2026-07-12 07:56:22
On Thursday morning, PEN America, the free-speech organization, posted an article detailing the “isolation and exclusion” many Israeli and Jewish writers have felt since October 7, 2023. The authors describe being blacklisted at publishing houses, boycotted by activists, pressured to downplay their Jewishness, and called out in online witch hunts including a viral crowdsourced spreadsheet that asked: “Is your fav writer a Zionist???”
Drawing attention to such suppression would seem to fall squarely within the mandate of this watchdog group, whose motto is “the freedom to write.” And yet, publication of the article—which makes no policy recommendations and is written in a mournful, rather than accusatory, tone—was enough to make PEN America’s president, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu, decide to resign in protest within hours.
PEN America currently sits on a widening fault line, one that divides old-school liberalism, which treats the right to speak as more important than any particular ideology, from a surging and fiercely ideological left that sees Israel and Zionism as its enemy. Still, it was a shock to learn that this article—mainly a collection of writer testimonials—set off an eruption.
Mengestu had been in his position for only seven months following a few years of turmoil at the organization, much of it over Israel and Gaza. When I reached him, he described the PEN article as a possible threat to the constitutional rights of those who advocate for shunning Israeli products (including art) according to the standards of the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement. Apparently setting aside the question of defending free expression for Israeli and Jewish writers, he focused on the rights of pro-Palestinian activists. A document like this from PEN, he felt, could provide more fuel for legislation that targets proponents of BDS. Such legislation already exists in most states, though it is usually aimed at businesses and individuals seeking government contracts. “It’s the first amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu wrote in an email. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
I spoke with several current and former PEN staffers and board members who characterized his position, expressed in emails he wrote to the board, as highly partisan. From their perspective, the leader of their organization was arguing that merely reporting on the stifling of one group’s free expression amounted to suppressing the rights of another.
Some PEN staffers came away feeling that his worry about the free speech of pro-Palestinian protesters and student activists foreclosed any defense of Israeli and Jewish writers—even writers, such as the Israeli novelist Etgar Keret, who have condemned the war in Gaza and have suffered consequences both outside and inside Israel. (It should go without saying, though maybe it needs to be said, that it would be meaningless to have free-speech organizations if they defended only speech they agreed with.) These staffers also expressed sadness that even a small effort to fulfill PEN’s mission by describing the experiences of writers under political stress was met with such a dramatic gesture of rejection, seemingly because of those authors’ identity.
[Read: Shutting down Salman Rushdie is not going to help]
PEN does in fact defend the rights of people who want to engage in boycotts, even though it “emphatically opposes” organized efforts to shut down speech. In practical terms, this might mean condemning a literary festival’s ban on a group of writers but defending an individual’s refusal to attend. As Mengestu and others pointed out to me, the organization amended its guidelines on this point and reissued them on Thursday, at the same time as the article was posted. “We see no contradiction between opposing boycotts ourselves, and defending the right of others to engage in them,” the new language reads, in part.
Many people inside the organization, including its co-CEOs Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, believed that publishing the article about Israeli and Jewish writers was a matter of principle. When they first began serving as interim leaders last fall, after two years of organizational crisis marked by protests following October 7, Lopez and Rosaz Shariyf went on a “listening tour.” (Their positions became official in February.) They heard again and again from authors who described a chilled environment for any books related to Jewish themes or involving Jewish characters. As with any issue that affects the freedom to write, this one felt important for PEN to investigate.
The resulting document took months to produce—an unusual length of time, I was told, in part because of the scrutiny that such reporting would surely face. The authors of the article spoke with people such as Deborah Harris, a prominent literary agent who represents many Israeli authors. She described being unable to sell any works of literary fiction by them in the American market since the October 7 attacks. “The standard line is, ‘I wouldn’t know how to publish this author right now,’” Harris said.
Some of the information in the report was highly anecdotal; for instance, a romance novelist named Meg Keene says she was told by her agent to strip out all Jewish references from her book and to change one character’s name from Yael to Sue. But there was also some attempt to offer hard data, including the fact that a hotline set up by the Jewish Book Council for reporting “antisemitic literary-related incidents” has so far received 350 self-reported complaints over two years.
The article does not conclude that all of these experiences were the result of BDS. In fact, it considers a constellation of factors: “It is difficult to assess how much of what the writers PEN America spoke to are experiencing stems from cultural boycotts and broader efforts to protest the war; how much from anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or antisemitic sentiment; and how much reflects matters of business or taste, which are also shaped by geopolitics.” The objective of the article was rather to describe the effect: a sense of diminished opportunity for free expression and the feeling of being targeted because of one’s “identity, nationality, or views.” The release also mentions the “dire consequences” that Palestinian and pro-Palestinian writers and artists have faced over the past three years, including “arrests, harassment and threats, deportation attempts, and detention.”
[Read: A prominent free-speech group is fighting for its life]
The document does not project the authority or condemnatory conclusions of an official PEN America report. The report produced last fall about the cultural destruction of Gaza, “All That Is Lost,” represents a far more comprehensive effort to capture the result of Israel’s war. This new article, in contrast, felt to some PEN America outsiders more like a “blog post”—and an equivocal one.
“PEN does not muse that the removal of a Toni Morrison novel might be a matter of taste,” Allison Lee, the former head of PEN America’s Los Angeles office, told me, referencing the group’s many reports that have condemned book bans over the years. “Only one group of writers, it seems, must have the case for their suppression respectfully contextualized before the harm done to them can be acknowledged—and even then, only provisionally.”
Most discussion of Israel and Palestine has devolved into a zero-sum game. The simple act of drawing attention to what Israelis and Jews might be experiencing was always going to be read as a position statement for the organization. “The blog post was brave and right,” Andrew Solomon, a former PEN America president and current honorary board member, told me. He opposes the current Israeli government, but he does not see why that should preclude him from defending Israeli writers. He has also done work in Ukraine—he risked his life to deliver vehicles to Kharkiv earlier this month—and said he would still speak up against the mistreatment of Russian writers, regardless of what Vladimir Putin does.
“Why would anyone complain of acknowledging the suffering of anyone else?” he asked. “Is the lie that some people’s suffering matters more than that of others the role of an organization dedicated to free speech and truth? I don’t deny Palestinian suffering and don’t see that acknowledging and representing it means I cannot acknowledge suffering in Israel too.”
Solomon’s position is shared by others on the board, a fact reflected in the decision of the organization’s leadership to stand by the article. But Mengestu was named president in order to solve a serious problem at PEN America, one that this new crisis threatens to expose again.
In 2024, PEN America went through something like an internal revolt after a large number of prominent writers, including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, and Lorrie Moore, issued a series of letters making escalating demands that the group take a harder line on Israel, and specifically that it characterize the war in Gaza as a genocide. (The new article uses the word—but among Mengestu’s objections is that the designation was attributed to “experts” and other organizations.) A group of writers attacked the then-CEO, Suzanne Nossel, calling for her resignation. In one of their letters, they describe Nossel as having “longstanding commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East.” So many writers pulled out of the 2024 World Voices Festival and that year’s literary awards that both events were canceled, and the annual gala was nearly called off too. (Nossel, who ran the organization for more than a decade and left in October 2024 partly in response to the protests, had grown PEN America’s membership and influence as well its revenue, which increased fivefold.)
[Read: When writers silence writers]
An organization that had prided itself since its creation in 1922 on protecting free speech and the defense of writers—no matter who they were—was thus overtaken by a passionate and sizable contingent that demanded the group become vocal advocates on behalf of Palestinians and in opposition to Israel. One of this constituency’s central demands (they called themselves Writers Against War on Gaza, or WAWOG) was that PEN America be more accepting of BDS and not condemn writers who joined calls for a blanket cultural boycott.
When Mengestu assumed office, WAWOG announced in an Instagram post that it had achieved “VICTORY AGAINST PEN AMERICA” (the same group today offered a “salute” to Mengestu’s “principled decision” to resign). But in one early interview, the new president promised to “mend and rebuild.” Since then, PEN America has focused considerable attention and resources on Gaza. In addition to its extensive Gaza report last fall, the organization has spent as much as $500,000 dollars, according to several insiders, on helping Palestinian writers and artists.
Besides helping Palestinians artists, PEN America has made other efforts to keep the protesters inside the tent. In January, the group released a statement condemning the cancellation of performances by the incendiary Israeli comedian Guy Hochman—in keeping with its general stance against “ideological litmus tests”—but later withdrew it in response to backlash. At this year’s World Voices Festival, which included more than 140 writers from more than 40 countries, not a single Israeli was part of the program.
In light of these shifts, last week’s article came as a genuine surprise, including perhaps to Mengestu. The PEN America board does not have any editorial control over the work of the staff. But after the release of the report on the cultural destruction of Gaza, the organization decided to share potentially controversial publications with board members in advance. They saw the article two days before it was published, and a number of them decided to meet to discuss it. I could not confirm whether Mengestu was part of these conversations. When I asked him about it, he didn’t respond to the question. Board members are held to confidentiality about their internal discussions. (Among these members is the Atlantic staff writer George Packer.) Mengestu delivered his judgement on the article and decision to resign in emails to the board.
The next president of PEN America will decide the group's course—and that course is hard for anyone to predict. The decision by Lopez and Rosaz Shariyf to publish the article was described to me by many people I spoke with as an act of “courage.” (I should acknowledge that others who declined to speak with me might feel very differently.) And yet they expressed no desire to return to the tumult that the organization experienced in 2024. The younger members of the staff who, according to Mengestu, were upset by the article’s appearance, and the hundreds of writers who have signed petitions opposing PEN America in the past, cannot be ignored without imperiling the organization’s future.
Maybe the most revealing aspect of this eruption, though, is just how little it took to set it off. Thursday’s article nodded to the curtailed freedoms of Israeli and Jewish writers without taking any ideological side. It was far from a battle cry or a shift in priorities. It was just a way of acknowledging, in the measured but principled language common to PEN America, that the past three years of discourse have had an effect on a large group of writers. For anyone who has spoken to Israeli or Jewish artists—as I have—this is undeniable; you hear it everywhere. This reality does not neutralize the cause of pro-Palestinian writers or the suffering in Gaza and elsewhere. The fact that the article was perceived that way, and that it led to the resignation of a president, tells us all a great deal about the hair-trigger moment we live in, and about the precarity of the liberal principles on which PEN America was founded.
2026-07-11 22:38:52
After Graham Platner officially withdrew from the Maine Senate race this week, Democrats are now in the process of naming his replacement. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss how the party is trying to salvage their chances in the state, and more.
Democrats have been looking to win races in states such as Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Alaska in the hopes of flipping at least four seats in the Senate during the upcoming midterm elections, Adam Harris, host of Radio Atlantic, explained last night. But the party’s scrambling over Platner suggests that Democrats may have learned the “wrong lesson from 2020 and 2024,” he argues. They were “looking for the prototypical candidate who can win back the isolated white male voters who they may have thought they lost to President Trump.”
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Harris.
Watch the full episode here.
2026-07-11 21:00:00
Pieter de Hooch was a contemporary of Johannes Vermeer in the Dutch city of Delft for a time; they painted similar subjects, in similar costumes, engaged in similarly quotidian activities. But they were quite different artists. De Hooch’s 1663 painting Interior With Women Beside a Linen Cupboard delivers exactly as little drama and numinous transcendence as its title promises. (It was formerly called The Good Housewife, which is hardly better.) The intrigue lies elsewhere.
De Hooch’s picture is a puzzle box—an ingenious construction of openings and closings, insides and outsides, revelation and concealment. The sturdy wall behind the standing women with their crisply folded stack of linen is breached in three different places, extending our vista with sudden depth. On the right is a stairway twisting up and out of sight, on the left a window, and in the center a door.
[From the May 2023 issue: How to look at a Vermeer]
These last two open onto the voorhuis, a foyer punctuated with a second, taller window and another doorway, beyond which we can see a sunlit snippet of the outside world—a bit of tree, the suggestion of a canal, and a building on the opposite side, with its own syncopated grid of windows, doors, and brickwork. (Look again at the spot of sky, diced by overlapping panes of glass, and you might catch a glimpse of the light and structure, the clarity and enigma, of Piet Mondrian.)
Our attention is being endlessly redirected. The brightest things in the picture—that bit of blue heaven and the red-and-white house across the canal—are also the most distant. Meanwhile, the one piece of incipient action is hidden in shadow: a child of 5 or 6, standing on the threshold between what we can see clearly and what we can’t, with a kolf stick cocked to send a small ball straight out of the picture and into our world.
[From the December 1972 issue: The inside story of the Mellon art collection]
Looked at one way, De Hooch’s scene is assertively ordinary. Looked at another way, it’s a lesson in the limits of visibility and knowledge. There’s the rectilinear orderliness of floor tiles and bricks, limpid windowpanes, and perfectly folded fabric. And there’s mayhem, writ small, in the unpredictable trajectories of a child and a ball.
This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “Interior With Women Beside a Linen Cupboard.”
2026-07-11 21:00:00
The other night, I found myself in the unenviable position of trying to cook a salad. And I mean cook a salad: I spread fresh, delicious-looking gem lettuce in a pan and watched it wilt away into a sad, heated blob.
America appears to be in the midst of an outbreak of—I’m sorry, but there’s no better way to say this—explosive diarrhea. More than 2,900 people nationwide have reportedly been sickened by the parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which has historically been spread through raw produce, including basil, cilantro, raspberries, and, yes, lettuce. The resulting illness, cyclosporiasis, causes bouts of diarrhea that, if left untreated, can wreak havoc on the digestive system for a month.
Cyclospora is most common in tropical climates and areas with substandard sanitation. It’s spread through contact with bits of human waste that have sat in a warm environment for a week or two, allowing the parasite to mature and become infectious. One of the first documented large-scale outbreaks of foodborne cyclosporiasis in the United States, for example, was caused by raspberries imported from Guatemala. In recent years, though, it’s started to seem that the U.S. has a homegrown-parasite problem on its hands. Americans were sickened in both 2018 and 2020 by outbreaks that were believed to be caused by domestic produce. The FDA set up a task force to deal with the issue in 2019. It apparently hasn’t stopped what is looking like a dramatic uptick in cases this summer. Michigan usually sees about 50 cyclosporiasis cases a year. During this current outbreak, it has recorded upwards of 1,500.
Officials and scientists are not yet sure just how dire the apparent rise in cyclosporiasis is and whether the cases around the country are actually connected. Although the CDC reports that 31 states are seeing cases, the majority are reporting fewer than 10, which is close to normal for the summer months.
They also don’t know what is behind this spate of illness. Don Schaffner, a food scientist at Rutgers University, told me his theory is that perhaps the largest cluster of cases came from people swimming in or otherwise consuming water from a common water source, such as Lake Erie, which borders the affected states of Michigan and Ohio. Michigan’s chief medical executive has said, however, that the state’s working theory is that the cases are tied to produce.
That lack of clarity has led public-health officials to offer somewhat unsatisfactory advice on how to keep yourself safe. My home state of Illinois suggests that people avoid food and water “that may have been contaminated with feces,” as if that were not always the goal. Other states recommend washing produce, but that won’t eliminate all of the risk, Schaffner said. Some experts believe that washing might help reduce the number of infectious particles that a person takes in, but they don’t know for sure how many a person needs to ingest to actually get sick, and some data suggest that the number may be very low. The only way to reliably kill the parasite is to cook your food thoroughly—hence my feast of wilted, warm greens.
