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The two sisters were growing old now, but they went on gazing toward Palm Springs from this windblown prairie town as though to Mecca. Each was a widow, Mildred thrice over—her last husband had died after decades of work as a brakeman for the Burlington Northern—and now the sisters, if not on public assistance, were close to it, and, despite their uncertain compatibility, forced to live together in the same house, the house where they had grown up, with a brother whose success had once been the town’s biggest story. Now Cooper lived in Palm Springs, within walking distance of the former home of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and had among his conveyances a helicopter, with a portrait of him twirling a lariat painted on the side, which he used for visits to the chain of furniture stores he owned. Although, for a time, Cooper’s home town cited him when listing its glories or courting a polluter unwelcome elsewhere, he never came back. He didn’t remember his origins fondly. He remembered being pitied and ridiculed, ashamed of his shiftless parents and their binges.

Age and shared genetics made the sisters look enough alike that, though each wore shapeless wash dresses, they chose markedly different patterns to go with their tennis shoes, which were similarly coded with Nike swooshes. Constance wore her hair short; Mildred’s was long enough to reach her waist when it wasn’t piled atop her head. The sisters hadn’t seen Cooper in almost a quarter century, but they hoped to before they died—an event they longed for, especially when they were very tired or when too many things had gone wrong, not necessarily earthshaking things but things with the house, the plumbing, or the car, which was good enough for buying groceries but not for going anywhere, leaving town, for instance, or getting away from each other. This last was implausible, because they each feared being alone in the car if it failed, which it had done twice already; the alternator, whatever that was, had gone bad. Mildred’s obnoxious son, Wayne, could usually do the repairs, but he always made a stink about it. Once a mean adolescent, Wayne had not turned out well and sometimes threatened his mother. But the sisters argued whenever Constance referred to him as a “dope fiend,” circumventing Mildred’s preferred “dependency issues,” language that annoyed Constance. “He’s a bum,” she said.

Mildred, once a looker, had grown very heavy, heavy enough that Constance had to tie her shoes for her. Constance supposed that the weight was what finally killed her—that and diabetes. The irritable old town doctor had told Mildred to watch her sugar or lose a few toes, “period.” But she’d still gone through a death-defying carton of jelly rolls every few days. She’d had an enlarged heart since childhood, and it simply couldn’t work that hard. Mildred expired in her bedroom with a last breath that was like the air going out of a tire.

Constance heard her yelp as she fell and was at her side, neither of them quite suspecting the enormity of the moment, though Mildred played with the idea that this was the end for her and perhaps the thing that would bring their brother out of Palm Springs in his helicopter—a suggestion that Constance pooh-poohed on the ground that it was too far for a helicopter ride and he’d have to come by plane. But then Mildred actually died, and the minute Constance realized what had happened she was surprised by the feeling of envy that came over her. Then it passed, and she understood that she was alone now, something she had feared since she’d retired after decades at the county clerk’s office. She called the undertaker, and, with that, she felt release.

Mildred’s triple widowhood had made her unsentimental about mortality; she was always aware that she would soon be, as she put it, on the business end of death. Wayne, who had left home years ago, was a middle-aged man now, but she had kept some of his toys around, including his metal seesaw, which now rested under her unfeeling calves. On the floor, she looked uncharacteristically peaceful. It really wasn’t Mildred any longer. Constance needed someone, anyone, to come to the house soon, in case she was misunderstanding this.

In time, a flashy woman from the funeral home arrived, accompanied by two assistants in suits and ties. They placed Mildred on a kind of sled and, using ropes to ease it down the stairs, soon had her out the door. All three of them muttered, “Sorry for your loss,” as Constance dusted off her hands.

Once it was quiet, she locked the front door and fell apart at the loss of her sister and companion, and perhaps at a glimpse of her life alone, or even with Wayne, who, upon inheriting half the house, might move back in. She hadn’t seen him in a while but had always thought of him as an eyesore with his hand out.

Constance didn’t entirely accept the new conditions of her life until she’d negotiated the cremation. Perhaps she was in shock. The undertaker, Terri, a keen businesswoman and a former runner-up Miss Big Sky, convinced Constance that she cared very much about her needs but went on trying to sell her things—cremation jewelry, a deluxe urn, and a coffin that was only going to burn up. Constance was worn out by the legal challenges of getting Mildred released to the funeral home, but she was sufficiently on top of things to pick the cardboard option and indignantly declined to view the cremation itself, unmoved by the once beautiful undertaker saying, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” She paid no attention to the urn slide show, or to the undertaker’s suggestion that Mildred’s size might run things up a bit. Looking at the beauty-pageant photograph above the undertaker’s desk, Constance was fascinated by how much ground the woman had lost in only a few years. Constance declined embalming, so the refrigeration fee was unavoidable.

The viewing took place in the anteroom of the funeral home, and, desperate to avoid being swept away by her feelings, Constance focussed not on Mildred but on the cardboard coffin. A few of Mildred’s old friends straggled through, but Constance didn’t recognize them or else considered them disreputable. There was a minor commotion over Constance’s debit card, but she left with her hands over her ears, as though the roar of the furnace could be heard from the parking lot. If the car hadn’t started, she’d have headed home on foot.

Cooper said that he was one hundred per cent unable to come to a funeral, mentioning the opening of his flagship furniture outlet in Encino. He’d had a terrible argument with his daughter, Bonny, who was staying at his place while making an unflattering documentary film about him, and he was still, as he said, trying to build up enough strength to kick her and her camera out of the house, but the thing had a huge lens, and she could see him all the way from the Ball-Arnaz house down the street. Who knew who lived there now that Lucille and Desi were gone—probably nobodies with more money than brains—but, from their lawn, Bonny’s telephoto could see right into the wet bar unless the venetian blinds were firmly shut. Cooper made her leave the camera in the front hall when she came in at night, but her very presence was delaying his healing—from what went unstated. Anytime Cooper was tempted to lay down the law, a reminder of what Bonny had on him, thanks to her derelict mother, brought him to his senses. He was even compliant during interviews for the documentary if she stuck to his chosen topic: the handful of forgotten movies that had launched the cowboy persona that allowed him to open so many furniture stores. Cooper still thought of himself as an old-time cinema cowpoke, but that didn’t mean it was fair of Bonny to intercut black-and-white footage of gunfights, cattle drives, and fleeing Indians with shots of brightly colored furniture. With so much bitterness on her part, fairness didn’t really enter into it, and now she was starting to get interested in his lowly origins, unless, she said, those stories were just “more of his Horatio Alger bullshit.”

The day that Cooper learned of the death of his sister Mildred, Bonny was shooting another film, at an industrial turkey farm outside Lancaster, and he had the house to himself. It was a fraught time to absorb the death of a sibling, and it was all he could do to keep memories of his gruesome home town out of his head. Mildred had protected him in boyhood; her reputation had been such that people feared crossing her. Living under her unwavering shelter had helped to make him who he was. Still, he’d stayed away for decades, and nothing his bossy sister Constance could say or do would change his mind about going there now. It was unfortunate that he felt this way, as his home town was, if nothing else, a place that turned a blind eye to his practice of throwing ersatz going-out-of-business sales that caught the attention of the Better Business Bureau. