Your Weekly Dose (12/13/21)
This week’s prescriptions include a re-imagined noir, the conclusion to a global phenomenon, and a contemporary literary classic. As always, thanks for subscribing and sharing.
FILM
Nightmare Alley
A couple of weeks ago, in Houston, TX, a plumber found an undisclosed amount of money hidden in the walls of a bathroom at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church. This money could be part of a missing $600,000.00 that was reported back in 2014 and has yet to be fully accounted for.
This Friday, Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, Nightmare Alley, releases in theaters nationwide. It is something of a quintessential American story of grift, hucksterism, naïveté, belief, and even faith, based on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel of the same name. A similar story has echoed throughout film history with the likes of The Night of the Hunter, Elmer Gantry ,and The Apostle, to name a few, and Bradley Cooper’s performance as Stanton Carlisle stands alongside Burt Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry and Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell. I have yet to see the 1947 version of Nightmare Alley, starring Tyrone Power.
In Nightmare Alley, Stanton Carlisle joins a carnival and proves himself to be a quick student of mentalism and an adept showman. He falls for Molly (Rooney Mara), a younger woman with “electrical powers” and promises her an idea for a two-person show that will give her “the world and everything in it.” The two run away, and we find them two years later in New York, working audiences for two shows a night. When psychologist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett) watches one of their shows and tries to expose him for a fraud, Stanton convinces her to partner with him to fleece New York’s rich and powerful. She gives him background information on a client, and he uses this to conduct seances in which the bereaved can connect with the deceased. But when Stanton goes too far, against the advice of everyone around him, the fortune that he so quickly built is in danger of disappearing even faster.
Faith and superstition, or the simple desire to believe in something bigger than ourselves, have more firmly and persistently held Americans in their grasp than folks in many other parts of the Western world. WWII, the outbreak of which forms the backdrop to the events in Nightmare Alley, disabused many Europeans of this. The marriage of evangelical Christianity and far-right politics—along with faith-based scandals like the “toilet money” at Lakewood—might be chipping away at it here in the United States. As such, Nightmare Alley arrives at a timely cultural moment, a year after the removal of the Huckster-in-Chief and as so many conspiracy theorists continue to hawk crackpot COVID claims and remedies. You could easily see Stanton Carlisle as a guest on Fox & Friends.
But the film itself is also a visual marvel, echoing old Hollywood when light and shadow played such vital roles in cinematography. It’s a masterclass in character development, slowly revealing just who Stanton is and the lengths to which he will go to construct and preserve his new identity. Along the way, it exposes our self-destructive tendencies to believe lies, particularly the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves. All of this is possible, in part, thanks to two strong performances, perhaps one of Cooper’s best and, alongside his Stanton, Blanchett’s Dr. Ritter is a vision of seduction mixed with insight (she can also spot a mark from a mile away).
Nightmare Alley rewards the theatrical pilgrimage. Add it to your holiday viewing, but not with the whole family. Be warned, there are two moments of extreme violence that may be unsettling to some viewers. Nightmare Alley opens in theaters everywhere Friday, December 17.
TV
Money Heist
Some of you may have already enjoyed this week’s TV prescription, but for those of you who haven’t, you’re in for a real treat. Money Heist recently concluded its fifth and final season on Netflix and, in the process, became something of a global sensation thanks, in part, to its presence on the streaming platform (in 2018, it was the most-watched non-English-language series and one of the most-watched series overall on Netflix, even with virtually no marketing budget behind it). Sports fans will even spot Brazilian football star (and fan of the series) Neymar in a cameo appearance. The series became such a hit that Netflix produced two documentaries, one about its global popularity (Money Heist: The Phenomenon) and another about the making of the final season (Money Heist: From Berlin to Tokyo).
The series follows a group of misfit criminals, lead by a mastermind known as The Professor (Alvaro Morte), as they first overtake the Royal Mint of Spain to manufacture over $1 billion for themselves and then the Bank of Spain where they steal the country’s gold reserves. On the surface, Money Heist is a near-perfect example of the genre, with all the ingenious safe-cracking and lawbreaking and “how will they get out of this next jam” escapades you can handle. Just below the surface, however, it is also a critique of our global financial system, wealth inequality, and other economic and social injustices. While the creators walk a fine line with the later never overshadows the former, you’re sure to be humming the anti-fascist song, “Bella Ciao,” long after the series ends.
What is just as miraculous as the heists are the ways in which the characters and the series itself worms its way into your heart. This is all due to a brilliant bit of casting backed up by impeccable performances, which were so effective that the actors’ personalities and performances eventually shaped who the characters would become as the series progressed. This lends a level of authenticity, believability, and emotional impact to what could otherwise be a standard crime drama.
The conclusion of Money Heist has me eager to see if or how the cast will be able to capitalize on the success of this series with future roles. While we wait to see what’s next for creator Alex Pina, I can recommend his subsequent series, Sky Rojo, but it’s not for the faint of heart (a group of women fight to free themselves from their pimp, and there is graphic violence and explicit descriptions of sex and sexual abuse throughout). All five seasons of Money Heist are now streaming on Netflix.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Most of the books I’ve prescribed since starting the Pop Culture Rx newsletter have been relatively new releases. Staying on top of the book world is difficult, if not impossible, with so many new releases and the amount of time it takes to read them. This week’s print prescription is something of a contemporary classic, one that I’ve finally gotten to, in part, because it is part of a course I am co-teaching with a friend next spring. But better late than never. Published in 2019, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a stunning hybrid of poetry and fiction, a coming-of-age immigrant story loosely based on the author’s (here nicknamed Little Dog) own experiences.
On Earth is composed as a letter—or a series of attempts at writing a letter—to the author’s mother, a PTSD-addled survivor of the Vietnam War, domestic abuse, and a hostile (or at best indifferent) adopted country. Vuong writes, “I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible” (190). It is a series of flashbacks to the author’s grandmother and mother’s life in Vietnam during the war and the author’s own childhood in Hartford, Connecticut, his tumultuous teenage relationship with a young man named Trevor, and, most recently, his post-collegiate life in New York City.
Throughout the book, pages of prose are interspersed with poetry (Vuong first received acclaim for his poetry with the collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds). Regardless of the genre or format, turn to any page of the book and you will find passages of the most profound beauty or disturbing brutality (often in the same paragraph). It is a book that demands to be re-read…to be savored. In that, there is something of lectio divina here, the ancient practice of meditating over sections of sacred texts. I could list dozens of passages, but I’ll just quote one here:
That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity. (134-135)
Be warned, there are graphic descriptions of sex and violence throughout that may be disturbing to some readers. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is available wherever books are sold, but consider purchasing it form an independent bookseller like Broadside Books in Northampton, MA (Vuong’s home).
You can watch Seth Meyer’s interview with Vuong here: