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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Encounterism,’ by Andy Field

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      Conceived before the pandemic, Andy Field’s ode to sharing space in person glosses over the ways our everyday habits seem to have changed for good.ENCOUNTERISM: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person, by Andy FieldIt has been shockingly easy, hasn’t it, to fall out of the habit of being with other humans. All it took was one world-stopping pandemic that demanded we keep our distance from one another, and taught us to use technology to maintain that separation for months on end.At home with our screens, we have yet to bounce back from that disruption, yet to readopt old habits like commuting to the office or watching movies at the multiplex. If recent trends in bad behavior are any indication, we may also have yet to relearn the skill set of coexistence — like how not to throw hard objects at musicians during their live shows, even if it makes for eye-grabbing video.Into this precarious state of affairs steps “Encounterism: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person,” an argument by the British artist Andy Field for venturing out among the populace. To him, our most ordinary sidewalk interactions can be imbued with “friction and possibility … anxiety and joy.” These are little pockets of opportunity where compassion might grow.“What do we lose when we stop inhabiting the streets of our towns and cities?” he asks. “What understanding of the world, and of each other, are we depriving ourselves of as we spend less and less time in proximity to all these strangers and their lives that are so very different from our own?” In an author’s note, Field says right up front that the idea for “Encounterism” came before the coronavirus pandemic, not in response to it, and that he wrote much of the book during “the caesura it created.” That goes some way toward explaining why its chapters — essays, essentially — so often feel trapped in amber, describing realities of another time, as if no paradigms had shifted. It might also explain why the book so frequently relies on research that a person could do from home, though its premise suggests what a limited portal to understanding that can be. (Granted, I am a journalist, and I cover theater. I believe in showing up.)Field’s most vivid, potent writing channels the sensations of physical immersion in activities he clearly cherishes — like dancing in clubs, which he believes nurtures empathy among strangers finding a collective rhythm in the dark, or sitting in a crowded movie theater, navigating a shared experience with a laughing, shushing, crying, shrieking audience: “We hold each other tightly until the moment the lights come up, and then we all go our separate ways.” But Field’s opening chapter — an intended homage to the tactile care that hairdressers provide, and a nod to its absence when salons were closed — reads like a performance of appreciation rather than the genuine article. And a chapter on shared meals strains to convey the significance of everyday dinners, unmindful of the sacred longing that those simple social rituals took on early in the pandemic, when people could not eat together.This is the dissonance that trails us through the book, nagging all the way. Field makes theater and performance art, and he tells some entertaining stories about his offbeat career. (One involves a stranger, whom he was attempting to feed as part of an experimental piece, biting him hard enough to leave a bruise.) But he barely mentions what it meant for his creative work — so dependent on up-close, in-person presence, and often involving travel — to go remote.It isn’t that the memories don’t belong; it’s that the changes do, too, as do the insights that they brought. The best part of Field’s chapter on city parks is about the community he has found in the London green space where he walks his dog, and how vital that place became to him in 2020 and 2021, when people were often forbidden to meet inside.Even so, Field never truly gets at the fundamental, tangible value of being present, bodily, with our fellow human beings. Not until the lovely final chapter, on the pleasure of hand-holding, does he very briefly mention one of the most excruciating privations of the early pandemic: the inability of people to be with their loved ones, holding hands at a deathbed.But the book doesn’t plumb the desperation so many felt for in-person contact: to hug and touch one another; to sniff a new baby’s head; to gauge someone’s well-being in 360 degrees and three dimensions, unconstricted by the frame of a video screen.We have those multisensory joys back — yet whole in-person art forms (hello, theater) are mired in financial crisis because the audiences that have returned are just too small. Such a fragile moment cries out for a ferociously persuasive argument for engaging with the world in person, not through our screens.The epigraph of “Encounterism,” a quotation from the French novelist and essayist Georges Perec, is about questioning “the habitual.” But our habits are not what they were only a handful of years ago. Far better to register what’s habitual now and examine that.Laura Collins-Hughes, a freelance journalist, writes about theater for The Times.ENCOUNTERISM: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person | By Andy Field | 288 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company | Paperback, $17.95 More

