Eliana Willis

Carrie Mathison’s very first words on “Homeland” are: “I don’t care where he is. Find him. It’s urgent.” They are shouted in a tone of unvarnished scorn at her colleague’s slowness, lack of insight and imagination. Carrie Mathison, a C.I.A. agent played by Claire Danes, does not mince words. She does not avoid conflict or difficult feelings. In fact, she has bipolar disorder (sometimes untreated, according to story-line needs), so difficult feelings are actually her thing. Many (dudes, mostly) are put off by her dogged, sawing pursuit of truth, and distrust the instincts born behind her beautiful spinning eyes. They are always institutionalizing her, always wrong, and she is always getting out of the institution to prove it. She is also a single mother.Bottom line: Carrie Mathison has her hands full, and never goes anywhere without her cross-body bag.“Does Carrie take her bag from the car to wherever she was going, or whomever she was interrogating?” Ms. Danes said over email of her character’s bags. “The shorthand for this question was always, ‘Does she take her friend?’ Occasionally, it was a more explicit ‘best friend,’ but never necessary because the lack of competition was a given.”I like Carrie Mathison. I love Claire Danes. I detest cross-body purses. You see, I like a nice solid shoulder bag, a hobo, a doctor bag, a tote, like the deep green Prada Issa Rae carries in her first scene in “The Photograph.” That’s a bag, people. Good bags elevate the beauty of women onscreen and in person, whereas cross-body bags erase, with their placement on the body, all beauty, all sexuality, all sensuality, all grace, all style, all life. Cross-body bags cut the form in a half, and the purse itself is so silly-looking, so flimsy. Also, if all you need to carry are your phone and your debit card, why don’t you just put them in your pocket? And if you haven’t taken the trouble to wear something with pockets, but you have taken the trouble to go out and purchase this ridiculous little body pendant, then what, exactly, is your problem? When I told this to Katina LaKerr, the costumer designer who created Carrie’s look on “Homeland,” she just laughed. “Carrie is a superhero,” Ms. LaKerr said. “A cross-body bag is the only choice.” I didn’t argue. But that doesn’t mean I will let this go.The series finale of “Homeland” airs on April 26, after eight seasons. If you rewatch the show purely for bag spotting (it happened to me), you will start to recognize the main players.Carrie starts out with a nondescript black one with a flap, but Ms. LaKerr refined this look into a Marc by Marc Jacobs cross-body with subtle but sturdy gold hardware that became, by the middle of Season 3 and onward, a Carrie staple. A gray cross-body, its provenance sadly lost to the sands of time, accompanies Carrie through much of Season 5, in Berlin. Now, in Kabul, Afghanistan, for Season 8, she carries a black Le Donne, and as Carrie ends the show’s run, she’ll be back in the United States, carrying a more sophisticated Rag & Bone. “We always keep track of which bags might no longer exist, due to events in the story line,” said Debra Beebe, the show’s current costume designer.When I told Ms. Beebe that I don’t like cross-body bags, she also said that Carrie’s job demands them, a point that I’m willing to concede. But many women who are not Carrie Mathison, who never hit people over the head with bricks, who don’t get repeatedly kidnapped, wear cross-body bags, and what, exactly, is their problem?“They are just everywhere,” said Maria Sherman, a writer, whose 2019 Jezebel piece “Why Are All Bags Crossbody Bags Now?” chronicles her fruitless search for a not-cross-body bag and is the “Howl” of purse shopping. “Cross-body bags are supposed to be cool but I feel like they lack dignity,” she added. “Carrie might as well be wearing a backpack, or a fanny pack.”I told her how uncomfortable it makes me to have a drink or coffee with someone who leaves hers on the entire time (it happens more than you’d think); I can never shake the feeling that this person is always on the verge of getting up and walking out. Clare Vivier is the founder and C.E.O. of Clare V, a high-end purse company. Though she has unfettered access to some of the most beautiful bags in the world, she voluntarily owns nine of the cross-body variety, and said they’re extremely popular with her customers. She does have one cross-body bone to pick: “Carrie wears hers too long. It actually drives me crazy.”Carrie Mathison probably didn’t make the cross-body bag popular, Ms. Vivier said, but her look dovetails with how modern women are dressing now. “Women these days want to be chic, but comfortable and without impairment, so that we can tackle our harried lives, whether we are working moms or fighting terrorists,” she said. “Cross-body bags are a hands-free bag equivalent to sneakers with skirts — sporty but feminine.”Now, I have watched every single episode of “Homeland,” not only in spite of Carrie’s bags, but in spite of something infinitely more troubling: It centers the 20-year-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on American angst. It’s as if, with the hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis who died in these wars, the real battles were in the American intelligence community. I thought about how Carrie Mathison — working mom and terrorism fighter — loved the convenient hands-free cross-body bag. And I had to wonder (to invoke another television Carrie, of “Sex and the City”), could the bags and the show’s politics be related?I talked to Stephen Shapiro, a professor of English at the University of Warwick, in England, who has written on “Homeland,” prestige television and its messages about culture and class relationships. He suggested that the cross-body bag is about a lot more than convenience. “The bag seems to be taking its cue from military uniforms, and it’s evocative, the same way that the prevalence of S.U.V.s are, of the way that the Forever War let us copy the military in our everyday lives,” Mr. Shapiro said.Obviously, S.U.V.s aren’t military vehicles, but they have the same shape and heft. “When you see someone driving one,” Mr. Shapiro said, “you wonder if they are worried about running over an I.E.D. in the Target parking lot.” I have the same sensation looking at people wearing cross-body purses: What, exactly, do you feel you need to be prepared for?“To me, cross-body bags are so Elizabeth Warren feminist,” said Amy Westervelt, a climate writer, and a friend of mine. “They say to me: ‘We’re going to solve climate change by greening the military.’”Then there’s the whole hands-free thing, particularly notable since there’s a major story line around Carrie ordering a drone strike, and drone strikes are how Americans themselves have been able to be involved in this war, while often never touching or being touched by it. “The costume of a hands-free bag presents Mathison as innocent of dirty deeds,” Mr. Shapiro said. “These bags say, ‘My hands are clean.’”.Of course, I myself am not innocent. I saw every single episode the moment it came out, for all nine years. I just loved watching Carrie show all those sane, yawningly right-brained people how much better she, an electrically left-brained person, was than they were. Despite the casualties, I couldn’t stop watching. You could say it was out of my hands.And I will be watching all the way to the end, partly because I want to, partly because what else am I going to do, and partly because Ms. Beebe promised me that in one of the last episodes, Carrie goes to an event carrying a Tissa Fontaneda evening — not cross-body — bag. I can’t wait to see this bag. The spoils of empire are so beautiful, and never more so as they dwindle away.Sarah Miller is a writer who lives in Nevada City, Calif. More

What’s StreamingTHE LIGHTHOUSE (2019) Stream on Amazon; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are given little but each other for company in “The Lighthouse.” The film casts that pair as Winslow and Wake, two 19th-century lighthouse keepers on a small, secluded island off the New England coast. It’s a claustrophobic experience for the characters and audiences alike: Directed by Robert Eggers and filmed in black-and-white, the grimly funny film shows the two men spending their days fighting and drinking, growing closer together even as they antagonize each other. The plot “is thin enough to invite plentiful interpretations about masculinity, homosocial relations and desire,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times. The movie’s “more sustained pleasures,” she added, “are its form and style, its presumptive influences (von Stroheim’s ‘Greed,’ German Expressionism), the frowning curve of Winslow’s mustache, the whites of eyes rolled back in terror.”TROLLS WORLD TOUR (2020) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Watch “The Lighthouse” and “Trolls World Tour” and on average you’ll have seen about the number of different hues you’d find in a single standard movie. This candy-colored follow-up to DreamWorks Animation’s musical comedy “Trolls” (2016) sees Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake reprise their roles from the first movie, this time with a host of new voices (including Rachel Bloom, Anthony Ramos and George Clinton) and a story that widens the pop-centric scope of the original movie to incorporate techno, rap, funk and other genres. “While the genre-bridging premise affords the film more variety and verve than its sugary predecessor,” Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The Times, “the movie, directed by Walt Dohrn, still gives you the sensation of being barricaded in a karaoke lounge where all the attendees have snorted Sweet Tarts.”TIGERTAIL (2020) Stream on Netflix. This family drama from the “Master of None” co-creator Alan Yang darts between two eras and three languages to tell the story of Pin-Jui, a man who leaves behind his lover in Taiwan to emigrate to the United States. It casts three actors (Tzi Ma, Hong-Chi Lee and Zhi-Hao Yang) as Pin-Jui at different ages, exploring the way the international move shapes his life — and evoking the work of Asian filmmakers like Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien. “It’s using classic techniques to tell a modern story that I hadn’t seen before,” Alan Yang said in an interview with The Times.What’s on TVIN THE DARK 9 p.m. on the CW. Murphy (Perry Mattfeld), the 20-something at the center of this dramedy, spent the series’s first season solving a murder mystery. In Season 2, Murphy deals with the fallout of the cracked case while getting wrapped up in another dangerous pursuit, as she’s forced to use the guide-dog school she runs with her roommate (Brooke Markham) and her boss (Morgan Krantz) to launder drug money. More

