Is New Yorker film critic Richard Brody sundowning?

And also some thoughts on how the copy editing department of The New Yorker is secretly a cult

SOME THOUGHTS ON STYLE

I hate stupid New Yorker style trends. No, I'm not talking about Melitta Baumeister’s show at New York Fashion Week this year, although that was, um…

Yeah anyways moving on.

What I’m talking about is the stupid fucking style decisions that The New Yorker is so fond of making while its gleefully-sadistic team of copy editors, chief among them the notorious Mary “The Comma Queen” Norris, vociferously defend every one of them in a seemingly-intentional quest to ragebait an extremely niche section of their own readership. Their approach to comma usage, for instance, is fucking deranged, as pointed out here by Ben Yagoda:

‘Before [Lee] Atwater died, of brain cancer, in 1991, he expressed regret over the “naked cruelty” he had shown to [Michael] Dukakis in making “Willie Horton his running mate.”’

No other publication would put a comma after “died” or “cancer.” The New Yorker does so because otherwise (or so the thinking goes), the sentence would suggest that Atwater died multiple times and of multiple causes.

That is nutty, of course.

This is insane. A fucking Rain Man approach to figuring out comma placement that bears no relationship to any imagined reader capable of common sense but instead imagines punctuation as a precise algorithm that must be followed with mathematical scrutiny. I am a great believer in “descriptive” comma usage over so-called “prescriptive” comma usage, although within reason—I think that an adroit enough writer can determine comma placement insofar as the commas “feel” like they make sense with regards to the intended sense of coherence, readability, flow, style, and so on. “Before [Lee] Atwater died, of brain cancer, in 1991” as a construction reads like trying to drive stick shift for the first time (or so movies seem to show me it is, I’ve never driven a car), it’s a fucking nightmare, and to decide to that usage is just fucking obtuse.

Here’s another fucking insane one: the infamous “possessive junior” controversy that emerged in the wake of Donald Trump Jr. suddenly receiving a lot of coverage after his father’s election to the presidency in 2016. When dubbing someone a “junior,” The New Yorker writes it out like this: Donald Trump, Jr. If the sentence continues, then it goes: Donald Trump, Jr., looks like Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray. Already, the period followed by the comma makes me start to itch. But here’s what they do if there’s a possessive: Donald Trump, Jr.,’s girlfriend’s four-post post had a halo hanging on the corner. Now I have full-blown hives. What could possess you to think that the string of characters forming “.,’s” belongs anywhere outside of ASCII art? It just looks like a typographical error caused by your cat walking on the keys. The New Yorker closed ranks around this decision and wrote an authoritarian manifesto on the CORRECT way to punctuate Donald Trump Jr. that reads like an editorial from Joseph Goebbels (talk about putting the “Nazi” back in “Grammar Nazi”). If your style guide leads to situations like these… then fucking change it, it’s a bad style guide. Do what most people do and ditch the commas around “Junior,” because why are you styling “Junior” as an embedded clause? It’s his fucking name. It looks like you’re saying “yeah so Donald Trump—that’s to say, the junior Donald Trump—just wants to fly (put your arms around him, baby).” When you people write about the American Revolution do you style it as “George, III”? Wait. Stop. Don’t get any fucking ideas. Understand that the copy editors at The New Yorker are a cult. A boring cult, yes, but a cult. They stick to their guns with a kind of zealous fervour that even gets scary at times, such as when Norris called usage of the Oxford comma—a rare good style fixation of theirs, much like their placement of commas and periods within quotation marks rather than without—a “sacred responsibility.” Oh. Um. Okay.

When they’re not pulling that shit they’re instead just ruining perfectly good words. This is a magazine that styles “elite” as “élite.” FUCKING WHY??? Yes, something can be said about decisions regarding the acute accent mark in “cliché” or the diaeresis in “naïve,” both of which can (and are) often written without them maybe as much as with them, but NOBODY writes “elite” with an accent over the e, nobody is going to read “elite” without an acute accent mark in The New Yorker and think “hey, shouldn’t that have an accent?” Most recently I encountered their use of… “reënactment.” Yes, that’s an umlaut. Ahem, if I may refer to a previous turn of phrase I used:

FUCKING WHY???

