Lenika Cruz | The Atlantic

Jungkook of BTS Is Chasing His Pop-Star Dream

2023-11-03T00:00:00-04:00

When my video call with Jungkook begins, he has the look of someone roused too early from a good sleep. On camera, the youngest member of the South Korean pop group BTS is wearing a black zip-up, hood pulled over his head in a way that suggests he’d enjoy a nap—a little surprising, given his reputation among fans as an indefatigable “Energizer Bunny.” We’re less than two weeks away from the release of his first solo album, Golden, and his days are packed with dance practices, rehearsals, video shoots, interviews with overseas press. The exhausting demands of promotion aren’t new to him—he’s been with BTS for more than a decade, racking up best-selling albums, Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s, sold-out stadium concerts, and world records. But this is Jungkook’s first time releasing a full record on his own, and it happens to all be in English.

At first, Jungkook felt conflicted about this. “I was thinking, Is it okay for a Korean to not release Korean songs at all?” the 26-year-old singer told me through an interpreter, from his entertainment company’s office in Seoul. BTS achieved global popularity while making music almost entirely in their native language, with the exception of a few English-language hits such as “Dynamite” and “Butter.” At the same time, the whole point of his solo effort was to challenge himself—and exclusively singing in English seemed like one good way to do that. Yet he hopes to connect with people on a level deeper than language. “When you think about pop stars, they’re these really cool singers that you’d look up to since your childhood,” he said. “Of course, things have been changing a lot. But I still have that pop-star image stuck in my head since my childhood. And I want to be a cool guy that gives off that amazing vibe.”

It’s a disarmingly simple description of a pop star: a cool person who gives off an amazing vibe. But it’s an image he’s been chasing for a long time. As a teenager, Jungkook decided to join BTS because he was so impressed by the English-speaking and rap skills of the group’s leader, RM. He used to upload covers of his favorite pop songs on SoundCloud, and regularly gushes about the likes of Justin Bieber, Usher, and Ariana Grande. The first time I saw him perform live, he flew through a stadium, suspended by a cable over tens of thousands of fans, his vocals so stable you’d think he was reclining on a chaise.

[Read: The spectacular vindication of BTS]

But underpinning this desire for coolness is an equally old obsession with excellence. The title of Golden immediately evokes Jungkook’s best-known nickname: the golden maknae. Coined by RM, it refers to his status as the youngest (“maknae,” in Korean) member, who seems to be preternaturally talented at everything he does. Not only is Jungkook a powerful dancer and a strong vocalist, but he also excels at drawing, painting, songwriting, archery, wrestling, sprinting, swimming—a compilation of him simply being good at stuff has more than 18 million views on YouTube. When it comes to his main job as a performer, he’s a known perfectionist who is exacting about his work. So expectations have been high for Golden, the release of which was preceded by two singles, the U.K. garage track “Seven (feat. Latto),” which set a Spotify record for the fastest song to reach 1 billion streams, and the early-2000s throwback “3D (feat. Jack Harlow).” But I wasn’t prepared for the stunning main track, “Standing Next to You,” which brings to mind Parliament-Funkadelic and Michael Jackson. It’s not quite like any song that Jungkook or BTS have done before.

Jungkook said he loved the demo for “Standing Next to You” so much that he recorded a full track the next day. One trade-off he made in order to experiment with different shades of pop while singing in English was enlisting professional songwriters and producers. Golden features the producers Andrew Watt and Cirkut, who worked on “Standing Next to You,” as well as Major Lazer, Ed Sheeran, and David Stewart. The album’s 11 songs sound like a broad survey of what you’d hear on American radio—trendy R&B, acoustic, synth-pop earworms with sing-along hooks—but transformed by Jungkook’s buttery, versatile vocals.

He told me that, for a long time, he thought it was important for artists to write their own records (as some BTS members elected to do for their solo albums). Jungkook has written and produced songs for BTS, including quiet ballads and electropop anthems; at least two tracks that he wrote for his solo project ended up being recorded by the group instead. “As I grew up, I came to terms with reality and started accepting what I’m not good at or what I don’t have to do,” he said. “At this moment, there’s nothing I want to write about. So I was thinking, Do I really need to invest my time into creating a song from the beginning to the end?” With Golden, the urgent desire wasn’t there, and the timing didn’t make sense. (BTS is expected to reunite in 2025, after all of the members have completed their mandatory military service; Jungkook has yet to begin his.) Rather than writing lyrics or composing melodies, he chose to experiment with new vocal techniques and hone his live-performance skills.

The songs on “Golden” reference mature themes—namely, substances and sex—more explicitly than his previous work, in part because of the relative cultural conservatism of his home country and the idol industry. Jungkook has openly acknowledged this shift (and seemed unbothered by the more pearl-clutching reactions) but says he’s not trying to redefine himself in relation to his past. “Jungkook back then was Jungkook back then, and somehow, I became who I am right now. The one that’s making all the judgment calls is me, myself, in this very moment,” he said. “I’m not thinking, Oh, I should break away from that cute image as the youngest member ... Lyrics are just lyrics, and images are images.” He added that he chose love songs for their universality, but that people shouldn’t read them as autobiographical.

Throughout our conversation, Jungkook would do things that might read as typically maknae to those fans who’ve followed him for years: drinking his water by lifting the cup with both tattooed, sweater-pawed hands; waving goodbye for a solid 15 seconds with a giant smile on his face, again with both hands. But the way he talks—how he visibly works through a tricky question as he’s speaking, correcting himself or jumping in to add a thought—and his poised manner offer clear signs of creative intentionality and hard-won maturity. Those signs come through in the album too: in his natural-sounding enunciation, the way he slips between a fluttery falsetto and a warm lower register on “Closer to You” or plays with volume and tone on “Hate You.” It’s the sort of growth you see in someone who hasn’t stopped running.

How BTS Did It

2023-07-09T00:00:00-04:00

In early May, rumors swirled on social media about a mysterious book. Its title wouldn’t be announced until June 13, but it was slated for worldwide publication on July 9, with an initial print run of 1 million copies. Media coverage focused on fan speculation that the author was Taylor Swift, a theory that drove a wave of preorders of the still-unnamed project. However, some of us immediately deduced that the book was actually about the South Korean pop group BTS. The biggest clue was that the announcement and release dates were each a major anniversary for the band—10 years since its debut and the naming of its enormous fan base, ARMY, respectively.

And indeed, within days the publisher, Flatiron Books, confirmed to The New York Times that the 544-page book was titled Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS. It was written by the South Korean journalist Myeongseok Kang (and translated into English by Anton Hur, Slin Jung, and Clare Richards), based on extensive interviews with the group’s seven members. But I still had questions, both as a fan and a cultural critic who has written my own book about BTS. How candid would the members be? Would the book speak mostly to diehards like me, or would it manage to capture the nature of stratospheric fame for general readers? After a decade of the group’s existence, how far would Beyond the Story go beyond the … well, you know.

[Read: I wasn’t a fan of BTS. And then I was.]

As it turns out, the book is less a traditional memoir or personal biography than a meticulous accounting of how BTS was born and became a worldwide juggernaut under the once-tiny record label Big Hit (now the massive entertainment company Hybe). For anyone who’s ever heard “Butter” on the radio and puzzled over the group’s ascent in America, Beyond the Story has answers: It’s a fascinating, complicated, and at-times anxiety-inducing chronicle of fan-driven global domination—as well as a highly accessible resource for newer devotees.

Many ARMYs first learn about BTS’s long, bumpy history in a piecemeal manner—through fan-made YouTube videos, official documentaries, livestreams, memes, and Twitter threads. Now this history is available in an unguarded, comprehensive package, narrated by Kang. Even for longtime enthusiasts, seeing BTS’s career laid out so deliberately is staggering. Kang covers every album, tour, and big awards show up until mid-2022, right before BTS announced that the members would temporarily be focusing on solo projects and preparing for their mandatory military service. The book doesn’t delve into their lives outside their job, which is unsurprising, given that the members are extremely protective of their personal relationships and known for working nonstop. But Kang still manages to layer an emotional history on top of the professional one. By contemplating their evolution as artists, BTS’s members also give readers a clear sense of how the crucible of fame forced them to grow as human beings.

Beyond the Story is divided into seven sections that trace the major eras of the group’s rise. Many readers will know where the story eventually goes—several No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hits, Grammy nominations, countless historic firsts, multiple United Nations General Assembly appearances, a White House visit—but suspense still infuses the early chapters. Kang conveys the intensity and savvy of BTS’s leader, Kim Namjoon (stage name RM), who was recruited as a teenager by the mastermind producer Bang Si-hyuk to form a hip-hop group with the fellow underground rapper and aspiring composer Min Yoongi (Suga) and the highly respected street dancer Jung Hoseok (J-Hope). Eventually Bang, wanting BTS to be more of a traditional idol group, brought in four vocalists: the unflappable eldest, Kim Seokjin (Jin); the perfectionist Park Jimin (Jimin); the versatile Kim Taehyung (V); and the golden maknae (or multitalented youngest), Jeon Jungkook (Jungkook).

[Read: BTS’s ‘Life Goes On’ did the impossible]

When they first meet, they experience the typical personality clashes of any new group: The clean freaks balk at the dirty dishes in the sink and sweaty clothes on the floor. The hip-hop aficionados hold constant lessons to teach the novices about rap music. Everyone, regardless of dance experience, practices the tough choreography until they’re perfectly in sync—all while they’re on strict diets. (ARMY will be pleased to know that Kang devotes several pages to the infamous mandu incident.) “The more you look back on BTS’s preparation for their debut, the more surprising it is that none of them quit in the process,” Kang writes. Even after that 2013 entrance, the members described experiencing isolation and facing mockery from many of their peers at bigger, more financially successful companies. So difficult were BTS’s first two years that when a Big Hit staffer informs the label’s vice president, “Something’s happening. Uh … they’re getting more and more fans,” the moment lands like a shocking twist.

In the first half of the book, Kang provides context about the broader K-pop world, showing just how many rules BTS broke to differentiate itself from its peers and predecessors. The members filmed vlogs offering fans an unpolished look at their lives, even sometimes criticizing Bang or the company directly—a “complete rejection of genre norms in Korea’s idol industry,” Kang writes. Of the unusually dark realism of 2015’s single “I Need U,” he observes, “Within the Korean idol industry, experimenting like this was no different from intentionally trying to ruin yourself.”

As a fan, I was astonished that the BTS members seemed to go a long time without knowing why their own supporters liked them so much. Even when they were confused by their popularity, they expressed deep gratitude to the people who boosted them. Jimin tells Kang, “Even now, I remember that one row next to the broadcast cameras during our first performance,” referring to the handful of fans who showed up to cheer them on as rookies. For ARMYs, this evidently genuine humility is part of what makes them so appealing—they’ve never behaved as though success was an inevitable outcome of their talent or hard work. Of “Dynamite” topping the Billboard Hot 100, Suga talks about not wanting to bask in the achievement: “I realized it would be wiser to get back down to Earth as quickly as possible. There was no need to be floating in the air like that.”

[Read: The spectacular vindication of BTS]

Beyond the Story immerses the reader in how bewildering this whole growth process was from BTS’s perspective. Extreme highs (appearing on the American Music Awards and Billboard Music Awards, as well as major talk shows) are juxtaposed with profound lows (overwork, unrelenting depression, an increasing lack of privacy). The members open up about the stress of becoming huge in the U.S., a totally unfamiliar market, when six of the seven didn’t speak English. J-Hope recalls berating himself for not being able to master the language as quickly as intricate dance moves: “Each time, in the hotel room I thought to myself, ‘Oh, so I guess this is all I amount to.’” Once they began to adjust to the international nature of their fame, the pandemic arrived. They were forced to abandon their plans and experiment once again by releasing their first English-language single, “Dynamite,” whose success surprised RM: "The fandom must’ve craved it more than we’d thought," he said.

Not until this later part of BTS’s career, Kang writes, did the members transition from doing things for “the sake of outside approval or to prove themselves” to turning inward and “trying to reach a point of excellence where they could feel satisfied with their results.” Readers can appreciate how their interior growth has been almost inseparable from their artistic development. Jungkook, who joined Big Hit in middle school, talks about learning how to recognize his own emotions for the first time and “unleash” them in music. V reflects on growing older and going through an “adolescence of the mind,” before realizing that he’s the kind of musician who can write only when genuinely inspired. Jin talks about abandoning his obsessive worrying to the point of “living without any thought at all,” which allowed more “mental space” to sustain his work.

For fans, there’s something comforting about how much of this story we already know, and something satisfying about finally seeing it put down officially in words. To me, this familiarity is a reminder of how vulnerable BTS’s members have been from the beginning, even when the risk of self-revelation was high. Kang doesn’t touch on what lies ahead. The band’s future chapters have yet to be written, but this survey tells a complete story. It’s a document capturing how it feels to go from aspiring musician to worldwide superstar, and what it takes to do so.

Suga of BTS’s World Tour Is Pop Subversion at Its Finest

2023-05-19T15:33:54-04:00

Four hooded figures seemed to float down the stage, through the soft exhalations of a fog machine. On their shoulders, they carried a body clothed in black. Rain and lightning flashed a clean white on the screen behind them. When the man was finally laid on the ground, what followed looked like a resurrection: The spotlights found him, screams rose, and at last he stirred. Then he raised a microphone to his mouth.

This rock-star Lazarus was Min Yoongi, better known as the rapper and songwriter Suga of the Grammy-nominated, chart-topping South Korean group BTS. But none of his bandmates were onstage that night at UBS Arena, on Long Island, New York, because it was the first date of his solo world tour. Since last summer, the members have been focusing on individual projects as each prepares to complete his mandatory military service. The first in BTS to do a solo tour, Suga was also performing as Agust D, the name he adopted in 2016 for making music that was darker, more raw, and more personal than his group work. Last month, he released his studio album D-Day, the powerful conclusion to his trilogy of Agust D records, which delivered social critique and meditations on trauma, fame, mental illness, alienation, and forgiveness.

Suga’s ongoing tour, also titled D-Day, is the first real showcase of his oeuvre, and, on the sold-out U.S. leg of his tour, it felt like a declaration of artistic individuality more than a decade in the making. His concerts exploded with frontman energy and auteurist flourishes. But his most striking achievement was embracing pop music’s empathy-fueling potential while resisting its dehumanizing effects.

All 11 of his U.S. tour dates, which wrapped Wednesday night in Oakland, California, began with a short film that ended with Suga lying on a road in a thunderstorm. This was a reference to when he was hit by a car while working in Seoul part-time as a delivery boy to support himself while training to debut with BTS. The crash left him with a painful shoulder injury that continued to dog him even as BTS went on to achieve international fame. The segue from the video to the real-life Suga being carried onstage, seemingly lifeless, was smooth yet jarring—a reminder of the human vulnerability of a pop star whose fans camp outside concert venues for days.

When I saw Suga on that first night, at UBS Arena, as well as the final U.S. night, at Oakland Arena, his show challenged expectations of what a pop concert can do. On one level it was a dynamic hip-hop show, put on by a technically proficient rapper who as a kid would sample the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music to make his own beats. Suga set the tone for the evening with “Haegeum,” whose title refers both to a Korean string instrument and to the notion of lifting a ban on something that was forbidden. “Endless influx of information prohibits freedom of imagination / And seeks conformity of thought,” Suga rapped in Korean. “Slaves to capitalism, slaves to money, slaves to hatred and prejudice / Slaves to YouTube, slaves to flexin’.” The haegeum’s haunting strings and a deliciously grimy bass vibrated the air. Though the track was written entirely in Korean, the crowd roared the lyrics back to him. He practically entered a hypnotic state while running through a rap-heavy opening sequence with the defiant “Daechwita” and the earlier fan favorites “Agust D” and “Give It to Me.”

[Read: The friends who listen to BTS together stay together]

Before the audience could get too settled, Suga brought out his acoustic guitar, its body decorated with messages and drawings from the other six BTS members. He’d only learned to play the instrument during the pandemic, so his unplugged version of “Seesaw” cut a sharp contrast to previous performances of the song, which featured choreography, backup dancers, and an elaborate set. His effortless swagger during the earlier hype songs gave way to the quieter spectacle of Suga in singer-songwriter mode. Later, he sat down at an upright piano and performed his own version of the 2020 BTS track “Life Goes On” and, in a particularly emotional moment, a solo rendition of the song “Snooze,” which features the singer Woosung and the late Sakamoto. A clip of Suga and Sakamoto’s sole meeting, from late 2022, played beforehand on the big screen—the older musician playing the song on a grand piano while the younger man tries to contain his joy. Sakamoto’s presence on “Snooze,” one of his final collaborations, was especially poignant to Suga, who idolized him and wrote the song to comfort younger struggling artists.

[Read: The astonishing duality of BTS]

Again and again, D-Day allowed Suga to experiment in ways that he hadn’t been able to with BTS, and it was thrilling to see. Yes, he was still clearly a seasoned entertainer, who knew how to command the attention of tens of thousands of people, who could jump around a stage rapping without appearing to take a breath, as during the exhilarating medley of BTS rap songs in the middle of the concert. And at two Los Angeles shows, he welcomed guest appearances by the American singers Max and Halsey for their respective collaborations. But his subversive choices stood out too. The concert was interspersed with short films that evoked the dream logic of David Lynch and the grainy aesthetic of grind-house movies, telling the story of the musician’s three identities: the pop idol Suga, the shadow self Agust D, and the human Min Yoongi. The ultimate artistic aim of the concert seemed to be to clarify each of these distinct selves to the audience while recognizing that they must all exist together. Seeing him perform his solo BTS songs, including “Interlude: Shadow,” as well as his verses from tracks with the other BTS rappers, affirmed that he wasn’t looking to reject his past but instead was proud of it. After all, it had taken him to South Korea’s Blue House, America’s White House, the United Nations General Assembly, and the Grammys stage.

In another fascinating production choice, throughout the show, pieces of the extended stage were pulled to the ceiling by chains, giving Suga less and less space to perform, requiring him to navigate the platform more carefully. For his last pre-encore song, “Amygdala,” he stood on a lonely-looking square as fire blazed all around him, a terrifying prison. The centerpiece of the D-Day album, the emo-rap track serves as an origin story for the alter ego of Agust D, referencing his life’s defining traumas—the car accident, his mother’s heart surgery, and his father’s liver-cancer diagnosis—and how they shaped him. During the song’s final lines, apparently depleted, he collapsed on the ground, and the hooded figures returned to carry him away. Only this time, he wore all white, as though he’d been cleansed, his catharsis complete.

By the encore, all of the stage pieces had been removed, revealing the technical equipment that had been hiding beneath it. Scattered about were fire extinguishers, electrical cords, pyrotechnic devices. No longer elevated above the crowd, Suga performed his last few songs at ground level, right in front of fans, sometimes grabbing their phones and filming himself. These last moments were bittersweet: Much of the audience knew that after the tour ended in Seoul in late June, Suga would begin his military service for at least 18 months. That reality made the concerts feel like a temporary farewell. Fans’ glowing lightsticks rippled like a single wave throughout the arena. Every so often, carried by a feral energy, the crowd would start barking, making Suga gawk or laugh. In Oakland, he told the audience that he would return with the rest of the BTS members, asking fans to wait just a little longer.

On the tour’s first night, one more surprise awaited. I had assumed that the final song would be something sentimental or light-hearted. Instead, Suga walked over to an ominous circle of video cameras, stood right in the middle, and began murmuring the opening bars of “The Last.” This song, off his first mixtape, is one of his best and one of my favorites. It’s also a song I have a hard time listening to these days. On “The Last,” Suga raps about his OCD, depression, and social anxiety. His delivery starts out low and subdued and gradually grows more desperate; by the end he sounds like he’s somewhere between screaming and crying. When I first heard it years ago, I recalled my own unceasing panic attacks and the suffocating desire to die. The song lodged itself in my heart, a welcome shard.

[Read: I wasn’t a fan of BTS. And then I was.]

In recent years, Suga has made more music about growth, about self-love and being okay with uncertainty and suffering. He spoke early during the concert, in English, about wanting to perform with less anger, highlighting songs such as “SDL,” “People,” and “People Pt. 2”; these tracks painted a portrait of someone with a great capacity for measured reflection, forgiveness, and humility in the face of life’s challenges. I understand that too: The relief of no longer hurting so badly, of discovering healing on your own terms. So when I heard the first lines of “The Last” (“On the other side of the famous idol rapper stands my weak self, it’s a bit dangerous”), I froze. What was he doing? Those cameras—arrayed like a surveillance system, transmitting the videos to the screen above him—devoured and projected the anguish he was performing, suggesting that I was devouring it too.

But after a minute, I understood. Though he rapped with the same breathless passion he did as a striving 23-year-old, I realized that he wasn’t performing with pure fury but with an anger tempered by time. This emotion was no less powerful or sincere, but it was less damaging to the person communicating it. These days, he could stand in the flames and feel their heat, but not be consumed by them. He could connect with his younger self without fully becoming that person again.

Then the spell was over. The moment the song ended, the house lights went up so that we could see him walking in silence offstage. No goodbye, no drawn-out thank yous and waves to the cheering audience. Not even a glance backward. On the first night, people exchanged confused looks, shocked by his sudden exit. You could perhaps see this whole finale as a quiet confrontation with an audience, a grand assertion of the self by a beloved artist. But if it was a confrontation, it was one rooted in trust rather than condescension. Trust that the audience can sit with discomfort, that they’re self-aware enough not to be offended or horrified by what he’s showing them.

It was the perfect ending. A concert that began in darkness and mythmaking ended in light and exposure. Suga started the show being carried by others; he ended it by carrying himself out. What more could we want? He had just shown us everything.

RM of BTS Is Embracing the Silence

2022-12-02T00:01:00-05:00

One year ago today, the leader of the world’s biggest pop group stood beneath bright lights and told more than 50,000 fans about his fears. Kim Namjoon, better known by his stage name RM, had guided his fellow BTS members through the vagaries of early-pandemic life—a canceled world tour, delayed music releases and life plans, illness. In an emotional speech during a Los Angeles concert last December, the then-27-year-old South Korean rapper confessed that he’d spent that time worrying about the future. What if their fans abandoned them? What if he lost his abilities as a performer? But, RM said, those concerns had melted away. “I promise that … I’ll be even better when I’m 30, 35, or 40,” he declared, to an eruption of cheers.

Some people might find this curious—a 20-something artist agonizing over his longevity. Since BTS debuted in 2013, though, RM has been highly conscious of the mark he’s wanted to leave on the music world. In addition to writing a sizable chunk of BTS’s discography, he’s put out two solo mixtapes—2015’s RM and 2018’s Mono—that define his style: cerebral, technically complex, introspective, defiant, wordplay heavy. His lyrics grapple with the nature of art, identity, fame, and love. As the group’s leader and only fluent English speaker, he is often at the forefront of their public appearances, whether in TV interviews and award shows or at the United Nations and the White House.

So it’s fitting that his first official solo album is a record that looks backwards. Today, RM released Indigo, which he calls “the last archive of my twenties.” The 10-track project is a musically omnivorous, profoundly collaborative effort that still feels like the work of an auteur—one who’s spent years refining his own sound and thematic obsessions. At its core, Indigo is a work of hip-hop, but RM infuses it with neo-soul, folk, R&B, electronic, and rock. So instinctive is RM’s tendency to work with others that eight tracks feature other artists (including Erykah Badu, Anderson .Paak, Kim Sawol, and Tablo). Listening to this album is like witnessing a person carve his name into the top of a mountain as a way of saying not just I was here, but also I’m glad you made it too.

When I spoke with RM on Zoom two weeks ago, he seemed nervous about Indigo’s impending release: “I just hope that time flies more quickly,” he told me. Yet a calm, earth-toned aura emanated from my screen. His hair was a natural deep-brown, and he wore dark-rimmed glasses and a loose-fitting olive shirt. I was reminded that, despite being a pop star, RM is drawn to slower, more contemplative forms of art and engagement. He’s an avid reader (and literary influencer), a nature lover, and a museum goer, all of which comes through clearly on Indigo. For instance, the album opener was inspired by the Korean painter Yun Hyong-keun, and the second track playfully extends the metaphor of a “still life” to talk about stagnation and momentum. For RM, Indigo is a way of “speaking silence”—essentially, expressing himself truthfully in a way that doesn’t cause chaos or confusion.

“As a star, or as a famous boy-band member … it’s really hard to be honest and frank,” he told me. “People sometimes misunderstand you. Like, ‘You said something really insensitive’ and ‘I hate you’ … Emphasizing silence is really hard, because you have a lot of platforms, like Instagram and Facebook and YouTube; people have their own minds but can still be easily manipulated by algorithms and articles and other people.” In this environment, he said, knowing when to talk and when to remain quiet is even more valuable.

Which explains why he hesitated to say too much about the meaning behind different songs. “These days, I’m thinking that empty space is really important to the audience … to digest the music on their own,” RM said. “So I don’t want to reveal too many intentions.” Because of that, we didn’t talk about why his first words on Indigo are “Fuck the trendsetter”; nor did we dig into his exploration of intimacy on “Closer” and solitude on “Lonely.” But I did ask about the gorgeous lead single, “Wild Flower,” which features the powerhouse vocals of Cho You-jeen, of the rock band Cherry Filter. (“For me, personally, she’s a No. 1 Korean rock star. She’s a legend.”) The song isn’t quite like anything RM has released before; an epic that swirls like a hurricane, it is sincere, pleading, and full of hard-won acceptance. The lyrics set up a memorable contrast between fireworks and what he calls “flowerworks”: The former burn out brilliantly and quickly, whereas flowers can exist humbly and peacefully for much longer.

Lyrics from the Indigo song “Wild Flower” (Getty; The Atlantic)

RM has spent a long time—seven years, to be exact—thinking about this particular metaphor and its intriguing contradictions. He noted that fireworks can draw millions of people who want to witness their beauty for a 30-minute show. (I immediately thought of the displays that concluded many of BTS’s concerts.) The spectacle of “flowerworks,” though, is simpler and more anonymous. “I think of a field with tons of wildflowers that you don’t even know the names of. You just hold the flowers and throw them into the sky, and they come down so suddenly, maybe after five seconds,” he said, an edge of wonder in his voice. “I want to have a life like more of a wildflower.”

In some ways, you could think of his career thus far as a never-ending series of fireworks: several Hot 100 No. 1s, sold-out stadium shows, mammoth album sales, historic firsts, and a slew of both Korean and American music awards. The day before we spoke, BTS received three Grammy nominations: two for their collaboration with Coldplay on the song “My Universe,” and a third for the music video for “Yet to Come,” which RM acknowledged is the group’s first Korean-language track to be nominated. When I asked how he felt about the news, he replied so quietly that I almost didn’t hear: “Never expected it.” He paused, then added, “I think that’s, you know, thanks to Coldplay.” Which sounds like something a wildflower might say.

Like much of RM’s past solo work, Indigo is autobiographical without being too literal. He’s keenly aware that much of his youth has been captured online in countless videos, photos, and social-media posts. That willingness to connect is part of what BTS’s fans, known as ARMY, love about the group. But eventually, RM had an epiphany about all this self-disclosure: “My whole life was an exhibition,” he told me. “Unconsciously, or maybe consciously, I’ve been exhibiting my life for decades. So [I said], Okay, then let’s make it into a real exhibition.” He thinks the songs on Indigo unify different facets of his life over the past few years, as well as his different personas. “When you think of Piet Mondrian’s [work], all the paintings are titled Composition, right?” he said, referring to the Dutch painter’s abstract pieces. “At some point, I just realized [my identity] is a composition of my own … I want this album to be a composition of everything.”

That desire to create cohesion out of many parts is reflected in Indigo’s collaborations. RM said that each featured artist added “frequencies of their own,” and that many were “my stars in my youth” whose music he listened to when he was having a hard time. This album will likely serve the same purpose for many of his own listeners in the coming months. In October, BTS’s label, Big Hit, announced that the members are preparing to step back from their career in order to fulfill their mandatory military service under South Korean law, before hopefully reconvening as a group in 2025. Indigo is expected to be among RM’s last full-length releases until his enlistment ends, and in many ways, it plays like a farewell-for-now. But it also sounds like an artist taking a deep breath and feeling out what new experiences and insights his career might bring in five, 10, or 15 years. He already knows how it feels to stand beneath explosions of color and light. Now it’s time for falling petals.

The Guilt-Free Pleasure of Airplane Movies

2022-08-23T07:00:00-04:00

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For most of us, to travel by air is to endure a million tiny indignities: strictly enforced cabin hierarchies, ludicrously small pretzel snack packs, coffin-size lavatories, vicious elbow battles over shared armrests—never mind all the cancellations and delays.

When I’m trapped in a metal tube, trying my best to keep my limbs from inconveniencing anyone else around me, I find myself clinging to any small pleasure I can find, even if it’s just a cup of muddy coffee. Up here, the illusion of luxury might as well be actual luxury. Airplanes are a place of needle-thin margins, where an ounce of comfort for yourself can come at a steep cost to someone else. Only one true retreat remains: watching free movies.

For me, air time is like stolen time. Because Wi-Fi costs extra, I can justify staying offline and unreachable, indulging in free entertainment. And so, from inside a haze of anti-anxiety medication, mild dehydration, back pain, and belly bloat, I plan my escape. If the plane has seatback touch screens with on-demand movies, I browse the library like I’m in a fancy chocolate shop. So many choices! Something for every palate! Mmm, but what am I in the mood for?

I have a weirdly good memory of all the movies I’ve watched on airplanes, and my picks invariably fall into a few categories. The first is Blockbusters I’ll Never See in a Theater—in other words, any superhero movie. I am too behind on the Marvel Cinematic Universe at this point to even pretend that I’ll catch up, and yet I’ve seen both Guardians of the Galaxy films plus Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on airplanes. The second is Indie Films I’ve Heard Good Things About—smaller, well-reviewed movies, such as Dope, Beyond the Lights, and Clouds of Sils Maria, that I can feel good and cultured about having watched, and that I otherwise might not have made time for. The third is Old Comfort Movies, the ones that I rarely actively seek out anymore but that make me laugh and cry and happy to be alive. (Moana. End of list.)

[Read: Why we cry on planes]

As someone who flies from the East Coast to Guam somewhat regularly—that’s an entire day lost to travel, and nearly another day lost to the time difference—I’ve become used to thinking of long-haul flights in terms of how many movies I can watch. An 8.5-hour flight from Houston to Honolulu? That’s a few movies plus a couple of naps. (Miniseries binges can work just as well. Earlier this year, I watched all of HBO’s The White Lotus on a 14-hour flight from Newark to Narita.)

Others have also touted the small delights of watching movies during flights. In early 2021, Joshua Rivera wrote for Polygon that airplane movies were the one thing he missed about not being able to fly during the pandemic. “When I was flying, I’d take weird, inscrutable chances on films I wouldn’t normally watch at home,” Rivera said, confirming my belief that airplanes are the ultimate liminal space—a place that seems sort of fake, where our actions don’t matter as much, where we feel somehow more free.

Of course, like any other part of the air-travel experience, movie watching can have its downsides. Ryan Lambie wrote for Den of Geek of the many questions he asks himself when selecting a film on a plane: “Which movie won’t be ruined by the fact that the picture will have been chopped to fit on a tiny 4:3 screen, thus removing any sense of cinematic grandeur? Which movie isn’t so stuffed full of nudity or screams of sexual ecstasy that you’ll have to worry about what other passengers might think of you if they catch you watching it?” With apologies to Christopher Nolan, I once made the mistake of trying to rewatch Tenet on a plane. The first time I saw it was in a theater, and I had trouble understanding the plot (reverse entropy! inverted time!); I wanted to give it another go. But the flight was unusually loud and the audio quality especially poor, so my grasp of the story remained tenuous. I settled for the thrill of watching Nolan’s balletic action sequences unfold in reverse.

As our entertainment choices on the ground increase, there’s something wonderful about making do with the smaller viewing menu that most airlines provide. Of course, more passengers now have the option of buying a Wi-Fi pass and streaming Netflix or Prime Video from their personal devices. And many carriers pour money into licensing and curating their own huge libraries. But I like not spending an hour agonizing over what to watch, and up in the air, where time doesn’t feel real anyway, low-stakes choices like these are easier to make.

Surely some of the fondness I feel for airplane movies goes back to when I was a kid and the entire plane would watch the same film—simultaneously on a big screen in the middle and on tiny screens to the side. I remember watching Godzilla and Shrek this way and feeling like the stuffy cabin had suddenly transformed into a glamorous movie theater in the sky, like I shared a deep connection with all these anonymous bodies sitting with me in the dark. Something of that small joy surfaces in me every time I squint at a tiny screen, munching on my terrible little pretzels, cocooned by the narrow armrests, the roar of the plane’s engines dulled to a hum—nothing on my mind except what the next scene will bring.

His Mother’s Life Was a Mystery He Needed to Solve

2022-08-01T15:18:15-04:00

Writing about the dead is difficult business. Whenever I write about my mother, I spend a lot of time struggling to recall: How did she take her coffee? What music made her dance? When she laughed, did she throw her head back, like I do? My ability to answer these questions—to try to create an honest portrait of her on the page—is constrained by the five and a half years we spent together before she died. To fill in the gaps, I’ve interviewed family and friends, even built an archive of documents and photos. Each piece of new information—her U.S. naturalization certificate, her honeymoon pictures—is a gift, but it’s also a reminder of all that I will never know about her.

Given how intense and emotional the work of remembering can be, I was stunned to learn the story behind a book called Mariquita: A Tragedy of Guam. First published 40 years ago by the journalist Chris Perez Howard, it’s considered to be the most widely read contemporary text from the often overlooked U.S. territory of Guam, where my family is from. Part novel and part biography, Mariquita follows the author’s Indigenous Chamorro mother, who was killed when he was a small boy during the World War II occupation of Guam by the Japanese. She died just three days before American troops arrived; her body was never found.

In some ways, Mariquita is the story of all Pacific Islanders whose lives have been shattered by the wars of empire, the surviving generations left to make sense of the ruins. Although my own mother was born in Okinawa, as a young girl she moved to Guam. There, she met my Chamorro father, whose parents had lived through the war. I first learned of the occupation during the years I lived on the island as a child, but I just as quickly learned that most manåmko’, or elders, didn’t like to talk about that time. Better to leave old wounds alone. This was the silence—the pain—that Perez Howard had to confront in order to write Mariquita. As an adult with limited connection to his homeland and few memories of his mother, he set out to learn about her. It was in piecing together the details of her short life that he resurrected her.

[Read: When the U.S. military came to Guam]

Perez Howard grew up knowing only the basic facts of his earliest years, though this was enough to justify his use of the word tragedy in the book’s subtitle. He was born on Guam in 1940 to Maria “Mariquita” Aguon Perez and Edward Neal Howard, an American sailor who was stationed on Guam aboard the U.S.S. Penguin when the Imperial Japanese army invaded in December 1941. The elder Howard was captured as a prisoner of war and sent to Japan; back on Guam, his wife, young son and daughter, and thousands of Chamorros endured 31 months of what the historian Robert F. Rogers called “a vigil of courageous despair.” In the summer of 1944, once when it became clear that Japan’s cause was doomed, the violence against the local people escalated: labor camps, rapes, death marches, massacres. Mariquita, who’d been forced to work as a personal servant to a Japanese officer, was last seen being severely beaten and then taken into the jungle. After Japan’s defeat, Howard tried but couldn’t locate his wife’s body; he moved to the United States with both of his children, who were now motherless.

Edward, Chris and Helen at Aiea Heights Naval Hospital in Hawaii in October 1945, shortly after they were reunited. (Courtesy Chris Perez Howard)

Although this extraordinary summary reflects the book’s main arc, it doesn’t capture what I find most moving about Mariquita. No—for me, the deeper meaning comes from Perez Howard’s return to Guam in 1979. In the prologue to a revised 2019 edition of the novel, Perez Howard writes of being perturbed by how family and friends welcomed him back to the island by sharing their memories of his mother, who had been pretty, petite, lively, and well-loved. “Everyone seemed to know something about her, except for me, her son,” he writes—a relatable sentiment for anyone who has lost a parent at a young age. His mother’s death haunted him, but so did the mystery of her life. Who was Mariquita? Like any good journalist, he decided to report it out. He pored over university and library archives, conducted oral interviews with other war survivors, and pressed relatives for the smallest of details: the kinds of dresses his mother wore, where she and her girlfriends liked to hang out on weekends.

As a result, even though Mariquita is frequently described as a novel, it’s more accurately a work of fictionalized, yet heavily researched, biography. It is also an illuminating, emotional, and at times disorienting read. The genre and tone are in constant flux. Mariquita jumps between romance (when tracing Edward and Mariquita’s courtship), textbook (as it explains Guam’s colonial past), soap opera (during the sometimes-maudlin invented dialogue), and action thriller (providing an account of the fall of Guam). “Out beyond the reef were several ghost-looking ships, and flares were lighting the sky,” Perez Howard writes of his family’s experience of the Japanese invasion. “As they stood there, transfixed by the incredible sight, the menacing sound of gunfire came from a distance.” The narrator’s voice shifts, too, never quite settling on one perspective. Sometimes, the speaker seems matter-of-fact and detached; at other times, the reader enters Mariquita’s mind and the minds of other characters. Of the taichō, or Japanese officer, whom Mariquita worked for: “He wanted Mariquita to submit willingly to his superiority, and sex would be the ultimate proof of this submission.” Of Mariquita: “She had thought of running away, but surely, she would have been killed when caught.”

Where some readers might see a frustrating lack of cohesion, I see authentic fragmentation and disorder. At 113 pages, the book is too slim to be everything its author wanted it to be: family saga, war novel, love letter, historical text, anti-imperial cri de coeur. But Perez Howard’s attempt to capture all of these moods and points of view only reinforces the unspeakable complexity of these wartime years for Chamorros.

The somewhat underdeveloped quality of the original novel was due in part to the lack of literary resources on the island at the time of publication. In the ’80s, Guam had no infrastructure for producing books. Determined to publish it locally, Perez Howard enlisted a local printer and typist; as a result, the first run of 100 copies featured rampant typos and poor binding. Eventually, the story found an audience; it was published in Japan and then by the University of the South Pacific in 1986, making it “one of the first contemporary Chamorro literary texts to circulate beyond the Marianas archipelago,” according to the Chamorro scholar and poet Craig Santos Perez. “Much of Chamorro literature … is unpublished, archived, and out-of-print; or, if it is published, it has not circulated widely,” Santos Perez notes. As a result, Mariquita is a significant entry in the context of both Pacific literature and, given Guam’s status as a modern-day American colony, U.S. literature.

Today, following centuries of rule and suppression by the Spanish, Japanese, and Americans, the Chamorro language has fewer than 50,000 native speakers. My grandfather Antonio used to teach Chamorro to schoolchildren, although I never learned it myself. Still, oral tradition remains a core part of the culture. The stories my grandparents told me as a child—of the mermaid Sirena, of the brother-and-sister creation gods Puntan and Fu’una, of the taotaomona spirits—are my inheritance. But growing up, I didn’t know that books by Chamorro writers existed, and I’d certainly never heard of Mariquita. Reading it as an adult—particularly one interested in questions of grief, memory, and heritage—felt like stumbling across a secret. Yet these kinds of stories shouldn’t be secrets or mere footnotes in literary history. It is possible for dispossessed people to participate in their own history, to make art that captures their singular experiences, and to resurrect their loved ones.

Mariquita and Chris (Courtesy Chris Perez Howard)

At its core, Mariquita is a gravestone made of ink on paper, built by a son for his mother. Some of the most heartbreaking passages are the ones in which Perez Howard describes his younger self in the third person.“The months passed and it was almost Chris’s first birthday,” he writes about himself. “He was a good child, who rarely fussed, and the contentment in his dark eyes reflected all the love he was given. The happiness he gave Mariquita was such that she seldom left him.” This is that difficult business of writing about the dead; emotions surface out of nowhere, leaving you reeling for days.

[Read: I didn’t know my mom was dying. Then she was gone. ]

Perez Howard understood this. In the afterword to the updated edition of the book, he describes how the process of researching and writing the book changed him. “At the beginning, it was easy to write about her because I was writing about someone I didn’t know,” Perez Howard recalls. But over the course of working on the book, he grew to love her—a realization that caused him to break down at one point as he was nearing the completion of his manuscript. “I may not have remembered her in the ordinary sense, but I had a deeply rooted memory of her and I was reminded that day about how much I loved her and missed her,” he writes.

When I read those lines, I cried. I knew what he meant. You write in order to make sense and to remember—and at some point, the ground tilts, the page vanishes, text becomes flesh, and she is there again, like she never left. Alive and yours.

BTS Gets It

2022-06-07T17:08:21-04:00

The White House briefing room hadn’t been packed like this in ages. That’s what journalists kept saying last Tuesday, as more than a hundred of them squeezed into the room, cradling their cameras and murmuring sorrys every time they bumped into one another. South Korean media outlets jockeyed for space alongside the usual American networks. A few people joked that the huge crowd was there for Brian Deese, the National Economic Council director, who was also scheduled to speak. Everyone kept checking the time. Then, a few minutes past 2:30 p.m., the blue door at the front of the room slid open and in walked Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, followed by a line of seven young men in immaculate black suits. The camera shutters exploded. BTS had arrived.

[Read: I wasn’t a fan of BTS. And then I was.]

Everyone seemed to understand that they were in rare company, even if the gathering’s purpose was serious. The biggest band in the world was in the American capital to speak with President Joe Biden about anti-Asian hate crimes and Asian representation. Though their briefing-room appearance lasted fewer than 10 minutes, RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook all took turns speaking, mostly in their native Korean. Through an interpreter, they shared that they’d been devastated by the recent surge in violence against Asian people in the U.S. and spoke about the ability of art to transcend language and culture. “We believe music is always an amazing and wonderful unifier of all things,” Jungkook said.

Though some observers might have raised their eyebrows at the visit, the group has a history of addressing social issues through a universal lens—and, of course, bringing visibility to any cause they’re associated with. American media coverage of the event seemed to grasp this broader context. Reuters referred to BTS as “a fundraising juggernaut for U.S. social-justice causes,” noting the group’s donation of $1 million to Black Lives Matter in 2020, which was matched by their fandom, known as ARMY, in a day. Some articles noted the group’s three past appearances at the UN General Assembly, and most mentioned how in 2021, after the shooting deaths of eight people in Atlanta, including six Asian women, BTS posted a statement to Twitter in support of #StopAAPIHate. In the note, they described instances of racism they had faced before turning their attention outward. “Our own experiences are inconsequential compared to the events that have occurred over the past weeks … What is happening right now cannot be dissociated from our identity as Asians.” According to Twitter, it was the most retweeted post of 2021.

#StopAsianHate #StopAAPIHate pic.twitter.com/mOmttkOpOt
— 방탄소년단 (@BTS_twt) March 30, 2021

The question of how to turn heightened awareness into lasting change is a complicated one that many groups—including the Stop AAPI Hate movement—are currently reckoning with. And activists and legal experts have acknowledged the limits of legislation such as the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. Where a world-famous band of Korean performers fits in is even more complicated. Last year, I attended a press conference with BTS where another journalist raised the subject. “We in the U.S. had to deal with Asian hate since 2020,” she said, going on to ask if the members had any comments “about the positive role that you’ve taken to help end that Asian hate and show a positive light to Asians and Asian Americans.” The question, though well intended, bothered me with its wording. After all, Asian Americans have had to deal with violence and discrimination since long before 2020, and surely ending hate against Asian people requires more than just offering them a positive light.

[Read: The forgotten history of the Western Klan]

Her query seemed to place an unfair burden on the shoulders of seven young musicians who have never claimed to be activists. It was not their responsibility to stop people in America from committing hate crimes, or to inspire would-be attackers to see people of Asian descent as humans deserving of life and safety. But RM replied with grace, saying that as Asians, BTS had felt “the walls” throughout their career—walls that were sometimes visible, sometimes invisible—and that he hoped that their success as artists “can truly help every Asian in the world.”

Fast-forward six months to when BTS’s visit to the White House was announced and some critics questioned its appropriateness. Why would BTS be asked to talk about issues concerning Asian Americans, who are marginalized in the U.S. in ways that the members, as Koreans in a Korean society, are not? Some suggested that the White House should’ve instead invited Asian Americans—never mind that the Biden administration had done precisely that two weeks earlier in honor of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Or that BTS’s members have always been careful to acknowledge their perspective as Koreans, not Americans. Or that people who are perceived as Asian in America have been attacked without regard for their citizenship status or what language they speak.

Because of the attention drawn to BTS’s meeting with Biden, many AAPI folks ended up projecting their own feelings about Asian identity onto the group. On one hand, some were overjoyed about being represented on a global stage by talented, beloved artists who look like them, or who share their heritage. On the other hand, some voiced their anxiety about the ongoing injustices against their communities that no single speech or tweet can fix. It’s true that the ugly illogics of racism are rooted in American history and perpetuated by its institutions. But, to me, that doesn’t mean that BTS’s trip to the White House, which they paid for themselves, was pointless.

[Read: The spectacular vindication of BTS]

Whatever part BTS plays, plenty of people are embracing the visibility that the band is bringing. “Given their stardom, BTS could easily choose to turn a blind eye and dismiss anti-Asian violence and racism. They choose not to, and neither should anyone else,” wrote Jennifer Lee, a professor of social sciences at Columbia University, in a blog post for Science. She cited a recent poll that found that at least 15 percent of Asian American adults were victims of hate crimes in 2021, and another report that found that one-third of Americans are still unaware of this rise in violence.

BTS’s full, 35-minute conversation with Biden was closed to the press, but an edited video of the meeting was finally uploaded this week by the White House. In it, RM, the group’s leader and the only member fluent in English, talks about BTS feeling a “great responsibility” to use their platform to help people. Speaking to Biden in the Oval Office with the other members, RM recalls how the group reacted when they received their invitation to the White House—the disbelief, the excitement. “This is it. Why not? We have to go—we have to go to D.C.,” he remembers them saying. As though their sense of duty kicked in. No, this is not their country, and Biden is not their president. But to do anything less would have gone against who they are.

The Post-villain Era of Animation

2022-04-15T07:00:00-04:00

Few characters are as strikingly memorable as a classic Disney villain. Sleeping Beauty’s haughty sorceress, Maleficent; The Little Mermaid’s operatically campy sea witch, Ursula; The Lion King’s melodramatically evil Scar—each one so charismatic they tend to obscure their movie’s protagonist. (Quick: What is the princess’s name in Sleeping Beauty?)

But despite their prominence in classic films, animated villains have slowly disappeared from screens over the past decade. Recent movies such as Turning Red and Encanto certainly have drama, though instead of defeating a cackling evildoer, the main character now typically has an internal battle made external. The conflict in both films involves a broken relationship with a loved one, made cinematically epic by way of magical metaphor. Turning Red, like The Little Mermaid before it, arrives at its climax with the antagonist blown up to kaiju proportions. But while the 1989 Disney movie ends with behemoth Ursula skewered on a ship, the 2022 Pixar film finds its dramatic peak in a quieter moment of mother-daughter understanding.

Animation didn’t do away with villains all at once. Early iterations in the trend, such as Frozen, had classically good-and-evil setups, but subverted them as the films went on. And with Moana and later films, children’s animation shed predictable tropes of hero/villain plotlines while also centering cultures that don’t have much representation in the depths of the Disney vault.

Turning Red is the latest and certainly among the most culturally specific animated works. While films such as Raya and the Last Dragon create fantasy-pastiches of cultural context, Turning Red follows a real 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl living in Toronto in 2002—who just happens to turn into a giant red panda sometimes.

Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz discuss Turning Red and the state of the animated villain on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review. Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for Turning Red.

Spencer Kornhaber: This week, we’re talking about Turning Red, the latest Disney/Pixar release. It’s been out for a while, debuting on Disney+ about a month ago, but we wanted to talk about it because, well, there’s been some discourse around the movie. It’s had an odd kind of staying power. It’s doing well in the streaming numbers. And also, I think we all kind of love it and want to just fawn over it. It’s really a remarkably specific animated film. It’s about a Chinese Canadian 13-year-old girl living in Toronto in 2002.

All Meilin Lee wants to do is hang out with her friends, go to a boy-band concert, and, most importantly, make her somewhat overprotective mother proud. Then one day she wakes up and she finds out that she turns into a giant adorable red panda whenever she loses control of her emotions. As director Domee Shi put it: “The panda is a metaphor for magical puberty.” Shirley, what did you think of Turning Red?

Shirley Li: I love this movie. It is absolutely a film about magical puberty, but it’s about many other things, too. The first time I watched it, I was surprised by how wonderfully it pulled off all these different elements. One is the coming-of-age puberty element. Another is the specificity of a Chinese Canadian 13-year-old and what her life is like. And there’s also the element of dealing with parents.

I walked away from this film really impressed by how well it juggled all of it. I went in incredibly stoked for Domee Shi. This film is her debut, and it makes her the first woman to direct a Pixar feature. She’s also the first woman to direct a Pixar short: her Oscar-winning film Bao, which played in theaters before Incredibles 2.

Kornhaber: It’s about an edible dumpling child, right?

Li: It is about a steamed bun that becomes an anthropomorphized child to this mom who’s suffering from empty-nest syndrome. As a director, Shi has really quirky ideas and draws from a lot of different animation styles. I was really excited to see what her first feature film would look like, and when I saw the animation for the lead character, I got really worried because she looked exactly like me. (Laughs.)

Lenika Cruz: (Laughs.)

Li: And she’s obsessed with pop culture, or an element of it. And it really felt like, maybe in all these years of asking to be seen on-screen, maybe things went too far. And here is this embarrassing rendition of who I am. (Laughs.)

Cruz: Really embarrassing for you. (Laughs.)

[Read: What the controversy over Turning Red misses]

Li: Anyway, that’s where I was coming from with this film. And I could gush all day about Domee Shi. I think she’s such a genius. She is fearless about creating a fearless character with unabashed primal energy in this teenage girl, and pulling from all these different visual styles. It’s pushing what a Pixar film is.

Cruz: I, too, love this movie. It’s super funny. It’s sweet. It gets at the emotional realities of being a 13-year-old girl. When I heard that it was going to be set in 2002, I was like, Oh no, this is going to tap into a time in my life when I was just so earnest and embarrassing. But at the same time, I feel like, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less embarrassed of myself at that age. This movie made me think a lot of PEN15, which I know some of us are big fans of, not just because of the cringey, embarrassing element, but also because, while it’s funny, it doesn’t make fun of what it’s like to be that age and be so full of excitement and uncertainty and enthusiasm.

It gets at the psychological depth of kids at that age. And so I liked that this was a film that wasn’t at all making fun of teenage girls or the things they love. And, Shirley, I actually hadn’t seen Bao when it first played, but I watched it in between my first and second viewings of Turning Red. And even though I knew I knew what would happen, I was still in tears by the end. And you do notice the similar themes to this movie, where you have this mother character who clearly really loves her child and wants to spend all her time with them, but once the child starts breaking off to go on their own, the protective instinct turns dangerous. There’s an edge to it, where the mother wants to do anything to keep her child close, even if that means maybe hurting them.

[Read: Pixar’s Turning Red has the cleverest take on puberty]

Kornhaber: This is a movie that is so, so funny and so charming, because it’s about being extra. It’s about going into the red in all these different ways. I was so taken with it from that very first stretch of narration, where the voice actress who plays Meilin, Rosalie Chiang, is basically shouting her lines. (Laughs.)

She monologues in this kind of stentorian “I am a 13-year-old, but I am basically an adult and this is what I like, and this is what I don’t like.” And my reaction was: I know this girl. I recognize that she’s not an adult. She’s a child, because she is able to express herself and is completely authentic in this over-the-top way. Because what is childhood other than an escalating experience of becoming more and more playful and imaginative … and then running into this wall of puberty where other people start to notice you as an autonomous creature in the world and start to make you feel embarrassed about who you are?

And, in this movie, there’s also this other layer of that brought by the parents, who have their own experiences in life that caused them to get across this idea that you need to watch yourself, to quiet down, and to be careful about how you present to the world. But unfortunately, there’s a family curse that turns you into a gigantic red panda if you aren’t able to control your emotions. And there’s also a magic ritual to turn you into less of who you really are.

The other thing I love about this movie is that it’s completely unpredictable to me. I did not feel prepared for every story beat in the way I’m used to with movies where a villain is defeated. And it does feel like we’re in this moment where children’s animation at least is really far away from the movies that we grew up with.

Li: Yeah, Disney+ released a documentary called Embrace the Panda about the making of Turning Red. And in it, Domee Shi talks about how she didn’t necessarily start with the idea to make a movie about a Chinese Canadian 13-year-old, or to make a movie about dealing with an overprotective mother, or anything like that. She started with just thinking that red pandas were cute and wanting to illustrate them.

And as she learned about red pandas, she learned that they’re quite individualistic, that they eat bamboo even though it doesn’t provide nutrients for them. So she imagined them like a lazy teenager eating chips and sleeping all day. And so she applied a story to it, and found red pandas to be a good metaphor for something she wanted to explore more of. And maybe that’s why the film has its own sense of discovery. She didn’t approach it with a story in mind. She didn’t begin with a heroine and a villain. She just started with the fact that red pandas are really cute, and she wanted to draw them! But this film does fit into a recent spate of Pixar films where there isn’t really a tangible villain: Encanto, Raya and the Last Dragon, Frozen II.

[Read: The flawed fantasy world of Raya and the Last Dragon]

Cruz: Yeah, even a movie like Moana has a plot that’s harder to predict, because there wasn’t an obvious antagonist. Moana wants to save her island. In Encanto, they want to save the house. And then in Turning Red, she wants to go to a concert, but still make her mom happy as this obedient daughter.

And I guess we should set up how the panda is first triggered, because the mom doesn’t expect it and doesn’t prepare her for it. Meilin basically sees a cute boy one day and, after denying to herself that she thinks he’s cute, she finds herself at her desk absentmindedly doodling pictures of him. She gives him biceps and a cute smile, and suddenly she finds herself drawing these sexy drawings of her crush. And then her mom finds the drawings and doesn’t once think that her daughter might actually be enjoying them. She assumes her daughter is being victimized in some way and goes off to embarrass her by confronting the boy. It’s the most embarrassing scene ever.

Kornhaber: Even hearing you describe it hurts.

Li: I’m sweating, just hearing this. (Laughs.)

Cruz: I know! She draws him as a merman. It’s like everyone’s worst nightmare, no matter how old you are. But then, that night, she goes home and tells herself to push all of this down and not disappoint her mother again. She starts berating herself in the mirror. And this is one of the first moments where she’s aware of these desires being stigmatized, something she needs to control and contain and bury. And she wakes up the next morning, and—poof—she is the cutest, biggest, fluffiest red panda. And that’s kind of where the trouble begins.

But what I was surprised by was: In a lot of transformation stories, the fact of the transformation itself is a problem that lasts for most of the film, and I was shocked by how quickly it went from being a secret to being something that she just kind of went with. She’s making money at school taking pictures with people. It goes from being embarrassing to being celebrated so quickly. And I really liked that. If turning into a red panda is a metaphor for puberty and growing up, the movie didn’t treat it as something that the entire world looked at as bad. It was mainly her mother’s idea of how she should be.

Kornhaber: I’m so sick of narratives where, the whole time, you as a viewer are stressed about the protagonist’s secret coming out. There are so many movies like that, and I was concerned this movie would follow that path—but there’s such a relief when her friends join her in the secret and it becomes a totally different kind of movie, where you use your superpowers to have fun.

Cruz: Yeah, it feels so much more realistic to how, if one of your friends were to turn into a giant panda, that’s what you would do. (Laughs.)

Kornhaber: It’s a movie that has conflict, but it’s not gut-wrenching. The real conflict is just: How do I be myself, but also keep my parents happy? She’s a straight-A student. She’s always done what she’s told. That incredible cringe moment you mentioned, Lenika, where the mom marches into the convenience store and confronts the 17-year-old boy Meilin had a crush on— what teenager would not fly off the handle over that? But that’s part of the specificity of this movie. In this family, she really will not say one negative word to her mom. And that’s another way in which it’s telling a story that is less rote than you expect but, I also imagine, true to how a lot of people have lived their lives. It’s certainly true to what appears to be the case for her mom.

Li: Yeah, what’s so special about this film is that all of these supernatural elements work because the rest of it is so specific and rooted in the real. It can borrow from anime visuals and make her eyes go all sparkly when she sees her crush, but at the same time, this is a story that’s not taking place in a fantasy world. It takes place in Toronto in 2002. She has a core group of friends that I think a lot of viewers could see themselves being a part of. And the real conflict, even though there are supernatural elements, is being unable to communicate with a parent.

Something a lot of people have taken away, and something specific about this film, is that the immigrant experience does come with this feeling of needing to live up to your family’s expectations. They’ve sacrificed so much to make it over here. You better do your job and be a perfect child, or else you are disappointing not just your parents, but your entire lineage. But the film is also really just about not being able to communicate with your mom.

Kornhaber: Yeah, it really does feel like a companion piece to Encanto, the other huge Disney streaming hit this year, which is set in Colombia but is also about a family with supernatural powers that are undergoing a crisis that is ultimately resolved by communication and understanding and compromise. It really is a remarkable crop of movies. They’re not slaying a dragon. It’s doing something much more subtle and real. Why do you think Disney is trying to make movies like this right now? Or, rather, why does the culture want these movies? Because they are hits.

[Read: The biggest reason “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is a hit]

Li: I think there are a couple of different factors at play. The first is that Frozen was such an unexpected hit for Disney—and it was a hit that actually retooled the villain story line that we were talking about. Elsa was supposed to be the scary, wicked queen who runs her ice castle away from Arendelle, but the story got retooled to be about sisterhood, with Elsa not as this big bad, but just someone who can’t get a handle on her powers. And, of course, that’s a story beat we see in later Disney animated films.

Frozen was such an unexpected smash hit—but at its core, it is about family. It didn’t have an explicit villain throughout, and I think Disney started tapping that well because they saw how popular it was. Along with that, I think there’s been a push in recent years for more culturally specific stories. There’s been this recognition of culturally specific stories as universal and resonant and, rather than something to be avoided, something that has an audience.

And as animators at Disney and Pixar started recognizing that, they turned to writing those stories and green-lighting those stories. And, behind the scenes, there’s been more female leadership. And because of that, there are more stories that I think women storytellers realize haven’t been told as much. When you think about it, teenage girlhood isn’t really often depicted in stories for children, even in stories for adults.

Kornhaber: What did you make of this movie’s portrayal of someone who’s the child of immigrants? Because I just saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, the incredible science-fictional, multiverse-tripping, make-you-cry-and-barf movie that is currently shaping conversation—and it’s also about a Chinese immigrant family.

[Read: How Hollywood’s weirdest filmmakers made a movie about everything]

Li: I just had this conversation with a friend where we were like, “Are there too many? Is it weird that there are all these Millennial stories about immigrant children?” And this friend of mine was like, “This is the most Asian-immigrant thing we could be saying right now, asking if there’s too much and if we should stop.” (Laughs.)

That said, I do think Asian casts and Asian storytellers have been finding their moment recently. And I don’t mind there being a wave.

Cruz: I’m happy that we have gotten to this point where representation can be a small part of a bigger conversation. For a little while, it felt like every time there was a movie that starred protagonists of color, there was a reaction like: “Ooh, representation! Is this going to fix Hollywood’s diversity problem?”

And it feels like the tenor of the conversation has changed a lot. These movies are super popular despite the complaints that they would only resonate with certain kinds of people. In Turning Red’s case, there was the viral review that said this movie was just made for the director and her immediate family. But the fact that so many people are watching it is proof of the opposite.