Spare, elegant, disjunctive, initially annoying and ultimately drop-dead beautiful, Marguerite Duras’s “India Song” (1975) was one of the great European art films of the post-art-film era. It followed the 1960s heyday of Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Alain Resnais, Duras’s one-time collaborator (she wrote the screenplay for his first feature, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”), and was in some ways more radical than their work.Like much of Duras’s work, the film, streaming through May 3 on the highly curated site, Mubi, is obliquely self-referential, drawing on earlier writings as well as her childhood in French-occupied Indochina. It originated in the early 1970s as a play — commissioned but never staged by the National Theater in London — loosely based on her 1965 novel, “The Vice-Consul,” in which a French diplomat in Lahore painfully yearns for the French ambassador’s promiscuous wife.“India Song,” which begins with a stunning sunset, shot in what feels like real time, is nominally set in late-1930s Calcutta (but was filmed in and around a French chateau). It is less theatrical or literary than it is ritualistic and, as the title suggests, musical. A handful of characters — notably Delphine Seyrig as the ambassador’s unhappy wife and Michael Lonsdale as the smitten vice consul — languidly drift, pose and pivot around an old-fashioned drawing room.Incense burns, the dominant color is a velvety jade green, and the single Indian servant wears a turban. (The story takes place in a bubble — you never see India or, the one servant aside, Indians.) The action is the more stylized for being scored with society jazz and for unfolding in the sultry, rarefied world of European colonialism. Intimations of madness, horror and suicide hover just outside the narrative.Duras’s most daring ploy is the elimination of synchronized dialogue. It’s never clear whether characters are actually speaking to each other or if the viewer is simply privy to their thoughts. (Given the subtlety of her expressions and gestures, Seyrig would have been a sensational silent movie presence.) A chorus of off-screen voices seems to be reacting to the action or perhaps simply remembering it. Language is incantation. The oft-referred to Ganges River produces “the smell of mud and leprosy and fire.”“India Song” manages to be both florid and austere and, for all its forbidding formalism, not so far from a steamy tropical romance or the B-movie exotica beloved by French surrealists. Reviewing “India Song” when it appeared at the 1975 New York Film Festival, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby (not a fan) found the movie reminiscent of a Hollywood “four-hankie” melodrama but praised “the fine, schlocky, thirties musical score” by Carlos d’Alessio.The heart of “India Song” is a masterpiece of hypnotic minimalism — a scene in which the stricken vice consul watches as the ambassador’s wife dances and flirts with several current and would-be lovers during an embassy reception.All relations are ambiguous, as is the space. (Duras gets more mileage out of a floor-to-ceiling mirror than anyone since the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup.”) The vice consul, who someone says, “seems to be in a state of tears,” stalks the ambassador’s wife and, his advances rebuffed, makes a scene that reverberates, off-screen, for the rest of the movie.India SongAvailable on mubi.com through May 3.Rewind is an occasional column covering revived, restored and rediscovered movies. More

For years, “Jeopardy!” fans have yearned to learn more about the behind-the-scenes life of their beloved host, the silver-haired, even-toned Alex Trebek. But so far he has been relatively tight-lipped about it.In July, those fans will get new insights into Mr. Trebek in a memoir that delves into the game show host’s thoughts on topics like marriage, parenthood and spirituality, the publisher, Simon & Schuster, announced on Tuesday.Mr. Trebek had resisted entreaties to write a book about his life for over three decades, the publisher said, but his position changed after his Stage-4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis last year prompted an outpouring of support and interest in his health.“I want people to know a little more about the person they have been cheering on for the past year,” Mr. Trebek writes in the book, titled, “The Answer Is …: Reflections on my Life.”The book, which is a slim 160 pages, is scheduled for release on July 21, the day before Mr. Trebek turns 80. The structure of the memoir is inspired by “Jeopardy!,” with each chapter title taking the form of a question.It will include some of Mr. Trebek’s thoughts on two record-breaking players, Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer, who shot to game-show fame last year and inspired a multiday tournament meant to determine the “Greatest of All Time” (Mr. Jennings won). There will also be an appraisal of Will Ferrell’s impression of him on “Saturday Night Live” and an explanation of why Mr. Trebek shaved off his famous mustache.Mr. Trebek, who became the host of “Jeopardy!” in 1984, has consistently kept fans updated on his health in media interviews and videos shot on the set of the game show. Last month, he announced in a video posted on Twitter that he had passed the one-year mark since his diagnosis, something he said only 18 percent of Stage-4 pancreatic cancer patients do.Mr. Trebek has been candid about the struggles of battling cancer, saying in the video that “there were moments of great pain, days when certain bodily functions no longer functioned, and sudden, massive attacks of great depression that made me wonder if it really was worth fighting on.”But Mr. Trebek said he is taking solace in the solidarity of fellow cancer patients and taking one day at a time. More

