Liars and Saints

 I have seen so many Mike White scripts, and yet this writer can still surprise me. Families sometimes struggle with boundaries. An alarmed mom on "Maplewood Moms" recently wrote about having discovered her own daughter with "Mommy's vibrator"--the vibrator was in a compromising position. A neighbor recalled spotting eggplant emojis on his daughter's iPhone; the private text suddenly became a semi-public event within the family. But how do you work this material into a TV seriocomedy? Here is Mike White, leading the charge. His creation--"Patrick Schwarzenegger"--is mesmerizing. When Patrick complains to his parents that his massage lacked a happy ending, it's difficult to look away. When Patrick flaunts his bare ass in front of his (aroused? homosexual?) brother, the effect is similarly hypnotic. I have no idea where the Patrick story is heading. With remarkable subtlety, White ties Patrick's issues to Patrick's mother. Parker Posey--l...

  Obviously, I didn't watch the game; I went to Broadway to see "And Juliet." I resent the NFL because--if the Chiefs do well--my husband is agitated, impulsive, visibly nervous. Also, if the Chiefs do not do well, my husband is agitated, impulsive, visibly nervous. He is a gifted political tactician; he has built a career on thinking before he speaks. In fact, one of his signature moves is to start a sentence, march three words in, then subtly pause, erase his phrasing, and proceed with a *new* and more muted version of the sentence (before you have a chance to spot what he has done). I know this; I know after years of careful study. But that craftiness disappears around the time of the Super Bowl. Suddenly, I am part of text chains in which my husband is advising Philly natives to "Fuck off!!!!" I have to do a thought experiment when this happens. I have to recall the irritation I feel when I consider the omission of Marianne Jean-Baptiste from this year's...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB5hafiKjtA The 1990s gave birth to the American "true crime" musical. Strange, strange musicals that made song-and-dance occasions of appalling events from U.S. history. "Titanic" had the venal financier Ismay trying to blame others for his own unethical decisions. (Blaming in rhythm with an orchestral accompaniment!) "Parade" grafted syrupy ballads onto a horrifying story of a miscarriage of justice--an antisemitic lynching in the South. "Ragtime" showed the robber baron J.P. Morgan flaunting his wealth while others suffered. By contrast, "Floyd Collins" staged an event that may not have been technically criminal--but still registered as "spiritually" criminal. This was the Deathwatch Carnival. It actually happened in American history. A man, Floyd Collins, was trapped in a cave and slowly dying; Americans made a social event of this interlude. People came from far and wide to enjoy a picnic...

  Anne Tyler has made certain concessions. Perhaps her audience is dying; perhaps people don't read books anymore. We now see Tyler consenting to interviews; her discomfort is palpable. Also, her new book ("Three Days in June") is decorated with effusive quotations. Did we need all of these back in the era of "Ladder of Years"? People complained about Anita Brookner that her plots had become repetitive; her drippy heroes were oppressive as companions. But Brookner didn't care. She was writing for herself and not for "market trends." The same is true of Anne Tyler. There are things I will always remember about my wedding. The person who showed up late, a little awkwardness around someone's alcohol consumption, a couple of odd remarks. These are the tiny details that interest Anne Tyler. She isn't writing about Trump, Elon Musk, Caitlyn Jenner, Benjamin Netanyahu. But I do think that her writing is topical--because there will always be flawed...

  My college roommate wrote a picture book called "How to Train Your Porcupine." It's a brilliant idea; a family can keep a pet porcupine only if the little critter learns to pee in a potty. His quills puncture a diaper; taming the quills with curlers just means that he will roll right off the porcelain throne, like a beach ball rolling down a slide. The kids set down newspapers as a kind of "pee zone," but the porcupine becomes distracted by the crossword puzzle. I feel deep empathy for my son, who is just not quite ready to pee in the potty. The "tips" I've collected have been unintentionally amusing. Assure him that the pee is something disposable; he isn't shedding a precious part of his body. Hold a diaper open, just above his knees, so he can see his own pee exiting his body and making a "soft landing" on the fabric. Read a story about freaky, talking underpants; the story will encourage your son to express his feelings in a the...

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnZQL5XIouo An "I Am" song just expresses a feeling; in a musical, the speaker can simply address the audience. In "Chicago," when Amos whines about being "cellophane," he whines directly to all of us in our seats. "Feeling Good" (which also comes from a musical) is a song that does *not* address the audience. It's a song that addresses the natural world. Birds flying high-- You know how I feel. Sun in the sky-- You know how I feel. Breeze drifting on by-- You know how I feel It's a new dawn-- It's a new day-- It's a new life for me. And I'm feeling good. The speaker is celebrating because--now--she can "sleep in peace when day is done." What is so interesting is that the formerly oppressive force is never named. Why couldn't the speaker sleep in peace yesterday--or the day before? In Nina Simone's rendition, the song seems to be about race; "I have shrugged off the self-...

  It's difficult not to narrate your life on Facebook and to present your milestone events in a self-flattering way. "My husband -- right before he was named head surgeon at Cornell...." "I was humbled to receive a rare honor Saturday night...." "Look what she gave me for my birthday!" For this reason, it's a treat to see the toxic frenemy trio in Mike White's new season of "The White Lotus." In the standout scene, Michelle Monaghan complains that a friend has derided her mid-life crisis vacation. "And I said," she notes, "this is not my mid-life crisis. This is my Victory Tour." Clearly, "victory" is a concept that interests Mike White; in this way, the new script reminds me of White's film "Brad's Status." There is speculation online that the Schwarzenegger plot may be about incest. Maybe so, but it could also simply be about "winning." Schwarzenegger craves "more money,...

 My daughter's teacher is a mindfulness coach; that's her side hustle. She taught my son--as well--and she often seemed to think that my son's aggression could respond well to soothing ideas from a vague "Eastern spiritual" realm. "When he wants to hit his sister, encourage him to breathe deeply....remind him to seek out his cozy corner...." (In fact, these strategies did not work. What Joshua needed was a linebacker--ready to remove him from fraught scenarios at all times. No words. Just pick up the little tornado and place it in a new spot. In this way, I am like the "magic claw" in an arcade game.) When I visited Ms. Y's class last week, my goal was to read a brief story, but Ms. Y sort of derailed my presentation. The story alluded to "the beauty all around us," and Ms. Y took this as a cue. She needed to respond with a speech about mindfulness. "Children, in our busy lives, we fail to notice the flowers, and the clouds, ...

  "The Simpsons" has been voted the greatest American TV show of all time (see the works of Alan Sepinwall), which makes "Rosebud" (a classic "Simpsons" script) one of the smartest half-hours available to you via Amazon Video. You literally cannot find more than a handful of worthy rivals -- at least in the American TV landscape. The writer is John Swartzwelder. The subject is power. Monty Burns yearns for the stuffed teddy he abandoned in his childhood -- but Homer, a schlub, has gained possession of the bear. Homer seeks advice from friends. "Just reject the first offer that Burns puts on the table." When Homer sees Burns, Burns makes his offer: "Would you like a soft drink?" After Homer storms off, Burns says, "Ah, he's just playing hardball....." Next, Burns offers millions of dollars and three Hawaiian islands ("not the shitty ones"). Homer resists -- so Burns drains all of Springfield of its beer and its TV...

  There are things I dislike in Geraldine Brooks's work. The titles are often bland. "March," "Foreign Correspondence," "Horse." There is little or no evidence of a sense of humor. And there is a distressing fondness for cliche; the new memoir opens with a catastrophic 3 AM phone call and ends with a "primal scream." (This is how an undergraduate would structure a "sad memories" essay for a writing seminar.) Brooks's dead husband, Tony Hurwtiz, seems sort of obnoxious. In life, he swore off butter and dessert. (Good grief.) He seemed to mock everyone around him, to the extent that a guitarist discussed this trait at his (Hurwitz's) funeral. When Hurwitz read Joan Didion's memoir for an awards adjudication job, it seems he could note only the memoir's "padded" quality and its interest in name-dropping. There isn't more to say about that book? Brooks never writes, "It might seem like my husband was s...

  I was raised on the Patti LuPone version of "Sunset Boulevard" -- and, like Jesse Green, I had problems with the scansion. "SHE'S immortal!" (Why would you emphasize SHE? Wouldn't you say.... she's im-MOR-tal ?) "I've seen so MAN-y idols fall." (Wouldn't you say.... I've seen SO many idols fall ?) "Hers WAS the face you'd think of...." (Why not.... HERS was the face you'd think of ?) It's like Taylor-Swift-at-her-worst is writing a musical. Fortunately, we've removed "The Lady's Paying." (That said, we lose Patti's famous rendition of "loving flannel on a man."  I love flaaaanuhmah na maaaaaa! ) We've also removed much of the collaborative drafting session that features Joe and Betty. This seems ripe for an SNL parody, because the two characters alter their plot in bizarre ways each time they speak. "What if the lead is an alien? What if he climbs up from Middle Earth?...

 My writing teacher in college highlighted the works of Dr. Seuss -- because Dr. Seuss understood story structure and because he had an eccentric relationship with the English language. Seuss began his post-military life in advertising; his literary career seems to have been an accident. Although "The Cat in the Hat" was not his first book, it was certainly his "watershed moment." People approached him with a worry: "Little kids have small vocabularies, and they pick up books with unknown words, and they get discouraged. Can you write a book with a deliberately tiny range of small, small words?" The novelist PD James talked about how "restrictions can set you free." It was the *confinement* of the murder mystery structure that inspired her. Seuss approached his assignment like a poet writing a sonnet; he allowed the "rules" to become a source of inspiration. The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house All that ...

  "Aladdin" is a strange hybrid, a Frankenstein's monster. There are three Howard Ashman songs; they're the good ones. Then Ashman dies, and Tim Rice writes three additional songs; they're the bad ones. Ashman cared more about "Aladdin" than about "Beauty and the Beast"; "Beast" was just a favor he contributed to Disney, while he worried about "Aladdin." One intriguing issue with "Aladdin" is that the villain does not get his own big number. He just does a reprise of "Prince Ali." I can't help but imagine that Ashman would object to this decision. Another thing: Ashman had not written a major, splashy work for a male protagonist since "Little Shop of Horrors." Ariel and Belle were women, and they were fabulous right away. Aladdin--in Ashman's daydream--was more like Seymour from "Little Shop." Poor. All my life I've always been poor. I keep asking God what I'm for-- And...

 One TV character who haunts me is Kim Wexler, and I'm grateful to the critic Alan Sepinwall for shedding light on Kim's place in the landscape. Sepinwall argues that the antihero trend reached its climax with "Breaking Bad." That particular story--the story of the difficult man, sinking and sinking--couldn't really be improved upon. We'd seen Walter White, Al Swearengen, Dexter, Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Omar Little. Enough already! (Sepinwall fails to explain the role of Philip Jennings or Shiv Roy in TV history. Oh, well.) In Sepinwall's (initial) reading, "Better Call Saul" is *not* centered on an antihero. An antihero wants to do bad things (even if the world, NM-with-Walter-White-style, insists on misreading the antihero as decent). But Jimmy McGill generally does not want to do bad things. He wants to do good; the world, fixated on Jimmy's past, demands that Jimmy be seen as bad. But wait. Sepinwall later back-pedals. "Better Call...

  The polar explorers came in two flavors. There were those who were sensible and prepared, like Roald Amundsen. And there were those who made poor choices (and who were later, bizarrely, romanticized)--like Ernest Shackleton. I live down the road from the Roald Amundsen of parenting. I love this woman. She considers problems in a steely, pragmatic way. For example, she has required her ADHD kid to take skating lessons. This is not because anyone in the family has expressed an interest in skating--but because skating has physical boundaries, unlike outdoor soccer. The ADHD kid can stray from the lesson--but he can't stray *very* far. My neighbor has a way of handling filial/parent conflict. "You just have to lie. They want to go to Burger King? Tell them it's closed. They notice cars in the parking lot? It's the painters--using toxic paints to get the dining room ready for springtime....." (I adopt this tactic perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. "Susie,"...

 * "Willow: The White House Cat." I disliked this plotless, badly written picture book by Jill Biden. It annoys me when celebrities imagine they can write picture books; it's a sign of disrespect toward an actual art form. Also, Jill seems to have scribbled this particular book while half-asleep. The story concerns a cat who is abducted from a farm and sent to live at the White House. With little evidence, the humans nearby conclude that the cat really likes this new state of affairs.  Jill includes several coy and narcissistic portraits of herself; this made me think of Bob Dole referring to himself in the third person. Also, I couldn't help but wonder what this story reveals about the writer's inner life. Does Jill herself feel that she was abducted and sent to live at the White House? Does she feel a certain ambivalence toward this move (even though she always seemed to want Joe in office, including when most of the country had grown very, very tired of this m...

  The insightful writer Alan Sepinwall has a new book out on "Better Call Saul"; to get ready, I have been spending time with Sepinwall's essays on "Breaking Bad." Some fun observations: *People recall that Emily Nussbaum hated the "Breaking Bad" finale so much, she suggested that it was a daydream. The real ending, for her, was Walt in his car, in "Granite State," slowly dying in a snowstorm. But I didn't know that Joyce Carol Oates also advanced this theory. *The foreword pays special attention to a broken dinner plate. By the writer's calculations, "Breaking Bad" first achieved greatness when Walter White had to contemplate the possibility of his inaugural killing. White really wanted to avoid the killing. But, as he scraped up the shards of a broken dinner plate, he deduced that his captive had snatched one quarter of the plate; that little piece was waiting to become a weapon. For this reason, Walt then committed his mu...

