Marielle Heller sat in a postproduction facility in lower Manhattan, looking shaken.
It was June, 2023, and for months she’d been finalizing edits on “Nightbitch,” a movie with a Kafka-adjacent premise: a former artist, struggling to adjust to life as a stay-at-home mother, discovers that she’s turning into a dog. That day in New York, things felt nearly as surreal. Forest fires in Canada had sent smoke drifting over the Northeast, flooding the air with toxic particles that tinted the sky the lurid orange of a traffic cone.
Heller had already been feeling off kilter, having just had to put her beloved cat, Cleo, to sleep. She’d also recently had a series of unsettling encounters with animals, including one afternoon when a squirrel invaded the Brooklyn home that she shared with her husband, the director Jorma Taccone, and their two children. (She’d cornered the frantic rodent in a bathroom, then released it into Prospect Park.) And all month she’d been having bad dreams, reflecting the anxiety of releasing a new film. In one of them, she’d shown off a picture of a wolf cub to her friends, insisting that it was a beautiful baby. “I could hear them talking behind our back, saying, like, ‘Did they think we would think that was a baby? We know that’s a wolf !’ And I was, like”—she did a goofy imitation of herself, her voice querulous—“ ‘Jorma, no one thinks our joke is funny.’”
Denne historien er fra November 25, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra November 25, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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ART OF STONE
\"The Brutalist.\"
MOMMA MIA
Audra McDonald triumphs in \"Gypsy\" on Broadway.
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
\"Black Doves,\" on Netflix.
NATURE STUDIES
Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”
WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?
Ask not just where it came from but what it does for us
THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME
What is the world's largest music-streaming platform really costing us?
THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG
. . . to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch? - From \"Windy Evening,\" by Kim Seong-dong.
YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.
TALK SENSE
How much sway does our language have over our thinking?
TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER
Dear Detective, I'm not dead, but a lot of people can't stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.