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    Brian Dennehy Found the Tragic Grandeur in Ordinary Lives

    On a November night, 22 years ago, fresh off a plane from New York, I walked into the Goodman Theater in Chicago and straight into the depths of depression. I felt privileged to be there. Because my guide that evening into the state of paralyzing unhappiness was Brian Dennehy, who was making one man’s inner darkness uncannily visible as the title character of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”I had admired Mr. Dennehy — who died on Wednesday, at 81 — as a smart, risk-taking and undersung actor onstage and onscreen. He was a heartbreakingly sensitive lout as the parvenu Lopakhin — a brute with a touch of the poet — in Peter Brook’s production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” (1988) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His performance as the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy in the 1992 television film “To Catch a Killer” was a penetratingly human portrait of a monster, and it haunted my nightmares for a long time.But nothing I had seen Mr. Dennehy do before prepared me for his take on Willy Loman in Robert Falls’s shadow-shrouded “Salesman,” Miller’s benchmark drama from 1949. The scale of his performance was more genuinely tragic than any version of Willy I’ve seen before or since. Mr. Dennehy had a large and brawny frame that loomed intimidatingly from a stage. Yet the character he was portraying thought of himself as a little man — so insignificant that he was afraid he was on the verge of disappearing altogether.The disparity between Mr. Dennehy’s physical stature and his character’s sense of smallness generated extraordinary pathos. It was as if he had been made outsized by pain. And there was a visceral intensity to the way he moved, always grabbing at his body and face, as if he wanted to tear off his skin.Paradoxically, this intensely physical performance conveyed the interior of Willy’s mind with a sharpness that stung. One of Miller’s early titles for “Salesman” had been “Inside His Head,” and that was precisely the location of Mr. Falls’s production.The world this Willy inhabited was the life-sapping landscape of depression. Mr. Dennehy defined this realm as a place that was both claustrophobic and all too easy to be lost in forever. When the other characters — embodied by an excellent supporting cast that included Elizabeth Franz as Willy’s wife, Linda — reached out to him, you knew that he was beyond their touch.And you felt in your gut that the death of the title was a foregone conclusion, that Willy would never be able to find his way out of his unfathomable sadness. And yet I stayed with every second of that performance — first in Chicago, and then again when the production transferred to Broadway the next year, when Mr. Dennehy won a Tony Award for best actor.He received his second Tony four years later, as the miserly, combative father in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” also directed by Mr. Falls. Though his character, James Tyrone, was a retired matinee idol, Mr. Dennehy refrained from the easy temptation of playing the ham.This production gave center stage to Mary, James’s morphine-addled wife, who was played by Vanessa Redgrave, in a wrenching performance that had something of the externalized inner anguish that illuminated Mr. Dennehy’s Willy. There was an almost self-effacing gallantry about his James, as if his primary raison d’être had become shoring up a woman on the edge of dissolution. At the same time, he registered the enduring, impossibly tested love of a man for his wife, and the wounds with which she had left him. It was as if he were always trying to rein in his instinctive urge to lash out at her.I am deeply sorry not to have caught Mr. Dennehy in the two productions of O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” in which he appeared, first (in 1990) as the slick-talking, pipe-dream-selling salesman Hickey; and later as the sozzled, grizzled, self-destroying Larry, opposite Nathan Lane in 2015.I am therefore doubly grateful to have seen his Willy Loman, not once but four times. There was no masochism in my returning to that production. The agony that Mr. Dennehy exuded should have been unbearable. But when darkness is rendered with such glowing detail by an actor of such strength, it becomes a triumph over the night. More

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    Brian Dennehy, Tony Award-Winning Actor, Dies at 81

    Brian Dennehy, a versatile stage and screen actor known for action movies, comedies and classics, but especially for his Tony Award-winning performances in “Death of a Salesman” in 1999 and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 2003, died on Wednesday in New Haven, Conn. He was 81.His agency, ICM Partners, announced his death. His agent, Brian Mann, told The Chicago Tribune that the cause was cardiac arrest resulting from sepsis. Mr. Dennehy lived in Connecticut, where he was born.Brawny and gregarious, Mr. Dennehy was often called on to play an Everyman or an authority figure: athletes, sheriffs, bartenders, salesmen and fathers. He was in scores of movies — “First Blood” (1982), “Gorky Park” (1983), “F/X” (1986) and “Presumed Innocent” (1990) were among them — as well as an assortment of television series. But his first love was always the stage.“He was a towering, fearless actor taking on the greatest dramatic roles of the 20th century,” Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where Mr. Dennehy did some of his finest work, said in a phone interview. “They were mountains that had to be climbed, and he had no problem throwing himself into climbing them.”Mr. Dennehy, who once played college football, thrived on roles that let him contrast his physical presence with an emotional vulnerability.“Mr. Dennehy is a big bear of a man, but sometimes more of a teddy bear than a grizzly,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times in 1990 after seeing Mr. Dennehy’s performance as the protagonist Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” at the Goodman, which Mr. Falls directed. “There’s a buried, dainty tenderness in his burly frame as well as a hint of festering violence.”Mr. Falls also directed Mr. Dennehy’s two Tony-winning turns, which started at the Goodman. Ben Brantley of The Times, in his review of the Goodman’s production of “Salesman,” the Arthur Miller play, called it the performance of Mr. Dennehy’s career.Mr. Falls said in the interview that Mr. Dennehy’s background — he had come to acting somewhat late, after knocking around in various blue-collar jobs — had helped make his portrayal of Willy Loman, one of the great roles of the American theater, so memorable.“When he did ‘Salesman,’ he just brought everything to that role,” Mr. Falls said. “It was tailored for him. He knew those people. He knew that world.”Brian Manion Dennehy was born on July 9, 1938, in Bridgeport, Conn., to Edward and Hannah (Manion) Dennehy. He grew up on Long Island.He enrolled at Columbia University on a football scholarship, though, he said later, what he really wanted to do was perform with the Columbia Players.“In those days, the Players had an artistic definition of themselves which didn’t allow a football player to be active,” he told the alumni magazine Columbia College Today in 1999. “I remember going up there a few times and distinctly feeling unwelcome.”His first newspaper notices were not as an actor but as a tackle on the Columbia football team. He was picked to be one of the senior captains, but in July 1959 The Times ran an article headlined, “Football Captain-Elect Drops Out of Columbia.”Mr. Dennehy, who said he had struggled academically, left school to join the Marines, serving in the United States, South Korea and Japan while he and his first wife, Judith Scheff, had two children. After leaving the service he completed his bachelor’s degree at Columbia in 1965 while working variously as a cabdriver, trucker, butcher, bartender and motel clerk to support his family.He also spent time as a stockbroker — Martha Stewart was a co-worker — though he admitted that he hadn’t been a very good one and hadn’t enjoyed the work.“I was sitting in the bullpen at Merrill Lynch down at Liberty Plaza and 30 guys got off the elevator with their attaché cases and headed for their desks,” he told the Columbia publication. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ And I did. Eventually, I was an overnight success — after 15 years.”He had been acting in community theater productions, mostly on Long Island, for years, but in the mid-1970s he branched out.“The thing was,” he told the Long Island newspaper Newsday in 1991, “you could work in community theater for 30 years and no one would spot you, no matter how good you were. Eventually, I had to take a chance in New York.”His first mention as an actor in The Times was in 1976, when he was in a showcase production of Chekhov’s “Ivanov” by the Impossible Ragtime Theater. An agent named Judy Schoen saw the show and happened to be looking for “a pro football type,” as Mr. Dennehy put it, for a role in the movie “Semi-Tough.” He was cast, and small roles in other movies and television series came quickly after that.By 1982, when he landed a regular role in the TV series “Star of the Family,” The Associated Press was calling him “one of Hollywood’s busiest character actors.” That same year his role as an overzealous sheriff in “First Blood,” the Sylvester Stallone hit (the first of Mr. Stallone’s “Rambo” movies), was something of a breakout.For the next four decades Mr. Dennehy seemed to have as much television and film work as he wanted, racking up more than 45 credits in the 1980s alone. In 1990 he received the first of six Emmy nominations, as outstanding supporting actor in a mini-series or special for the TV movie “A Killing in a Small Town.”In 1992 he played the serial killer John Wayne Gacy in “To Catch a Killer,” another mini-series. On the other side of the law, he played a Chicago police investigator, Jack Reed, in six TV movies in the 1990s, directing and earning writing credits on four of them himself.Another well-known role in the 1990s was Big Tom, the father of Chris Farley’s character in the 1995 comedy “Tommy Boy.”In recent years he had recurring roles in the TV series “Public Morals,” “Hap and Leonard” and “The Blacklist.” His last Broadway appearance was in 2014 in A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters.” In an interview with The Times in conjunction with that show, he was asked about favorite fan letters he had received.“The most interesting was from John Wayne Gacy, who was in prison at the time, awaiting execution,” he said. “I played him in ‘To Catch a Killer.’ It was a letter of disappointment in the fact that one of his favorite actors had participated in this calumny. The movie revealed that 33 bodies of young boys were buried in the crawl space of his little house. His explanation: ‘Lots of people had access to that crawl space.’”Mr. Dennehy’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1974. In 1989 he married Jennifer Arnott. She survives him, as do three children from his first marriage, Elizabeth, Kathleen and Deirdre; two children from his second marriage, Cormac and Sarah; and several grandchildren.One of Mr. Dennehy’s best-known film roles was as an extraterrestrial in “Cocoon,” Ron Howard’s 1985 film about residents of a retirement home who are rejuvenated by swimming in the aliens’ pool. The movie was shot in Florida. For an article marking its 25th anniversary, Mr. Dennehy told The St. Petersburg Times that cicadas had been in season and chirping loudly during the filming — so loudly that before Mr. Howard called “action,” a crew member would fire a gun to quiet the insects.“You could get two or three minutes when they would shut up, and you could actually shoot and record,” Mr. Dennehy said. “That would be the last thing done before we’d roll the cameras.”Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting. More

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    Thomas Miller, Hit-Making TV Producer, Is Dead at 79

    Garry Marshall, the noted producer and director, was talking about the best-known character in one of his best-known television shows.“I always wanted a tall Italian boy,” he said in an oral history recorded in 2000 for the Television Academy. Instead it was a 5-foot-6-inch Jew named Henry Winkler who ended up playing the Fonz on “Happy Days,” a portrayal so distinctive that what had been envisioned as a supporting role became one of the most recognizable characters in television history.The man responsible for that casting leap of faith was one of Mr. Marshall’s fellow executive producers on the series, Thomas L. Miller.“Tom Miller was the whole key to casting Henry Winkler,” Mr. Marshall said in the oral history. Mr. Winkler, who was an unknown when he auditioned for the role in 1973, concurred.“Tom took me to makeup, plucked my unibrow, told me what to do,” he said in a telephone interview. And it was Mr. Miller who called him that October — on his birthday, no less — and told him he had won the role. He had only just arrived in Los Angeles from the East Coast.“Two weeks into my stay I hit the jackpot,” Mr. Winkler said. “And a lot of it was thanks to Tom, who made sure that I came across with the right image, and Garry, who changed his mind about the character.”Mr. Miller, who produced dozens of other TV shows, including “Perfect Strangers” and “Full House,” died on April 5 in Salisbury, Conn. He was 79.The cause was heart disease, Warner Bros. Television, which had worked with the production company run by Mr. Miller and Robert L. Boyett, said in a statement.Mr. Miller was not generally known for the kinds of groundbreaking shows that draw critical acclaim and awards. What he and his production partners did draw were viewers.“Our award is that 30 million people are watching,” Mr. Miller told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “To me, the goal is to entertain.”“Happy Days,” which premiered in 1974, ran for a decade with 255 episodes. “Perfect Strangers” racked up 151 episodes from 1986 to 1993, overlapping for much of that time with “Full House” (192 episodes, 1987-95). Other long-running shows that had Mr. Miller as an executive producer included the “Happy Days” spinoff “Laverne & Shirley” (1976-83), “Valerie” (later renamed “The Hogan Family,” 1986-91), “Step by Step” (1991-98) and “Family Matters” (1989-98).Some producers are less hands-on once a TV series is launched, but Mr. Winkler said Mr. Miller was an active presence on “Happy Days.”“He was there at every shoot,” Mr. Winkler said. “He was part of the family, and a creative part. He was there in the editing room. He knew where to put the violins for the emotional moments.”“He understood the audience,” Mr. Winkler added, “and then, if you had a problem, he understood you.”Thomas Lee Miller was born on Aug. 31, 1940, in Milwaukee to Edward and Shirley Miller. He earned a bachelor’s degree in drama and speech in 1962 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, then set out for Los Angeles, where he worked for the director Billy Wilder on “Irma la Douce” (1963), “The Fortune Cookie” (1966) and other films.After four years with Mr. Wilder he developed TV shows at 20th Century Fox, then became a vice president of development at Paramount Studios before embarking on his producing career, founding a production company with Edward K. Milkis. Miller-Milkis Productions joined with Mr. Marshall, who died in 2016, to produce “Happy Days” (which was set in Mr. Miller’s hometown) and “Laverne & Shirley.”Mr. Boyett eventually joined the group, and in the mid-1980s, after Mr. Milkis’s departure, the company became Miller-Boyett Productions. Miller-Boyett shows, including “Full House” and “Family Matters,” were a key part of ABC’s Friday night sitcom lineup, known as TGIF. Mr. Miller and Mr. Boyett’s most recent TV producing credits were on “Fuller House,” a Netflix sequel to “Full House.”In 2000 Mr. Miller and Mr. Boyett, his life partner as well as his business partner, relocated to New York, where they were among the producers of a number of Broadway shows, including “Tootsie” last year.Mr. Miller, who lived in Salisbury, moved to Connecticut with Mr. Boyett in 2007. Mr. Boyett survives him along with a brother, Robert, and a sister, Kitty Glass.Mr. Miller aimed for shows that didn’t try to deliver a Message with a capital M but did have heart.“It’s never about lecturing, it’s about entertaining,” he told The New York Times in 1990, “but we always like to have somebody in our shows make some human connections, so the people who watch it say, ‘Yes, I understand that and I like it.’” More

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    A Dissident Company Celebrates 15 Years Underground

    Long before the coronavirus closed most of the world’s playhouses, one company pioneered creating theater at a distance.The Belarus Free Theater, founded in 2005 by dissident artists in the former Soviet republic, has operated clandestinely in the capital, Minsk, and in London, where the artistic directors, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, have lived in exile since 2011. For performances in Belarus, where most of the 12-person ensemble is still based, the troupe rehearses its provocative productions over Skype and puts them on in changing “underground” locations, in defiance of a government ban.Their plays, which often lay bare political corruption and social decay in the authoritarian country, have been raided by the K.G.B., Belarus’s secret police. Audience members and actors alike have been jailed.The Belarus Free Theater has nevertheless been able to present its productions abroad, and it has performed in over 40 countries. The troupe was getting ready to celebrate its 15th anniversary with an ambitious lineup of productions and workshops and the premiere of a documentary film. But then the coronavirus struck.With its performing activities on hold for the foreseeable future, the company has opened its digital archive. (A spokeswoman said it hoped to reschedule as many of the anniversary events as possible for later in the year). This month, it began streaming 24 productions, roughly half its repertory, on YouTube, with English subtitles.Although recordings often fail to capture the excitement of live performance, these documents of the troupe’s intimate performances convey what makes the Belarus Free Theater such a unique and artistically thrilling company. New videos will be made available each week until late June.In the early works that have streamed so far, all of which predated the government’s ban in 2010, you have to marvel at the troupe’s ability to achieve startling theatrical effects with extremely modest means. Performing in underground clubs and black box theaters, the actors often have little more than a chalkboard, bed or chair to work with. This is theatrical minimalism born of privation and necessity. Eschewing flashy stage effects, the four productions I saw achieved a remarkable theatrical purity.While the political situation in Belarus looms large in the productions, the country’s specific struggles take on a degree of universality that all revolutionary art strives for. Politically urgent though they are, these productions are not agitprop.A stark staging of the British playwright Sarah Kane’s feverish “4.48 Psychosis,” the Belarus Free Theater’s first production, from May 2005, kicked off the online programming. It premiered at the Graffiti Club in Minsk, a bar in an industrial neighborhood that hosted the group’s first three productions before the authorities pressured it to stop.A tormented monologue about mental disintegration, “4.48 Psychosis” can be staged any number of ways. In this production, two of the company’s mainstays, Maryia Sazonava and Yana Rusakevich, share Kane’s wrenching and poetic text in a performance that alternates between violence and tenderness.The video shows the audience mere feet from the performers. Many cover their laps with blankets; they look cold. Onstage, props and effects are kept to a minimum: candles, a cigarette, a thermos, projected video and blinding light against the venue’s brick wall.In its frank dissection of mental breakdown, “4.48 Psychosis” is clearly a subversive text, although you would need to read between the lines to find a political message. Since then, the company has mostly staged original work with more explicit references to Belarus.In “Generation Jeans” (2006), Khalezin, one of the artistic directors, delivers a highly personal monologue on dissident culture in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Onstage with a D.J. and a bag full of props (including clothes, LPs, flags and pickles), Khalezin looks the audience straight in the eye as he describes the risks involved in procuring real denim jeans, as opposed to Lithuanian knockoffs.The black market for imported clothing and music was under close surveillance at the time, but being hauled in for questioning by the K.G.B. was a small price to pay: “We didn’t know that it was possible to long for anything else,” he says. “Jeans and music were our symbols of prosperity.”“Generation Jeans” is a good introduction to the troupe’s technique of building productions from simple, polished monologues that bristle with mordant humor and closely observed details. This also works for more ambitions stagings, like “Zone of Silence: A Modern Belarusian Epic in Three Chapters” (2008), a sweeping yet intimate production in which the actors’ personal reminiscences fuse with vivid character sketches to paint a kaleidoscopic portrait of life in the country.Painful memories, including the deaths of parents and children, dominate the play’s fast-moving first chapter. These give way to a series of colorful monologues about characters on society’s margins, including an armless guitar aficionado, a babushka whose fanatical belief in communism has not been shaken and a sex-obsessed old man with a motor mouth.In the overtly political final segment, damning statistics about Belarus are projected on a wall. They expose the country’s devastating human rights record, including the government’s hostility to the press and free expression, and high rates of suicide, domestic violence and human trafficking. Then, in an unexpected coda that lands somewhere between cheesy and stirring, the statistics give way to a list of famous Belarusians (or people with Belarusian heritage), including Ralph Lauren, Harrison Ford and several founders of the state of Israel.The personal and the political come together in the more narratively straightforward monologue that runs through Khalezin’s 2008 production “Discover Love,” inspired by the real-life case of Anatoly Krasovsky, a businessman who disappeared along with a prominent political opponent of the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, in 1999.Staged from the perspective of Krasovsky’s widow, Irina, the sparse production conveys the sense of disorientation and hope, shot through with panic and possibility, that the characters feel in the midst of vast social and political upheavals. The powerful dialogue, delivered with unerring directness by actors who have evolved together with the company over the past decade and a half, accomplishes far more than any amount of expensive stagecraft could ever achieve.Right now, much of the world is learning firsthand that it takes enormous courage to persevere in a time of adversity. Bravery and artistic focus have kept the Belarus Free Theater producing singularly robust stage work through the past 15 years. What they have done has gone beyond coping. They have thrived. More

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    Look, America: No Hands!

    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

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    What’s on TV Thursday: ‘The Lighthouse’ and ‘Trolls World Tour’

    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

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    A Mesmerizing ‘India Song,’ Pulpy and Austere

    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

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    Alex Trebek Memoir Is Coming in July

    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