What the response to One Battle After Another, After the Hunt, and Sydney Sweeney's GQ interview teach us about the imperiled power of art in public life.
I thought One Battle After Another was ironic, although you're right that it's being treated as completely sincere in some quarters. Brian Tallerico of rogerebert.com:
> Without spoiling, “One Battle After Another” becomes about erasure. It becomes about what we don’t teach about Benjamin Franklin in history class because the powers that be don’t want us to teach it
I laughed out loud when Leo badgers the teacher with this stuff, while she's trying to talk to him about his daughter. But I was the only one in the theater who laughed!
The father-daughter relationship strikes me as sincere, but the politics seems like a farce. If I had to interpret it as a comment on contemporary politics, I'd say it's poking fun at self-serious, extremely online people, left & right, who see American politics as a struggle between revolutionaries and fascists.
Dang, this is the second time I’ve heard about the book Vineland this week. It’s in the “to-read” bucket now.
I never heard about “After the Hunt”, will check it out!
Great essay!
I honestly thought/felt that “One Battle After Another” was a critique or at least, a meditation on illiberal leftism via the dialectic tension between the two parents — the tensions between them resolved by the story of their kid, a synthesis between her parent’s zeal and resignation, concluded by her choice to survive the odds as an act of rebellion. I thought their kid’s journey in the film straddled between adolescent rebellion and shame at the world her parents came from. Food for thought.
I thought One Battle After Another was ironic, although you're right that it's being treated as completely sincere in some quarters. Brian Tallerico of rogerebert.com:
> Without spoiling, “One Battle After Another” becomes about erasure. It becomes about what we don’t teach about Benjamin Franklin in history class because the powers that be don’t want us to teach it
I laughed out loud when Leo badgers the teacher with this stuff, while she's trying to talk to him about his daughter. But I was the only one in the theater who laughed!
The father-daughter relationship strikes me as sincere, but the politics seems like a farce. If I had to interpret it as a comment on contemporary politics, I'd say it's poking fun at self-serious, extremely online people, left & right, who see American politics as a struggle between revolutionaries and fascists.
Yes! Nailed it. I also laughed during that scene, and a few others where no one else laughed.
Dang, this is the second time I’ve heard about the book Vineland this week. It’s in the “to-read” bucket now.
I never heard about “After the Hunt”, will check it out!
Great essay!
I honestly thought/felt that “One Battle After Another” was a critique or at least, a meditation on illiberal leftism via the dialectic tension between the two parents — the tensions between them resolved by the story of their kid, a synthesis between her parent’s zeal and resignation, concluded by her choice to survive the odds as an act of rebellion. I thought their kid’s journey in the film straddled between adolescent rebellion and shame at the world her parents came from. Food for thought.
This is my naive and off the cuff take.