Aurelia Butler

An adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 movie at the Salzburg Festival eschews cinematic realism, instead taking a highly stylized approach.“How can I speak of love when I’m dead?” runs a powerful line in “Amour,” a stage adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 film that premiered on Sunday at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria.Love and death are, of course, the two great themes of art, but rarely have they been brought together so hauntingly as in Haneke’s film, a portrait of an elderly couple forced to confront the issue of when life is no longer worth living. Told in Haneke’s characteristically severe style, the film earned the Austrian director both a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar for best foreign language film.Karin Henkel, the adaptation’s director, eschews the film’s realism, opting instead for a highly stylized and self-consciously artificial staging that achieves its visceral impact through a combination of Brechtian estrangement techniques, emotionally naked performances and biographical monologues written by onstage extras.Henkel scored a triumph in Salzburg two summers ago with “Richard the Kid and the King,” a sweeping epic of Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty monarch that ran to four hours. The German director’s “Amour” — a co-production with the Münchner Kammerspiele theater, in Munich, where it will run in late October — is as affectingly tender as her earlier Salzburg outing was grimly savage.At the beginning of the production, the stage is dominated by a white tunnel, whose pristine, antiseptic interior is progressively sullied: Its walls written on with watery black paint, its floor stained by thick black ink that trickles onto the performers, and mounds of dry earth that fall in heaps from the ceiling. One of the characters reclines on a metal-frame hospital bed that begins to resemble a medieval torture device when operated by a zealous nurse.The tunnel, with its clinical associations, is eventually dismantled, revealing an unadorned stage strewn with an assortment of chairs, a piano, microphone stands and stage lights. Muriel Gerstner’s stage design is a constant negotiation between sterile everyday objects (harshly lit by Stephan Mariani) and elemental imagery of earth, water and flowers.Like the film, however, this reimagining of “Amour” is anchored by its two central performances. Unlike the film, which starred two aging French cinema greats, the stage version is ignited by a dose of counterintuitive casting.Jung is 69 and Bach, 38. In Haneke’s movie, the actors who played their characters were in their mid-80s. Matthias HornKatharina Bach, who is just 38, brings unexpected vitality and deep pathos to her portrayal of Anne, an elderly music teacher who is paralyzed by a stroke. (Emmanuelle Riva was in her mid-80s when she played the same role in Haneke’s movie.) Bach’s is a fitful and tormented performance, marked by intense physical and dramatic control. As Georges, Anne’s still-vigorous husband, André Jung, 69, brings an embittered and defiant spirit that is a thoughtful departure from Jean-Louis Trintignant’s pained and subtle performance in the film.The German-language stage adaptation, by Henkel and the dramaturg Tobias Schuster, hews closely to the French screenplay. At the same time, they employ strategies to defamiliarize the piece. The dialogue is heightened by frequent, often uncanny repetition. And many of the script’s stage directions are read out loud by two actors, Joyce Sanhá and Christian Löber, whose limber performances — as narrators, nurses and other characters — add to the production’s anxious, off-kilter energy.Henkel’s greatest gamble is including a twelve-person chorus of nonprofessional extras. Each of them is old, infirm or in mourning, and, although they don’t speak much onstage, they have written moving testimonies about living with health conditions, or losing loved ones to illness that are recited as monologues by the main cast. In the wrong directorial hands, this sort of intervention could easily have curdled into sentimentality. Here, however, the emotional charge of these testimonies is balanced by understatement and restraint. By a similar token, the production’s depiction and discussion of euthanasia, while sometimes shocking, resists moralizing.Hovering somewhere between the cast of extras and the main performers is the actress Nine Manthei, a little girl who acts as an ambiguous intermediary. Is she a protecting angel? The personification of Anne’s soul? Along with Bach’s skillful performance, Manthei’s poise and onstage presence suggests a double exposure of Anne as an old woman and a child.“Old age might be tragic, but it is not individual,” we hear Haneke’s voice say in an excerpt from an interview about “Amour” that plays during the production.More than a decade ago, Haneke employed his formal austerity and emotional restraint to immerse us in one elderly couple’s tragedy. But where film encourages realism, theater can embrace allegory and abstraction. With her sensitive, at times idiosyncratic, approach to this same material, Henkel uses her theatrical artistry to reach the universal.AmourThrough Aug. 10 at the Salzburg Festival, in Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at. More

He played dozens of memorable roles on big and small screens throughout his career. We’ve rounded up what to watch and where to watch it.Paul Reubens, who died on Sunday at age 70, will always be remembered for his beloved alter ego, the perpetually childlike Pee-wee Herman — a character so popular that it was able to carry a stage show, movies and a TV series. But Reubens also made memorable impressions playing a variety of supporting characters of the big and small screens — like Penguin’s father in “Batman Returns” and the turtleneck-wearing fixer Mr. Vargas in “The Blacklist,” just to name a few out of dozens.Looking for more? Here is a list of Reubens’s greatest hits and how to watch them. (Note that his recurring Emmy-nominated turn on “Murphy Brown” as the network president’s nephew is not included because that series’s original run is not streaming. Start the petition!)‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure’ (1985)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.This film may well be one of the most extravagantly weird comedies of the 1980s — and possibly ever. A breakthrough for both Reubens and the director Tim Burton, the film built on the Reubens’s live show, which had been captured for an HBO special in 1981 (and is available on Max). Strapped into a fitted gray suit with a bright red bow tie, his face a collection of sharp angles in a kid’s idea of Kabuki makeup, Pee-wee is simultaneously innocent and crafty, unencumbered by social mores and deliciously arch, accessible to all and cultishly weird. And Reubens brought him to life in a performance of utter physical and verbal precision.‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse’ (1986-1990)Buy it on several major platforms.Like the finest children’s shows, this series delighted both the younger set and its parents. The first could laugh at Pee-wee’s antics and his gallery of wacky friends, while the second would get a kick out of the double entendres, the brilliant art direction and the surreal guest stars — like Grace Jones turning up to sing “The Little Drummer Boy” in a Christmas special. The show, which aired for five seasons on CBS on Saturday mornings, remains one of the oddest productions to ever land on American televisions.‘Flight of the Navigator’ (1986)Stream it on Disney+.Reubens had distinctive intonations, and he put them to good use in extensive voice work, especially during the 2010s. An earlier example is this family friendly science-fiction film from 1986 in which he voiced Max, the computer helming the Trimaxion Drone Ship on which the pint-size hero, David (Joey Cramer), found himself. Sadly, Reubens’s second outing with the movie’s director, Randal Kleiser, did not turn out quite as charmingly: It was “Big Top Pee-wee,” the disappointing sequel to “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” (The final entry in the movie trilogy, “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” premiered on Netflix in 2016.)‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (1992)Stream it on Max.The year after Reubens’s career was temporarily derailed by indecent exposure charges in 1991, he began quietly making his way back with small, quirky roles like Amilyn, the henchman of a vampire kingpin (Rutger Hauer), in the original “Buffy” movie. Sporting a dashing goatee and looking as if he’d just escaped from a prog-rock band, Reubens chewed the scenery with gusto. He fully embraced camp in a death-by-stake scene that went over the top, and then did not even stop there. (It continued after the end credits.)‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ (1993)Stream it on Disney+.Reubens reunited with Burton for this stop-motion classic in which he voiced Lock, who with Shock (Catherine O’Hara) and Barrel (the composer Danny Elfman, who did the music for “Big Adventure”) forms a trio of minions who are “Halloween’s finest trick-or-treaters.” Together, they assist the villain Oogie Boogie (Ken Page) and, most important, sing “Kidnap the Sandy Claws.” Reubens and his team even went on to perform the song live.‘30 Rock’ (2007)Stream it on Hulu and Peacock.Reubens’s gift for the, shall we say, unusual found one of its most outlandishly grotesque outlets with the simultaneously funny and unsettling Prince Gerhardt — an inbred royal with a terrifying left hand who felt as if a John Waters character had suddenly invaded a prime-time sitcom. Sadly, Gerhardt appears only in Episode 12 of the show’s first season.‘Portlandia’ (2015)Stream it on AMC+; rent or buy it on most major platforms.As the lawyer defending a couple of Goths played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein in the series’s Season 5 finale, Reubens gets a fitting speech that includes the line “Being weird is not a crime!” He turns it into a statement of pride and a rallying cry, as well as a moment of, well, weirdness.‘Mosaic’ (2018)Stream it on Max.Reubens was terrific as the gay best friend of a successful author and illustrator played by Sharon Stone in this Utah-set murder drama from Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon. Sardonic and supportive, his character, J.C. Schiffer, was the dream confidante, and Reubens beautifully underplayed him. For some insights into his sensibility, you can read his account of shooting the series on his official website, complete with candid photos. More

The Oscar-nominated actor’s new memoir is at once a Hollywood air kiss and a moving tribute to a happy marriage that ended too soon.A POCKETFUL OF HAPPINESS, by Richard E. GrantRichard E. Grant is a wonderful actor and, it seems, a rather wonderful (goofy, talented, loving) man. His new memoir, written in diary form, is about his terrific 38-year marriage-of-opposites to Joan Washington (he the eternal adolescent, star-struck optimist and gifted actor, she a sharp-tongued, no-nonsense and equally gifted dialect coach) and her painful death from cancer. (It is she who, while dying, instructs him to seek a “pocketful of happiness” every day after she is gone.)Grant writes: “Am wondering, at the age of 63, and 11 months, if I am ever going to be a proper grown-up.” It’s not a question I asked myself while reading this book. He is so open, so filled with feelings and giddy with delight when loved, noticed and/or praised. (He not only writes about every exciting detail of being Oscar-nominated for his extraordinary performance in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm. And then there are a few more quotes from friends who tell him how gifted and wonderful he is, as he ultimately does not win the Academy Award.) But he is too thrilled with all this to hold any of it against him, even as the Hollywood sections take away from the intensity of the book.If Richard E. Grant were writing a review of this moving memoir, there would be many, many fond and admiring adjectives used to describe almost everyone who appears in the pages: witty, forthright, feisty, silky-soft, button-bright, hilarious, loving, generous, heartbreaking, warmhearted, inclusive, brilliant, sparky, amazing, charming, gilded, entertaining.He lavishes these adjectives on his friends, famous and otherwise. Nigella Lawson seems as warm and lovely and sensitive as I’ve always thought she must be. Rupert Everett is gallant and delightful. So is King Charles, as it turns out. And Queen Camilla is thoughtful and generous. Cate Blanchett sends gardenias. Gabriel Byrne brings charm and kind attention. A frail Vanessa Redgrave provides ice cream and recites poetry. (It is a certain pleasure when Grant makes a very rare negative remark, usually about someone he tactfully does not name.)Washington and Grant at a 2016 awards ceremony.Getty ImagesThere are two women at the center of this sweet and openhearted book. One is Joan Washington, whom we get to know as passionate and commanding, a great teacher, a wonderful mother, a smartass and a woman who understood and loved her husband, deeply. I would have been happy to go on reading about their life and their marriage, and even their shared adoration of their “longed-for, miracle, baby,” Olivia, who seems to be an impressive woman, very supportive of them both, during the fears and misery of Washington’s Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis and the “tsunami of grief” that Grant describes. I was not happy to read the details of Joan’s diagnosis and dying, but those sections of the book are genuine and compelling.The woman in the book whom I could easily do without is … Barbra Streisand. Barbra Streisand comes off well: shy, thoughtful, wildly gifted and a genuine mensch. To be clear, I make no complaints about her, and neither Grant nor I criticize anything she does in this book. It is not her fault that Richard E. Grant has adored her since he wrote her a fan letter when he was 14. Not her fault that he commissioned a “two-foot-tall sculpture of Streisand’s face” for his garden. Not her fault that there are far too many pages about his adoration, his ruses to meet her and those meetings, in which — let me say again — she was the soul of grace.I could have done without all of that, because, like Richard E. Grant, I just wanted more of the feisty, unvarnished, irritable, generous, wise, unimpressed Joan Washington. You cannot read this book and not miss her very much.Amy Bloom’s most recent books are “Flower Girl” and “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss.”A POCKETFUL OF HAPPINESS | By Richard E. Grant | 336 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $28.99 More

Paul Reubens committed to profound silliness without ever going mean or dark — though some peers were disappointed that he focused on one character.Of all the great flesh-and-blood cartoons of 1980s popular culture — Hulk Hogan, Madonna, Mr. T — the one easiest for small children to relate to was Pee-wee Herman. He made the same kind of obnoxious jokes we did (“I know you are but what am I?”), in a similar, if more overtly nasal, squeak while capturing an un-self-conscious exuberance that felt deeply familiar.That’s how it felt. In reality, Pee-wee Herman was nothing like us at all, a dreamy man-child in a red bow tie whose sugary smile could curl into a punky scowl. A singular piece of comic performance art for a mass audience, Pee-wee Herman stood out in every form he appeared in, from improv theaters to late-night talk shows to the movies to Saturday morning television.That this character could be so easy to identify with and so singularly, slyly alien at the same time is the stupendous magic trick of his creator, Paul Reubens, a true original who died on Sunday at 70.The first time I saw him do Pee-wee was on “Late Night With David Letterman,” where he was one of the oddballs the show’s executives would spotlight when they couldn’t book real stars. Unlike Brother Theodore, Harvey Pekar or Andy Kaufman, Pee-wee introduced no hostility or even conflict to the show. His appearances on that most ironic of late-night shows were like invasions from Candy Land. He brought toys and disguises, and he would get up and dance even before the music played. There was a joy in his presentation that was bracing. You laughed not because the jokes were funny, but because they were told with such commitment to the fun of it all.Letterman didn’t know what to make of him. You did get the sense that the host enjoyed his guest’s adolescent jerkiness. But there was more there. Even though Pee-wee was a broad character, something about him seemed more real than any conventional comic slinging punchlines or movie star selling a movie. This was a Bugs Bunny level of charisma, built to last.Paul Reubens (born Paul Rubenfeld) started his career doing many characters for the sketch group the Groundlings, and he went on to embody even more extreme characters, including the monocled father of the Penguin in “Batman Returns” and an Austrian prince with an ivory hand in “30 Rock.”But once Pee-wee became a hit with crowds in the 1970s, he mostly abandoned his other roles, to the frustration of Phil Hartman, his improv peer and a future “Saturday Night Live” star, who thought he was wasting his talent focusing on just one part.By the time he was starring in a Pee-wee movie directed by Tim Burton, Reubens was credited only as the writer. Pee-wee Herman played himself. This blurring of character and actor added a sense of mystery, and odd authenticity, to this stylized performance. A natural outsider, Pee-wee excelled at fish-out-of-water comedy. In “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (1985) a classic comedy that is still Burton’s best movie, Pee-wee finds himself winning over unlikely people in a quest narrative about his search for his bike.He accidentally knocks over the motorcycles of a bunch of grizzled Hells Angels types, before charming them by jumping on the bar and dancing to the Champs’ surf tune “Tequila.” In another bit, he is talking in a telephone booth and trying to explain where he is, so he peeks his head out to sing, “The stars at night are big and bright.” A team of cowboys responds in unison: “Deep in the heart of Texas!”The world of Pee-wee is full of this loopy surrealism that could veer into innuendo but never got dark. It was always welcoming, wildly diverse, profoundly silly. The movie, along with his anarchic Saturday morning children’s show, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” melded a child’s energy with a love of show business. Reubens, who grew up in Sarasota, Fla., nearby the winter headquarters of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, managed to imbue such entertainment with the spirit of performance art, while never taking the easy route of going mean or dark. His work just got weirder.Pee-wee’s television stint ended in infamy when Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in a porn theater. Late-night hosts pounced, and so did the news media. CBS took reruns of his show off the air. The controversy now seems preposterously overblown. That happened just one year before Sinead O’Connor’s career suffered a blow from her protest on “Saturday Night Live” against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — an episode that has come under new examination after her death last week. It’s clear that dopey moralizing scandals are far from a hallmark of our