I was driving through Crown Heights, Brooklyn today on my way home from a session at the recording studio and I saw a sign in someone’s window: “BLACK LIVES MATTER – DEFUND NYPD.” Defunding or outright abolishing the police has become a rallying cry on social media, and in the country at large as of late, largely in response to the unjust killings of Elijah McClain and George Floyd by law enforcement officers in recent months. Police-facilitated deaths of young, innocent black men and women are not new in this country, but even after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Eric Garland, and Michael Brown (among many others) over the last six years, this is the strongest push towards eliminating police departments I have seen in my lifetime. I understand why these calls are being made, and in many ways I support them. But I’ve also begun to notice a curious effect that these demands are having, in conjunction with one of my favorite television programs of all time: Law & Order SVU. SVU , one of several spin-offs of Law & Order (often referred to affectionately as “the mothership"), has recently with its 21st season, surpassed the records of its parent show and Gunsmoke, to become the longest running live-action primetime series in American television history. As the opening to the show proclaims, “In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.” SVU focuses mainly on the capture and prosecution of perpetrators of sexual assault, but often takes on issues of child abuse as well. I have been a fan of SVU since day one, and having kept up with it for so long, I can say that it has a pretty interesting history, especially in terms of its cast. The show originally began with Detectives Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Brian Cassidy (Dean Winters), and John Munch (Richard Belzer), all supervised by Captain Donald Cragan (Dann Florek, who came to the show from “the mothership”). Eventually, Cassidy was unable to handle the stress of the harrowing and brutal crimes he was forced to investigate, and so, he left the show and was replaced by Detective Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T), often referred to as “Fin.” As the show evolved and grew in its first decade on the air, it gained additional cast members – several Assistant District Attorneys (reporting up to Sam Waterston as Jack McCoy, the DA from "the mothership") who aided in the prosecution of the criminals (the two most famous in this era are Alex Cabot, played by Stephanie March, and Casey Novak, played by Diane Neal), Medical Examiner Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie), Special Agent Dr. George Huang: the team’s psychiatrist who knows how to get into the minds of rapists and abusers (B.D. Wong), and for a while, Detective Chester Lake (Adam Beech). Towards the end of the first decade of the show, it had a massive, eight-person primary cast, which then slightly thinned out over the next few years as Lake left the team, ME Warner and Huang’s roles were diminished, and Novak left her position as ADA after being censured for violating the Brady rules. The defining feature of SVU has always been how personally its characters take the crimes they are investigating, and how far they will go in pursuit of justice. During the Stabler years, this was often problematic, as Stabler had significant anger management issues, and frequently got into trouble with Captain Cragan for roughing up perps while arresting or interrogating them. Benson was forever trying to help keep him in line; Fin almost transferred out of the unit, claiming Stabler was a ticking time bomb, and his wife ultimately left him because he was unable to leave his work life at work. Benson and Stabler were like the yin and yang of the show – she deeply empathized with the victims, herself being the product of her own mother’s rape, and Stabler was the quasi-vigilante, doling out justice with his fists to pedophiles and serial rapists, often openly fantasizing about killing defendants he believed were guilty. However, a massive change occurred prior to the start of Season 13: Christopher Meloni, one half of the main team of Benson and Stabler, couldn’t come to an agreement with the show’s producers regarding his contract, and he left the show abruptly. His character was written off hastily, and is replaced by Danny Pino as Detective Nick Amaro. Kelli Giddish also joins the cast at this point as Detective Amanda Rollins, newly arrived in New York from an SVU squad in Atlanta. I almost gave up on the show after Stabler left, but in the end I couldn’t contain my curiosity with how the show was going to recover from the loss of one of its most popular characters. From Season 13 onwards, there is a marked shift in the tone and tenor of the program, though it never drops the signature: “ripped from the headlines” plot lines it relied upon (similar to “the mothership”). If you’re old enough to remember when Cheers was on NBC (or young enough to catch it streaming on Netflix), you may recall that a similar shift happens during Season 5, when Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) leaves the cast, and is replaced by Rebecca Howe (Kirstie Alley). During the Sam-and-Diane years, Cheers had been mainly a screwball romantic comedy, but with the arrival of Rebecca, the show changes gears and becomes more of a workplace comedy. SVU , in the post-Stabler years, feels like a very different show. While the focus on the characters’ personal lives is still in play, we get acquainted with a whole new group of characters. We watch Amaro struggle with his own anger management issues (less severe than Stabler’s), Rollins struggles with a severe gambling addiction, and Benson recovers and moves on from the loss of Stabler as her partner – devastating due to the length of their partnership and their close personal relationship. In Season 14, ADA Rafael Barba (Raul Esparza) joins the cast and hugely breathes new life into the program with his flamboyant and aggressive prosecutorial style – I think he is hands-down the best ADA the program has ever had, and he remains to date, one of the show’s most popular characters. (I was heartbroken when he departed the show, and almost gave up on SVU again… but as usual, I couldn’t stay away for long.) With both Esparza and Pino in the cast playing Latino characters (they occasionally speak unsubtitled Spanish to each other), the show began to more accurately reflect the actual demographics of New York City. In Season 15, John Munch retired, followed not far behind by Captain Cragan. This left room for Benson to get promoted to Sergeant. A new plucky detective, Dominick “Sonny” Carisi, arrives in Season 16 and also became a fan favorite, due to his folksy Staten Island Italian affect and his overachieving nature (in the evenings, he attends night school to study law and eventually passes the bar, while still remaining a cop). While Amaro moves on at the end of the season, Benson is promoted to Lieutenant. Eventually Fin, long known for his lack of ambition, caves and gets promoted to Sergeant under Benson, who by Season 21 (this past year) finally gets promoted to Captain of the unit. Along the way, she adopted a son, Noah, and had two serious relationships, one with Brian Cassidy (Dean Winters returned for several episodes), and Ed Tucker from the Internal Affairs Bureau of the NYPD, played by Robert John Burke. All of these new scenarios allow Benson some serious character development after being personally stunted by her long partnership with Stabler, which often made her feel emotionally unavailable for romantic relationships. Why am I giving you all of this information? Here’s why: On June 12, 2020, EJ Dickson wrote a fiery op-ed in Rolling Stone Magazine entitled: “Sorry, Olivia Benson is Canceled Too,” claiming that her lionization as a good and righteous cop on SVU does real world damage. This was followed by an overwrought article by Jordan Calhoun on June 28, 2020 in The Atlantic , entitled: “Saying Goodbye to Law & Order,” in which he says that although he used to love SVU, he can no longer reconcile it with his real life experience with police officers and he needed to walk away. EJ Dickson appears to be White, while Jordan Calhoun is Black. Let me be perfectly clear: although I am a woman of color (my family hails from East India) - I was born in Washington D.C., then raised in San Francisco, and I have lived in the Hudson Valley for the past 17 years - I in no way can claim to fully relate to or understand the experiences of Black Americans in this country. That being said, both of these articles made me extremely angry, because after reading them it became completely clear to me that neither writer has even bothered to watch SVU during the past eight years. The banner on Calhoun’s article prominently features a photo of Stabler in the foreground. Dickson’s article is written as if Stabler is still a character on the show: “… Elliot Stabler, the platonic ideal of an emotionally unbalanced, physically abusive Bad Cop, is played by a man so hot and charismatic it should be illegal.” I can understand where the confusion may lie, given that SVU reruns featuring Stabler run constantly in syndication (TBS may as well rename itself All SVU All The Time). However, Stabler has not been on SVU since 2011. He’s been gone for nearly half of the show’s run at this point, and the story has moved on. He doesn’t even come up in passing dialogue. So I have to ask: why the fuck are these people still talking about Elliot Stabler? I recently binged all of SVU ’s record-breaking 21st Season, right up until they had to suspend production due to COVID-19, and using information from this season and the prior eight seasons (that I actually bothered to watch), I’m going to refute several allegations from Dickson’s hit piece on Benson: “Olivia Benson won’t change, not fundamentally, because nobody wants Olivia Benson to change. We’re probably not going to see her making an effort to hire more police officers of color.” Wrong. This season, Carisi decides to use his law degree and moves over to be the ADA assigned to SVU cases. Benson responds with replacing him with Katriona “Kat” Tamin (Jamie Gray Hyder), a young cop poached from the Vice unit, who is of Lebanese descent. This season also features the introduction of Vanessa Hadid (Zuleikha Robinson), Bureau Chief of Sex Crimes at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, and Carisi’s new boss, who is of Iranian descent, and Deputy Chief of SVU, Christian Garland (Demore Barnes), who is African-American – obviously Benson did not hire either of these two superior officers, but the point holds that neither Benson the character, nor SVU the program, is resistant to change. (And in fact, it wasn’t resistant to change years ago when Detective Amaro and ADA Barba were snarking at each other constantly in Spanish while investigating cases.) Sergeant Fin Tutuola (Ice-T) also takes a larger role in this season due to his promotion, as Benson’s second-in-command and all-around back-haver, bringing a Black actor into top billing on the show, alongside Mariska Hargitay. “We’re probably not going to see George Floyd incorporated into plot lines in anything but a cursory, ripped-from-the-headlines way.” This is just stupid. Law & Order “the mothership,” and all of its spin-offs: Law & Order SVU, Law & Order Criminal Intent, Law & Order Trial by Jury, Law & Order LA, and Law & Order UK (yes, it exists!) have always taken their plots by ripping from the headlines. It isn’t actually a problem. The show has always attempted to accurately represent the current realities of society on this show; if it didn't, it would have fallen hopelessly out of date years ago. In Season 21, SVU features episodes based on the Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein scandals, as well as a rather sensitive approach to the Jussie Smollet debacle. Had SVU not suspended production due to COVID-19, their season would have ended prior to George Floyd’s tragic murder. I absolutely believe that whenever they are able to resume production for Season 22, they will do a George Floyd episode, and I don’t really understand what special extras Dickson expects from a show that has always taken their plots from the headlines. “We’re probably not going to see her (Olivia Benson) being taken to task in front of an internal review board for overseeing a cop roughing up a black male suspect.” Wrong again. In Season 17, SVU detectives get sucked into a disaster where cops from a precinct assisting them in a case, shot an unarmed black man who was unconnected to the investigation. Literally everybody had to go testify in front of the Internal Affairs Bureau. Come on, Dickson – at this point, I have to assume you’re just pulling this out of your ass. (Not to mention what about the many, many times Stabler was called in front of IAB for his volatile behavior?) Oh, and let’s not forget to revisit this: “… Elliot Stabler, the platonic ideal of an emotionally unbalanced, physically abusive Bad Cop, is played by a man so hot and charismatic it should be illegal.” ELLIOT STABLER IS NO LONGER ON THE SHOW, AND HE HASN’T BEEN FOR YEARS; COME THE FUCK ON, WATCH THE GODDAMN SHOW BEFORE YOU WRITE UNINFORMED OP-EDs. JESUS H. CHRIST. Calhoun seems to have watched the show up until the point that Stabler left the program, noting that: “ His departure was abrupt but not without meaning, even if unintentional, amid a real-world context, Instructed to attend anger management and have his conduct investigated by Internal Affairs, he refused and quit.” But Calhoun seems to think that this is indicative of the character never having a true reckoning with his violent nature and celebrates him as a hero, which is a failing of the show. I disagree; I think the fact that Stabler refused to go in front of IAB (again) or attend anger management courses, but instead QUIT BEING A DETECTIVE indicts Stabler as a coward. People, HE DIDN’T EVEN SAY GOOD-BYE TO BENSON, HIS BEST FRIEND AND LONG-TIME PARTNER. He just vanished, leaving Captain Cragan to deliver the news to her, and never reaches out to her once after he left. But again, Calhoun seems to be hanging his critique of SVU on Stabler’s problematic nature – the use of the photo of Stabler in the article’s banner emphasizes this. Which leads me to ask again: why aren’t people who criticize SVU watching what the program has done in the years since Stabler’s violent ass bailed on all of them collectively? In Season 21, SVU featured episodes regarding the immigration and detention of immigrants trying to cross the border, and the children that they are separated from. They did another immigration-related episode, featuring an Immigration Officer who is abusing his position - vetting Green Card applicants’ marriages to coerce attractive women to sleep with him and deporting anyone (or their spouse) if they refuse. They did an episode featuring a 13 year old girl from Ohio, who travelled to New York to get an abortion, after her stepfather raped and impregnated her, and dealt with the complicated issue of which state’s rules applied in her situation. Another episode, addressed the sexual assault of a transgendered sex worker who was brutally attacked by a man who procured her services. Yet another featured an investigation of a white former Sergeant who violently raped one of his black Detectives many years ago, causing her to spiral downhill into alcoholism, self-destruction, and eventually suicide. And this is in addition to the timely episodes pertaining to Weinstein, Epstein, and Smollet. In all of these cases, yes, the detectives prevail (mostly) in achieving justice for their victims. I can understand the concern that episodes that show officers like Benson, Tutuola, Rollins, and Tamin succeeding contribute to an idea that all police officers are righteous, and how that is a dangerous message to send during an era where real-life, state-sanctioned killing of Black and Brown people has become depressingly commonplace. But what I’m ultimately trying to say is: SVU , especially in the post-Stabler years, has made an effort to responsibly depict the good and bad aspects of policing. Benson and her crew often get caught going viral while arresting Black suspects by passersby who turn on their phone cameras, and they are constantly evaluating whether they are doing the right thing in these moments. SVU frequently features episodes about dirty cops getting their comeuppance - another Season 17 episode shows the squad busting the Deputy Chief Police Commissioner for the possession and distribution of child pornography. The characters are constantly discussing the parallels between their cases and the #MeToo movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement. The show has always had a diverse cast, and still does to this day. Benson may be an unrealistic angel of a police captain, but I don’t understand why people are declaring that they cannot watch the show anymore, or that she should be “cancelled.” SVU is meant to be entertainment. At its best, it is thought-provoking, moving, and influential – many victims of sexual assault point to SVU as a program that has helped them feel heard and validated in their recovery from trauma. At its worst, okay, it’s a little soap-opera-ish and preachy. But why is it a problem to have a show on air displaying good cops trying to do the right thing, investigating the good and bad aspects of policing responsibly? Why are we being guilted by writers like Calhoun and Dickson to abandon the show in order to be good progressives (especially when they are referencing a character who has been gone from the show for years as a reason why)? Why can’t we just be happy to see a bit of a wish-fulfillment-fantasy on TV, as an example of what we hope our police officers should strive to be instead of the monstrous acts that they have become associated with in years past? Entertainment can build empathy, and it can inspire. SVU is an example of a show that takes its responsibility to tell sensitive stories about difficult topics very seriously, and for the most part, it succeeds. I’m sorry, folks. I think we’re being pressured into abandoning SVU, just because it once featured a problematic character, and I’m just not buying it. Look at what the show has become in the last eight years before casting your judgement. * I was almost done with this piece when I read an article saying that NBC has green-lit a new Law & Order spinoff which will resurrect the character of Elliot Stabler and bring the much-beloved Christopher Meloni back to TV. It’s almost a given that there will be the inevitable crossover episode (or multiple episodes) with SVU , reuniting Benson and Stabler again. So okay, I guess we do have to talk about Stabler some more. Maybe there’s concern that Stabler will be back to his old tricks, and we’ll be watching him roughing up perps and slamming his fist into walls like it's 2003 all over again. But I doubt it, and here’s why: a lot has changed since Stabler quit the force, both within the unit and within Benson’s personal and professional life. As Captain of the SVU crew, she likely outranks Stabler at this point. As a parent, she has become even more empathetic, and also even more steely, in her desire to protect children from predators. If Stabler is still a loose cannon, I don’t think she’ll put up with that, regardless of their close bond. I also doubt it because of what Dickson so derisively referred to as the “cursory ripped-from-the-headlines” plots of the Law & Order franchise. In 2020 or 2021, in an environment where people are demanding to defund and abolish police departments nationwide, there is no way the producers of the franchise are going to allow Stabler to return without having a massive change of heart. Teasers for this new show suggest that Stabler has undergone a personal tragedy in the last eight years that has forced him to change his nature. This could be a great new leaf for Stabler, and coming back to visit Benson and Tutuola (and meeting the new detectives) could lead to some interesting, sensitive stories about the potential for change and growth. Heck, knowing the way the producers and writers of the Law & Order franchise operate, they will most likely address the issue of the calls to defund the police directly in the shows' plot lines . How could they not? Isn’t that good news? Wouldn’t that be the best case scenario? I’m not saying goodbye to Law & Order SVU. I don’t think you should either. This isn’t the time to hide from depictions of unpleasant institutions, this is the time to applaud depictions that do so sensitively and responsibly. SVU during the Stabler years may not have succeeded at this, but post-Stabler, they have changed their game considerably, and I highly doubt that they will pretend not to notice how angry the world is at the police right now. They simply can't afford to. Let’s see what happens once COVID-19 allows them to resume production. Let’s give it a chance. I think we owe it to them, given their track record over the past eight years. And if you haven’t watched an episode over the past eight years – good lord, what are you waiting for? Even if you were ride-or-die Stabler, once you meet Barba, Carisi, and Tamin, you won’t miss him one bit. (Nor should you. That dude was crazy.) Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

Reflections from a Fellow Desi Foodie I must be absolutely clear: Padma Lakshmi is nothing short of a total badass. But I didn’t always feel that way. Let’s rewind: it’s November 2006, and I’m visiting my godparents in Washington D.C.; Padma Lakshmi has just taken over for Katie Lee Joel as host of the second season of Bravo’s cooking competition show Top Chef. At this point, my godmother and I only really know of her as a former model who is most famous for being married to Salman Rushdie. We are excited to see an Indian woman on a popular TV show, and so, when Bravo runs a Thanksgiving Day Top Chef marathon, we tune in. And man, were we disappointed. Her body language was stiff, her affect was flat, and her laconic speaking style had me seriously convinced that she might be slightly stoned (like all the time). She looked pretty and she wore nice clothes, but as a host, her TV presence was roughly equivalent to a wilted stalk of celery. This kind of thing tends to frustrate me immensely. I wrote an article for Story Screen a couple of years ago about how important it is for people of color in America to see depictions of people like themselves on screen. Now as an Indian-American college student (who at the time was interested in eventually working for Bravo) watching a famous Indian-American model sleepwalk her way through Top Chef , and I knew she would get dragged by reviewers for it. I was bummed. “Padma. Padma!” I thought, “Step it up, you’re making us all look bad.” “What is this woman even doing on Top Chef ?” my godfather piped up from his corner of the dining room table where he was working on a report for his team at the IMF. “What does she know about food? Since when do models eat?” Turns out, that was an interesting question for him to have asked. In 2016, Lakshmi wrote a fantastic wickedly witty memoir entitled: Love, Loss, and What We Ate , in which she explains that she grew up in a family that loved cooking and eating, and was cooking her grandmother’s recipes as soon as she was tall enough to reach the stovetop. When she became a model, spending the bulk of her time shuttling around Italy and France, (eating her way through many cities in between modeling jobs and learning about food and culture from her then-boyfriend, an Italian academic) she was approached by a publisher who wanted to ask if she had any low-fat recipes that could be compiled into a cookbook – because of course, who doesn’t want to know a model’s secrets for keeping her svelte figure? She happily accepted the offer and in 1999 she put together a compilation of recipes and short essays entitled: Easy Exotic: A Model’s Low-Fat Recipes From Around the World , which was subsequently awarded Best First Book at the 1999 Gourmand World Cookbook in Versailles. So, yes Anupam Uncle – there is at least one model who eats. Padma Parvati Lakshmi Vaidynathan was born into a middle-class Tamil family in Madras, India on September 1, 1970. Her parents divorced when she was two years old, and her father disappeared. She spent her childhood traveling between Madras, with her grandparents and aunts, and New York City, where her mother immigrated to pursue training to be an oncology nurse, before permanently settling down with her mother in a small suburb outside of Los Angeles. In 1984, she was hospitalized and eventually diagnosed with Stevens-Johnson syndrome. Driving home with her mother and step-father after being discharged, they were all severely injured in a car accident in Malibu, leaving Padma with a fractured hip and badly broken upper right arm, which needed surgery to correct. The surgery left her with a dark, seven-inch scar between her elbow and her shoulder. She grew up bullied and taunted by kids in her high school for her scar, for being too tall, and for being Indian, and she says that it caused her to experience significant self-loathing that has taken years to overcome. Later, after spending a semester in Madrid during her final year at Clark College majoring in theater arts, she was brought to a modeling agency by a friend. Convinced that her ethnic looks and visible scar would be viewed as a liability, she assumed that she’d have no chance of being booked. Instead, she learned that compared to the modeling world in America, the European modeling world didn’t find her scar off-putting – in fact, the Italian photographer Helmut Newton sought her out specifically because he thought her scar made her more beautiful, and she was featured in many of his photo shoots highlighting the scar. What followed was a fairly lucrative career in Europe, including a stint as a television host on the top-rated Italian show Domenica In . Upon her return to the United States, the parameters of the beauty ideal for modeling had changed with the advent of the grunge era – “heroin chic” was in, models were showing up for castings with visible tattoos, and her scar was no longer a problem. Lakshmi’s first foray into American television was a show on the Food Network: Padma’s Passport – which she describes as similar in theme to Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, but with “a smaller budget and better hair.” She also hosted two one-hour specials for the British culinary tourism show Planet Food , one in South India and the other in Spain, which was broadcast on the Food Network in America. She had a syndicated column in the New York Times for many years on food and fashion. When Top Chef was set to debut on Bravo, Andy Cohen specifically sought her out as host, but she wasn’t able to take the job because she was contractually committed to acting in a film during the show’s shooting season. Katie Lee Joel (who has the personality of a flaccid overcooked oily piece of eggplant) served as host for that first season. Once the season was wrapped, Cohen called Lakshmi again: “Are you available now? Because we really need you.” And, as they say, the rest is history. I have watched Padma host Top Chef now for 16 seasons. In the beginning, (as I mentioned) her TV presence was stiff and awkward, and it was very clear that she felt extremely intimidated in the presence of Head Judge Chef Tom Colicchio, and the other famous guest judges, who rotated in and out of the show (Eric Ripert, Anthony Bourdain, Gail Simmons, Dan Barber, John Besh, Jacqeus Pepin, Rocco DiSpirito, among others) trying to offer up her opinions of the chef-testants’ offerings for each challenge. But something really great happened around Season 8. That season, Top Chef was doing an All-Stars competition - picking top competitors from the prior 7 seasons of the show who did not win the Top Chef title - giving them a chance at redemption. I don’t know Lakshmi felt more comfortable in an environment with chefs she already knew from previous seasons, or if she finally felt confident after so many years of hosting, but in Season 8 she overcame her shyness of speaking her mind at the Judges’ Table with Colicchio and the others. This was the season where she really came into her own. She relaxed, she was comfortable, she made jokes easily, and she owned the fact that although she has never worked in a restaurant, she does know quite a bit about food - given her upbringing, her experiences eating and cooking food all over the world in her modeling days, and her prior experiences on the Food Network. By the time Season 8 rolled around, I was working as a food & wine buyer for an upscale resort in the Hudson Valley, and the nuances of cooking, working on a line, and good hospitality, were all keen interests of mine. Season 8 All-Stars is my favorite season ever of Top Chef , partly because I adore most (but not all) of the contestants who returned, partly because the right chef (Richard Blais) won, and partly because I finally saw Lakshmi for who she really is aside from being an attractive clothes hanger standing next to Colicchio. I loved that a woman who came from the same country as my parents was being represented on a popular show and utilizing her platform. You’re making us look good, Padma. * But her growing confidence on Top Chef is only one component of Padma’s badass-ery. I’ve met her ex-husband Salman Rushdie; he came to speak at an event held at my college in the fall of 2006, where I spoke with him during a reception afterward. He is, without a doubt, a pompous blowhard who is in love with the sound of his own voice, and extremely pretentious to boot. He declared that he would only speak at my school if one specific professor from the English department was conspicuously disinvited from the event and reception (due to some unknown and likely overblown beef he had with the said professor about one of his books, #staypetty Salman). Rushdie is most notably famous for Midnight’s Children (which not only won the Booker Prize when it was first published but subsequently won a “Booker of Bookers” competition with all other recipients of the Booker Prize). The Satanic Verses was a book that Islamic fundamentalists found to be so blasphemous, that for many years Rushdie traveled with extensive security protection because in 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill him. Numerous killings, attempted assassinations, and bombings resulted in response to the novel. My godmother actually met him in the mid-eighties during a dinner party in Bombay, where she asked him if he was planning to write a new book anytime soon; he was indeed writing The Satanic Verses , but Rushdie coyly refused to reveal the title and said only vaguely that he was working on a book about “migrations” – a ludicrous answer given what transpired after its publication - just hearing the word “migrations” causes my entire family to roll on the floor laughing. I got the sense when I heard Rushdie speak that even though the fatwa was terrifying and he was hiding for his life, he secretly loved the romance and adventure of dodging supposed assassins. In 1998, the Iranian government said it no longer supported the killing of Rushdie, but the fatwa does remain in place to this day. He travels with much less security now, and I honestly think he misses the attention. Rushdie, a graduate of Cambridge University who speaks like an upper-class Englishman and doesn't seem to show proficiency in any Indian language, also once famously gave an interview in the New Yorker declaring that the only good writing that comes out of India is writing in English, basically overlooking the vast amount of literature written in India in its numerous regional languages. This gaffe was so offensive that it also bordered on comical. What the hell was he thinking?! Suffice it to say, I don’t like the guy. #sorrynotsorry (But do read Midnight’s Children ; it’s very good.) Lakshmi and Rushdie met in 2001. As she explains in her memoir: he was 23 years older than her, she was a huge fan of his writing; he thought she was gorgeous, she was flattered that someone like him would want to be with someone like her. They got married in 2004 and divorced in 2007. During the early years of their courtship and marriage, Lakshmi felt very intimidated by Rushdie’s circle of literary friends, often feeling like she had nothing to contribute to a conversation during a dinner party, and instead would throw herself into working hard in the kitchen of their Manhattan brownstone, cooking more and more delicious food for their guests. Food was the only thing she had to offer. As the years rolled by, Rushdie went through a bit of a dry spell while Lakshmi’s career was taking off with Top Chef and a column in the New York Times . He was often bitter about that – for instance, when she got a cover feature on Newsweek magazine after Top Chef became a huge hit, he told her, “That must be nice. The only time I’ve been on Newsweek’s cover was when people were trying to murder me.” In 2005, Lakshmi was rushed to the hospital for severe abdominal cramps. She had been suffering from extreme menstrual cramps since she had gotten her first period as a teenager; they were so painful that she would often just take to bed for a week, immobilized from the pain radiating down her abdomen and lower back, and from crippling nausea. She found out in the hospital that endometrial tissue had wrapped itself around her small intestine. After surgery to remove the tissue, she was told that she’d be fine, only to have all of her painful symptoms return with her next period. The following year, after seeing many specialists all over New York, she was finally diagnosed with endometriosis. Her doctor suspected she had been suffering from it since early adolescence. Lakshmi underwent several surgeries to remove excess endometrial tissue from her uterus, as well as from other organs in her body where the tissue went rogue. During this time, Rushdie would often complain about how they weren’t having sex as often as he wanted to – despite her suffering in so much pain from the endometriosis and recovering from surgeries to treat it. The combination of his jealousy of her career (it appears he felt there could only be one superstar in their household) and his complete lack of empathy for her health problems essentially destroyed their marriage. Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in June of 2007. My roommate at the time and I had heard rumors that Lakshmi’s and Rushdie’s marriage was on the rocks, although we didn’t know why. We often wondered if Lakshmi was the kind of person who would stay married to a knighted jackwipe if only to enjoy the status and privilege of being Lady Padma. We were wrong. About one month after he was knighted, Lakshmi left him. She moved her belongings out of their house and into the Surrey Hotel on the Upper East Side. In a total, “You can’t quit, you’re fired!” move, Sir Salman’s PR team issued a statement saying that he and Lakshmi were filing for divorce, implying that it had been his decision. By that point, although heartbroken, Lakshmi no longer cared. She just needed to get away from him. Let’s recap: Padma Lakshmi, a former model, and current basic cable television host left perhaps the most famous writer in the world after he was knighted because he was a shitty husband. Love it. I told you she was a badass. Here are some other examples of her badass-ery: As a result of her childhood spent shuttling back and forth between India and America, as well as her years spent modeling in Europe, Lakshmi speaks English, Italian, Spanish, Tamil, and Hindi fluently. Lakshmi is a co-founder of The Endometriosis Foundation of America, a nonprofit focused on increasing awareness, education, and research about the disease (the cause of which is still unknown) in the hopes of discovering early intervention techniques to prevent the disease from growing and finding a cure for those who suffer from it. As of 2015, 10.8 million women across the globe have been diagnosed with endometriosis. The foundation helped facilitate the opening of the MIT Center for Gynepathology Research. Lakshmi is also the American Civil Liberties Union ambassador for immigration and women’s rights. She is an outspoken critic of skin-lightening creams marketed towards people of color in predominantly non-white nations. This is a direct result of the suffering she faced from the Indian community in which she grew up and the American modeling industry where she made a living, where she was constantly being told that her darker skin made her less attractive. It is also in resistance to the dehumanizing effect of colorism as one of many horrible legacies of colonialism. Lakshmi gave birth to her daughter Krishna in 2010. One year later, her partner of three years, businessman Teddy Forstmann, tragically passed away. Forstmann wasn’t the father of Lakshmi’s child; they began dating after she got pregnant from venture capitalist Adam Dell and that relationship ended. She refused to apologize for keeping a pregnancy from a failed relationship while dating someone new so quickly, despite tabloid criticism, noting that if she was a male celebrity who impregnated a woman and left her for someone else, there would not be similar scrutiny. Dell and Lakshmi share joint custody of their daughter, but for most of Krishna’s life, Lakshmi raised her as a single mother. Given that many women who have endometriosis are unable to conceive, she feels lucky to have a child and is a devoted parent. (She and Dell apparently rekindled their relationship back in 2017). Lakshmi is an outspoken advocate for the independent restaurant industry – especially meaningful during this pandemic in our country that has forced many restaurants to close due to lack of business. And most interestingly, she has a new show on Hulu (production wrapped before COVID-19 shutdown of the entertainment industry) called Taste the Nation. The show’s conceit seems simple: Padma travels all over America to get a sense of the regional differences in food, but it reveals the complexities and complications of what we consider “American” food. Initially, Taste the Nation wasn’t even supposed to be about food – Lakshmi wanted to use her platform as an ACLU ambassador to research a project on immigration, as an immigrant who was troubled by the rhetoric coming from the current inhabitant of the Oval Office. Given her long career as a food writer and cooking show host, she realized that food was a way to get closer to the immigrant communities she wanted to investigate. As Sophie Gilbert at The Atlantic recently put it: Lakshmi instead shows how American cuisine can be a bit of a paradox, in which dishes made by immigrants are quickly appropriated as national staples while the people who make them are rejected over generations. In every episode, Lakshmi considers what a particular dish or place reveals about immigration, assimilation, and homesickness. In the first episode, she visits the border town of El Paso, Texas, and cooks burritos with a chef at the Jalisco Café. Helicopters frequently fly over El Paso to survey the border with Mexico, while delicious foods that have come to America via Mexico are recreated by chefs on the American side of the border. “A burrito is tradition wrapped in colonization,” she notes. She looks at how in Milwaukee hot dogs and lager have become American staples despite an uneasy history of German immigration to the States. She even devotes an entire episode to chop suey, a dish completely set apart from authentic Chinese cooking. Chop suey was embraced by American citizens in the 19th century, while Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration for decades. Taste the Nation is delightful – Lakshmi’s warm personality and raunchy sense of humor shine through, but it is also thoughtful and poignant, and it reminds me of the best of travel and food writing and programming by her dear friend and frequent Top Chef guest judge, the late Anthony Bourdain. I imagine that wherever he is now, he is very proud of her. See? Bad. Ass. And let’s not forget what an act of badass-ery it was for Padma to even marry a dude as famous and famously self-absorbed as Salman Rushdie, and to know, despite her intimidation of his intellect, when it was time to leave him. To be perfectly honest, given the life she has lived as a woman who has completed many “migrations,” (HAHAHA sorry Salman, it’s still funny) I’m pretty sure she is much smarter than Rushdie. From India to New York to LA, to Massachusets and Madrid, to Paris, Milan, Rome – Padma embraces the languages, cultures, and foods of every place she visits. Her honesty about the toll Top Chef takes on her whittled model’s body (she openly admits to gaining about 16 pounds during every season of Top Chef) feels like an absolution for the body hatred many women feel and her work against colorism for human rights, I’m pretty sure makes her much smarter than Rushdie. By far. Padma Lakshmi turned 50 on September 1, 2020. (And she looks amazing!) She’s come a long way from the stilted, uncomfortable TV personality I watched with my godparents back in 2006. I hope that she will be with us for many years to come: teaching us about food, critiquing intricate meals with her Top Chef colleagues, advocating for immigrants and women’s reproductive health, and forcing us to unpack exactly why Americans love tacos even as our President keeps shouting at rallies that he’s going to build a wall to keep Mexicans out of our country while his feeble-minded supporters clap and cheer. Rock on, Padma, you badass. You’re doing us proud. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

They called him: “The Glue.” That’s the thing I keep coming back to when I read reflections on Phil Hartman from his former Saturday Night Live cast mates. They called him The Glue. The origin of this nickname has been debated for a while; former cast member Jay Mohr claims that Adam Sandler came up with it, while others say that it was (the late, great) Jan Hooks who started calling him that after he helped her with her terrible stage fright when she joined the show. He could hold any sketch together, no matter how tenuous or shakily written it was, no matter how nervous the guest host was, no matter how much the others on stage might have been struggling to suppress their laughter. He was The Glue. Alec Baldwin, the record-holder for most times hosting SNL (17 to date, not including his many recent appearances as Donald Trump) says that his favorite sketch he’d ever done on SNL was a soap opera parody when he hosted in the early 90s. The house was burning down, and Hartman just grabs Baldwin, looks him in the eyes, and says, “Take me with you.” Baldwin says it was the delivery, the right combination of desperation and absurdity, that got to him. It almost made him break character. He says that although many people might find “Schweddy Balls” to be the funniest thing hs ever done on SNL, for him, that sketch was not even remotely as funny as that moment when Hartman implored: “Take me with you.” Hartman was on SNL during the years when I first discovered the show, and so many of my favorite sketches featured him, such as: · The Anal Retentive Chef (with his tape dispenser cozy!) · Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer (“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I’m just a caveman. I fell in some ice and later got thawed out by your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me. Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW and run off into the hills or whatever. Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, did little demons get inside and type it? I don’t know. My primitive mind can’t grasp these concepts. There is one thing I DO know… and that is my client is innocent.”) · Frankenstein – where his only line of dialogue was “Fire Bad!” (True story: when I finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in high school, I was deeply disappointed to learn that Frankenstein’s monster was fairly eloquent in his speech and understanding of the world. I honestly was hoping to see page upon page of “Fire bad! Fire BAD! FIRE BAD!” I even voiced this objection in class, causing my English teacher to roll her eyes to the back of her head. Life is hard.) · Any sketch where he got to display his incredible talent for impressions – Frank Sinatra (“I’ve got chunks of guys like you in my stool!”), Ed MacMahon (“YOU ARE CORRECT, SIR!”), Barbara Bush, Charlton Heston (“Soylent green is peeeeeeeeople!!!”) and, Phil Donahue. · Speaking of impressions, how about his brilliant impression of Bill Clinton (I know most think Darrell Hammon’s later impression of Clinton is the definitive one, but I defy you to watch this sketch and not marvel at how well Hartman captured the essence of the early years of Clinton’s presidency (“ Fellas, there are going to be a lot of things we don’t tell Mrs. Clinton… ”) (Also, ouch). · And hey, remember Ross Perot’s VP running mate in 1992, Admiral James Stockdale? That guy who was even weirder than Perot himself? Hartman impersonated him too, in this gem of a sketch (“ Who am I? Why am I here? GRIDLOCK! ”) · And one of my all-time favorite sketches in the history of SNL – another political impression: Phil Hartman as Ronald Reagan, pretending to be folksy and dimwitted, but secretly the mastermind behind the Iran-Contra scandal. Again, I defy you to watch this sketch and not be blown away (“BACK TO WORK!”) He is often heralded as one of the best (if not THE best) SNL player that has ever come through the show. He had hilarious recurring characters, he did great impressions, and he performed almost all of the voiceovers for introducing sketches and for the commercial parodies that usually appear after the guest host’s monologue (“Compulsion… by Calvin Kleen”). How did we come by such a comedy icon? Hartman was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1948. His family moved to the United States when he was ten years old. His parents were extremely Catholic, and Hartman mentioned in interviews that being raised in a strict Catholic household left him feeling devoid of real affection, so he started being a class clown in school in order to find love and attention away from his home. Little known cool facts about Hartman’s life before his comedy career: He dropped out of college in 1969 to become a roadie for a band. He returned to school in 1972 and majored in graphic art, and eventually designed more than 40 album covers for various 70s-era bands, as well as developing the marketing materials and logo for none other than Crosby, Stills & Nash. Hartman began his comedy career with the LA-based improv comedy troupe The Groundlings – a breeding ground that has been the origin of almost as many SNL cast members as Second City in Chicago. He found that the life of a graphic artist was pretty lonely and wanted a more social outlet, so on a whim while watching a Groundlings show he jumped on stage and joined the cast in performance. He won a spot in the troupe due to that random impulse. He met and worked with Paul Reubens, of Pee-Wee Herman fame, while at the Groundlings, and when Reubens got a television deal for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse , and cast Hartman to play Captain Carl, one of Pee-Wee’s friends. Hartman got plucked from the Groundlings to audition for SNL and passed the Lorne Michaels test. He joined the show in 1986 and spent 8 seasons there, creating a long-lasting, glorious legacy through his impressions and characters. He also was a brilliant straight man, leaving room for more flamboyant cast members like Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, and Chris Farley to push their work to the extreme. Hooks once said of him, “He was a team player… he was never insulted, no matter how small the role may have been… [he] knew how to listen… he knew the power of being able to lay back and let someone else be funny, and then do the reactions. I think Phil was more of an actor than a comedian.” He left SNL in 1994 to pursue a film career. However, in 1995, he was cast as arrogant but loveable radio news anchor Bill McNeal on NBC’s wonderful and perpetually underrated sitcom NewsRadio (“Dave, there comes a time in every friendship when you have to say ‘I never liked you.’” ) While the show was critically acclaimed, ratings were always low and the show was always on the brink of cancellation. That being said, the Bill McNeal character was always a fan favorite. (Rumor has it that Stephen Colbert modeled his “Stephen Colbert” character on The Colbert Report partly on Hartman’s portrayal of McNeal, but I cannot find a source that corroborates this. Nevertheless, it makes total sense to me.) And alongside his work on SNL and NewsRadio , from 1991-1998 he also voiced many characters on The Simpsons , appearing in 52 episodes in total. He was originally cast for a one-time appearance but the writers loved him so much that they kept writing more parts for him. His two recurring Simpsons characters were Lionel Hutz, an ambulance-chasing lawyer with questionable lawyering skills, and B-List actor Troy McClure (“Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such educational films as Lead Paint: Delicious but Deadly and Here Comes the Metric System! Today I will be your narrator in this sex-ed film called Fuzzy Bunny’s Guide to You-Know-What.” ). He also voiced the one-off character Lyle Lanley in what I consider to be the best Simpsons episode of all time: Season 4’s “Marge vs the Monorail” (also famously known for being written by Conan O’Brien prior to his late-night talk show career – O’Brien says that of all the Simpsons episodes he wrote, this was by far his favorite). Lanley is a fast-talking salesman, akin to Harold Hill in The Music Man , who cons the townspeople of Springfield into building a monorail via a song-and-dance routine and then randomly hires Homer to be the monorail’s conductor – only to have his true intentions to run away with the money and let Springfield’s population suffer from a badly-built train be discovered by Marge, who saves the town and the day. This episode is so good that I’m just gonna urge you all to subscribe to Hulu so you can watch it in its entirety. It is sublime. As you can see, Hartman is eminently quotable in pretty much everything he did in his career. All of the quotes you’ve seen so far? They are burned in my brain. Such is the genius of Phil Hartman. He is, by far, my favorite performer whoever came through SNL. * If it seems like I’m avoiding the elephant in the room, you are right. It’s still painful to think about. Phil Hartman was killed on May 28, 1998, at age 49, by his wife, Brynn. While their children were asleep in the house. She then killed herself. To this day I am genuinely shocked by the brutality of this. I just pulled up Hartman’s Wikipedia page to make sure I was remembering the date correctly and my heart skipped a beat seeing a whole section entitled “Murder”, even though I knew it would be there. My mother passed away seven months before Hartman was killed. I was in 7th grade. Shortly after my mother passed, my dad hired a woman, Sue, from a nanny agency, although I was a bit too old for a babysitter by that point. Her job was to pick me up from school, make dinner, confirm that I was doing my homework, and make sure the house didn’t burn down before my dad got home. Sue and I got along immediately – we had a similar curmudgeonly sensibility about the world – but getting used to this new arrangement in general after losing my mother took a while. But when the news of Hartman’s death broke, I was a mess all day long at school, even though most of my friends didn’t follow Hartman’s career and didn’t seem upset about it. That afternoon, Sue came to pick me up and she was in tears. Hartman was her favorite SNL performer too. At that moment, I knew that we were destined to be friends forever. (We are. She stayed with us until I went to college. I send her a card every year on Mother’s Day. I call her:“Mom 2.0”.) Earlier this year I watched an ABC network special on the anniversary of Hartman’s death, entitled: “The Last Days of Phil Hartman”, where I found out more about the circumstances of the night he was killed. I knew the broad strokes already: Hartman and Brynn had been fighting a lot, mostly due to her jealousy of his friendships with female actors he worked with, and also her jealousy of his two previous ex-wives. She was verbally and sometimes physically abusive, and she once sent a death threat to one of Hartman’s ex-wives demanding that said ex-wife never speak to Hartman again. She also was threatened by his success as an actor: she was an aspiring actress who could never find her big break. Hartman tried to help her get work but she was bitter that she needed his help. (There is some speculation that Hartman considered retiring from acting to save the marriage.) The night of the murder, they had an argument, Brynn stormed off, Hartman went to bed, she returned at 3 AM, and shot him in the head, the throat, and the chest. That’s what I knew. ABC revealed that she was taking Zoloft at the time due to depression and rage issues, and that night she had also been drinking and doing cocaine. She drove to a friend’s house after killing Hartman and confessed. Her friend didn’t believe her and went back to the house with her to confirm. When he saw Hartman’s body, he called the police. It was about 6 AM at that point. The police came to take the Hartmans’ two children from the house, during which time Brynn locked herself in the bedroom and shot herself. ABC also spent a lot of time unpacking Hartman’s prior relationships. They spoke to many of his friends and family, and his ex-wives and some girlfriends. A common theme cropped up: Hartman could be distant with his loved ones and hard to connect with. As the seemingly never-ending slew of people kept saying this about him, I began to find it more than a bit disturbing that ABC was seemingly trying to draw a connection between his difficulties in intimate relationships and being murdered by his wife. The facts of their marriage reveal that it was not so simple. (Also, what the hell, ABC? Is this really what passes for journalism these days?) There have been a couple of theories as to why Brynn committed this senseless act. In 1999, her brother filed a lawsuit against the manufacturers of Zoloft for wrongful death, saying that side effects from the drug drove her to murder/suicide. Hartman’s best friend from his SNL days, Jon Lovitz, believed that Hartman’s NewsRadio co-star Andy Dick had given her cocaine at a party not long before the murder, knowing that she was in recovery, which caused her to relapse, having a nervous breakdown that night. Dick denies any culpability in Hartman’s death, but he and Lovitz do not speak to one another. I have no idea what made Brynn do it. None of us ever will. NewsRadio was renewed for a fifth season prior to Hartman’s death, and the writers had to write Bill McNeal off of the show (they had him die of a heart attack off-camera). Lovitz joined the NewsRadio cast in the fifth season to fill the void (surely making the set extremely awkward given his feud with Dick), but the show just didn’t work anymore and was canceled. As much as I would love to write this piece in memory of the best aspects of Hartman’s career rather than having to address his death, it’s difficult. He would have been 72 years old on September 24, 2020. 72! I find myself thinking about how much more he had to offer the world. I find myself missing his presence onscreen, missing his voice. I find myself wondering how many other indelible comic characters he might have given us in the past 22 years. NewsRadio seems to have vanished – reruns almost never run in syndication, and the show is next to impossible to find on streaming services. The Simpsons retired all of Hartman’s characters rather than replace him with another voice actor. The Simpsons have marched on and on ever since, and every year they are on TV is a bittersweet reminder of Hartman's time on the show. SNL reruns used to air on Comedy Central, and they could be downright haunting. Whenever Christopher Walken hosted and reprised his character: “The Continental,” they used the original voiceover introduction recorded by Hartman in 1990. (They even did this as recently as 2008 when Walken hosted, which gave me goosebumps.) During Hartman’s last few seasons on SNL, Brynn appears in the opening credit sequence, sitting at a table with him. You can only see her back, her blonde hair, her earrings swinging, but it is unmistakably her. And then when he returned to host SNL in 1996, he thanked her in his monologue for being such a wonderful wife. Sue thought that that particular episode should be pulled from syndication altogether, or at least edited to not include the monologue. I’m inclined to agree with her. But we got our wish, in a roundabout way: Comedy Central stopped showing SNL reruns. It is now on Hulu, but limited to Seasons 1-5 and Season 30 onwards. Seasons 12-20, when he was a cast member, seem to have disappeared into the ether. Everything he did, when I think about it now, seems to be tainted by his premature death. I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I wish there was a way to remember Phil Hartman without thinking about what Brynn did to him. What she did to his children. What she did to his family. What she did to his friends. What she did to us. I wish we could have seen him grow old, playing elder statesmen on other sitcoms and in movies, returning to host SNL again and again. I wish we could have seen him do something resembling Bill Murray’s late-career reinvention as a serious actor. I wish I could watch the SNL compilation: “The Best of Phil Hartman,” (as I did before writing this – I have it on DVD) and not have to think about this horrendous tragedy. I wish I could just bask in the glory of Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer and The Sinatra Group and Admiral Stockdale and devious Ronald Reagan. I wish I could just enjoy him being the exceptional performer that he was. In some ways, it is a perverse blessing that the only way to see him now is in YouTube clips. His death is a reminder of how tenuous, how ephemeral, how jagged life can be. We are all just in pieces, trying to keep it together. It’s the human condition – especially these days. But for a while, on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, on SNL, on NewsRadio , on The Simpsons , when he was there, when he was alive, we could escape. We could marvel at his skill. We could watch him make us laugh. He was “The Glue.” Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

The film marks its 20th anniversary. Billy Elliot - the story of an 11 year old boy from a mining town in Northern England in the mid-80s who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer despite his disapproving family - was released 20 years ago, on September 29, 2000. I was 15 years old at the time, and I had long given up my own childhood dream of being a bass player. I had wanted to play bass since I was 6 years old, but my mother – otherwise a sensible, progressive sort – had a notion, (probably deeply ingrained from her own childhood) that the bass guitar was not an instrument that girls played. “Girls don’t play the bass. Girls play piano,” she told me. And so, she forced me into piano lessons instead, (which I hated) with a very cruel teacher who used to scream at me and hit my hands when I made mistakes, and who considered my own taste in music to be irrelevant and plebeian, which she reminded me of constantly. My mother and I spent the next six years in a nonstop battle over whether I was going to stick with the piano or not. She won the battle in the short-term, but when she passed away when I was 12 years old, the lessons finally stopped, as my overwhelmed now-single dad didn’t have the time or inclination to force me to continue. But in a sense, she also won the battle in the long-term, since my experience with those lessons scarred me to the point where I didn’t play music again for nearly two decades. * Billy Elliot is a story about self-expression, tolerance, and subverting gender roles and expectations – all themes that resonated with me at the time the film came out, despite it taking place before I was born in a location of the world I had never seen. Billy (Jamie Bell, in his film debut) is from Everington, a (fictional) English town in County Durham. He lives with his older brother, Tony (Jamie Draven), his father, Jackie (Gary Lewis, in a tremendously controlled performance that I think deserves awards), and his maternal grandmother (Jean Heywood). Billy’s mother passed away about three years prior to the film. Tony and Jackie both work as coal miners, and the story takes place during the United Kingdom Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985. The strike, led by Arthur Scargill, the President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was against the National Coal Board (NCB), a government agency that had managed the coal industry since 1947, when it was nationalized. It was a major industrial action to shut down the British coal industry in an attempt to prevent coal pit closures. The union had previously gone on strike in 1972 and 1974, both times over wages. During the 1974 strike, Prime Minister Edward Heath declared a state of emergency and instituted a three-day workweek in order to conserve energy. At the time, Britain got most of its energy from coal, and Heath hoped that the public would blame the union for the blackouts and massive disruptions that occurred from the shortened workweek. (The 1974 NUM strike and its repercussions are depicted in “Imbroglio,” episode 9 of The Crown ’s third season). Instead, the public grew frustrated with Heath and a general election was held. Heath and the Conservative Party were voted out, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson of the Labour Party (who had been PM before Heath) was voted back in. Under the Labour Party, the NUM flourished, and eventually became one of the most powerful unions in Britain. In light of Heath and the Conservative Party’s defeat, Nicholas Ridley, a right-wing member of Parliament, came up with a plan for the next time their party was in power. He advocated buying and stocking foreign coal and oil resources so that if the coal miners went on strike again, the public would not feel the effects. He also suggested that the country train and arm a large mobile police force, ready to employ riot tactics in order to combat violence on picket lines. By 1984, only 173 mines were still operating, and employment had dropped to 231,000. The richest seams of coal had been mined and the remaining coal was more expensive to reach. The industry had been restructured between 1958 and 1967, with the cooperation of the NUM: halving the workforce, along with government and industry initiatives and subsidies, to provide alternate employment for laid-off miners. However, Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, and then Prime Minister in 1979, and she agreed with “The Ridley Plan,” as it came to be known, quietly setting into motion the suggestions that Ridley had advised. She began to push harder for mines to be shut down, regardless of union cooperation. She wanted to reduce the political influence of trade unions overall. Her ideology and economic outlook was based on privatizing industries that had been previously subsidized by the government. Her plan to shut down the mines also did not include any provisions to assist out-of-work miners in finding new jobs. In March of 1984, the NCB announced that 20 coal mines would close with a loss of 20,000 jobs, leaving many communities in Northern England, Scotland, and Wales without a primary source of employment. Arthur Scargill claimed that the government had a long-term strategy to close more than 70 mines and called on the NUM to strike. The strike was universally observed in North England, South Wales, and Scotland. Now, many historians look back at this strike as the most bitter industrial dispute in British history. Everington, where Billy Elliot lives, is an example of one of the towns and communities that would be destroyed if the mines closed permanently. Tony and Jackie are both mineworkers and heavily involved in the strike, showing up to the picket line every morning to shout and taunt and throw eggs at the private busses that bring strikebreakers to the mines. They accost a former friend and strikebreaker in a grocery store, threatening assault: “Scabs eat well, do they?” Jackie says as Tony flings his cart into the strikebreaker’s chest. It is within this hyper-masculine world that Billy grows up. Masculinity can even be seen in casual physicality – both Jackie and Tony walk with their backs ramrod straight, their arms swinging, their eyes front, and their chests pushed forward, as if to provide a shield with their own corporeality. Billy is not like this – he fidgets, he taps his toes, he loves listening to Tony’s T.Rex records and jumping on the bed. He is gentle and caring towards his grandmother, who has dementia. The men Billy is exposed to all do hard manual labor, take pride in their work and in their working class bona fides; they are passionate about their rights, and tend to show emotion only in the form of anger and sometimes violence. Billy is a sensitive child; one night, remembering his late mother, he asks Tony if he ever thinks about death – to which Tony replies, “Fuck off!” Another night, Jackie discovers Tony about to leave the house at 4 am with a hammer, on his way to a planned action connected to the strike. Jackie demands to know why Tony is taking the hammer when the police are already after him for other acts of violent picketing, which leads to a fist fight between father and son, with Billy helplessly watching and crying, begging them to stop. Tony tells Jackie that he’s been “fucking useless ever since Mum died,” and he leaves with the hammer. Jackie then screams at Billy to go back to bed. Tony does have a point, although he makes it in a cruel way; Jackie has been struggling mightily with grief and depression ever since his wife died. But Jackie has no outlet for his grief, not in the town where he lives in, the men with whom he is friends, or in the society in which he was raised. He occasionally looks to be on the verge of tears, only to shout instead, or swallow them down and light a cigarette. Jackie sends Billy for boxing lessons, but Billy learns very quickly that he is terrible at boxing. On the other side of the boxing hall, Mrs. Wilkinson (played fantastically by Dame Julie Walters) teaches a ballet class. Billy is curious about the class and joins in on a whim, only to have Mrs. Wilkinson notice that he has a knack for it, as well as natural grace and fluidity in his movement. Billy continues to go to ballet for months, even going so far as to steal a book from the local library about ballet so that he can practice at home secretly in the bathroom, until Jackie finds out and yanks him out of Mrs. Wilkinson’s class, forbidding him to return. “Ballet is for girls,” Jackie says, “not for lads.” No matter how much Billy tries to explain to him how dancing isn’t necessarily feminine, and how much athletic strength and stamina is needed for dancing, Jackie is terrified that the Everington community will think Billy is gay – “a poof” – if he learns ballet. Mrs. Wilkinson doesn’t give up, though, and thinks that Billy has a chance at earning a spot at the Royal Ballet School in London. She offers to train him for free and take him to an audition in Newcastle in a few weeks. Mrs. Wilkinson is in an unhappy marriage: her husband had a middle class job but was recently laid off. He also had been cheating on her with a secretary – so teaching ballet is a creative outlet and a welcome distraction for her, even if it’s only the local school girls in Everington. But Billy is the first student she has ever had that she believes has a chance for a future as a professional dancer. Mrs. Wilkinson can be kind, yet often cutting and sarcastic, and her teaching methods are decidedly in the “tough love” zone. One day when Billy lashes out at her after she scolds him for not practicing, telling her that: “just because you fucked up your life don’t take it out on me!” she strikes him across the face, and then immediately gets upset with herself, putting her face in her hands. Billy doesn’t get angry at her for the slap; somehow, it causes him to realize how much she truly does care for him. They hug, and resume their training. Another day they take a drive together and listen to a recording of Swan Lake while she explains to him the story of the music; it’s a sweet moment that shows just how much Mrs. Wilkinson is the closest thing to a mother Billy has at this time. * In many ways, Billy Elliot can be viewed as a meditation on grief. Tony seems to have dealt with his grief over his mother’s illness by plowing forward and throwing himself into his work – even when his work involves violent picketing. Jackie, as I mentioned earlier, doesn’t seem to have dealt with his grief at all, except to push it away or shout. Billy, on the other hand, seems to think of his mother a lot, and has imaginary conversations with her. When he goes to meet