Liars and Saints

 Sometimes, a facile narrative quickly gains steam. There is an idea that Alysa Liu has rewritten the rules; before Liu, figure skating was joyless, and now all is changed. But there was joy pre-Liu. Tara Lipinski's Olympics programs were joyful; also, Yuna Kim, channeling James Bond, was joyful. But I get the point. It's a treat to see young kids inspired by a brilliant performance. Both my daughter and my grade-eight student have commented on Alysa Liu. A weird experience I have is thinking about the writer Elizabeth McCracken. While watching Liu (which I do often), I remember McCracken's advice to artists: "Subject doesn't matter. Topicality doesn't matter. What matters is the link *between* the writer *and* the subject. If the writer cares passionately about her pet frog, she can write something unforgettable about her pet frog." That's what Liu does. She uses an ostensibly silly number--a number that she loves. She seems to care deeply about each ...

If ever there were a documentary that feels like a PD James murder mystery, it's "Natchez."  The setup is almost too good to be true. In Natchez, Mississippi, there are eccentric boomers who belong to a "Garden Club"; each boomer leads tours through his or her own haunted mansion. Tension arises because a Black woman joins the Garden Club, and the Black woman wants her white colleagues to begin to wrestle both with slavery and with the *legacy* of slavery. The ensuing "community meeting"--with deep sighs, half-ironic statements, and the frequent clearing of throats--is a wonderfully passive-aggressive disaster. It is miraculous that someone agreed to have a camera present for this event. That's frequently the case throughout the movie--people say terrible things. People say these things on camera! The filmmaker must have counted her lucky stars night after night after night. (It's unfortunately a cliche of documentary filmmaking that the final ...

 Hammerstein's "If I Loved You" is more complicated than it looks. A descendant of Hammerstein's "Make Believe," "If I Loved You" is about coyness. Billy *does* love Julie Jordan. He can't say that. Pretending he does *not* love Julie, he suggests that he is going to weave a "counterfactual tapestry," but what he sings is (in fact) the truth. If I loved you.. Time and again, I would try to say... All I'd want you to know... If I loved you... Words wouldn't come in an easy way. Round in circles I'd go... Billy is of course predicting the future; he will be a very flawed husband, more flawed than the portrait he offers in his song. Julie understands this -- and, regardless, she says yes. Yes to everything. We're often most articulate when we're wearing a mask. Billy can find the perfect words to describe reality...but only when he is role-playing: Longing to tell you -- but afraid and shy -- I'd let my golden cha...

 *Jodie Foster won a Golden Globe for "The Mauritanian" but failed to secure an Oscar nomination. This essentially does not happen. In Foster's category, this hadn't happened even once in the previous 44 years.  *Dino De Laurentiis is the villain in the Thomas Harris story -- pushing for "Hannibal Rising," purely for cash. Deep down, no one wanted "Hannibal Rising." When it happened, it was embarrassing for Harris. *One odd twist in the story of Hannibal Lecter: Anthony Hopkins's performance is beloved, but many fans would not rank Hopkins as their ideal Lecter. Many would give the title to Mads Mikkelsen. Some might give the title to Brian Cox. (No one is fond of Gaspard Ulliel, the star of "Hannibal Rising.") *No one really understands Trump's fascination with Lecter. (Bill Clinton, the great explainer, cannot explain.) There are two main (contradictory) theories. One: Trump wants Americans to imagine immigrants as Hannibal Lect...

  My husband was drawn to the "Quad God"; he thought the Quad God's trajectory was really a parable about hubris. "You just don't name yourself the Quad God . That's asking for disaster." Of course we read that Ilia Malinin had chosen that nickname in a facetious way; he intended to be self-mocking. But I'm reminded of a lesson I learned in a creative writing class. Never, never choose an "ironic" title for your short story. This is just a gateway to confusion and misinterpretation. My own "Olympics journey" has led me to some shocking discoveries. For example: Kristi Yamaguchi is now a self-outed Conservative Republican. And--having lost the gold--Michelle Kwan once mounted a comeback by skating to the melody from the song "Fields of Gold." Was this meta-commentary--or just an athlete responding to a particular tune she liked? We'll never really know. In this house, we're still divided on the Ilia Malinin questi...

 Stefan Merrill Block had a hard time learning about sex. For a long while, he thought that "beating off" was a brass-tacks description of a process, so he would literally slap his own organ until he grew bored. He attempted to have an online relationship with a peer--"Skittles4U"--but he overlooked certain bits of subtext. When the "peer" sent a photo--a self-portrait of a man in his thirties--things fizzled. In college, hoping to create a dramatic rupture within his family, Block willed himself to become gay. He encouraged his own body to ignore its "programming." No dice. Not one of these stories is earning media attention; "Homeschooled" is buzzy because of its descriptions of Block's mentally ill mother. Block's mother--depressed and isolated in Plano, TX--kept her child home from school for something like five years. There was nothing like a curriculum. Block's mother physically assaulted her child, required him to cra...