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      in Movies

      Behind ‘Oppenheimer,’ a Prizewinning Biography 25 Years in the Making

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      Martin Sherwin struck the deal and dove into the research. But it was only when Kai Bird joined as a collaborator that “American Prometheus” came to be.Martin Sherwin was hardly your classic blocked writer. Outgoing, funny, and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic.But by the late 1990s, he had to admit he was stuck. Sherwin, a history professor and the author of one previous book, had agreed to write a full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer two decades earlier. Now he wondered if he would ever finish it. He’d done plenty of research — an extraordinary amount, actually, amassing some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and F.B.I. dossiers, stored in seemingly endless boxes in his basement, attic and office. But he’d barely written a word.Sherwin had originally tried to turn the project down, his wife remembered, telling his editor, Angus Cameron, that he didn’t think he was seasoned enough to take on such a consequential subject as Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. But Cameron, who had published Sherwin’s first book at Knopf — and who, like Oppenheimer, had been a victim of McCarthyism — insisted.So on March 13, 1980, Sherwin signed a $70,000 contract with Knopf for the project. Paid half to get started, he expected to finish it in five years.In the end, the book took 25 years to write — and Sherwin didn’t do it alone.When Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” is released on July 21, it will be the first time many younger Americans encounter the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But that film stands on the shoulders of the exhaustive and exhilarating 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography called “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” co-written by Sherwin and Kai Bird.Knopf published this masterwork in 2005. But it was only thanks to a rare collaboration between two indefatigable writers — and a deep friendship, built around a shared dedication to the art of biography as a life’s work — that “American Prometheus” got done at all.Cillian Murphy, center, as the title character in “Oppenheimer,” which was written and directed by Christopher Nolan.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated PressOPPENHEIMER would have been a daunting subject for any biographer.A public intellectual with a flair for the dramatic, he directed the top-secret lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, taking the atomic bomb from theoretical possibility to terrifying reality in an impossibly short timeline. Later he emerged as a kind of philosopher king of the postwar nuclear era, publicly opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb and becoming a symbol both of America’s technological genius and of its conscience.That stance made Oppenheimer a target in the McCarthy era, spurring his enemies to paint him as a Communist sympathizer. He was stripped of his security clearance during a 1954 hearing convened by the Atomic Energy Commission. He lived the rest of his life diminished, and died at 62 in 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey.When Sherwin began interviewing people there who had known him, he was taken aback by the intensity of their feelings. Physicists, and the widows of physicists, were still angry for the casual neglect Oppenheimer had shown to his family.Yet after Sherwin moved his own family to Boston for a job at Tufts University, he and his wife Susan met Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists, who admitted with embarrassment that their years working under Oppenheimer on the bomb were some of the happiest of their lives.Among the scores of people Sherwin also interviewed were Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer’s onetime best friend whose Communist ties in part formed the basis of the inquisition against him, and Edward Teller, whose testimony at the 1954 hearing helped end his career.Published in 2005, the book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for biography.Naum Kazhdan/The New York TimesOppenheimer’s son Peter refused a formal interview, so Sherwin brought his family to the Pecos Wilderness near Santa Fe, saddled up a horse and rode to the Oppenheimers’ rustic cabin, wrangling a chance to talk to the scientist’s son as the two men built a fence. “Marty never thought he was a great interviewer,” said Susan Sherwin, who accompanied him on many research trips, and survives him. But he had a knack for connecting with people.Sherwin’s deadline came and went. His editor retired, and he did his best to avoid his new one. There was always another person to interview, or another document to read.The unfinished book became a running joke in the Sherwin household.“We had this New Yorker cartoon on our refrigerator my entire childhood,” his son Alex remembered. “It’s a guy at a typewriter, and he’s surrounded by stacks of papers. His wife is in the distance, in the threshold of the door to his office. And he says, ‘Finish it? Why would I want to finish it?’”KAI BIRD, A FORMER associate editor at The Nation, needed a job. It was 1999, and while Bird had written a couple of modestly successful biographies, as a 48-year-old historian without a Ph.D. he was underqualified for a tenure-track university position and overqualified for nearly everything else. His wife, Susan Goldmark, who held a lucrative job at the World Bank, was getting tired of being the main breadwinner.Bird was unsuccessfully applying for jobs at newspapers when he heard from an old friend. Sherwin took Bird out to dinner, and suggested they join forces on Oppenheimer.They had known each other for years, and their friendship had solidified in the mid-1990s, when Bird included Sherwin’s essays in a volume about the controversy surrounding a planned Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb.A 1957 photo of Oppenheimer at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study.John Rooney/Associated PressBut there was one complication. “My first book started out as a collaboration with my best friend,” the writer Max Holland, Bird said, “and eight years later ended in divorce.” Things broke down, in part, over disagreements about how much research was enough.The episode had been painful. Never again, his wife reminded him.