My husband and I have different approaches to Oscar season. I cannot bring myself to watch "The Brutalist." I believe deeply in the power of titles, and "The Brutalist" is among the least appealing titles I can imagine. The title seems to say: "The experience of watching--or sleeping through--this film  will be brutal ." It's not a title that draws me in. Marc is more wide-eyed; he believes that Hollywood awards culture is a meritocracy; in his most innocent moments, he seems to think that the characters he observes are real people. Watching "Babygirl," he makes comments to suggest that it is Nicole Kidman--not "Romy"--who is living through a midlife crisis. Also, he expects that Romy/Nicole might look directly at the camera at any moment; Romy/Nicole might instruct us in an earnest way. "We come to this place for magic....that indescribable feeling....when the lights begin to dim...." It's said that novelists sometime...

  Aida Turturro was a short-term hire for "The Sopranos"; she was drafted to spice up the second season, and then she was meant to drive off into the great white somewhere. Gone forever. But Nancy Marchand died. And Turturro was very compelling. So "Janice Soprano" returned to the Eastern United States--and TV history took a left turn.  Janice gets two great storylines in the middle of the series. First, she identifies Bobby as a useful ally; she can't coach Bobby's kids to get over their dead mother, so she assumes the *role* of the dead mother, sending creepy AOL messages from beyond the grave. Bobby's house then begins to crumble--and Bobby runs into Janice's embrace. Second, Janice is forced to take anger management classes after assaulting a fellow soccer mom. This seems to please Tony--until the shift in Janice's personality becomes irritating, threatening. Tony begins to "tease" Janice about the son she has abandoned; Janice lose...

  Just consider the Steven Soderbergh filmography. Not only "Sex, Lies, Videotape," "Erin Brockovich," "Ocean's Eleven," "Magic Mike," "Contagion." But also "Side Effects," "Unsane," "Let Them All Talk." I love these movies. They are smart, weird, and unpredictable. The new film "Presence" is a retelling of "The Sopranos," if "The Sopranos" were a ghost story. A mom is breaking various laws; she tells herself she is doing it to support her family (especially her son). Her husband is complicit; he seems to think he deserves absolution because he has various secret meetings about the possibility of divorce. (Like Carmela Soprano, the husband doesn't really act on the advice he receives.) Husband and wife worry--just a bit--about their wayward teens, but the parenting we see is mostly ineffective. (In one of the most brutal scenes, the man says to the woman, "Have you...

 There is a slight tinge of psychopathy in my son's response to illness; I'm not saying that my child is a psychopath, but instead I'm suggesting there is just a slightly "skewed" quality to his caretaker behavior. Spotting his flu-stricken sister, he widens his eyes. "SUSIE!" he shouts. "Susie, are you OK?" (I think, in this moment, if he could gobble popcorn and pull up a chair, as if at the cinema, he would be in heaven.) I understand the reaction. Yesterday, I watched a neighbor berate a helpless adolescent because a certain local place of business was experiencing issues with its heating. My heart did not swell with empathy; instead, I stared, with fascination, at my neighbor, eager to observe what she might say next. "Where is Susie?" shouts Josh. "She is sleeping? She is sleeping  on the couch ?" And he adds, in a thunderous bellow: "We have to BE QUIET! She is sleeping!" I do not think that this is a time f...

 "Jumping Mouse," written by a gay man, John Steptoe, is like a picture-book version of "The Odyssey." A mouse dreams of seeing the world from the tops of various mountains. This seems impossible, but a magical frog gives him powerful "jumper" legs. So he makes some progress. Briefly, he spends time with a fat, lazy rat; the rat is waiting to die. The rat suggests that a nearby snake may be a threat--"but he can't swim, he can't cross the stream, so we should be fine." Having crossed the stream by means of a log-bridge, the snake kills the rat. The mouse is cunning and hungry for life; he escapes. Next, the mouse encounters a bison who has lost his hearing; the mouse "donates" his ears to the bison. In turn, the bison allows the mouse to walk in various bison-shadows; the shadows disguise the mouse so that he is safe from birds of prey. The end of the tale is surprising and moving; it makes me think of "The Yellow Bus,...