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      Chloe Moriondo and girl in red, Maestros of Growing Pains

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      Moriondo cited Marie Ulven (who records as girl in red) as an early influence. Both are releasing new albums that showcase frank emotions and more ambitious productions.Chloe Moriondo began posting YouTube videos in 2014, when she was 11 years old, part of the early waves of young people who built their musical identity on the platform, one bedroom-pop song at a time. She’d been growing up in public for years by August 2019, when she posted a video titled “a ramble about self identity, growth, and being a lesbian.”She was evolving, she said, and a lot of the old songs she’d sung (or even listened to) no longer felt quite right. Her tastes were changing, and her confidence was growing. A month later, she posted a cover of girl in red’s “Bad Idea,” and at the end of the performance, spoke about how influential girl in red’s music was becoming on her own songwriting.When the Norwegian teenager Marie Ulven began posting songs online as girl in red in 2016, she quickly attracted fervent attention for her ecstatically frank and utterly candid declarations of gay love, and quickly built a community for whom girl in red fandom was a safe space for identity expression.Ulven also provided a raw foundation that’s now being built upon, both by her acolytes and also herself, as is clear from two excellent new releases: “If I Could Make It Go Quiet,” the first full-length girl in red album, and “Blood Bunny,” Moriondo’s major label debut album.On the robust and vividly plain-spoken “Blood Bunny,” Moriondo, now 18, is a pop-punk whiz, deftly hopping between musical approaches from spare to lushly produced, and emphasizing intimate, cut-to-the-bone lyrics. Most songs are about relationships that don’t quite congeal, like “Manta Rays,” when she sings, “My therapist will tell me that it’s best to let it be/but I wanna light fires, I wanna explode/I want to be everything you want to know.”Moriondo writes with a winning bluntness, both about her own shortcomings and the objects of her obsession. “I wanna be with her all day/I’m a bitch to everyone else anyway,” she shrugs on the crystalline “Strawberry Blonde.” On the frisky, muscular “Take Your Time,” she bemoans her fate of being in thrall to someone who’s no longer around: “I wanna know/what will it take to make you let me go/You don’t fade like old stick and pokes.”Musically, Moriondo has absorbed several waves of punk praxis. On “I Want to Be With You,” she’s a maximalist, comfortable with jet-engine-intense production, and “Girl on TV” is keenly tuneful, verging on Avril Lavigne, or even Ashlee Simpson territory. But some songs on this album, like “Rly Don’t Care” and “Favorite Band,” are redolent of the earliest, and sparest, girl in red singles — direct production, and the simple joys of expressing oneself in first person, reveling in the emphatic, liberating power of the “I.”Moriondo is part of a microgeneration influenced by Ulven’s loud and uncomplicated transparency. (She had been scheduled to open for Ulven on tour last year before the pandemic.) Ulven is 22 now, and her emotional circumstances have become more complex. “If I Could Make It Go Quiet” finds her in the throes of romantic anxiety, singing about relationships that are buckling under the weight of her success. “If I ever make it back/Will I find what we once had?” she sings on “Hornylovesickmess. “Guess I ruined us pretty bad/So don’t ever take me back.”Ulven is also astute in capturing the pain of coming in runner-up for someone’s affections. “I can’t be your midnight love/When your silver is my gold,” she sings on “Midnight Love,” with vocals suggesting an unusually spooky Dusty Springfield.Early in her career, Ulven’s production was unfussy, but as she’s developed, her songs have become amplified. “Did You Come?” is rife with moaning feedback, and the lightly curdled “You Stupid Bitch” pulses with a wall of sound that nods to new wave.“If I Could Make It Go Quiet” was produced entirely with the Norwegian musician Matias Telléz, the only exception being “Serotonin,” which is also produced by Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother and sonic architect. It’s a lush song that’s also risky, singing about a painful, chaotic internal tug of war:I getIntrusive thoughtsLike cutting my hands offLike jumping in front of a busLike how do I make this stopAnd yet Ulven’s vocals are rendered dreamily, almost inspirationally, over guitars that slash and throb in the manner of loud 1990s indie rock. Her boldness and defiance is taking on new shades — just like those she influenced, Ulven is growing up in public, too.girl in red“If I Could Make It Go Quiet”(AWAL)Chloe Moriondo“Blood Bunny”(Public Consumption Recording Co./Fueled by Ramen) More

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      Live Your Gay Millennial Pandemic Fantasy in Stardew Valley