Americans have little other recourse to protect themselves from cyclosporiasis and, thanks to ongoing uncertainty about the outbreak’s size, little way of knowing how likely they are to catch it. In healthy people, cyclosporiasis causes mostly mild (if uncomfortable) symptoms. But that lack of control still makes cyclosporiasis, like other foodborne illnesses, unsettling and frustrating. Right now, choosing to eat only cooked produce is one of the few decisions I can make to protect my fast-approaching wedding from being interrupted by frantic trips to the bathroom, so I’m going with it.
When a foodborne outbreak happens, public-health officials’ goal is to quickly identify its cause and warn people to stay away from the suspect food. Sometimes that happens quickly—in 2018, for example, investigators took just nine days to tie an E. coli outbreak to chopped romaine. The current investigation into cyclospora has already been happening for nearly a month. In the coming weeks, Americans might learn the cause, or causes, of the surge, which would make taking precautions much easier. And if the parasite has been in fact spread by raw produce, the contaminated products may already be off grocery-store shelves.
Cyclosporiasis, though, is particularly tough to track. Scientists can analyze the genetic sequence of most pathogens to identify clusters of related diseases, but that process doesn’t work as well for cyclospora, because the parasite is difficult to extract from stool and can’t be grown in a laboratory for testing the same way other pathogens can. And even if officials zero in on specific foods that they believe were contaminated, the public may never learn what specifically went wrong. The CDC’s website notes that “no one fully knows how Cyclospora gets into food and water.” Although past investigations of the parasite have turned up suspected sources, they have stopped short of concluding how those sources became contaminated. When bagged lettuce caused a cyclospora outbreak in 2020, for example, officials suspected that the parasite had been introduced to farms through a municipal water canal, but they were ultimately unable to definitively establish a causal link. The investigation may also be hindered by the Trump administration’s recent cuts to the CDC and the FDA. Until yesterday morning, the CDC was reporting that fewer than 200 people in the U.S. had contracted the parasite, despite ample evidence from states that the situation was much more severe. It has since updated that count to 843. (A CDC spokesperson declined to explain the earlier discrepancy between state reporting and its own case count, and did not respond to a follow-up request for comment after the new numbers were released.)
Cyclosporiasis, thankfully, is not the most serious foodborne illness that the world has to deal with. Although cyclosporiasis has landed nearly 100 Americans in the hospital so far this summer, no one has died. That’s much preferable to, say, the 2024 listeria outbreak tied to lunch meat that killed 10 people. In that case, a clear culprit was identified, and there were consequences for the company that produced the tainted meat, which has paid out millions in settlements. The United States may never get the same closure to its cyclospora problem.
2026-07-11 20:00:00
My early days of expatriation were disorienting. It was 2011, and I had recently gotten married and moved to Paris. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my friendships to that point had depended on proximity: Once I crossed the Atlantic, many of them dwindled to digital approximations of intimacy. I went long stretches without talking to Carlos, my closest confidant since high school, even though we’d been like family when we lived in Brooklyn.
At the age of 30, I was learning just how fragile friendship becomes in adulthood. A jungle of solitude is the norm, and it grows back when we’re inattentive. In 1990, Gallup found that one-third of men reported having 10 or more close friends. By 2021, according to polling from the Survey Center on American Life, just 13 percent did—a figure that has barely budged even since the pandemic. The number of men who said they had no close friends rose from 3 percent in 1990 to 17 percent last year.
But I found luck in Paris. By way of my sister-in-law’s partner, Steve, I was invited to join a tight-knit band of friends on their recurring guys’ night out. These men knew some simple and worthwhile truths, like where to eat, what to drink, and how to welcome a stranger. In a time of transition and self-imposed exile, the outings became a source of stability and nourishment. Most fundamental, they revealed to me how potent rituals are as antidotes to isolation—capable of making us not only happier but also better.
My weeks assumed a familiar and comforting logic when the text message arrived: “C’est booké!” On the appointed Thursday or Friday night, we’d meet at the local p’tit bar for fatty sheets of charcuterie and glasses of chilled burgundy, trading wisecracks with the mustachioed proprietor. Some evenings he’d present us with an off-menu concoction—slow-cooked pig’s feet, or a mason jar of fried ants that he’d rubbed in a sensational blend of Mexican chiles—that was without fail one of the best dishes I’d ever eaten. Our appetites opened, we’d venture into the Paris night for dinner.
[Read: Are they still your friends if you never see them?]
Though I might not have put it this way back then, I had been adopted into a kind of brotherhood. With my basic French and their accommodating English, we built a hybrid language in which we talked plainly about our fears and the people we loved. Steve was a successful business owner, five years my senior, who modeled a level of elegant generosity I still haven’t seen paralleled. His son, my nephew, was born within months of my arrival. Capable and never flummoxed, Steve was the first man around my age whom I’d seen inhabit the role of patriarch and provider. His closest buddies, Julien and Michaël, were musicians. By chance, I’d been listening to Julien’s deep-house records since college, and I often praised his work. This didn’t sit well with him, given his extraordinary humility, so he immediately set about reading my memoir to return the attention.
Among these men and others in their orbit, I found myself surrounded for the first time by friends who had spouses, children, and real responsibilities. Back in New York, no one in my social environment was seriously discussing the possibility of parenthood. I had often gone to restaurants, bars, and clubs with male friends, but we didn’t conceive of those evenings as guys’ nights out. We were guys, and we were out, but even among those of us who had long-term girlfriends, we never felt the need to demarcate these gatherings from any others.
That changed in Paris. As my savings diminished and—to my astonishment, though it had been planned—I became a father, the couple of evenings a month that I shared with Steve and the others became for me a safe and premeditated truancy from domestic commitments. The ceremony amounted to a pressure valve. Once released, it sent us home tired and inebriated but also kinder, happier, and more giving.
This wasn’t just in my head. In a 2017 study led by the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, researchers at the University of Oxford found that nights out with friends support mental and emotional well-being. Other research has shown that strong friendships are associated with increased generosity, lower rates of depression and anxiety, and even a more robust immune system.
Those long evenings provoked tears of laughter, sometimes sorrow, and occasionally both in the course of a meal. They affirmed the choices and sacrifices I had made: turning away from an established career path in America, and redirecting my energy and resources to less self-interested ends. Over the slow procession of weeks, months, and years, these nights out helped me grasp new and unforeseen opportunities that my growing family and French society could extend. They made me a better friend, partner, and father.
The end came not because of any grand falling-out but simply because some of us assumed new priorities. That the p’tit bar shut down didn’t help. Our collective bond, which once felt imperishable, began to decompose without the movable feasts that had sustained and renewed it.
[Read: How the passionate male friendship died]
I am old enough now to realize that my true fortune in life has been amassed in friendships. My marriage came apart several years ago, and I now split my time in America, where I’ve found another iteration of what I first experienced in France. My friend Carlos never left New York, and when I began to spend half the year in the city, we resumed our long conversation as though it had never been paused. The two of us, along with Ari, Carlos’s close friend of 20 years, have made our own guys’ nights out here. As divorcés and single fathers, each of us has confronted loss and disappointment. Each of us has also learned that even satisfied ambition and material success will never suffice. To an extent that would have probably been unthinkable to me as a younger man, Carlos, Ari, and I have formed a fraternity in which we do not feel the need to dissemble or compete.
Because of our squeezed itineraries and complex custody arrangements, these New York nights require the kind of rigorous planning that makes me grateful at least two of us are lawyers. Perhaps because these gatherings require so much forethought, spending the entire evening in a single establishment feels wasteful. So we go to three, fully aware that at our age the next drink will ruin Sunday morning.
Despite the joy that these outings provide—probably because of it—I still feel a sense of nostalgia and even something like grief for those old dinners in Paris. Relationships, whether platonic or romantic, change subtly. Couples who seem inseparable gradually grow untethered, and even best friends disagree in ways that leave them strangers. It is hard to perceive in the midst of laughter that this exquisite meal is never to be repeated. And yet, there comes a night when the group will have been seated, as it has so many times already at that familiar and well-set table, for what will be its final supper.
