Of all the creative professions, acting is the one I have the hardest time reconciling an appreciation for. It’s not directly the fault of actors, but the culture of celebrity that has grown out of Hollywood and infected so much of how the United States operates—I mean, so much in this country is factored around fame and notoriety. While it’s not the fault of any one actor, the entire cultural phenomenon of the ‘movie star’ and its impact on the rest of us is grotesque and makes me feel the people who actually vie for that title are akin to those running for Prom King and Queen of the arts.

That being said, every now and then an actor comes along who is just so good that any fame they pick up along the way only seems fitting. Actors like Phillip Seymour Hoffman (RIP), Meryl Streep, and Daniel Day-Lewis are among names where it’s like, sure, they’re famous, but their fame is a byproduct of their talent. With the new trailer for Primetime coming out today, it’s pretty obvious that now Robert Pattinson is coming up to place his name among that list.

The irony being, of course, that this guy got his start as part of a giant teenybopper IP vampire franchise—but has since done outstanding character studies across a slate of independent stalwarts (a doomed brother in Good Time, a philosophical capitalist in Cosmopolis, an insane drunk in The Lighthouse, a dreamer in Maps To The Stars, a lost husband in Die My Love) as well as taking on giant blockbusters in ways that aren’t necessarily straightforward leading-man approaches (a reserved Bruce Wayne in The Batman, a fine-with-playing-second-fiddle operative in Tenet, the weird cloned double-lead of Mickey 17).

Then you have the four films he’s doing this year—leading roles in Primetime and The Drama and supporting roles in The Odyssey and Dune Part Three. Four wildly different roles in four films that are all going to make one year-end of list or another.

To me, there’s the impressive talent for sure, but another thing to look at is how an artist chooses their path. A guy that looks the way Pattinson does could have taken the Ryan Reynolds route and starred in the same generic romantic comedy year after year, stacking up paychecks and interviews with Seventeen magazine. Instead, he opted for challenging and particular roles generally backed by interesting writing and good collaborators—all the tell-tale signs of what makes acting and working in film or theater fun to begin with.

In an age where too many big names are cashing in on multi-film Marvel contracts, it’s good to see movie stars exist for people who actually love the movies. It’s important to see artists who have achieved success continue to push themselves deeper into craft, and hopefully that will inspire the next generation to not just adopt the idea that IP or AI green-screen slop cash-outs are the best way forward.

There’s a pretty decent interview with Jordan Harper where he talks all things Los Angeles and he’s got some great one-liners (“This city is such a ball of contradictions—I love that we aren’t hidden from the violence of the world, but we also aren’t hidden from the beauty of it.”)

I think my favorite though comes toward the end when he’s asked about the nature of LA—

I just think that Los Angeles is the most American city. It is kind of the culmination of everything we think about ourselves and the truth about ourselves … New York, that’s a European city, they just happened to land here. People in the Midwest want to think that they’re different than us, but they’re captured by the same things: it’s real estate and money and guns and cops and sex and violence and dreams. This is the place where American dreams come from. Nobody talks about the American Real, they talk about the American Dream … This is America dreaming itself, right?

I wholeheartedly agree and I think that’s why I’ve always gravitated towards LA—even before I moved here I’d visit often and enjoy every moment. Even though most of my personal views are antithetical to much of what the city represents, underneath the Hollywood sheen does lie the foundations of what the United States is, for better and worse, and that’s a fascinating thing to observe while the empire is in a rapid state of decay.

If nothing else, Los Angeles is the cultural hub of America. While New York might represent the ‘Art World’ more, artists in LA have always had to clash and compromise with the world of entertainment—which is just art with its neck under the boot of capitalism. So much of culture in LA is representative of the class war being experienced nationwide—corporate movie chains struggling while independent theaters flourish, taco trucks having lines as long as fine dining wait-lists, the homeless encampments underneath apartment complexes where a one-bedroom is $3800 a month, Oscar winners grabbing In-N-Out. The contrasts are on full display, everywhere, all of the time—here, you can’t ignore what America truly is, how the push and pull between the everyday people and the ones in control ebb and flow, the way you can in a suburb where the center of town consists of an Outback steakhouse and a Whole Foods.