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      In the farming RPG, I can enjoy a life of pastoral domesticity. IRL, I’m a lesbian urbanite struggling through the pandemic.Fed up with his soulless corporate job, a young man moves to the farm he inherited from his grandfather, where he joins a quaint community and meets his future husband. That’s not the plot of a new gay Hallmark movie — it’s the story of my pixelated alter ego in the video game Stardew Valley.In February 2016, Eric Barone, known online by his alias ConcernedApe, released Stardew Valley for PC. The simulation role-playing game quickly became a hit. In the pandemic, Stardew Valley fever is back with a vengeance. Thanks to the popularity of the Nintendo Switch and a massive game update released in December, it recently sold its 10 millionth copy.Since its debut, Stardew Valley has been lauded for its relaxing, immersive gameplay, a Harvest Moon-inspired simulator sure to delight lovers of Animal Crossing. Players create their own farmer avatars, who then leave the city for Stardew Valley. There, they manage their farms while honing skills, completing quests and, if the player desires, romancing an eligible villager. The game’s wholesomeness is universally appealing, but its particular blend of same-sex romance options, anti-corporate sentiment and pastoral Zen makes it even more tailored to escapists like me — gay millennial urbanites stuck in an endless pandemic slog. I grew up thinking any adult could easily have access to the simple life. Now I’m pretty sure I can only get it from a computer game.In real life, I’m a single lesbian in Brooklyn trudging through my second year working from home. My most productive days involve a move from Office A (the desk in my bedroom) to Office B (my coffee table). On Thursdays, I wake up excited to water my houseplants. I cope with stir craziness by watching TikToks of mushroom foragers, expert hikers and cottagecore lesbians. These people all seem to live in a universe sans Gmail, Zoom or masks, their rents paid by birdsong and dried lavender.In Stardew Valley, life can also be that simple. My farmer’s days usually go like this: He wakes up and gets coffee for his husband, then kisses said husband and their two toddlers before setting about his agrarian duties — collecting eggs, making goat cheese, planting sunflowers. His biggest problem right now is a voluntary quest to ship 500 fruits by the month’s end. There are no consequences for failure. I can redo any bad day with the click of a button.During same-sex weddings, the officiant charmingly stumbles through pronouncements of “husband and husband” or “wife and wife.”Stardew ValleyThough inclusive romance has increasingly become an option in open-ended, role-playing games like Stardew Valley, it is rarely the default in video games. Players take on straight male personas by rote in blowout franchises like Halo, Zelda, Grand Theft Auto and Mario. And same-sex romance — much less same-sex domesticity — is already scarce in media of all kinds. When depicted, that romance is often necessarily fraught with real-world problems: coming out, finding a community, combating prejudice. In Stardew Valley, my farmer’s gayness is a nonissue. I had him woo his husband, the town doctor, by bringing him fruits and vegetables.Yet gayness is not so embraced as to become invisible. If you have your farmer pursue a younger villager of the same sex, cut scenes sometimes show the young person shyly acknowledging their first gay crush. During same-sex weddings, the officiant charmingly stumbles through pronouncements of “husband and husband” or “wife and wife.”This balance between inclusivity and acknowledgment can feel especially heartwarming given the game’s small-town setting. A 2019 report by the think tank Movement Advancement Project found that, although between 3 and 5 percent of rural Americans identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, their environments come with significant challenges. “On average, public opinion in rural areas is relatively less supportive of L.G.B.T. people and issues,” the report states, citing discriminatory legislation and political representation as additional barriers.There is one notable blind spot in the game’s sunny outlook: You can customize your avatar to have a darker skin tone, but your farmer would join a minority in Stardew Valley. There are only three characters in the game’s preset, 41-person world with dark skin, making this pixelated paradise more alienating for people of color.There are no consequences if the avatar fails at his tasks. The player can redo any bad day with the click of a button.Stardew ValleyEven if I did want to change my career, overcome those obstacles and live out my gay farm fantasy, homeownership feels even less realistic to me, at 26. According to a recent survey, most millennials reported they do not have enough saved up to make the average U.S. down payment. Even if I could get a mortgage, it’s difficult to imagine I could pay it off with fresh dairy and organic parsnips.In Stardew Valley, corporate greed is a far more oppressive force than homophobia. JojaMart, the Amazon-meets-Walmart conglomerate from which your farmer escapes, hopes to take over the town by replacing the community center with a warehouse. Competition drives prices up at the local seed shop, and two villagers struggle with poverty and alcoholism. In order to rebuild the community, players must grow, craft and forage a series of goods. From there, it’s practically impossible to spend your hard-earned Stardew Valley cash maliciously. After exhausting your options for farm buildings and house expansions, all that remain are ways to uplift the town, like upgrading a fellow villager’s trailer home to a house.As I scroll social media, I see my peers indulging their own fantasies with mood boards and TikTok videos of beautiful weddings, humble woodland cottages and biodiverse lawns. These things are attainable in theory, but to many young gay people today, they can feel more like daydreams. I don’t think my farmer avatar will be able to harvest his 500 crops before the clock runs out, but at least he comes by those simple pleasures easily. More

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      ‘Tu Me Manques’ Review: Traces of a Lost Love

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      A conservative father who could not accept his son’s sexuality is led on a contemplative tour of queer life in New York in this Bolivian film.The Bolivian film “Tu Me Manques” begins with a fight for an absent man’s affection. Jorge (Oscar Martínez) was the father of Gabriel, the former lover of Sebastian (Fernando Barbosa). When a chance phone call makes it possible for Jorge and Sebastian to meet, Sebastian is quick to hurl accusations at Jorge, who wouldn’t accept his son’s sexuality. Jorge has only tragedy to fling back: Gabriel died by suicide upon returning from New York City to Bolivia.What follows is an exploration of grief and adoration, as both men try to find a way to honor Gabriel’s memory. Jorge travels to New York looking for answers, and in response, Sebastian gives him a tour of Gabriel’s life in the city, introducing him to queer friends and gay nightclubs. The reminiscences lead Sebastian to write a play about his lost love, and the movie uses his theatrical ideas as an interesting, if somewhat alienating, reason to experiment with editing and form. Sebastian hires 30 actors to perform the role of his beloved — a gimmick that is mimicked in the film’s flashback sequences, which rotate in different performers as Gabriel.The film was written and directed by Rodrigo Bellott, who adapted the story from his play of the same name, based on similar events in his own life. Though the movie’s aesthetics are tepidly pleasant, Bellott’s biggest success is freeing his film’s relationship to time. In this sense, the movie retains some of the vitality of theater, where the characters invite the audience into reverie. Sebastian’s past, present, future and his fantasies of all three interact through flash-forwards and flashbacks, weaving together to create a moving and intellectually rewarding testament to queer life and loss.Tu Me ManquesNot rated. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on virtual cinemas. More

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      in Television

      Colton Underwood, ‘Bachelor’ Star, Comes Out as Gay

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      The 29-year-old former football player had written about questioning his sexuality in a memoir, published in 2020.Colton Underwood, a star of “The Bachelor” and a former football player, came out as gay in an interview with Robin Roberts that aired Wednesday on “Good Morning America.”He described 2020 as a year of self-reflection, one that “probably made a lot of people look in the mirror and confront what they were running from or what they’ve been putting off in their lives.”“I’ve ran from myself for a long time,” Mr. Underwood, 29, said in the interview. “I’ve hated myself for a long time. And I’m gay. And I came to terms with that earlier this year and have been processing it, and the next step in all of this was sort of letting people know.”He said that coming to understand his sexuality has been a “journey,” and now he is “the happiest and healthiest” he’s felt in his life. He had reached a low in 2020, he said, that led to thoughts of self-harm and suicide.“I got to a place where I didn’t think I was ever going to share this,” he said. “I would have rather died than say, ‘I’m gay.’ And I think that was sort of my wake-up call.”In his 2020 memoir, “The First Time: Finding Myself and Looking for Love on Reality TV,” Mr. Underwood described being confronted by his parents about his sexuality as a teenager.“‘You know, Colt, we’d still love you and support you if you were gay,’” he recalled his mother telling him.His father was more confrontational. “He’d pulled up the history of recent Google searches, which included gay porn sites and a variety of questions: ‘Am I gay? How do you know if you’re gay? Why don’t I like having sex with my girlfriend?’” Mr. Underwood wrote in the book. “At first, I denied responsibility. Then I owned up to having been curious. He asked if I wanted to talk about it. I said no, explaining that I’d figured things out on my own.”Mr. Underwood appeared on “The Bachelorette” in 2018 and quickly became a fan favorite on the reality dating show. But Becca Kufrin, the season’s star, worried that he was unprepared for a lifelong commitment and eliminated him after their “hometown” date, where she met his family. (The show’s producers had made Mr. Underwood’s sexual inexperience a major plot point.)He starred on “The Bachelor” in 2019, where again his virginity was a central theme. Near the end of the season, as the stress of the show increased, he said he was “done” with filming and “jumped the fence” of a resort in the Algarve region of Portugal in an effort to escape the set.After the show ended, Mr. Underwood and Cassie Randolph, 25, the front-runner of his season, began dating. Ms. Randolph’s family helped him recover from Covid-19 in March, around the time his memoir was published.The couple announced their split in May 2020. In November, Ms. Randolph filed a restraining order against Mr. Underwood, who she said had placed a tracking device on her car. Viewers of his “Good Morning America” segment inferred that this was the personal low to which he was alluding.The “Bachelor” franchise had its first onscreen same-sex relationship in 2019 on “Bachelor in Paradise.” Demi Burnett, who appeared on Mr. Underwood’s season of “The Bachelor,” and Kristian Haggerty, who was flown out to the set midseason, ended up getting engaged. (They later broke it off.)In its 20 years, the franchise has never featured an all-gay cast. More

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      Eddy de Pretto Is the Proud Sound of a New France

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      Born in the Paris suburbs, the singer has made waves with two albums that draw as much from ’60s chanson as contemporary hip-hop.Eddy de Pretto is now 27, and these days he sings on some of the largest stages in France — or he did, when the stages were open. When he was 21, he performed for a smaller audience: the tourists on the bateaux-mouches, the Paris sightseeing cruises that ply millions of people up and down the Seine.“It was a pretty crazy job. I was on the singing cruises, the ones where they serve you dinner,” de Pretto said in a recent video interview from Paris. From the little stage in the boat’s dining room, he recalled, he’d serenade tourists with syrupy Charles Trenet standards, to total indifference. “They were eating, looking out at the Eiffel Tower. They didn’t even realize someone was singing — they thought it was a soundtrack.”“But those three years on the bateaux-mouches were so completely typical of what it’s like to make a career,” he added. “It was totally formative to sing every night in front of people who didn’t give a damn at all.”Those lonely nights on the cruise ship are the origin of “À Tous Les Bâtards” (“To All the Bastards”), de Pretto’s second album, released in France last month. “I was waiting patiently to take the throne/And they’d sing my songs like I sang ‘La Vie en Rose,’” he belts on the first single, “Bateaux-Mouches,” whose started-from-the-bottom lyrics recall many a hip-hop boast. But name-checking both Rihanna and Édith Piaf as your lodestars? That’s rarer.De Pretto burst to fame in 2018 with his triple-platinum album “Cure,” and its blend of urban beats and chanson poetics was not its only uncommon attribute. There was his voice: big and vibrant, with every syllable articulated for the back of the house. There was his look: hoodies and tracksuits, a three-day beard, and a strawberry-blond tonsure like a medieval monk’s. And there was his biography: a young gay man, uninhibited and unperturbed, from the suburbs that Parisians still typecast as a cultural backwater.De Pretto started out singing on the tourist barges that ply the River Seine. “It was totally formative to sing every night in front of people who didn’t give a damn at all,” he said.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesHe was born in 1993 in Créteil, to the capital’s southeast. His father was a driver, and his mother a medical technician who revered an earlier generation of French singer-songwriters. “We lived in public housing, and my mother listened to a lot of Barbara, Brassens, Brel, Charles Aznavour,” he said. “She listened to it all the time, and really loud, too. Loud enough to hear it over the vacuum cleaner.”De Pretto said he played sports as a child, badly enough that his mother enrolled him in acting classes. The stage suited him. He landed a few small TV and movie roles. But his theatrical tendencies were not in harmony with the macho culture of the Paris suburbs.That tension inspired his breakout single, “Kid,” a mid-tempo ballad about parents and their effeminate sons. “You’ll be manly, my kid,” de Pretto sings over spare piano chords and digital hi-hats, though the song’s video shows him struggling to heed the call. Shirtless and sweat-soaked in the gym, de Pretto looks far too rangy to lift the massive barbells, trapped between family expectations and his true nature.“Every single word of ‘Kid’ is so wonderful,” said the singer Jane Birkin, who performed a duet with de Pretto in 2018. “He faced up to quite a lot of teasing, getting through in quite a tough neighborhood, with tough friends. And I should think he made himself respected — I wouldn’t mess around with him. And, at the same, time he has great fragility and great poignancy.”“Kid” was an instant hit in France, and seemed to come out of nowhere. De Pretto’s weighty voice sounded like a ’60s throwback, but he sang over spare, menacing, bass-heavy beats. The slangy lyrics had the vibrancy of the suburbs, but they were as poetic as they were acidic, with that French fixation on what de Pretto calls “the weight of the word.”For his first big TV appearance, in 2017, he performed with nothing but his own iPhone for accompaniment. The album cover of “Cure” had the same Gen-Z nonchalance: mirror selfie, phone in hand, leg hoisted on the kitchen table. A critic for the French newspaper Libération said astringently — but not without cause — that it looked like a late-night drunk pic sent to a Grindr hookup.Indeed, there was also de Pretto’s subject matter: furtive glances in the locker room, sloppy after-parties in darkened basements, grim evenings trawling the apps. On his spiky single “Fête de Trop” (“One Party Too Many”), he details the malaise of yet another evening getting high and “slipping my tongue into the salivating mouths” of “tonight’s boys.” “Jungle de la Chope” (“The Hookup Jungle”) delves into the “insipid conquests” of casual sex, safe or otherwise.Some gay musicians treat their homosexuality as a nonissue; others want to make it a mark of distinction. What made de Pretto’s debut so thrilling was that he did neither. He assumed his identity to the hilt, and thereby made it nothing special. “I’m writing from my point of view as a gay man,” he said. “But the songs are not a defense of being gay. I mean, yes, I’m gay, and I’m casting an eye on society.”De Pretto said his albums were about “breaking these fantasies and these received ideas of what happens in the suburbs,” and confounding a “stereotypical view of being gay.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesHe has, however, recorded one sideways pride anthem. “Grave” (“A Big Deal”) is a funny, filthy encouragement to anxious gay youth — think Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” for teens whose first view of same-sex intimacy comes through streaming video. It’s a catalog aria of gay rites of passage that, de Pretto sings, are “not a big deal”: scoping out classmates in gym class, fantasizing about your best friend, and many more not printable in a family newspaper. “Not living it: That’s a big deal!” goes the refrain.“If I had to compare him to anyone, it would be Christine and the Queens, although Eddy hasn’t exploded internationally,” said Romain Burrel, the editor of the French gay magazine Têtu. “Christine really opened the way for questions of gender and sexual orientation,” he said. “But Eddy is very, very French. There’s been a globalization of music, but when you listen to Eddy de Pretto, you’re in the 11th Arrondissement.”Musically, “À Tous Les Bâtards” sounds a lot like “Cure”: the same big voice, the same minimal beats. But de Pretto’s writing has become less angry, more confessional. “Désolé Caroline” (“Sorry Caroline”), its second single, sounds at first like a breakup song, addressed from a young gay man to the straight girl he cannot love. (In the interview, De Pretto described this kind of romantic rejection with the charming franglais verb “friendzoné.”)Then again, this “Caroline” — whom the singer wants to get out of “my veins” — may not be an actual girl. She may be a personification of cocaine: a double meaning he underlines in the music video, which features de Pretto in a white parka singing amid flurries of snow.“I love playing with these double meanings,” de Pretto said, “because it opens up the field of possibilities.” He certainly leaves the field open at the end of “À Tous Les Bâtards,” in the ingeniously smutty ballad “La Zone.” Here suburbs and sexuality become interchangeable, as de Pretto entreats us in a smooth falsetto to risk visiting … well, a certain area often considered dirty, or dangerous.“La zone,” in French slang, denotes a rough suburban neighborhood, the sort of place you might go to score drugs. But as de Pretto croons of the “dark pleasures” of a place where “some men are afraid to go,” we realize the particular zone he’s inviting you to is more anatomical than geographical. (Birkin said this song reminded her of “Sonnet du Trou de Cul,” a poem by Verlaine and Rimbaud written in 1871. “It’s a wonder people don’t talk about it more!” she added.)The Paris suburbs have birthed so many of France’s best singers and actors and artists, not to mention the reigning world champions of soccer. And yet western Europe’s largest and most diverse city still treats the towns outside its ring road as inaccessible places. “That was the whole project of the first and, I hope, this second album: breaking these fantasies and these ideas everyone has of what happens in the suburbs,” de Pretto said. “And of a pretty stereotypical view of being gay.”“That’s the job of an artist,” he said, “to find points of view that haven’t been found yet.” More