age alone.The one time I talked with Reubens, around seven years ago in an interview, he was, not surprisingly, quite different from his character: thoughtful, reserved, sober-voiced. He was modest about Pee-wee, who eventually returned.No character that beloved, that meme-able, would not be pulled back to action in our current nostalgia-driven culture. There was a Pee-wee Herman Netflix movie and a Broadway show, and, while there were small updates here and there, the character remained in essence the same: giddy, exuberant, singularly strange and primally tapped into childhood.Pee-wee got older but he never grew up. His career is an update on the Peter Pan story, except no one in Neverland would say: “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.” More

In May, Lori Vallow Daybell was convicted in the murders of two of her children and of conspiring to murder her husband’s previous wife in Idaho’s district court.An Idaho judge sentenced Lori Vallow Daybell on Monday to three consecutive terms of life in prison without parole for the murders of two of her children and for conspiring to murder her husband’s former wife in a case that drew national attention for what prosecutors described as her “doomsday” beliefs.Judge Steven Boyce of the Seventh Judicial District said at the sentencing, which was streamed online from a packed Fremont County Courthouse in St. Anthony, Idaho, that Ms. Vallow Daybell “chose the most evil and destructive path possible.”“The most unimaginable type of murder is to have a mother murdering her own children, and that’s exactly what you did,” Judge Boyce said, adding that allowing Ms. Vallow Daybell to serve her terms concurrently “would not serve the interest of justice.”In May 2021, a grand jury indicted Ms. Vallow Daybell, 50, and her husband, Chad Daybell, 54, in connection with the deaths of two of Ms. Vallow Daybell’s children, Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua Vallow, 7, known as J.J.Before she was sentenced, Ms. Vallow Daybell told the court that she has had “many communications with Jesus Christ” and that because of those communications she knows that her children are “happy and busy in the spirit world.”Rob Wood, the prosecuting attorney, read a statement written by Colby Ryan, Ms. Vallow Daybell’s only surviving child, who said that “Tylee will never have the opportunity to become a mother, wife or have the career she was destined to have,” and that “JJ will never be able to grow and spread his light with this world the way he did.”“My siblings and father deserve so much more than this,” Mr. Ryan wrote. “I want them to be remembered for who they were, and not to be just a spectacle or a headline to the world.”The sentencing followed a jury’s guilty verdict in May in the murders and the conspiracy. Ms. Vallow Daybell had initially been declared not competent to stand trial and was required to undergo psychiatric treatment. The trial in Boise, Idaho, began on April 3 after years of delays.At the start of the trial, prosecutors described Ms. Vallow Daybell as a negligent mother who believed that her “religious mission” took precedence over caring for her children.Ms. Vallow Daybell, according to prosecutors, believed that her children were “zombies” possessed by evil spirits.About 60 witnesses were called by prosecutors to testify, according to Fox 10, a Phoenix news station.Ms. Vallow Daybell pleaded not guilty but did not testify in her own defense, and her lawyers rested their case without calling a single witness, Boise State Public Radio reported. Her lawyers told the judge that they did not believe the state had proved its case. The verdict was streamed online.Ms. Vallow Daybell was also found guilty of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the death of Tammy Daybell, Mr. Daybell’s former wife. Mr. Daybell, who also pleaded not guilty, has been charged with first-degree murder in that case. Mr. Daybell’s trial was set for April 2024.In November 2019, Tylee Ryan and J.J. Vallow were reported missing by J.J.’s grandparents, who had become concerned when they were unable to reach him by phone.Officers with the Rexburg Police Department in Idaho tried to conduct a welfare check and later executed search warrants at the apartment complex where Ms. Vallow Daybell and her husband lived. The authorities said the couple seemed unconcerned with the children’s whereabouts.In February 2020, Ms. Vallow Daybell was arrested in Hawaii on a warrant issued by the authorities in Idaho, after, they said, she had not cooperated with the effort to find the missing children.In June 2020, investigators found human remains buried on Mr. Daybell’s property in Idaho that were later identified as belonging to his wife’s missing children. He was arrested and charged with concealing evidence.At the trial, Detective Ray Hermosillo of the Rexburg Police Department described photographs of the children’s