That, and the weather is perfect like seven months out of the year.

Today’s haul from Stories

Man, Emily Wilson sure took Chris Nolan and The Odyssey to task in her review and I am all for it. If you’ve seen the film, the entire piece is worth reading—but the conclusion really brings her point home:

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.

For far too long, Chris Nolan has been relatively immune to criticism for reasons unknown. Perhaps it’s the striking imagery he’s been able to create—the black hole in Interstellar, the folding cities of Inception, the bomb in Oppenheimer—or maybe it’s that a couple performances have been Oscar-worthy (I would say Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight is the only truly great performance in a film of his, though). Whatever the reasoning, he’s considered critically by many journalists and social media cinephiles alike as one of the premier directors of this generation and I am absolutely dumbfounded as to why (I find Interstellar and Oppenheimer both to be as overrated as The Odyssey).

Good writing is the foundation of any cinematic achievement and none of Nolan’s films have had an above-average script. Worse still is his direction of conversational dialogue, which is often choppy on top of being drowned out by sound design that favors background environments and nonstop scores. His female characters are often hollow and disposable (and even the men are largely one-dimensional). He excels in aesthetic scale but consistently fails to deliver on any emotional, human level. It raises the questions: What are modern audiences looking for in a film, anyway? Why are these movies considered among the best of our time?

I can’t help but think this is less about Nolan being a bad director than it is more a sign of what art means to a society so molded by the vacuous, profit-driven ambitions of capitalism. Humanity must be stripped from most endeavors or people might feel guilty about the collateral damage that ensues from endlessly prioritizing financial well-being over that of the communities this economic model ‘serves.’ Under this ideological weight, art is chipped away at until it becomes nothing more than shallow entertainment—unchallenging to the audience or the interests behind the scenes that fund it. Consequently, we get these grand films of empty rhetoric which, more than anything else, become statements on the decline of our appreciation for the potential of culture in America.

In many ways, protest art doesn’t really make sense now. While one would think the rise of fascism would make for ample space for artists to respond, the truth is the parody Donald Trump and his cohort have made of media in general makes it difficult for any kind of traditional creativity to resonate. The ether of media has become a battleground where lines are drawn around political affiliation and people disregard or appropriate art for their own personal interpretations and could give a shit about the rest. Look no further than Elon Musk promising a ‘historically accurate’ AI version of The Odyssey.

Another recent case in point is Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead, which cited the ‘official’ death toll in Gaza—at which point people supportive of Israel would go around ‘correcting’ the album. (Other modern ironies are conservatives who listen to Rage Against The Machine to the point where Tom Morello had to explicitly tell them the music was not intended to support their perspective, or pro-police ilk adopting the Punisher skull without understanding its true history.)

I think Olivia Laing said it best in Funny Weather—

Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis? In 1967, George Steiner wrote a famous essay in which he observed that a concentration-camp commander could read Goethe and Rilke in the evening and still carry out his duties at Auschwitz in the morning, regarding this as evidence that art had failed in its highest function, to humanise. But this makes art sound like a magic bullet, which should reorganise our critical and moral faculties without effort, while simultaneously obliterating free will. Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.

It is true that once a piece of art is finished, you can’t really control how it is interpreted by the audience—and while that has always been part of the beauty of creativity, in times when people use art in ways that are distinctly antithetical to its obvious intention in order to promote oppressive messages, it makes it increasingly difficult to portray an idea of dissent. Even as political affiliation has become entrenched in personal identity, people still don’t want to feel excluded from culture—however when your view of the world includes domination through violence, it’s tough to find art that supports that outlook.

Like everything else in the world currently in flux, it remains interesting to see how art responds to the progressively contentious political environment (and the world of art being increasingly intertwined with the capitalist systems that are obviously right-wing). Journalism has all but completely failed to hold the state accountable for its actions, and most art feels like it’s right there too. When all is said and done with this era, how art critics and historians write about what is happening now will surely be a good read.