Mrs. Wilkinson for his first day of one-on-one dance training, she asks him to bring some personal items that are important to him. One of the items is a letter Billy’s mother wrote for him to read when he turned 18, but he has already opened it years ago and has it memorized. He lets Mrs. Wilkinson read it. The last lines of the letter are: “I’m proud to have known you. I’m proud that you were mine. I love you forever, Billy. Always be yourself.” That sentence in his mother’s letter, “always be yourself,” is in essence, the thesis of the movie. Through dancing, with Mrs. Wilkinson’s help, Billy remains true to himself. He doesn’t pretend to be someone he’s not. He doesn’t fake being a boxer, or try to force himself to be the type of boy who will grow up to work in a mine. He finds a way to express himself through dance in a way he never could before, and certainly was never allowed to while growing up in a house raised by two proud working-class mineworkers with very rigid ideas of what constitutes masculinity. Mrs. Wilkinson helps Billy come up with a dance routine to “I Love to Boogie” (one of Tony’s beloved T.Rex songs) and they dance together, both happy for the first time in years. Dance allows Billy to transcend the doom and gloom of life in Everington during the strike, and dancing with Mrs. Wilkinson also gives him an avenue to process his grief over the loss of his mother. * Alas, the events of the strike catch up with Billy’s dreams in a terrible way. The day before Billy is set to meet Mrs. Wilkinson and go to Newcastle for the Royal Ballet School audition, Tony gets into an altercation with the police over violent picketing behavior, leading to his injury and arrest. This scene seems to be a direct reference to a real-life event that occurred during the 1984-85 miners’ strike: the “Battle of Orgreave,” which took place in June 1984 at a mining pit in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, where striking miners were attempting to blockade. About 5,000 miners came into confrontation with 5,000 police officers and all hell broke loose after police on horseback charged, striking miners with batons and injuring many – a direct result of Ridley’s position to prepare police in riot combat. Billy must go to Tony’s arraignment with his father the next day, causing him to miss the audition. Mrs. Wilkinson arrives at their house to explain the gravity of Billy missing his audition, which devolves into a fight between her, Jackie, and Tony about whether it is appropriate for Billy to be studying ballet as a boy. Tony, fresh out of a jail cell and always looking for a fight, insults her for putting crazy ideas in a little boy’s head, and takes issue with her “oblivious” middle class ways, insinuating that she has no idea how hard life has been on the Elliot family since the strike. Jackie agrees with Tony that he will not stand for Billy learning ballet while Mrs. Wilkinson screams at them for being small-minded and insulting her while knowing nothing about her life. This chaotic scene then transforms into one of the most amazing sequences of the film: a moment of magical realism, where the fight between the adults in his life dissolves into Billy dancing outside of his house. Coming up against all of the literal bricks and metal grills that keep him pinned into his life, Billy tries to push against them. This sequence ends on a solemn note, as we realize while Billy has been dancing nonstop, a lot of time has passed. It is Christmas, and Billy hasn’t seen Mrs. Wilkinson in months. The strike is still ongoing, and the lack of coal means that there is no way to heat the house except to chop up Billy’s mother’s beloved piano into firewood. Billy watches as Jackie takes an axe to the piano, and asks his father: “Do you think she’ll mind?” Jackie turns to Billy, eyes filled with tears, but then shouts: “She’s dead, Billy!” However, the question seems to have hurt him, as he chops up the rest of the piano choking back sobs, finally letting loose over Christmas dinner - openly weeping while they sit by the fire created with the remnants of the piano. Chopping up his wife’s piano for firewood seems to be the first real crack in Jackie’s armor regarding his grief and the strike. Later that evening, while Billy hangs out with his school friend Michael, Jackie goes to the Everington Miners’ Social Club and gets Christmas drunk with his mining pals. Michael, who knows about Billy’s passion for dance, admits that he has a crush on Billy. Billy responds by explaining that just because he likes dance, “that doesn’t make me a poof.” But he doesn’t shun Michael – he brings him into the boxing hall, hands him a tutu, and starts giving him a mini-ballet lesson, which then devolves into the two of them running around the hall laughing while jaunty orchestral music plays overhead. Finally, Michael asks Billy to dance the way he would have at the missed audition. Billy enthusiastically does so until Jackie walks in. Turns out, one of the lads at the Social Club noticed the boxing hall lights were on. After a brief stare-down, Billy continues his dance in front of his father, and over the course of the performance, Jackie comes to see how gifted his son really is. Jackie runs to visit Mrs. Wilkinson at home, asking how much it would cost for Billy to audition. She offers to pay for their bus fare, but he refuses, thanking her for all that she’s done for Billy, but says he’ll take over now, as he is Billy’s father. This leads to perhaps the most heartbreaking moment in the film: the next morning. Jackie crosses the picket line and boards the private bus taking strikebreakers to work in the pit. He is visibly upset and anguished over this decision, but he cannot see any other way to raise the money to get himself and Billy to London for the audition. Tony, at the picket line, sees Jackie on the bus and takes a shortcut to the pit, stopping him from officially returning to work, begging him not to do this after all they’ve been through. But Jackie knows, in his heart, based on how the strike has been progressing, that it’s going to be a lost cause. At this point in real life, many of the striking miners in the UK were forced to cross picket lines because they were in danger of losing their houses or they were unable to feed their families. Jackie knows it won’t be long before they see other friends of theirs turned scabs. “We’re finished,” he tells Tony. “The boy could be a fucking genius for all we know! Let’s give him a fucking chance!” For all of Tony’s macho posturing, he loves Billy. He hears his dad and understands. “Not like this,” he says, begging his dad not to be a scab. “We’ll find the money some other way.” Between Jackie, Tony, and several of their mining friends, they raise almost all of the money needed to pay for the bus fare to London, with Jackie obtaining the rest of it by pawning his late wife’s jewelry. This is a heart-warming moment: a community rallying together to help a young boy attain his dreams; but it’s also bitterly sad on another level. Everyone seems to have put away their homophobic fears about whether it’s appropriate for Billy to study ballet as a boy, and the subtext seems all too clear: it no longer matters, because there’s no future in mining. Billy has a better shot in life as a dancer than he’ll ever have in a mining town like Everington, especially given how dire life under the strike has become. Does it really matter if people think he’s a poof? Billy and Jackie travel to the Royal Ballet School in London. On the way, Billy is shocked to hear that his father has never visited the capital city of England. (“I’ve never made it out of Durham… there are no mines in London, Billy!” “Jesus Christ, is that all you think about?”) And although he is so nervous that he almost backs out of the audition, (Jackie has to literally push him back into the waiting room and stand in front of the door) Billy does well, despite getting into a fight in the locker room with another of the boys auditioning. They return to Everington and try to resume life as normal – Billy goes to school, Tony and Jackie show up at the picket line everyday – waiting to hear back from the Royal Ballet School. Eventually, Billy gets a letter that he has been accepted. Overjoyed, Jackie runs to the Everington Miners’ Social Club and shouts to everyone in the room that Billy got in… only to be met with stone silence. “Didn’t you hear, Jackie?” one of them says, “We’re all going back to work. The union caved.” * There are a number of factors that doomed the 1984-1985 NUM strike from the start, the first and most obvious one being that Thatcher and the Conservative government had learned a lesson from what happened to Heath in 1974 and had a plan – the Ridley Plan – in place should the miners strike again. But there were many other flaws: NUM President Arthur Scargill called for the strike in March 1984 – springtime, when the country’s need for coal was nearly non-existent, and so, the impacts of having no one working the pits were not felt at all by the public. He also never took a ballot of NUM members to call the strike, which caused much controversy and led to the strike being inconsistently observed, with many strikebreakers in the north, and workers in the Midlands, not striking at all. The lack of a ballot was seen as an erosion of democracy within the NUM; it hurt the reputation of the NUM in British public opinion, damaged Scargill’s standing with other trade unions, and led to violence along the picket lines. The strike was the most violent industrial dispute in Britain of the 20th century. Billy goes to Mrs. Wilkinson’s house for dinner one night and her husband, upon confirming that Billy’s father and brother are on the picket line, explains yet another flaw in the strike: “When it costs more to mine the coal and pay the people who mine the coal than the coal is actually worth, that should tell you something.” Scargill’s demands for no more pit closures on economic grounds, even if the coal in the pit had been exhausted, were unrealistic. Because of the success of the Ridley Plan in reducing Britain’s reliance on coal mining (by importing it from overseas more cheaply than it could be produced in Britain) the strike only ended up emboldening the National Coal Board to accelerate the closure of mines on economic grounds. In the aftermath of the strike, after the union’s official return to work, there was still tension between the strikers and the strikebreakers. The latter, were shunned and attacked by other miners, in some cases seeing attacks on their homes. The NCB was accused of deserting the strikebreakers as the violence continued and requests for transfers to other pits were declined. Many of these miners were demoralized and eventually sought work in other industries. In the end, the coal industry was privatized in December 1994, and is now known as UK Coal. Between the end of the strike and privatization, pit closures continued. While there were 173 operational mines in 1984 at the start of the strike, at the time of privatization, there were only 15 left in production. By 2009, there were only six. As of today, only three remain. The closure of the mines left the affected communities economically devastated and unlikely to recover. This makes one of the final scenes of Billy Elliot extremely haunting. Tony and Jackie have put Billy on the bus to London to start his adventure at the Royal Ballet School, and then they return to work. One by one, they enter the mine elevator with their miner friends, grim-faced, and are lowered into the pit, knowing that no matter how hard they fought, no matter how much they believed in their working-class pride, the strike had failed. This pit would probably close soon, more pits will close, and this is the beginning of the end of the mining industry. Yes, everyone had their jobs back, but for how long? Everington would inevitably fall into deep decline. Billy was able to escape. For him, dancing wasn’t just a hobby – it saved him. * The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had a theory about “cultural capital” – that is, one’s clothing, mannerisms, style of speech, and taste not only demonstrate one’s competence, but their social position in society. Billy Elliot is a film not just about a union strike or ballet, but about how class operates in English society. Though Mrs. Wilkinson also speaks with the same thick Northern accent that Billy and his family does, she lives in a nicer neighborhood, and has had the opportunity in life to receive enough dance training that she can teach others; she can easily retell the story of Swan Lake to Billy, who had never heard it before. On the other hand, during Billy’s audition at the Royal Ballet School, the interview panel asks Jackie if he supports his son’s dream, and if he himself is a fan of the ballet. “Well,” Jackie says sheepishly, “I wouldn’t call myself an expert.” This concept is further elucidated during the final question Billy is asked by one of the interview panelists: what does he feel while he is dancing? At first, Billy doesn’t know how to answer the question. Unlike the upper middle class boy with whom he fought in the locker room, he has never given much thought as to why he has a passion for dancing; it’s not something that anyone has ever asked him before, not even Mrs. Wilkinson. He quite literally says, “Dunno,” to the panelists at first, which disappoints them. But then he starts speaking, slowly, trying to sort through what happens in his body when he dances. He continues, haltingly, explaining himself, and it’s far from eloquent or well-thought out until the end, when he finally finds the word he was looking for: electricity. “Yeah,” he finishes by saying. “It’s like electricity.” This speech is like a little miracle in an already gorgeous film. In that one stumbling monologue while trying to explain why he loves dancing, Billy comes to understand something about himself, he moves the panelists, and he also ends up explaining to his father what brought the two of them there to this room in London. In a very real sense, that speech is more for Jackie than for the panelists. Which is what makes the coda of Billy Elliot so lovely: 13 years later, Tony and Jackie travel to London to see Billy perform the lead role in a production of Matthew Bourne’s adaptation of Swan Lake . Jackie and Tony arrive at the theater and meet Billy’s old friend, Michael, who is there with his boyfriend, saying he wouldn’t have missed it for the world. We see 25-year-old Billy (now played by Adam Cooper) in the wings. A production assistant tells him his family is here. Billy warms up his muscles, stretches, and then leaps onto the stage as the camera cuts to Jackie, visibly moved, holding back a sob. Jackie is experiencing a catharsis, witnessing the power of Billy’s electricity, allowing it to activate his own self-expression – his grief over his wife, his anger and disappointment over what became of his life, and his pride in his son. But this coda leaves me with a few questions – questions that are not necessary to enjoying Billy Elliot as a film-watching experience, but questions nonetheless, especially given the political climate we live in now. We know what happened to Billy: he succeeded. He is a professional ballet dancer, and a very good one at that, it seems. But I want to know what happened to Jackie and Tony. In 1998, when Jackie and Tony went to see Billy in Swan Lake , the coal industry had been privatized for four years and many pits had closed for good. Was the pit in Everington one of them? And if so, how did Jackie and Tony survive? Tony was young enough to learn another trade and perhaps start a new career, but Jackie would have been done; if the Everington pit had closed, he’d have to take retirement and live on his pension. And, if the Everington pit closed, what happened to Everington as a town? What happens when an industry dies? What happens when you lose a community? One of the ironies of this film is that the moral status of coal mining is time specific. In the 1980s, coal, and the NUM, were considered progressive, left-wing causes, related to labor rights and fighting against the economic agenda of Thatcher and her Conservative Party. But today, coal has a different meaning. Coal is a fossil fuel, and the method of obtaining it for use classifies it as an “extractive industry,” both of which make it anti-environmental, and so to support the industry means one is aligning themselves with a right-wing cause. Which brings me back to Jackie and Tony. In spite of Scargill’s mismanagement of the strike, he became the president of the NUM for life in 1985 (although accusations of financial impropriety and legal disputes complicated this going forward). In 1996, he founded the Socialist Labour Party. This was right after the Labour Party abandoned the original wording of Clause IV from their constitution (Clause IV advocates the public democratic ownership of key industries and utilities). He eventually stepped down from the NUM and became active in the UK's Stalin Society, claiming that the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin explain the real world. And in 2016, he became a vocal supporter of Brexit, stating that he believed that British manufacturing could be rebuilt after Britain leaves the European Union. He said that under EU rule, the government could not subsidize coal mines, but the Brexit vote presented an opportunity to re-open coal mines. This is ridiculous on face value – the mines closed because they were no longer economically viable, and there was no more coal to be found in them. But still, in spite of this truth, the cities and regions at the forefront of the dispute that led to the United Kingdom Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985 voted overwhelmingly in favor of Brexit. It’s hard not to see the parallels between the former mining towns that voted for Brexit and the Americans who voted for Trump in 2016; Trump promised to bring coal jobs back. And so, I wonder about Jackie and Tony. I wonder how they voted. I wonder if they believed that there was a way to rebuild their community based on unrealistic promises – somehow – and so voted to leave the EU. I wonder if two men who fought tooth-and-nail for workers’ rights – maybe one of the leftist of left wing causes – ended up voting for on odious, racist, xenophobic referendum. As I said before, it really doesn’t have a lot to do with whether or not I enjoy the film, but especially in these times, in 2020, during a pandemic and an economic crisis, with state-sanctioned shootings of Black and Brown people continuing to happen with no justice served, with a massively important presidential election coming up… I keep wondering about what happened to Jackie and Tony after Billy left Everington for London. What happens when an industry dies? What happens when you lose a community? What state of mind does that put you in when you are standing in a voting booth? * Billy Elliot is one of my all-time favorite movies because it explores the feeling of what it’s like to really, really want something, to spend your life pursuing it and in the end, through family support and mentorship, succeed. It is the very definition of a feel-good story. I come from a very privileged background. There’s no point in trying to conceal it. I am fortunate enough to have grown up with the kind of “cultural capital” that Billy lacked that day at his Royal Ballet School audition. But unlike him, I was never able to express to my mother what playing the bass would have meant to me. I never had the chance to show my mother that her ideas about gender norms in music performance were outdated and nonsensical. I never had the chance to prove my potential to her, to explain how the bass makes me feel - the way Billy is able to do so for his father. I never had the opportunity to push up against the walls that pinned me into my life: performative piano femininity, unfettered strength in fighting my mother’s cancer, stoic acceptance of her death. I knew how to be a certain kind of brave in the face of my own family struggle, but not the kind of brave that Billy Elliot is in the face of his. He pushed on; I gave up. I squandered two decades after my mom passed, not playing music at all. Instead of standing firm like Billy and continuing to dance even when no one was paying attention; I only finally picked up the bass five years ago. I’m decent, but at 35 years old, I’m a bit too old to be a musical genius at this point. But Billy Elliot is a movie that reminds me of the importance of always being myself, and never giving up on pursuing what I really, really want, even if it feels like it might be too late. It’s a story of hope, for anyone who ever felt like an outsider, for anyone struggling to move on after losing a loved one far too early, for anyone who wants to be an artist. It’s a story of hope, and so I hope – I want to believe – that much like Jackie watching Billy in Swan Lake , if my mother had been around to see me play the bass guitar, she would have been just as moved. But I will never know. Billy was lucky to escape the brick walls around him. We can all only hope to be as lucky as him. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

Good lord, Reeya , you may be thinking. What more could you possibly have to say about Home Alone after your Story Screen article from 2018? It’s a fair question, but this November marks Home Alone ’s 30th anniversary, and dear god, somehow, even more than Back to the Future hitting 35 this summer, Dana Carvey turning 60 , Padma Lakshmi turning 50 , or realizing that Phil Hartman would have been 72 years old this year, (had his wife not murdered him in cold blood in 1998) Home Alone turning 30, makes me feel SO INCREDIBLY OLD. I’m only 35, and I know I’m not technically old, but when a film that I have watched hundreds of times since I was six years old hits Decade Three… well, it’s a bit of a shakeup, mentally and emotionally. My yearly tradition of watching Home Alone is coming up soon. I usually wait until a few weeks before Christmas, and in the past two years, life has been such, that I don’t really have the time to go all-out like I used to: with the cheese pizza and the Pepsi. It’s because I’m getting older and my “adulting” obligations are increasing, as they are wont to do when one has purchased a home, entered into a serious relationship, and focused on building a new career after burning out of Corporate America HARD five years ago and going through the health issues and existential crisis that followed. And so, instead of reiterating what I said two years ago, talking about how Home Alone holds up all these years later - because it is a story about personal growth, about how Kevin comes into his own after being overlooked by his whole family for being little and slightly clueless (the way young children are), not only saving his family home from burglary by the Wet Bandits but also learning how to do laundry, grocery shop for necessities, and generally take care of himself, as well as learning important lessons about facing his fears from Old Man Marley – I find myself wanting to check in on some of the beloved cast members from this movie now that 30 whole years have gone by. Perhaps it’s easier to start with the older, sadder news: John Heard, who delivers a wonderfully wry performance as Kevin McAllister’s father Peter in Home Alone , passed away in 2017 of a heart attack, after a long career as a character actor in popular films like Big, Beaches, Awakenings, and The Pelican Brief , as well as guest appearances on TV shows like Miami Vice, Law & Order (the Mothership, Criminal Intent , and my beloved SVU ), CSI, CSI Miami, Battlestar Galactica, Entourage, Modern Family, and NCIS: Los Angeles . John Candy, who played Gus Pollinski, the leader of a traveling polka band who gives Kevin’s mother Kate (played by Catherine O’Hara) a ride back to Chicago from Scranton, passed away in 1994, after a long comedy career featuring far too many brilliant films to even name, but here are a few: Stripes, Splash, Cool Runnings, Spaceballs, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck , and a couple of dramatic turns in Only the Lonely and (of all films), JFK . Candy was a national treasure (both in his native Canada and here in the States), and is a huge loss, but Heard’s death hit me hard, as he showed up in so many of my favorite films and shows and I can still quote several of his lines in Home Alone by heart. But then, we also have some happy news: O’Hara, after gaining great acclaim as a part of Christopher Guest’s company of actors in his tremendous films - Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind , and For Your Consideration - the latter of which won her much praise and an award from the National Board of Review, as well as memorable roles in Beetlejuice, Dick Tracy, Heartburn, and The Nightmare Before Christmas (among others), and a hilarious turn as the boss-from-hell Carol Ward on HBO’s Six Feet Under , is at the moment riding high after winning a Primetime Emmy Award for her role as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek , starring alongside her frequent Christopher Guest-company and fellow SCTV alum, Eugene Levy. O’Hara’s performance as Kate in Home Alone is both wildly funny and extremely heartbreaking as she fights against extremely difficult odds to make it back to Chicago from Paris during Christmas, the busiest travel season of the year. As well as making peace with Kevin, with whom she had a terrible argument the night before the whole family accidentally leaves him behind while rushing to the airport. O’Hara’s scenes with John Candy (another fellow SCTV alum) on the ride back to Chicago are hilarious and weirdly poignant, as she confides in him her fears that she’s a bad parent, and he tries to comfort her by pointing out that he and the others in his polka band are far worse parents than she is, relating more and more bizarre examples of parenting failures (a scene that was reportedly 100% improvised by O'Hara and Candy) in his attempts to help. Having said all that, I think it’s fair to say that the one cast member of Home Alone that I most want to check in with during the film's milestone 30th year is the one without whom the entire film wouldn’t have been a success: Macaulay Culkin. His small-child cuteness, unpretentious precociousness and charisma are what make the story succeed, and the fact that the film still holds up all of these years later is almost entirely due to his capable skills as a performer. Which makes it a real shame, on some level, that we haven’t really seen much of him since Home Alone . He did appear in the film’s sequel, Home Alone 2 (which is horrible, and not just because it features a cameo by Donald Trump). He also returned with a heartwarming performance in My Girl , a bizarrely creepy turn in The Good Son (where he plays a murderous sociopathic child – I do not recommend watching this movie, as it is not just disturbing content but also disturbingly terrible writing) and of course, as Richie Rich , an all-around mediocre movie that he clearly sleepwalks through, which is understandable given that by that point, he had had enough of being an actor. But can we really really blame him? Macaulay Culkin is the third of seven children of Patricia Bentrup and Christopher “Kit” Culkin. Macaulay and his entire family lived in a small railroad apartment in Manhattan before he became a star – 9 people in two bedrooms. Kit was a former stage actor who was determined to milk his children for financial gain in acting to compensate for his failure to become a successful actor himself. He sent Macaulay and his siblings, Shane and Kieran, out for auditions and casting calls constantly, for off-Broadway shows, ballet companies, and films. Macaulay had natural talent for ballet and acting, and he began booking work at the age of four. Prior to Home Alone he had appeared in small roles in a couple of less-than-notable films (such as Rocket Gibraltar and See You in the Morning ). He landed a role in the John Hughes film, Uncle Buck (starring Candy). Hughes was so impressed by Macaulay that he wrote the script for Home Alone for him. And the rest, as they say, is history. But the tyranny of Kit Culkin, hung over all of the success Macaulay attained during his childhood film career. Chris Columbus, the director of Home Alone , has commented that one of the biggest lessons he took away from the shoot was realizing that when you cast a child, you were also getting the child’s family as a part of the package – something he kept in mind years later when he was casting the children of the Harry Potter films. I knew that Kit Culkin was notorious for being a monstrously awful stage dad, and that he worked his kids to the bone – especially Macaulay, once he became famous – but I had no idea the full extent of his abusive nature until I listened to Macaulay on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast. Macaulay says his father’s attitude was essentially: “do a good job or I will beat you.” Kit was physically and emotionally violent to all of the children and their mother. He said that when he was traveling with his father to movie sets and television appearances, the rest of his family must have been relieved to get a respite from Kit’s rage. When Macaulay hosted Saturday Night Live at 11 years old to promote My Girl, Kit insisted that Macaulay not use cue cards. He told his son that “professionals know their lines,” and insisted the young Culkin memorize every sketch. This in turn made it so that the SNL cast members appearing in sketches with Macaulay couldn’t use cue cards either. Given the often slapdash nature of the writing on SNL – they are often rewriting sketches right up until showtime, and sometimes even during the show if it’s running long and they need to trim time from later sketches – this was an almost impossible thing to ask of the cast, and Kit’s unreasonable demand has gone down in the show’s history as resulting in one of the hardest shows they’ve ever had to do. Macaulay ended up confiding in Maron that he and his father simply didn’t like each other. He feels that not only was Kit driven financially to push him so hard, but he was also jealous of his son because he was a better and more successful actor and dancer than his father. Macaulay didn’t like Kit because, as he put it bluntly, “He’s not a good person. He is a bad man. He is just straight-up a bad person.” He told Maron that when his parents separated, shortly after he did the film Richie Rich, (a movie where, no joke, you can see in Macaulay’s face how much he hated being on set) it was the best thing that happened to the family, and it gave him an opening to walk away from show business altogether. Even though he never formally emancipated from his parents, he did at that point get a lawyer to remove his parents’ names from the trust in which all of his earnings from his career were funneled into until he was an adult, just to wrest some control in his life for once. He has not spoken to his father in nearly two decades (although he is still on good terms with his mother and his siblings). In February of 2020, before the whole world went into COVID-19 lockdown, Esquire Magazine did a profile about Macaulay (who now goes by “Mack”). Mack has appeared in a handful of films since his childhood career, (most notably Saved and Party Monster ) but he has mostly stayed away from acting, apart from the occasional stage show or European TV commercial. He is nearly 40 years old, and considers himself essentially retired. He loves to write and paint, and he tries to enjoy his life and the freedom he has to pursue oddball projects like Pizza Underground (a pizza-themed Velvet Underground tribute band that he toured with for a couple of years) and his latest pursuit, a podcast called “Bunny Ears.” Mack lives with his girlfriend Brenda Song, another former child actor who unlike him, has continued to work into her adulthood. They met last year on the set of Changeland , a film directed by Mack’s friend Seth Green, (with whom he co-starred in Party Monster ) and they have now purchased a house together, own two cats, and are trying to have a baby. It’s the first real taste of a happy domestic home life that Mack has ever had, and while it loverwhelms him at times, he is happy to be where he is. He doesn’t regret his childhood, nor does he regret putting up with his father for as long as he did. He told Maron on “WTF,” that although they are estranged, he wouldn’t be the person he is today without having gone through those experiences with Kit. And I can’t help thinking that maybe if his life trajectory had been different, he wouldn’t have met Song. Which would be a shame, because it seems the two are very much in love. I am happy to see that Mack has come to a sense of peace after what seems like an absolutely brutal childhood. But now that I know the extent of Kit Culkin’s abuse, I worry that when it comes time for me to do my annual Christmas viewing of Home Alone , the experience will be tainted by knowing that it was the extreme success of that film – the highest grossing live-action comedy film ever made – that drove Kit to exploit and harm his talented child. Or maybe not. As I said earlier, Home Alone still holds up, year after year, not just because of its stacked supporting cast, not just because of John Williams’ beautiful soundtrack, but because of Mack’s sheer star power. He carries 85% of the film all by himself. Think about that: so much of Home Alone features Kevin McAllister in solo scenes, punctuated by brief interactions with Old Man Marley, and of course, the climactic showdown with the Wet Bandits. There is no denying the force that was Macaulay Culkin in his prime. I would like to believe it is possible to marvel at his skill without getting too bogged down in the knowledge of how awful his childhood was. I guess I’ll find out in a couple of weeks when I load it up and revisit the movie I associate the most with my childhood in the Chicago suburbs, not far from the McAllister home. Song, Mack’s girlfriend, is quoted in the Esquire piece as hoping that he returns to acting full-time: I truly believe that he is the actor he is now because of all the things he had to go through... He has gone through so much tragedy; he’s had so many ups, so many downs; he’s seen the ugly side of this industry; he’s also seen the amazing side of this industry. So he can pinpoint exactly what he doesn’t want and what he doesn’t like about it. But yeah, I hope, I hope, I hope. I also kinda hope. But if he doesn’t want to, that’s okay too. As I become more and more comfortable with aging – despite my periodic fits of angst when I realize that one of the biggest emotional touchstones of my childhood is THREE DECADES OLD – I am beginning to realize the joys of being able to truly call the shots in my own life: to settle down in a home of my own with a supportive partner and to not push myself so hard to excel at working jobs that make me hate my life. I get where Mack is coming from, in a roundabout way. And I mostly just want him to be okay. I think he deserves it after gifting us with one of the most iconic (and in my opinion, the greatest) Christmas films of all time. Raise a glass of Pepsi, everyone, in honor of Home Alone turning 30, and please enjoy this cartoon by Jen Lewis that cracks me up every time I look at it: Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

Systemic Oppression of the Other, Systemic Oppression of the Self Servitude, COVID-19, and “Family.” When I was very young, my father used to regale me with stories about his childhood in East India, growing up with his older sister Lara and his younger sister Sheela* being shuttled around from small town to small town with his father, my grandfather, who worked as an administrator for the Indian Railways, responsible for the movement of goods trains in a section of the Eastern Railway, traveling throughout the system, touring and inspecting operations activity across dozens of stations. One person my father often spoke of was Bahadur, a young man who worked for his family for a few years when he was a child who became his de facto caretaker. My father idolized Bahadur, a servant who was so much more to him than that, and the stories my father told me about him painted him as an almost mythic creature with mysterious origins who had a profoundly deep impact on his life. It’s been decades since I thought about Bahadur, but he came to mind when I recently watched The White Tiger , Ramin Bahrani’s 2021 adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 novel of the same name. It’s a sharply written rags-to-riches story about a servant in New Delhi named Balram, (Adarsh Gourav, in a stunning performance in his first leading role) who gradually overcomes his station in life, raising himself up to become a successful entrepreneur through questionably moral means. Balram begins his life as a chauffeur for the wealthy Shah family; he holds the firm belief that it is an honor to perform his duty to serve them, and the family in return frequently claims that they consider him a member of their family, even though, as time goes on, it becomes clear what a disingenuous claim this actually is. So I recently asked my father to recap his memories of Bahadur. This is what he wrote to me: Bahadur was about 17 years old when he floated in across the border from Nepal into Sahibganj, in Bihar, where we were stationed for a few years. He came to my dad’s office at the Railways looking for work. Bapi brought him home, and he and Ma hired him as a kind of ‘utility player.’ I was about 4 years old at the time. Bahadur became my hero. He taught me about life’s everyday secrets. He taught me adventure and courage. He taught me how to revere nature. I ate wild berries with him and listened to him tell me about the behavior of earthworms in our ecosystem. When we moved to Dhanbad, I was playing in the back garden of our house and there was a cobra among the rocks under a tree – a deadly, poisonous snake – and I was poking and prodding it. Bahadur saw what was happening, brought a stick, and killed it, which saved my life. I used to ride on the handlebars of his bicycle to the bazaar, and he bought me toys. I sat with him as he sat near the manhole outside the kitchen while he ate his dinner. There was a stray dog in the neighborhood called Tutey, and somehow Tutey became Bahadur’s dog. He trained him to bring pillows between his teeth while making our beds. I felt Bahadur could do ANYTHING. Strange, but I think I learned confidence from him. Not to fear anything in life. He was family. I never saw him as anything else. When I was 7 years old, he left. I’m not sure of the exact reason, but I think it was because he wanted a permanent job in the Railway organization. Bapi couldn’t find a slot for him in the short term. Bahadur went to Nepal for a short home leave and never returned. Broke my heart. He told me he would come back someday. I’m still waiting for him. My father is 70 years old. He has lived in the United States since 1978. He currently lives in Berkeley, CA, and works as a Vice-President of Wells Fargo Corporate. And he’s still waiting for his beloved Bahadur, who left him when he was a little boy, to come home to Dhanbad. This made me tear up. But I can’t help unpacking some of this story critically. This young man, an immigrant from Nepal, showed up wanting a paying job in the Railways, and my grandfather couldn’t make that happen, so he hired him as a servant. Bahadur ran errands, he took care of my father, he made the beds. My father considered him family. But there it is, right there in my dad's narrative: Bahadur didn’t eat dinner inside the house with the family. Bahadur ate outside the kitchen, seated next to a manhole. And while my heart hurts for my father losing his friend, companion, and protector, I can’t exactly blame Bahadur for leaving. Nobody with the balls to walk into a perfect stranger’s office and ask for a job, would want to remain a servant indefinitely. * In The White Tiger , Balram is from a lower-caste family, living in a village in Laxmangarh, where the Shah family operated as their landlords. Balram was a bright child who could read and write English and was offered a scholarship to a school in New Delhi. He was declared the titular “White Tiger” by his community: an exceptional creature born only once a century. However, due to his father being stuck working low-paid menial jobs with no formal education, there was not enough money to pay their landlords and a prestigious school, and so, Balram’s grandmother forces him to go to work in the village tea stall to earn money for the family. He never returns to school, and his father eventually dies from tuberculosis, because he cannot afford medical care. When Balram becomes a young man, he aspires to become the chauffeur for the Shah’s son Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) who has returned to India from the United States with his New York-raised wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and, he succeeds. Ashok’s father and older brother, both born and raised in India, treat Balram poorly, often asking him to do menial tasks on top of his chauffeuring duties, and they speak to him dismissively or aggressively. Balram is initially willing to accept this as his lot in life; he was born a lower-caste individual, and he considers it an honor to serve his duty to the wealthy family who provides a place for his family to live. The dynamics shift significantly when the Shahs decide to send Ashok and Pinky to New Delhi. The elder Shahs are fundamentally corrupt, a family who has made their millions in the oil industry, and Ashok's father wants to avoid paying taxes. Their method of staying solvent (and not in jail) is bribing politicians to look the other way. Ashok’s job in New Delhi is to keep paying regular visits to various high-ranking members of Parliament, handing over literal bags of cash to them. The Shahs view this as protecting their interests and buying favor (a kind of funhouse mirror version of being a political lobbyist). Back in New Delhi, once it’s just Ashok and Pinky to chauffeur, Balram gets a taste of what it’s like to be treated with kindness. Ashok and Pinky, influenced by their life in New York, don’t believe that servants should be treated like mere peons. Ashok demands that Balram stop calling him “Sir” or “Master.” Pinky tries to ask Balram what he really wants to do with his life, saying that she escaped a depressing future working in her parents’ bodega in Jackson Heights by going to NYU and becoming a licensed chiropractic practitioner, and she sincerely believes that Balram could do anything he wanted to do if he set his mind to it. (Although, Balram keeps insisting that all he wants to do is his duty towards his employers). Even though Ashok and Pinky both tend to speak to Balram in a condescending manner, with the privilege of their Western outlook, they don’t expect him to perform humiliating tasks like massaging their feet with oil (something Ashok’s father demands of Balram when he sees him) or shouting at him not to touch things in their home. They even invite him to celebrate Pinky’s birthday with them, and they tell him that they consider him family, and he begins to genuinely believe it. * My Sheela Aunty lived her entire adult life in Calcutta with her parents. She had a full-time job, working for one of the largest hotel companies in India, but she never quite left home. My dad and my Lara Aunty, always considered this to be a bit of a “failure to launch.” After all, my father immigrated to America after he got married. Lara moved to Paris at the age of twenty with less than $50 to her name to study at the Sorbonne, where she met my uncle Claude. When my grandfather passed away, Sheela Aunty continued to live with my grandmother, and every few years, throughout middle and high school, and well into my college years, my father and I would go to visit them over my winter breaks. Hema was Sheela Aunty and my grandmother’s housekeeper. She was a refugee from Bangladesh who fled over the border as a child during Bangladesh’s war for independence against Pakistan. She never completed high school. She had a daughter but was estranged from her husband, and she supported herself and her daughter with domestic work. I don’t know how Sheela Aunty found Hema, but when I remember my trips to India, Hema is always a huge part of the landscape of my memories. Hema was sharp as a tack, efficient, and sassy. I adored her. We all did. Hema couldn’t speak much English, and I cannot speak a word of Bengali. My parents used to speak it to each other but were lax about ensuring that I learn to speak it myself, only speaking to me in English. After my mother’s death when I was 12 years old, I stopped hearing the language at all at home. But having been immersed since birth around two native speakers, I understand it fluently. So fluently, that I even understand it idiomatically – there are times when I hear colloquial phrases in Bengali that are absolutely untranslatable to English in a coherent way, but on some instinctive level, I know what they mean. Some might find my relationship with Bengali to be fraught, but I’ve never felt that way. Being able to understand it is about 85% of the battle when one is in Calcutta, especially because after 300 years of British rule, most Indians know how to speak English. I get along just fine. Hema and I were always able to communicate with each other pretty thoroughly between her broken English, my fluent comprehension of Bengali, and our mutual love of Bollywood movies. My favorite story of Hema and myself – the definitive one of our relationship – was during one of our winter trips to Calcutta, when the day after we arrived, I was so miserably jetlagged, that I could barely drag myself out of bed to eat the hot breakfast Hema had cooked before I went back to the living room to pass out again on the couch. Hema was bustling around the flat, tidying up, and she walked past me flopping around on the cushions in a semi-fugue state. “Reeya,” Hema said in Bengali. “Reeya! You should take a bath. You’ll feel refreshed with a bath. Shall I run one for you?” I grunted in assent, and she started chuckling. “Okay, I’m getting the water started for you, you delicate American girl,” she said, again in Bengali. “Hey!” I retorted in English. “Don’t be using ‘American’ as an insult with me, Hema!” And then we both were cracking up. A whole conversation, a whole camaraderie, a whole relationship, carrying on a whole conversation in two different languages, with a woman I only saw every few years. When I think of Hema, I think of that moment, and it still makes me laugh. In 2005, my grandmother suffered a major stroke and lost much of her ability to be independent. Hema really stepped up when this happened. Sheela Aunty had to go to work, and my grandmother was not safe alone in her flat on her own given her mobility issues. Hema, who used to only come in the mornings to make breakfast and clean the flat, began staying with my grandmother all day long, while Sheela Aunty was at work. She made sure my grandmother ate lunch, got her out of her chair, and moving slowly around the house, holding her by the arms, to try to maintain what remained of her flexibility and muscle. Eventually, Hema got my grandmother to the point where they could go up to the rooftop terrace of the apartment building and walk the perimeter several times. Hema did this cheerfully and without complaint, because she genuinely loved my grandmother, and genuinely loved Sheela Aunty. If she felt it was her “duty” to help, that was never the impression I got. She gave herself to the task of caretaking for my grandmother as if she was caring for her own mother. Hema was family. I saw her as family. We all saw her as family. She was a godsend during those years. Sheela Aunty paid her extra for her efforts. But every day, when Hema wasn’t actively helping my grandmother, she was cooking, dealing with the laundry, and often down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floors of the flat. She was family. But was she, really? My grandmother passed away a few years later, and Hema’s job description morphed back into regular housekeeper from being a caretaker. She continued to work for Sheela Aunty, but something in their relationship had profoundly changed. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, and I also wasn’t really in a position to speculate. The last time I visited India was in 2005, after my grandmother’s stroke. I haven’t been back since. My relationship with Sheela Aunty became strained once I graduated from college, as she seemed to fall into a deep depression that she refused to seek treatment for, which then turned into a mild form of agoraphobia and an extreme form of judgmentalism towards basically everyone. Even though no one knows more than me how untreated mental illness can have a calamitous effect on the way one treats their loved ones, talking to Sheela Aunty became increasingly unpleasant and I began ducking her calls and texts. In the last few years, I would communicate with her twice a year: once on her birthday and once on mine. The realities of being a working adult (as opposed to a student who gets nearly a month off from classes at Christmas time) made it hard to justify a 27-hour journey to visit an aunt with whom I didn’t enjoy spending time, and three cousins - my father's older brother's kids - with whom I have nothing in common. (Them: Vijaya - pharmaceutical rep turned stay-at-home mom, Robi - engineer and father, Arpita - anesthesiologist and mother. Me: unmarried, childfree by choice, no post-graduate degree, blue hair, tattoos, musician, long-winded writer of Story Screen essays, underemployed accountant, and very, very American). As a result, I haven’t seen or spoken to my Bangla-English banter buddy Hema in over 15 years, this wonderfully funny, courageous, generous woman under Sheela Aunty’s employ who gave so much to her and to my grandmother. Was Hema ever really my family? Considering how rarely I talk to my actual family in India, it’s hard for me to say at this point. * After what turns out to be a calamitous end to Pinky’s birthday celebration in The White Tiger , Balram’s story becomes quite dark. I am purposely not going to elaborate on the circumstances of what went down because I don’t want to ruin the plot. But Ashok’s father and brother end up paying a visit to Ashok and Pinky in New Delhi after the incident. The two of them resume their humiliating treatment towards Balram, forcing him to massage Ashok’s father’s gross feet again, shoving him and even kicking him at times, and being verbally abusive. Ashok, while perfectly magnanimous towards Balram when his family isn’t present, starts mimicking their treatment of Balram, which appalls Pinky (who already finds the way her husband shrinks into himself and stops speaking his own mind in front of his father and brother to be pathetic and distasteful). Eventually, after her in-laws return to Laxmangarh, Pinky leaves Ashok and returns to New York. Ashok falls into depression, starts drinking excessively and smoking copious amounts of pot, and begins to depend on Balram for emotional support. Balram, used to serving Ashok as a matter of “duty,” is only too happy to comply. “Why are you so kind to me, Balram?” Ashok wails drunkenly one night, “You are my only true friend. You are like my little brother.” But when Ashok’s actual brother returns yet again to coach Ashok through another round of political bribery, Ashok (in his brother’s presence) begins to mistreat Balram yet again. Balram finally begins to understand that as a servant, he will never truly be family to Ashok. And as long as he remains a servant, he will remain locked into a confining lifestyle, dictated by the realities of his birthplace and station, and by the reality of having to provide consistent income for his family back in Laxmangarh. He begins to realize that the societal system is rigged against people like him – and not just for the stereotypical reasons of caste. Balram has not just been harmed by the way the Shah family treats him. Balram has been harmed by the fact that his opportunity for an education was snatched away from him for a multitude of reasons: his father’s ignorance about money, the fact that his grandmother emotionally blackmailed him into working in that tea stall to help provide for his family, by the fact that he was conditioned to be a servant - not just by societal expectations of his caste and class - but by his own family’s attitude about where they stood within the hierarchy of Indian society. He was conditioned to believe that being a chauffeur for a rich family was the highest honor that he could achieve. The farthest up he could climb. He never once thought that he was capable of more in his life because every aspect of the world he lived in conspired to keep him down. And it is once Balram makes this realization, and remembers his childhood prophecy that he is in fact the famed, once-in-a-lifetime “White Tiger,” that he plans his escape from the fate of being a servant for life. The way that Balram extricates himself from a life of servitude and becomes a spectacularly successful entrepreneur and business owner is also quite grim. He flees to Bangalore and establishes a fleet of professional drivers to service the booming tech industry there. (He makes a point of saying that he treats his employees like employees, with the respect an employee deserves. He has them sign contracts when he hires them, and he never once refers to them as his “family”). I am again going to purposefully avoid elaborating on how he succeeds in becoming a successful business owner, so as not to ruin the plot, because honestly, everyone should watch The White Tiger . But by the end of the film, we realize that the thesis of the whole story is that once a slave realizes he is a slave, that is what allows him to free himself. Balram makes a (very welcome, in my book) snarky comment about the fantastical rags-to-riches tale of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire at one point, saying that in real life, there is no sparkly celebrity with a million dollars who will pull you out of poverty. One must take ownership of their own life in order to succeed. One must be willing to believe that they deserve better than what forces outside of their control - family, exorbitant wealth vs. extreme poverty, the entire culture of servitude that exists in India - exert on their lives. In the end, Balram is living a version of the American dream. But it’s actually the Indian dream. “White people are on their way out,” Balram tells a colleague, “It’s the brown man and the yellow man’s world now.” * On January 6, 2021, while my boyfriend and I sat dumbfounded on our couch watching CNN’s coverage of the Capitol Riot, my phone rang. It was my father. At nearly 9 pm. When my father calls that late on a weeknight, with the three-hour time difference between us, it’s never good news. But that night when I answered the phone, I assumed that he was calling to talk about the utter insanity that had happened in Washington DC that day (which, admittedly, was NOT good news). But I was so incredibly wrong. “Reeya,” my dad said, “Sheela is dead.” Sheela Aunty, my father’s baby sister, had been found dead in her flat that morning by Hema when she came in to do her usual cook-and-clean. Sheela Aunty was only 67 years old. I couldn’t believe it. “What happened? How could this happen?” And then it dawned on me. “Did she have COVID?” “I think she did,” my dad said. He had video-chatted with her only a few days prior, and she had looked pale and drawn and exhausted. She was having difficulty talking because she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, and when she did breathe, she was wheezing heavily. My dad obviously couldn’t diagnose his sister in Calcutta from Berkeley over WhatsApp, but we had been living in a global pandemic for nearly a year, and she certainly was showing symptoms of the coronavirus. The thing about Sheela Aunty is that well before she fell into depression and quasi-agoraphobia, she was afraid of doctors. In fact, she was always afraid of doctors, for as long as I can remember. When she got sick, she relied on a homeopath. During one of my trips to Calcutta, I was struck by a horrendous case of food poisoning, and I couldn’t even keep water down. I was so weak that I couldn’t hold my head upright. I probably should have been taken to the hospital for intravenous hydration. But Sheela Aunty was afraid of doctors, and so she popped over to the neighborhood homeopath, who gave her some random tincture that I was forced to swallow every hour, and a packet of foul-tasting electrolyte powder that she stirred into glasses of water and had my dad administer to me. (To this day I do not know why my father didn’t intervene and get me to a hospital, but no matter now; obviously, I survived. Still, WTF Dad?) So from what my dad, Lara Aunty in Paris, and my doctor cousin Arpita in Calcutta could surmise, Sheela Aunty began showing symptoms of COVID-19 about a week prior to her death, and instead of going to a doctor (or even calling her niece, Dr. Arpita, the hot-shot anesthesiologist, for a reality check), she went to that goddamn homeopath and came home with some tinctures or powders or some such bullshit, and then she died in the middle of the night from what the medical examiner determined was “cardiorespiratory failure.” (“Yeah,” my neurobiologist godsister in Boston told me when I called to give her the news, “That’s what happens to people who die of COVID. They literally cannot breathe.”) In their grief, Lara Aunty and my dad began to blame, of all people, Hema for Sheela’s death. Why hadn’t she intervened? Why didn’t she care enough to do anything to help? Obviously, my dad said, she didn’t give a shit. “Why would you say that about Hema?” I asked my dad. “Remember how good she was to Dida after her stroke? Why are you insinuating that she let Sheela Aunty die?” “Hema was a trouble-maker,” my dad said. “She was very difficult. Over the past ten years or so, she kept blackmailing Sheela all the time.” I was confused. “What do you mean by ‘blackmail’? Did Sheela Aunty have some sort of secret life that Hema knew about or something?” “No, no,” my dad said dismissively. “She was always asking Sheela for more and more money. Her daughter was having a baby and having a difficult pregnancy, the cost of living was going up, she was taking on more responsibility because Sheela was getting older, Hema herself had arthritis but couldn’t afford to stop working, so she was always trying to get more money. Blackmailing. Sheela would complain to me about it all the time. To Lara too – ask Lara Aunty. She felt Hema was taking advantage of her kindness and always asking for more, more, more.” This felt truly bizarre. Why was it such an affront that Hema, who had worked for Sheela Aunty for decades, should ask for a cost of living pay increase? Especially, when she had lost the bonus payment she received during the years she took care of my grandmother? Why was it offensive that Hema would ask Sheela Aunty for support during her daughter’s difficult pregnancy? Why was it offensive to point out that Hema was taking on extra responsibility because Sheela Aunty’s mental health was taking a toll on her physical health, especially after she retired (she reportedly left her flat so rarely that walking up a flight of stairs would leave her back aching and her lungs burning)? Why was it offensive to point out that as a low-income earning domestic worker, Hema, could not afford to stop working even though her own health was suffering? That isn’t blackmailing . That isn’t even emotional blackmail . That was a woman advocating for herself to her employer. Not only that, it was a woman who went above and beyond to take care of my sick grandmother while Sheela Aunty was still working full time, and she did so from the moment of my grandmother’s stroke, until the day of my grandmother’s death. What she did was nothing short of heroic, in my eyes. Sheela Aunty never considered this fact once – that Hema took care of my grandmother when she couldn’t – and instead, she had the audacity to complain to her siblings in France and America that Hema was asking for a raise? Sheela Aunty never married, never had kids, and she lived a frugal life. She owned her flat outright and had considerable savings, investments, and a pension. She could have more than afforded to pay Hema a little bit more – or a LOT more, given what Hema had done for my grandmother. “We never treated our servants like they were dirt,” my father told me after he watched The White Tiger . “We were not like the Shah family in this film. We treated them well. We cared for them. It might have been a little relic of that old British colonial noblesse oblige , but still, we took care of them, because we valued what they did for us. They really were like extended family.” And yet now, Lara Aunty and my father speak about Hema as if she fucking murdered Sheela Aunty. As if by virtue of asking for a raise, Hema somehow kept Sheela Aunty from seeking treatment for COVID. (If you ask me, it’s the bloody homeopath who should be blamed here.) I realized, at this moment, just how deeply my father and Lara Aunty had been steeped in the societal conditioning of their upbringing in India. My father has lived in the United States for over 40 years. Lara Aunty has lived in France for nearly 50 years. Most of the time, I would describe the two of them as more Western than Indian, both in outlook and worldview, especially after spending more than half of their lives living abroad. However, it's clear that on the topic of servant culture in India - a culture and practice that does not exist or function, structurally, in the West - they can't turn those cultural blinders off. They can't quite see someone like Hema as a real person. They are like Ashok and Pinky in The White Tiger : convinced of their enlightened, liberal sensibilities, they believe they acquired in America and France, but in the end, still condescending, insulting, and disrespectful of someone's humanity just by virtue of their servitude. * In the nearly six months since Sheela Aunty died of COVID-19, India has seen a horrendous surge of COVID deaths. A second wave of the pandemic has arrived in India with multiple new variants of the virus cropping up with deadly results. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a member of a Hindu fundamentalist political party. He cares more about turning India, a Democratic country founded on secular principles, into a Hindu country, - oppressing its not-insignificant Muslim minority - than he does about the health of his people. He bragged and boasted last year that the COVID-19 response in India was one of the best in the world. He took credit for that claim even though he actually did nothing to prepare to see India through an inevitable second wave (because in pandemics, there is always a second wave). This is proving to be a living nightmare – supply-chain issues are causing shortages in oxygen, hospitals across the country are desperately sending out distress signals, saying they are running out of beds and do not have enough oxygen to treat the thousands of newly-infected citizens. There are so many deaths in India now that there are mass cremations. Families who lose loved ones to COVID don’t even have the ability to give them dignified end-of-life care, a proper funeral service, a measure of closure. Modi refuses to acknowledge the oxygen shortage, and members of his political party have begun to threaten activists who speak up about the calamity that is Modi’s supposed brilliant COVID response preparedness. A month ago, in Calcutta, my cousin Vijaya, her husband, and her teenage daughter, all tested positive for COVID-19. Because Vijaya has access to one of the best hospitals in the city, (her sister Arpita works there as an anesthesiologist) she and her husband were given beds, access to the ICU, and oxygen, which they both needed. Vijaya’s daughter Malini experienced comparatively less severe symptoms and was sent to a quarantine center for ten days, followed up by another two weeks of isolation at Arpita’s house. While she was in the quarantine center, Malini texted me frequently about how scared and lonely she was, and I did my best to comfort her. “I am so angry at God,” she kept texting me, “God has ruined my happy family.” How do you tell a frightened ninth-grader who lives a very sheltered life in Calcutta (compared to the life I lived in San Francisco when I was 15 years old) that she’s angry at the wrong person, without sounding like a fucking asshole? As much as I desperately wanted to say “Malini, I don’t believe in God. There is no God. Modi is the problem. Modi is the one who has done this to your family. Be angry at Modi,” I just couldn’t. It wasn’t going to make her less scared. And it wasn’t going to make a lick of difference. We already had one relative die of COVID this year; I don’t think this kid wants to hear a political rant from her absentee righteous American Reeya Aunty right now. Vijaya has since been released from the hospital and is with Malini at Arpita’s house. I hear that Vijaya’s husband is on the mend as well. They are lucky because Arpita is a doctor. All over Facebook and Twitter, I see desperate pleas from Indian friends of mine from college: “Does anyone know if there are any beds in any hospitals within a 50 km radius of Pune right now?” “Does anyone know if there are any hospitals in Mumbai with oxygen?” Asking for family, they all said. I went to college with wealthy-ass motherfuckers; you don’t get into the kind of dubiously prestigious name-brand school that I went to, as an international student, without coming from money. They were resorting to social media to save their families. Their wealth cannot help them now. This is a full-blown catastrophe. In a recent editorial by Arundhati Roy in The Guardian , she wrote: On the night of 22 April, 25 critically ill coronavirus patients on high-flow oxygen died in one of Delhi’s biggest private hospitals… where shall we look for solace? For science? Shall we cling to numbers? How many dead? How many recovered? When will the peak come? On 27 April, the report was 323,144 new cases, 2,771 deaths. The precision is somewhat reassuring. Except – how do we know? Tests are hard to come by, even in Delhi… if Delhi is breaking down, what should we imagine is happening in villages in Bihar, in Uttar Pradesh, in Madhya Pradesh? Where tens of millions of workers from the cities, carrying the virus with them, are fleeing home to their families, traumatized by their memory of Modi’s national lockdown in 2020. It was the strictest lockdown in the world, announced with only four hours’ notice. It left migrant workers stranded in cities with no work, no money to pay their rent, no food, and no transport. Many had to walk hundreds of miles to their homes in far-flung villages. Hundreds died along the way. This time around, although there is no lockdown, the workers have left while transport is still available, while trains and buses are still running. They’ve left because they know that even though they make up the engine of the economy in this huge country, when a crisis comes, in the eyes of this administration, they simply don’t exist… these are villages where people die of easily treatable diseases like diarrhoea and tuberculosis. How are they to cope with Covid? Are Covid tests available to them? Is there oxygen? More than that, is there love? Forget love, is there even concern? There isn’t. Because there is only a heart-shaped hole filled with cold indifference where India’s public heart should be. "India..." Balram says more than once in The White Tiger, his words dripping with the venom of bitter cynicism, "...the biggest democracy in the world." As I hear more about what is happening in India right now, I keep thinking of those words. India has always been so proud of its status as a democracy after centuries of colonial rule, and yet, the foundation of Indian society is still built on the principles of feudalism, racism, and colorism, and the man currently in charge is a fascist demagogue who is literally watching the dead bodies of his citizens burn in mass cremations. The workers Roy is writing about in her editorial are people like Balram . They are people who have realized that no one cares to truly take care of them. While Aravind Adiga certainly had no idea when he was writing his novel that 12 years later there would be a global pandemic, nor did Ramin Bahrani know while he was directing The White Tiger that the film’s release would be pushed back almost a year due to said global pandemic, here we are, just like with The Trial of the Chicago 7, One Night in Miami, and Judas and the Black Messiah – being presented with a film that inadvertently resonates with the current political moment. I have to wonder if the workers Roy is referencing in her piece are having a similar awakening to Balram’s? Are they beginning to understand how they live in a country that doesn’t see their humanity, or that they are trapped in a system that perpetuates a culture that keeps certain classes of people down and self-reinforces that oppression? Do they realize they need to truly recognize their own fate, as low-income workers, in poverty, that reduces them to the level of slavery, and that only by recognizing their slavery can they change things? I find myself thinking about Hema. I don’t know where she is now that she no longer has Sheela Aunty as her employer, now that my father and Lara Aunty have turned on her. I find myself remembering that time she jokingly called me a “delicate American girl” in Bengali, and I wonder what she would think of me now, writing an essay that might result in me getting canceled by my entire damn family. I worry about her because someone has to. I hope she’s okay. I hope she’s found another job. I hope she doesn’t get COVID. If she does and she dies of it, that news will never reach me. I will never know what happens to her now. I have to live with that. And then this gets me thinking about my father’s beloved Bahadur. The mythical tough Gurkha, the young man from Nepal who wandered into my father’s life and changed it so profoundly. The man who abandoned my father nearly six decades ago. The man my father says he is still waiting for. The man my father says was family to him, even though he ate his dinner next to a manhole outside the kitchen. The man whose reason for leaving is still somewhat of a mystery to my father. But I know why Bahadur left. I am certain of it. Bahadur came to my grandfather looking for a career in the Railways. He left because he likely realized that as long as he stayed, he would always remain a servant. He knew that no matter how well my father’s family treated him (and I know my grandparents; I know they never abused him), no matter how attached my father was to him, no matter how much he loved my father, that if he stayed, he was signing up for a life he did not want. Whatever he was escaping from in Nepal when he first walked into my grandfather’s office was preferable to a life of servitude, of self-reinforcing notions of “duty,” of conditioning himself to believe that this was the best he could do with his life. But instead of resorting to the extreme measures Balram does to free himself from this fate in The White Tiger , Bahadur did the only thing he could: he went home. He took his power, and he walked away. And after watching The White Tiger and seeing the way that COVID has destroyed the people of my mother’s land, and witnessing the vicious way my father and Lara Aunty turned on Hema after Sheela Aunty died, I can’t help but admire Bahadur for his courage. He got out before he slipped too far in. I don’t know if Bahadur is still alive now, but if he is, I wish I knew how to reach him. I need to tell him that I believe he is that once-in-a-lifetime creature. That he is, indeed, the OG White Tiger. * Names of family members have been changed throughout this piece. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

In mid-March, I was visiting friends in Brooklyn (they are part of my quarantine pod), and one of them insisted that we needed to watch Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. I had intended to watch this on my own anyway; some of you may remember that I wrote about their wedding a few years ago , and how symbolically important it felt to have Meghan join the Royal Family. Of course, the potential that Meghan could have brought to the relevance of this increasingly irrelevant family was all for naught. The notoriously ruthless and questionably ethical British tabloid press, as well as members of Harry’s family itself (or “The Firm,” as the couple referred to it with Oprah), subjected Meghan to a barrage of racist coverage, all seemingly designed to paint her as a “difficult black woman” (especially in comparison to Kate Middleton, Prince William’s wife). It became clear over time that the tabloids may have been working in cahoots with certain high-ranking members of “The Firm,” with negative stories being planted by factions within William and Kate’s camp, and perhaps even by factions within Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles’ camp. There was a bombshell of a revelation that literally left Oprah speechless: that a member of the family had openly expressed concern about the potential darkness of Archie’s (Harry and Meghan’s son) skin tone while Meghan was still pregnant. And there was another bombshell revelation: that the choice to not give Archie a title upon his birth - despite it being the Royal precedent and his birthright - was not a choice Harry and Meghan made themselves (although the press had led the world to believe so), but because The Firm did not want a mixed-race child to be an official part of the Windsor family lineage. Because Archie lacked a title, he was not given a security detail. And because both Harry and Meghan had received death threats from racist crazies, the idea that their son would not be protected was utterly terrifying to them. Harry and Meghan were adamant that the Queen herself had never been unkind to them and that the skin tone comment was not made by either herself or her husband, the now-late Prince Philip. They pointedly refused to name who had made the comment as they believed it would be too damaging and cause more drama that they simply did not have the bandwidth to handle. And yet another bombshell: Meghan, from the pressure of being vilified by the press and the open racism on display from her in-laws, began to experience suicidal ideation during her pregnancy with Archie, but when she asked the family for help, they refused, on the grounds that a member of the Royal Family seeking psychiatric help would make the family look bad. Meghan continued to suffer up to and through Archie’s birth, and then she and Harry made a choice: they were going to step back from being senior members of the Royal Family, relocate to Canada (a Commonwealth country), and face a less stressful lifestyle out of the public eye. This choice, as we now know, backfired, because The Firm seemed to take this move extremely personally. They stripped Harry and Meghan of their titles and have seemingly disowned them. Harry and Meghan have now settled outside of Los Angeles and are figuring out what their new lives are going to look like. Oprah clearly understood why Meghan wanted to step back from active Royal duty, due to the racist press coverage and the lack of support from The Firm. But she made a point of asking Harry what made him step back - from a family, he was born into, a lifestyle he was born into, the only life he had ever known. How does one break away from one’s family at all? And especially, how does one break away from THIS family? (Which seems more and more like a cult the more I learn about them). Especially since it seems to have cost Harry his relationship with his older brother and his father, both of whom he is no longer on speaking terms with. But Harry was quite clear: he knew they had to walk away because he remembered all too well the toll on his mother Princess Diana’s mental health, of being married to his father, as well as the role of the paparazzi in her death. He didn’t want to see history repeat itself. But moreover, he wanted to protect his wife and his child. His mixed-race wife and his mixed-race child. He said that being in a relationship with a woman of color had opened his eyes to many things about society that he had been blind to, and he did not want to play a role in perpetuating racist treatment against his wife. He said he had made three statements denouncing the racist treatment of Meghan while he was still an active member of the family: once as a boyfriend, once as a husband, and once as a father, to no avail. Then, his wife became suicidal, and his family turned their backs on her. So he made the hardest choice of his life. This is remarkable considering the history of his family and the legacy of racism and imperialism that the United Kingdom left in its wake ever since abandoning all of its former colonies worldwide after essentially going broke during World War II. “The sun never sets on the British Empire,” it was once said. The British colonized half the world, and now have the temerity to complain about immigrants (Brexit), and one immigrant in particular (Meghan Markle). Harry decided to support his wife, at the cost of losing most of his immediate family. He took a stand. When asked, “What side are you on?” he said, essentially, that he was on the side of compassion, and anti-racism. * I know that I’m about to make what will feel like an insane juxtaposition, but as I watched Harry and Meghan’s conversation with Oprah, I started thinking about three films that came out last year that were contenders for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards: Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 , Regina King’s One Night in Miami , and Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah. These films all take place around the same time period in the 1960s, during the height of the civil rights movement in the United States; the stories all contain overlapping plotlines. It’s curious that we have three high-profile films this year that cover such similar themes. Or perhaps not. All three films were hailed as “timely” by critics given the political atmosphere last summer of the massive Black Lives Matter protests that erupted over the deaths of George Floyd, Elijah MacClaine, and Breonna Taylor, among numerous others, at the hands of the police. The Trial of the Chicago 7 allows Aaron Sorkin to do what he does best: snappy, sharp, intelligent dialogue about politics and the law; searing, inspirational speeches about justice and how great America has the potential to be; riveting courtroom cases, and sprawling ensemble casts. You can recognize bits and pieces of former Sorkin properties in this film: A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, The Newsroom. Sorkin has primarily been a screenwriter (and showrunner) during his career, but Chicago 7 is his second time in the director’s chair and it was the first time I’d seen him direct. Unsurprisingly, he understands intuitively how to match his direction with his writing, and although the film runs a smidge too long for my taste, it is ultimately a very compelling watch - not just for the trial scenes, but for the backstory of the disparate members of this group who have been put on trial, seemingly arbitrarily, against the toughest federal prosecutors the Nixon administration can bring, and with an outrageously biased judge, Julius Hoffman (played by Frank Langella). The Chicago 7 were all members of different groups protesting the Vietnam war at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The main focus in Sorkin’s film is on Thomas Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) from Students for Democratic Society (SDS), Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen, in an absolutely spectacular performance) from the Youth International Party (often called “Yippies”), and William Kunstler (Mark Rylance), the attorney representing the group. The Chicago 7 were charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intention of starting riots at the DNC. Although riots did occur due to police taking control of the hill where the protesters were congregating, they were not premeditated by these seven men (nor anybody), and none of them actually incited the riots. The Nixon administration had seemingly singled these men out for being prominent members of anti-Vietnam War organizations. Originally, there was an 8th member charged along with the other seven: Bobby Seale, National Chairman of the Black Panther Party (Yahya Abdul-Mateen), who was only in Chicago for a few hours that night. He was represented by a different attorney than the Chicago 7, who could not attend the trial due to illness. The Judge keeps insisting that Kuntsler step in to defend Seale, which both Seale and Kuntsler vociferously reject (though behind the scenes, Kunstler keeps offering to help, only to be repeatedly turned down). Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panthers, comes to court to lend support to Seale, which the Judge assumes is legal support, and leads to further trouble. Hoffman openly mocks the court proceedings, much to Hayden’s dismay and frustration. Hampton is killed during a police raid, Seale continues to demand that he should not stand trial without legal representation, leading the judge to punish him by having security take him to another room and return him beaten, bound, and gagged, which is immediately objected to by both prosecution and defense. Seale’s case is ruled a mistrial and he is removed from the court, the judge begins to remove jurors suspected of sympathizing with the defendants, and charges the defendants and their attorneys with multiple charges of contempt of court. By all accounts, this trial is a complete clown show, and after court each evening the defendants debate with Kunstler regarding the best strategy to defend themselves, with Hayden and Hoffman in particular, continually clashing with each other. Hayden finds Hoffman too abrasive and antagonistic, and Hoffman thinks that Hayden is not strong enough in his espoused values. Kuntsler discovers a tape recording with evidence that a statement Hayden made the night of the riots (after his friend Rennie Davis is struck in the head by a police officer) started the violence, but Hoffman agrees to get on the stand and offers testimony exonerating him while criticizing the US Government’s leadership. Hayden uses his opportunity to make closing remarks to name all of the soldiers who have been killed in Vietnam since the trial started. In the end, only two of the seven were acquitted of all charges, while the remaining five were acquitted of conspiracy but convicted for crossing state lines intending to incite a riot. They were sentenced in 1970, but in 1972 all of the convictions were reversed by the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. At the end of the day, The Trial of the Chicago 7 shows that despite the bickering and drama between the defendants behind the scenes, all of the defendants are in fact on the same side. Despite their differing tactics in how to effectively protest or conduct themselves in court, they all want the Vietnam War to end, and they act in accordance with that desire. They have taken a side, a side that with the hindsight of 50 years we can all agree was the right side; the Vietnam War was a failed war that killed far too many and ruined the lives of countless veterans who survived, the US should have gotten out sooner, and we probably never should have gotten involved in the first place. But the fate of Bobby Seale is the one that haunts me the most in this film. After he is finally removed from the courtroom, when his case is declared a mistrial after enduring horrendous brutality and humiliation at the hands of the court officers, we never see him again or hear about what happened to him. By including him in the story, Sorkin succeeds in further underscoring just how abhorrent the judge’s behavior was during the trial, but it felt a bit like a manipulative trick in the end, as if Sorkin was using Seale as a way to shoehorn in the idea of black bodies being abused by white law enforcement to enhance the “timeliness” of the film, but didn’t take any time to unpack how his position as one of the original defendants charged with this crime was dramatically different from those of his white co-defendants. There is a lot to like about The Trial of the Chicago 7 , and I can understand why Sorkin would be reluctant to make a long film even longer, but I genuinely feel like this was a missed opportunity; we see so much of the rhetorical sparring between Hayden and Hoffman mediated by Kunstler, but we never see what Seale’s point of view in those debates might have been, and how differently he undoubtedly would have seen and felt his place in that courtroom. He, too, was on the same side as Hayden, Hoffman, and the other defendants, but as the Chairman of the Black Panther party, his tactics for protesting were notably different. Whose side would Seale have been on - Hayden’s, or Hoffman’s? I’m inclined to think it would have been neither. Hearing more of Seale’s voice would have made the conversation underlying this story far more interesting. * If you’re interested in a philosophical conversation about racism and protest, Regina King’s December 2020 film, One Night in Miami, will definitely appeal to you. One Night in Miami is a fictional account of an evening Malcolm X spent in a hotel room with Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, and Cassius Clay (not long before he converted to the Nation of Islam and adopted the name Muhammed Ali) in February of 1964, on the night of Clay’s historic defeat of Sonny Liston. The film plays out as an extended meditation on the nature of, and how to leverage the effects of celebrity, fame, and political power within the fight for civil rights. Malcolm X (Kinglsey Ben-Adir) pushes Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) hard, saying that he is disappointed that Cooke has such a powerful voice as a singer-songwriter, and could be using his talent to try to create meaningful change for Black people in society, but instead, Cooke only records crooning love songs. Cooke says that of course, he cares about civil rights, that his success and creative autonomy can serve as an inspiration to the Black community, and that protest songs aren’t radio-friendly, nor do they elicit millions of dollars in sales the way his music does. Malcolm then plays Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind,” on the record player, challenging Cooke about his assertion that protest songs aren’t commercially viable. Cooke eventually leaves in anger, with Clay (Eli Goree) in pursuit, while Brown (Aldis Hodge) asks Malcolm why he is being so hard on Cooke. Malcolm responds, “There is no more room for anyone… to be standing on the fence anymore. Our people are literally dying in the streets every day. Black people dying. Every day! And a line has got to be drawn in the sand… a line that says, either you stand on this side with us, or you stand over on that side against us.” In the lead-up to the Academy Awards, Derek Chauvin, the police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he died, was on trial for murder. Historically, we have not seen law enforcement be held accountable for their culpability in what is essentially state-sanctioned killing of Black and Brown bodies. In months since Floyd’s death, this has escalated into a debate about whether or not the police should be defunded. I wrote an essay recently defending Law & Order: SVU , with its coterie of do-gooding NYPD officers, continuing to be on air doing their always righteous thing as more and more police officers kill innocent Black people year after year. I predicted - rightly so, based on the 11 episodes of the current season that have aired - that the Law & Order: SVU team would directly address this issue in their storylines - because how could they not, right now? There is a moment in the SVU season premiere, which aired in the fall of 2020, where Chief Christian Garland (Demore Barnes) is infuriated after footage of the SVU squad arresting an innocent Black man seemingly for Exercising In The Park While Black goes viral. “The man had outstanding warrants; he wasn’t cooperating with the police on the scene. We were by the book,” Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) explains. “That’s the book that got us here!” Garland shouts back. Right now, he says, given the state of the country after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, “business as usual” is not going to fly, and the man who was arrested is suing the NYPD and naming Benson and Sargeant Fin Tutuola (Ice-T) in the lawsuit. Later on, Garland pulls Tutuola aside and asks if he thinks racial bias had anything to do with what happened to the man in the park. Tutuola says he’s known Benson for twenty years, and “her only bias is for the victim.” Garland then tells him: “I know I’m not someone you relate to but we have something in common: we’re both black in blue. We’ve been on this job a long time… things are changing.” Tutuola laughs. “You know how many times I’ve heard that? The one thing I know, this country will always break your heart.” “Nah,” the Chief says. “This time is different. This is a true inflection point… I appreciate your loyalty [to Benson], but you need to watch out for yourself.” When I saw this episode, I was struck by Garland’s choice of words: “This is a true inflection point. Watch out for yourself.” When I subsequently watched One Night in Miami, I noticed that Malcolm X was essentially telling Sam Cooke the same thing, that despite his loyalty to those who buy his apolitical music and have made him rich, he has a choice to make about where he stands as a Black public figure. I’m thrilled to see that SVU has proven wrong all of the breathless uninformed op-eds last year castigating the show for even existing. And I’m intrigued that the themes that SVU is explicitly exploring in 2020-2021 are being implicitly echoed in three major films from 2020. Ultimately, the bottom line is that at some point, you have to pick a side, whether you are a famous musician or a fictional television cop. * The words of Malcolm X and Chief Garland were in my head when I watched Shaka King’s February 2021 film, Judas and the Black Messiah , a film set in the late 1960s about Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), the aforementioned Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and his betrayal by William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), his security captain who is also an undercover FBI informant. While Hampton (almost always referred to as Chairman Fred) never became a household name in the same way Malcolm X did - he certainly did not have access to celebrity friendships with football players, champion boxers, and pop singers - his politics in regards to the civil rights struggle are not dissimilar to Malcolm’s. Both The Nation of Islam (in which Malcolm X was a prominent leader and chief spokesman) and the Black Panther Party (founded by Huey Newton and the aforementioned Bobby Seale in 1966, a year after Malcolm’s death by assassination), disagreed with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideology of using non-violent protest to further the cause of civil rights, even though the ultimate goals of both organizations are different. Malcolm pushed for a Black Nationalist movement, “by any means necessary,” to remove African Americans away from American society because he believed that as long as white people exist, African Americans would not be able to prosper. He, and the Nation of Islam, felt that separatism – even to the extreme of all African Americans going back to Africa – was the only way to ensure true civil rights and safety for the Black community. The Black Panther Party, on the other hand, did not believe in separatism; they wanted to end police brutality and the murdering of Black people, but they wanted to do so in a way that allowed Black people to exist in American society safely, even if it meant being heavily armed at all times. (This is why I wanted so desperately to see a conversation between Bobby Seale and the rest of the white defendants in Chicago 7 .) Specifically, Malcolm’s words about picking a side resonate heavily with the story of O’Neal – a man who, depending on how you view his betrayal of Hampton, either didn’t pick a side, picked the wrong side, or desperately wanted to pick a side but was unable to reconcile that desire with his own selfish motives. In 1966, O’Neal was caught at the age of 17 by FBI Agent Roy Martin Mitchell (played by Jesse Plemons) for car theft. In exchange for having all of his charges dropped, O’Neal agreed to infiltrate the Black Panther Party in Chicago and provide intel to Mitchell as the FBI had expanded its dubiously legal anti-communist COINTELPRO program to include Black civil rights activists. O’Neal ingratiates himself with Chairman Fred and the other Panthers in Chicago quickly, and eventually, he is appointed as a captain for Chairman Fred’s security detail. Every now and then, he meets up with Mitchell to tell him what he knows about the Panther’s current plans and future demonstrations. However, by the summer of 1969, Hampton had been working with Chairman Fred’s Rainbow Coalition, an alliance between the Panthers, gangs, and minority groups within Chicago. The FBI was becoming increasingly nervous, not just about the existence of the Rainbow Coalition, but that their informant had gained political power by being such an integral part of the movement. The FBI raids Panther headquarters, burns down the building, and demands that O’Neal draw them a sketch of the layout of Chairman Fred’s apartment, so they could plan another raid, with the Chairman as the target. O’Neal complies. The night of the planned raid, December 3, 1969, at a gathering at Chairman Fred’s house, O’Neal spikes Chairman Fred’s drink with a sedative, so that he won’t wake up when the police come storming in. Then he fled and fell asleep at about 1:30 AM. The police burst into the Chairman’s apartment at 4:00 AM, killed the security officer on duty at the time, injured several others in the apartment, and then shot the Chairman in the back of the head two times. This film is astonishing to me for a number of reasons. First of all, by centering the story as ostensibly around the relationship between O’Neal and Mitchell, director and screenwriter Shaka King, managed to squeeze in a backdoor biopic of the life of Chairman Fred Hampton. We see that he was a charismatic leader, a brilliantly inspirational, poetic speaker, and a romantic - not necessarily characteristics one would associate with the typical stereotype of a “militant” Black Panther. He cared about his people. He set up programs so that children in the community could get free breakfast and people in the community could get free health care. I had no idea about these programs. In fact, I had no idea of anything about Chairman Fred, nor did I know much about the Black Panthers before watching this film, beyond what I was superficially taught in school. (All I remember from high school is that the Panthers were open to using violence as a means to protect themselves, as opposed to Martin Luther King Jr.’s devotion to passive resistance). Judas and the Black Messiah gave me some extremely crucial insight into this time period, and into how revolutionary Chairman Fred was. He believed in the idea of a collective being the way to raise his community up, which is why he formed the Rainbow Coalition. Daniel Kaluuya just won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for this performance, and it was well-deserved. But it would be doing the film a disservice to overlook the exceptionally nuanced performance by Lakeith Stanfield (also nominated for an Oscar in this category) as Bill O’Neal. At first, it seems clear that O’Neal is only in this FBI informant gig for himself, to avoid inevitable jail time for car theft. However, as the years go by and he spends more and more time with Chairman Fred and the other Panthers, you can see how he is slowly, perhaps without realizing it, growing and evolving his worldview by listening to what Chairman Fred says about the Black community and the issues of racial injustice in America. He is moved by Chairman Fred. He is inspired by Chairman Fred. And so, not only is this a story of a man betraying another to the latter’s peril, it’s a story about the fight for O’Neal’s soul. There is a moment during a rally after Chairman Fred has been released from prison and is giving a speech. At this point, Mitchell and the FBI are getting concerned about O’Neal becoming too entwined with the Panthers, given his participation in the Rainbow Coalition, and so, Mitchell shows up to the rally in disguise, just to show O’Neal that he is watching. While Chairman Fred gives a tremendous speech, O’Neal stands before the podium, as a security captain, and the fear in his eyes is so apparent. But what is he afraid of? Being accused by Mitchell of no longer following through with the plan and getting convicted of car theft? Being suspected by the other Panthers that he does not truly believe in Chairman Fred or the party’s platform, which would certainly not end well for him? Or is it that he is having a sudden realization that, separate from his relationship with Mitchell or with the other Panthers, he truly believes in Chairman Fred’s politics and platform? He feels like he is on the Chairman’s side. And yet… O’Neal gives the FBI that sketch of the floor plan, drugs the Chairman’s drink, and allows his boss and friend to be killed brutally in the middle of the night. So in the end, it can be argued that in the fight for O’Neal’s soul, Mitchell defeated Chairman Fred. O’Neal picked a side: the side of the FBI. The side against his community. Or did he? Judas and the Black Messiah is bookended by footage of an interview with the real William O’Neal from Eyes on the Prize , a 14-part PBS documentary filmed in the late 80’s about the history of the 20th-century civil rights movement in America. The film ends with O’Neal, simultaneously explaining that he had no allegiance to the Panthers, but also when he looks back on this time period, he feels proud that he was someone who took an active role in what was happening in his community. It’s a confusing statement. Does he honestly believe that being the informant who provided key information that allowed the FBI to murder the 21-year-old Fred Hampton in his sleep meant he was taking an active role in his community? Personally, I think it’s more muddled than that. Director Shaka King has said in interviews that O’Neal strikes him as the kind of person who, having been so beaten down by white supremacist culture, genuinely believes that what Mitchell, the white FBI agent, has to offer him is inherently better than anything Chairman Fred has to offer. While I can see his point, I don’t necessarily think that’s what bears out in the film. Stanfield’s edgy, agitated performance as O’Neal so clearly captures the struggle of a man who for the first time in his life is trying to discern what his own moral and ethical code is. While Mitchell treats him well, buying him expensive drinks and dinner at a posh restaurant when they meet to trade information, O’Neal also inherently understands that Chairman Fred’s progressive agenda could be massively powerful for the Black community that he grew up in, and he is flattered by the Chairman’s trust in him. The tragedy of Judas and the Black Messiah is that O’Neal never figures out which side he’s on - and that is even borne out in the coda to the film: after they play the clip of O’Neal’s Eyes on the Prize interview, a title card appears on the screen saying that O’Neal continued to be an informant within the Black Panther Party for several years and that he took his own life shortly after Eyes on the Prize began airing on television in January of 1990. The timing of his suicide, to me, feels telling. It almost seems as if once he was forced to confront the hypocrisy of the interview he gave to the documentary filmmakers, the reality of the toxic duality of his contribution to the civil rights movement was too much for him to bear. * I started writing this article at the beginning of April 2021, but during the lead up to the Academy Awards on April 25th, I ended up taking a pause, not just because I wanted to see how the awards shook out (especially with regards to these three films), but also because it turns out that Derek Chauvin’s verdict was to be handed down five days prior to the show. Like most of us, I was happy and moreover relieved, to see that Chauvin was found guilty of the three murder charges against him for the death of George Floyd on Tuesday the 20th. At the Academy Awards, Regina King began the show with the first of many references to the verdict that night, and I couldn’t help but think of Chief Garland on Law & Order: SVU telling Tutuola that we are at a “true inflection point.” Maybe he was right. This years’ nominee pool at the Academy Awards was the most diverse I have ever seen, and there were more winners of color than I have ever seen as well, including Youn Yuh-Jung (Best Supporting Actress, Minari ) and Chloe Zhou (Best Director and Best Picture, Nomadland ). Daniel Kaluuya, as I mentioned earlier, won Best Supporting Actor in Judas and the Black Messiah for his beautiful performance as Chairman Fred Hampton. Unfortunately, both One Night in Miami lost in all three categories it was nominated for, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 lost in all five categories it was nominated for. But it doesn’t mean that we have solved the problem of systemic racism. Not by having a diverse array of nominees and winners, including the two films I have written about here directly about the civil rights movement and the one that exists just adjacent to it, after several years of #OscarsSoWhite protests, in tandem with only one police officer being held accountable for the death of an innocent Black man to which he was responsible. Garland claims: “This time is different,” meaning as opposed to past instances of the United States reckoning with their history of racism. Malcolm X, in One Night in Miami , spends the whole film trying to convince Sam Cooke that this is the time to establish which side of the line they are on. This film, along with The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Judas and the Black Messiah , are an exploration of an earlier inflection point in our history on this subject. And there have been even earlier inflection points as well - going as far back as the Antebellum Period in the United States, and the protests of abolitionists that led to the Civil War, and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the complicated and fundamentally flawed period of Restoration after the South was defeated and slavery was abolished, which led directly to the Jim Crow era and lit the fire for the civil rights movement during which Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Fred Hampton were prominent leaders. In each of these inflection points, citizens have had to take a massive personal inventory about which side they choose to be on, and Judas and the Black Messiah is a tragic example of what can happen when someone is unable to make that choice definitively. The overwhelming celebration of Derek Chauvin’s guilty conviction (not to mention the conviction itself) gives us hope that Americans are beginning to take this inventory and are coming down on the right side of the line. They are beginning to make their choice. Right now this could, indeed, be the inflection point that causes real change. I’m reluctant to say that definitively. America doesn’t exactly have a great historical record on this topic. And it feels silly to take some dialogue from a fictional television character and use it as a declarative statement about the state of race relations in this country. But this brings me back to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. As I mentioned earlier, the United Kingdom has a particularly horrendous track record of exploiting the labor, bodies, and dignity of the people of color in the colonies they maintained for over 350 years, moving lower status populations of certain colonies to be indentured servants in other colonies. And now, 73 years after granting independence to those colonies, the British population voted overwhelmingly in support of Brexit, which exempts them from EU immigration rules and keeps foreigners from moving to the UK. In the meanwhile,15 of their former colonies belong to an organization known as the British Commonwealth States - countries that are technically independent and have their own rules of government and political leadership - where the Queen is still regarded as their ruling Monarch. Among these countries are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. The rest of the former colonies are also loosely considered to be connected to the Commonwealth, and the Commonwealth is reportedly something that the Queen holds dear to her heart, but in a very paternalistic, noblesse oblige way. This is the culture in which Harry grew up, and he reached an inflection point with the treatment of his wife by his family and by the British media. He took a personal inventory and he made a choice - an unprecedented one - to back away from that culture to protect his family. Granted, just because a white British Prince decided to definitely declare himself to be anti-racist doesn’t suddenly mean that the entire United States of America is going to follow suit; in fact, his estrangement from his family and the continued nasty media coverage of his choice in the UK proves that there is still a long way to go there, too. But it is a small step towards a larger hope of a true reckoning in society - the same kind of small step that the Chicago 7 were working towards in their protests of the Vietnam war, the same step, but larger in scale than Malcolm X and Chairman Fred Hampton were working towards in their championing of civil rights and raising up and protecting their community. These three movies feel timely for a reason, and the reason is, we’re not done yet. Derek Chauvin’s conviction is an encouraging development. Let’s hope we get more of this going forward, using the example of the protestors and agitators and inspiring figures who came before us that we have been so thoroughly reminded of in our most recent movie awards season, to continue to take an inventory, to leverage this inflection point, and to choose to make society safer for all of our citizens, regardless of the color of their skin. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

I was 11 years old when The Birdcage, Mike Nichols’ adaptation of the 1978 film La Cage aux Folles , was released in 1996. The film depicts (the late, great) Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as Albert and Armand Goldman, life partners who own a nightclub/cabaret called The Birdcage in South Beach, Florida, navigating their son Val’s (Dan Futterman) engagement to Barbara (a very young Calista Flockhart), the daughter of a homophobic Republican Senator, Kevin Keely (played with hilarious bombast by Gene Hackman). Seriously, how wonderful of a cast is that already? And there are still more actors to come! I was probably too young to have been watching the film given its content and the time: Armand is the manager and artistic director at the club and Albert is a drag queen and the headline act, featuring a large crew of beefcakey male backup dancers and more drag queens - this at a time when depictions of longterm gay couples or any facet of gay culture were decidedly uncommon (and still somewhat taboo) in mainstream media. Their housekeeper, Agador (Hank Azaria), parades around the house wearing very little clothing, and there is a prolonged scene featuring him visible in the background of the shot, cleaning the pool while wearing a thong, butt cheeks un-ignorable. And the subplot involving Senator Keely’s colleague’s sex scandal with an underage prostitute was definitely not 6th grader material, though at the time it flew clear over my head. But I was completely blown away by the performances in this film - a sprawling ensemble of exceptional actors firing on all cylinders. One of the most notable things about The Birdcage is that despite the fact that one-half of the leading couple is played by the larger-than-life comedic force of lightening that is Williams, Armand is the straight man (so to speak) of the two. Lane’s Albert is the comedic center (and the bleeding heart) of the film, and it’s astonishing to see someone hold his own so strongly while sharing a screen with Williams. Azaria is absolutely hysterical as the hapless Agador, who is desperate to land a role within the nightclub’s company of performers despite an acute lack of talent, and somehow manages to steal the show in every scene he is in, even when sharing the frame with Lane and Williams. Hackman is clearly having the time of his life playing the deplorable Kevin Keeley, flailing as he attempts to reconcile his role as the co-founder of the Coalition for Moral Order with the news of his co-founder’s sex scandal all over the news, and Dianne Wiest does some lovely, subtle work as his long-suffering wife Louise. The sublime Christine Baranski is also here, playing Katherine, Val’s biological mother (Armand had a drunken one-night stand with her many years ago and in exchange for full custody of Val, paid her a large sum of money that allowed her to open a very successful dance studio). The performances hold up to this day - this movie is just as funny in 2021 as it was in 1996 - even if some aspects of the plot haven’t aged well. For instance, Barbara, in an effort to have her conservative father approve of her engagement to Val, has lied to her parents, telling them that Armand is straight and a cultural attache to Greece. (She also lies about their last name - saying it’s Coleman - to conceal that Val’s family is Jewish. Yes, really.) Armand is not happy when Val explains this to him, saying that he doesn’t want to be shoved back into the closet, but ultimately agrees to play along for Val’s sake. He recruits Agador and his club employees to completely redecorate their apartment to look more like a traditional Christian household before the Keeleys come over to meet them, and he enlists Katherine to join them for dinner and pretend to be his wife. Worst of all, Armand and Val realize that Albert is so effeminate that he would blow their cover, so they literally attempt to keep him out of his own house - this despite the fact that Albert helped to raise Val - which is just horrible. Albert discovers what is going on and says that he will pose as Val’s straight uncle, but after he fails at Armand’s crash course in performing masculinity accurately, he gets upset and locks himself in the bedroom - which Armand and Val decide is a good thing for this evening. Seriously. Armand and Val are fucking awful, y’all. And Barbara sucks too, for getting them into this mess. When they Keeleys arrive at the Goldman’s (sorry, Coleman’s ) redecorated apartment, Kevin is agitated because he is trying to hide from the press so as not to have to answer questions about the sex scandal, and he’s also slightly worried that the Colemans (Goldmans - see, this is getting tiresome, Barbara, why, why, why?!) have heard about the scandal and will judge him. Armand and Val are agitated because there are so many lies they have to remember to keep the evening from going awry. Agador is awkward, attempting to act like a straight Greek butler named Spartacus. (Also, he has to wear shoes. He never wears shoes. This causes many problems.) And then, Katherine gets stuck in traffic, and everyone starts to wonder where “Mrs. Coleman” is. But Albert saves the day, by entering the room dressed and styled as a middle-aged woman. This terrifies Armand, Val, and Barbara at first, but he charms Kevin by pretending to be a small-town girl, espousing the traditional values of a housewife, and even makes Louise a bit jealous. The evening is a success - until Katherine knocks on the door and the whole complicated ruse is revealed. As the Keeleys are about to leave in a huff, taking Barbara with them, there is a knock on the door from two tabloid journalists looking to get dirt on the sex scandal, and they get a photo of Kevin. Turns out Keeley’s chauffeur tipped them off. More and more reporters begin to turn up outside the nightclub, and Kevin despairs. And then Albert saves the day - again - by realizing that they can sneak the Keeleys out of the apartment unnoticed by the media, by dressing them all as drag queens and sneaking them into The Birdcage through the back entrance and then out the door during the final number “We Are Family” amongst all of the other dancers and club-goers (Kevin looks utterly ridiculous in his dress and wig, but Louise actually looks pretty good in her leather-daddy getup, weirdly enough). And then, the happy ending - Val and Barbara do end up getting married, in an interfaith ceremony, attended by both families, the nightclub staff, and Kevin’s Republican friends and colleagues. (Bob Dole is declared a hottie by one of the club’s bartenders.) Moral of the story: DON’T LIE ABOUT YOUR FIANCE’S FAMILY AND FUNDAMENTAL IDENTITY TO YOUR PARENTS. BARBARA. And yet… despite Albert getting bagged on, insulted, and essentially erased from his son’s identity during Armand and Val’s desperate attempt to fool the Keeleys, there are some moments of true hilarity in the struggle - most notably Armand’s attempt to show him how to “act” straight, involving lessons in How Not To Hold A Glass Of Water With One Pinky Raised, How To Talk About Sports, How to SMEEEEAR Mustard On Bread In An Aggressive Manner (“Oh god, I pierced the toast!” “So what? The important thing is to remember is not to go to pieces when that happens. You have to react like a man, calmly. You have to say to yourself, ‘Albert, you pierced the toast, so what? It's not the end of your life.’”) and How to Walk Like The Ur-Straight Man, John Wayne. Watching Albert attempt to mimic Armand’s impression of John Wayne’s physicality makes me weep with laughter. And yet… despite Armand treating Albert like a freak of nature that needs to be hidden through a large part of the film, there are also some moments of genuine pathos. Armand chases Albert down after Albert melodramatically declares that he is going to the cemetery, as he is getting old and is clearly no longer wanted by his family. He catches Albert at a bus stop, and tells him he loves him: “...it's true: you're not young, you're not new, and you do make people laugh. And me? I'm still with you because you make me laugh. So you know what I got to do? I got to sell my plot in Key Biscayne so I can get one next to you in that shithole Los Copa, so I never miss a laugh.” After which he gives Albert a set of legal documents that he has had prepared for months that declare Albert to be 50% owner of The Birdcage - effectively declaring that they are, for all intents and purposes, married. Not gonna lie, the power and sweetness of this scene, completely lost on me when I was 11, now makes me tear up. In fact, one of the loveliest things about this film is how believable Williams and Lane are as an old longtime couple - before Barbara turns everything to shit with her lies, we see the warm, genuine affection between Armand and Albert, their comfort with each other, Armand’s willingness to put up with Albert’s anxiety-ridden ranting before a show, Albert’s pride in his home and his work and his family. We even see how much Val loves Albert, who he eventually introduces to the Keeleys as his mother when the jig is up. A lot has happened since this film was released - Flockhart’s brief dance with celebrity as the infamous Ally McBeal , the juggernaut that was The Producers on Broadway starring Lane, the tragic loss of Williams to suicide in August of 2014, Nichols’ death only a few months later of a heart attack, and Azaria being raked over the coals in 2017 for being a white voice actor playing a broad caricature of an Indian man on the Simpsons when people finally figured out that hey, that’s actually pretty racist. (Progress? Progress!) Even though 1996 feels like a whole lifetime ago, and despite the many plot elements that read as just plain cruel with the hindsight of 25 years, The Birdcage still manages to be funny. And ultimately, with the Keeleys’ embracing of Val and his unconventional-to-them family - which, to be perfectly frank, was groundbreaking in a mainstream film of its time - this story is a celebration of the messy realities of a family in general, where you love each other no matter what, warts and all. Love is love is love, as they say, these days. With that joyous premise as the film’s foundation, I’m willing to overlook the stuff that seemed normal when I was 11 but now looks ugly in my mid-thirties. And in a roundabout way, that also makes me happy - that our society has progressed so much in the last quarter-century that the main conflict that drives the plot of this story can now be seen for the heartlessness towards Albert that it is, as opposed to belly laughs at a man just for being effeminate. I hope I haven’t put anyone who hasn’t seen The Birdcage off with this write-up. It is still one of my favorite movies - again, with a cast like this, a witty script penned by Nichols’ longtime collaborator Elaine May, and flawless performances, it is a wildly entertaining ride. A lot may have changed since The Birdcage was in theaters, but the talent on display in this film is timeless. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

“I can’t wait to see what the intros to all your lists are going to be,” Story Screen’s creator, owner, and general mastermind, Mike Burdge chuckled to me one hot summer day at the Story Screen Drive-In. A sentence covered in all the lovable Burdge brand sass that friends and cohorts know all too well from the man. Story Screen’s top ten lists are a collection of carefully crafted “best of” rankings from our growing family of talented film nerds. January is a busy time for us and the family takes these lists very seriously. To us, it’s our Oscars and will dominate our film conversations for years to come. I remember where my stubborn little mind drifted to after his remark, thinking to myself, “I’m just going to write nothing.” HA, yes that’ll show ‘em. In my stoic moment of galaxy brain proportions, I, Robby “BaeBae” Anderson will NOT write an intro waxing poetics about 2020, the flaming trash can that is somehow STILL BURNING. Or perhaps, I’ll write something short and sweet, a sentence that is both stabbing and hilarious like, “What a total shit show, anyway here’s ten movies.” Yet, here we are, in the year 2021, a cold night in my apartment; I am so reflective, I have more to say than short quips. Even from the heat waves of summer, my life has changed. The Theater is closed (for now), I had to find another gig, which is actually pretty good so far. The world feels like it’s still on fire. In its best moments, it feels like the murky storm that washes the ashes away, leaving us to ruminate in the mud. I don’t feel all that cheery (couldn’t you tell?) and honestly, for many months, I’ve felt beatdown and unmotivated. Even doing the things I love have started to feel useless and I just want some level of normalcy to return. Even that feeling, longing for what I deemed “normal” comes with guilt. My year compared to a lot of folks hasn’t been all that bad. I’m here, and so many are not. Something that glimmered throughout the year, like a bright flare through the smoggy pungent smoke: entertainment. Oh, glorious escape! While locked in our homes we bonded over zoom calls, discussing what our favorite heroes, villains, and little green babies were up to. It was as one 2020 fictional hero uttered, “VERY NIICE.” Stories exchanged around the virtual fire helped steer our conversations away from the trash can that is shockingly STILL BURNING. There are ten films I’d like to highlight for you all this year (and a few shoutouts to other things). When making these lists I think it’s important to choose things that speak to you on a personal level. To simply choose “the best'' films seems like a cold exercise. So, as I have stated many times before: Hi, I’m Robby, my friends call me BaeBae, I’m co-head of telecommunications for storyscreenbeacon.com . I host many of our website's podcasts, I create a ton of content for our YouTube channel, I’ve edited a lot of the “Drive-In” commercials on our Instagram, and this isn’t a list of the "best films" of the year, this is a list of my FAVORITE films of the year. Without further ado, here are the stories that made 2020 a bit brighter. 10. Love and Monsters Something you could say about all of these movies is a phrase that’s picked up a bit more traction in 2020: “I wish I could’ve seen this in a theater.” Love and Monsters has a big summer blockbuster energy. It’s a quirky flick and has a heart so big it pushes against the confines of its post-apocalyptic genre. The emotional core of the movie lies in the performance of Dylan O’Brien’s, Joel. Joel remembers the day normal ended and the monsters took over the surface, his inability to act at that moment, to become the hero the people he loved needed, haunts him for many years. Living in a communal underground pod with other survivors Joel finds himself as more of a pod-keeper than a real contributor to the team. His adventure kicks off when he learns his old girlfriend is in another pod only 85 miles away. Joel, crossbow in hand, sets off across the monster-covered lands to be with the woman he loves. Then he makes best friends with a dog. That dog becomes like a main character too; it’s wild. Love and Monsters feels classic, championing heroic morals like an adventure from the 80s, but with the modern aesthetic of today. What really helps sell this adventure (that you don’t get from the trailer) is just how GOOD the action and the design of the monsters are. Really impressive set pieces, and for a movie that could honestly skimp on the CGI and probably still be pretty charming, it doesn’t. Love and Monsters feels underrated, it has been deprived of its water cooler conversations, its cool summer night at the drive-in, its packed theater seats. The movie feels like this decade's Zombieland . It’s charming, character-driven, and having a joy ride in the seat of its genre. 9. Bacurau Bacurau was one of the first new movies I saw in quarantine. We recorded a podcast for it and I remember thinking it was cool but it wasn't really jiving with me. I appreciated its vibe but it just didn’t connect. While I was talking to my other co-hosts it was like I watched a different movie, and I learned that perhaps my inability to speak the same language of the film (the movie is also in Portuguese but that’s not what I mean) comes from the fact that it’s a love letter to John Carpenter, the big horror daddy of the film world. I had not seen all that many Carpenter movies, in fact, I think the only one I did see at that point was Halloween . This inspired us to do a John Carpenter retrospective podcast series, to educate my dumb ass, and educated I was. We watched them all man, even the weird ones like Dark Star, Elvis, Star Man, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, you get the idea. Of course, I fell in love with the director and developed some spicy takes of my own ( Escape from L.A. is better than Escape from N.Y. don’t @ me). I spent a lot of 2020 with the man, but it is obvious that writers and directors Juliano Dorenelles and Kleber Mendonça Filhospent spent their lives with him. Yes, this movie is in many ways a love letter to Carpenter, but it is also so, so much more. It's a film that meditates on colonization from the perspectives of the invaded. The film's antagonists are a bunch of sociopathic white people, who treat the lives of others as points in a game. Sometimes it’s good when the bad guys are just bad, not just hiding a nugget of empathy fuel, like a narrative gusher or a jelly doughnut. It is a bit of a cliche to say the setting or environment itself is a character in a film, but it’s not so much that the small town named Bacurau is a character, it’s the community within. There is no central protagonist, it is this small community, who in tandem, work together to educate, heal and fight for themselves. The amazing, subtle performances within the film almost make it feel like a documentary. I am embarrassed it took me this long to come around on Bacurau; luckily, I decided to watch it one more time. It was the final flick I watched in my 2020 movie marathon prior to writing this list. Don’t let the homework scare you away from this special film, and if you’re versed in Carpenter, strap in, this one is special. 8. His House It is on the record that I am a scaredy-cat. Most years I am elaborately tricked by the Story Screen family into seeing whatever nightmare A24 has cooked up, (I was worried that First Cow was actually about a spooky bovine), and usually such movies weasel their way into my list. Despite major blockbusters getting delayed, streaming services stepped up their game in 2020. The year had a treasure trove of amazing horror flicks and it seems appropriate because yeah... 2020 is the year of horror in many ways. His House follows two refugees fleeing to London, trying to make a new life for themselves and to be seen by the English government that handles such affairs as “one of the good ones.'' Our heroes, a married couple named Bol and Rial Majur, represent the conflicted feelings of immigrating to a foreign place. Whether to assimilate, to lose one's culture to start anew, the film weighs these philosophies as equally as our two heroes face them. What is any good metaphor without visuals to back it up? His House didn’t frighten me the way MEGA DOWNERS like Hereditary or MOTHER! did, but I wasn’t any less enthralled with its plot. The movie's horror elements are made all the more exciting because they are presented as cultural mysticism but have REAL consequences. This movie delightedly plays with the idea “it’s all in their heads'' briefly before revealing that the apparitions that haunt our heroes can do real-world damage to them. As with any good horror movie, the escalation of its plot is exquisite and has a turning point towards the end of the film that will have you exclaim, “What a twist!” 7. Palm Springs It’s been said before, but I do think it holds some weight, Groundhog Day stories hit a bit differently now, huh? When we were all trapped inside everyone had their routine, and it was a perpetual cycle of attempting to seek the new normal. Every day for Nyles (Andy Samberg) is the same: waking up on someone’s wedding day in Palm Springs. For me, and I’m sure for others, the most relatable element of the movie is Nyles nihilistic (that’s on purpose right?) attitude towards his strange circumstances. Nyles has to find a reason to live, a reason to exist. I know I had spurts of failing to move forward in quarantine. Just playing videos and drinking a bottle of whiskey because hey…we might not even be here tomorrow, and if we are, does it even matter? Nyles has to find love in consequences and break free of the monotony he found comfort in. There’s more to life than drinking and fucking, to drink and fuck with meaning! With purpose! To live a life, with a beginning, middle, and end. All of this contained in a film that is also having a ton of fun with the concept and rules of a “Groundhog's Day” story. The film is hilarious and heartwarming, has a magnificent cast, and culminates in a solution to its dilemma that feels smart, while also making you ask yourself, “why didn’t I think of that?” It is so rare for comedies to exceed this well, while having this much on their mind, and Palm Springs has it all. 6. One Night in Miami... Regina King cannot be stopped. One Night in Miami... is King’s directorial debut, and it is a stunner. Adapted from and written for the screen by Kemp Powers, the film imagines what happened on a fateful night where Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown were all in the same room together. Stage plays when adapted to the screen have a fairly good success rate, but it’s also interesting to see the strategy involved. King makes brilliant use of the few settings at her disposal, you know the hotel room that these titans of history conversed and argued in better than your own home. Yet despite its few settings, the film is never stale. Every angle our heroes are presented in is spectacular. Visually, this is what you want to see out of a play adapted to screen - cinematography pushing the drama to new heights. As to be assumed from something adapted from the stage, the dialogue and performances reign supreme here. This cast brings some of the most powerful performances of the year and I have to highlight my personal favorite, Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X. Every time he spoke I was enthralled. Power’s dialogue is as poignant as ever. The arguments between our heroes tackle the complex issue of civil rights still rings true even today. I can’t wait to see what King directs next. One Night in Miami... is a cinematic debut that will be remembered for all time. 5. Feels Good Man A lot of really incredible documentaries came out this year but Feels Good Man felt the most important to me. It was a movie that once I finished I wanted to force the world to watch, to scream, “THIS IS THE TRUTHHHHHH.” We’ve all seen him, the frog, the myth, the meme, Pepe the Frog. This documentary uses its incredible visual flair to tell the story of frog creator, cartoonist, and generally really good dude, Matt Furie, as he tries to reclaim a character that has become the face of so much hate. Of course, Matt didn’t know that Pepe would become an internet sensation - one of the most iconic and recognizable characters in the cultural zeitgeist - when he first posted him on Myspace.com . The film deals with the concepts of ownership of ideas and artistic intent, but it is also heavily rooted in the internet's darkest corners. 4Chan, Reddit, all of these spaces have meme-ified Pepe to endless degrees, oftentimes for hate, like our (now) former president, and his legion of white supremacist voters. The film uncovers a lot about our recent digital history, warts and all. It also takes the time to dissect what goes into a hateful Pepe the Frog meme, how a lot of these 4Chan posters used him as an outlet to post about the way they felt - their sadness and isolation - and how what was almost a beacon of empathy, quickly turned into one of hate. It became less about expressing your feelings and more about hating and attacking those who made you feel this way. I’m just scratching the SURFACE of what Feels Good Man, discusses. They have a dude in the documentary that explains how Hillary Clinton fainted in 2016, and how it happened by hive mind mentality wishing something into existence, creating a type of cultural magic, and honestly, I kinda believed him! And he looks crazy! Go watch Feels Good Man , to me, it’s not only one of the best movies of the year, but it’s also one of the most important. 4. Wolfwalkers There are a few jokes the Story Screen fam likes to make about me. I haven’t seen any movies and Robert loves animation. Not so bad as far as jokes are concerned, and I can confirm they are very accurate. Here’s a movie that I have seen and yes it’s animated. I’m so happy I watched Wolfwalkers before making this list; it is something so special. It's a tale set in 1650, about a girl and her father who move from England to a bustling town in Ireland, and on the outskirts of that town, deep within the labyrinth of woods, are a pack of mysterious wolves. I, a simple idiot, did not see the film’s twists and turns coming. This is a story that has all the makings of a classic: friendships, daring adventures, and mystical consequences. The film feels more like classic Disney than a flick from the house of mouse has in years. Not to throw too much shade at Mickey and company. The animation in this film is MINDBLOWING. Wispy line work, bright beautiful colors, and when the tension rises, there are incredible action sequences. I actually cried in the middle of the film because of just how happy the movie was making me. I love a good classic tale. Wolfwalkers' whole vibe from music, aesthetics, accents, and more will have you feeling like you’re going through a stroll at the Renaissance Fair. Don’t bother watching a trailer, just believe me, go watch a cartoon and feel like a kid again. 3. Sound of Metal There’s a level of fear that Sound of Metal taps into. I think people who have all of their senses have anxiety about losing any of them. The story of a drummer in a metal band who loses his hearing is the perfect pitch for a flick. The film feels intimate, akin to films like The Wrestler. The camera is always intimately close to our hero Ruben, played by Riz Ahmed. We see his fear at the beginning of the film; we see his perseverance. We see his mistakes up close and personal. Sound of Metal is in your face, but it’s also in your head. Riz Ahmed's performance will have you feeling like you’re his best friend, just praying, wishing, that he’ll make the right choices, and yelling in anguish when he doesn’t. This movie doesn't present itself as a tragedy, at least not in the way you would expect. One of the most fascinating elements of the film is the deaf community. Ruben finds himself having to learn sign language but he learns so much more in the process. The deaf community doesn’t see themselves as missing anything. Music, beats, tempo, are all elements that do not belong solely to the hearing. These things can be felt, vibrations can connect us. Ruben learns these things…it’s when he rejects them that the most heartbreaking moments of the film occur. The way the film deals with sound is endlessly impressive, it really communicates to the audience what Ruben is hearing and what he’s not hearing. The sound editing and mixing are some of the movie's strongest technical elements and I really hope it is properly applauded for it. For all of the tragic moments that lead to Sound of Metal’s conclusion, for all of the revelations and rejections, it’s in the final moment that you’ll feel astonished by its greatness, leaving you silent and at peace. 2. Butt Boy Butt Boy was pitched to me as: “it’s the most Robby movie that’s ever been made.” I hate how easy I am to figure out because…it’s true. Is it so wrong to love a satirical noir that’s filmed brilliantly, has a synth score, and is perfect from start to finish? I think not. Yes, yes Butt Boy is Robby AF. It's a noir mystery about a detective who must solve the case of a disappearing child, and all trails lead straight to the bottom, a man’s asshole. Chip, a suburban man with a Lovecraftian hole is wreaking havoc on the world and only one alcoholic detective can stop him. The movie is ridiculous in premise but is played straight. These are dire consequences and the film never breaks its serious tone, even when things reach LEVEL 10 NARRATIVE INSANITY. In many ways, it reminded me of Rian Johnson’s Brick, another film that uses genre to set an unlikely setting for a noir. I was on the edge of my seat during the film. “What’s this dude’s ass gunna eat up next!” is a sentence I didn’t think I’d yell at my television. I loved the score, I loved the cinematography, I loved the simple archetypes of the characters. The movie spoke to me because it’s a movie I wish I thought up. What makes this a "Robby movie?" What makes any movie a "Robby movie?" I’m still figuring that out, but I know it when I see it, and apparently, others do too. I’d imagine it’s a bit of subverting a genre, with neon lights and a synth soundtrack. I’m a sucker for that shit. Even if you’re not me, I’m sure you’ll love this movie; it is FUN. Remember fun? Butt Boy for a while was my number flick of the year, it met my sensibilities head-on and I loved it for speaking my language, but right before the polls closed on my 2020 list, I watched one more flick… 1. Promising Young Woman When the credits rolled I jumped up from my couch and started pacing around my apartment. I was hyped, I was jazzed, I had tears in my eyes. I felt things. Promising Young Woman is my favorite movie of the year, with a fucking bullet. A revenge story that should be mandatory viewing material for all people everywhere. Carey Mulligan plays Cassandra, a woman whose life was in disarray after a sexual assault during her time in college. Cassandra now goes to bars at night, pretending to be drunk, tricking men into thinking they can have their way with her until she reveals she hasn’t been drinking at all. This isn't revenge, no. She does this for a bit of sport, but also as a means of reckoning for all men everywhere, putting herself into harm's way to educate the drunken date rapists of the city that never sleeps. The revenge is when she tracks down all of the parties involved in an event that took her closest friend away. Cassandra does dastardly deeds to these people, things that disrupt her status as the hero of this film. What I found so intoxicating about Promising Young Woman was its attitude. Unapologetic, powerful, rarely did it let us rest from its thesis of fucking over the monsters who ruined her life. Though in its quiet moments, revealing the times in-between trapping men at night, the film shows a side of Cassandra that is still soft but scarred with trauma. Her glimmer of hope in finding normal, in putting the past behind her, tricks the audience for a brief moment. This is not the moral of this story, it could not be the moral of this story, let the past die, heal beyond it. The moral compass of this film is spattered in blood; it isn’t clean, it isn’t wholesome. It is revenge. Promising Young Woman looks great, sounds great, and has some accurate coffee shop moments - which I understand is a weird thing to highlight but as a full-time barista (again) I connected with it. The way the film conveyed purgatory, how a traumatic event can stunt forward momentum is striking. Promising Young Woman is about consequences, it’s an exercise in giving the audience the blood it should crave, no matter what the cost. I love the mess of a movie it becomes by its conclusion. In a time where the powerful seem to face no consequences whatsoever, this film can feel like a cool breeze. Bold, unapologetic, ravenous, and screaming to the world that it’s had enough, yes, yes I am fully forever here for Promising Young Woman. HONORABLE MENTION: The Last of Us Part 2 It's probably one of the most divisive pieces of media all year. The Last of Us Part 2 was not overwhelmingly met with critical acclaim. Yes, by now you have heard of its many game awards, technical achievements, and woman with large biceps, but surely you’ve heard a neckbeard or two, call it: "SJW TRASH." Luckily, those people are pieces of shit. Of course, that isn’t to say you can’t have thought-provoking criticisms of The Last of Us Part 2 , but to me, this game is perfect. I played through the double-headed revenge story three times, and to answer your question, "Yes, I do think there is something wrong with me." But until the neurologist gets back to me let me explain. I loved the gameplay of TLOU2 , how its gut-wrenching brutality either begged you to stop or commit to it being the only option. I loved how its story felt like a proper extension of all the things that the first game exceeded at, especially the absence of choice. This is NOT a choose your own adventure game. The game chooses to return control to you after a cinematic scene, forcing you, the player, to commit to a death you may be morally against, or bloodthirsty for. This is the dance TLOU2 performs so well. This is how it punctuates a story that even if it wasn’t interactive, it would have you on the edge of your seat. I understand if a post-apocalyptic story about a virus that ravages the world isn’t your cup of tea right now, but it really was mine. Never has a piece of media so affected me emotionally. I was straight up ugly crying even during the parts that maybe didn’t call for it. I’m a huge fan of this franchise and its characters, and I just want everyone to be happy damn it! Perhaps I’m a contrarian in nature, or maybe I just like to drink a hot cup of “anti-fan-service” sometimes. TLOU2’s discourse reminds me so much of what happened around Star Wars: The Last Jedi , one of my other absolute favorite pieces of media. Of course to the haters, I think they should imagine me as the Kermit the Frog drinking tea meme and hear me say, “I’m sorry you didn’t love it as much as I did.” Thank you for reading my list, and as always thank you to all the creators, artists, and designers that help bring these stories to life. Of course, thank you to the Story Screen family for lifting me up in my time of need and giving me a much-needed outlet to express myself and yell about The Last Jedi. For now, let's see what we can do about that trash can that... OH MY GOD, IT’S STILL ON FIRE! C’MON MAN! Robert Anderson Co-Head of Podcasting Robert has a degree in Screenwriting and Playwriting and works in multiple genres. He's just your typical man-child who enjoys most things nerd culture. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @RoBaeBae

Thoughts on the Surprise Return of Master of None The COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying lockdown caused me to reflect on a lot of complicated aspects of my past. Many of my friends and loved ones experienced a similar reckoning. We’ve all been talking about it – over Zoom, or from a safe six-foot distance – for over a year. But as the pandemic began to slowly wind down (for now), I was forced to confront a question that I never in a million years thought I’d have to think about: Was I ready to let Aziz Ansari back into my life? Let’s back up. In 2015, Ansari’s Netflix original series Master of None burst onto the scene – a peppy sitcom that explored navigating dating, relationships, friendship, family, and institutional racism and sexism with a quirky, effervescent mood that only occasionally dipped into dramedy. To say this was revolutionary is an understatement – here was a popular show, created and executive produced by two Asian men: Ansari (who is Indian-American) and Alan Yang (who is Chinese-American). It starred Ansari in the lead role as Dev Shah, a working actor in New York City. The first season mainly explored the trajectory of his long-term relationship with Rachel (Noel Wells) from meet-cute to breakup. The second season, in 2017, explored how Dev healed from that breakup by running off to Italy for a few months to learn how to make pasta, and upon returning to New York, rushed head-long into a very ill-advised relationship with one of the women he became friends with while in Italy. All the while, Dev is also grappling with a professional TV show partnership with celebrity foodie Chef Jeff (Bobby Cannavale, doing his best Anthony Bourdain impression) who is accused of sexually harassing many women who worked on his shows (okay, so, that’s not Bourdain, I’m thinking more like… Mario Batali here). The relationship stories in Master of None tracked with the content of Ansari’s stand-up comedy and indeed, also with a book he wrote, Modern Romance: an investigation about dating in the digital age, and the show’s focus on depicting accurately how frightening life can be for women trying to date or even exist in the world while fending off potential predators in comparison to how men do not experience this same fear, piggy-backed on a lot of Ansari’s stand-up material about how men need to understand what women go through, and what men need to do to be good feminists and allies. Ansari was one of the good guys, and as an Indian-American performer myself, it was so heartening to see a popular show starring a guy who looked like me, who grew up in similar circumstances as me (American born child to Indian immigrant parents), who was pursuing a creative career like me, and heck, was even my age to boot. So many of Dev Shah’s life experiences resonated with me that for a while, I almost felt like he was some sort of male alter ego of mine. Since the character of Dev was explicitly mined from Ansari’s autobiographical experiences (he even cast his real-life parents as Dev’s parents!), I watched Master of None feeling truly seen by a media property for the first time in my life. While Master of None’s focus was understandably centered around Dev’s romantic life, drawing from Ansari’s stage material and book, the two stand-out episodes for me are Season 1’s “Indians on TV,” and Season 2’s “Thanksgiving,” (the latter of which I wrote about last December in my roundup of what I consider to be the best holiday television episodes of all time). “Indians on TV,” in particular had a huge impact on me; it depicts the struggle working Indian-American actors go through to try to get roles in TV and films, pitting Dev against his fellow Indian-American actor friend Ravi Patel (playing himself), and arguing the merits of whether it’s offensive to put on a fake Indian accent for auditions (Dev feels it’s uncomfortable and not authentic coming from him as an American-born actor, Ravi feels like if that’s what he needs to do to make a living, he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do). When Dev and Ravi both audition for roles in a new sitcom called "3 Buddies," they both do so well that the network struggles to figure out which one to cast – because, of course, the network doesn’t believe two of the aforementioned three buddies can be Indian, since then it would become an “Indian” show. In the process, Dev accidentally gets cc’d on an email from a network executive making the decidedly-in-poor-taste joke: “Let’s see which one will curry our favor,” (ugh) and Dev, Ravi, and their Indian-American body-building friend and fellow actor Anush (Gerrard Lobo) try to decide whether it would be career suicide for Dev to leak the email. Dev’s agent, played by Orange Is the New Black’s Danielle Brooks is decidedly against the leaking. (“I’M TRYING TO GET YOU THIS MONEY, HAVE YOU SEEN DAVID SCHWIMMER’S HOUSE, I’M TRYING TO GET YOU THIS FRIENDS MONEY, DEV!”). After the network executive who made the joke takes Dev out to a Knicks game to apologize, and he affirms that he wishes the world were different so that he could cast both Dev and Ravi, Dev begins to waffle on whether or not to leak the email, causing Ravi to hilariously declare him an “Uncle Taj.” The brilliance of this episode lies not just in its exploration of the politics of identity and representation in American media, but also in the meta-narrative of having the story revolve around Dev, Ravi, and Anush, all figuring out how to navigate this landmine they’ve inadvertently walked into. They are, quite literally, the 3 Buddies – proving that of course, there can be a show featuring more than one Indian cast member that is still extremely funny for anyone watching regardless of ethnicity. I have extolled the beautiful writing and storytelling in Season 2’s episode, “Thanksgiving,” in my earlier Story Screen article , but to sum up: it’s a lovely, nuanced episode with a lot of humor about Dev’s childhood best friend Denise (Lena Waithe) coming to terms with her sexuality, and coming out to her mother (a magnificent Angela Bassett). Bassett's character struggles with the news that her daughter is a lesbian and takes some time to realize that in the end, the most important thing is that her daughter is happy. It is also a great exploration of Dev and Denise’s close friendship. He comes to Thanksgiving at her house every year as an adopted “brother” to her and he supports her in her coming out story. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll cheer, because Ansari and Waithe won Emmys for "Best Writing in a Television Comedy" for the episode, making Waithe the first black woman to win an award in the category. Master of None was flying high. Even with what felt like a pretty big misstep in the latter half of Season 2 – getting bogged down in Dev’s futile and frankly boring dalliance with his Italian friend – it was a genuine disappointment when Ansari said at the season’s conclusion in 2017 that he couldn’t envision writing a Season 3 unless something very significant in his life changed: like getting married or having a child. He felt he had said all that he could say about being a young single dude in Manhattan. I was disappointed, but I had to respect his choice. Shows, where you can see showrunners and performers being forced into creating new material just because of network pressure, tend to become weaker and weaker over time, overstaying their welcome. I didn’t want the good things about Master of None Seasons 1 and 2 to get diluted by what I saw happen to, say, The Office and How I Met Your Mother, and of course, Friends . But then, the other shoe dropped. In 2018, Ansari was accused of predatory and coercive behavior during a date with a woman identified only by the pseudonym, “Grace.” The story was broken by the now-defunct website: babe.net . Reporting of the incident was admittedly not handled well by the website, and while Ansari's behavior didn’t escalate into the realm of rape, what he did to Grace very much skirted the edges of consent, upsetting and traumatizing her considerably. According to babe.net's expose, Ansari did apologize in a sincere way to Grace when she called him out on how uncomfortable and frightened he made her during the date, and he did release a statement saying that he had taken her words to heart and knew that he needed to do some work to reflect on how his actions hurt someone. When he tentatively returned to the stand-up comedy circuit pre-pandemic, he also addressed what happened (obliquely) and acknowledged his failings in this area. However, the incident still profoundly changed how I saw Ansari. I no longer could think of him as my dudely alter-ego, my fellow American Born Creative Desi. I no longer could watch my favorite Master of None episodes without feeling sick inside – especially the episode in Season 1 that takes a close look at the fear women can feel while simply existing in a world of men, or the episodes in Season 2, where Dev has to decide whether to torpedo his impending Best Food Friends TV collaboration with Chef Jeff in light of the allegations of Jeff’s sexual harassment (made worse by the fact that in the text of the show, Dev actually doesn’t do that great of a job of taking a stand against Chef Jeff’s behavior). I was emailing Story Screen’s Managing Editor Bernadette Gorman-White about this a couple of months ago, and I told her flat-out that when Ansari had his #MeToo moment, it cut me hard. It felt like a personal betrayal. Here’s this guy I identified with so much, one of my own people, one of my fellow Indian-American Old Millenials in the Arts (a very specific subculture indeed), and he’s making us look bad. Bernadette had a great point about this as well – that because Ansari had built his stand-up career on material exploring the dynamics of male/female relationships and dating in the modern age, and how to be a good feminist ally as a male, and even wrote a book about it – what he did to Grace also felt like a punch to her gut. He was supposed to be one of the good guys, and he ruined it. Suffice it to say, I decided to write Ansari off and I was relieved that he wasn’t going to be making any more seasons of Master of None . I couldn’t even bear to think of him, either as Dev Shah, or as himself. I just wished I hadn’t cared so much about Master of None when it was on. I wish I hadn’t allowed myself to get so invested in what Ansari was doing and saying with the show. I wish he hadn’t hurt Grace. I wish he hadn’t let me down. Good riddance. * So color me surprised when in late May 2021, I was aimlessly scrolling through Netflix for my latest late-pandemic binge and I see that of all things, Season 3 of Master of None had dropped. Quietly. Unceremoniously. Just showing up there in my queue, because I had forgotten to delete the show from my watchlist. And I froze. Because, honestly? I really was not ready to let Aziz Ansari back into my life. But then, because my curiosity got the best of me, I watched the trailer, and I realized that the newest season of Master of None was only 5 episodes in total, and it had switched gears entirely to make Lena Waithe’s character Denise the protagonist. This intrigued me. I imagined that perhaps this season would be a logical continuation of Season 2's “Thanksgiving” episode, featuring Denise’s coming-out story. So… I settled in to watch. Turns out I was kind of right, but kind of wrong. The five episodes that comprise Season 3 of Master of None follow several years - exploring the marriage of Denise and her wife, Alicia, played by new cast member Naomi Ackie. Denise has graduated from working in the New York publishing industry at magazines and achieved great success with her debut novel, which has allowed her to afford a gorgeous house somewhere in upstate New York. (I’m guessing upper Westchester, but for all I know, she ended up somewhere in Sullivan or Columbia County based on the breathtaking and sparse farm landscape where the home is located). Denise is hard at work on her second book while juggling interviews, readings, and panel appearances. Alicia, a former PhD in Chemistry, is trying to break into interior design by working at an antique store. They have intellectual books on their shelves and amazing art on their walls. They have a beautiful living room with a fireplace. They have chickens named after Tina Turner, Chaka Khan, and Patti LaBelle. Their kitchen is one that HGTV lovers would dream of. Their house is stocked with gorgeous antiques that Alicia has collected. Alicia cooks with vegetables fresh from their garden. They giggle and laugh together, they share the same weird sense of humor (a scene involving some nighttime banter about whether Denise would lick gross armpits to save Alicia from death is simultaneously disgusting and endearing), they dance together while folding laundry, and they by all accounts seem to have a happy life in their remote home, despite the seeming lack of community around them. But as groundbreaking as it is to see a depiction of black queer marriage on television, right off the bat, something feels off about Denise and Alicia, starting with the fact that they seem to have become unfortunately bound to heteronormative roles in their relationship. Alicia does all of the cooking and cleaning and generally plays a supporting role while Denise is the traditional breadwinner, pampering her wife with the results of the wealth and adulation from her book’s success. Alicia downplays her advanced education and intelligence during an interview with a journalist who comes to the house to learn more about Denise’s second book, and she seems almost embarrassed to admit what she does for a living at the antique store. Denise, on the other hand, seems to spend most of her time smoking weed, idly typing on her laptop, staring off into space, and getting trapped on long calls with her agent and assistant about book-related engagements. This ends up being one of the bigger flaws of the season. We don’t really see what brought these two women together in the first place, or how they ended up married. It’s hard to be invested in a relationship for which we have no context, and although Ackie does an amazing job playing Alicia, imbuing her performance with a lot of heart, integrity, and humor, this is the first time in three seasons of this show that we are meeting her. And so, as the show’s five episodes progress, we watch their marriage fall apart due to conflicting views about whether or not to start a family. Alicia very badly wants a baby, Denise is ambivalent (bordering on apathetic). This is further complicated by a pregnancy and a miscarriage, followed by Alicia’s resentment that she had to make herself so small in their relationship to allow Denise to shine. There is infidelity on both sides, and it’s hard to really feel sad about the dissolution of their marriage even as we witness it play out over the course of tense conversations, harrowing arguments, and a full-blown explosion from Alicia when they are signing their divorce papers. We don’t know what made their relationship so wonderful to begin with, and so, the loss that Denise experiences and the depression we see her go through as she sells her home (now suddenly half empty of the furniture and art that Alicia took with her when she left) are hard to truly connect with. We have to take it at face value that the failure of this marriage hits Denise even harder than the apparent failure of her second book – and some of this is also, admittedly, because while Lena Waithe is a wonderful screenwriter, she is a bit too laconic as a performer and one-note in her delivery. Her physicality conveys her sadness, but when she speaks to her mother (a phone cameo from Angela Bassett, of course), about how hard things are for her in the wake of the divorce, I don’t really buy that she is upset. She sounds like the same old Denise who in her general laid-back manner would give her friend Dev advice on how to navigate his relationship with Rachel way back in Season 1. One of the other big flaws in Season 3 is inadvertently a positive: Ansari, along with co-writing each episode with Waithe, directs every single episode. This ultimately means that his character Dev Shah hardly shows up at all in this story – we see him visiting Denise and Alicia with his girlfriend Reshmi in the first episode (a dinner party that goes to shit when Denise and Alicia realize that Dev and Reshmi kind of hate each other, and plants a seed of doubt in Alicia’s mind about her relationship with Denise). He turns up again for a scene in episode 3 when Denise, post-divorce, is moving out of the house, there to support his childhood best friend during what she deems the worst moments of her life. This is a positive because not seeing that much of Dev means I didn’t have to see that much of Ansari, which was helpful considering how much I really didn’t want to have to think about the guy. It’s a negative, though, because while Ansari does craft some really stunning shots in the upstate locale, as well as some great moments of uncomfortable tension during the fight scenes, he tends to overindulge in holding shots for just a smidge longer than necessary. Or even more than a smidge: episode 2 opens with a shot of Denise in her car, listening to opera while eating a hamburger. We watch her eat this hamburger in real-time, which feels like bordering on torture after less than two minutes. Episode 4 contains a nearly five-minute shot of Alicia, wordlessly exhausted in a laundromat, listening to a Spanish song on the radio while a Latinx woman nearby moves her clothes from a washer to a dryer. I don’t know what Ansari’s point is with these interminably long shots of literally nothing going on, but I ultimately ended up fast-forwarding through them. That being said – and I realize this is going to sound insane given that I previously noted that the viewers’ lack of knowing Alicia at all prior to this season is one of the things that ruins the potency of the divorce story – episode 4 is an absolute masterpiece (with the exception of the laundromat scene). It’s an episode entirely centered around Alicia’s character. We don’t see Denise at all. Three years after leaving Denise, after moving back to the city and not being able to find another partner with whom to have a baby, Alicia decides to embark on the process of having a baby on her own via IVF, giving us a window into how difficult (emotionally, physically, and financially) this can be for a queer single woman in the later stages of her fertility amidst our completely broken health care system. In particular, her relationship with her nurse, Cordelia, who is there every step of the way as she goes through the exhausting egg-stimulation, collection, fertilization, and embryo-implantation process, is one of the most wonderful things I have seen on Master of None in all three seasons. Cordelia is kind, unflinchingly supportive, understanding, and so completely on Alicia’s side. Their scenes together during Alicia’s doctor appointments and their conversations about the failure or success in getting Alicia pregnant are so lovely and heart-warming to see that it made me tear up (and I am childfree by choice!). Marianne Jean-Baptiste provides a voice cameo, Bassett-style, as Alicia’s mother in London, and again we are given a glimpse of the kind of support that Alicia has, even in her isolation, that is genuinely touching. Naomi Ackie’s performance in this episode is nothing short of astonishing, and it’s incredible how she is able to give us so much information about Alicia’s life, backstory, values, and her conviction in herself as a “bad bitch” who knows she is destined to be a mother in a way that made me truly care for and root for her – despite only having met her for the first time three episodes ago. Ansari’s direction in this episode also does a masterful job of depicting how invasive, uncomfortable, and borderline humiliating IVF can be, and the indignity that women must endure for choosing this path to motherhood, in a way that adds to how much I was really hoping, along with her mother, and Cordelia, for Alicia to finally get her chance at pregnancy and having a baby. Really, the only thing that could have improved this episode is if he had trimmed down that laundromat scene. * The third season of Master of None was clearly envisioned as a pandemic film project, given the small cast and the way its episodes were written to show no more than four characters on screen at a given time. Because of those circumstances and the arc of the season’s plot, the tone of the show is drastically different from the joyful, bouncy, ebullient tone of the first two seasons. There is a deep feeling of melancholy that permeates these episodes, right from the start, even while Denise and Alicia’s relationship is still ostensibly in a good place. In fact, once I finished watching the fifth episode of Season 3, Netflix automatically bounced me back to Season 1 Episode 1 and the contrast in tone was extremely jarring. This season feels like an entirely different show, and not just because it no longer features Dev Shah as its protagonist. Ansari and Waithe seem to be aware of that, as the opening titles of each episode mark the show as Master of None Presents: Moments in Love, acknowledging that this is not a traditional continuation of what we had last seen happen on Master of None. In fact, aside from Dev and Denise, none of the other recurring characters from the first two seasons appear during Season 3. While this is a bummer, as the dynamic among Dev and his friends was a huge part of the appeal of Master of None , it also makes sense, not just for pandemic safety measures but also because one of the themes of this season seems to be about how time and age affect relationships. Ansari seems to be aware of the fact that I am probably not the only person watching Netflix who doesn’t feel like seeing him these days, as not only does he keep Dev’s appearance in the plot limited to only four scenes, he also goes out of his way to show us that Dev himself, not unlike the actor who portrays him, has fallen from grace. Dev is no longer getting work as an actor (perhaps the aftermath of the Chef Jeff sexual harassment disaster did his career in?). He is working as an accounting assistant on CSI: Brooklyn and can no longer afford his gorgeous Manhattan loft, so he and Reshmi are living with his parents in Queens. Reshmi basically blames his acting career failure on the fact that his hair is thinning, and berates him in front of Denise and Alicia for not getting hair plugs as she suggested, which causes Dev to all but accuse Reshmi of being a wine-drunk dilettante, which escalates into the huge fight between them that ruins the dinner party. While Alicia tries to talk Reshmi down in the bathroom, Denise pulls Dev outside to ask him what the hell is going on in his personal life, and why he never told her that he wasn’t acting anymore and is living with his parents. Dev explains that when Denise’s book became a success, he felt she left him behind for new, sparkly, famous friends; she stopped reaching out to him and they stopped hanging out. It is implied that the annual Thanksgiving dinners at Denise’s mother’s house, where he was always welcome as her adopted “brother,” no longer take place. Denise says that she considers Dev family, and she always will. “You have to tell me what is going on in your life. You should have called me.” There is a long pause here, and then Dev says, “It just sucks. You’re doing so well. And I’m doing so bad. It’s embarrassing.” While this is indeed something that often does happen between longtime friends due to time, age, and what life throws at you, it’s hard not to read this moment as a very blatant bit of meta-commentary on the state of Waithe’s and Ansari’s careers – and lives – after their Emmy win for Season 2’s “Thanksgiving” episode. Waithe went on to write and produce several new projects, while Ansari got publicly called out for being sexually coercive on a date with a younger woman. Waithe was doing so well. Ansari, in turn, had to go into hiding for a few years. He was doing so bad. Again, it felt very apparent to me that Ansari’s choice to (mostly) stay behind the camera for Season 3 of Master of None , coupled with his emphasis on how far Dev has fallen, might be a way for him to creatively work through and process the ramifications of his behavior on his career, and to let the audience enjoy a bit of Ansari’s comeuppance via Dev’s failures. It’s also interesting to me that Ansari chose this moment to bring Master of None back to Netflix, in the context of his comment in 2017 after the finale of Season 2 that he couldn’t see himself having more to say about Dev without something hugely life-changing happening to him in real life. At the time, he was talking about perhaps getting married or having a child, but it looks like in actuality the life-changing event that prompted his return to television was enduring a public reckoning with his own shitty behavior towards women. As a result, he and Waithe created a five-episode arc spotlighting the lives of queer black women. It’s an interesting choice, and actually kind of an admirable one. I’m not ready to call Ansari my alter-ego again, but I begrudgingly respect what he is trying to do here to make amends, as it were. The single biggest misstep in this five-episode miniseries brought to you by Master of None (which feels like a more accurate descriptor than continuing to refer to it as Season 3) is during its final episode, where we learn that Alicia has a daughter. Both Denise and Alicia have remarried to new partners, Denise now has a son of her own… but every once in a while, Denise and Alicia steal away for a long weekend to rekindle their romance. I found this episode to be absolutely baffling and I think it’s again related to the fact that we really only just met Alicia recently (her carrying of episode 4 single-handedly notwithstanding). We don’t know a whole lot about what Denise and Alicia's marriage was like back when it was good. I can’t quite buy the idea that Denise and Alicia are star-crossed lovers who were cursed with bad timing, which seems to be what the show is trying to tell us, and it’s also a bit hard for me to fathom the two of them carrying on what seems to be an ongoing affair when infidelity was one of the contributing factors to their divorce. Waithe and Ackie do an admirable job of trying to fill in some of the obvious blanks in this episode’s story, but they don’t quite land. The failure of Denise’s second book has relegated her back to cubicle farm life in magazine publishing, while Alicia is now a very successful antique dealer who owns her own store. Denise is also enjoying life as a parent, which she knows she never would have been able to do had she not gone through the miscarriage and subsequent divorce with Alicia. The role reversal is intriguing, but really only results in two small conversations about it between the two former spouses. Alicia talks about how her former resentment of Denise’s success has transformed into an understanding of the pressure Denise must have felt while writing that second book, but the topic gets dropped in favor of gift exchanges, and then devolves into dance partying and lolling around in bed. Alicia gets upset at one point, asking whether she should have fought harder for the marriage, while Denise comforts her and says no, she did what she had to do, and it was the right thing to do at the time. Later, Denise gets upset, wondering how long they can keep going with this affair without getting caught, and what will happen if/when they do get caught. The episode ends with them in each others’ arms, and then an abrupt jump cut to Denise smoking weed under a tree, presumably the next morning, alone. And that’s where Waithe and Ansari choose to leave us for the season. I wasn’t sure if I’m supposed to interpret episode 5 as some sort of dream sequence, or some sort of exploration of polyamory, or what exactly. If it’s the latter, it’s certainly not an ethical version of polyamory, given that Denise and Alicia’s spouses have no idea what is going on. But what would be the point of a dream sequence? I had a really hard time parsing what episode 5 was trying to tell me, until I went down a rabbit hole researching the 2017 Emmy Awards, when Waithe made history with her Emmy win for “Thanksgiving.” Ansari, her co-writer, rightfully gave her the microphone and kept quiet, and in her speech, she said “...to my girlfriend Alana, I love you more than life itself,” – this statement alone being groundbreaking in its nonchalant openness about Waithe’s sexuality and lesbian relationship. Alana Mayo, a film producer, and Waithe got married in 2018, and then after only two months of marriage, they split up, amidst rumors of Waithe’s infidelity. Learning this information suddenly caused me to reevaluate everything I had seen in the five-episode arc of Denise and Alicia’s marriage. I am now wondering if, like Ansari taking this opportunity to work through his problematic behavior via Master of None Season 3, Waithe was also using this story as an opportunity to work through some of her own failings. Master of None has been a show rife with the potential for meta-commentary pretty much since it burst onto the scene in 2015, due to the highly autobiographical nature of Ansari’s writing Dev as a character. It makes a perfect sort of sense that during a pandemic, when, as I mentioned in the beginning of this piece, a lot of us suddenly had the time to confront and reflect on our own complicated identities and past missteps, Ansari and Waithe decided to write a little miniseries unpacking and uncovering a lot of things that they have done wrong in the past four years – staging a public reckoning for their bad acts. At any rate, while Master of None Presents: Moments in Love is wobbly in a lot of places, it is simultaneously a very interesting and compelling exercise in storytelling and meta-storytelling. I didn’t want to watch it at first, but now that I have, I won’t lie and say that I didn’t enjoy it. I really did. Episodes 1 and 4 are the true standouts, and I would say that it is worth watching the season for those episodes alone, if nothing else. I don’t know if this season of Master of None will hold up over time. I think a lot of these pandemic productions are going to feel very weird with the hindsight of many years, and this one was so unevenly written and performed that I feel like the biggest takeaway might only be that Naomi Ackie is a damn good actress for making me care so much about a character I only just met and I now I want to see her cast in All The Things. But at the same time, despite the unevenness of Season 3, I did find myself coming back to it over and over again over the past few months. I can’t bring myself to watch anything from Seasons 1 or 2 again, but Season 3 somehow got its hooks in me, even with its flaws and frustrations, and I have watched the entire five-episode arc at least 15 times at this point – a weird thing for me, given how unwelcome the sight of Ansari or any Ansari property was for me not so long ago. I think the reason for this is that even though the execution of the overall story wasn’t perfect, it captured a certain strain of profound sadness and melancholy that I think may be endemic to people my age. I’ve been joking with my friends from high school about the: "Existential Malaise of the Middle-Aged Millennial," for a while now, but it’s not really a joke. There is something about being in your mid-to-late thirties in the United States at the moment that is just deeply depressing and exhausting. We assume more and more responsibilities and make more adult life choices while trying to find some sort of real-life purpose and some sort of real personal happiness amidst a society that has done nothing but mock our generation since we were teenagers. Master of None , in its first two comedic seasons, captured the more joyful elements of the life of older Millennials in our late twenties. After a four year hiatus, during which time we all grew up a little bit, or a lot – including Ansari and Waithe – it’s not surprising, necessarily to see the focus shift from happy fun-loving rom-com good times to the sometimes overarching pain of aging when we aren’t really that old, but we feel the weight of the world that everyone has dumped on our generation's shoulders to succeed and make things better without the economic and financial stability our parents had to do the same. Certainly the pandemic amplified it, but I think this pain was always going to be there when Ansari, Waithe, and others in my generational cohort hit this age bracket. Ansari and Waithe were perhaps in an especially unique position to explore this pain due to their own complicated personal lives having played out in the media, but what they achieved with Master of None Presents: Moments in Love is almost more of a mood than a cohesive storyline. I don’t know if this mood has a proper name. It’s the mood of: “Getting Older is Complicated.” But it permeates these five episodes so profoundly, and it’s that mood that really hit me and has stayed with me despite my many misgivings about giving Ansari any more of my time and eyeball usage and brainpower. I am almost embarrassed to admit, at this point, that Ansari has yet again managed to create something intensely relatable to me. I suppose the only thing left for me to do at this point is to try to learn how to live with the discomfort of my ambiguous feelings about him as a writer, performer, and a person. And I’m not sure how to do that. Not yet, at least. That’s going to be my journey now, for a while. Getting older is, indeed, complicated. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

January is what is known as a “dump month” for the film industry – domestic audiences are smaller than the rest of the year (perhaps due to a combination of weather and holiday fatigue) and so, this is when studios tend to release films with less prominent stars, movies that didn’t perform well with test audiences, or movies that cannot be easily marketed to broader audiences. Paddington , based on the popular children's book series about a well-mannered bear who emigrated from Darkest Peru to London, and moves in with the Brown family in Windsor Gardens, was released in the United States in January of 2014. At first glance, I can understand why this film would have been relegated to the “dump” category: it’s a live-action animated comedy based on a talking bear, first introduced in 1958, starring a number of British character actors who are not necessarily big names in the United States. But I refuse to believe that this film tested poorly with sample audiences. Paddington is one of the most charming films I have seen in my life; it has a gentle, kind-hearted sensibility, and a screenplay written with enough wit that adults would easily find the story as compelling as children would. Perhaps this is the time for me to admit that at this point in my life I am almost incapable of revisiting the children’s literature that I loved when I was a child myself. This isn’t because I find children’s books childish – it’s because there’s something about the vulnerability of the characters, and the earnestness within the lessons told in these stories that absolutely wrecks me now that I’m in my mid-30s and have actually experienced a few lifetimes since I first read them. Ferdinand the Bull ? Completely relatable for anyone who refuses to conform to societal expectations, experiences ridicule for it, but is determined to be true to themselves. Corduroy ? For anyone who has wanted to be accepted but is damaged and tries their hardest to fix themselves, this story is deeply resonant. The Velveteen Rabbit ? Forget it. Just thinking about the famous passage where the Skin Horse explains to the Rabbit how true love can make you real makes me bawl. The original Paddington stories, at their core, are about what constitutes a home, and how one defines family. The first Paddington film is roughly based on: A Bear Called Paddington , the first book in what became a more-than-20-book series (the final book was published in 2018, shortly after creator/author Michael Bond’s death). Paddington, as voiced by Ben Whishaw, (perhaps best known to American audiences as Q in the Daniel Craig James Bond films) is sent to London by his Aunt Lucy (voiced by incoming Queen Elizabeth II in Season 5 of The Crown, Imelda Staunton) when she is forced to move into a “Home for Retired Bears” in Darkest Peru. She and her late husband, Pastuzo, were discovered many years ago by a British geographer named Montgomery Clyde, who was originally going to capture them as samples for the Natural History Museum but instead, was surprised to learn that this species of bear was intelligent and empathetic. After bonding with them, teaching them English, and learning of their deep love of marmalade, Clyde left them his explorer’s hat as a gift, and told them that they would always be welcome in London should they want to visit. Lucy, with this invitation in mind, sends Paddington to London as a stowaway on a lifeboat, along with a suitcase of marmalade, Clyde’s hat, and a note around his neck saying: “Please Look After This Bear.” Paddington ends up at Paddington Station in London (fittingly) and runs into the Brown family, who agree to take him in temporarily. The father, Henry Brown (Hugh Bonneville, undoubtedly best known to American audiences as Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham in the PBS mega-hit Downton Abbey ) is a risk analyst by profession, and he fears the potential safety consequences of having a bear in their home, but Paddington, despite being a bit clumsy, and often leaving a pile of devastation in his wake, (he destroys the Browns’ bathroom by flooding the tub within 15 minutes of arriving to Windsor Gardens) easily wins over Henry’s wife Mary (Sally Hawkins), their two children Judy and Jonathan (Madeleine Harris and Samuel Joslin), and their housekeeper Mrs. Bird (the sublime Julie Walters). Henry is adamant that Paddington needs to find a permanent home elsewhere, and so Mary goes with Paddington to the local antique shop to trace the background of his hat. They learn about Montgomery Clyde and Paddington sets about trying to see if he can find any members of Clyde’s family who might be willing to take him in for good. There is a villain in this story: Millicent Clyde, the late Clyde’s taxidermist daughter, who has been bitter for most of her life at her father’s failure to bring the Peruvian bears back as samples for the Natural History Museum, thus thwarting their family from fame and fortune. Millicent is played with icy style by Nicole Kidman, and once she learns that a Peruvian bear has been roaming around London looking for a home, she devises a plan to capture Paddington, and turn him into a museum sample, thus salvaging her father’s legacy. She fails, of course, because this is a feel-good children’s movie, and this plotline feels fairly low-stakes due to the flimsiness of Millicent’s characterization (despite Kidman clearly enjoying the hell out of playing the part). The aspect of the first Paddington movie that really feels high-stakes is whether the Browns – especially risk-averse Henry – will decide if they are willing to let Paddington stay with them and become a part of their family. At one point, the Brown children decide they need to give Paddington a proper bath and dress him up nicely in order to make a good impression on their father, which threatened to unleash the part of my psyche that cannot handle revisiting children’s literature – the moment when Mrs. Bird slips Henry’s old blue duffle coat onto Paddington, transforming him into the spitting image of all of the iconic illustrations from the books, (not to mention all of the iconic stuffed animal renditions of Paddington). I began to feel a lump form in my throat. When Henry sees Paddington in the coat, he visibly softens, and I was ready to cry. And of course, during the film’s climax, when the Browns learn that Millicent has kidnapped Paddington and intends to kill and stuff him, they embark on an epic plot to rescue him by breaking into the Museum, because they realize that he has indeed become a part of their family… I was full-on weeping. But in a good way. In the end, Millicent is sentenced to clean up animal scat at the petting zoo that her father opened upon his return from Peru, all those many years ago as community service, and Paddington writes a letter to Aunt Lucy telling her that he is happy and has found a home – living with the Browns, who love him dearly and provide him with as many marmalade sandwiches as he wants. How could anyone not adore this movie? Why on earth would any sane film distribution company drop this charming story ignominiously in the hinterlands of January? And furthermore – after the immense success and critical acclaim of Paddington , what sane film distribution company would subsequently drop Paddington 2 also in the hinterlands of January? Especially considering that Paddington 2 is one of the best movie sequels I have ever seen in my years on earth. It’s better than the first film. Paddington 2 was released in the United States on January 12, 2018, and depicts Paddington’s life in Windsor Gardens after having been settled in as a member of the Brown family (the entire original cast returned for the sequel) for several years. Paddington is a popular figure in the neighborhood due to his friendliness, offering emotional support to several people in the community - from a neighbor who frequently locks himself out in the morning leaving for work (Paddington reminds him daily to retrieve his keys before the door shuts behind him), to the lonely woman who runs the newspaper stall (Paddington sets her up in a meet-cute with a cranky neighbor and they start dating), to helping a garbageman who is studying to be a black cab driver (yes, one must take a test to become a cabbie in London; according to one of my boyfriend’s best friends who is a London cab driver, the test is very, very difficult). Paddington wants to buy a pop-up book depicting landmarks of London from the local antique shop as a gift to send for his Aunt Lucy’s 100th birthday at the Home for Retired Bears in Darkest Peru, and he takes on a series of odd jobs in order to earn enough money to purchase the book. However, before he has a chance to buy it, he witnesses a thief stealing it from the shop, and chases after him. The thief escapes with the book, but Paddington is arrested and framed for the theft, and ultimately convicted in court. He is then sent to prison. Not just any prison. The Tower of freakin’ London. While in prison, the Browns work hard to try to prove Paddington’s innocence, and they find the real culprit. They discover that the actual thief is their neighbor, Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant having the time of his life in this role), who is a new client of Henry Brown’s risk management firm, and an egotistical actor of former acclaim who is now reduced to making dog food commercials. Buchanan has stolen the book because he believes it holds clues to a treasure box filled with gold and jewelry, stolen from a circus performer by his grandfather. As he travels through London seeking the clues from the book, he evades the police through the use of his acting skills and many old costumes from his theater days. Meanwhile, Paddington, still quite clumsy, accidentally dyes all of the prison uniforms pink while on laundry duty, irritating the inmates, but his good-natured willingness to make the best of all situations allows him to make friends with many of his fellow prisoners, three of whom offer to help him clear his name if he helps them break out of prison. The Browns, having gotten bogged down in a plot to break into Buchanan’s house to see if they can find the costume Paddington described of the real thief of the pop-up book, accidentally miss coming to see Paddington during visiting hours, and he becomes despondent, thinking that they have forgotten about him. Thus, even though he is usually a stickler for the rules, he agrees to help Knuckles, Phibs, and Spoon with their jailbreak. Once on the outside, the other three inmates immediately abandon the idea of helping Paddington prove his innocence, and they try to talk him into leaving the country with them, which he refuses on principle, setting off to clear his name on his own. In the end – without getting overly bogged down in details because I want to encourage you all to watch this film on your own – Paddington is reunited with the Browns, and they are able to trap Buchanan on a train, holding the pop-up book. Judy takes a photograph, so that they have proof that he is the thief. And in the 11th hour, Knuckles, Phibs, and Spoon return from their attempt to flee England in order to help the Browns rescue Paddington from drowning in the train car that Buchanan uncouples, causing it to land in a river. Buchanan is arrested, and sent to prison, where… I won’t say any more. This is one of those films that you need to watch the closing credits sequence for extra fun, and it is there where you will see Buchanan’s ultimate and glorious fate. Paddington 2 didn’t choke me up the same way the original film did; the storyline is a clear deviation from any of the original stories by Michael Bond, and so it didn’t activate that dastardly childhood nostalgia button of mine. However, the film succeeds in depicting the universal lessons and truth of Paddington as borne out in all of Bond’s stories: Paddington, by being kind-hearted and willing to see the goodness in everyone, is able to rally any community he is in – whether it is Windsor Gardens, or the Tower of London – to be on his side. His honesty, genuineness, and polite manners (he tips his hat to one and all he sees), allow him to survive any shenanigans he accidentally gets himself into. And with the unconditional love of the Browns (and even the love of his prison inmates), we learn that the bonds of chosen families can be as strong as those of blood families. And now I can feel myself getting a bit teary again. Before I leave you all to eat my dinner (marmalade sandwiches, of course), I need to let you know one last thing: Phoenix Buchanan is, without a doubt, the best role of Hugh Grant’s entire damn career. While Kidman’s steely Millicent Clyde in the first film was unsettling with her smooth-talking love of taxidermy, Buchanan is frightening on a whole new level, because he is legitimately batshit insane, while also being hysterically funny. This is a tough needle to thread, especially in what is ostensibly a children’s film, but Grant hits it out of the park and it is spectacular to behold. It’s January. It’s cold. It is, after all, a “dump month.” And we’ve just emerged from what is possibly the worst year of most of our lives. Do yourself a favor and watch the Paddington movies. They are a gentle, warm, soothing, and witty balm after the hellscape of 2020. And with any luck, we’ll be getting a third Paddington film soon… Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone

I always read my previous year’s Top 10 list before starting my new one. I write so rarely now that I need to almost remind myself how to do it. Not how to type or how to make sentences but how to properly express myself. Lube up the brain so thoughts can zip past my mouth right to my fingers. Sorry, I said lube, but “grease up” doesn’t exactly conjure up a better image, right? This time of year for me, and I imagine many others, is very reflective. Reading my previous list gives me some insight as to where I was mentally before and usually reminds me of the progress I’ve made. These lists for Story Screen are one part of a celebration of a medium we hold so dearly that we spend hours of our week discussing, displaying, writing, making content for. The lists also serve as a journal entry. I’ve been doing these for six years now; it’s pretty neat to look back and see how my writing has changed and evolved. Having yearly anchors lends to a stroll down memory lane, as each one feels distinct. These prologues to content are more for me than anyone else. I feel very emotional reading my last year's intro because I see the beginnings of a problem I’ve been having that’s only gotten worse since the advent of 2021. I wrote last year about how I was feeling beat down and unmotivated. I wrote about how creating content, a thing I used to really enjoy, feels harder and harder to do. I can’t believe that hasn't changed. I can’t believe it’s gotten worse. I feel like I’m a bug trapped in sap, soon to be frozen in an image that people will look at and whisper, “look how hard he tried to get free.” Maybe this is all part of the “creative’s” journey. Maybe this is the first time I stopped, looked at the content I’ve created these past few years and wondered, “Does this make me happy? Am I any closer to my dream career?”. For six years I’ve been doing this. Have I moved the needle? Was the speedometer broken all along? I can only blame myself. Everyone on the team is very talented and supportive, and I wouldn't have had any success if it wasn’t for the rest of them. Yeah, I dunno, sorry I’m such a bummer. I don’t even know if anyone reads these. I’ve been struggling with my creative destiny recently BUT outside of that existential crisis, ya boy is pretty happy. 2021 was a year of great change in my life. I turned 30, and the transition truly felt like the closing of one toxic chapter and the beginning of a new and exciting one. In some ways, movies and the content I create around them have been a source of turmoil, but they’ve also been the source of extreme happiness. If 2021 taught me anything, it’s that movies truly are a magical medium. One of the most exciting moments of my life happened in a movie theater in 2021 and I can’t help but wonder if the film gods are giving me some kind of cosmic high five for how much I worship them. I won’t bore you with the details; if you know, you know. Alright, so I’m assuming you’re mostly here to see what movies I liked last year. My name is Robby, my friends call me Baebae, I’m a podcaster and content creator for storyscreenbeacon.com and sometimes Mike Burdge calls me Head of Telecommunications when I’m doing okay at my job. This isn’t a list of the best movies of 2021; this is a list of my FAVORITE movies of 2021. 10. Bo Burnham: Inside This counts as a movie right? Well, it’s on my list so sit down. That’s what I thought. Inside was my first love of 2021. I don’t know if you guys remember, but 2020 was a pretty weird/rough time. Bo’s newest special really seemed to encapsulate a lot of the feelings so many of us were having while locked down at home. I connected with it on a personal level, as is the special’s design. Bo sings songs about struggling with inspiration, the treadmill of content creation, and staring down the Grim Reaper’s younger brother, Thirty. Also, both of our names are Robert, so that’s pretty cool too. Bo’s special is ubiquitously loved at this point, with every song on Spotify exceeding at least 20 million listens. It feels like the millennial’s soundtrack to 2020. Something that really united a lot of us by articulating a generation’s unanimous contemplation of yeah…” what the fuck is going on?”. Bo’s always been a one-man musical act and here he feels at both the peak of his powers and the saddest. He’s always been alone on stage but he’s never felt isolated. I finished Inside feeling inspired. Armed with a sick lighting kit, good camera, and an obscene level of talent Bo was able to make one of the most powerful pieces of performance art I’ve ever seen. Surely with an iPhone and Premiere Pro, I could make something that was at the very least “cool.” Bo Burnham isn’t exactly a struggling artist, and when everyone found out he made this special from his spare home I was a little surprised to see other people surprised. Like somehow being successful discounts his experience or his feelings. But that’s the natural lifespan of popular media. The dissenters dance around the little shit-talking fire they started chanting, “well actually” into the stormy sky while conjuring discourse from the Gods. I found everything about Inside to be genuine. From breakdowns to lonely laughs. I don’t think the real moments of human frustration are only performative. It’s really cool that one of the most prolific performers of our generation is a child of the internet - spawn of the early Youtube generation. I think that Inside will prove to be a very important time capsule, one that future generations (if there are any) will be able to watch and understand where we all were emotionally at the time: feelin’ bad, but still funny. 9. The Novice “It’s Whiplash but about a girl on a college rowing team,” was the pitch I received for this movie by Story Screen founder and cinema hype man, Mike Burdge. The Novice does feature many thematic ingredients from Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash . Both feature a protagonist that against all odds and against all logic will endure any level of torture to achieve a goal. There is a core difference between Whiplash’s protagonist and The Novice’s Alex Dall. Rowing isn’t a lifelong dream of Alex’s, it’s just another proving ground. We all can relate to chasing a dream. I spent the intro to this list discussing the emotional turmoil that can come with it, but Alex’s drive in this film is much darker. While this may be Lauren Hadaway’s directorial debut it is not her first foray into film. She was a part of the sound department for such films as Justice League, Hateful Eight , and Whiplash . Hadaway brings her expertise in the world of sound to The Novice as well. Sound is what sells the epic scope of this intimate story. Oars crashing into the water, rowing machines tearing open blisters, and frantic freakouts inside porta-potties. The soundscape of the film is immaculate. All there to punctuate extreme close-ups of Alex’s body, tearing apart under the strain of her drive. Isabelle Fuhrman’s powerful performance as Alex Dall gives you a character you’re not just sympathetic for, you’re afraid of. The Novice sits boldly among movies about obsessive protagonists, but this film sits darkly separate from the rest, desperately trying to be the best. 8. Benedetta The name of the book this movie was based on is probably the greatest title in human history: Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.” If you read that and aren’t like “fuck yeah tell me everything,” then we CANNOT be friends. I can’t speak to whether this film is the intended vision of the book’s author Judith C. Brown, but director Paul Verhoeven certainly used it to make the spiciest damn movie of 2021. If lesbian art house drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire was considered a slow burn, Benedetta is so ablaze even the flames are on fire. It’s sexy, darkly funny, and as crass as movies come. I can’t think of a single period piece that comes close to Benedetta’s tone. The film’s spiciness aside, Benedetta’s plot has much on its mind. In Verhoeven fashion, this film’s satiric undertones ring painfully true. Dealing with hypocrisy in the church, this era’s restrictions placed upon the female body, and the encroaching black plague thematically can all be unearthed and interpreted as reflections of today’s modern hellscape. Virginie Efira’s performance as the titular Benedetta is in all ways captivating. Her character is one of many different and subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) inflections all trapped in a nun obsessed with her destiny. Benedetta is never afraid of what it is and it's one of the boldest movies of 2021 that is fully poised to cause walkouts, uproar, and bring little freaks like me happiness. 7. Summit of the Gods I think my favorite thing about animation is the malleability of the medium. Despite special effects and CGI being able to bring live-action cinema to new visual extremes, nothing can quite keep up with the creative freedom of animation. You can have insanely abstract art house montages like Fantastic Planet . You can have movies like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse that presents complex ideas like the multiverses and quantum theory but are made all the more palatable through visual storytelling and comic book tropes. For all the worlds, dimensions and abstract concepts animation can cover, there’s something so special when it shows restraint. When it’s grounded (maybe not the best phrase for this example). Summit of the Gods is a French adaptation of a Japanese manga of the same name and it's truly one of the most meditative and beautiful films I’ve ever seen. Movies like Free Solo and The Alpinist have explored the almost sociopathic nature of some of these death-defying climbers. Summit of the Gods feels like an excellent companion piece to these documentaries of similar ilk. Despite being a story with not too many frills, it still uses its medium to great effect. The animation captures the ambiance of these harrowing climbs and these beautiful isolating vistas. It also communicates tension in one of the most anxiety-inducing scenes I’ve seen all year. Summit of the Gods tackles obsession on multiple planes, both literally and thematically. By its conclusion, it doesn’t present answers, it simply endures. 6. Nine Days Saying a movie is about “life” or “existence” is about as vague as a plot synopsis gets. We’ve seen it before, an award-winning pretentious slop that intellectuals chew from their troughs only to meet your criticisms with, “maybe you didn’t get it.” Nine Days is one of those existential romps, no doubt about it, but its narrative accessibility is what sets it apart from the rest. The world of the film acts as the queue before life itself, establishing its rules very early, allowing for plenty of room for amazing character beats. That’s what this film does best, character . A powerhouse cast, every character has a moment and shines. Winston Duke plays an arbiter or perhaps liaison to life itself, and his performance might be the most stunning of the year. Sometimes when I watch a quiet, intimate story I say, “This feels like a play.” Nine Days does feel like it could be happening live on a stage at times. Its narrative is buoyed by amazing performances, but it has so much to say about cinema: the way we watch life voyeuristically on screens, the way we view tragedies and stories while so rarely basking in our own. Life feels like it’s always happening on the outside. We so rarely appreciate the fact that we exist in the sea of it. 5. Shiva Baby Shiva Baby is one of those movies that will make you tear your hair out. A film about a college girl attending a family shiva who runs into her sugar daddy. There are laughs to be sure, but trust me, this movie is by definition a thriller. Many spoke about how Shiva Baby was reminiscent of Uncut Gems, and I find this observation to be right on the money. The difference is Shiva Baby boils down that anxiety-inducing energy to its purest form. We are TRAPPED at this shiva. It is hilarious, it is painful, it is oh so awkward its entire runtime. This movie wouldn’t be possible without the performance of actress and social media icon Rachel Sennott, whose portrayal of Danielle shows a young woman who is not only trapped in the worst of scenarios, she just might feed on it as well. Seeing a character stuck in a bad situation will make an audience anxious, but when they actively start making things worse is when you start losing your damn mind. There isn’t a more fun movie this year than Shiva Baby, don’t let your fear of having a bad time deter you, but instead, enjoy the ride. 4. Titane I host a podcast called Hot Takes (like, share, subscribe, thanks) and I was so happy that we didn’t cover this movie immediately after watching it. Some films are meant to be sat on, to mutate in the jelly of your brain until coalescing into an opinion you can share with the world. I left Titane initially digging it, but not even knowing where to begin analyzing it. I knew I liked it because I had some familiar buzz words vibrating in my head. It was provocative, it was bold, it was sexy, it was French. My girlfriend and I talked about the flick for days; we’d share articles reviewing the film and breaking down its themes back and forth while formulating our own. That’s the cool thing about these weird-as-fuck art house movies: there’s not just one way to interpret them. Titane is no different. I wouldn’t sit here and tell you exactly what the movie is about. I can, however, speak to its themes. The way the film handles gender and identity is wholly unique. The way it conveys tenderness will surprise and intrigue you. The film, to use another buzzword, is visceral. It’s a movie you feel . It’s a movie that has to shock you, that has to break you down as you watch it. It will not bore you, it will aggressively hold your head and make you watch. Movies like Titane are so exciting in the world of film criticism. The discussions that can blossom from it can continue forever. Go watch Titane and talk to a friend about it, I guarantee it will be some of the most fun you’ve ever had. 3. Dune: Part One Name a movie that looks cooler than Dune. I’ll wait. That’s what I thought, now sit back down. Our sweet, sweet boy, director Denis Villeneuve, follows up his incredible sci-fi “didn’t think that would ever happen” sequel, Blade Runner 2049, with a movie that may just be his best film yet. Dune is obtuse. Dune is weird. Dune is the next Lord of the Rings . For a long time in Hollywood Lord of the Rings was considered to be a book that just could not be adapted properly to screen. Frank Herbert’s Dune was not too different. Dune inspired a lot of sci-fi media, including the biggest film franchise ever made, Star Wars . Even in this week's most recent episode of The Boba Fett Show (or whatever it’s called), they refer to a commodity as spice . When Dune was adapted in 1984 by known weirdo David Lynch, it pretty much dashed all hopes of seeing the franchise on the big screen ever again. But our sweet boy did it. Dune has all the ingredients of an epic: political strife, magic, war, and a steady stream of proper nouns. The design and craft of the film are meticulously perfect, feeling like pure retro science fiction aesthetics come wholly to life. This doesn’t feel like an old property shoehorned into modern aesthetics, this feels authentic . Authenticity, like spice on the sand planet Arrakis, is the rarest commodity in film. It is too early to tell if Dune can be the next mega-franchise, we’ll have to wait until its sequels come out. I’m so excited for the future of Dune; I’m relieved that it was met with pretty much universal acclaim. Somebody give the sandworm an Oscar, c’mon. 2. Pig It was interesting listening to folks discuss the Pig trailer prior to seeing the flick. So many were convinced it was a John Wick- esq revenge story. To be fair, Pig does share some themes with the king of headshots - a character who’s left a community behind after the death of a loved one, finding peace in solitude and animal companionship, a character who must slip back into the catacombs of his past to unearth information on their mission. Tonally, Pig is on the other end of the spectrum from John Wick . Nicolas Cage‘s character, Rob, doesn’t use bullets and brute force against his foes, but instead, his weapon is memory and tenderness . John Wick has to dig up his old guns and blocks of money (?) when it’s time for him to re-enter the world of assassins. Rob has to dig up his expertise; he has to cook again, he has to mend his relationship with food so that he can get what he wants. Sometimes it feels reductive, but I like pitching movies to people as “it’s this meets this. ” Pig is First Cow meets John Wick . It’s tenderness and respect for animal companionship, meets the painful loss and drive of a man on a mission. Pig is one of the sweetest movies of the year, and it is a film that will mean the world to me forever. 1. The Green Knight The Green Knight was one of the most anticipated films of 2021. Having been delayed multiple times, a certain level of fervor was starting to surround it, which was a tad bit uncommon for movies of its kind. Perhaps it’s because of its kickass trailer, seemingly purporting it as an Arthurian epic. (Which in my humble opinion, it is not). This is a horny art house movie, and if you’ve made it this far down my list, you know that’s the exact kind of sicko shit I like. This isn’t to say it feels classic like legends of yore. Quite the opposite, The Green Knight feels old yet modern, classic yet new. It feels as whimsical as it feels ancient. Its moral allegories are tea leaves steeped for thousands of years, that now, in the modern world, we can toss the tea bag to wind and drink dankness. The Green Knight , despite its flairs, its intricate design, its “artsy” aesthetic, is still a simple story. It has to do with honor and what we do to achieve it. It questions the pursuit of honor, it asks if such pursuits are, in fact, honorable . Is it just a game invented by men to make them throw their lives away for something meaningless? This movie imprinted on me. I saw it at a formidable time in my life. Sir Gawain’s journey may be one that’s easy to understand but the road is complex with imagery. Much like Titane , The Green Knight is open to interpretation down to its final moments. I think we all have movies we saw at certain times in our lives, where scenes and moments reflect something personal to ourselves. No, I’ve never had to prove my honor to a big wooden dude with an axe and amazing tenor, but, I have questioned the honor in my decision making, the call of risk aversion, and the freezing surge of choice paralysis. Nothing stood a chance of pushing The Green Knight off the top of my list, to me, it’s an embodiment of a wild year, and I couldn’t be happier. Thank you for reading my list. Thank you to all of the incredible creators that offer us escape during these tumultuous years. Thank you to my Story Screen Family. All original artwork created by Robby Anderson Robert Anderson Head of Podcasting Robert has a degree in Screenwriting and Playwriting and works in multiple genres. He's just your typical man-child who enjoys most things nerd culture. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @RoBaeBae