remains. A DNA analyst testified that a hair found stuck to duct tape used to wrap J.J.’s body matched his mother’s, according to The Associated Press.Detective Hermosillo also said at the trial that Tylee’s remains had been burned and packed into a bucket that was buried elsewhere on Mr. Daybell’s property.Both Mr. Daybell and Ms. Vallow Daybell have been in custody since the arrests.In October 2019, Tammy Daybell was found dead in her Idaho home. The authorities had initially said that she appeared to have died of natural causes, but her body was exhumed that December after the authorities began to question the circumstances of her death and its potential connection to the disappearances of Ms. Vallow Daybell’s children.At the start of the trial, prosecutors revealed in court that an autopsy determined that Ms. Daybell died of asphyxiation.The murders were the focus of a Lifetime movie, “Doomsday Mom: The Lori Vallow Story,” and a Netflix documentary series, “Sins of Our Mother.”Michael Levenson More

From the Trinity test to “Oppenheimer” and “Asteroid City,” the symbol of nuclear destruction has held multiple but equally disturbing meanings.Witnesses to the Trinity test, the inaugural atomic bomb experiment in 1945 portrayed in “Oppenheimer,” described the billowing blast in various ways. It was said to resemble a chimney, a parasol, a raspberry and — shades of science fiction — a “convoluting brain.” The physicist Enrico Fermi and others likened the furiously rising cloud in the New Mexico desert to a mushroom, and that became the shape now inextricably associated with nuclear explosions.The enduring shorthand of the mushroom cloud has taken on different meanings over the decades, reflecting fantasies and fears as it boomed and bloomed across American culture, including, most recently, onscreen in “Oppenheimer” and “Asteroid City.” A multiplicity of meanings is appropriate for a weapon that was partly conceived as a symbolic demonstration in the first place, meant to cow Japan into surrender in World War II.Once the cloud appeared, it quickly stood in for that watershed moment in history. By the beginning of nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in 1946 — meant to measure the effects of such blasts on warships — one reporter referred to the mushroom as “the common symbol of the atomic age.” At a reception to celebrate the first round of tests, the commander of the operation, Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy, even cut a cake shaped like a mushroom blast.From Armageddon to dessert decoration in a little over a year: The rapid progression captures the wonder-horror duality that the bomb elicited. On the one hand, the looming form fed easily into a military and jingoistic pride. What other instrument of war essentially left a trademark in the sky? On the other, it provoked sheer terror with its vision of godlike destruction funneled straight up to the heavens. The co-pilot of the Enola Gay bomber put it more succinctly: “My God, what have we done?,” words that Oppenheimer echoed with his momentous quotation from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”David Lynch depicted the Trinity test in a hallucinogenic scene in “Twin Peaks: The Return.”ShowtimeAnd yet something so novel and dazzling couldn’t help but make its way into popular culture. If the Bikini test could inspire the name of a swimsuit, then of course the mushroom cloud would be picked up as a titillating marketing gimmick. A few beauty queens were deployed as “Miss Atomic Bomb” and the like, wearing mushroom-shaped headgear or swimwear, part of a general fad for atomic-themed kitsch (as memorably chronicled in the documentary “The Atomic Cafe”). The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce offered calendars with detonation times for watching the mushroom clouds from desert tests. In Wes Anderson’s desert-set “Asteroid City,” characters also observe an atomic test on the horizon, trooping out of a diner to watch with nonchalance.But a golden era of sci-fi movies in the 1950s ensured that the deadly possibilities of the atomic age were also explored in vivid visual fashion. These mushroom clouds directly addressed new sources of anxiety: the arms race (set off after the Soviets’ 1949 atomic test), the effects of radiation, and the hydrogen bomb and its even bigger boom. Monster and alien movies (and sci-fi book covers) featured the cloud as a modern Pandora’s box, a foolish unleashing of unknown forces.From early on, it could signify the unthinkable — the erasure of civilization — as in Arch Oboler’s movie “Five” (1951), which opens with explosions and a montage of historical monuments. The cloud could represent the beginning or the end (to echo the title of a 1947 docudrama about Oppenheimer). It might be the prelude to a plot about surviving the aftermath of a nuclear blast, or the doomsday finale to a story that has gone very, very wrong. Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” from 1964, falls into the second category, concluding with a montage using footage from explosions (including the Trinity test).But Kubrick alters our understanding of the mushroom clouds with the ironic usage of Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again,” originally a British World War II standard. Viewed silently, the explosions might have induced the usual dread, an emotion that in a way also fed back into awe and fear of military prowess. Kubrick’s peerless satire redirects our focus toward those in power, the absurd-sounding game-theory strategies at work, and the self-serving vanities involved — including the image of Slim Pickens riding the bomb, bronco-style, American soldier as cowboy.All of which undercut the mushroom cloud as totemic image that ends all discussion. It wouldn’t last long: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 campaign ad “Daisy” distilled the nuclear menace in just under two minutes. This is the cloud as the eternal “or else” of the protecting patriarch. The stakes are too high to ignore, Johnson intones in voice-over, as a girl counts the petals on a flower; the audio segues into a countdown toward an explosion that fills the screen. So, you know, get out and vote!The horrors of the mushroom cloud approached new levels in the 1980s thanks to realistic depictions of global nuclear war. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union reached a fevered pitch during the Reagan administration (as if fulfilling the fears of “no nukes” protesters), “The Day After” (1983) broke television ratings records portraying explosions from incoming missiles and the ensuing graphic suffering in Kansas. In Britain, “Threads” (1984) did much the same, while in Japan, Shohei Imamura’s 1989 “Black Rain” dramatized the Hiroshima bombings anew. These films reconnected the near-cliché of the mushroom cloud with its human context of death, destruction and chaos.But in the ensuing decades, the mushroom cloud became the ultimate special effect for blockbusters. James Cameron’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) faithfully replicated the fiery annihilation of a bomb blast, hauntingly explicit but still part of a science-fiction thriller with robots. Three years later, a nuclear explosion was just the icing on the action-adventure cake in Cameron’s “True Lies.” Call it the decadent era of nukes onscreen: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis embrace after the umpteenth thrilling escape, with a warhead’s mushroom cloud for a romantic backdrop.Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in “True Lies,” which uses a mushroom cloud as a romantic backdrop.Lightstorm EntertainmentThe entertainment value of disaster briefly lost its appeal in the wake of Sept. 11 (when a number of films were postponed or altered). But atomic devices were useful plot devices with increasing prominence in 2010s blockbusters, deploying the shock of the mushroom cloud whenever useful, as in the jaw-dropping World War II-set opening of “The Wolverine” (2013). When Nagasaki is bombed by the United States, Logan (Hugh Jackman), prisoner of war, shields a Japanese soldier from the blast, thereby rendering the cataclysm as simply part of the X-Men back story.Will the mushroom cloud reacquire the same foreboding quality it had at the height of the Cold War? David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017) demonstrated one possibility in its genuinely destabilizing Episode 8, drawing out the full uncanny horror of the atomic age and the possibility of evil. The Trinity test is depicted with a hallucinogenic slow camera movement into the cloud from far away, and in one of the ensuing surreal sequences, a mutant creature hatches on the bomb site years later. Oppenheimer said that his scientists had “known sin,” and Lynch, a voyager into the American unconscious, restores some sense of the atomic blast as locus of a 20th-century original sin.“Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan, presents the latest entry in the iconography of the mushroom cloud with its chronicle of the Manhattan Project’s explosive results. We do see the traditional rising plume, but at a certain point, this turns into an IMAX-size wall of flame, blotting out the landscape. It’s a fearsome sight, yet the reaction shots of the observers are just as important. Cillian Murphy’s title character — who is more or less haunted by subatomic particles even in his dreams as a student years earlier — looks briefly disarmed or stricken by the infernal sight of the blast. We hear the famous words from the Bhagavad Gita, but in Nolan’s telling, they’ve been previously uttered in a wildly different context that suggests the atomic bomb as the ultimate psychosexual release.It’s a depiction that manages to fulfill and tweak expectations at the same time. Nolan returns the nuclear explosion from the realm of symbolism to a primal zone of fears and urges — a cataclysm created by other human beings like us. More