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      In Rina Sawayama, Elton John Found a Collaborator and a Friend

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      From left: RINA SAWAYAMA, singer, 30; and ELTON JOHN, singer, 74. Photographed at John’s home in Old Windsor, England, on March 1, 2021. New Friends The rising star and the established icon who’ve discovered they have a lot in common. From left: RINA SAWAYAMA, singer, 30; and ELTON JOHN, singer, 74. Photographed at John’s home […] More

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      in Television

      Last Call: ‘Shameless’ Showrunner Says Goodbye to the Gallaghers

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      John Wells discussed the impact of the pandemic and police protests on Sunday’s series finale.This interview includes spoilers for Sunday’s series finale of “Shameless.”Before he created “Shameless,” the long-running family drama that ended Sunday night on Showtime, John Wells was the showrunner of “ER” and later seasons of “The West Wing,” both on NBC.Though the shows are superficially dissimilar, Wells sees all of them as examinations of function — or dysfunction. “ER” is about how medicine works. “The West Wing” is about how government works. And “Shameless”?“That’s about how the system doesn’t really work for families living near the poverty line,” Wells said. “Man, talk about that being underrepresented on television! That is a huge portion of our society that we don’t tell nearly enough stories about.”Over 11 seasons, “Shameless” conveyed the outrageous and topical stories of the Gallaghers, a sprawling family with largely absent addict parents Frank and Monica (played by William H. Macy and Chloe Webb), leaving the daughter Fiona (Emmy Rossum) to raise her younger siblings Lip (Jeremy Allen White), Ian (Cameron Monaghan), Debbie (Emma Kenney), Carl (Ethan Cutkosky) and Liam (Christian Isaiah).Based on a British TV series, the Showtime version transferred the scruffy family to the South Side of Chicago and, among other things, thoroughly modernized the British concept of “kitchen-sink drama.” The Gallagher kitchen hosted such events as Monica slicing her wrists, Fiona having impromptu sex, Debbie giving birth, Frank removing Debbie’s necrotic toes and then-toddler Liam collapsing from a cocaine overdose.“Comedy can be brutal,” Wells said. “It can reach past our reluctance of being preached to.”“Shameless,” he added, is “a show about a family trying to survive and laughing their way through it.”Wells would have been happy to continue relating the Gallaghers’ misadventures — while addressing weighty topical issues like inequality, gentrification, addiction, mental illness and sexuality — for “another 20 years.” But Showtime gave the show a final season just before the coronavirus pandemic. Then three days before shooting began, in which the mostly grown-up Gallaghers finally disperse, production was shut down for months.During the unexpected time off, Wells rethought the season and decided to incorporate the pandemic, using Frank, who was long past his sell-by date for various medical reasons, as the poster boy for anti-maskers. In Sunday’s series finale, Frank died of Covid.“We weren’t trying to do a ‘Very Special Episode,’” Wells said. “Even in comedies that are satirical, there should be real consequences.”In a phone interview from Victoria, British Columbia, where he’s working on a new series for Netflix, Wells discussed the inspiration for Frank’s death, Fiona’s near-return and the legacy of “Shameless.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Frank has so many possible comorbidities,” Wells said. “Covid is just the thing that finally pushed him over the edge.”Paul Sarkis/ShowtimeYou rewrote the entire season after the shutdown. Was Frank destined to die all along? How did you decide he would get Covid? There have been plenty of Covid-19 subplots on TV but I can’t think of another lead character who actually died from it.We didn’t want Frank to get off scot-free for all his lifestyle choices. We were always planning for him to pass away from something at the end. Originally, we were thinking he would take his own life in an overdose. What the hell — why not go out in a blaze of glory?Then I lost a close family member from Covid at Christmastime. That’s happening to lots of families. So I thought, “We should make a comment on that.” We tried to make a comment all season on the particular difficulties that the pandemic has presented in low-income communities, and still make it kind of funny. To have Frank die of something else in the midst of this pandemic, it would be a little too easy. Frank has so many possible comorbidities — Covid is just the thing that finally pushed him over the edge. There’s certainly some schadenfreude in this, Frank always thinking he can skate by everything and coming to a moment he couldn’t skate by.In his delirium, Frank mistakes a health care worker for Fiona, which is the first time that she has been mentioned since Emmy Rossum left the show two years ago. Why haven’t the Gallaghers talked about their sister? The house is in Fiona’s name, and she remains Liam’s legal guardian.We had written in various mentions of Fiona over the last two years, but Showtime asked us not to remind people of her absence. I think they were very concerned that Emmy’s absence would significantly hurt the viewership of the show.We very much wanted to try and bring back Fiona for the finale, but there was just no way to make it all work with the pandemic. I’m sure Emmy would have come back and done it, and it would have been nice to see her again. But she had some health concerns about returning, quarantining and trying to be safe. It’s hard to question anybody’s choices based on travel and safety.There was going to be a family discussion about who was going to take care of Frank. In the early ideas of the story, that was a perfect way to have Fiona return. We had some humorous versions of it, where they all got sick of Frank, put him in a box and sent him down to Florida. And then Fiona opened the box! Best laid plans.Did Showtime ever veto any other ideas or voice other concerns?It was kind of our inside joke: “You can do about anything, but you can’t steal a library book.” I think that was because [Showtime co-president of entertainment] Gary Levine didn’t want to encourage people to actually keep library books. [Laughs.] Showtime expressed concern about various things that then they ultimately supported, like Frank sending Carl to cancer camp. The idea was that every kid should be able to go to camp.In the early days, we had a lot of conversations about Frank choosing to sleep with Lip’s girlfriend Karen (Laura Slade Wiggins). Then we came up with the solution of how Frank would seek forgiveness, how Lip would urinate on Frank’s head and Frank would actually accept it, because he realized he deserved it. It was always about the balance of what’s been done and what we leave unpunished and unforgiven in the family, because the show is really just about how a family can pull itself through all different kinds of crisis.In its final season, “Shameless” sought to reflect the losses many families have experienced during the pandemic.Paul Sarkis/ShowtimeWas there ever a story that you wished you had contextualized more?Carl’s story line, becoming a cop. We could have used two more seasons to explore that. We had a lot of conversations with Showtime about how much we could say. It was a fine line, trying to ride an ongoing conversation in the country.How much did the Black Lives Matter protests and the ongoing national conversation about racial inequality influence what you had originally planned?Carl’s story line became far more topical. Not that these issues weren’t always there, but they became front and center after a number of horrific incidents of police brutality. What is proper policing? Is the purpose of the police to protect the well-off from the not-well-off? There are certainly many people who believe that. That’s an oversimplification, but we all need to understand what those fears of the police are, the lack of trust that exists in a lot of communities.We were also trying to address things about lack of housing. One thing I wish we had another year to explore was the eviction moratorium expiring, when we discover just how many people have lost their jobs and live with food insecurity. I’d love to be talking about pandemic checks, and what a huge difference affordable day care would make to Debbie and Tami (Kate Miner). We’d find the humor in these stories but these are life-and-death issues for families who live on the margin.Why do you think “Shameless” wasn’t part of a larger cultural conversation, particularly during awards seasons?I never want to complain about it, because I’ve been on the good side of that equation. But I would say that when you’re doing stories about people who are less fortunate, if you’re not providing easy answers, the shows tend to get overlooked a bit more. I don’t have any explanation for why “The Wire” was never the most decorated show in television history. We want to pretend that the country is egalitarian, that it’s a meritocracy, that everybody has the same opportunities, and it’s just not true. That’s hard for us to accept. It challenges our sense of who we are. What are our responsibilities to each other?There was some backlash. Critics did not latch onto the show at the beginning. Many people wanted to write off “Shameless” as a sex comedy. And that’s OK. We had a great, loyal audience for a long time. People would stop me on the street and tell me that Frank was like their dad. Kids would come to our Chicago set, and tell us about how they were thrown out of their homes for being gay, lesbian or trans. People would tell us how their big sister raised them, or how they reconnected with older siblings because of the show. We all search for community, and the Gallagher world was a community of kids who cared about each other.What would you want to see in a “Shameless” spinoff?I want to see the Alibi cop-bar story, and what happens with Carl and Arthur (Joshua Malina) as police officers. I love Kevin (Steve Howey) and Veronica (Shanola Hampton), and would love to see what happens to them. Lip was on the verge of actually figuring things out and succeeding. We have a massive legion of fans for Ian and Mickey (Noel Fisher), so seeing where their life goes. For many people, they represent different ideas of who gay men can be and how those relationships can be.We did what we set out to do. Hopefully people enjoyed it, saw some of their own hardships in it, or have a little more empathy for the tens of millions of people in America who live at the poverty level that the Gallaghers lived at in the show. Tip your waiter a little bit more. Leave some extra money for the maid when you stay at a hotel or motel. Be a little more understanding with the person who delivers your package. Try and walk in other people’s shoes.Having all these stories out there reminds people that the things that they might be ashamed of and feel need to be hidden, nah — we’ve got to talk about it. More

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      From a South African Slur to a Scathing Drama About Toxic Masculinity

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      The new film “Moffie” examines the brainwashing of a generation of white men in the twilight of the apartheid regime.“Mo-FFIES!” chant the soldiers, precisely lined up under a baking sun, as a screaming sergeant reviles two men reported to be lovers. “Mo-ffies! Mo-ffies! Mo-ffies!”The word is a homophobic slur in Afrikaans, and the scene comes about 30 minutes into Oliver Hermanus’s new film, “Moffie.” It depicts South Africa in the early 1980s, when the country’s white government saw threats from the communists at the border, terrorists at home and the anti-apartheid movement worldwide. Every white man over 16 had to do two years of military service, and “Moffie” suggests the story of a generation through the shy recruit Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer). He endures the brutal basic training designed to brainwash the young men into a paranoid, aggressive defense of the apartheid regime, and is sent to fight on the border, while quietly experiencing an awakening of sexual identity in the worst possible context.“A scarringly brilliant anatomy of white South African masculinity,” Guy Lodge wrote in Variety upon the film’s premiere at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. It was equally well reviewed in South Africa before its distribution was derailed by the pandemic. The drama is reaching American theaters and video on demand on April 9.Telling a story set in the apartheid era from a white point of view was not an obvious choice for the Cape Town-born Hermanus, 37, who is mixed race (known as “colored” in South Africa), and did not join the army.“I did wonder whether my first film set in the apartheid era could really be about white South African men as victims of apartheid,” Hermanus said in an interview in London, where he is about to begin filming an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru,” written by Kazuo Ishiguro. “It’s not quite doing Winnie or Nelson Mandela!”Kai Luke Brummer plays a South African conscript uncertain of his sexuality.IFC FilmsIt was the title that intrigued the South African-born producer Eric Abraham (“Ida”), when he chanced upon the novel “Moffie” by André Carl van der Merwe a few years ago in London. “Anyone who has grown up in South Africa knows the power of that word to hurt,” he said in an interview. “It was the most demeaning, derogatory term you could come up with, used by white people to intimidate and de-select those who they feared infecting their ideology.”Abraham and his fellow producer Jack Sidey approached Hermanus, whose 2011 film, “Beauty,” they admired. He was initially skeptical. “In South Africa, you always arrive with a racial perspective, and that’s how I first thought about ‘Moffie,’” he said. “But something about it gripped me, and I realized that it is really about shame and indoctrination.”The word, he added, is equally vicious for a straight or gay man, “because it identifies you as an outsider, a man who does not embody the qualities of the strong hypermasculine dominator.”After working with two writers, Hermanus and Sidey eventually wrote the script together, moving away from the novel’s more personal love story. “I was more interested in the hurt and indoctrination than the protagonist’s catharsis,” Hermanus said. “I didn’t want to make another gay-centric relationship drama set in the army. I wanted it to be a serious portrait of this generation.”Hermanus obliquely and subtly evokes Nicholas’s shifting emotions, as the soldier gradually forms a silent attachment to a fellow conscript, Dylan Stassen (Ryan de Villiers). The price of expressing such feelings is made clear in that early scene when the two lovers, bloodied and trembling, are taunted and humiliated. Later, we learn they have been sent to the fearsome Ward 22, where they are the subject of brutal experimental treatments intended to cure homosexuals, drug addicts and others deemed to be deviant.“It was very important to both Oliver and me that Nicholas wasn’t certain of his sexuality,” Brummer said in a video interview from Cape Town. “His focus is survival, finding out how to fit in, and in finding Dylan something in him ignites, and his understanding of the world shifts.”The deep social repression of sexuality and of otherness is evoked midway through the film in a brightly colored, sun-dappled flashback to a childhood experience of humiliation, which Hermanus drew from his own memories. It is shot in a single take, one of several unpredictable cinematic decisions that inflect the movie. “We set a lot of rules beforehand about our choices, but sometimes you just surrender to what is there,” said Jamie D. Ramsay, the director of photography, who had worked with Hermanus on two previous films. “Oliver is brave and will commit and say, ‘OK that’s the shot.’”The director was initially skeptical of a film about apartheid told from a white perspective. “In South Africa, you always arrive with a racial perspective, and that’s how I first thought about ‘Moffie,’” he said.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesHermanus, who was 11 when apartheid ended, said that he had always been obsessed with films, shooting his first movie — “a horror movie, terrible, starring my cousin” — at 13. After earning a degree in film and media studies from the University of Cape Town, he worked at a film production company (“as a slave”) eventually becoming a newspaper photographer. All the time, he said, “I wanted to be a filmmaker, and was living through a depression as a colored South African who just didn’t know how to make that happen.”A chance meeting with the director Roland Emmerich and his cinematographer, Ueli Steiger, in a Cape Town restaurant led to a friendship that changed everything. “One day Roland said to me, if you can get in to film school, I’ll give you a scholarship,” Hermanus recounted. “Somehow they saw something in me; it’s a perfect example of what it means to invest in people.”Hermanus went to the London Film School for three years, and made the full-length “Shirley Adams” as his graduation movie. “You are supposed to make a short film, but I wore them out,” Hermanus said. The film’s critical success in South Africa and abroad led to the invitation of a residency in Cannes, where he began to work on “Beauty,” a study of a gay obsession in a tight Afrikaans community.Like Hermanus’s other films, “Moffie” is the product of what he describes as “forensic” preparation. He researched the era, helped by Ramsay, who had collected images of the South African border war in the ’70s and ’80s before he was involved with the movie. And the director met regularly with the actors for months, working out their back stories, then sent them to a boot camp for a week.“Oliver created an environment in which anything was possible because we understood our characters and that world,” Hilton Pelser, who plays the terrifying Sergeant Brand, said in a video interview. “I came to understand what Brand is trying to do; in a very dark, very violent way, he is trying to save their lives.”The movie, Hermanus said, is a reflection of the crumbling of apartheid, the moment when the minority government cranked up fear and distrust because it was losing its grip. There are very few Black figures in the movie, and all are the brief subject of violence or contempt. “I wanted the film to be from the perspective of white South Africa,” Hermanus said, “and that was its reality.”Despite that perspective, Hermanus feels “Moffie” resonates in broader ways. “I see it as a portrait of the factory, how men were being made in the service of an ideology,” he said. “That relates to their treatment of women, their treatment of other races, how they potentially become the men we identify as problematic today.”Apartheid, he added, “isn’t one face. It’s a bit like World War II — there are lots of different films you could make. ‘Moffie’ is about just one facet of that history: the beginning of the end.” More