2026-07-11 20:00:00
Last week, as I settled into my seat in the dark and blessedly cool basement theater of New York’s Guggenheim Museum to watch an experimental film, I was conscious that in just a few hours, people all over the planet would be turning on TVs and streaming from laptops and phones to see that night’s lineup of World Cup matches. This knowledge was partly what had primed me to view the film Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait; more important was the giddy expectation that I would be closer to one of the legends of the sport than any televised spectacle would allow.
Zinedine Zidane—or Zizou, as he is often called—ranks with Pelé, Diego Maradona, and Lionel Messi as one of the greatest players of all time. I’d last seen Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film about him—which the Guggenheim had the good idea of screening this summer—soon after it was made, almost 20 years ago, and I’d found it riveting, if slightly perplexing. This time, I saw clearly: It’s a deeply humane masterpiece.
Most soccer games (allow me a moment to state the obvious) come to us in a standardized format: The camera shows the field from an elevated perspective at the halfway line. Replays in slow motion show the action from different angles, including from overhead or (an unhappy recent innovation) the referee’s body camera. But much of the footage is steady and consistent, designed to maximize our understanding of the game’s patterns and the way one action leads to another. The camera, above all, follows the ball—because the ball is ultimately what tells the story.
Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait is different. Instead of following the ball, the cameras—17 of them, set up around the pitch—follow the man. They follow Zizou. And through this simple switch of focus, the experience of watching soccer is totally transformed. Suddenly, you have no connection with the story of the game, no way to grasp its ebb and flow—the distinctive, dynamic equilibrium of attack and defense that is at the center of every match. All you’re seeing is Zizou.
Gordon and Parreno understand that soccer is spectacle. Their split-screen video work presents a magnetic individual performing in a massive, televised spectacle—a contest between Zidane’s celebrated team of Real Madrid Galácticos and Villareal FC. The game took place at Madrid’s Bernabéu stadium in the spring of 2005, but the film doesn’t really follow the game. Instead, it invites us into a totally fresh relationship with Zizou. It systematically breaks down the aura of legend around Zidane until you, the viewer, begin to identify with him on a level that only great art makes possible.
[Read: When France plays soccer, you can’t look away]
Sometimes the camera focuses on his feet. Other times we see his shadowy, sweat-soaked face in close-up. Here he is walking, now jogging, now running backwards. Very occasionally, he explodes into a brief sprint. The other players (including his legendary teammates Luís Figo, Roberto Carlos, and David Beckham) count for nothing; they flit in and out of the picture like pilot fish in a shark documentary.
If this is spectacle, it’s weirdly illegible (the one thing spectacle is never supposed to be). Parreno and Gordon’s collage aesthetic is designed to undercut the coherent, accessible narratives served up by televised sport. The split screen allows them to show synchronized footage from different perspectives. Like a Cubist painter integrating fractured, shifting views of the same café table, the filmmakers want us to see this very familiar phenomenon with fresh eyes.
So they mix it up. They zoom in and out. Sometimes the footage is blurred, as if Zidane is briefly underwater; other times it’s crisply focused. To keep our attention, Parreno and Gordon splice in snippets of overhead shots or official TV footage. One camera pans up to show us the stadium lights. Another shows us the dark and empty spaces beneath the stands. And the viewer sees the crowd too—sometimes as a great, heaving body, other times as individual figures, each with their own rapt expression.
The film’s sounds are as striking as its visuals. The microphones pick up the rhythmic thwack of leather on leather as Zizou executes a series of short passes with teammates. The audio then switches to the crowd’s chants, the swell of excitement as a promising move is executed, the applause after a missed attempt on goal or a desperate tackle. There’s also a soundtrack by the indie-rock group Mogwai, a sonic emulsion of dreamy, amplified guitars and semi-industrial drones, but this music cuts in and out, so the mood remains fractured.