The comedian and star of “The Beanie Bubble” feels proud to be an American when he watches “The Simpsons.” These are some of his other favorite things.Zach Galifianakis grew up on Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Redd Foxx and David Letterman, but he never sat in front of the family television thinking he wanted to be them. He was more interested in keeping up with his family.He liked the way his older cousins imitated people. His parents were hilarious. They all performed skits at reunions. He once dressed his sister up as the Ayatollah Khomeini. He got good at doing the robot.“The way we communicate is through humor,” the comedian and actor said in a phone interview in July, before Hollywood actors went on strike, adding: “It’s as basic as: I enjoyed the sound of people laughing.”In his latest film, “The Beanie Bubble,” he portrays the billionaire behind Beanie Babies, the stuffed animals that were a cultural craze in the 1990s. There are moments when viewers might not know whether to laugh or cringe.“You don’t see it much in movies because movies want to sometimes show a different side of humanity,” Galifianakis said. “I live in the awkward and cringe because I find life can be like that.”Galifianakis, a 53-year-old resident of the “Canadian woods,” discussed writing jokes on his tractor, avoiding Twitter, and the radio he listens to on the road. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1NatureI grew up rural, and all I wanted to do was run to the city. Now that I’m older, all I want to do is run back to the woods. I always tell people: Don’t forget about the woods, because as city dwellers, as urbanites, as suburbanites, we forget. There’s a lot of poetry in the woods.2Nature DocumentariesI often go back to “Alone in the Wilderness,” this documentary about Dick Proenneke, a man who lived in a remote cabin in Alaska that he built himself. I’m envious of his skill, of being able to live off the earth. There’s something beautiful about that kind of life. I’m a complete hypocrite. I’ll never get there. But had I reworked a couple things, I would’ve probably aimed a little bit more for that kind of life.3Local RadioI don’t know how to work apps. So, when I’m in the car, I listen to the radio. In Canada, CBC always has something good on. When I’m working in Atlanta, radio there has a lot of good, old hip-hop. And when I’m in California, I listen to KCRW, which still plays new music.4Gardening-Adjacent HobbiesWhen I first moved to Los Angeles, I planted peanuts, and I’ve been gardening ever since. My hobbies are usually garden-related, like making my own fertilizer. My kids will go get deer bones out of the woods, and then I’ll grind them up and make my own bone meal.5Grilling for DummiesI cook pizza on my Big Green Egg, which I bought during the pandemic. I’d always been intimidated by grilling. But any moron can cook on that thing and you’ll think you’re eating at an amazing restaurant.6Thinking While on My TractorI’ve had a tractor for a number of years. It’s where I do most of my thinking about standup — specifically joke-writing. It lets me sit there and numb out and think about jokes I’ve done and try to add to them.7Visiting Greece and Taking It EasyThis is the thing about Greece, where my dad’s family is from, and Europe in general: It’s about walking to go get a coffee. It’s about sitting down and having a conversation. I feel like these older societies have their priorities a little bit more in check sometimes. They’ve been through it. They’ve seen it. So there’s a coolness to me about Greece. And I just agree with the lifestyle. Also, the history there is unbelievable.8‘The Simpsons’ (Made in the U.S.A.)I’m always pleasantly surprised at how much that show can still make me gut laugh. There’s not many shows like that. Shows like “The Simpsons,” and the fact that Prince was from America, that just makes me proud to be an American.9A Book Worth Paying Attention ToWhen I read a book, I want everyone to know I read books, so I talk about it to everyone. “Stolen Focus,” by Johann Hari, is basically a deep, deep dive into the phone and social media. When you finish this book, you’ll go: We’ve all been duped, especially young kids who feel social media and constant contact is a must. I highly, highly recommend it, especially for parents.10IRL ObservationsThe biggest crime of social media is that it’s so boring. I’ll hear people say: You should see what I just tweeted out. As soon as I hear “Twitter,” my face glazes over. For somebody like me, I have to observe. I need to see the small spaces in life as an actor, as someone that tries to make people laugh. I’m not going to get that from Twitter. But, look: I’m 53. I’m old. I’m out of the loop. Nobody should listen to me. More