Kornhaber: Do movies like this mean that we’ve moved past being able to talk about actual villains in our culture? There are real Scars and Jafars out there. (Laughs.) Is it that, as these stories move into these more real-world stories, it would be politically dicey for Disney to try to identify who are maybe the villains in real-world scenarios? Or at least it would be a bit dark and disturbing?

Cruz: It makes me think a little of the discourse around Zootopia and how people were trying to draw these clear political parallels, but it just wasn’t so easy. And I feel like that was maybe the closest we’ve gotten to people reading into these films. I think Disney and Pixar maybe don’t want to make antagonists that correspond too closely to real life. Especially in these more culturally specific stories.

Li: Yeah. And I don’t want all future animated films to eschew villains. I think there’s a place for an all-out meanie, especially if it brings back those excellent villain songs.

Kornhaber: Yeah, the villains are some of the best things in children’s entertainment of years past.

Li: I do think the idea to complicate certain villains is a good one. Instead of having the mother be all-out terrible, encouraging kids to think about how their parents view them and what their parents were like as children seems positive. But there are also other stories that don’t require developing sympathy. I’m thinking of the live-action Cruella, which we definitely didn’t need.

Kornhaber: Yeah, we love a lot of old Disney villains, but the company has famously had this tendency for creating queer-coded villains. Whether that’s Ursula or Jafar or Scar, the baddie is usually someone who’s kind of campy and of marginal identity. And if these movies were made now, it’s almost impossible to imagine them getting away with not presenting that character’s side of the story a little more, showing whatever traumas cause them to be just so devilish. And honestly, I understand the impulse to move away from opening that can of worms. It’s a lot more about conquering your inner stuff and working things out with the people around you.

A Film That Finally Captures Murakami’s Writing

2022-03-16T16:17:32-04:00

Drive My Car is a special movie. It’s a film about language, but its silences carry the most powerful moments of communication. It’s a three-hour drama about grief, but the experience of watching it is breezily loose and oddly comforting. And it’s one of very few adaptations of the renowned Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s work, although the moments that best capture his style were invented by the director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.

Together, these contradictions make Drive My Car an electrifying watch, but a difficult one to properly summarize. Now streaming on HBO Max and competing at the Academy Awards, it’s finding wider audiences that can experience its magic for themselves.

That awards attention marks another revealing contradiction: Despite Japan’s rich film history, including the filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, Drive My Car is the country’s most-nominated movie ever at the Oscars and its first to get the nod for Best Picture. It’s also the first non-English-language film from any country selected as Best Picture by all three major American critics groups.

The recognition comes at a time of tentative hope for the future of international film. Drive My Car won Best Non-English Language Film at the Golden Globes, an award whose last two winners were Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Minari’s nomination was controversial as a film set in Arkansas that deals with very American experiences around immigration and isolation. Despite having a script in both English and Korean, Minari was nonetheless relegated to the foreign-language category.

With international films making halting, hopeful progress toward recognition outside the old categories then, will they also find audiences? Will they—as Bong famously urged in 2019—“overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles”?

Listen to David Sims, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz discuss on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast The Review, where they break down Drive My Car, Haruki Murakami, and the state of international film:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for Drive My Car.

Lenika Cruz: Drive My Car is based on a Murakami short story of the same title. It follows a theater actor, playwright, and director named Yūsuke Kafuku as he directs an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya for a festival in Hiroshima. He suffers a loss at the beginning of the story and ends up forming this connection with a young woman who the festival hired to drive him in his red Saab 900. He resists this at first. But he’s won over by this quiet young chauffeur named Misaki Watari, and the two of them develop this interesting, quiet friendship.

This is a film by a Japanese director based on an original work by a Japanese writer, but the play at the center is multilingual. The actors cast in it speak their native tongue: Japanese, Mandarin, Tagalog, and Korean Sign Language. And so the notion of people reaching across the distance of language is baked into the plot. It’s about the fundamental question of how we relate to one another: To what extent can we be comfortable with the things we don’t understand about one another and still feel empathy?

David Sims: Right, it’s digging into the gulfs between people that are spoken and unspoken. It is a difficult movie to summarize and yet, once you’re watching it, it’s not an inscrutable film at all. It’s not the kind of art film that feels very distancing. It is a very human drama about humans.

Cruz: Yeah, the basics are pretty straightforward, but what sticks with you goes beyond the plot. It’s about the things that are not said, often between characters in the same scene. It’s the things that they intuit from the silences in between their words. It’s a really magical film.

[Read: Drive My Car pushes the limit of language]

Sims: It is so fascinating to watch Kafuku’s acting process play out. He’s dealing with actors who at times grow frustrated because they don’t know what their acting partner is saying. They don’t know what to react off of. The style seems to be shutting down traditional models of communication, but Kafuku just tells them to do the work and it’s all going to make sense. What was your takeaway from his method and what the movie’s saying about language?

Shirley Li: The rehearsal scenes became really meditative for me. The actors were just reading instead of emoting. That felt like a moment when Hamaguchi was actively saying, “This is what you need to pay attention to. Pay attention to the spaces.” For a couple of years now, we’ve been talking about how foreign-language films are accessible. Bong Joon Ho said that great line about how subtitles are just a one-inch barrier that we need to get over. I appreciated that this film didn’t try to indicate what language was even being spoken in the subtitles. Even if I looked away, I still understood the scene as it was playing out because I wasn’t trying to focus on exactly what was being said.

Cruz: And at no point does it explain the plot of Uncle Vanya or what parallels it might have to Drive My Car, because it’s not about that. Kafuku is constantly telling the actors to let the text live within you. Just be the vessel for the text and say the words. And once you get the rhythm of the words, some transformation will happen.

Li: It’s about the creative process and how you reach the core of a character. Reading interviews, I found one from 1990 where Murakami said he didn’t want his works to be adapted.

Sims: Yes, he’s against his novels being adapted.

Li: “It’s enough for a book to be a book,” he said. And I take the rehearsal scenes as a direct argument against that. You can make a Chekhov play absolutely understandable just through emotions and spaces and intonation, rather than the language itself.

Sims: I am a bit of a Murakami superfan. I have read the short story “Drive My Car,” which is in the collection Men Without Women. And this movie also pulls from another couple of stories in that collection. But none of the stories have the high-concept Uncle Vanya. That’s one of the many embellishments Hamaguchi is throwing onto this movie.

And what I was amazed by when I first watched this movie is that it’s very difficult to nail the slightly removed, aloof tone of Murakami. It is not something that feels automatically visual and cinematic. And Hamaguchi really just understands that atmosphere better than anyone else I’ve seen try to do it. And I really do like some of the work on the adaptations. What do you think?

Cruz: I’ve enjoyed Haruki Murakami. I’m glad you mentioned the short story. In it you see Kafuku’s backstory unfold through these conversations with his driver. But Hamaguchi chose not to use flashbacks. He wanted people to see the entire story from the beginning. And it’s so effective, I think, because, with a lot of stories about grief and loss, those flashbacks act as explanations for why a character is the way they are. But if you are just there from the beginning and you see this relationship with his wife as a living, breathing person before she dies, that simmers underneath the rest of the text and the rest of his interactions with people. You’re waiting for it to bubble up as opposed to having him just tell you. This is a movie that really shows, and tells very little. You’re constantly reading between the lines. And I think that creates a little bit of that remove you’re talking about, David. It doesn’t feel forced or cold. It’s a very warm and humane movie. And so I was also impressed by how he managed to get that tone.

Li: Yeah, he doesn’t adapt Murakami in a way that you might expect, considering the way Murakami plays with memory and nested realities, but the visuals of this film are evocative of Murakami. It’s kind of a film that I think traffics in a lot of contradictions. It’s dealing with all of these intangible emotions and ideas, and yet it feels so grounded. It earns its long running time because it needs you to immerse completely into the reality of the story itself so that you start reading between the lines. There’s one scene in particular that I think we should talk about: in the back seat of the car, when Kafuku talks to the man he’d seen his wife cheat on him with.

Now, on the surface, you could sum it up as a conversation between two men who share a love for the same woman. But the way Hamaguchi films it, the way the shadows move across the younger man’s face and across the older man’s face, and the way that you see the landscape continue to move around the car, it becomes spooky. It becomes much richer. And that’s what Murakami gets at: something very simple on the surface, but thoroughly rich and complicated.

Sims: It’s very meditative.

Li: Yes!

[Read: An electrifying adaptation of Murakami’s Drive My Car]

Sims: When I was a teenager, I was in a bookstore and I picked up a book called Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is the first Murakami book I ever read. It’s still my sentimental favorite, even though I think he’s written better novels. When I was 15 years old, I was excited about a cool noir, sci-fi plot, but there’s a very early scene where a character in an elevator talks about the difference between understanding that the elevator is moving and not moving. Murakami has always been very good at framing this meditative space your brain can enter even in a mundane moment. And in Drive My Car, Kafuku’s resistant to having someone else drive his red Saab 900 because clearly—like his wife does when they have sex in the early parts of the movie—he enters this kind of peaceful fugue state in the car. That’s where he is at his most balanced.

And so he’s not sure if he wants Misaki Watari to drive him around. But then—and it’s a scene I love; it’s the lede of my review—early on at dinner with the theater festival people, Kafuku is asked about her driving and he says, “I think it’s great. When she speeds up or slows down, it’s very smooth and doesn’t feel heavy at all. I sometimes forget that I’m even riding in a car. I’ve ridden cars driven by other people, but this is the first time it’s been this comfortable.”

That’s the Murakami vibe! He’s saying it out loud! I went to the short story and tried to find that line, but it’s not in there. Hamaguchi just gets what is so important about that frame of mind. That’s what this character is craving and that’s why he forms this unspoken bond with Watari. Ah! This movie is so good!

Cruz: It’s so good! I’ve watched it multiple times, and each time, new things jump out at me. There are so many little paths you can go down with this movie, all equally fascinating and rich. You could be talking about each of them for hours. One of the characters I found mesmerizing was Lee Yoon-a, the nonverbal actress cast in the [Uncle Vanya] role of Sonya. She’s introduced during the audition phase and her scene almost brought me to tears. It’s fairly short, but the way she communicates with her body and with her eyes—you can see immediately why she was cast.

She’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about with language and how we can say things without the traditional modes of communication. I just feel like I could talk about this movie forever.

Sims: Right, there are little eddies you can explore every time you watch it. This movie is obviously smaller than The Batman or whatever, but it is a movie that was given a shot during Omicron—a tough time for theatrical exhibition in general—and people went to see it. Critics and awards bodies highlighted it. Oscar voters paid attention. It’s a three-hour movie with subtitles. It seems like a tougher sell than it actually is. If people see it, they get it.

Read: How Haruki Murakami’s translators shaped his early novels

I love Murakami unreservedly. I know he’s got his faults, but he was big for me as a younger reader. But he is often like, “I smoked my 18th cigar and poured my 14th glass of Cutty Sark.”

Cruz: (Laughs.)

Sims: “I put on a sonata and fed my cats some sardines … And then I went to the kitchen to make some meal that sounds completely fabulous using whatever was in the cupboard … And then I reminisced on some insanely hot sex I had with someone.”

Li: (Laughs.)

Sims: “… And then the phone rang and it was a secret agent!” (Laughs.) Like, he’s got his vibes. And this movie zeroes in on the particular melancholic aspects of Murakami. It’s a little less cool. I mean, it is cool, but no one owns a jazz club or anything like that.

Cruz: I watched this film before I read the story. And if you’ve read Murakami, you know that when Misaki Watari’s character appears for the first time, he probably wrote something like “a very quiet and unassuming young woman” and probably described her in great physical detail. And indeed, the story is like, “She was a very plain and homely young lady.” And so there are some obvious Murakami elements to it, but I’m glad that Hamaguchi did not include the material in the first few pages of the short story where Kafuku expresses how he thinks women aren’t great at driving.

Sims: Right, and the character is supposed to be won over by this female driver. I’m now thinking of other Murakami adaptations. I assume you’ve seen Burning, which was a wonderful Korean film from a few years ago that’s also based on a short story. Almost everything is based on a short story. I’ve never seen the Norwegian Wood annotation, which is his only novel I know of that’s been adapted. Murakami was not thrilled with that movie, though.

Li: He’s thrilled with this one.

Sims: Yeah, he likes Drive My Car?

Li: Yeah, he’s said that he likes this one. And Bong Joon Ho also loves it. He said, “I would compare this to the sound of a bell that resonates for a long time.”

Sims: Bong Joon Ho, who is of course the director of Parasite, which won Best Picture a couple of years ago. And in terms of the Oscar conversation for this movie—and we talked about this a little bit on the Power of the Dog episode, how the voting membership’s clearly changed—there have been efforts to diversify and young-ify the voting pool, which have reaped very interesting rewards. Do you think there’s a change in how audiences are approaching international film?

Cruz: The year after Parasite, when Minari came out, the comparisons were made. It now feels like each year for the past few years, there’s a hot non-English-language Best Picture contender. And I’m grateful for that, if only for the fact that these movies are more in the spotlight.

Read: Minari and the invisible stars of Asian-led movies

Li: I largely feel the same way, Lenika. I think it’s great that there’s room at the Oscars for foreign-language films to be recognized. Sometimes we may be too hasty to see a film like Parasite winning as a harbinger for everything being great from here on out though, you know? For last year’s Golden Globes, Minari was only nominated for Foreign Language Film.

Sims: Right, because the Golden Globes have a sort of annoying rule where if it counts as a Foreign Language Film, it doesn’t count as a drama or comedy.

Li: Right, and Minari is also a deeply American story, so we saw there was a lot of debate around that. I just think it’s great that there’s a space for foreign-language films to be recognized on this level, but I also don’t think they should only be seen as foreign-language films.

Sims: Japan has one of the richest cinema histories of any country. And so it’s sort of shocking that this is the first Japanese film to get a Best Picture nomination. It’s great that the Oscars are expanding, but it does feel like there’s only space for a movie or two to break out in that way. It’s still baby steps.

It’s not just that this is a foreign-language film; it’s that this is a very quiet, very spare, three-hour emotional drama about feelings slowly being drawn out, car ride after car ride. The Oscars used to have some real middle-of-the-road tastes, and Drive My Car is in the left lane, baby!

Li: (Laughs.)

Yellowjackets Is So Much More Than a ‘Female Lord of the Flies’

2022-02-04T16:25:42-05:00

Attempts to summarize the Showtime series Yellowjackets have mostly had to rely on creaky comparisons: a female Lord of the Flies … a ’90s Stranger Things … a teen Lost, but in Canada. The coming-of-age horror story is indeed tough to categorize, but nonetheless thrillingly addictive. The show follows a championship-bound girls’ soccer team that crashes in the wilderness in 1996, threading their story with that of the surviving members as adults in 2021.

Like Stranger Things, the show uses genre horror as a way to recall what it feels like to be a teenager. After all, with so much in high school seeming life-and-death, a survival narrative is almost too on the nose. But although the anxieties of that age are universal, Yellowjackets also speaks to the very specific trauma of this moment. As they dream about college, crushes, and national championships, the girls have their lives interrupted by an unthinkable disaster. Suddenly grappling with surviving each day, they find themselves in a world without clear rules for how to stay safe and return to normal life.

Yellowjackets isn’t just about the trauma of the team’s 19 months in the wilderness, though. It’s also about how that trauma has stayed with them—how they’ve tried to grow past it and support one another through it.

The comparisons to Lost are mostly quite apt: Yellowjackets’ quasi-supernatural plot has spawned endless online theorizing. (Who are the “pit girl”and the “antler queen”? Who’s blackmailing the adults? What does the cult’s strange symbol mean?) In breaking from Lost’s mold with two timelines, though, the show introduces a fascinating new kind of mystery: How did the teenagers we see in the woods grow into the adults they become back home?

For an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review, Shirley Li, Lenika Cruz, and Megan Garber analyze Season 1 of Yellowjackets. Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for Season 1 of Yellowjackets.

Shirley Li: How would you describe Yellowjackets, Megan? Because I’ve struggled with it.

Megan Garber: I also have struggled. I’ve tried to proselytize on this show and often failed because I haven’t been able to adequately describe why it is so good. It’s so many things happening at once. The premise is basically this: In 1996, a plane crash takes down a high-school girls’ soccer team on their way to national championships. They then have to survive what we think is the Canadian wilderness and the many, many things that transpire there. Alongside the 1996 story, there’s also a timeline set in the present day where some of the survivors deal with various mysteries and life after trauma. I also think the show makes clear that we are not seeing all of the people who made it out of the wilderness. But again, that does not really convey the greatness of this show. (Laughs.)

Lenika Cruz: One of the nice things about Yellowjackets is that it’s so hard to describe that you end up listing things, one or two of which is going to catch someone’s attention. And they’ll go and watch the show and they’ll still find plenty of things to be surprised by. That’s how it was for me. I literally edited Shirley’s piece about the finale of Yellowjackets. And she mentioned multiple spoilers, and I still watched the show and had no idea what was going to happen.

One thing I wish I had heard from people recommending the show is: If you liked Lost, watch this show. That was definitely an inspiration—or at least a vibe—that really hooked me. One of the more common descriptions I’ve heard is “female Lord of the Flies,” but the mystery angle was just so engrossing to me, as I think it was for so many who watched this show.

Li: What does a female version of Lord of the Flies look like according to Yellowjackets? The showrunners have said they were kind of inspired by commenters who had scoffed at this idea of there being a female Lord of the Flies. One of the comments the showrunners highlighted read: “What are they going to do? Collaborate to death?”

[Read: The bloody, brutal business of being a teenage girl]

Cruz: Even though the creators say that’s how the idea came about, I feel like “female Lord of the Flies” is the least interesting way to describe what this show is. Yes, it’s about survival and throwing this high-school team into the wilderness to see what they do, but one of the appeals for me was seeing how long it took for any semblance of the violence from the pilot to appear. And that very slow start is why I think I liked the show so much. It reminded me of a show like Lost or even AMC’s The Terror, which I will never miss an opportunity to hype. I like survival shows where it takes people a really, really, really long time to give up what makes them human.

And I feel like having the show be about a high-school soccer team, you see them clinging to the very specific dynamics and stereotypes that we all cling to when we’re in high school. It just becomes easier to sort people into labels, and I think that’s really hard to give up, especially when this season only shows their first four months in the wilderness.

I didn’t hear the Lost comparisons, but the plane-crash scene did remind me so much of the very first episode of Lost. And then obviously the mystery and the theorizing, the sense that there was something supernatural afoot that you’re trying to puzzle through.

Garber: I also found myself thinking a lot about shows like PEN15 and Big Mouth and Stranger Things. These shows also use horror as a way to get at what it feels like to be this age when so much feels life-and-death. Even though it might be a school dance or something like that, it takes on the dimensions of survivalism. I also think this show fights back against this impulse that it’s very easy to have as adults, to look back on that time of life and roll our eyes: We were so foolish then!

We often look down on that period of life as not full of very much dignity, and I think these shows are actually trying to recapture and remind us how much you feel in that period of life, how much things mean to you. I think they’re trying, in their way, to restore a little bit of respect for that phase.

Li: Yeah, if it only stuck to the ’90s plane-crash timeline and the whole female Lord of the Flies, it would only be exploring that liminal space between girlhood and adulthood. But instead, the present-day story really helps emphasize that what happens to you in that time—I mean, most of us haven’t gone through 19 months in the wilderness—really affects who you fully are as an adult.

Cruz: Right. The show’s mysteries are about murder and this strange symbol, but there’s the other mystery of connecting who they were to who they become. I’ll watch a certain scene and be like, Oh, that’s why she’s this way, or That’s why she reacted this way. And this is a very pulpy show. It’s really fun to watch. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. And so you kind of simplify both the teenagers and their adult counterparts to these archetypes: She’s the disaffected suburban mom … She’s the uptight high-achieving politician … She’s the burnout teen …

And you realize how that functions both in fiction but then also in how we look at real people, and what a disservice that is to both teenage girls and middle-aged women. And once I realized I was doing that—making these assumptions about who these people were—it started becoming more interesting, because the show subverted my expectations. They proved to be so much more complex, more humane.

Garber: Another element to the mystery is just: What kind of world is this, even? Are there supernatural elements at play? And I think what ultimately drew me in is the ambiguity of the answers. There are so many fundamental elemental things that we don’t know yet. And this is a little bit navel-gazy but, to me, so many of the questions we’re dealing with in life outside of this show—in politics, in culture, etc.—really do come down to: Why do people believe what they believe? Why do people see the world as they do? Who gets to decide what is true? Who gets to decide what is art? What is history? And I think this show feels so resonant right now because it’s actually trying to get at some of those questions.

[Read: Yellowjackets is art for the age of conspiracism]

Cruz: The length of time they’re there is 19 months, which makes me think about how long the pandemic has lasted. Their time in the wilderness came out of nowhere. They were on their way to nationals. They had college. They had boyfriends, girlfriends, all these different things in mind for themselves. And all of a sudden that was interrupted. They’re thrown into this space that nobody really knows how to navigate. There are more questions than answers. And they’re trying to make the best of the situation but have no idea when it’s going to end.

Li: One of my favorite scenes is from the present timeline when Shauna rests in bed with Taissa.

Cruz: Love that scene.

Li: They’re just talking about what they had wanted their lives to look like. It’s a really beautiful, sweet friendship. As a viewer, you wonder how they got to this point. And you learn about what happened in the woods, how they empathized with each other about the secrets they couldn’t share with their closest partners or friends. That’s the power of the show.

Garber: Yeah. The Taissa-Shauna relationship is one of my favorites in the show, particularly because there’s so much pressure for young women to sort of commodify their relationships and treat them as capital. Your friendships are not just friendships on their own terms. Often they define where you are in the hierarchy, and there can be something a little bit transactional about them. The book that Yellowjackets slyly alludes to is Queen Bees and Wannabes, the sociological treatment of girls at this time of life, which then became the inspiration for Mean Girls.

It’s all about those dynamics. And one of the things that I really love about the Taissa-Shauna relationship is that it sort of elides definition. There’s a quiet, beautiful understanding between them. These two people just get each other, and they’re going to get each other regardless of the context, regardless of the social hierarchy at play. And most important, they’re going to be there for each other. Taissa is the first to realize that Shauna’s pregnant, and she makes sure Shauna has everything she needs for it in the wilderness. Conversely, Shauna is the person that Taissa goes to when she can’t sleep. It’s the one thing she desperately needs in the world, and she knows she can get it from Shauna. There’s just something so great about that: this very quiet, very unremarkable and yet totally remarkable reliability between them, even though they’re not technically best friends. They’re not technically anything. They’re just there for each other.

Li: Yeah, and we don’t have to put a label on it.

To continue the comparisons to Lost, part of what I loved about that show was how you could really put yourself in the character’s shoes. What would I be doing in this situation? Would I be screaming my head off for Walt? Would I go on the raft and try to leave the island? And in Yellowjackets, too, you wonder, Would I join Taissa’s group and try to hike out of the wilderness?

Cruz: Lost is a useful point of comparison because of their obvious parallels as stranded survival stories, but also because of the way both shows encourage theorizing. And I wasn’t watching while people were actively theorizing. As soon as one episode ended, I could just watch the next one without checking the subreddit in between to look up who fans thought Adam might be or who the ”pit girl” and ”antler queen” were.

Those more granular questions were not as much on my mind. And I think it’s helpful to know that the creators shot the pilot well in advance of shooting the rest of the show, before even breaking down the beats of the show. And so yes, that’s a very provocative way to begin a season and to tease the questions of the series, but I almost feel like I was expecting something else from the show than what it delivered—and I kind of like the other stuff it started to deliver. I appreciated that it was less focused on how these young women find themselves in a cannibalistic cult and more on questions about what parts of themselves from that time they kept to the present.

I’m more interested in how they retain their humanity. It’s not just about the brutality they can show to one another. It’s also about the ways in which they care for one another, despite the ways they’ve hurt each other. This show is so good at tracking the ever-evolving teen dynamics, the ways centers of power shift just like they could have back in New Jersey.

Being almost setting-agnostic was really refreshing to see and made the show for me. Its ambitions are so much more than just, “What happens when teenage girls are at each other’s throats?” Because that itself can be a tired trope. Seeing the forms of care was also important.

Li: For me, the fun of the show is in looking at the theories week to week and going into the subreddit. Sometimes you find some theory being like, ”Caligula is the name of Misty’s bird. Caligula is the name of a Roman emperor who performed a C-section, and ate the baby. This must mean that Misty ate Shauna’s baby.”

Cruz: I hadn’t heard that. And that’s probably not true, but I love it.

Li: Yeah, same, but that’s the power of the show. But what keeps you watching is not to find out whether Caligula was named specifically to refer to something about Misty; it’s to find out whether, like, Shauna and Jackie can repair their relationship.

But since we’ve mentioned Caligula, I don’t think we’ve talked enough about a really particular character: the one and only Misty Quigley. She’s the best character, right?

Garber: Second only to Caligula, who is definitely the best character. (Laughs.)

Cruz: I love grown-up Misty. I’m terrified of, and sort of hate, young Misty.

Li: How can you hate young Misty?

Cruz: Every time I see young Misty, I’m like, Please go away. Stop trying to get with the coach. Like, she commits the original sin of the show in destroying the transmitter. And for what? She overhears some of the other girls talking about what they would have done without Misty’s medical knowledge. And then Misty, who’s more of an outcast back in their high school, hears that and thinks this is her chance to be somebody. So she destroys the transmitter because social currency is more important than food and shelter, we’re led to believe.

Li: I feel for her though! I can’t hate her for it. (Laughs.)

Cruz: And she probably thought that they would still get rescued eventually. She just wasn’t thinking about what that meant. And there is something about both high-school and adult Misty. She’s a terrible person, but also someone who has this well-meaning innocence about her. And she’s so funny. Christina Ricci’s incredible. She is this almost campy villain. And no matter what she does, no matter how betrayed you feel by her actions, it’s still just, ”Oh, that’s Misty being Misty!”

Li: I can’t hate that character, but I get what you’re saying about her being annoying. Like, let go of your crush on the coach! You’re making this guy uncomfortable.

Cruz: She definitely goes around the world thinking she’s the main character. ”I’m Misty Quigley, main character of my story. I’m about to kidnap this woman. And so I’m going to play Phantom of the Opera as a soundtrack to this cool crime I’m about to commit.” (Laughs.)

Li: (Laughs.) Yeah, she definitely has Main Character Syndrome. She’s unbearable in many ways, but she’s efficient. When you need to get rid of a body, you call Misty Quigley.

Garber: (Laughs.) Yeah, totally. I mean, as a person, I detest her. She is a monster. But as a character, she’s one of the all-time greats. Christina Ricci is so good and so compelling. And returning to this idea of a women-focused Lord of the Flies, she does embody these stereotypical feminine traits, right? She’s physically small. She presents as meek and weak. She happily fades into the background and wants to serve others. Even on the team, she’s the equipment manager. If we’re just trafficking in stereotypes, she’s sort of the homemaker for the team, right? And even into adulthood, she goes on into a caring profession, which I think the show argues is to sort of reclaim the power she had in the wilderness. The show puts the stereotypically feminine stuff and her capacity for mayhem alongside one another in this interplay.

Li: Megan, I also want to hear your thoughts about Shauna, because I know you like modern-day Shauna’s dynamic with Jeff, her lovable doofus husband.

Garber: I would love to defend Jeff. Yes, he’s a bit of a doofus. I think the show’s very much trying to imply that he’s someone who peaked in high school. But I really do appreciate the relationship he has with Shauna. I came to love and respect that character by the end of the first season. The show primed us at the beginning to not give him much credit and dismiss him as a stereotype. But throughout the season, he just proved again and again his loyalty to Shauna.

I’m always interested in nuanced portrayals of marriage in pop culture. And, to my mind, the Shauna-Jeff relationship is one of the better ones out there. One of my favorite scenes is the one where Shauna finds out it’s Jeff who’s been blackmailing the Yellowjackets. I love the scene, first of all, for “There’s no book club?,” which is just an all-time great line. It’s so good.

Li: (Laughs.) So good! His voice cracking. I love it.

Cruz: Poor, sweet Jeff.

Garber: But my actual favorite part of that scene is when Shauna realizes that Jeff read her diaries a long time ago. And so he’s known everything that happened in the wilderness all along—everything that she did, everything she’s been feeling so guilty about for all these years. And she realizes he loved her anyway. I just love the way Melanie Lynskey plays that moment. She’s filled with shock and gratitude at once.

This show has all these different genres at play—satire, horror, psychodrama—but I think the moments I ended up loving most are of these relationships being deeply explored and lovingly treated on the screen.

The Spectacular Vindication of BTS

2021-12-16T13:31:32-05:00

For 20 months, I was haunted by two fears: that some things (the pandemic, isolation, anxiety) would last forever, and that others (dreams, loved ones, entire years) would be lost forever. Time warped around me, as it did for so many people. Some days, it moved like molasses. On others, like when I saw family and friends, it seemed to flow like a river that I couldn’t stop or outrun.

Then, for two weeks at the end of 2021, I tried to control time for myself.

In September, as live music was returning in earnest, the South Korean pop group BTS announced their first in-person concerts in two years. They’d play four nights at the open-air SoFi Stadium, in Los Angeles, where the Super Bowl would be held in 2022. (Mask wearing and proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test would be required.) Knowing that demand was bound to be fierce, I hoped to attend once; after a lot of planning, stress, and luck, I had tickets to all four dates. For one week, I’d share hotel rooms with dear friends, attend shows, and blast BTS’s extensive, genre-melding discography while carpooling in L.A. traffic. And for the first time in months, I smiled at the idea of time standing still.