“I told Marty, ‘No, I can’t. I like you too much,’ ” Bird said.So began a yearlong charm campaign to convince Bird, but especially Goldmark, that this time would be different. “I was watching very carefully, looking at them interacting and finishing each other’s sentences the way couples sometimes do,” she recalled. “They were both so cute.”Finally, with everyone on board, Gail Ross, Bird’s agent, negotiated a new contract with Knopf, which agreed to pay the pair an additional $290,000 to finish the book.Sherwin cautioned Bird that there were gaps in his research. But soon “untold numbers of boxes” started showing up at Bird’s home, according to his wife. As Bird began to sift through everything, he recognized how painstakingly detailed and dizzyingly broad Sherwin’s research was. “There were no gaps,” Bird remembered.It was time to write. Bird started at the beginning.“I wrote a draft of the early childhood years,” he said, “and Marty took it and rewrote it.” Sherwin sent the revision back to Bird, who was impressed. “He knew exactly what was missing in the anecdotes,” Bird said.Kai Bird, left, and Martin J. Sherwin in 2006, showing off a copy of their long-in-the-making book “American Prometheus.”Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressTheir process took shape: Bird would pore over the research, synthesize it, and produce a draft which he’d send to Sherwin, who would recognize what was missing, edit and rewrite, and return the copy to Bird. Soon Sherwin was drafting as well. “We wrote furiously for four years,” Bird said.Sherwin always knew that the hearing that stripped Oppenheimer of his clearance would be the “epicenter” of the biography, Bird said. They argued about what the evidence might suggest, but never about style, process, or the shape of the book itself. “It became,” Susan Sherwin said, “almost a magical thing.”By fall 2004, nearly 25 years after Knopf committed to the project, the manuscript was almost ready. Bird and Sherwin’s editor Ann Close vetoed “Oppie,” the pair’s working title. A scramble ensued, until something came to Goldmark late at night: “Prometheus … fire … the bomb is this fire. And you could put ‘American’ there.’ ”Bird dismissed “American Prometheus” as too obscure, until Sherwin called the next morning to tell him that a friend, the biographer Ronald Steel, had suggested the same title over dinner the night before. “I’m in big trouble,” said Bird. His wife felt vindicated.Bird said that his collaborator would have been pleased by “Oppenheimer.” Michael Avedon/AugustOn April 5, 2005, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” was published to enormous acclaim. The Boston Globe raved that it “stands as an Everest among the mountains of books on the bomb project and Oppenheimer, and is an achievement not likely to be surpassed or equaled.”Among its numerous accolades was the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Bird always thought the book had an outside shot at the prize, but Sherwin had been skeptical. “He always thought I was an incorrigible optimist. So he was genuinely astonished,” Bird would later say. “He was, in fact, sweetly elated.”BY THE TIME the collaborators learned in September 2021 that Christopher Nolan planned to turn “American Prometheus” into a film, Marty Sherwin was dying of cancer.The pair had read several unmade scripts based on their book over the years, so Sherwin was doubtful of its chances in Hollywood. He was too sick to join, but Bird and Goldmark met Nolan at a boutique hotel in Greenwich Village. Bird reported to Sherwin in person afterward that, with Nolan as writer and director, their work was in good hands.“Oppenheimer’s story is one of the most dramatic and complex that I’ve ever encountered,” Nolan said recently. “I don’t think I ever would have taken this on without Kai and Martin’s book.” (Anticipation for the movie has put the biography on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction paperbacks.)A still from the movie shows Murphy at Los Alamos, where one of the authors got to visit the set.Universal PicturesOn Oct. 6, 2021, Bird received word that his friend had died at the age of 84.Sherwin “would have been deeply pleased,” by the film’s accuracy, Bird said after seeing the film for the first time. “I think he would have appreciated what an artistic achievement it is.”He recalled the day he and his wife spent a few hours on the film’s set in Los Alamos. The crew was filming in Oppenheimer’s original cabin, now painstakingly restored. Bird watched Cillian Murphy do take after take as Oppenheimer, astonished at the actor’s resemblance to the subject he’d spent years studying.Finally, there was a break in filming, and Murphy walked over to introduce himself. As the actor approached — dressed in Oppenheimer’s brown, baggy 1940s-era suit and wide tie — Bird couldn’t help himself.“Dr. Oppenheimer!” he shouted. “I’ve been waiting decades to meet you!”Bird said Murphy just laughed. “We’ve all been reading your book,” the actor told him. “It’s mandatory reading around here.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Umberto Eco’ Review: Remembering a Literary Explorer

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      A new documentary delves into the infectious curiosity and passions of the Italian scholar and author of “The Name of the Rose.”“To be intellectually curious is to be alive,” Umberto Eco once said. The Italian thinker, who died in 2016, was a professor, a novelist — who wrote, most notably and at one time inescapably, “The Name of the Rose” — a semiotician, a columnist and a connoisseur of arcana. He also conveyed a twinkling sense of fun around reading and thinking about the world and literature, a notion that erudition could be not just edifying but entertaining.“Umberto Eco: A Library of the World” celebrates the man and his many bookshelves, but it’s his symbolic appeal that comes across above all. Davide Ferrario’s documentary front-loads the physicality of books, with drooling pans of libraries from Turin, Italy, to Tianjin, China, before easing into Eco’s eclectic interests, with clips of him dispensing aperçus and quips about memory and the noise of modernity.Eco’s passion for the literary canon is clear, but we hear more about his wanderings through his favorite oddities, such as Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar who wrote sprawling and sometimes wrongheaded treatises. Well-intentioned dramatic readings from Eco’s writings are punctuated with fond anecdotes from his children and a grandson that burnish the image of Eco as the extravagant scholar. His love of arcana supplies an outward eccentricity that seems to interest the film more than his semiotic work or political commentary (in which he was a critic of Silvio Berlusconi since the 1990s).Eco’s 1980 debut novel, “The Name of the Rose,” a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, became a surprise runaway success. Eco neatly describes the appeal of such detective-style investigation as being essentially spiritual, asking, who is behind all this?; he’d continue with more esoteric adventures like “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1988). Throughout his work, the frisson of fiction and its assorted deceptions attracted Eco, from speculative travelogues to the phenomenon of lying.Viewers (and readers) of a certain age may come away wondering whether Eco’s profile has faded somewhat. Ferrario’s documentary presents a figure who feels more firmly European than international, not to mention old-fashioned. (He was definitely a guy who liked to explain his scorn for his cellphone.) But exploring fictional worlds with Eco for a guide remains a diverting and often enlightening pursuit.Umberto Eco: A Library of the WorldNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      A Queer Revolutionary Classic Book, Now Onstage With Music

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      Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s latest work adapts a utopian, fantasy cult favorite by Larry Mitchell.Many operas in the standard repertoire are based on fairy tales and fantasy. But few of those describe a global queer-feminist revolution, and fewer still have main characters whose names begin with “Warren” and end with an unusual moniker for a genital appendage.Both can be found in “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” a new piece of music theater by the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman. After premiering at the Manchester International Festival on Thursday, it will travel, with its original roster of 15 performers, to the Aix-en-Provence Festival in early July, then elsewhere, including NYU Skirball in New York this fall.Venables and Huffman’s two previous collaborations — the operas “4.48 Psychosis,” based on Sarah Kane’s play about mental illness and suicide, and “Denis & Katya,” about teenage lovers in Russia who died in a 2016 livestreamed standoff with Russian police — have won them acclaim as artists who find beauty at the extremes of form and subject matter.Their new show, freely adapted from a gay liberation fantasy novel of the same name that was self-published by the activist Larry Mitchell in 1977, is both a continuation of that broader project and, as Venables said dryly in a video interview, “a tonal shift.”The piece, like the novel, covers thousands of years of human history, telling the story of the rise of an imperialist capitalist patriarchy called Ramrod; the resistance to that patriarchy by the sexual and racial Others it has created; and its eventual defeat by a revolutionary queer coalition.Katherine Goforth, front left, with Eric Lamb in rehearsal for the show, which will travel to NYU Skirball this fall.Tristram Kenton“There are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions,” this fairy tale reads, on the page and onstage. “The first is that we will get our [expletive] kicked. The second is that we will win.”Over the show’s 90 minutes, Rosie Elnile’s deceptively simple, bare stage becomes a model of this improvisatory, revolutionary utopia. Everything you hear, you see: The 15 performers play a largely memorized score on a mixed ensemble of baroque and modern instruments. A harpsichord, a theorbo and a viola da gamba sound alongside an upright piano and an electric organ.The result is a romp through history that’s both joyous and politically serious. “These stories of oppression and resistance are performed with and for each other,” Venables said, “as part of our processing of and resistance to oppression.” And the piece proposes and enacts the destruction of what it calls “the men’s categories” — the classifications of race, gender, expertise and taste that, it argues, stop the global majority from becoming free.“We all, at some stage in a utopia, want to get past identity politics to this universalism,” Venables said.The actor-choreographer Yandass, who narrates large portions of the show, said in a video interview that the show’s form echoes its politics: “Everyone is multiskilled in so many ways. I would imagine that’s how the utopia that’s dreamed of in this piece would be, everyone having different talents, having to rely on each other for cues, engaging in real teamwork.”The actor-choreographer Yandass, who narrates portions of the show.Tristram KentonWhen Mitchell wrote his book, he was inspired by Lavender Hill, a gay commune that he was a founding member of in Ithaca, N.Y. Such communes, which rejected both straight society and a gay movement that they saw as consumerist and assimilationist, peppered late 1970s and early 1980s America. They were places filled with political theorizing, collective cultural expression, and folk and baroque music. “Carl later gave the visiting harpsichordist a copy of ‘Eros and Civilization,’” reads a representative quote from a diary of life at a mid-1970s commune in the gay liberation journal RFD.Activists — many of whom, like Mitchell, settled on the word “faggot” to imply a gender-expansive, sex-positive and politically radical gay subjectivity — believed that collective movement had the power to change the world, and that folk and baroque dances were forms infused with political radicalism.In a video interview, Venables called this a “politics of pleasure and joy and play and community,” one he has sought to express in a musical style in which “form and genre are a way of putting on costumes and telling stories, with folk and baroque music references having to do with community music making, social gatherings and social rituals.”One aria, for example, starts as a duet between the soprano Mariamielle Lamagat and the harpist Joy Smith, before the gambist Jacob Garside joins in — on glockenspiel, and wearing a multicolored evening gown — helping to initiate a transformation of the tune into a swinging bossa nova, and eventually an accordion-accompanied shanty.Kit Green said that the production gives the sense “that we are a part of something bigger.”Tristram KentonThe book that inspired all this — despite, or perhaps because of, how rooted it is in its specific political moment — has had a recent revival. After years of being out of print, with copies and PDFs circulating among gay artists and activists like samizdat, it was republished in 2018.“I had questions about how Ted wanted to stage it because it felt uncomfortable doing some halcyon utopian thing set in the 1970s,” said Kit Green, one of the show’s narrators. “He is doing it in a way, though, where we are not part of the book. We’re telling it; there’s a distance. We’re on this massive time continuum, and when things feel hopeless, this sense that time rolls on, that we are a part of something bigger, feels different and exciting. We need that revolutionary zeal — but what does it mean now? We should all be asking that question.”As the performers gathered onstage during a dress rehearsal this week, Yshani Perinpanayagam — the music director, as well as a member of the cast — said: “There have been so many beautiful moments of connection today on- and off-set. If something doesn’t go as expected, just yes/and it. Go with it.”In the show, feats of technical bravado — in one early scene, Garside plays complex music on gamba while lying on his back on a blanket being dragged across the stage — are paired with simpler collective actions, like an aria accompanied both by the trained violin playing of Conor Gricmanis, as well as by much of the cast playing on the open strings of violins, a simple echoing of harmonies. Perinpanayagam gives some cues, but mostly the musicians play without a conductor.From left, Kerry Bursey, Collin Shay, Conor Gricmanis and Yshani Perinpanayagam in rehearsal.Tristram Kenton“We wanted to make it feel like a community onstage, to try to break down some of the hierarchies and traditional relationships that different art forms have onstage, especially classical music stages,” Huffman said in a video interview. “Asking everyone onstage to participate in everything is not a spirit of amateurism but of willingness to test one’s creativity, of finding beauty in simple things.”The challenge of the score, the flutist Eric Lamb said, is in “the physicality, the movement.” He added that he hoped audiences would “witness this love and understanding of 15 people onstage who inhabit various spaces within the queer community holding each other up and caring for each other.”These artists believe that the revolutions the piece aims to incite are both current and urgent. “Everything that I’d thought about my life made sense,” Yandass said, describing reading the book for the first time. “This is how I should have been living. I felt called out in terms of not sticking to my queerness, not sticking to my being. It helped me understand my thinking and my instincts.”Green mentioned the final section — in which the performers scream, “And the third revolution engulfs us all!” — and added, “I had a proper feeling of ‘Let’s do this! Let’s go out and start it!’” More

