball and drove earthmovers and revered a band with two monthly listeners on Spotify, presumably him and the grizzled guitarist. When Erika asked a woman across the table about a trip to Cancun that she had referenced, she took us on a years-long tour of her cursed first marriage, including the wedding, which involved seven screeching ambulances that carted off one dead body and six others that fainted amid the hysteria.