I’ve been thinking about this line from Claire Dederer’s book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma : “Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art.”

That quote was, I think it’s fair to say, more concerned with the biography of the artist, since the book was dealing with the thorny question of what do we do with great art made by monstrous people? But I’ve been thinking about that second part of the quote, about the biography of the audience member shaping a viewing. I thought of it after viewing the animated film, The Wild Robot, a film about parenthood (motherhood, specifically) and the concept of family. It was a film that I watched entirely alone in a movie theater, and it was a film that, on numerous occasions, reduced me to silent tears. The quote came about because I’m not a parent, and especially not a mother, yet I was affected profoundly. I was thinking about my biography: the part of me that, wandering and somewhat lost, turns to film for comfort and my parents, but especially my mom, who helped cultivate that tendency in me.

A professor of mine used to begin his seminars with an exercise: Tell us the story of your name. Our names are our very first story.”

I was named after Cary Grant, the charming Hollywood leading man of yesteryear. I like that film, and one of the actors synonymous with movie stardom for so long, is wrapped in my first story.

I considered it such a treat (but also such a way of life) to drive through our sleepy little town and visit a local video rental store, Movie World. My dad was a regular, and we wore out the (seemingly) endless VHS offerings. Then came Blockbuster, right down the road from us, and while we tried to stay loyal to Movie World, the convenience of Blockbuster began to win us over.

The town I grew up in was (and still is) too small to justify a movie theater. We had to drive to north Mississippi to find the closest theater, and it’s a drive my mom still makes when she’s eager to see a new release. She took me many times as a kid, and it quietly became a thing we’d do together as I got older and my trips home grew farther and farther apart.

So it would have come as no surprise to anyone who knows me well to hear I found myself in an afternoon double feature last week. I’d do this on good days, no doubt, but I was there because I felt a little stir crazy, felt a little wrung out from applying to jobs over and over again throughout the days of the week. I went to laugh, to be transported, to lose myself for a while.

What I got from The Wild Robot was something else entirely.

The summary is pretty simple: In some distant future, a robot crash lands in a forest with only animal inhabitants. It’s made to help humans accomplish tasks and sets out to find someone to help. It goes over poorly with the animals, which view the robot, Roz, as a monster. Eventually, Roz comes to be the first thing a young orphaned gosling imprints on, thus becoming his mother. Geese need to migrate, they learn, and it becomes Roz’s mission to see to it that her baby goose is prepared to make the trip.

That’s basically the gist of it, with some additional characters thrown in for good measure. But what struck me throughout the film was the earnest depiction of the selflessness of motherhood, parenthood more generally. The animation was clever and funny, but the overwhelming experience I had was one of crying. So many different scenes. And I’m not pretending this was achieved by some great depth of filmmaking and storytelling, because it really wasn’t. The message wasn’t hidden or hard to access; it wasn’t buried under layers of symbolism. It was quite apparent, right there on the surface.

But it just felt full circle for me in that moment. There I was, sitting and crying in the dark, not from the experience of being a parent but of simply having them. Having parents who likewise turned to film for escapes. It mattered not that it was an animated film, aimed at children and their parents. When I’d remark on how I liked animated films and cartoons, Mom would remind me that my dad did, too. So did his dad, as a matter of fact, she’d say. I liked to think there was something about the artwork of it all that captivated them, both painters and artists in their own rights. It was a truism of Mom’s that there wasn’t a day so bad that Toy Story couldn’t make better. These were my influences, why I am the way I am, a huge part of my (ongoing) story.

Migration, of course, meant leaving home in the film, and I thought of all my parents had done to make sure I could leave home, over and over again. I thought of the final goodbye I said to my dad 550 days ago now. I thought of the trips home, too few and far between, too short in duration, and the sting of tears in my eyes as I back out of the driveway, every single time since my mom got sick. I was sad, but I was comforted, there in that movie theater, alone in the dark.

Such is the power of art. Doesn’t even need to be great art, capital-A “Art.” It can be found in a relatively straightforward children’s film, if your biography is just so. Turns out, on that day, mine was, and I like that part of my story.

Ten Worth Your Time

1. I recently had the opportunity to engage with the writing of college students, and it was a shocking experience. It was more than simply unpolished writing that caught my attention (though there was plenty of that). It was a complete unfamiliarity with basic punctuation marks and their uses. It completely baffled me. I couldn’t get my head around it; I kept thinking, “OK, sure, but didn’t they ever read something, anything, and just sort of pick up by osmosis how these things are used?” I went so far as to look up the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s learning objectives and finally found what I was looking for, tucked neatly under Language: Communicate using conventions of English language: “In written text, use dialogue that contains quotation marks.” It is deemed an objective for 2nd grade students. I think a lot about writing, and I think a lot about students’ writing. Same with their reading (see last week’s newsletter). There is a developing conventional wisdom that both have gotten worse. The COVID-19 pandemic is often cited as part of the problem (though quick math will tell you that the 2nd grade came for those struggling writers long before COVID-19 was a thing). So is technology, and I’ve written and shared lots about my distrust of and aversion to large language models and chatbots that use them. For the very reason that they reduce or diminish students’ abilities to think and write. But The New Yorker’s Cal Newport tries to suggest that A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT are something more than, better than a potentially perfect cheating machine. I enjoyed his article but remain largely unconvinced. The test case shouldn’t be mature writers at the most prestigious publication in the country nor even graduate students. The worrisome group is the up-and-comers who don’t yet have much to compare the writing to, have not engaged in that sort of critical distinction, and run the risk of accepting first or second drafts from ChatGPT and assuming they’re just fine. If that doesn’t seem likely or like a reasonable concern, consider the college sophomores struggling to master 2nd grade learning objectives.
2. There’s no shortage of stories I could have shared as a follow-up to Newport’s, stories that chronicle the unbelievable amounts of garbage being created by A.I. and flooding social media sites and Google search results. But I preferred this one, from 404 Media, about the band of dedicated frontline defenders against A.I. slop on one specific site: Wikipedia. It’s a little more hopeful due to the very nature of Wikipedia and how content is added and modified, but it clearly represents just fingers in various leaks in the dam.
3. Speaking of online communities, Letterboxd, the social media app for film aficionados, is one of my favorite. It’s generally regarded as a throwback to an earlier time on the internet and social media, but this story from WIRED details the infighting that threatened to ruin that image. It’s all about what gets to be considered a film, thereby worthy of a place on the site, the tricky decisions around defining what constitutes a movie (versus a miniseries (acceptable) versus TV shows (not)), and the power of online fandoms.
4. From Letterboxd’s moderate-but-health 15 million users to TikTok, which boasts a user base somewhere close to the very scientific figure of one bazillion. The social media giant stays in the news, mostly around its forthcoming ban in the U.S. if it doesn’t find a non-Chinese buyer. But it was in the news more recently for—well, to be fair—a really big oopsie-daisy on the part of some poor low-level attorney in Kentucky. Whoever this person was redacted things incorrectly, which was a constant fear of mine back in my lawyering days. As a result, the text was easily copy-and-pasted by NPR reporters to reveal lots of juicy details about the ongoing lawsuit from 14 states’ attorneys general alleging that TikTok is harmful to teenagers.
5. Jimmy Chin and a team from National Geographic discovered the probably remains of Sandy Irvine, the climbing partner of George Mallory, on Mt. Everest 100 years after they were last seen. It’s fitting that Chin would be a part of the team to discover Irvine, as Chin’s friend and climbing partner Conrad Anker was the one who found Mallory’s body back in 1999. For more incredible work from Chin and Anker, check out the documentary Meru, which is just an all-timer of a film.
6. Back to The New Yorker: Elizabeth Kolbert on the melting of the Arctic, what it means for Greenland, and what it means for the rest of us is not to be missed.
7. For something different: What must it be like to be Bronny James? Even if you care not one whit about basketball, consider for a moment what it must be like to grow up the son of one of the most famous people in the world and one of the best athletes a given sport has ever produced. Then try to imagine following along in the family business, trying to play professional basketball, with your father’s name but, by all accounts, not nearly the same level of talent. It’s impossible not to be fascinated by the story.
8. The use of statistics in this whopper of a New York Times Magazine piece about Netflix’s rise to the top of the heap and its massive content library are astounding. Consider just this tidbit alone (not at all the main point of the story): “The library we enjoy today may have been built with debt instead of venture capital, but its sheer enormousness reveals it as a visitor from another universe, something that could have only been dreamed up in Los Gatos. Its size constantly fluctuates as it inhales and exhales material, but the most recent snapshot the company has offered shows more than 16,000 titles of content, thousands of them Netflix Originals, created for or acquired by the platform, to live there practically in perpetuity, even as they are slowly entombed by new shows, new movies, new documentaries. If you assume, conservatively, that the average length of any given title in the catalog is two hours — a title can be anything from an entire season of a show to an hour of standup — then it would take three and a half years of nonstop viewing for someone to experience the whole Netflix library. Five and a half years if you allowed yourself to sleep for eight hours a day. Twenty-nine if you chipped away at it day by day, consuming the American daily average: about three hours.”
9. One of my favorite podcasts, Slate’s Culture Gabfest, has three segments per episode, and every now and then, all three are on topics that I’m familiar with. (It’s not necessarily better that way, as the critics’ opinions on things I haven’t yet explored often push me toward things I might not otherwise check out.) This episode’s discussion includes: the aforementioned The Wild Robot (loved), the Netflix rom-com show Nobody Wants This (liked fine enough), and my beloved Criterion Closet (can only dream I’ll get to set foot inside it one day).
10. I’ve read lots obits and remembrances of Lewis Lapham since his death, as well as many of his old essays. He was an incredible man of letters, and his life and resume is a thing of the past but one I deeply wish were still possible. This essay from Elias Altman in Lithubis delightful and touching and packed with editorial wisdom he acquired at Lapham’s side for seven years at Lapham’s Quarterly.

More From Me

Over on my blog, I’ve been writing about various topics of interest to me.

Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit Live From the Ryman, Vol. 2

Did This Guy Create Bitcoin?

Hurricane Hunter Meets Milton

Culture Diary

Here’s a collection of what I’ve been consuming in the past week.

The legend for my list was stolen from Steven Soderbergh, where ALL CAPS represents a movie, Sentence Case is a TV show, ALL CAPS ITALICS is a short film, Italics is a book, and bold is a live performance or show. A number in parentheses after a TV show highlights how many episodes I watched. An asterisk after an entry means it’s a rewatch. The source of the movie or show, whether streaming service, physical media, or in theaters, is shown in parentheses as well.

10/7:

10/8: MONEY ELECTRIC: THE BITCOIN MYSTERY (Max)

10/9:

10/10: English Teacher (3)(Hulu); Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, S11(2)(Max)

10/11: THE WILD ROBOT (Theater); SATURDAY NIGHT (Theater); Survivor, S47 (Paramount+); Only Murders in the Building, S4 (Hulu)

10/12: Tennessee Vols vs. Florida Gators (ESPN+)

10/13: JACK REACHER (Paramount+)