However, that itself was the least of my problems, because the word itself was inside a Richard Brody article. Let’s talk about Richard Brody. But first, a plug for subscribers:

OKAY, RICHARD BRODY TIME

I am convinced that the continued employment of Richard Brody constitutes elder abuse. I think he has dementia. Look no further than his hilarious review of Inside Out, a children’s movie by Pixar, which nearly made me piss myself the first time I encountered it. The review is littered with gems. Let me show you a few:

I was jolted from the start by its deformation of children and of mental life. […] That sense of self is rooted in the inner landscape, among Riley’s so-called islands of identity, defining traits that include family, hockey, and honesty. I don’t believe it. […] Anyone who hears a baby scream at the slightest quiver of need or discomfort knows better than Pixar that primal forces, entirely more hirsute and imperious, are in control from the start, and those forces only slowly and grudgingly make room for the five cutesy minions of emotional negotiation. When a baby cries with hunger, it’s not from joy or sadness, and describing that feeling as a blend of fear and anger gets the palette wrong, makes it too negative. It’s the drive to survive, the will to exist, the life force—the principle of action itself.

[Emphasis my own]

Listen: Brody is a big boy. He doesn’t believe in this whimsical fantasy world for children. And he doesn’t want the kids to be condescended to by the shiny cartoon with the purple elephant friend, he needs ontological realness, he needs it to be serving “the drive to survive, the will to exist,” it needs to be fishy but of the world, or, as Hegel put it, Weltfisch. Well, alright, what would Brody suggest the kids watch instead?

In lieu of the mysteries and wonders of life, instead of big dreams and big fears, in place of the cosmic sense of childhood infinity that Terrence Malick thrillingly got at in “The Tree of Life”¹ (the best movie about a child’s inner life that I’ve ever seen), “Inside Out” offers problems to be solved, a narrow range of a narrow life of narrow prospects and narrow experiences, narrow fantasies and narrow desires confined within the margins of a trivialized notion of what Riley’s imagination might entail.

…Oh. That’s what the kids need. The Tree of Life. Surely Brody isn’t serious.

It’s unfair to expect a cheerful animated comedy to approximate Malick’s cosmogonic exhilarations, but for a director of genius there are ways.

Oh. No. He’s deadly serious. Um… well, if we’re going to go there, I mean, beyond the fact that… no, babies will not connect with The Tree if Life, I guess I like The Tree of Life but he’s giving it some high praise, I felt that movie to be ham-fisted and overly-sentimental. The best movie about a child’s inner-life? You can’t be serious. I suppose if you’re stupid enough to think that dreamy out-of-sequence shots “accurately” portray a sense of early memory rather than are just actually pretty cliché cinematic shorthand for same, and dont realize that you have been conditioned to associate this technique with those qualia due to that shorthand’s ubiquity. What about films that gesture at that inner-life like The 400 Blows or Little Fugitive? I find that the effect those films have on me far more accurately brings me into a space of “feeling” those qualia. Of course, that takes for granted Brody’s stupid suggestion here that art really just boils down to mimesis—if that really is how you feel, Brody, then just admit you’re a Platonist and go out and live life instead of wasting your time with deceptive representations of representations. Otherwise I’m going to have to simply slap you with this:

What set me off about all this in the first place was a recent piece Richard Brody wrote about the film Terrorists in Retirement. At first I didn’t even think about whether I was reading Brody in the first place, but it became very clear very quickly. Just look at this paragraph:

[T]he reënactments of “Terrorists in Retirement” are different in kind: at a surface level, there’s a striking incongruity in seeing these aging men re-create the dangerous exploits of their youth; more important, the presentation of the documentary’s subjects reliving the events onscreen at the places where they happened is an act of imaginative power and existential authority. Far from being merely a dramatic or even forensic device, Boucault’s reënactments play like a quasi-metaphysical conjuring, a reincarnation, making the past live in the present with a force akin to that which it exerts in the participants’ own memory. (By contrast, the reënactments performed by Indonesian political assassins in the 2012 documentary “The Act of Killing” come off as instrumentalized, whether accusatory or therapeutic.) Boucault’s achievement is an extrusion of overwhelming subjectivity in an objective cinematic form.

There’s a lot to talk about here so let’s break it down bit by bit. Firstly:

…the presentation of the documentary’s subjects reliving the events onscreen at the places where they happened is an act of imaginative power and existential authority.

…existential authority? Meaning what, exactly? Is that just an extremely stupid way of stating the obvious here: that people who lived something have lived experience that may translate into authority on the subject? That doesn’t even need to be fucking said. It’s already implied by the word “reliving,” only now you have implied a firm belief that existence implies authority, which… I disagree, but sure, go on.

…Boucault’s reënactments play like a quasi-metaphysical conjuring…

…what the fuck does it mean for something to be quasi-metaphysical? You’ve already used a simile, you have already said it is “like” something else, and anything which is the subject of a simile is already quasi-whatever-the-comparison to begin with, but even ignoring that—you wanna know something that is quasi-metaphysical? That which is physical. The physical is imbued with principles which are metaphysical but is not itself metaphysical, all that is physical is thereby quasi-metaphysical.

making the past live in the present with a force akin to that which it exerts in the participants’ own memory.

Once again, not interesting and worth saying, Brody is just repeating himself (See!!! Symptoms of dementia abound!!!). Yes, a reenactment is like making the past live in the present, and when it’s reenacted by those who did it, then yes, I imagine they will have their memories of it jogged. I don’t need to watch Terrorists in Retirement to know that, I could just go to a Rolling Stones concert (their most recent tour was literally sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons).

By contrast, the reënactments performed by Indonesian political assassins in the 2012 documentary “The Act of Killing” come off as instrumentalized, whether accusatory or therapeutic.

???? What the fuck are you talking about? How are the reenactments in Terrorists in Retirement NOT “instrumentalized”? They weren’t done spontaneously and happened to be captured on film, they were produced for a fucking film, that is the definition of fucking instrumentalization. They were made an instrument of to achieve an aesthetic goal.

Boucault’s achievement is an extrusion of overwhelming subjectivity in an objective cinematic form.

WHAT. THE FUCK. ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. Overwhelming subjectivity in an objective cinematic form? That’s just called ALL MOVIES EVERY MADE, YOU FUCKING DIPSHIT! Cinema itself is constituted by collections of what is perceived to be an “objective” form, the photograph, which is then subjected to a curated “overwhelming subjectivity.” Even just the “objective cinematic form” Brody is gesturing at, documentaries, is explicitly that—even bereft of conventional “writing” these films are subjectively curated; the way they are framed, directed, edited, scored, etc. How Brody, a career film critic in his fucking sixties, can be so fucking guileless as to say something so patently fucking stupid about the subject he has spent his life analyzing is just breathless.

If Brody isn’t completely sundowning then Brody is merely a fucking moron, scarcely worthy to polish Pauline Kael’s shoes (rest in peace, queen, Brody would never interrupt a movie review to do racist phrenology on Italians for an entire paragraph). This is a guy who liked Shutter Island so much he named it the best movie of 2010. Are you fucking joking? That movie sucks a bag of dicks! What else came out in 2010? Incendies? Certified Copy? Poetry? Most importantly, Who Killed Captain Alex?????

THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT, BABYYYyyYYY!!!!! FUUUUCCCKKKK YEEEEAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1. I haven’t mentioned this decision to not italicize titles, but fuck that noise too. They also deliberately refuse to spell various other words properly, such as adding an extra “L” to the word “fueled”: