Pranks and masculinity on “Who Is America?” and “Nathan for You.”
Before screening Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Who Is America?,” Showtime flacks handed me a nondisclosure agreement. They locked up my phone. Guards roamed the aisles with night-vision goggles. The implication was clear: this show, heralded by panicky press releases from politicians, was incendiary stuff. Then, three days later, the network tiptoed backward like Trump after Helsinki. “At its core WHO IS AMERICA? is a comedy show,” a pre-airing e-mail insisted. “This is not a statement on the state of the country, but Baron Cohen experimenting in the playground of 2018 America.”
Please. Better for Showtime to own what it’s doling out: an ugly response to an ugly age. Baron Cohen is a skilled troll, whose work is fuelled by contempt—though he’d probably prefer to be described as a bouffon, the rule-breaking clown who exposes hypocrisy. (Baron Cohen studied with the French clown Philippe Gaulier, an expert on the tradition.) When his sketches get laughs, they’re barks of disgust, as when I found myself yelling, “Are you fucking kidding me?” during the now famous montage of prominent N.R.A. shills, including the former congressmen Trent Lott and Joe Walsh, plugging a program to train toddlers to shoot guns. The show uses nihilism as a stripping agent, sort of the way the Cat in the Hat touted Voom as the proper method to clean up the stain he’d helped create. During its weaker segments, it’s juvenile—and, in maddening, unexamined ways, misogynist. But during that Kinderguardian segment, which manages to nail the G.O.P., the N.R.A., and right-wing support for Israel, Baron Cohen’s method is like radiation: sickening, but better than cancer, unless it kills you first. He’s Tocqueville by way of Willy Wonka, a sadist who’s certain he can separate bad eggs from good ones.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der August 6 - 13, 2018-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der August 6 - 13, 2018-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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The Puppet Masters - Compulsion, complicity, and the art of Bunraku.
The National Bunraku Theatre, in New York recently for the first time in more than thirty years, presented an evening of suicides. The performance, at the Japan Society, consisted of excerpts from two of the company’s most celebrated productions. In the Fire Watchtower scene from “The Greengrocer’s Daughter,” by Suga Sensuke and Matsuda Wakichi, from 1773, the titular character sacrifices herself to save a temple page boy she loves. In a scene from “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki,” by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, from 1703, two lovers are driven to take their own lives. Both plays were inspired by real events, and Chikamatsu’s was followed by a wave of double suicides that led to a ban on further performances. This mirroring of life and art is all the more astonishing given the fact that the actors are not people but puppets.
The Convert - The sudden rise of J. D. Vance has transfixed conservative élites. Is he the future of Trumpism?
Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate had punctuated an astounding rise. Born in the small manufacturing city of Middletown, Ohio, he was raised by a drug-addicted mother and his beloved Appalachian-born grandmother, Mamaw. He worked his way up through storied American institutions: the Marine Corps, Yale Law School, Silicon Valley. “Hillbilly Elegy,” the best-selling memoir Vance published in 2016, made him famous, and his denunciations of Trump as “cultural heroin” for the white working class even more so. A few years later, he was a senator from Ohio, the Republican Party’s most effective spokesman for Trumpism as an ideology, and—both improbably and inevitably—the VicePresidential nominee. “If you think about where he came from and where he is, at forty years old,” the conservative analyst Yuval Levin, a Vance ally, said, “J.D. is the single most successful member of his generation in American politics.”
SONGS OF WAR
Early on in “Blitz,” Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), a London factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan), aboard a train. Rather, George puts himself aboard; he twists angrily free of his mother’s grasp—“I hate you!” he cries—and tears off down the platform.
STAR-CROSSED
“Sunset Blud.” and Romeo Juliet,” on Broadway.
A PIECE OF HER MIND
Does the Enlightenment’s great female intellect need rescuing?
EACH MORTAL THING
What other creatures understand about death.
From the Wilderness
One morning in the rainy season, I went to bed at 6 a.m. after working all night and was on the verge of falling asleep when I was startled by the sound of my father’s voice coming through the air-conditioner next to my bed.
THE BIG DEAL
Joe Biden's economic policies are starting to transform America. Will anyone notice?
THE LAST MILE
The aid workers who risk their lives to bring relief to Gaza.
TAKE ME HOME
The filmmaker Mati Diop turns her gaze on plundered art.