By all appearances, time had been kind to the seven members of BTS. Already global superstars before the pandemic, RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook had only gotten bigger since 2020. They’d released three albums and scored six Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 songs, in both English and Korean. They won millions of new fans and became the first K-pop act to receive a Grammy nomination last year for their single “Dynamite” (followed by another nomination this year for “Butter”). This fall, they spoke at the United Nations General Assembly for the third time, accompanying South Korean President Moon Jae-in as special envoys. So when the group finally took the stage in Los Angeles in late November and early December, the shows might have seemed like a simple victory lap. In truth, they also served as a kind of vindication of BTS—of their talent, authenticity, reach, and emotional connection with fans. All of those things had been called into question by critics, or at times by the artists themselves, in 2021. The four nights were loud, ecstatic, and poignant proof that they had all been wrong.

BTS shows are legendary affairs, known for elaborate production design, pairing demanding choreography with live vocals, goofy banter, sincere speeches, inside jokes, and a high level of crowd participation by their fans, known as ARMY. I had experienced all of this as a brand-new (and somewhat intimidated) ARMY attending my first BTS concert in May 2019, but I still felt unprepared for the L.A. shows, which were named for the band’s latest single, “Permission to Dance.” In the preceding weeks, I couldn’t conceive of spectacles of sound, movement, and community after spending much of the past two years in silence, stillness, and solitude.

[Read: I wasn’t a fan of BTS. And then I was.]

Imagine some 50,000 people gathered in the dark as lights blink around them like stars. They’re dancing like one body, singing with a single voice in a language that may not be their own. Many of the people in this little universe understand how easily their happiness at seeing a “boy band” or a “K-pop sensation” could be derided as trivial or childish. But that condescension has no place here. As the night goes on, thoughts of what they’ve suffered or lost recently grow dimmer, and the strangers around them start to look like family.

This is the spell that a BTS concert can cast. When the group opened the first show in L.A. with their inaugural in-person performance of the adrenaline-pumping “ON,” the air crackled. When the beginning notes of the moody gem “Black Swan” started, the stadium seemed to hold its breath. The group members staged a gorgeously choreographed sequence, alongside white-feathered dancers, that seemed to belong in a baroque theater rather than a pop concert. The back-to-back, live-band renditions of their smash singles “Dynamite” and “Butter” were like aural serotonin, particularly on day two, when an effervescent Megan Thee Stallion strutted out to rap her verse in the “Butter” remix.

Watching these two performances in particular, I thought of the critics who had accused BTS of abandoning their identity as Korean artists—all for releasing three songs in English. As the show continued, I watched BTS perform Korean tracks from their largely self-written 2020 record BE, including their Hot 100 No. 1 single “Life Goes On.” The set list reaffirmed the group’s roots as they performed many of the Korean-language tracks (“DNA,” “Blood Sweat & Tears,” “I Need U,” “Idol”) that had helped them break out. And when BTS paused between songs, many members abandoned the English remarks they had practiced and instead shared their feelings in their native tongue. The shows, especially coming weeks after the group’s official appearances as cultural ambassadors for South Korea, seemed to obviate any lingering questions about their authenticity.

[Read: BTS’s ‘Life Goes On’ did the impossible]

Alongside complaints about their supposedly waning Koreanness, BTS have faced renewed criticism about how popular they really are. Some American critics admit to the group’s enormous appeal, while also trying to undercut it. “If you look at the charts … you’re going to get a completely distorted idea of how popular BTS actually are,” declared a Stereogum piece that accused fans of “gaming the system” for organizing streaming and buying campaigns to support the group’s music. The piece also lamented the death of “organic popularity” in pop music, even though BTS came from a tiny label and slowly earned a following through social media and word of mouth. A June cover story by Billboard questioned whether BTS’s grassroots fan efforts were being secretly coordinated by their own label; BTS and their record label’s parent company, Hybe, denied this. “It just feels like we’re easy targets because we’re a boy band, a K-pop act, and we have this high fan loyalty,” the group’s leader, RM, said at the time.

In interviews ahead of the SoFi shows, RM took further aim at attempts to shade BTS’s success and fans, subtly mocking the notion that ARMYs were bots or just 15-year-old girls. At the concerts, I was stunned and heartened by the sheer diversity of the attendees: older women with purple highlights and tattoos, couples wearing matching BTS headbands, young people conversing excitedly in French or Japanese, middle-aged men in T-shirts emblazoned with Jungkook or Jimin, and friends carrying Pride flags. While waiting in the hours-long lines to get in, people played BTS songs on their phones and danced to BTS routines. I overheard some attendees telling new friends how they had gotten into the music—through a friend, a child, a YouTube link from a co-worker, a late-night TV performance caught by chance. All of this looked like organic fandom to me.

The impermanence of beauty, the beauty of impermanence—these are things BTS understand well. Their lyrics are full of self-aware references to the ephemerality of both fame and contentment. Take the 2016 song “Epilogue: Young Forever”: “The huge applause can’t be mine forever … even if there is no everlasting audience, I will sing.” As artists who debuted in 2013 with little industry support, BTS were surprised enough by their rise to be always, on some level, imagining the moment when everything might evaporate.

[Read: The astonishing duality of BTS]

At a press conference with BTS the day after their first concert, I asked how their performances at the American Music Awards a week earlier—where they picked up three awards, including Artist of the Year—compared with the show at SoFi. Through a translator, Jungkook spoke of how the cheers from ARMYs at the AMAs had given them energy that they then carried into the concerts—as though the pandemic had trained them to have a scarcity mindset when it came to absorbing their fans’ voices. That energy radiated from each member under the hot lights of the stadium: RM’s fierce and authoritative presence, Jin’s bottomless vocal virtuosity, Suga’s effortlessly charismatic cool, J-Hope’s peerless dance mastery, Jimin’s intoxicating command of movement, V’s singular vocals and aura, and Jungkook’s tireless domination of the stage. When they moved together, you could not look away.

Still, on the final night, BTS again offered a window into the looming sense of expiration they feel. During the final speeches, an emotional V said in Korean that they “had doubts if there would be any ARMYs left” after two years. Through tears, RM said in English that he spent much of the pandemic being afraid of their future, wondering, “What if I got too old to do this, to dance like I was 23 or 25, when we were so new and fresh?” He talked about working out for the past two years just to prepare for these four concerts, and admitted that though they had no idea when they could perform again, he was now less scared. “I promise that … I’ll be even better when I’m 30, or 35, or 40,” he said.

By the end of it all, I had arrived at a similar realization. None of us could stop time, but we didn’t need to. The performances that BTS delivered, and the community with whom I shared those experiences, made me less afraid of holding moments of joy gently, and then letting them go. They reminded me that the future would bring joy again. That night, BTS sang the fan favorite “Home,” whose lyrics are about feeling brave enough to go out into the world, because you know you have somewhere, and someone, safe to return to.

After the shows ended, I learned that BTS grossed $33.3 million and sold more than 200,000 tickets; their SoFi run is one of the best-selling concert runs at a single venue in history. But those numbers don’t capture everything. The image that stays with me is of people’s hands reaching up in unison, through the fluttering confetti, toward the sky. Eyes wide, as if in disbelief. As if nobody had told them that going to a concert could feel like coming home.

You Won’t Regret Rewatching The Ring

2021-11-05T07:00:00-04:00

The 2002 horror film The Ring can be summarized in a delightfully analog fashion: After finding a VHS tape and receiving a phone call, a local newspaper reporter searches library archives to solve a mystery. As John Mulaney would say, that is a very old-fashioned sentence.

But while audiences today have little to fear from a ghost that travels by VHS and kills by landline, the terrors in Gore Verbinski’s modern classic are oddly resonant. The threat at the center of the movie isn’t the technology; it’s the spread of a story. And whether an urban legend whispered at a ’90s slumber party or a viral anecdote shared and reshared online, alluring half-truths present a certain danger when circulated.

The Ring was a phenomenon when it came out 19 years ago. It set off a wave of J-horror remakes, rekindled the supernatural monster movie, and gave audiences one of the best shock endings of all time. But in the “prestige horror” era, it offers a warning about the temptations and responsibilities of sharing.

And so, in the spirit of the Halloween season, Atlantic staffers revisited The Ring for an episode of our culture podcast, The Review. Listen to Sophie Gilbert, David Sims, and Lenika Cruz here:

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers.

Sophie Gilbert: It was Halloween this weekend, so we decided to step away from new releases and watch what I think all of us consider a classic horror movie: Gore Verbinski’s 2002 movie, The Ring, which, of course, is the remake of the Japanese horror movie released in North America in 1998 as Ringu. In the almost-20 years since it came out, it has had a vast influence on horror movies, and we wanted to rewatch and see if it holds up as a modern horror classic. David, are you a Ring fan?

David Sims: I certainly am. I had not seen this film in quite a long time. I saw it in theaters and I remember it scaring the sillies out of me. I had seen Ringu, the original film, and it had quite a profound effect on me because I rented that when I was 13 or 14 from the video store, knowing very little but being a pretentious little proto film-boy.

Gilbert: (Laughs.)

Sims: So I thought, I’ll just watch this Japanese horror movie … and I didn’t know that she was going to come out of that dang television! And I have really never forgotten it. It’s such an effective scare. So I’ve always had a fondness for the original, and when I saw the remake at 16, I thought it would be watered down, [but] I remember liking it at the time. And watching it now, I was sort of astonished at how well-made it is compared with a lot of horror of my youth—2000s horror. It has held up quite well, in my opinion.

Gilbert: Lenika, how about you?

Lenika Cruz: I saw the American remake first when it came out, also in theaters. I was 12 and did not have much of a tolerance for scary things. I don’t think I really knew what the movie was about. One of my friends had told me that it’s about a girl climbing out of a well. And from the first jump scare, when the mom opens the closet door and sees her daughter, I thought, Oh, no, I’m screwed. I have, like, ruined my whole life. I probably should have left the theater, but I sat there and I watched the rest of it. And for the next two years, I basically had nightmares about The Ring.

But weirdly enough, I have rewatched it a lot over the years, almost as if to exorcise it from my mind. And rewatching it as an adult, I’m surprised by how the things that terrified me are still scary, but I can appreciate some of the other elements of the movie now. I think Ringu is maybe scarier in some ways, but honestly, the American remake does hold its own.

[READ: 25 horror movies for every kind of viewer]

Gilbert: I want to have words with the friend who told you that this was a movie about a girl coming out of a well. David, for those people who haven’t seen The Ring in 19 years since it came out, can you give us a quick catch-up on the premise of the movie?

Sims: So it starts with a little preview of how everything works: There’s this videotape. It’s cursed. If you watch it, you will get a weird phone call and then die seven days later of basically being scared to death.

Cruz: I love the way the two girls in that preview talk about the video. It does feel like the sort of urban legend that you would share at a sleepover. It’s the exact kind of night that you would be talking about this thing.

Sims: And so one of the teenagers in that intro scene dies. And her aunt, a reporter named Rachel, played by Naomi Watts, tries to dig into the tape and uncovers this weird, ghostly folktale: a remote island in Washington state, a girl named Samara who had strange powers and vanished, a creepy story of these horses dying …

The whole thing is basically a folktale that could exist at any time. But then it has this modern technological layer on top of it, of this tape that is passed around and has this physical presence beyond the frightening phenomenon that’s going on. It’s mostly a mystery film about Naomi Watts trying to figure out what’s behind this story. And it’s just the right blend of techno-horror about modern, futuristic fears along with a classic vengeful-ghost story.

Gilbert: The virality is so interesting. Because now, the nature of our lives is so different. Now it’d be like, “Oh, watch this cursed TikTok.” “Click on this link.” We’d all be dead.

Sims: In Rings, the video is uploaded to YouTube, right? And it eventually does go viral like you’re saying.

Cruz: Yeah, I reviewed it for The Atlantic once upon a time.

[READ: Rings is a sequel that belongs at the bottom of a well]

Sims: The other thing about this movie that is so funny to me is that it is extremely old-fashioned now. It’s sort of a last cry of analog media. The videotape is scary, but a videotape is so quaint—the idea that something would have to be spread by people copying VHS tapes. You needed two players for that, whereas now, like you say, Sophie, it would be boring. The world would be dead in a week.

Gilbert: Or we’d be saved because everyone in the world would see it and then show friends, and have copies, and Samara would be happy.

Cruz: If this movie is a critique of something, what is it a critique of? A lot of scenes from the movie support this interpretation that it’s about our addiction to watching things and screens. There’s a scene where Naomi Watts is standing on her balcony while her ex-boyfriend is watching the tape inside. She looks into these other apartment buildings and everyone has a TV, and she’s like, Oh my gosh, people are just addicted to their TVs.

But you don’t die by watching the tape; you die by not sharing it. And I think that is what is so resonant today. A movie scolding you for watching TV is boring. Television’s been around for such a long time. But The Ring does seem to be tapping into this metaphor of the virus now, when it’s so easy to share. You don’t have to go and have these two players and press the buttons to copy anything now; you literally just have to click. I don’t think this movie is really a critique of TV watching. I think it is very interested in the question of how stories get spread, the responsibility of the people who spread those stories in misinterpreting them, and really considering the weight of that responsibility.

Gilbert: Let’s talk about the Samara character a bit. Ringu is based on a book, and in it, she’s institutionalized and becomes evil after being sexually assaulted by a doctor. It’s a manifestation of rage and wanting to take revenge. Sexual violence is one of the most potent forces for that emotion, and often used in terrible ways in film and television. But I found that so fascinating, where in The Ring and in Ringu, Samara, as it turns out, by the end, is just inherently evil.

You are led to believe that she was just treated cruelly by her adoptive parents. They preferred horses. They institutionalized Samara. And they threw her in a well and left her to die for seven days. And Naomi Watts’s character thinks that if she can just put Samara’s body to rest, the spirit of Samara will be at peace. But it turns out that’s not how it goes.

Cruz: I love that it wasn’t just that simple. Because I think both of those things are true: that she was mistreated and also that there was nothing to be done anymore. She doesn’t actually want to be placated. She’s dead. She can’t have her life back. She can’t have a family again. So she’s going to take it away from everybody else.

Sims: I do love the fakeout in this movie. Naomi Watts has uncovered the mystery, learned everything you’re talking about, and found Samara’s corpse. So she’s like, Great, I know how ghost stories work. I have freed the wayward spirit! The handprint on my arm is gone. I’m going to survive. The curse is over.

Instead, is Samara just malicious? To me, it’s more that we just never knew how to deal with this, and just acknowledging the wrong is not enough to prevent her [vengeance]. Every horror movie, of course, has to end with the villain being like, “I’m not dead. You’re not rid of me.” And The Ring’s way of doing it is so good, rather than the classic, “Well, they’re still alive and maybe we’ll see him next time. Roll credits.”

Cruz: Do you think of Samara as this evil spirit … maybe we don’t even know where she came from?

Sims: I mean the much-maligned and fairly awful The Ring Two clarifies that she might be the product of, like, a water demon?

Gilbert: Yeah, J-horror, draws on motifs from Noh theater and Kabuki theater. And evil spirits exist within those traditions. They’re as much a force as light and air. And the movie tricks you into thinking that Samara is a product of nurture—a product of abuse and horrific mistreatment—and you’re compelled as the viewer to feel sympathy for her, as Rachel does. And then it turns out that actually, she really is evil too. It’s such a good trick.

Cruz: You want there to be a reason for her to be doing this. And that’s what Rachel gets so tied up in as a journalist looking for some sort of narrative that she can write her story around.

Gilbert: David, what do you make of Samara?

Sims: Um, I like her. She’s cool.

Cruz: (Laughs.)

Sims: No, to me she’s not, like, some inherently evil being, in terms of, like, a demon seed. I like to think about her as more the product of various evils that have compounded and not been helped, and so by the time she’s institutionalized, the impression I always get from the clip that Naomi Watts watches of her in the mental hospital, is that she kills her interrogator. And of course, she drives the horses to madness when she’s locked up in the barn.

It’s this ongoing tale where we just don’t know how to confront something supernatural. And so we just lock it away over and over again. And that’s why I love the image of the ring as the well closing on her. That’s our only recourse: Bury it, lock it away, throw away the key over and over again. And that’s why it’s such a cool idea to merge that kind of a ghost story with a tape that’s viral. That’s out of control. That can’t be buried. That can’t be destroyed. That entered the cultural ether.

Cruz: The film uses this motif of virality, of a sickness spreading, that was very explicit in the novel, where Sadako, the Japanese version of the Samara character, basically has an illness that she spreads.

Gilbert: Isn’t it smallpox?

Cruz: It’s like smallpox, but then combined with her, like, psychic powers. So there are two different sicknesses that are created, one of which causes ring-shaped lesions. And that’s where the original title for The Ring comes from. Watching Ringu, the phone ringing is not as much of a thing. And the shape of the well is also not really discussed.

That’s something the American remake had to make clear: What is the titular Ring? And I guess it’s the phone ringing, and then the well, but it’s interesting how this story has mutated and transformed from the novel to the Japanese adaptation to the American remake. Stories get retold. Parts are kept and transformed for future audiences.

[READ: When social-justice horror goes wrong]

Gilbert: What kind of influence did The Ring have on movies and horror movies that came after it?

Sims: You just see this intense wave of J-horror adaptations for the next five years: The Grudge, Dark Water, The Eye, Pulse … There was just this sort of swerve toward horror being very atmospheric. Less gore. Not so jumpy. And then like almost any horror trend, it’s out after a few years, because audiences get a little inured to it and they sort of want something new. Saw comes out in 2004 and that jump-starts the next thing: these visceral, edited-to-bits, gory, torture-y horror.

And the current horror trends are the Blumhouse movies, which I love a lot of, and then there’s the A24 “elevated” arty horror that’s hot these days as well. But I do miss this specific techno-horror mixed with old, folky ghost story.

Cruz: One that comes to mind is It Follows.

Sims: Oh, I love that movie. Not so much with the techno-horror, but in the sense of needing to spread something and low on the jump scares. It’s a creeping dread. The antagonist is invisible and just anonymously takes the form of the people around you.

Gilbert: There was a movie called Share that came out on HBO a couple of years ago. It’s not, strictly speaking, a horror movie. It’s a day in the life of a teenage girl who finds out from the beginning of the day that her sexual assault has gone viral. And over the course of the day, her phone pings with the reactions of her friends, and there’s this increasing horror as she realizes that everyone has seen it. It’s strikingly well-done. Every time her phone goes off, you tense up. It’s similar to It Follows in that sense, although without the supernatural element.

Sims: Share is a good movie. A lot of the sort of post–Get Out Blumhouse horror movies are more blunt-force and direct in their social commentary, which is an interesting and exciting trend. It Follows is more of this great blend where it feels like an ’80s teen horror movie you’d watch on a VHS back in the day, but then has these more ponderous, interesting elements as well.

It is tougher when horror movies are about upsetting real issues. It’s very powerful, but obviously it makes it a little less of a, like, entertaining thrill ride. A reason I salute The Ring is that it’s so entertaining. It’s a gripping two-hour movie. It moves really well. It looks great. It looks slick. It’s got a movie star giving a good performance. But it’s not entirely stupid either. That’s a hard balance to strike.

I Didn’t Know My Mom Was Dying. Then She Was Gone.

2021-10-04T11:04:52-04:00

The pink notebook my mother kept when she was sick contains 18 entries, most of them shorter than a haiku. The pages list medications and surgeries, the names of family members who sent money, and which body parts hurt and how badly. One entry, from October 1995, reads: “Neck (severe pain) Coming out of the mall to cold air.” I was 5 that day; my sister was 3. We were leaving the mall after taking a family portrait when my parents started panicking—about exactly what, I didn’t know. I just remember my dad rushing my mom home because of what I later learned was an excruciating neck spasm. Hours later, an ambulance took her to the hospital for the last time. Four months later, she was gone.

One strange thing about losing a parent so young is that you might forget which details you learned about their death and when; you might also question whether what you remember is the truth or a distortion. At some point during the first decade of my life—I’m not sure when or how—I became aware that my mom had died of breast cancer. Last month, I asked my father how much my sister and I knew about our mother’s illness at the time, if we understood that we might soon lose her. “I don’t know if we ever told you,” he admitted. “Your mom wanted to shield you both from that stuff. She always wanted to protect you.” I figured, then, that we had learned the truth from overhearing conversations between the grown-ups around us—and I wondered whether it would have been better if we had known before she passed.

What should you say to a child when a parent is dying? The answers to this impossible question generally fall into two buckets: Tell them the truth or protect them from the truth. The most persuasive arguments in either direction prioritize what would be best for the child. My colleague Caitlin Flanagan wrote about why she and her husband told their then-5-year-old sons that she had breast cancer: “I thought I had the power to protect them from hardship. No one has that ... But endurance is built into the human condition, and it’s as powerful in children as it is in adults.” In a 2019 Atlantic essay, Jon Mehlman explained why he and his wife chose not to tell their three young daughters about her cancer for seven years—until a month before her death: “Our kids would not be robbed of stability; protecting their sense of the ordinary was everything.” Later, his daughters told him they were grateful not to have known for so long.

The author’s mother on her honeymoon in Japan (Cruz family / The Atlantic)

Reading these accounts, I felt conflicted about my own experience. I hadn’t known my mom’s diagnosis, and no one explained to me what a mastectomy or chemotherapy was, but I witnessed plenty of signs that she was declining. I saw her without her wig after all her hair fell out. I knew that she sometimes didn’t feel well, and I would visit her in the hospital, where I’d push her wheelchair and play with the automatic-recline button on her bed. I understood during those dark months that things weren’t normal, but I still remember myself as a happy child. I know now that memories can be faulty, and I wonder if it’s truly possible for a child surrounded by so much evidence of suffering—and denied the full truth about that suffering—to emerge from that experience unscathed.

Was I simply too young to understand mortality? Linda Goldman, a grief counselor and the author of several books on children and loss, told me that, contrary to what many adults believe, small children are not too young to feel sad about death. “Kids can love when they’re toddlers, and they can grieve. They’ll cry when a goldfish dies!” she said. And when it comes to a parent’s illness, Goldman explained, children are more perceptive than many adults give them credit for: “Kids are pretty savvy, and they take in what’s going on in their environment even if they’re not told the truth.”

[Read: Tell children the truth]

While she acknowledged that the question of preparing children for loss has “no black-and-white answer,” she does recommend being honest about a loved one’s illness or death in an age-appropriate way. That’s because when children sense that they’re being lied to, Goldman said, they can start to fear for their safety and become distrustful. I told her that I had been wondering whether my parents were wrong not to have prepared me and my sister for my mom’s death, and whether I wasn’t really as happy as I remembered.

But the more we talked, the more I realized that fixating on a binary question—to tell children or not tell them?—obscures the many other factors that shape how a child will process loss. For instance, Goldman explained how having a memory of helping a dying family member—giving them flowers, bringing them medicine, making them laugh—can make children feel useful, and be an enormous psychological comfort. I thought of how one of my strongest memories of my mom’s illness is helping her reverse the car when she was driving. By that point, the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and turning her neck hurt, so I would look back for her and let her know whether the coast was clear.

So much, too, depends on the ability of adults to cope with the situation. “I’ve found that kids can handle what adults can handle,” Goldman said, noting that children look to grown-ups for emotional cues. When we spoke recently, my dad told me something I had never known before: that back then, even he hadn’t truly believed that his wife might die. He had always thought that she would pull through somehow. Perhaps that naïveté or stubborn faith—whatever you want to call it—had the unintended consequence of shielding me and my sister. Goldman also said that when parents are struggling, children need to have adults around them whom they know they can depend on. While my dad was balancing a full-time job with helping to care for my mother, my mom’s parents came to stay with us and looked after me and my sister. At no point did we have to feel abandoned or alone.

[Read: My wife was dying, and we didn’t tell our children]

Being able to say goodbye—whether before or after a parent dies—is crucial as well, Goldman said. Even though I didn’t know that my mom was nearing the end, I was at the hospital all the time during her final weeks. And hours after she passed, according to my father, I took him by the hand and led him toward her hospital room. Then I crawled into the bed next to her and started touching her face and talking to her, even though she could no longer respond. A week later, at her funeral, my sister and I stood next to her coffin the entire time. Sometimes, Goldman said, adults want to keep children away from funerals and other rituals of loss: “We’re so death-phobic that it’s hard to admit that death is a part of life.” But these moments can offer valuable opportunities for closure, even if the search for answers and feelings of loss never quite go away.

When I called Goldman, I was half-expecting her to tell me all the ways I must have remembered something incorrectly, to point out the holes in my story. Instead, she gave me a deeper appreciation not only for what my parents had to go through, but also for the ways in which my 5-year-old brain had allowed me to come away from that painful time carrying warmly lit scenes of my mother: Even with IVs coming out of her, with a terry-cloth cap keeping her bare head warm, she looked so pretty laughing.

Somehow, when my parents made what some therapists might call mistakes, the results still had a certain beauty to them. Goldman said adults should be careful with clichés about death, such as telling young children that someone who is dying is simply “going to sleep” or that they will be “watching over you all the time.” Kids might take these words literally and become afraid of sleeping or worry about being surveilled. Like many other children, I was told that my mother would be “watching me from up in heaven,” a place I understood only as being somewhere in the sky. Two weeks after she died, we flew back to Guam, the island where my parents first met, where we would bury her. I had the window seat. Staring out over the left wing of the plane, I searched for her among the clouds.

The Astonishing Duality of BTS

2020-12-26T07:00:00-05:00

BTS has spent enough time in the pop-music stratosphere that it can be easy to forget, or surprising to learn, about the years they spent at the basement level. Back in 2014, for the first anniversary of their debut, the group’s seven members celebrated by cleaning the tiny dorm they shared and cooking a nice meal. They recorded a video of themselves for fans, soaking seaweed for a traditional Korean birthday soup, blowing up balloons, vacuuming the living room, and decorating a cake. Their then-19-year-old leader, RM, attempts to peel an onion. “Man, I wonder how my mother did this every day,” he says, sounding embarrassed. “The members always tell me not to drive or cook for the sake of world peace.”

Unbothered by the cramped quarters, they seem giddy about reaching a career milestone together. Watching this video now—six years, seven studio albums, and a mountain of broken industry records later—isn’t just an exercise in nostalgia for the early days of RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook. It’s a reminder of how the world’s biggest band became so popular in the first place, an object lesson in making the most of what little you have.

[Read: I wasn’t a fan of BTS. And then I was.]

Humility was useful in 2020, a year that brought the entertainment industry, as well as the world, to its knees. The coronavirus pandemic led to canceled tours and closed venues; when musicians performed, they did so from home or to empty seats. This new reality could’ve hurt BTS, an act known for putting on spectacular, high-energy live concerts. (Last year, they sold out a show at London’s Wembley Stadium in 90 minutes.) Used to thriving on elaborately designed stages before tens of thousands of people, they suddenly found themselves recording TV appearances from their practice space and executing grandiose comeback routines with only staffers cheering them on. But although BTS is no longer a ragtag rookie group from a tiny label, their modest beginnings prepared them to succeed during a year that would have had them shrink their ambitions.

Originally, 2020 promised a world tour for Map of the Soul: 7, the group’s most sophisticated album to date and one that fans hoped would land the pop stars their first Grammy nomination. “We’ve struggled this year,” Jin told me in a recent email interview with the group. “Most of the plans that we arranged two years ago have vanished, but in the midst of this, we worked hard and … did something meaningful.”

For BTS, something meaningful is getting nominated for a Grammy months after performing at the Grammys—and being the first Korean group to do either. They released their fifth Billboard Hot 200–topping album in a row with BE. They landed three No. 1 songs on the Hot 100, including their first English-language single, “Dynamite,” and their dark-horse hit, “Life Goes On.” Although “Dynamite” is BTS’s biggest song thus far, RM said the latter achievement made him feel “double the joy because, as you said, it was a Korean song. It’s a title given to us by our fans.” Unlike “Dynamite,” “Life Goes On” received virtually no radio play, so purchases and streams by fans pushed it to the top of the chart, making it the first Korean song to get there.

[Read: BTS’s ‘Life Goes On’ did the impossible ]

The hyperbolic language that surrounds BTS today (global phenomenon! K-pop sensation! First Korean act to …!) can obscure the fact that the group doesn’t need big stadiums or epic set lists to reach audiences. They’re comfortable talking to fans via impromptu live-streams in their PJs and posting stripped-down song covers on Twitter. And unlike many idol groups, the members of BTS have always addressed the subject of mental health in their lyrics and in their lives. That candor resonated this year in particular, as they’ve spoken about feeling angry, helpless, and depressed.

For his birthday earlier this month, Jin released a solo track called “Abyss,” along with a note explaining that he wrote it after experiencing severe burnout and seeking counseling for anxious thoughts. When I asked whether he found this honesty difficult, he demurred. “I don’t know if it was hard to share this,” Jin said. “I think music is just another form of expression. If I hadn’t written the text on the blog, I think people might have only guessed I was in such a state.” Moved by his words and the song’s delicate beauty, fans shared their own struggles on social media. “If you know how to deal with your mental health, it’s fine to keep it to yourself,” Jin said. “But if you don’t, I think it’s good you open up because you might have someone around you who knows how to handle it.”

This week brought a duo of surprise SoundCloud releases also intended to comfort: Jimin’s “Christmas Love” and V’s “Snow Flower.” Jimin, to accompany his bright, nostalgic track, wrote a message about feeling joy despite the social scripts of adulthood: “Instead of dismissing your feelings as ‘cringey’ or ‘childish,’ as we often do, I hope the day will come that we can all happily enjoy these emotions together.” In his note for the sweetly jazzy “Snow Flower,” V wrote, “This year felt like time stopped, and I think there will be many people who feel more anxiety and depression as the end of the year approaches. For at least today, I hope the white flowers come down to your hearts and you feel even just a little bit of warm comfort and happiness.”