At the end of March I was, like many people, spending hours each day on the internet, my attention glued to graphs of projected deaths, maps of infection hot spots, photos of masked travelers huddled in subway cars. But then new images appeared, and they were quite unlike the others. Here were maps showing improvements in air quality, photographs of deserted streets and squares bathed in sunlight and, most surprising, videos of wild animals thriving in newly deserted towns and cities.These animal videos are astonishingly popular — one video, “Coronavirus lock down effects on animals” on Nature Connection’s YouTube channel, which includes clips of wild boar roaming Italian towns, Japanese sika deer walking the streets of Nara and a family of Egyptian geese crossing the empty tarmac of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has had over five million views — and their content has often been recirculated in mainstream news media. The videos are earnest and encouraging. “What a difference without humans,” says one YouTuber on the Planet Now channel, her voice full of wonderment as she shows us before-and-after shots of Venice, moving from muddy water and bustling crowds to empty streets and clean canals. She talks us through footage of fish and dolphins, screenshots of tweets about Venetian swans, news that ducks have returned to the fountains of Rome. “Look how blue it is,” she says, dreamily, of the canal water.Such testaments to nature’s sudden resurgence are, according to one Nature Connection video, a “silver lining” to the pandemic’s manifold horrors. In them, human progress, traditionally seen as a movement outward from cities to conquer the wild, seems to have not only halted but also turned back on itself. We cannot go anywhere; we’re stuck in our own homes, and it is the animals, suddenly, that are coming to us. “Nature is taking back Venice,” reads one headline in The Guardian, as if this were a war and humans under siege. It’s the return of the repressed, taking the form of goats browsing clipped garden hedges and cantering along the streets of Welsh seaside towns, flocks of wild turkeys strutting about Harvard Yard as if they remember the forests that once grew there. More

What’s StreamingMRS. AMERICA Stream on FX on Hulu. Cate Blanchett plays the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly in this new mini-series, which revisits the fights for and against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. On the “against” side is Schlafly, a self-described housewife who spent the decade campaigning against the E.R.A., which would have amended the Constitution to legally codify equality between women and men. Fighting her on the “for” side are a cadre of figures from the left, including Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman) and Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale). The show tells stories from both sides, as it chronicles events leading up to the defeat of the E.R.A. — a defeat, led by Schlafly, that had lasting effects. “Love her or hate her, you cannot not take away that she was extraordinary,” the series’s creator, Dahvi Waller, a former “Mad Men” writer, said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “And if you find yourself rooting for her and hate yourself for it, that’s also fun.”THE MAIN EVENT (2020) Stream on Netflix. In “The Main Event,” an 11-year-old boy uses superhuman abilities to defeat school bullies — and then professional wrestlers. A surreal comedy geared toward families, the film centers on Leo (Seth Carr), a young wrestling fan who discovers a mask that gives him supernatural strength. With his newfound power, he enters a pro wrestling competition, where his adult opponents underestimate both his physical abilities (his body weight appears roughly equal to that of his adult opponents’ left legs) and his determination.THE FITS (2016) Stream on Criterion Channel; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. An 11-year-old girl flits between boxing and dancing in this indie drama, the first feature from the filmmaker Anna Rose Holmer. The girl, Toni (Royalty Hightower), spends most of her time at a recreational center in Cincinnati, where she boxes and trains with her older brother (Da’Sean Minor). But after she gets a glimpse of a local dance team, her interests begin to expand — setting into motion what Manohla Dargis referred to in her review for The Times as a “dreamy, beautifully syncopated coming-of-age tale.” Holmer, Dargis wrote, “leads with atmosphere and space (including that landscape called the human face), and tends to let the sumptuously textured visuals and intermittent blasts of percussive music express what the characters don’t.”What’s on TVWHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS 10 p.m. on FX. Bloodsucking and bathroom humor return in the second season of “What We Do in the Shadows.” Born of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s mockumentary film of the same name, the TV series concerns a group of vampire roommates navigating undead life on Staten Island. Wednesday night’s Season 2 premiere begins with a series of deaths — including an unfortunate impalement. “The show is funny and silly,” Paul Simms, one of the show’s executive producers, said in an interview with The Times last year. “But it is about the sadness of eternal life.” More