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      in Movies

      Will Children Save Us at the End of the World?

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      A wave of recent and forthcoming TV series, books and movies meditate on how young people might fare during an apocalyptic event — with varying degrees of optimism.The noxious orange smoke that descended over New York this month reminded me of a parlor game I used to play with my husband: Would we have what it takes to survive the apocalypse? We abruptly stopped enjoying this thought experiment in March 2020 and when I had a child the next year, I became even less tolerant of blithely considering the end of the world. But now, suddenly, versions of our game are everywhere, in a new and near-unavoidable genre: stories that revisit our pandemic trauma via even worse — but plausible! — scenarios. Making these works doubly poignant, many of them have children at their center.Mackenzie Davis in the series “Station Eleven” (2021-22).Ian Watson/HBO MaxThere’s “Station Eleven,” the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel about the aftermath of a swine flu, which was turned into a much-discussed 2021 HBO Max series, in which an 8-year-old girl manages to survive with the help of a stranger turned surrogate parent. “The Last of Us,” HBO’s video game adaptation, which debuted in January, features a zombie-fungus pandemic; a seemingly immune teenage girl is humanity’s one hope. “Leave the World Behind,” Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel — soon to be a movie — about a bourgeois family vacation gone very bad, features a vague but menacing threat of apocalypse. Also loosely belonging to this category are the shows “Yellowjackets” (2021-present) — a girls’ soccer team turns to cannibalism after a plane crash — and “Class of ’07” (2023) — a school reunion coincides with a climate apocalypse — and the new-to-Netflix 2019 Icelandic movie “Woman at War” (a renegade activist tries to stop the destruction of the environment and adopt a child).These stories are, in various ways, about how and whether our children can survive the mess that we’ve left them — and what it will cost them to do so. In “Station Eleven,” post-pans (children who were born after the pandemic) are both beacons of optimism and conscripted killers deployed by a self-styled prophet who hopes to erase anyone who holds on to the trauma of the past. And in “The Last of Us,” Ellie, the young girl with possible immunity (played by the actor Bella Ramsey), is forced to kill to survive, and to grapple with whether it’s worth sacrificing her own life in the search for a cure.The anxieties that these works explore — about planetary destruction and what we did to enable it — are, evidence suggests, affecting the desire of some to have children at all, either because of fear for their future or a belief that not procreating will help stave off the worst. But following the children in these fictions, who didn’t create the conditions of their suffering, isn’t just a devastating guilt trip. Almost all these stories also frame children as our best hope, as we so often do in real life. Children, we need to believe, are resilient and ingenious in ways that adults aren’t. In these stories, when the phones stop working and Amazon stops delivering, it’s children, less set in their ways, who can rebuild and imagine something different. They’re our victims but also our saviors.W. W. Norton & Company, via Associated PressNowhere is this more explicit than in Lydia Millet’s 2020 novel, “A Children’s Bible,” in which a group of middle-aged college friends rent an old mansion for a summer reunion. When a superstorm sets off a chain of events that erodes society, the parents drink and take ecstasy but the kids — teens — remain clearheaded. They care for a baby, grow food and plan for an unrecognizable future. This fantasy of a youth-led solution is both hopeful, Millet implies, and a deplorable shirking of responsibility. (It recalls somewhat Greta Thunberg’s rebuke of grown-ups: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”) Its price, these works suggest, is a childhood robbed of innocence. In the rare moments when kids are allowed to be kids in these narratives, there is always a sense of foreboding; for every romp through an abandoned shopping mall, there’s a zombie lying in wait in a Halloween store. “Is this really all they had to worry about?” Ellie asks Joel, her companion in “The Last of Us” (played by Pedro Pascal), about the teenage girls who lived before the fungus hit. “Boys. Movies. Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt.”Mahershala Ali, Myha’la Herrold, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in the forthcoming movie “Leave the World Behind.”JoJo Whilden/NetflixThis current crop of postapocalyptic stories isn’t the first to feature children prominently. Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road,” published in 2006, early in the so-called war on terror, followed a father and son after civilization had been leveled by an unnamed flash from the sky. (“Are we still the good guys?” the son asks the father as they ignore others’ pain in their struggle to survive.) The movie “Children of Men,” released the same year, imagines a world so destroyed that most humans have lost the ability to reproduce — and hope lies with the only pregnant woman. Of course, one reason these fictions foreground children is that a world without them is the most doomed world of all. It’s no accident that some of the earliest near-apocalypse stories — the biblical flood, the one in the ancient Mesopotamian poem “The Epic of Gilgamesh” — imagined that the world was saved by bringing the “seed of all living creatures,” as the latter work puts it, onto a boat.But maybe more than any particular fear of a civilization-ending calamity, these fictions are most useful for helping us work through an unavoidable, terrifying truth on an individual level. That the world, in whatever state it descends to or remains in, will go on without us after our death, and unless tragedy strikes, our children will live in it without us. It’s not comforting to imagine, but it can be illuminating. They will navigate things we can’t imagine, but — just maybe — they’ll do better than we did, even without our help. More

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      in Television

      Samantha Irby Says It’s OK to Hate Your Body

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      As far as descriptions of writers go, “humorist” has an old-fashioned, almost quaint ring to it, the literary equivalent of haberdasher or lamplighter. But across four book-length collections — the newest is the best seller “Quietly Hostile” — Samantha Irby has always brought scabrously honest, never pat and, it must be said, operatically scatological vivacity […] More

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      in Movies

      Cormac McCarthy Movies: Stream These 5 Film Adaptations

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      The Coens and Ridley Scott are among the directors who took big swings at the novelist’s work. The distinctive writer left his mark on the big screen.By turns terse, poetic and baroque, able to find the essence of human nature in the bleakest of circumstances, Cormac McCarthy, who died Tuesday, was widely considered to be one of the greatest novelists of his generation. His writing, with its Western landscapes, noir-inflected dialogue and biblical inclinations, proved to be catnip to filmmakers, including the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott and Billy Bob Thornton. Here is a look at how this most distinctive of writers left his mark on the big screen.‘All the Pretty Horses’ (2000)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Probably the gentlest of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy novels, this film adaptation tells the story of John Grady Cole, a young man who high-tails it across the border to Mexico, where he falls in love with a wealthy rancher’s daughter (Penélope Cruz), runs afoul of her family and the law, and navigates the horrors of prison life. Yes, this is gentle by McCarthy standards. Matt Damon, riding the success of “Good Will Hunting” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” plays Cole as a sensitive lad dumbstruck by love. Cruz, a native of Spain, does her best as a south-of-the-border lass. Thornton directs with lyrical respect for the source material, if not a whole lot of grit or imagination.‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.The Coen brothers return to the Texas noir roots of their first feature, “Blood Simple,” for the most successful McCarthy adaptation to date. It won Oscars for best picture, directing and screenwriting, as well as Javier Bardem’s supporting turn as one of McCarthy’s nihilistic villains, an implacable killing machine who speaks in riddles and engages his prey in fatal rhetorical jousts. But the heart of the movie, about a briefcase full of money and the in-over-his-head opportunist (Josh Brolin) who pilfers it, is Tommy Lee Jones as a small-town sheriff who wants out of the game, which seems to get more sinister and incomprehensible by the minute. He is the old man of the title and the author’s surrogate, a poetic soul just trying to wait it out until it’s all over.‘The Road’ (2009)Stream it on Tubi, Vudu and Freevee.The novel that brought McCarthy’s world to a wide audience (and won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize), “The Road” redeems a postapocalyptic hellscape with the pure love of a father (played by Viggo Mortensen with heartbreaking intensity) for his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, already a young actor of uncommon instincts). It’s a gray land of digitally enhanced wreckage, peopled by cannibals and other desperate survivors played by the likes of Robert Duvall, Michael K. Williams and, in a brief but indelible and terrifying performance, Garret Dillahunt. John Hillcoat directs like he means it. “The Road” is up there with “No Country” as one of the purest visual distillations of McCarthy’s prose.‘The Sunset Limited’ (2011)Stream it on Max.Sometimes McCarthy likes to take a couple of characters, wind them up and just let them riff on what it all means. His 2022 novel, “Stella Maris,” fits this bill, as does this HBO film version of McCarthy’s play “The Sunset Limited,” about a God-fearing ex-con called Black (Samuel L. Jackson) and the secular humanities professor, called White (Tommy Lee Jones), whom Black saves from jumping in front of a subway train. Confined to Black’s apartment, they thrust and parry, Black offering a brand of streetwise divinity, White stewing in his own suicidal juices. Both actors clearly relish the opportunity to speak McCarthy’s dialogue, and who could blame them? This is some of Jackson’s best work, allowing him to return to his theater roots with a high-wire act of philosophy and feeling. Jones’s direction is workmanlike, but that’s all this material really needs.‘The Counselor’ (2013)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Ridley Scott directs the only original screenplay on McCarthy’s résumé, an unfairly maligned and misunderstood blast of criminal nihilism that carries the noir direction of “No Country” to its apotheosis. Michael Fassbender plays a glib lawyer whose taste for the finer things gets him in deep with a Mexican cartel. Other players come and go, including Brad Pitt, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Bruno Ganz and Cameron Diaz, who has an amorous encounter with a luxury car that you will never unsee. This is McCarthy and Scott having infectious fun with humanity’s dark side, including two bravura murder scenes notable for their cruelty and creativity. More