On culture

Fall Out Boy’s remake of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is worse than Billy Joel’s, and the reason is instructive. Joel stood inside each year and named it as it came; the remake stands in 2023 and looks back, and it fills its list with celebrities where the original named history. A song about the relentless present became a song about nostalgia for it, and you can hear the difference as a kind of hollowness.

Everything in an animated film is cared for except its third dimension. Each frame of design is deliberate, the palette, the light, the impossible colors of a depicted imagination, and then the 3-D is bolted on and adds nothing but spectacle and, to my eye, subtracts. My mother pays extra for it because she likes an “extra something” at the cinema. I have never been able to see what the something is. It may be the one element of the form that exists purely to be sold.

Media magic and actual magic have almost nothing to do with each other. On screen a hand or a wand glows and a will is enacted: pure fantasy, closer to Marvel and Star Wars than anyone admits. Real magic—apotropaic or sympathetic or ceremonial—belongs to horror, not fantasy. But the movies get one thing right, which is that you enter the magical realm by passage: Diagon Alley set diagonally to our world, the door into Halloweentown, always a threshold and often a psychopomp, a Hagrid, to walk you across. That part is true to life. The opening of the imaginal really does feel like finding a thing that was hidden in plain sight.

Dinosaurs have stopped being creatures of the past. Watch enough popular film and you would file them in a bestiary beside elves and trolls and giants: Dino Island, King Kong, Jurassic Park, even Transformers, each treating them as beings from “elsewhere” rather than from “before.” Nothing in the way we picture them registers that they went extinct sixty-five million years ago. Deep time turns out to be as unreachable to the imagination as fairyland, and so we reach for them with the same grammar.

Music in every store, a screen on every wall, the whole archive of recorded art available at all times for nothing, and I’m not sure we gained more than we lost. Art needed its scarcity; the context was part of the work. When everything is always available, what disappears is not access. It’s occasion.

What makes a slow film good? The same hour that drags in one movie is the entire point of another. Making interiority watchable is a craft with rules, and I don’t know what they are.

Route 66 is a road that exists mostly as merchandise. At the giant green statue in Wilmington I met a Polish family and a biker crew from Tennessee, and neither group was driving Route 66; they’d stopped in on their way to something else. The brand outlived the road. I can’t decide what that means.

Betty Boop. A sex symbol who is also a cartoon, still sold at roadside cafés to people whose grandparents weren’t born when she was drawn. I stood in front of a statue of her and realized I have no idea what she is. Somebody must.

The photographs of sub-Saharan Africa have not changed in fifty years: the same village, the same dust, no flags, no markers of which country, each image at once everywhere and nowhere. Every other region’s image modernizes; this one is held still. Swap the visual grammar with the one we use for ourselves and the meanings would invert overnight. Poverty’s look is assigned, not found.

The novel can do one thing no camera has managed: hold the gap between how a person sees herself and how everyone else sees her, from the inside, without it looking like a trick. Put that gap on a screen and it turns into voiceover, a gimmick the image resents. Interiority may be the last thing prose still owns outright.