Parreno and Gordon’s strategy of defamiliarization is so successful that, as you watch, Zidane, instead of being Zizou the legend, the god, slowly takes on the aura of an ordinary man going about his business. And quietly, improbably, the film generates a feeling that its subject could have been anyone—or maybe no one. As Zidane himself said (the quote appears on-screen at the end of the film), “Magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all.”
[Read: Something incredible every single game]
The filmmakers’ approach is counterintuitive because, on the field, Zizou was not at all like you or me. He walked like someone who’d spent most of his life on a horse, but he ran like a lioness, low to the ground, with power and preternatural balance. He seemed to pivot on the spot about three-tenths of a second faster than anyone else. Whereas Messi appears to have the ball on a string, Zidane had it orbiting in the air around him. This was helpful because he played in midfield, where his job was to receive the ball under high pressure and then distribute it to the wings or move it upfield. He was always improvising novel ways of getting out of impossible situations, and many of these escapes (you can see them in any number of highlights reels) had a sleight-of-hand quality.
Because of all this, I’ve started to think of Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait as contemporary art’s equivalent to Albert Camus’ The Stranger. It’s an exercise in existentialism. This association comes with pungent irony because the central act of The Stranger is the killing of an anonymous Arab on a beach in Algiers; Zidane, whose parents came to France from Algeria in 1953, is a protagonist, not a victim, and very close to being the least anonymous man in France.
Even when the ball was nowhere near him, Zizou was charismatic. He grew up in a housing project in La Castellane, a tough, working-class part of Marseilles. He began balding early, so he played for much of his career with something resembling a monk’s tonsure. His furrowed brow could make him look permanently angry. But he has a terrific, high-wattage smile that transforms his shadowy, hunted-looking eyes into mirthful slits. It was that smile that made so many fans love him instantly and deeply. (He finally cracks it near the end of this film, in response to something said by a teammate, and it arrives like a gift.)
Zidane had a 17-year playing career, representing his country and two of Europe’s greatest clubs, Juventus and Real Madrid. He went on to coach Real Madrid to three Union of European Football Associations Champions League trophies. But if you first heard of him only after this film was made, it was probably because of a headbutt—the astonishing eruption of violence that earned him a red card during the 2006 World Cup Final against Italy. Zizou stuck to his plan to retire after that World Cup, so the headbutt was his final act as a player.
If the filmmakers present Zidane as an Everyman equivalent to James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom or Camus’ protagonist Meursault, their approach is fertile because the same questions that hover around Meursault also surround Zizou. Why did Meursault kill the Arab? Why did Zizou headbutt Marco Materazzi? In both cases, the act was an impulsive, existential response with no single cause. Explanations exist, but none feels sufficient—by itself or even combined.
[Read: The other celebration of America]
These speculations are less incidental than they may sound, because the wild thing about Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait is that, although it was filmed more than a year before the World Cup Final fiasco, it ends with Zidane running to join a sideline scuffle and, for his trouble, receiving a red card.
I first went to this film thinking that it would be about the heroism of playing a high-level sport. But its meanings are both deeper and simpler than that. It’s about the heroism and pathos of being authentically human. Watching it, I felt as I do in front of Francis Bacon’s best portraits. Like Parreno and Gordon, Bacon (who studied pictures of cricketers and soccer players) used strong doses of artifice to lead us toward a deeper reality. He distorted his subjects’ features with lurid, lavishly expressive brushstrokes to bypass illustration, which he described as “a long diatribe through the brain,” and hit the nervous system directly.
Embrace the spectacle, Bacon seemed to be saying: Show the figure on the cross, the pope on his throne, the sportsman in the arena. Because only in intense, rarefied states will our illusions finally drop away, like redundant scaffolding, freeing us to perceive life on a more visceral level.
Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait does something similar, just in a different medium. It’s both a portrait of a specific man at work and a portrait of each of us. We get up every morning and go to work. We run around a lot, mostly to little effect. Things happen, or they don’t. People applaud, or they don’t. Someone says something funny, and you laugh. Maybe you run to support a friend only to end up headbutting someone. Suddenly (it was all so beautiful and baffling), your time is up, and you leave the arena.