Against this backdrop of vulnerability, BTS also offered audiences solace through eye-catching stages. With their tour postponed indefinitely, they reconfigured their songs for online consumption. A cozy summer performance, and a two-day fall concert attended by nearly 1 million, tested the boundaries of virtual live shows. “I don’t think our music or performance has been limited, but it’s just the way we deliver the best performance that has changed,” V said of the group’s pandemic-era work. In 2019, one of BTS’s best performances was a 37-minute set for South Korea’s Melon Music Awards, featuring live horses, seven solo stages, a lung-busting dance break, and a sea of extras. In 2020, many of their best performances were much smaller but no less memorable. For The Late Late Show With James Corden, they sang “Life Goes On” while walking (thanks to editing trickery) through the same room over and over again, conveying the claustrophobia of quarantine life.

When BTS returned to the Melon Music Awards this year, they wowed not with scale, but with precise choreography. Jimin and Jungkook performed an exquisite and technically difficult pas de deux during the song “Black Swan.” And the group unveiled an endlessly rewatchable Michael Jackson–esque dance break for “Dynamite.” “To be honest, I think that performance was close to perfection,” J-Hope told me. That means a lot coming from the group’s famously meticulous dance leader. “It wasn’t something that could be done by myself, but everything was in sync—the costumes, lights, choreography, camerawork, and the [other] members.”

[Read: BTS’s ‘Dynamite’ could upend the music industry]

Sometimes, putting on the “best performance” meant no dancing at all. For their NPR Tiny Desk Concert in September, BTS did the whole set (mostly) sitting down. And “Life Goes On” is their first title track to not have official choreography. “We think the song’s emotion goes better without any choreo,” Suga said of the understated single, which feels as though it was written not from idols to fans, but from one human to another. The rest of BE comes across that way too—raw and personal, like a mixtape designed for your closest friends. In his “Life Goes On” verse, Suga references a gorgeously introspective song from his latest solo mixtape called “People,” whose lyrics are similarly about taking an optimistic view of life’s vagaries. “The message of ‘People’ was something like ‘so what, life still goes on,’ so I wanted to extend that message,” Suga said.

At the end of 2020, as vaccine distribution begins, the notion that life goes on might sound more plausible than it once did. For BTS, as for everyone else, next year looks blurry, but it at least has a clear starting point. “2021 begins with the Grammys,” J-Hope said. “They say that the first step [of the year] is important, so I hope we have good results there.” BTS is nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for “Dynamite” and are expected to perform, although many fans were disappointed that Map of the Soul: 7 wasn’t recognized. “It would be such an honor to earn a nod for our album some day,” the group said.

BTS hopes that the rest of 2021 will bring with it the possibility of live concerts. “I want to show our fans our ‘On’ performance,” Jungkook said of their most extravagantly choreographed song. “If fans want to see ‘Louder Than Bombs,’ of course we can perform” it too, he added. The year ahead is also expected to yield more solo work, including highly anticipated projects from V and Jungkook. “This year has been packed so I couldn’t find that much time to work on it. I will try to perfect it next year,” V said of his mixtape. “When I revisit the songs I made, I am not fully satisfied. So I honestly don’t know just yet!” Jungkook said of his record’s release, though he has written or produced multiple songs this year, including the dreamy ballad “Still With You.”

Whatever happens at the Grammys, the nomination of “Dynamite” is a huge deal. As Jimin put it in a recent Vanity Fair interview, “Worldwide, when people look at us, they might not know what country we’re from. They might not know what little rural town us bumpkins came from. And yet, there we are on the highest stage, in the running to win an award.” That symbolism of the Grammys stage, the legitimacy it confers, is real. But BTS’s humble past is ever present. They seem, at all times, to remember where they came from, even as they seek to not be confined by the label of K-pop. “Producer Bang [Si-hyuk] once told me that I was ‘local,’ and I think that’s something that describes me accurately,” RM told me, referring to the founder of BTS’s label, Big Hit Entertainment. “I am also aware that, as millennials, limiting ourselves to a certain region is not desirable.” With BTS, the only constant is their duality—they’re “local” yet global, industry outsiders on the inside, equally skilled at intimacy and pageantry.

[Read: The 16 best albums of 2020]

This year might have looked very different for BTS if their bond hadn’t been forged in the crucible of those early years. “When life gets tough or it’s hard to find motivation in life, what keeps me going are the relationships and the energy I get from them—our members, the people around me and our fans are all so valuable,” Jimin told me. His sentiment is illustrated in the BE track, “Skit,” which documents the group’s reaction to learning of their first Hot 100 No. 1. The members yell and joke about skipping dance practice to grab a drink. The track ends with RM asking J-Hope, “Hope-ah, don’t you think this is what happiness is like?”

Six years ago, BTS gathered for a quieter sort of celebration. At the end of their first-anniversary video, they sit on their dorm-room floor around a table piled with delicious food, laughing. They sing “Happy Birthday” to themselves. Then, together, they begin to eat. It looks like happiness too.

The 16 Best Albums of 2020

2020-12-16T15:53:00-05:00

Did pandemic shutdowns make music sound different? Without concerts, parties, and (for many people) commutes, some of the best venues for enjoying the art form vanished. But isolation and panic gave music a more urgent job to do: help people survive. Here are the albums that made 2020 bearable. Follow along on Spotify.

Toby Hay, Morning/Evening Raga

Back in March, way, way back, when everyone was either baking sourdough or winding up to the first of their COVID-era nervous breakdowns, the Welsh guitar master Toby Hay sat below the hills of his native Rhayader and improvised a song to the dawn. Morning/Evening Raga collects that performance and eight more like it, recorded at different times of day and in different locations, all one-take performances. Hay’s technique is formidable, his obedience to the music complete. Now he shimmers like a harpist; now he blurs like an impressionist; now he plays in the wide-open style known as “American primitive”; now he sounds like the sweetest, most meditative parts of Led Zeppelin, those interludes stretched and looped and heightened and spangled over a sheep-studded hillside. Birds hop about in the background; the world hums distantly. The effect is gently stunning, and even (here’s a word that’s been doing a lot of work this year) healing. — James Parker

Listen to: “VI”

Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters

When Fiona Apple released Fetch the Bolt Cutters back in April, the album seemed eerily suited to the wearying early months of quarantine. Her first record in eight years, it vibrated with anxiety and defiance. Now, nine months into pandemic-induced isolation, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is no less resonant—we’ve all “been in here too long.” Apple is more than a musician of the moment, though. Some of the album’s sharpest moments are her most personal triumphs. Take the confident insubordination of “Under the Table,” for example: “Kick me under the table all you want / I won’t shut up, I won’t shut up,” she sings on its hook. A soft repetition of the song’s first two lines echoes behind her strident voice, then builds to its own banner declaration: “I would beg to disagree / But begging disagrees with me.” That’s a pretty timeless sentiment. — Hannah Giorgis

Listen to: “Newspaper”

Grimes, Miss Anthropocene

The events of 2020 were unprecedented but not, entirely, unexpected. In February, Grimes’s fifth album, Miss Anthropocene, whispered of fever plagues, flaming skies, and a world in which “we don’t move our bodies anymore.” Because she’s an experimental pop genius, such 21st-century apocalypse visions inspired sonic wonders: bass blasts that could frack all of Pennsylvania (“Darkseid”), chattering rhythms evoking panic and lust (“4ÆM”), facetiously pretty melodies about AI romances (“Idoru”). Though Miss Anthropocene’s musical touch points recall Ozzfest and Electric Daisy Carnival, its intricate arrangements conjure an image of Grimes locked in with a laptop, separated from human warmth but gorging on all of human knowledge and tech. If only our real-life isolations turned out to be as fun as listening to her. — Spencer Kornhaber

Listen to: “4ÆM”

BTS, Map of the Soul: 7

When BTS released Map of the Soul: 7 in February, the world looked very different. Hours after the record dropped, the South Korean septet gave an interview before an army of fans who had gathered in Manhattan amid the brutal cold to celebrate. Though memories of that day have dimmed, MOTS: 7 is still luminous. After seven years together (hence the title), BTS put out its most sophisticated record yet. Good luck pinning down the group’s sound; the genres distort beautifully, like an oil slick, whether on the solo tracks or full-group efforts. Sample hypnotic Latin guitars (“Filter”), wistful R&B (“My Time”), dreamy jangle pop (“Moon”), and nostalgic arena rock (“Inner Child”). Muse over Jungian reflections woven into the cerebral rap-rock of “Intro: Persona,” the hallucinatory emo hip-hop of “Interlude: Shadow,” and the exuberant Afrobeat rhythms of “Outro: Ego.” Lyrically, the album tells the story of a group that has pondered the most intimate and spectacular aspects of superstardom. The standout track, “Black Swan,” layers moody trap beats and traditional Asian strings over verses about how artists losing their love for their art is like dying—a fittingly profound theme for a shiny pop record of untold depths. — Lenika Cruz

Listen to: “Black Swan”

Haim, Women in Music Pt. III

When they broke out in 2012, the Haim sisters peddled a snackable sound of interlocking rhythms, harmonies, and classic-rock quotations—and they seemed to explore every possible permutation of that sound over two albums. It’s hard to say what exactly changed for their third outing, but Women in Music Pt. III exudes a sense of possibility and play that amounts to a breakthrough. Packed with tricky loops, wonky instruments, and cheeky samples, every measure of music is obsession-worthy. Yet the soul of the album lies in its intimate portrayal of the struggle to thrive in the face of anxiety and malaise. On the standout “I Know Alone,” Danielle Haim sets a scene: She’s alone in her car, wandering a city’s outskirts, belting out Joni Mitchell songs. Her bandmates’ funky, sad groove gives a high-definition rendering of how she feels. — S. K.

Listen to: “I Know Alone”

Kvelertak, Splid

Kvelertak’s live-streamed concert on April 10 was one of the great pieces of Lockdown Art: a carnal outburst launched into a digital abyss, a roaring, soaring performance-with-nobody-there that somehow transmitted both a tremendous loneliness and a still more tremendous defiance. For their fourth album, these triple-guitar Norwegian mega-rockers, in whose opus the wilder reaches of metal (death, black, etc.) are dragged into beery brotherhood with stadium grooves and big, fat tunes, had some heavy lifting to do: a new frontman—after the departure of the girthy, quintessence-of-Kvelertak bellower Erlend Hjelvik—and a new drummer. That Splid succeeds so magnificently, after this partial skeletal replacement, is because of crack songwriting and the feral, bluesy abandon of the vocalist Ivar Nikolaisen. “I will not try to copy Erlend,” he memorably declared when he joined the band in 2018. “Erlend is a lion. I’m just a small rat. But this rat is pissed off, infectious, and full of pestilence.” — J. P.

Listen to: “Rogaland”

Flo Milli, Ho, Why Is You Here?

To succeed on the frontiers of TikTok takes a certain kind of bratty cheer, and the 20-year-old Alabama rapper Flo Milli is that attitude’s best ambassador. Her music blends brightness and dissonance multiple times over: in the gee-shucks sarcasm of her inflections; in the Playskool-kegger vibe of her beats; in the exquisite exasperation of her ad-libs; and in her ever-so-hilarious tweaks to swag clichés (“His baby mother is my groupie!”). Even as her debut mixtape sticks to a consistent and addictive sound, Flo Milli varies her technique with alternately fluttering, hypnotic, and bruising flows. Another timely virtue: If you ever feel bad for ignoring someone’s text messages, put on a Flo Milli song. Somewhere in there, she’ll celebrate such rudeness as a power move. — S. K.

Listen to: “Weak”

Wizkid, Made in Lagos

It’s been almost 10 years since Wizkid, the Nigerian singer and songwriter, released his debut studio album, Superstar. Having more than earned the title, Wizkid returns to his roots on this year’s Made in Lagos. The sultry and wide-ranging album is the very best of what the author Bolu Babalola calls “African sweetboy music,” a compilation of deliciously percussive songs that pulls in artists from across the diaspora—among them, the reggae star Damian Marley, the grime heavyweight Skepta, the “African Giant” Burna Boy, and the elusive R&B chanteuse H.E.R. Like the Jamaican singer Lila Iké’s May EP, The ExPerience, Wizkid’s record sounds like the sorts of nights made impossible by the pandemic, like the condensation-filled air of a summer party. That Made in Lagos still feels hopeful when such gatherings remain unthinkable is a testament to Wizkid’s star power. — H. G.

Listen to: “Reckless”

Rina Sawayama, Sawayama

It’s tempting to call this the future of pop: internet addicts singing about capitalism and intergenerational trauma in a style that bridges Ariana Grande, Evanescence, and Sega Genesis soundtracks. Really, though, the debut album by the visionary Rina Sawayama hits so powerfully because it nails the zeitgeist of the past two decades. In a luxurious croon, Sawayama shares memories of Instant Messenger drama in 2003, Carly Rae Jepsen sing-alongs in 2012, and present-day struggles with self-worth. Meanwhile, her brash, super-saturated bops riff upon the materialism, melodrama, and Max Martin–isms that shaped Millennial listening diets. It’s clear that she’s studied pop culture to understand its power. What’s thrilling is the sense that she wants to harness that power to do nothing less than save the world. — S. K.

Listen to: “XS”

Taylor Swift, Folklore

“I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn’t though.” Indie emotions, indie instrumentation, a song about a cardigan and another one about climbing trees—Folklore (recently augmented by a sister album, Evermore) was a misty Swiftian gift to us in the dog days of the pandemical summer. And what a gift. Efficiently absorbing the groans and plangencies and wobbling choirs of her collaborator Aaron Dessner (The National) and guest vocalist Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) into the silver machine of Swift’s songwriting, leaving no mess behind, this extraordinary artist/shape-shifter seemed to have cracked some kind of genetic code for profound pastoral pop. “Mirrorball” is a dreamy wash of color: It could have been written by Juliana Hatfield. “This Is Me Trying” falls—sighingly, gorgeously—somewhere between a downbeat ABBA song and Joy Division’s “Passover.” And “Epiphany” is shattering. No “dwindling mercurial high,” this; it’s winter now, and I’m still listening. — J. P.

Listen to: “Seven”

Lil Uzi Vert, Eternal Atake (Deluxe)—LUV vs. the World 2

Lil Uzi Vert, the diminutive Philadelphia rapper, remains one of the industry’s most inventive young stars. This year, Uzi followed the surprise March release of Eternal Atake, his first solo project in three years, with a deluxe extended album just a week later. Lil Uzi Vert’s skill lies partly in his ability to make all of these projects feel not just different but also multidimensional—as in quite literally from multiple dimensions. LUV vs. the World 2 is all playful lyrics and creative production, pinball sounds and vocal acrobatics. To say it sounds out of this world feels like an understatement, but it’s a comparison the rapper himself invites. On one of the album’s best songs, “Moon Relate,” Uzi situates himself exactly where he belongs: “In a spaceship, outer space (Phew) / Geekin’ on Mars yesterday / Now I’m on Pluto today (Huh?) / I look the moon in its face (Yeah).” It’s the kind of line that makes perfect sense for an artist who dropped a joint project with Future later in the year. But Uzi keeps it from ever feeling too predictable. — H. G.

Listen to: “Celebration Station”

The Weeknd, After Hours

You could be forgiven for writing off The Weeknd’s indignant tweets about receiving no Grammy nominations as the product of a pop star’s massive ego. Celebrities, especially those in his stratosphere, aren’t exactly known for responding well to slights. But The Weeknd’s frustration was shared by several others—and for good reason. After Hours, the album he released in March, was a return to form for the moody, falsetto-loving singer. Sanguinary accompanying visuals and all, the album contained some of the year’s best R&B. After Hours anchored the genre this year with strong vocals, vulnerable songwriting, and undeniable vibes. The Weeknd lifted tracks like “Scared to Live,” a series of dark admissions, by stretching his voice to new heights. More refined than his previous projects, After Hours is an exercise in balance: The ’80s-leaning percussion of “Blinding Lights,” “Hardest to Love,” and “In Your Eyes” energizes the sedate melodies of songs such as “Until I Bleed Out.” He might be “Heartless,” but he’s certainly not untalented. — H. G.

Listen to: “Heartless”

Bonny Light Horseman, Bonny Light Horseman

The term folklore got a big look this year, perhaps because times of uncertainty send people scrambling for guidance from the past. On the shiver-inducing debut album by Bonny Light Horseman, centuries-old tunes are rewritten in the distinctive voices of Anaïs Mitchell (mastermind of Broadway’s Hadestown), Eric D. Johnson (of the rock band Fruitbats), Josh Kaufman (collaborator of Bob Weir, The National, and—look at that—Taylor Swift). The band has used the term astral folk to describe their arrangements’ reverberating, expansive majesty. But these songs are tethered to Earth with painful relevance. On the track that gives the band its name, a widow’s lament from the Napoleonic Wars comes to feel like a curse against all leaders who disregard common lives, and a vigil for anyone who has died in isolation from loved ones. — S. K.

Listen to: “Bonny Light Horseman”

Chloe x Halle, Ungodly Hour

For something called Ungodly Hour, the latest Chloe x Halle record sounds pretty damn sanctified at first blush. Soulful and melodic, the duo’s second studio album kicks off with an intro that recalls the kinds of harmonies one might hear in a hymn. Not until the last moments of the orchestral track is the album’s de facto thesis revealed: “Don’t ever ask for permission. Ask for forgiveness.” Ungodly Hour is a confident and mature offering from the two sisters, who are most often referred to as Beyoncé’s protégés. But just as the album is more complex in tone than its honeyed production initially suggests, Chloe and Halle are more than younger avatars of the R&B veteran. On Ungodly Hour, they shirk the buttoned-up vibes of their debut, opting instead to match their vocals with lyricism that emphasizes the freedom of their early 20s. “Tipsy,” for example, is a flirty little ditty, to be sure, but its chorus also carries a clear, poetic threat: “You’re strumming on my heartstrings, don’t be dumb / If you love your little life, then don’t fuck up.” — H. G.

Listen to: “Catch Up”

Drakeo the Ruler & JoogSzn, Thank You for Using GTL

Last month, the Los Angeles rapper Drakeo the Ruler was finally released from jail after a dizzying saga in which his band was accused of being a gang. Back in June, when the prospect of his freedom was still a far-off wish, he released Thank You for Using GTL, an album named after the automated recording that interrupts phone calls made to the jail where he was being held. Composed entirely of songs recorded during calls with his producer, JoogSzn, Thank You for Using GTL is a powerful meditation on the experience that Drakeo and young Black men like him have to contend with. In some of his most incisive lyrics, Drakeo points to the double standards that he and other rappers face in the criminal-justice system. As with all of his music, it’s not just heavy—it’s also clever and audacious: “Treat rap the same way that you’re gonna treat any other genre / You’re not gonna hold Denzel Washington accountable for his role in Training Day / So don’t do the same thing with my music,” he raps on “Fictional,” directly addressing the Los Angeles Police Department’s close reads of his lyrics. — H. G.

Listen to: “Tell You the Truth”

Andy Shauf, The Neon Skyline

Recorded chitchat—podcasts, audiobooks, talk radio—competes with music for the modern listener’s attention. Why not have both mediums in one vibey masterpiece? Working in the style of Paul Simon, while inhabiting a mood that’s glum yet grounded, the songwriter Andy Shauf recorded the hummable literary-fiction event of the year. Across 11 songs, he takes you inside the head of a man who, when out for a night of drinking, bumps into an ex. Not all that much action ensues. But as Shauf flashes between memory, observation, and discursive conversations, you’re reminded that the narratives of our lives transcend the physical spaces we live in. That was a comforting reminder in this year of forced introspection. — S. K.

Listen to: “Where Are You Judy”

BTS’s ‘Life Goes On’ Did the Impossible

2020-11-30T19:22:52-05:00

Maybe it’s because the pandemic has warped my sense of time, but it feels like just yesterday that BTS got their first No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100. The South Korean pop septet’s first all-English single, “Dynamite,” was everywhere—in commercials, at the MTV Video Music Awards, on the radio. In September, the song made them the first all–South Korean group to top the chart. Just last week, it landed BTS a Grammy nomination—the first such nod for a Korean group. (These guys break records so often that reciting their achievements can sometimes feel exhausting.)

[Read: BTS’s ‘Dynamite’ could upend the music industry]

When I wrote in September that BTS would one day get a No. 1 hit with a song in their native Korean, I didn’t think it’d happen less than three months later. Today, the band topped the Hot 100 again, this time with “Life Goes On,” a hip-hop–inflected, guitar-laced single about the struggles of pandemic life. Unlike “Dynamite,” “Life Goes On” received minimal promotion and radio play, which makes its debut at No. 1 that much more unbelievable. Enormous physical and digital sales—led by the group’s dedicated fans, known as ARMY—pushed the single to the top. In other words, “Life Goes On” is currently the biggest song on the charts, released by the biggest musical group in the world, and there’s a good chance you haven’t heard it.

The lackluster radio spins for “Life Goes On” aren’t surprising; many non-English-language artists struggle to break into the mainstream. (Even Latin music continues to be siloed, despite its enormous popularity, its artistic innovation, and the fact that Spanish is the second-most-spoken language in the United States.) The takeaway seems clear: If you don’t primarily perform in English, you need to outsell your closest competitors many times over—or secure a radio-friendly collaboration or remix—to have a shot at reaching No. 1 on the Hot 100. In September I wrote, “Whether the band intended to or not, the only English-language single they’ve released in seven years has become their biggest chart success yet, outperforming the dozens of more artistically ambitious records that they wrote or produced in Korean.” The success of “Life Goes On,” the lead single from BTS’s highly anticipated new record, Be (on which every member has writing credits), goes some way toward proving the extent of their star power.

.@BTS_twt is now the first and only group in history with multiple No. 1 debuts on the #Hot100 ("Dynamite" and "Life Goes On").
— billboard charts (@billboardcharts) November 30, 2020

Be provides ample evidence as well. The album is a kind of musical document of the members’ thoughts and feelings about losing a year to the pandemic. Unable to embark on their stadium world tour, the seven members—RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook—turned their attention back to making music, taking on a greater role in songwriting, producing, and even directing. The result: a carefully composed eight-track album of intimate and stylistically diverse songs in Korean, capped by the juggernaut “Dynamite.” Yesterday, the record debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 200.

If you’re familiar with BTS’s music, “Life Goes On” is both a perfect and unlikely candidate for their biggest Korean song yet. In an interview, the group’s leader, RM, described the track as “really calm, almost contemplative,” adding, “It might even come off as bland next to ‘Dynamite.’” Unlike many of BTS’s hit singles, the song has no compulsively danceable beat, no maximalist production, no intricate choreography. Its gentle, stripped-down melody is memorable, like a tune you’ve heard somewhere before. “Life Goes On” is full of longing for a different time, aching for human connection. This emotional register—nostalgic, vulnerable, melancholy yet optimistic—pervades BTS’s work and captures the core of their appeal to millions of fans around the world. That tone is most apparent in 2017’s “Spring Day,” arguably the group’s best song and one that holds particular meaning for South Korean listeners. But nearly every BTS song seeks, in some way, to assure the listener: You are not alone.

[Read: I wasn’t a fan of BTS. And then I was.]

Indeed, “Life Goes On” attempts to commiserate without getting consumed by grief. “One day, the world stopped / Without any prior warning,” Jungkook sings in a voice edged with exhaustion. “On a street with footsteps since erased, / Here I am, fallen on the ground,” Jimin continues, rising to a falsetto. In his rap verse, RM paints an image of trying to outrun a rain cloud before admitting his helplessness: “I must merely be human.” The members each add their own texture to the song, creating a sense of togetherness out of individual alienation. “Here, hold my hand / Let’s fly to that future,” Jungkook and Jin sing together before the chorus erupts: “Like an echo in a forest / The day will surely return / As if nothing happened / Yeah life goes on … like this again.”

If “Life Goes On” received airplay, non-Korean-speaking audiences would, of course, not understand most of the lyrics. But the aural warmth of the vocal harmonies, combined with the English refrains (“Life goes on” and “I remember”), make it the sort of healing track that could resonate with many listeners in a difficult year. (Alicia Keys seemed to agree, posting a short, all-English cover of the song over Thanksgiving weekend that went viral.)

The other new songs on Be create a more holistic emotional picture of pandemic life; the album is like a giant mood ring orbiting the listener. “Fly to My Room” is a jaunty track, full of delicious synth stabs and playful electric organ, about finding adventure amid claustrophobia. (“This year’s been stolen from me / I’m still in bed / I feel nauseous / It’s killin’ me slowly,” Jimin sings.) The midnight-colored lullaby “Blue & Grey,” originally written by V for his solo mixtape, reflects on the depression and malaise of quarantine existence. (“As ever, is this blue question mark / Unease or gloom / Perhaps it’s an animal of regret / Or a me, born of loneliness,” Suga raps.) These songs couldn’t be more different in energy or tone; back to back, they speak to BTS’s stylistic omnivorousness.

Be might be born of frustration and a sense of powerlessness, but it seeks to energize, not wallow. “Telepathy,” a funk-filled bop, delights in the thrill of a long-awaited reunion (“I think about these streets of ours that the stars have allowed for us,” RM raps). “Dis-ease,” largely written by J-Hope, is ostensibly about the sickness of overworking; an old-school hip-hop track with a slick, half-time bridge written by Jimin, this is for rap lovers. Aside from “Skit” (a recording of the members celebrating the No. 1 win of “Dynamite”), the final new song is “Stay,” a dance track originally intended for Jungkook’s solo mixtape that seems designed for the catharsis of a stadium performance. Jin sings his own lyrics (“When I open my eyes, it’s again / A room devoid of people”) in a near whisper before the track builds to a pulsating beat for its anthem-like chorus: Yeah, I know you always stay. Those words hold particular meaning for ARMY, especially those who organize to stream and buy BTS’s music in defiance of an indifferent industry.

When I said that BTS breaks records so often that reciting them can feel exhausting, I didn’t mean to suggest that those victories have become less meaningful over time, or that the group’s enormous success somehow dilutes its discrete achievements. But these records, no matter how dutifully listed, do not capture what is most interesting about BTS, which is their ability to be perfectly understood by fans around the world who themselves don’t speak a word of Korean.

Still, that cultural identity is essential to the group’s artistic identity. In a recent interview, RM referenced the famed Korean abstract artist Whanki Kim to make a point: “After moving to New York [in the ’60s], he embraced the style of artists like Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, but then [Kim] said, ‘I’m Korean, and I can’t do anything not Korean. I can’t do anything apart from this, because I am an outsider.’” The same, RM said, applies to himself, but it can also describe BTS. The language they speak, their steady sense of self, is a strength. Once pushed to the margins, these “outsiders” decided to create their own world and welcome everyone in.

BTS’s ‘Dynamite’ Could Upend the Music Industry

2020-09-02T10:21:00-04:00

When a record is broken, or a new one is set, it can say as much about the institution or industry in question as it does the talent of the winner. This is especially true in American entertainment. Halle Berry becoming the first (and only) Black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar, in 2002, was both an affirmation of her excellence and a testament to Hollywood’s racist history. America Ferrera becoming the first Latina to win a Lead Actress Emmy was a celebration of her work and a reflection of TV’s problems with representation. The corollary to an individual’s historic win is often a system’s historic failure.

On Monday, BTS became the first entirely South Korean act to have a No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 with their new funk-inflected, disco-pop song “Dynamite”—the latest evidence of the group’s superstardom. They’ve been everywhere this year. If you didn’t see the septet ringing in 2020 with a confetti-filled concert in Times Square, you may have seen them onstage with Lil Nas X at the Grammys. You may have caught them joking with James Corden on “Carpool Karaoke,” or when they shut down Grand Central Station for The Tonight Show, or when they performed while coiffed to the nines at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards. (Or maybe you heard about BTS when they donated $1 million to Black Lives Matter this summer, around the time that K-pop fans were the subject of constant media attention for their political activism.)

[Read: What it’s like to become a fan of BTS overnight]

Though BTS has sold out stadiums around the world and occasionally breaks Twitter, they didn’t land the top spot on the Hot 100 until they released a song entirely in English. It’s a huge feat for a group that debuted on a tiny record label seven years ago, underdogs even in their home country. (Speaking to international press last night, the members talked about crying when they learned of the news, and how it made them think back to their humble and difficult early years.) The distinction is a point of pride for their dedicated and highly organized fans, known as ARMY, who helped get them there. But like many of the records that BTS sets in America, the achievement is also a reminder of how hard it is for even massively popular artists who don’t perform in English to make inroads in the U.S. music industry.

When BTS first announced “Dynamite,” they emphasized that it wasn’t a pivot from singing in Korean. The seven members—RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook—came across the track while working on their upcoming album and decided to release it as a single with the original English lyrics: The euphoric, late-summer bop was meant to soothe listeners around the world who had been having a hard year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. When “Dynamite” dropped a week and a half ago, it shattered streaming records. American music critics immediately remarked on its catchiness and broadly appealing retro sound. The video—a sun-drenched, SoCal-inspired tribute to all things ’70s—had the biggest YouTube premiere for a music video ever, with 101.1 million views in 24 hours.

These weren’t unusual milestones for BTS, who had gained even more fans since the pandemic began. What was unusual was that American radio stations started to spin “Dynamite,” giving it the sort of play that had been denied to previous Korean-language hit singles, like “Boy With Luv” and “ON.” U.S. radio generally doesn’t play much non-English pop, and because radio play is one of the metrics used to calculate the Hot 100 (along with streaming and sales), artists who don’t perform in English have a harder time making it to No. 1. (The same goes for Latin pop, too, though the success of Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” in 2017 has been credited with helping to open up the chart for Spanish music.) “Dynamite” is radiant, feel-good pop, but the fact that it was in English helped it to reach new heights.

[Read: ‘Despacito’ and the revenge of reggaeton]

The industry’s aversion to non-English-language music extends from the charts to highly visible spaces such as the Grammys and the VMAs—shows that have long histories of overlooking some English-speaking artists, particularly Black artists. These platforms effectively marginalize different groups, as Marian Liu wrote for The Washington Post, by filtering certain musicians into other, implicitly less prestigious categories, including “Best Progressive R&B,” “Best K-Pop,” and “Best Rap Album.” BTS has nonetheless managed to enter these fraught spaces, in some cases peripherally, and only after years of proving their commercial value and ability to draw an audience.

When I wrote about becoming a fan of BTS last year, I spoke with the South Korean critic Kim Youngdae about the xenophobia that the band has faced in the U.S. over the course of their rise. (Earlier this year, a Howard Stern Show staffer joked about the group having the coronavirus, and fans recently circulated a clip of a radio-station host mocking BTS’s Korean lyrics on air.) “The American mainstream music industry is really hesitant to call Asian artists ‘pop stars,’” Kim told me at the time. “But the entertainment industry always has to acknowledge the hottest or biggest thing, whether they like it or not.” BTS’s giant, hyper-loyal fanbase was essential in fighting this institutional conservatism, he said. By aggressively streaming, buying, and sharing BTS’s music, these fans forced a dinosaur-like industry to pay attention.

Over the years, U.S. interviewers have asked BTS if they would ever switch to making music in English, only to get the same answer: No. For the seven members, performing in Korean is essential to their identity as a group. Though BTS is known for complex choreography, impeccable live vocals, and energetic concerts, their lyrics matter, too. The group has made genre-bending albums that critique aspects of Korean culture and society, including mental-health taboos and the rigid school system. Its rappers often write intricate wordplay into their rhymes. BTS fans around the world regularly look up lyric translations, contrary to what some American music critics believe, and many learn Korean to better appreciate the group’s work.

For some fans who have long followed BTS, the ascendancy of “Dynamite” is thus bound to be bittersweet. Whether the band intended to or not, the only English-language single they’ve released in seven years has become their biggest chart success yet, outperforming the dozens of more artistically ambitious records that they wrote or produced in Korean. “We don’t want to change our identity or our genuineness to get the No. 1,” RM, the group’s leader, told Entertainment Weekly last year. “Like if we sing suddenly in full English, and change all these other things, then that’s not BTS. We’ll do everything, we’ll try. But if we couldn’t get No. 1 or No. 5, that’s okay.”

If anyone can get a Korean song to No. 1 on the Hot 100, it’s the group that reached No. 4 with a Korean song earlier this year—that same track, “ON,” won BTS three VMAs last weekend. They don’t need to alter their DNA. “Dynamite” is likely to reach even more listeners who don’t think language barriers are a reason to ignore good music, listeners who might keep an eye out for the new album or dive into BTS’s deep Korean discography. The Talking Heads frontman David Byrne put it this way in a 1999 New York Times piece: “To restrict your listening to English-language pop is like deciding to eat the same meal for the rest of your life.” ARMY couldn’t agree more.

How One Atlantic Editor Is Spending Her Holidays This Year

2019-12-22T13:48:15-05:00

Last week, Vogue published an article detailing how some of its editors are spending Christmas this year. It was a wonderful opportunity for the denizens of the internet to gawk at unselfconscious proclamations of wealth and access and taste. Just another example of how “rich people are the worst.”

The extremely relatable holiday destinations for these Vogue editors included “a seven-day detox programme” at an Austrian health resort that would involve “intravenous vitamin drips” and minimal food; “a secluded villa on one of the world’s smallest private islands, overlooking Lake Nicaragua”; and a new hotel in the French Alps where nightly rates appear to start at about $800. The editors’ Christmas wish lists included “a Leica camera,” “a ceramic Hermès tray,” and “diamonds, of course—a woman can dream!” The takes about late capitalism could write themselves.

I am not here, however, to debate the sincerity or moral turpitude of the Vogue staffers. Instead, I’d simply like to offer a glimpse into my own plans for this year, as a fellow magazine editor and lover of holiday comfort.

Where will you be for the holidays?

This winter, I’ll be staying in a cozy one-bedroom pied-à-terre in Washington, D.C., that comes decked out with a full-size refrigerator, a toilet with strong water pressure, a three-month-old mini pumpkin from Trader Joe’s, and multiple pieces of furniture from a minimalist Swedish designer. I’m taking an ascetic approach and consuming one can of pamplemousse-essence French sparkling water every two hours. (I am fond of calling carbonated beverages “spicy water.”) This detox will help cleanse my system of all the pie and Indian food I will be consuming.

My evenings will be spent on one of the world’s smallest private islands: my bed, which is fitted with sheets that came recommended by a very good podcast I listen to on my way to work at The Atlantic’s riverfront offices in the historic Watergate complex. The building, as my esteemed D.C. colleagues well know, is home to a number of interesting fauna such as Mus musculus and Peromyscus leucopus.

What will you be packing?

Plenty of warm pajamas that can double as daywear if you throw an oversize H&M sweater on top. Scarves that can also serve as blankets—or as cloth napkins, for impromptu but classy couch-snacking—in a pinch. One of my favorite things to do is to wear sweatpants. They are comfortable for sleeping, and also for not sleeping, if you feel like doing that for some reason.

I never travel without at least six different kinds of snacks and at least six different kinds of medicine (antianxiety, anti-nausea, antidiarrheal, anti-pain, anti-heartburn, anti–cold virus). And my AirPods, which I am terrified of losing and haven’t quite figured out how to clean properly.

What are you most looking forward to?

Relinquishing any responsibility for myself and putting my physical, spiritual, and mental well-being in the hands of the Peloton bike my very feminist husband got me for Christmas.

Only joking! I’ll be relinquishing any responsibility for myself and putting my physical, spiritual, and mental well-being in the hands of the avant-garde burlesque fever dream that is Tom Hooper’s Cats. It means I will start 2020 off as the best version of myself: a person who has seen Tom Hooper’s Cats.

What do you hope to open on Christmas Day?

My ongoing project to convert my home into a BTS shrine, much to the chagrin of my husband, requires the addition of life-size cutouts of all of the Korean group’s seven members. Haha, just kidding ... (Unless ...?)

Also welcome are weighted blankets, fluffy socks, candles, and new novels that I’ve heard a lot of great things about and will definitely add to my Goodreads list ASAP. As every culture editor knows, a staggering tower of Books I Need to Read but Haven’t Yet Because I’ve Been Staring at My Phone All Night is the best bedside-table accessory in the world.

How do you relax?

I am a year-round sufferer of severe eczema on my hands, which turn into dinosaur paws in the dry winter air. So I plan to take advantage of the downtime to really indulge in every possible treatment in my toolkit: from daily soaks in colloidal oatmeal cream, to topical corticosteroid-ointment application followed by swaddling my poor mitts in breathable white cotton gloves. Relief is scant; the itching, flaking, and cracking is plentiful. Such is life.

What are you wearing on Christmas day?

I've been dying to wear this floor-length, haute couture black gown made of human hair and a pair of one-of-a-kind earrings, which are made entirely from found objects like old baby teeth and shards of glass.

How are you spending New Year’s Eve?

Since 2016, my husband and I have had a tradition of watching none other than Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 masterpiece, Children of Men, the night before a new year. The film is thematically a fit for the holidays—it’s a nativity story, after all—if not tonally. There’s something about entering January with a profound sense of sorrow, anger, fear, and a little bit of hope about the future of humanity that feels appropriate.

Then, we will change the channel to watch the ball drop in Times Square. Hopefully when the clock strikes midnight, I’ll be swathed in a pilling fleece blanket, twirling a flute of grapefruit La Croix, swinging my five-year-old cat in my arms, and not talking about the 2020 elections.

I Wasn’t a Fan of BTS. And Then I Was.

2019-07-18T11:16:00-04:00

I was already yawning when I sat down to watch Saturday Night Live one evening this past April. The host that night was Emma Stone, and the musical guest was BTS. I knew little about the seven-member South Korean pop group—even though they had millions of fans worldwide, released multiple Billboard 200 chart-toppers, and had recently delivered a speech at the United Nations. On Twitter, I saw plenty of enthusiasm, but also mockery directed at BTS and their followers. While I knew they would be the first K-pop act to perform on SNL, I had never listened to a BTS song before Stone introduced the first musical break.

The oh whoa ooh whoa backing vocals floated in, and a teasing bass line began as the lights went up to reveal seven figures—their backs to the camera—in dark suits and an array of hair colors. They swayed from side to side and spun around. Then the one with the pink hair started singing.

If you want, you can watch the video of BTS performing their breezy pop confection “Boy With Luv” on YouTube, where it has 21 million views, making it by far the most popular musical appearance SNL has uploaded to date. You might love it; it might not be your thing. Or it might not be your thing but something about BTS intrigues you anyway, like their synchronicity, their good looks, or the fact that they dance hard while singing and rapping live. Or how when the song ends, the guys stretch their hands toward the crowd, beaming and bowing as cheers drown out their thank-yous.

Before that night, I wasn’t a fan of BTS. After seeing them perform “Boy With Luv” and their 2018 banger “Mic Drop,” I decided to at least learn their names. One week later, I could tell you that BTS’s leader is 24-year-old RM, who taught himself to speak English by watching Friends. Then there are Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin (the pink-haired one from SNL), V, and Jungkook, all of whom do some mix of singing, dancing, rapping, producing, and songwriting. After learning their stage names, I absorbed their real names, birthdays, and personality quirks, as well as their musical strengths and weaknesses. Because the group’s lyrics are mostly in Korean, I picked up some Hangul and can now sing along, albeit imperfectly, to much of their discography. I binged their weekly variety show and random live-streams. I bought merch. I became close friends with strangers over BTS. I traveled to another state to watch them perform in a stadium with 55,000 people.

[Read: The friends who listen to BTS together stay together]

To confess the details of my obsession is cathartic and, given the stigma around fangirling, a little embarrassing. Yet my whirlwind evolution from a nonbeliever to an “ARMY”—as the septet’s diverse and devoted fans are known—isn’t a rare one. After exploding in global popularity in 2017, the Korean idol group (also known as the Bangtan Boys) reached an even greater level of superstardom this year. In 2018, they embarked on a world tour and appeared on a slew of major U.S. talk and awards shows. Their latest record, Map of the Soul: Persona, made them the first group to have three No. 1 albums in a single year since the Beatles. So it was fitting that when BTS appeared on The Late Show in May, they did so on the same stage where the Beatles made their American TV debut, a parallel that the episode embraced. You don’t need to like BTS to appreciate the significance of seven young Asian men, who sing mostly in Korean, being compared to the most famous boy band of all time on U.S. television.

All of which is to say that I’m not the only person who was captivated overnight by BTS; plenty of other recent converts have taken to social media to recount their own rapid transformation from novice to stan. For me, the journey into BTS’s genre-bending oeuvre and their community of fans has produced a joy and intensity I never thought I’d experience as an adult listener. At times, I felt like I was violating some sort of social boundary. I’ve learned, though, that being a fan of BTS means becoming intimately familiar with the many prejudices and hierarchies of taste that casually belittle the thing you love—and then deciding that none of it has any real power over you.

In the beginning, I treated BTS like a puzzle to be solved. I pored over YouTube comments for phrases and terms I didn’t understand. Why are people saying “I purple you”? What does it mean to have a “bias” or to be “OT7”? Why is Jungkook called the “golden maknae”? I watched not only music videos and performances, but also meme compilations, dance practices, interviews, and explanations of the complicated fictional universe running through BTS’s work. I tried to approach the group with a distance that came naturally to me as a journalist but that was also probably informed by an inchoate desire to not become a boy-band fan.

The more I dove in, though, the less I cared. I watched BTS perform their 2018 anthem “Idol” on The Tonight Show and wondered how their lungs didn’t explode from exertion. I watched the sumptuous short film for their 2016 hit “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” and couldn’t tell whether I was more impressed by the choreography or the high-concept storytelling. And I was entranced by the video for “Spring Day,” with its dreamlike cinematography and references to Ursula K. Le Guin and Bong Joon-ho’s film Snowpiercer. When I learned that the video is often interpreted as a tribute to the school-age victims of 2014’s Sewol ferry disaster, I replayed it and cried.

BTS were by no means destined for such heights, having debuted in 2013 with a tiny company in an industry ruled by three giant record labels. Since at least 2017, critics have been trying to formulate a unified theory to explain BTS’s success in the mainstream U.S. music scene in particular, eclipsing other K-pop crossovers. Writers invariably point to the group’s early adoption and savvy use of social media to connect with fans, who have in turn helped BTS smash record after record. Critics also mention BTS’s socially conscious lyrics, their openness about taboos such as mental health, their empathy for the struggles of younger generations, and their emphatic message of self-love.

Complicating their rise to popularity, of course, are the politics of any non-American group dominating the U.S. charts. The South Korean music critic Kim Youngdae told me that when he attended BTS’s first American performance in 2014 in Los Angeles, a crowd of a couple of hundred people seemed huge to him. In 2017, he attended the Billboard Music Awards, where BTS shocked viewers by winning the Top Social Artist Award and breaking Justin Bieber’s six-year streak. After the ceremony, bewildered American journalists in the audience asked Kim to explain who these guys were. Predictably, the win also led to racist backlash online from people scoffing at the “Asian One Direction.”

Such reactions stem from a cultural tendency to see Asian musical performers—and non-English-speaking artists in general—as inferior, said Kim, who recently published a book about BTS. “The American mainstream music industry is really hesitant to call Asian artists ‘pop stars.’ They’re okay with characterizing them as a subculture, or as an Asian American movement,” Kim told me. “But the entertainment industry always has to acknowledge the hottest or biggest thing, whether they like it or not.” This institutional conservatism was precisely what the massive numbers of ARMYs were equipped to overcome, Kim said: By voting for BTS for Top Social Artist (an award the group has won three years in a row), buying their music, and streaming their videos, fans forced the industry to pay attention.

A break from book promo: I saw BTS last night with my mother, who is a huge fan. She was super nervous about being the oldest person there, but was placated when we saw a Korean grandpa with a full head of white hair in line.
— Maurene Goo (@maurenegoo) May 6, 2019

With that attention has come a resistance based not so much on BTS’s talent or music, but on their identity as K-pop idols. For some, the group’s Koreanness is reason enough to dismiss them, as one Teen Vogue piece argued after an Australian TV network ran a xenophobic segment about the group. (Individual members are also regularly subjected to racist online attacks.) It’s common to see critics make snide comments about BTS because of their youth or their boy-band status. The author of a recent New York Times story said she wanted to “gag” after learning some people saw both Madonna and “a K-pop band of 20-somethings” as “legendary.”

The tradition of sneering at “boy bands” and their fans—who are often, but not always, young women—is an old one rooted in ageism and misogyny. While this stigma extends to BTS—even SNL’s promos played off the idea of ARMYs as mindless tween fangirls—Kim believes the “boy band” label isn’t entirely accurate. “When Americans see the handsome boys dancing together, for them that’s obviously the format of the boy band,” Kim said. But for Korean people and for fans, he added, they’re “more like a hip-hop group with vocal abilities who can also dance supremely well ... For a lot of people, ‘boy band’ would automatically discount their musical ability and authenticity.”

Because that label is so limiting, I tend to explain BTS’s appeal like this: Imagine if the players on your favorite sports team (the members train like athletes, after all) were also your favorite musicians and the stars of your favorite reality-TV show and you also thought of them as family members. Even so, I can’t speak to what draws everyone to the group; ARMY is no monolith, comprising followers of all ages, races, genders, nationalities, and religious backgrounds. While the community’s ethos of inclusion is one of its strengths, the size of the fan base also means that ugly elements do exist and internal disagreements can sometimes arise. (For example, last weekend it was announced that BTS would perform in Saudi Arabia in October. This prompted both elation from many Arab and Muslim fans in the region and criticism from others who pointed, in part, to the country’s human-rights abuses and the fact that BTS has raised more than $2 million for UNICEF, which is providing aid for victims of the Saudi-fueled conflict in Yemen.)

Most new fans I’ve spoken with however, have described ARMY as an unusually welcoming community that works to address bad behavior within its ranks. Like myself, the writer and editor Laura Hudson first encountered BTS through SNL and posted about her experience on Twitter:

Oh no I finally watched BTS on SNL and 12 hours later I know all their names and musical proficiencies and have opinions on who are the best singers and dancers and which of their hair colors and styles have historically looked the best oh no pic.twitter.com/gSAwiWwTje
— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) April 17, 2019

“I wrote that tweet, and then ARMY came,” Hudson told me. Though she had covered other fandoms as a critic, she was taken aback by how open BTS supporters were. “People were like, ‘Yeah, it’s great, love it with us!’ That’s what I wish more fandom was like,” Hudson said. “As a journalist, there’s the immediately skeptical part of me where I’m like, Is it a cult?” she went on. “But if it is a cult ... it seems like one that’s focused on positivity and acceptance.”

As new and slightly older fans, we also talked about not being able to have meaningful discussions about BTS with many people in our lives, and about how tiring it is to constantly, on some level, be policing our enjoyment. After explaining all the things she likes about BTS—their “nontraditional presentation of masculinity,” the joyfulness of their performances, the dizzying complexity of their storytelling—Hudson sighed. There are so many social forces, she noted, that get in the way of people allowing themselves to love what they love. “The simplest thing about it is: It makes me happy,” Hudson told me of BTS’s music. “But if it were also secretly garbage, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it.”

While writing this piece, I thought a lot about the concept of guilty pleasure, a term that doesn’t feel quite right for what BTS is to me. I don’t feel guilty so much as I feel like I should feel guilty. I revisited a 2018 New Yorker piece in which the critic Emily Nussbaum argued against calling The CW series Jane the Virgin a “guilty pleasure,” and I was struck by how much of her analysis of that show can also apply to BTS: “A bright-pink filibuster exposing the layers in what the world regards as shallow” could describe Map of the Soul: Persona, which invokes Jungian psychology to continue BTS’s exploration of identity. “A deeply heartfelt production ... sophisticated about and truly interested in all the varieties of love, from familial to carnal” could refer to the ambitious Love Yourself trilogy.

Nussbaum called Jane the Virgin “a smart show that parents and teen-agers can watch together—which, in a better world, might be a recommendation to a larger audience”; indeed, many BTS fans are parents or grandparents, but great for the whole family rarely conjures much respect. Some U.S. audiences might also have preconceived notions about the culturally specific formats of telenovela and K-pop, and as a result fail to evaluate Jane the Virgin and BTS on their own terms.

It takes work to ignore a lifetime’s worth of social messaging about what kind of pop culture is okay to take seriously. For me, it helped that BTS offered more than entertainment; following their music and learning more about the members’ personal struggles allowed me to better cope with an ongoing anxiety disorder and prompted me to take better care of my physical health. There were moments during the first month after that SNL episode aired when I leaned consciously into my BTS frenzy. It was almost as though beneath my excitement lay a fear that this hallucination I was sharing with millions of other people would evaporate, and that I’d go back to being an adult who didn’t follow a boy band as a hobby and who rolled her eyes at earnest lyrics about loving oneself.

Obviously, that hasn’t happened. For now, the hallucination continues, only as time passes it feels less like a dream and more like regular life. I’ll just learn their names, I told myself back in April. Somewhere out there, seven guys named Namjoon, Seokjin, Yoongi, Hoseok, Jimin, Taehyung, and Jungkook were laughing at me.

Did Viewers Win or Lose in Game of Thrones?

2019-05-20T00:18:57-04:00

Every week for the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, three Atlantic staffers have been discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners were made available to critics in advance this year, we’ll be posting our thoughts on the series finale in installments.

David Sims: Let me start this review by listing a few of Brandon Stark’s qualifications to hold the Iron Throne (or whatever throne takes its place) of Westeros. One, as the eldest male Stark, he’s got the lordly bloodline to appease the country’s more tradition-obsessed members. Two, he’s got the temperament—ever since he assumed the mantle of the three-eyed raven, I haven’t seen him get remotely upset about anything, so no Mad King potential there. Three, he can see across the sea of time and has the power to mentally experience every memory anyone in Westeros has ever had, which is definitely a helpful skill set going forward. Honestly, someone should have thought to crown Bran earlier.

The sudden decision by Tyrion and company to name Bran the new Lord of the Seven—sorry, Six—Kingdoms might have prompted a fair bit of whiplash for viewers. In all the warring between Daenerys, Jon, and Cersei, Bran was mostly overlooked as a contender, having become a living Wikipedia database and losing his personality in the process. The move to crown him was arrived at with the same kind of alarming speed that accompanied just about every big plot twist this season. The difference for me was that, by the time of the finale (titled “The Iron Throne”), I was less worried about plausibility and more just wondering how everything would end up. After a largely disappointing lead-up, I was at least satisfied by where the pieces fell.

To summarize: Daenerys the conqueror quickly indicates that she’s not done with warfare and promises to “liberate” people from tyranny all over the world. After a long chat with a depressed and imprisoned Tyrion, Jon realizes he’s not into that plan and stabs his queen (and aunt and former lover) in front of the Iron Throne, which Drogon then impressively melts before taking his mother’s body to parts unknown. In the wake of that carnage, Westeros’s surviving leaders gather to sift through the mess and appoint Bran king. “Bran the Broken” then names Tyrion as his hand, sends Jon to the Wall as punishment for killing Dany, and allows Sansa to run the North as an independent kingdom. Arya, eager to do something new, hops on a boat and sails west into uncharted waters.

After the misery of “The Bells,” it was a finale undeniably steeped in fan service, giving audience favorites such as Brienne, Davos, Sam, and Bronn seats on the new small council and doing away with literally every bloodthirsty or unstable member of the cast. Seriously—anyone important in Westeros who ever spent a minute scheming about anything is dead, except for Tyrion, who professed himself thoroughly cowed by the whole war and promised to atone for his sins going forward. Jon even got to pet his dire wolf Ghost, finally, before he journeyed with Tormund and the other Free Folk beyond the Wall to make a new life.

As a book reader who hopes that George R. R. Martin will one day finally deliver the ending he’s been working toward all these years, I was reassured. Daenerys’s flip to madness was utterly unearned by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, but in the end, her dream was achieved, and the wheel was ostensibly broken, partly by the bloodshed she wrought in King’s Landing. Sick of the wars of succession that consumed the nation for years, the lords of Westeros will now pick rulers by committee, a system that sounds lovely in theory and that is incredibly fraught in reality. So much of Bran’s rule will probably be plagued with its own issues, but that would be a story for another series, not the Song of Ice and Fire (a title that was helpfully embossed on a large volume for Tyrion to read).

As a fan of the TV show, I felt battered into submission. This season has been the same story over and over again: a lot of tin-eared writing trying to justify some of the most drastic story developments imaginable, as quickly as possible. As usual, the actors did their best with what was on the page; Emilia Clarke and Peter Dinklage, long the two standouts of the show’s ensemble, wrestled mighty performances from unwieldy monologues, with Clarke trying to justify Daenerys’s belief in the burning of the city, and Tyrion finally investing his support in Bran, a living archive of Westeros’s history. Pause and think about the logic of it all for a second, and it’ll collapse under scrutiny. But time and time again in recent years, Benioff and Weiss have opted for grand cinematic gestures over granular world building, and Drogon burning the Throne to sludge was their last big mic drop. Spencer, Lenika, was that enough to win your fealty?

Spencer Kornhaber: The penultimate episode of Game of Thrones gave us one of the most dramatic reversals in TV history, with the once-good queen going genocidal. The finale gave us yet another historic reversal, in that this drama turned into a sitcom. Not a slick HBO sitcom either, but a cheapo network affair, or maybe even a webisode of outtakes from one. Tonally odd, logically strained, and emotionally thin, “The Iron Throne” felt like the first draft of a finale.

When Dany torched King’s Landing last week, viewers were incensed, but I’d argue it was less because the onetime hero went bad than because it wasn’t clear why she did. Long-simmering madness? Sudden emotional break? Tough-minded strategy? A desire to implement an innovative new city grid? The answer to this would seem to help answer some of the show’s most fundamental inquiries about might and right, little people and greater goods, noble nature and cruel nurture. Thrones has been shaky quality-wise for some time now, but surely the show would be competent enough to hinge the finale around the mystery of Dany’s decision.

Nope. The first parts of the episode loaded up on ponderous scenes of the characters whose horror at the razing of King’s Landing had been made plenty clear during the course of the razing. Tyrion speculated a bit to Jon about what had happened—Dany truly believed she was out to save the world and could thus justify any means on the way to messianic ends—but it was, truly, just speculation. When Jon and Dany met up, he raged at her, and she gave some tyrannical talk knowing what “the good world” would need (shades of “I alone can fix it,” no?). But whether her total firebombing was premeditated, tactical, or a tantrum remained unclear. Whether she was always this deranged or just now became so determines what story Thrones was telling all along, and Benioff and Weiss have left it to be argued about in Facebook threads.

The Dany speechifying that we did get in this episode was, notably, not in the common tongue. Though conducted in Dothraki and Valaryian and not German, her victory rally was clearly meant to evoke Hitler in Triumph of the Will. It also visually recalled the white-cloaked Saruman rallying the orc armies in The Two Towers, another queasy echo. People talk about George R. R. Martin “subverting” Tolkien, but on the diciest element of Lord of the Rings—the capacity for it to be seen as a racist allegory, with Sauron’s horde of exotic brutes bearing down on an idyllic kingdom—this episode simply took the subtext and made it text. With the Northmen sitting out the march, the Dothraki and Unsullied were cast as bloodthirsty others eager to massacre a continent. Given all the baggage around Dany’s white-savior narrative from the start, going so heavy on the hooting and barking was a telling sign of the clumsiness to come.

Jon’s kiss-and-kill with Dany led to the one moment of sharp emotion—terror—I felt over the course of this bizarrely inert episode. That emotion came not from the assassination itself but rather from the suspense about what Drogon would do about it. For the dragon to roast the slayer of his mother would have been a fittingly awful but logical turn. Instead, Drogon turned his geyser toward the Iron Throne. Whether Aegon’s thousand swords were just a coincidental casualty of a dragon’s mourning or, rather, the chosen target of a beast with a higher purpose—R’hllor take the wheel?—is another key thing fans will be left to argue about.

Then came the epilogue, a parade of oofs. David, you say you were satisfied by where this finale moved all its game pieces, and if I step back … well, no, I’m not satisfied with Arya showing a sudden new interest in seafaring, but maybe I can be argued into it. What I can’t budge on is the parody-worthy crumminess of the execution. Take the council that decides the fate of Westeros. It appears that various lords gathered to force a confrontation with the Unsullied about the prisoners Tyrion and Jon Snow and the status of King’s Landing. But then one of those prisoners suggests they pick a ruler for the realm. They then … do just that. Right there and then. Huh?

It really undoes much of what we’ve learned about Westeros as a land of ruthlessly competing interests to see a group of far-flung factions unanimously agree to give the crown to the literal opposite of a “people person.” Yes, the council is dominated by protagonist types whom we know to be good-hearted and tired of war. But surely someone—hello, new prince of Dorne! What’s up, noted screamer Robin Arryn?—would make more of a case for another candidate than poor Edmure Tully did. Rather than hashing out the intrigue of it all as Thrones once would have done, we got Sam bringing up the concept of democracy and getting laughed down. The joke relied on the worst kind of anachronistic humor—breaking the fourth wall that had been so carefully mortared up over all these years—and much of the rest of the episode would coast on similarly wack moments.

It’s “nice” to see beloved characters ride off into various sunsets, but I balk at the notion that these endings even count as fan service. What true fan of Thrones thinks this show existed to deliver wish fulfillment? I’m not saying I wanted everyone to get gobbled up by a rogue zombie flank in the show’s final moments. Yet rather than honoring the complication and tough rules that made Thrones’ world so strangely lovable, Benioff and Weiss waved a wand and zapped away tension and consequence. You see this, for example, in the baffling arc of Bronn over the course of Season 8. What was the point of having him nearly kill Jaime and Tyrion if he was going to just be yada-yadaed onto the small council at the end?

One thing I can’t complain about: the hint that clean water will soon be coming to Westeros. Hopefully, someone will use it to give Ghost a bath. As the doggy and his dad rode north of the Wall with a band of men, women, and children, the message seemed to be that where death once ruled, life could begin. Winter Is Leaving. It’d seem like a hopeful takeaway for our own world, except that it’s not clear, even now, exactly how and why the realm of Thrones arrived at this happy outcome. Lenika, do you have answers?

Lenika Cruz: Do I have answers? Who do you think I am—Bran the Broken? Before I get into this episode, I need to acknowledge how unfortunate it is that Tyrion decided to give the new ruler of the Six Kingdoms a name as horrifyingly ableist as Bran the Broken. You could, of course, argue that the moniker was intended as a reclamation of a slur or as a poignant callback to Season 1’s “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things,” when Tyrion and Bran first bonded. But given the “parade of oofs” this finale provided—including the troubling optics of Dany’s big speech—it’s hard to make excuses for the show.

Now that we’ve gotten our “the real Game of Thrones/Iron Throne/Song of Ice and Fire was the friends we made along the way” jokes out of our system, where to begin? I basically agree with Spencer’s scorched-earth take on “The Iron Throne.” I was already expecting the finale to be a disappointment, but I didn’t foresee the tonal and narrative whiplash that I experienced here. At one point during the small-council meeting, my mind stopped processing the dialogue because I was in such disbelief about the several enormous things that had happened within the span of 15 minutes: Jon stabs Dany. Instead of roasting Jon, Drogon symbolically melts the Iron Throne and carries the limp body of his mother off in his talons. A conclave of lords and ladies of Westeros is convened, and Tyrion is brought before them in chains, and they know Dany was murdered, and Tyrion argues for an entirely new system of government while being held prisoner by the Master of War of the person he just conspired to assassinate. Excuse me? (The way that Grey Worm huffed, “Make your choice, then,” at those assembled reminded me of an impatient father waiting for his children to pick which ice-cream flavor they want.)

David, Spencer—of the three of us, I’ve been the most stubborn about thinking this final season is bad and holding that badness against the show. I don’t fault viewers who’ve become inured to the shoddy writing and plotting, and who’ve been grading each episode on a curve as a result. But I personally haven’t been able to get into a mind-set where I can watch an episode and enjoy it for everything except stuff like pacing issues, rushed character development, tonal dissonance, the lack of attention to detail, unexplained reversals, and weak dialogue. All of those problems absolutely make the show less enjoyable for me, and I haven’t learned to compartmentalize them—even though I know how hard it must have been for Benioff and Weiss to piece together an airtight final act solely from Martin’s book notes.

You mention, David, your feelings about the finale as a show watcher versus as a book reader. As someone who never finished all the books, I can’t blame you for feeling optimistic about how the story generally ends up. Much like with last week’s episode, I can actually see myself being on board with many of the plot points in the finale—if only they had been built up to properly and given the right sort of connective tissue. For all the episode’s earnest exhortations about the power of stories, “The Iron Throne” itself didn’t do much to model that value.

For example, I can’t be the only one who was let down, and at a loss for a larger takeaway, after seeing a high-stakes contest between two ambitious female rulers devolve after both became unhinged and got themselves killed. After all the intense discussion about gender politics that Thrones has spurred, and after seeing characters such as Sansa, Brienne, Cersei, Daenerys, and Yara reshape the patriarchal structures of Westeros, we’ve ended up with a male ruler (who once said, “I will never be lord of anything”) installed on the charismatic recommendation of another man and served by a small council composed almost entirely of … men.

Perhaps there’s no deeper meaning to any of this. Or perhaps this state of affairs is a commentary on the frustrating realities of incrementalism. I am, of course, beyond pleased that Sansa Stark has at least become the Queen in the North—a title that she, frankly, deserved from the beginning. But I haven’t forgotten that this show only recently had her articulate the silver lining of being raped and tortured. Nor am I waving away the fact that Brienne spent some of her last moments on-screen writing a fond tribute to a man who betrayed her and all but undid his entire character arc in one swoop. My sense is that the show’s writers didn’t think about Thrones resetting to the rule of men much at all, and that they were instead relishing having a gaggle of former misfits sitting on the small council. See? the show seemed to cry. Change!

At times, Thrones gestured more clearly to the ways in which the story was going a more circular route; this was especially true of the Starks. Jon headed up to Castle Black and became a kind of successor to Mance Rayder—someone leading not because of his last name or bloodline but because of the loyalty he’s earned. Arya’s seafaring didn’t feel out of character to me—it fit with her sense of adventure and reminded me of her voyage across the Narrow Sea to Braavos all those years ago. Sansa became Queen in the North in a scene that recalled the debut of “Dark Sansa” in the Vale, but that felt like a true acknowledgment of how much her character has transformed. I’ll admit, the crosscutting of the scenes showing the Starks finding their own, separate ways forward was beautifully done. It made me wish the episode as a whole had been more cohesive, less rushed, and more emotionally resonant.

Spencer, I think you smartly diagnosed so many of the big-picture problems with the finale—the sitcommy feel, the yada-yadaing of major points, the many attempts at fan service. So rather than elaborate even more, I’ll end this review by saying something sort of obvious: Viewers are perfectly entitled to feel about the ending of Game of Thrones however they want to. After eight seasons, they have earned the right to be as wrathful or blissed-out on this finale as they want; it’s been a long and stressful ride for us all. I’m genuinely happy that there are folks who don’t feel as though the hours and hours they’ve devoted to this show have been wasted. I know there are many others who wish they could say the same thing.

Game of Thrones Delivers Its Most Cataclysmic Episode

2019-05-12T23:55:12-04:00

Every week for the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, three Atlantic staffers will be discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners were made available to critics in advance this year, we’ll be posting our thoughts in installments.

David Sims: A crucial part of the lore of Game of Thrones—and the George R. R. Martin novels the show is based upon—is the sack of King’s Landing. The legendary attack happened long ago, at the end of the rebellion that put Robert Baratheon (remember him?) on the Iron Throne and forced the Targaryens from power. The sack was led by Tywin Lannister (remember him?) and was notorious for its brutality, as Tywin demonstrated his loyalty for the new king by brutally wiping aside the reign of the old. And it was repeated, even more terribly and bloodily, by Daenerys Targaryen on tonight’s episode, “The Bells,” as she swept away the remnants of the Baratheon–Lannister dynasty. The writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss clearly wanted to drive one point home: Everything old is new again. But wasn’t this show supposed to be about ending the cycle of conquering for the sake of conquest, about breaking the wheel?

Of course, there’s still one episode to go, which could upend things further. But “The Bells,” an installment caked in terror and death, was meant to underscore a miserable truth about war: It destroys everything in its wake, most of all the common folk whose allegiances are being fought over. Daenerys has run rampant through the series as an all-powerful, dragon-riding warrior queen, taking eastern city after city with ease. Why wouldn’t she do the same in King’s Landing, a city she barely understands, one occupied by the woman who just executed her closest friends? The capital of Westeros is, after all, the site of her family’s greatest failure, when they were turfed out decades ago; her wrathful reclaiming of it made a sort of sense.

[Read: The Atlantic’s review of the previous episode, “The Last of the Starks”]

Except it didn’t. Not really. I can see the underlying story structure at work here, and perhaps it’s one that Martin laid out to Benioff and Weiss when he told them his general idea for how the A Song of Ice and Fire series will end. Joanna Robinson of Vanity Fair wisely pointed out last week that Martin has long expressed his love for “The Scouring of the Shire,” the vicious, anticlimactic, penultimate chapter of The Lord of the Rings, where the heroic hobbits return to their idyllic home only to find it consumed by war and violence. Daenerys’s ride to victory would inevitably lead to chaos, so it’s reasonable to depict that chaos.

But so much of “The Bells” depended on Daenerys’s final attack being entirely vindictive and emotional—and far beyond anything she’s attempted before. Yes, the Dragon Queen has always had a passion for execution by fire, and yes, she is now without her two best counselors (Jorah and Missandei), who often kept her from acting recklessly. Still, the episode was written specifically to give her an out—to give Cersei and her remaining troops a chance to surrender, which they did, and perhaps spare King’s Landing from total annihilation. Instead, Daenerys, in nothing more than a fit of pique, decided not only to unleash her dragon on the Red Keep, but also to burn the city indiscriminately, incinerating street after street filled with the ordinary folk she intends to rule.

The show could have laid the groundwork for this turn; it didn’t. Daenerys has so long been presented as a leader who was fundamentally shaped by her experience as a captive piece of property, someone who abhorred slavery and had little taste for pure cruelty. Game of Thrones could have easily demonstrated the nasty reality of her fight for Westeros without putting the choice to massacre innocents directly on her shoulders. Instead, “The Bells” ended up painting one of the most pivotal plot points in the final season as an emotional lashing-out from a tired, lonely, paranoid young woman. That choice bodes poorly for the finale, since Jon was presented here as Daenerys’s counterpart, still holding on to his dignity and morality as his queen’s foreign-invasion force pillaged the city and killed civilians.

If the idea is that the “game” itself—the unending contest for the Iron Throne—is broken, well, I imagine every viewer figured that out a few episodes into the first season. The characters whom audiences have been invested in for so long had been evolving into something new, pointing toward a deeper change for this rich and fascinating fantasy world. Instead, in “The Bells,” more often than not, characters reverted to their base nature. Daenerys turned full Mad Queen. The Hound sought out his brother for one last battle. Jaime found Cersei and they died in each other’s arms. So many of these moments were well done—in general, this episode was beautifully executed and really well acted, with a lot of clean action and intelligent cross-cutting between set pieces. But it felt so hollow to me, the narrative stakes entirely obliterated, once Daenerys made her move. Lenika and Spencer, are you as disheartened as I am?

Lenika Cruz: The way last week’s episode ended, I had a feeling “The Bells” was going to portray and be a disaster, but the degree to which it did both still left me gobsmacked. This is, in my book, the worst Game of Thrones episode ever—though not in a technical sense, as you pointed out, David. The acting was spectacular. The effects were stunning. But that prowess was in service of a story that was extremely obvious in some ways (Dany becoming the Mad Queen, something fans have predicted for ages) and absolutely illogical in others (Dany burning babies alive mere hours after professing that “mercy is our strength”).

The Mad Queen thing in and of itself isn’t shocking, nor is it a bad storytelling move. Almost every major plot development in this episode—Dany razing King’s Landing, Jaime and Cersei being crushed to death together, Sandor and Gregor falling to their doom—could have made for an excellent penultimate installment. What I take issue with is how clumsily Dany’s transformation was portrayed—and that clumsiness, at this late stage in the show, with the stakes so high, feels unforgivable given how avoidable it was.

Maybe it’s a waste of space to list all the “ARE YOU SERIOUS?” moments of the episode, but I don’t want those to be totally overshadowed by all the grand spectacle. So here are some things that made me type in angry all-caps in my notes: Jaime wandering into King’s Landing with a hood and immediately taking the glove off his golden hand despite the fact that he knows his sister wants him dead and he would be very recognizable to any member of the Queensguard. Arya and the Hound also showing up, barely disguised, in King’s Landing at roughly the same time. Varys hastily setting fire to a scroll and then immediately placing it in a covered metal tin, which would have put out the fire (not to mention his horribly plotted spy efforts in general). The Hound changing his mind about Arya’s mission—right as they approach the Red Keep, after the fighting has broken out, after they’ve traveled thousands of miles from Winterfell—and telling the girl who assassinated the Night King she shouldn’t try to kill Cersei after all because … it’s too dangerous. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I could go on. But most frustrating is the fact that Daenerys, a character whose many virtues and moral blind spots Game of Thrones so skillfully sketched out over the years, suddenly lost her mind in the last couple of episodes because of the Targaryens’ well-documented predisposition to mental illness, the death of her best friends, and the fact that her nephew no longer wants to sleep with her. In its rush to deliver a wild reversal—or, if you want to be charitable, subversion—of everything the show had established about Dany’s deep-seated goodness and sense of justice, Game of Thrones all but destroyed her character. Where some viewers might see a satisfyingly awful upending of expectations about Dany’s supposed goodness, I see an unearned negation of the identity she spent years building for herself.

What I love about the show’s defining moments of horror—the death of Ned Stark, the Red Wedding, the death of Oberyn Martell, the destruction of the Sept of Baelor—was how perfectly they fit with everything that had come before while also catching me off guard. Perhaps Dany’s massacre wasn’t ever supposed to be part of that hallowed category but was meant to be its own class of inelegant monstrousness.

For all my unhappiness, I was still moved by a few scenes. My heart hurt during Jaime and Cersei’s final moments and when Arya tried to save a mother and daughter only to see them both melted by Drogon’s breath into a single, charred mass. Those doomed pairings, along with the Hound and the Mountain diving off the Red Keep steps in each other’s arms (a fitting end to Cleganebowl, I suppose), underlined how powerful the notion of dying together is—whether the animating reason is love or hate. I wonder whether this idea will be relevant for Jon and Dany in next week’s finale. Everything tells me that Jon must now defeat Dany and rule the Seven Kingdoms whether he wants to or not. More interesting and “Thrones-ian,” of course, would be if neither “wins”—if somehow the cruel destiny that brought these two together will want to see them entwined until the very end. Then again, as this episode suggested, I might no longer have a great sense of what is or isn’t Thrones-ian.

Spencer Kornhaber: I understand your dismay, but I’m going to mount a defense. The episode came into focus for me when the Hound thwacked off Darth Mountain’s helmet to reveal the bloated egg man beneath. “Yeah, that’s you—that’s what you’ve always been,” Sandor grumbled: not only a clutch line in a long-awaited duel, but also an explanation for what underlay the destruction of King’s Landing, which was a scandalous, wrenching, enthralling, and appropriate culmination for Game of Thrones.

Definitely, though, I groaned at various points throughout the mayhem. The mega-crossbows that had seemed so lethal on the seas an episode earlier became instant kindling; Tyrion’s plan for Jaime to sail away with Cersei was obviously DOA; Euron Greyjoy running into Jaime at the cave is the kind of TV coincidence no one wants. On the great question of the episode—what the hell are you doing, Daenerys?—it was impossible not to be baffled at first. But that’s because of the greater failing of the show lately: pacing. A series that used to meticulously, even tediously, build foundations for major character decisions instead has been sprinting through plot check marks. I’ve just become resigned to Benioff and Weiss’s shoddy motivation-explaining, I suppose. With just six episodes this season and seven in the previous, there hasn’t been a long enough runway for Dany’s murderous departure.

Still, the pieces of her decision-making apparatus were all on-screen, even if the show hasn’t put them together all that sturdily. Yes, there’s her “Mad Queen” lineage; yes, there is the quite noxious suggestion that she scoured King’s Landing out of some emotional jag. More important, though, is the strategic principle that Dany has learned time and again: Fear works. Love has worked for her too, but as she pointed out to Jon, Westeros hasn’t exactly erupted in cries of “Mhysa!” since she arrived. If she’d more mercifully taken the capital, would the people have been swayed to her? Maybe. But Varys’s betrayal and all its implications—about all her supposed allies who spread the incendiary news of Jon’s parentage—gave her reason to think that she’d be a marked woman after even the gentlest of victories.

She cogently laid this thinking all out in her scenes with Jon and Tyrion, which had the crackling air of an impending storm. How striking to see this new Dany, styled not to look “mad” but rather just plainer and wearier. A dark clarity had settled over her. The scene of her executing Varys, on a visual basis alone, with her dragon materializing from the blackness behind her, is something that will populate a generation’s nightmares. The queen’s delivery elevated it further. In her calmest tones, Dany recited her titles and pronounced her sentence. She didn’t have to explain her reasoning. All assembled understood it.

On some nauseating level, after the shock wears off, they may come to understand—but never approve of—her reasoning for what came later. Whereas the Battle of Winterfell took a scenario that seemed apocalyptic and, somewhat cheaply, gave it a pat happy ending, the battle of King’s Landing really did torch expectations in the way that Game of Thrones is supposed to. We all know by now that George R. R. Martin loves to raid ancient and medieval history for its most horrifying tidbits, and that’s what happened here. The total obliteration of cities in war is a very real phenomenon with an obvious if vile logic. Alexander the Great crucified men on the beaches of Tyre after he conquered their city not only because he could; he did it to discourage other would-be resistors on his drive to dominate the world.

Dany—a registered crucifier herself—knows the power of intimidation. She believes that she’s just bought herself insurance against too much trouble from the rest of the Seven Kingdoms. Sure, Varys may have gotten a raven or two out with word of Jon’s claim to the throne. But now that Dany has demonstrated her absolutely terrifying weaponry and her willingness to use it on any and everyone, who in Westeros will dare to back another claimant? Not the “new prince of Dorne” and other unidentified vassals, I’d bet.

Well, okay, maybe all the confidants who’d pleaded with her to go easy on King’s Landing will turn. Their horror at her actions must be thick and rich. Jon had to stab his own soldiers to stop them from taking Dany’s cruelty as license to rape innocents. Arya witnessed the bloody cost of the razing firsthand; this, appropriately, seemed to reconnect her with the greater human race just after she made the choice to turn away from spending her life as a revenge-bot. Tyrion now surely realizes he made his gravest judgment error yet by turning in Varys. These characters could now find themselves in an oddly inverted and lonely position—set against their chosen queen at exactly the moment when the rest of the continent bows, tremblingly, to her.

What ever happened to breaking the wheel, you ask? Dany will argue that there’s no better way to do that than by melting what’s long been the seat of despotism. Her mercy, as she said, is to future generations who will supposedly thrive under her fair hand. Granted: That logic is megalomaniacal, monstrous, and exactly the justification any given tyrant uses. Varys, diagnosing her “destiny” talk in the last episode as just the raving of another would-be iron monarch, was absolutely correct. This is who she’s always been, it turns out, and who can say they didn’t at least suspect that could be the case?

In other ways, too, this episode brought into relief what’s been going on all along on this show. Dany’s choice ended up burying various optimistic assumptions of viewers while also paying off on characters’ long, tragic arcs. The Hound admitted to staking his life on vengeance before he unmasked his brother and took him down into fire. Jaime staggered back to Cersei to, as he always wanted, die in the arms of the woman he loved. Cersei in turn trembled at her ultimate fear—her own death—which indeed came to pass with her brother’s hands on her neck, as her dreaded prophecy foretold. Jon had to pick between his two great virtues, loyalty and honor, and in choosing the latter, it meant killing his own men and implicitly disobeying his queen.

The cinematic pyrotechnics to accompany this grim symphony were occasionally repetitious but overall extraordinary. We’ve seen dragon fire before, but not zigzags of it across the map of King’s Landing. We’ve seen hellacious slaughter before, but not from soldiers we’ve been trained to root for. We’ve seen battles and betrayals that burn the show down to its foundations, but arguably never as radically as this. Perhaps another turn is coming that will see green shoots coming up from the ashes. But if you think this has a happy ending, well, you know what Ramsay said.

Netflix’s Tuca & Bertie Is a Surreal Celebration of Friendship

2019-05-01T10:12:00-04:00

The easiest way to describe Netflix’s animated comedy Tuca & Bertie is to say that it’s like BoJack Horseman meets Broad City. The new show, out Friday, was created by Lisa Hanawalt, the cartoonist and BoJack production designer whose colorful and absurd visual style notably features hybrid animal-people. And much like the recently concluded Comedy Central series Broad City, Tuca & Bertie is about two 30-year-old, codependent best friends who get up to various misadventures in work, love, and life.

Because this show came from Hanawalt’s brain, the protagonists aren’t humans, but bird-women—a loud, lovable, messy toucan named Tuca (voiced by Tiffany Haddish) and a sweet, anxious, people-pleasing song thrush named Bertie (Ali Wong). The inseparable duo live in the city of Birdtown, where Bertie works at a magazine publisher called Condé Nest and Tuca does gigs for a freelance service called ChoreGoose. Each episode of the show has at least one brilliantly bizarre scene that has nothing to do with the main plot but that sticks in your brain: At the end of the pilot, for instance, Bertie’s boyfriend, Speckle (Steven Yeun), discovers that his dead grandmother’s ashes have accidentally been baked into a cake that has now come alive with her ghost.

Despite its delightfully random moments, Tuca & Bertie is, in some ways, such a classic coming-of-age sitcom that it can be easy to forget how rare it is in the world of TV: It’s one of very few adult animated shows made by and about women. In an interview, Hanawalt discussed the thrills of making a series about a nuanced female friendship but lamented how male-dominated the industry she works in is. “It does feel like the stars needed to align just perfectly for a woman to even get a chance to get in the door,” Hanawalt told me. “I know a lot of women who pitch; it’s not that women aren’t pitching, and it’s not because they don’t have great ideas.”

For Hanawalt, the stars aligning meant that her acclaimed work on BoJack made Netflix receptive to her pitching a TV project. Originally, she was in talks to make an anthology-style series in which each episode looked like it was drawn by a different artist. But Hanawalt kept coming back to a collection of comics she had drawn about a “single, female toucan” named Tuca; finally, she settled on the idea of adding in Bertie as a counterbalance and making an entire show about their special dynamic.

At the start of Tuca & Bertie, the friends are presented as opposing yet complementary archetypes: Tuca is the gregarious, confident, raunchy, and irresponsible one; Bertie is the introverted, slightly repressed, and accountable one. They’re like sisters who are a little helpless without each other. When Bertie struggles to ask for a promotion at work (“I’m a really important cog in the machine—but sometimes I wonder, What would it be like to be a bigger cog?,” she explains), Tuca teaches her how to advocate for herself. When Tuca gets an STD in the episode “The Sex Bugs,” Bertie helps manage the grotesque catastrophe that erupts from her friend’s careless application of medicated ointment.

As the 10-episode season unfolds, the hard line between the women’s personalities gets smudged and their respective backstories and past traumas get shaded in. With Tuca, Hanawalt told me, viewers might start to see her unflagging confidence as a defense mechanism—a cover for her fears that she’ll never amount to anything. Meanwhile, Hanawalt added, “Bertie on the surface seems to have everything together: She’s got a stable job, a stable relationship, but she’s kind of a mess inside. She doesn’t really know what she wants, and she’s constantly getting mixed signals from herself.” For all the duo’s differences, the season sees both Tuca and Bertie engaged in a never-ending project of self-improvement—a self-conscious, mundane, and often performative process of “adulting.” Many viewers will feel a twinge of recognition watching these characters hope their various forms of low-stakes aspirationalism—trying to keep a tidier home or to speak up in a work meeting—will amount to something life-changing.

Bertie considers attending a meeting of a group called “Women Taking Up Space” or WTUS (pronounced woot-us). (Netflix)

In making her first series, Hanawalt took seriously the opportunity to tell an animated story about the lives of adult women. Because of the dearth of comparable projects to look to as a model for Tuca & Bertie, she drew inspiration from children’s shows such as Steven Universe (whose creator, Rebecca Sugar, Hanawalt called a “genius”) and live-action series such as Broad City and Hulu’s Pen15. She also knew she didn’t want Tuca & Bertie to be yet another animated program with a mostly white, mostly male staff; Hanawalt estimated that roughly half of the writers on her show were women and that slightly more than half were people of color.

Though she’d learned a lot on BoJack, Hanawalt thought about ways she wanted to distinguish her series tonally and visually. So she reflected on the things that had sometimes frustrated her creatively about working on BoJack. “As an artist and as someone who has my own personal style, I was always like, ‘Why can’t we have plant people? Why can’t inanimate objects come to life?’” Hanawalt said. Finally, she decided on a sensibility for Tuca: “It’s going to be very cartoony and surreal and loose—and set in a little bit more of an optimistic world than BoJack.” Tuca certainly has its gut-punch moments, but it has a much frothier vibe than BoJack; the inventive use of stylized sequences involving claymation and puppets further sets the series apart. While Hanawalt praised the fascinating women characters on BoJack, she knew her show would go further by having a female friendship as its central focus.

Telling a smart and relatable story about grown-up women meant resisting the urge to make her characters models of good behavior. Hanawalt describes herself as a feminist, but she wanted to make fun of certain elements of mainstream feminism, such as the superficial empowerment rhetoric that Tuca and Bertie sometimes glibly embrace. “I don’t want my characters to do what’s correct morally, which is a weird expectation that viewers sometimes have of fictional characters,” Hanawalt told me. Tuca & Bertie indeed has a few story lines that comment on weightier issues such as sexual harassment without offering straightforward or satisfying resolutions; if this sometimes makes for uncomfortable viewing, it’s also realistic—a way of grounding a show in which the subway is a giant caterpillar and the hottest new pastry is a cruller–bundt cake combo known as a “crunt.”

What remains consistent throughout the season, as Tuca and Bertie each try to reach some next level of adulthood, is the bond between the two. The show makes clear that their relationship isn’t invulnerable, which makes it all the more meaningful when they stick by each other’s side. This weird, frustrating, and affectionate dynamic was apparent in Hanawalt’s original comics, and it is the one that ultimately drives the show.

The “Sex Bugs” episode does a particularly lovely job illustrating how well the two fit together. The day begins with Bertie feeling especially anxious, which Tuca recognizes immediately. “You’re having one of your ‘I can’t go outside because literally everything terrifies me and my body is holding my mind hostage’ days,” Tuca declares before dragging Bertie out of the house for a bit. What follows is an uncannily accurate depiction of extreme anxiety that draws on Hanawalt’s own experiences. Consumed with panic at the grocery store, Bertie starts to sing a musical number called “I’m Losing My Shit”—a song that Hanawalt herself performed for Netflix executives during the pitch meeting for the episode—before being rescued and distracted by Tuca.

The episode comes across as a kind of miniature tribute to the people who’ve helped Hanawalt through similar situations in real life. “I have friends who aren’t as anxious as I am, but something about them makes me want to be a braver, better person,” she told me. “In a way, it’s more relaxing to be around someone who’s bolder and less afraid.” What makes her show a joy to watch is that sometimes the “braver, better person” is Tuca and sometimes it’s Bertie. But sometimes it’s neither—and that’s okay, too.

The Long Night Finally Arrives on Game of Thrones

2019-04-29T00:01:54-04:00

David Sims: After eight years of buildup, with promises of zombie swarms and ice dragons, it can finally be said: The Night King is a real bore. A party pooper to the extreme. I’m glad he’s dead! Season after season of Game of Thrones has passed with the frost-faced White Walker silently promising doom for the denizens of Westeros. After all that, it took only one epic episode, “The Long Night,” to dash all his plans and turn him and his dramatically inert army into a pile of snowflakes. Now I’m here to dance on the Night King’s grave.

For the past two episodes, I have pleaded for the show to get the White Walkers out of the way so that viewers can return to the more important stuff—Westerosi politicking and grand romantic tension, the twin pillars that have held up Game of Thrones for nearly a decade. The problem, of course, was that the teeming wave of death from above the Wall couldn’t be easily batted away: It was part of the show’s very first set piece, and more often than not has been relied on for a cliffhanger at the end of a season. So David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had to put audiences through the wringer of yet another massive battle episode, similar to editions such as “Blackwater,” “The Watchers on the Wall,” “Hardhome,” and “Battle of the Bastards.”

“The Long Night” was directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who also helmed “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards,” and it was filled with all his favorite visual flourishes. There were long tracking shots that staked out the location of every character before chaos arrived at the walls of Winterfell, plenty of shaky naturalism once the violence began, and, of course, darkness. Lots and lots of darkness. That the Night King fights at night is hardly surprising, I suppose, but as a result the action was mostly choppy and unsatisfying. Less was always more: The opening sequence involving the Dothraki charge into total darkness was gripping and clear. Once the horde of corpses arrived, though, my brain quickly turned off.

Hence my main point: The Night King is dull as dishwater. The comparison between his army of death and the looming threat of environmental catastrophe might feel facile, but in the end that’s all it really amounted to. The White Walkers were a means to unite ice and fire—Jon and Daenerys—and build an alliance in the North in order to sort out all the lingering conflict in the South. They served no plot purpose other than to threaten to bring about the apocalypse, and the only thing more boring, story-wise, than defeating the Night King would have been letting him win and cover the world in mute zombies.

The manner of his offing—death from above by Arya, wielding the Valyrian-steel dagger an assassin tried to murder Bran with way back in Season 1—was undeniably cool. I was a little let down, though, that Arya didn’t get to use her specific skills more (why not have her disguise herself as a White Walker?), but as far as dei ex machina go, it’s hard to argue with the pint-size killer Stark. Her supposed rulers, Daenerys and Jon, were by and large duds throughout the conflict, zooming around the sky on their dragons, unable to see most of the action. Bran, meanwhile, did little more than warg into a flock of ravens to alert the Night King to his presence.

But then, that was Bran’s apparent purpose in this Deathbowl: to sit tight and draw the Night King close so that Arya could get a clean shot at him. Melisandre’s return to Winterfell suggested that the final outcome had been preordained, much like some of the episode’s big deaths (Beric and Theon, along with Jorah, Edd, and little Lyanna Mormont). Melisandre even brought up a prophecy from Season 3, when she referred to Arya killing someone with brown eyes (the long-departed Lord Frey), blue eyes (the Night King), and … green eyes. Could the latter be Cersei?

Who knows. As the dust settles in Winterfell, major characters will mostly be happy to be alive, but they might quickly get to pointing fingers over what a disaster this battle was. Fighting an army of the dead is never easy, but Daenerys and Jon’s output was so pitiful here that I worry their alliance might not make it to the final conflict with Cersei. Either way, I’m glad the story can make its way south again, where the sun shines and the action is a little easier to follow. Spencer and Lenika, did you hope for more from the Battle of Winterfell?

Spencer Kornhaber: I’m satisfied, but my eyes need a rest. No one predicted this twist: HBO spent millions of dollars on weeks of muddy stunt work only to have some production assistant drape Lady Olenna’s delicate muslin veils over the cameras. The scenery already looked as dark as a Goya painting at the start of the episode, but when the (rather unexplained) ice storm blew in, I had to scurry from the couch to the floor, inches from the TV, so as to try to make out the action. A Thrones episode had become a Cocteau Twins music video, all blurred and strobe-lit.

Which wasn’t totally a bad thing. It makes some sense to swamp viewers in the same fog of war that the characters were in. Though frustrating at times, the haze was an example of Benioff, Weiss, and Sapochnik’s smart aesthetic riffing. Eight seasons into Thrones, castle battles are getting boring. Nine years into The Walking Dead, so are zombie hordes. But this edition of slash-and-hacking skeletons was broken into distinct sensory chapters: the eerie absences of the first approach, the psychedelic blizzard that followed, the dragon riders gorgeously zipping above the clouds to a whole new world, Arya’s quiet Resident Evil level in the library, and a dramatic music video for the composer Ramin Djawadi’s second big piano piece of the series. The visual variability helped make “The Long Night” one of Thrones’s few front-to-back riveting episodes.

Moreover, each scene tended to nicely tie together long-running story elements—the ice, the fire, the strange fact that Dolorous Edd hadn’t fulfilled his destiny as an expendable till now. After having the Unsullied’s awesomeness told more than shown in Daenerys’s interminable adventures in Essos, I felt a weird pang of pride seeing the spearmen hold the line against the dead when other regiments were routed. But it was Arya’s slayage that offered the most payoff. Though we’ve seen her shut many an opponent’s eye previously, her hail of staff-whirls and well-timed stabs nearly justified all those mopping scenes at the House of Black and White in Season 5. She felt like the right character to fell the Night King, because she was the one who had trained for this moment the most. She had faced death to face death.

It must be said, though, that much of the episode’s tension was bound up with nonsense worth yelling at the screen about. Jon and Dany getting lost when they should have been roasting wights: just baffling. Grey Worm’s flaming trench appeared to be a decent delayer of the dead, but why didn’t the soldiers build more than just one of them? Why weren’t there vats of burning coal on the ramparts? Why did everyone seem so surprised to see the newly dead rise mid-battle when they’d presumably been informed that was the Night King’s big trick? It was good Bran sent out ravens amid the carnage, but that also highlighted just how little scouting the Winterfell forces had done before the apocalypse was at their doorstep.

Then again, Thrones gave up its claim to much realism a few seasons back. This is thoroughly TV for TV’s sake now, and tonight it resulted in something fun and freaky—and oddly gentle to the characters. Last week’s host of farewells prepped viewers to assume the body count would be savage, yet at the end of the fight, seeming goners such as Tormund and Podrick still live. The deaths that did happen—each featuring drawn-out final gasps, slo-mo, and/or weepy music—were treated as bigger deals for the viewer than they probably needed to be. (Just how many scenes have we previously seen of Theon redemption? Did anyone request another?) The one exception was the squishing of Lyanna Mormont in an excellently callous dispatching of a fan favorite, which is the sort of gasp trigger that was once key to Thrones’s appeal.

The conclusion of the episode made for a different class of surprise: It’s more like Hollywood than like George R. R. Martin for the Night King’s horde to be zapped all at once. I agree, David, that Cersei-related intrigue makes for the real fun of this show, but Thrones has just spent so much time over the years on the subject of White Walkers. The march of the dead had long felt like a pesky side plot that surely would amount to something profound—but now it really does appear that the undead were mere minibosses the characters needed to kill before the final evil. Which is just deflating.

Nailing a post–Night King ending for the show will mean clearly conveying what the contenders for the Iron Throne stand for beyond their own bloodlines. The dragons, damaged as they were tonight, should play less of a role than before. That the episode ended with Melisandre evaporating may have seemed strange—hers was not the most anticipated death of the evening—except when you consider the implications. The gods have had their fight. An age of magic is drawing to a close. We’re left with the living, and there’s something scary in that, too.

Lenika Cruz: I think “The Long Night” is an episode Thrones fans will argue about forever. There was a lot to love, including some mesmerizing sequences from Miguel Sapochnik (who also directed the show’s best installment, “The Winds of Winter”) and a smattering of beautifully tender moments (like the ones shared between Tyrion and Sansa). The first half of the episode really tapped into a sickening current of dread and demonstrated some of the most effective uses of silence in the entire series.

Though I was gripped by much of the episode—convinced that the so-called plot armor was off for everyone and that literally anything could happen—I started getting frustrated the more I saw important characters escape from impossibly close-call encounters, again and again. (As soon as Edd saved Sam, I was like, “That means Edd’s going to die right now” and then, yep, a sword went through his face.) The rest of “The Long Night” saw friends conveniently saving friends and nearly all of our favorites managing to fight off waves of shrieking zombies while no-names perished in droves. So much for suspense. Eventually, given how dark and blurry everything was, I just had to trust that if someone important was going to die, Thrones would at least make sure their face was well lit. Indeed, everyone significant who fell got a heroic, clearly visible send-off—except for the poor Dothraki in the vanguard.

I think the degree to which you are satisfied or unsatisfied with this episode depends in large part on what kind of show you believe Game of Thrones to be—or at least what kind of show you want it to be. How much do you want it to continue to subvert expectations, to twist your stomach with an unthinkable death or reversal of fortune? How much do you believe the show values backroom politicking over more abstract environmental threats or spiritual conflicts guided by the invisible hands of the gods? After all the seasons of suffering, do you just want the supposed “heroes”—the “good guys”—to win? (The fact that I found myself seized by the desire to see stupid Jon get swarmed by wights and turned into a White Walker or something tells you something about my own sensibilities.)

“The Long Night” left me with mixed feelings that leaned toward disappointment and some confusion. On the one hand, I’m very open to the show getting back to the old power plays by people who don’t just want to annihilate the whole world. On the other hand, I’m deeply skeptical about how good the plotting and dialogue will be if Thrones fully goes that route. I worry that to be excited about that prospect is to believe the show can recapture the magic of its earlier seasons—a magic that I think is gone for good. While I agree, David, that the Night King was such a blank, simplistic villain, part of me was hoping this episode was going to reveal some surprising new dimension to what his grand plans might mean for the fate of Westeros.

And, David, I know you’re delighted about the Night King being gone for good and are happy to forget he existed if it means getting to the good stuff in King’s Landing. But … I can’t forget! I’m with Spencer on this one: I can’t ignore the years of being told this epic war between the living and the dead was the true conflict that superseded petty squabbles about who got to wear the fancy crown and be called “Your Grace.”

These past few seasons, Thrones was so successful at getting me to reconsider what the real stakes of its central story might be, so I feel a little betrayed after having the White Walker arc resolved so neatly (at least as far as we know). Was the Night King really only an excuse to get Dany and Jon together, to unite ice and fire? Perhaps I’d be okay with that if this royal pairing weren’t so unbearably dull. And maybe I’d be more excited about the action moving back south if Cersei currently felt like a compelling arch-nemesis for the show’s final act to be built around. Right now the very fascinating people in her orbit include Qyburn, Euron Greyjoy, (checks notes) Captain Strickland of the Golden Company, and precisely zero elephants.

It’s either a testament to a portion of Thrones fandom or a criticism of the show (or both) that most of the theories floating around—that Bran is the Night King, that the Night King would instead fly down and wreak havoc on King’s Landing—were more groundbreaking than what ended up happening.

Yes, Lyanna Mormont died a very cool and meaningful death. Yes, Jorah and Theon both redeemed themselves (again), this time by dying to save the ones they had betrayed years ago. Yes, Beric and Melisandre finally got some long-deserved rest, and the Night King got fatally shanked by the Faceless Men University’s most accomplished dropout, Arya Stark. But none of these losses hit me especially hard—or in a way that would have justified the gravity that the Battle of Winterfell had been freighted with. It might be odd to say this, but at the moment I’m having a tough time caring about who will rule the Seven Kingdoms, if that’s indeed the end game here. Maybe I’ll need to do a full rewatch of “The Long Night” and reassess. For now I’m just hoping that over the next three weeks, Game of Thrones can wind to a conclusion that honors the narrative and emotional heights it reached in its earlier seasons.

Game of Thrones: The One Where Everyone Contemplates Imminent Death

2019-04-21T23:11:29-04:00

David Sims: Last week’s episode of Game of Thrones was all about the human stakes of the conflict ahead, and the unlikely alliances and friendships that had been forged over the past seven seasons. “Winterfell” existed to build up serious dramatic tension ahead of the climactic clash with the Night King and his army of the dead. This week’s episode, titled “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” and written by series mainstay Bryan Cogman, served the exact same purpose. Set on the eve before battle, it saw almost all the show’s friendly characters gather at Winterfell to hash out old grievances, pursue long-simmering romances, and generally cast a wistful glance back at all the crazy circumstances that brought them together.

I’m not opposed to such a notion—Thrones has always been as much about the interpersonal dynamics as it is about the big-budget fights. I’d gently suggest, though, that perhaps audiences didn’t need most of last week’s dire episode, which suffered from molasses-slow pacing and an excess of interest in the Jon-Daenerys relationship (one of the least compelling bonds in the series, which exists only for plot purposes). Smoosh that episode together with this one, and you could distill from them a good hour of fan service. But with one-third of the season now spent, I can’t deny I’m eager for everyone to get to the fireworks factory already.

Cogman, who has served as the writing staff’s foremost expert on the deep lore of George R. R. Martin’s books, was best suited to tackle the action of this episode, which amounted to a bunch of meaningful fireside chats. Some characters who finally got to hash things out, like Jaime and Bran, essentially hadn’t interacted since the Game of Thrones pilot. Other long-awaited reunions—between Brienne and Tormund, or Sansa and Theon—had previously been interrupted by the usual Game of Thrones plot contrivances (war, subterfuge, throne-room politics).

The most vital and best-handled bit of “satisfying payoff”? When Davos Seaworth made a big pot of onion soup for everyone. Kidding. It was Jaime’s knighting of Brienne, which functioned partly as a way for him to try to repay her for the good she saw in him. The moment was also an acknowledgment of the ludicrousness of the chivalric traditions of Westeros, which had elevated him to godlike status while largely ignoring or marginalizing her. Jaime, even in his diminished state, is a legend walking into the halls of Winterfell at the beginning of the episode, his notoriety built up in a world that is likely going to be swept aside in the coming weeks. In knighting Brienne, he not only acknowledged his obvious love for her, but also nodded at a potentially bright future if everyone can make it through this darkest night.

The “fireplace club” (which also included great characters like Tyrion, Tormund, Davos, and Podrick) was a nice assemblage of Game of Thrones’ reliable middle-management workhorses—politicians and brawlers alike who have made their mistakes and scored a few big triumphs, and who will all soon be tossed into the blender by the Night King (and whatever battle for the throne follows). As Thrones wraps up, I’m always going to be happy to hear war stories from the personalities I’ve enjoyed the most over the years.

Some of the other reunions I could take or leave. Arya’s motivations in scoring one hot night with Gendry before the big fight were perfectly understandable, but the scene was awkwardly presented. It was one of a few that felt like it had sprung from the pages of fan fiction rather than Martin’s novels. As the show has progressed beyond the Song of Ice and Fire series, certain plot developments have felt annoyingly neat, and this was one of them—as was Arya’s cold goodbye to the Hound, or Sam’s presentation of a Valyrian steel blade to Jorah.

I’m all for Thrones celebrating the quieter moments. But there were times during “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” when I felt the show running down a checklist and making sure it spent a little time on everything before getting ready to kill off a bunch of main characters. Next week’s edition should finally settle the dust on the situation at Winterfell and start zooming back out to consider Westeros at large. But Lenika and Spencer, I ask you: Has the show left itself enough time to dig into what comes next?

Lenika Cruz: I hate that I’m thinking about this season in such a clinical way, but it does seem as if the showrunners have split these six episodes between “the lead up to The Big Battle” and “the aftermath.” Which makes sense! But I’m still not confident about what shape this aftermath will take; and that framing sort of assumes that the dead will be “dealt with” as of the end of Episode 3. (As Bran put it, “How do you know there is an afterwards?”) Nothing has genuinely surprised me so far this season as the show continues its table-setting, so I’m hoping that next week offers a development that feels somewhat paradigm-shifting or subversive.

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” was an entire episode dedicated to the “eve before the fight,” something that in the past Thrones had simply squeezed into the battle episodes themselves. Throughout the show’s run, these night-before scenes have featured some poignant mix of dark humor (remember Ser Davos’s lovely habit of anxiety-pooping the night before a fight), quiet horror (Cersei cooly informing Sansa about the wartime tradition of mass rape as they cowered in the Red Keep), and mundane logistics management. Characters tend to grapple with the tension between needing to accept the very real possibility of death and needing to hope that there might be an “after” to look forward to. Of course, the Battles of the Green Fork, Blackwater, Castle Black, and Bastards are nothing compared to next week’s clash, the stakes of which feel impossible to comprehend.

This episode, for all its loose-end-tying and fireside banter, tried to give some narrative structure to the impending Battle of Winterfell, perhaps realizing that the living versus the dead may be an epic premise, but also a vague one. The objective, as decided by a rather crowded war room, isn’t to play a numbers game and pray, but to target the Night King. If he falls, presumably, the whole nightmare will be over and the North will just have to clean up a bunch of leathery corpses for a few months. Really, it’s a dual mission: Kill the Night King and protect Bran. The former for obvious reasons (I’m rooting for Jaime to reprise his role as Kingslayer), and the latter because he’s a Stark and we like him (even if he’s prone to random pronouncements and eerie staring) and because he is the literal embodiment of the world’s history. “He wants to erase this world, and I am its memory,” Bran explained of the Night King. “That’s what death is, isn’t it?” Samwell offered, clearly having thought this through already. “Forgetting. Being forgotten … If we forget where we’ve been, what we’ve done, we’re not men anymore. Just animals.” Grander stakes: established.

I know a lot of people found plenty to love in this episode, and there were definitely some moments that made me emotional (Ser Brienne’s smile shone as brightly as the sun glinting off the sapphire waters of Tarth). But I wish “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” had dug a little more into the existential terror that characters must be feeling in concrete or insightful ways. I get that the prospect of dying is always going to be abstract, but the fate awaiting everyone now is qualitatively different from the kind of death facing the soldiers at the Blackwater or even in the Lannister loot train. When people died then—whether by wildfire or by dragonfire—that was it. This time, they’re contemplating not only dying but also having their bodies reanimated and possibly being used to murder everyone they love.

Maybe no one—outside of Jon and Sam and those who’ve already seen the wights—wants to think too hard about the details. But if we were going to have a quieter, dialogue-heavy episode, I could have used conversations filled with more curiosity or reflectiveness about the particular nature of the looming threat. Instead, we got Arya asking Gendry, “What are they like?” and him replying, “Bad. Really bad.” He elaborated: “Death. That’s what they’re like.” (There was a little bit of lampshading with Arya making fun of Gendry’s terrible answer, but she moved on quickly to flirting-via-dagger-throwing.) More broadly, we got the usual proclamations of “We’re all going to die!” and general references to being ripped apart by zombies.

The episode, to be fair, offered other meaningful exchanges that should make next week’s cavalcade of death harder to stomach and that helped foreshadow who might say goodbye. (I am sorry to report that Grey Worm will probably never see the beaches of Naath with Missandei.) And I appreciated the show’s efforts to pump the brakes a little on the post-battle, political table-setting in favor of revisiting the personal relationships. This is, after all, the last time that many characters will ever see one another off a battlefield. It’s also entirely possible that I’ll feel more warmly about “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” during future rewatches, after learning what devastation lies ahead.

How did this episode work for you, Spencer? Did it do enough to prepare you for the Battle of Helm’s Deep, part two? Are you as concerned as I am about the idea of stowing women and children in the crypt with a bunch of dead bodies when a zombie king with reanimation powers is on his way?

Spencer Kornhaber: I am concerned about the crypt, but I’m also perversely looking forward to a few of these suddenly sentimental characters turning spooky again. Thrones viewers used to be able to brag that this series offered something far richer than “good guys” and “bad guys,” valiant knights and wicked monsters, and so on. But after eight seasons of shaking up the conventional brew, the ingredients have settled, and here we are with more than a dozen über-sympathetic heroes, all rising to the top. Or, rather, to the North.

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” toured what might seem like a rogue’s gallery: holy men and drunks, princesses and commoners, tiny children and grizzled milk-swilling giants. Each character has undertaken some unlikely journey to arrive on the front lines of the fight to save the world. And yet somehow these diverse elements have recongealed into a samey goo. No one evinced knotty inner struggles or considered bolting before the dead arrive. Each conflict that arose evaporated just as quickly. When Jaime arrived at Winterfell, Dany understandably feared he might be there to cut her throat. The audience really didn’t fear that, though. They know the show is done with intrigue for now, which perhaps explains why Varys has stopped having lines.

Thrones is also apparently done mounting scenes that are riveting in their own right, rather than ones that just cash in on years of pent-up audience desires. Did any of this episode’s farewells and cuddle piles subvert expectations? Were any relationships further deepened? Were our understandings of characters made more complex? Okay, Podrick as a potential winner of Westerosi Idol was a twist. But Tormund Giantsbane just got more giants-baney, explaining his name and glugging out of a horn. The Brienne-Jaime interactions ratified a relational shift that happened long ago. Tyrion rued his mistakes, rued that his whoring days are behind him, and rued the memory of his father, which is to say, he just rued the obvious.

Even scenes that existed to amp tension felt remedial. It’s nice to see Dany try to use sweetness and solidarity to get Sansa on her side, but the dragon queen appeared bizarrely unprepared to address what both parties knew was the real impasse in their relationship: northern independence. Then there was Jon revealing his parentage to Dany at precisely the least opportune moment, and without offering any hint on whether he’d pursue his claim to the Iron Throne. Granted, there might not be any appropriate moment for such talk during an all-nighter before what could turn out to be an Endless Night. So maybe just stow it for now?

Arya and Gendry’s shack-up is sure to spark a ton of conversation, but that development too came off like a sop to fans’ bingo cards and betting pools. In our own world, Arya’s age being unspecified makes this a queasy coupling; given the circumstances in Westeros, you can understand it as not all that weird. The problem is that the show hasn’t done anything to reconcile the former fact with the latter, which is to say, it hasn’t gotten the viewer near being able to interpret what’s happening. Gendry, from everything he’s said, basically perceives her as a little girl. Arya has given almost no indication of sexual curiosity over these past eight years. The show seems caught between playing this pairing as cute and gross. It’s hard to trust that it knows what it’s doing.

It’s also hard to trust that Dany’s generals do. When the powers at Winterfell gathered over a map to formulate their battle plan, they engaged not in prickly deliberation but rather a game of “first thought, best thought.” Bran declared by fiat that he’d plant his trap in the Godswood. Theon landed the gig of guarding him, even though Theon would seem the last person anyone in Winterfell might trust with any important job, much less the task of securing all of humankind. No one fretted about how to prevent a White Walker from shish-kebabbing another dragon. And yes, Lenika, the crypt would seem to be a dicey sort of safe zone when the enemy can reanimate the dead.

Then again, let the hordes come. It’s time for some gnarly, insurmountable obstacles to again face these ragtag do-gooders who, after years of double-crosses and reversals, are hardening back into clichés. That the battle on the horizon will upend the heroes’ plans is a given. That many beloved characters will fall seems sure. But the scariest implication of this episode is that Thrones might execute its grandest showdown without the zings of surprise, imagination, and bald-eunuch machinations that once made it great.

Game of Thrones Makes Time for Love Before War

2019-04-15T00:27:45-04:00

Spencer Kornhaber: Game of Thrones’ ending has apparently put David Benioff and D. B. Weiss in the wistful mind-set of a high-school-yearbook editor. How else to explain this premiere’s doling out of superlatives? Jon Snow called the late Ned Stark the “most honorable” man he ever met, which is awkward because Sam was telling him that Ned had lied all his life. Euron Greyjoy was named “most arrogant” by Cersei Lannister in the sole compliment she could muster after the Greyjoy pick-up artist asked for postcoital feedback. Arya titled Sansa the “smartest person,” and Sansa in turn said that Tyrion was formerly the cleverest person she ever knew. (He lost his honorific by believing a promise from Cersei, the least trustworthy person in this realm and any other.)

This premiere might not rack up many superlatives when all the Thrones episodes are accounted for, though. After a two-year gap and a dragon’s-feast worth of hype, fans probably wanted grand plot movements. Instead, they got a buffet of inevitabilities (Daenerys arriving in Winterfell; Jon learning of his parentage), some spooky but short set pieces (the SEAL Team Six–like rescue of Yara; the pinwheel of severed arms), and one long sequence of lighthearted dragon flying that evoked Harry Potter seeking a Snitch. Yet I’d argue that this was the best Thrones episode in a long time. After the disastrous Season 7 channel surfed between far-flung battlefields and contrived confrontations, Thrones looks to have re-centered itself in human relationships and a concrete time space.

The shift was announced in the new title sequence, which not only relit the Seven Kingdoms in a wintery palette, but hinted at a tweaked perspective. With the locations winnowed down to just the decimated Wall, Winterfell, and King’s Landing, and the newly introduced Northern outpost of Last Hearth, the camera swooped and pried into crypts and throne rooms. It’s okay to gasp: After eight years, Thrones’ opening credits could legitimately be called iconic, and to tinker so drastically is nearly in the lineage of the show’s actual plot twists. I found myself thrilled by getting to go inside the cuckoo clock, but mostly I was reassured by the underlying implication. After so many years of sprawl, Thrones now wants to go deep, not wide.

Which means that details matter more than ever. The kid scampering up a tree at the start of the hour made for a clear callback to Bran’s climbing in the series premiere (more yearbook-nostalgia feels!). But that callback also deepened the episode-closing shot of Bran locking eyes with Jaime Lannister, the man who pushed him out of a window all those years ago. Rounding out the motif of “Watch out, little boy” was young Ned Umber, who requested wagons for his people and was then sickeningly crucified by the undead. All of which felt like omens about Bran’s fate. When he told Jon that he’s “almost” a man, he was probably talking about his humanity. But he also, despite having the mind of an ancient being (and possibly the Night King?), is still just a kid.

That’s part of why it felt so shockingly heartwarming to see Jon plant a gentle kiss on the forehead of his long-lost brother early in the episode. This was the first in a line of tender moments between characters, many of whom were reunited for the first time in a long time. Jon and Arya shared a hearty hug; Jon and Sam were emotional about each other’s presence even before Sam dropped his 23andMe bombshell; Yara delivered Theon an affectionate skull crack. Most memorable were Arya’s encounters at the blacksmith’s. First, the Hound called her “a cold little bitch” in a way that sounded like a compliment. Then she met up with Gendry for an unmistakable bout of goth-teen flirting, confirming the important fan theory that she’s been thinking about his abs since Season 2.

Indeed, romance and sex ran throughout the episode. In what felt like another throwback to the show’s early days, Bronn partook of a gratuitous prostitute confab. After some of the least sentimental wooing imaginable, Euron coupled with Cersei. At Winterfell, Varys, Tyrion, and Davos played yentas and schemed to pair up Jon and Daenerys. Those two, of course, have been secretly dating since their cruise to White Harbor. Their dual dragon riding surely served the plot purpose of setting up future dogfighting sequences. But more importantly, it was the kind of glorious ham upon which any good screen romance must be built. Jon got a better version with Ygritte on top of the Wall, but still, there are signs of life to this intra-Targaryen couple. If there weren’t, why would Drogon be staring?

Now: As Jon made like Atreyu on Falkor, audience members may well have made like Bran and screamed at their screen, “We don’t have time for this!” But the best moments of Thrones—see: all the big deaths—have been enabled by the sturdiness of the connections between characters. Focusing on relationships ahead of what’s sure to be a bloody, fiery, snowy, casualty-laden slog is smart. It’s only through caring about these knights and lords as human beings that we might get a jolt when Bronn is told to assassinate his buddies Tyrion and Jaime. We need to believe in Jonerys Snogaryen in order to be wrenched by Jon’s face when he’s informed of his parentage, which is both a complication for his political mission and his romantic life. “Did you bend the knee to save the North, or because you love her?” Sansa asked him, but the answer of course can be Both. Or at least that might be what Jon hopes.

I’ll leave you two to unpack the loyalty drama among Jon, Sansa, and the lords of Winterfell. Bonus points for figuring out which zodiac sign or spin-class logo the White Walkers assembled out of arms on that wall.

David Sims: I’m all for callbacks as Game of Thrones kicks off its final season. Remember when summer felt eternal in Westeros, and Jaime had a different haircut, two hands, and a propensity for child murder? Bran sure does, and he is ready for a trip down memory lane. But another character who’s ready to relive some classic moments from the pilot episode is the Night King, who assembled that bloody arts-and-crafts project out of the short-lived little lord of House Umber for everyone to see. Of course, this isn’t his first dismemberment tableau. Remember that sojourn beyond the Wall, in the show’s very first scene? It featured a similarly ghastly arrangement of severed limbs. Whatever message the White Walkers are trying to send, it’s the same one they’ve been pressing for a long time.

It’s nice to know that even the mute ice zombies of Game of Thrones are ready for the show’s swan song. But to me, this episode’s shocking conclusion spoke to how much Benioff and Weiss have exhausted their bag of narrative tricks. “Winterfell” was, like every season premiere, a fine bit of table-setting that served as a helpful reminder of where every character is, so that the viewers can have their bearings when things start to get chaotic. But the end of the episode was a grim and portentous warning that the White Walkers are … still en route. After eight years, you’d think that memo had been well and fully received.

After all, why else would Jon have given up his crown for Daenerys, to the consternation of just about everyone in Winterfell? How else would Cersei be able to keep her grasp on King’s Landing without the armies of the North bearing down on her? Because of the zombies, as Jon kept having to remind everyone who kicked up a fuss with him upon his return. Nothing else matters until the zombies are dealt with. So yes, I did nod when Bran impatiently noted that there’s no time for romantic dragon-back getaways, given that there are just five episodes on the books after this one; Game of Thrones has always enjoyed a healthy windup before the big pitch, but I’m beyond ready for the big showdown.

Because it’s only after dealing with the White Walkers that Game of Thrones can actually dig into the knotty character dynamics that “Winterfell” laid out. Right now, Daenerys is little more than a vital cache of resources. When Sansa, Arya, or any of Winterfell’s lords and ladies (including the forever-flinty Lyanna Mormont) question why Jon gave up his kingship to follow her, he points to her big army and her even bigger dragons. But after (if?) the looming undead crisis is resolved, there are a lot of thornier questions to ask of this invading force and the long-term assistance it can provide to the people of Westeros.

I’m all for Game of Thrones questioning the heroics of Daenerys’s conquering wave. Sam was never a big fan of his bully of a father, but his reaction to the news of the Tarly family’s fiery execution was a necessary rejoinder to all the brutal spectacle of Season 7. In the aftermath of whatever battles are on the horizon this season, every ruler is going to have to reckon with the tough choices they made during the war, and Daenerys’s plan to rule through the might of her dragons isn’t going to sound like much of a change from the tyrannies of old. That’s why it’s fair for Sansa to ask Jon if he’s just doing this all for love. Because while that would go over like a stone with his liege lords, his connection to Daenerys might also be the only way to usher in a peaceful future for Westeros.

But these are all questions the show is just hinting at, and with so little time left on the clock, I was hoping for something more weighty than arched eyebrows from Cersei and Jon’s blank bafflement at the news that he’s having an affair with his aunt. The deep dive into every castle from these revamped opening credits was a surprising new piece of spectacle, but it just as tellingly lacked in new information. Yes, Winterfell has a heart tree; yes, King’s Landing is where the Iron Throne is. That’s been true for eight years now, and it’s time for Game of Thrones to push forward to something that feels genuinely revolutionary. Lenika, do you see brighter days on the horizon, or will the icy annihilation wave take most of our pals away before change arrives?

Lenika Cruz: As I peer into the future, I’m sorry to inform you that it looks a lot like that scene of Beric, the Hound, and Tormund creeping around the Last Hearth: extremely dark. (Like “pause the episode, get up to turn off all the lights, and then squint hard at the TV screen” dark.) Yes, David, you’re right that for the past eight years, the White Walkers have been on the exact same path. But a lot of revolutionary stuff has happened. It might have been two years since “The Dragon and the Wolf” (arguably the worst finale in the show’s history) for us, but the Wall came down like a week ago in Thrones time. If anything, this episode made me marvel at just how much has changed since this whole journey began, which is clearly what Benioff and Weiss intended to do before they knock down the next set of dominoes.

We’ve had ages to get used to the fact that Arya is no longer a little girl playing at being a swordsman; that Sansa no longer trusts men who promise to keep her safe; that Bran is now Westeros’s most powerful computer/psychic; that dragons exist. So I liked getting to briefly grapple with these transformations through the eyes of characters who were less familiar with these truths. There was Jon’s sad, knowing look after Arya admitted to having used Needle “once or twice.” And Tyrion’s pained expression after his former wife scoffed at him for trusting Cersei. And Jon’s bewildered stare when Bran said he’s “almost” a man. And, of course, the townsfolk’s terrified reaction when Drogon and Rhaegal tore screeching across the skies of Winterfell. As the Thrones map contracts and more characters find themselves bumping into one another on the way to the armory or while gazing poignantly over the courtyard, these details will matter even more, like Spencer said.

David, you note that “it’s only after dealing with the White Walkers that Game of Thrones can actually dig into the knotty character dynamics that ‘Winterfell’ laid out.” Right now, I’m more nervous about how these dynamics will affect the living’s ability to deal with the dead in the first place. Jon and Dany’s partnership is already weakening Winterfell’s position, with the Glovers holing up at Deepwood Motte and the Dothraki and Unsullied cutting into the castle’s meager provisions. Now the reveal that Jon Snow isn’t Jon Stark or Jon Sand or Jaehaerys but Aegon Targaryen VI, rightful heir to the Iron Throne, is going to undermine an alliance that hinges entirely on Jon’s unambiguous subordination to the Mother of Dragons.

“Winterfell” did just enough to establish Jon and Dany’s enduring, um, respect for each other while also hinting at the fragility of their collaboration. “Nothing lasts,” Varys intoned as he observed the lovebirds. Approximately at that moment, Dany was complaining to Jon about Sansa’s shady behavior toward her. “She doesn’t need to be my friend, but I am her queen. If she can’t respect me …” Dany said before trailing off, which forced me to wonder: What, is she going to try to burn Sansa next?! Later, Jon looked shocked when he learned that Dany had executed the Tarly men, and he seemed genuinely lost for words when Sam asked, “You gave up your crown to save your people. Would she do the same?” To which viewers across the world yelled, internally or otherwise, “Absolutely not!”

It’s been ages since Dany felt in any way like a real ruler of The People. This week, she spent virtually no time among the regular folks; she gave no inspiring speech to the Northern Lords about how she’s fighting for them in order to earn their trust and loyalty. I realize that she chose to let Jon do most of the talking and that she’s no longer trying to amass a following, but you’d think she could’ve summoned a little of that populist magic she demonstrated so long ago at Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen. The last time she tried to talk to Westerosis about her profound desire to make the world a better place, she had to use her dragons to encourage people to bend the knee. If there’s anything that’ll wipe the forced politician smile off her face in the coming weeks, it’ll be the knowledge that someone else—even someone who’s as allergic to holding power as he is responsible at wielding it—might be her rightful king.

Lastly, I’m relieved we didn’t actually see the army of the dead this week, and that’s not only because my heart can’t take another scene of the Night King bobbing up and down on Viserion’s back. Those villains need to regain some of their mystique before the big battle arrives, and that horrific scene at the Last Hearth certainly helped (is it just me or did that awful flaming-child swastika look a little like the Targaryen sigil?). That scene also offered a useful update on the White Walkers’ progress south. The Umber stronghold is roughly a third of the way between The Wall and Winterfell, suggesting that the Night King could arrive around Episode 3 (also if episode running times are any indication, which they usually are).

There’s other stuff we didn’t really get into, like whether Cersei is going to try to pin Jaime’s baby on Euron (it seems I might have been wrong for assuming that she was only fake-pregnant last season), or whether Theon’s impending reunion with Bran will be as awkward as Bran’s impending reunion with Jaime. But we’ll have five more weeks to answer these questions and more. Until next time, I’ll be thinking about the Unsullied and Dothraki sleeping in those sad, cold, Fyre Festival–lite tents.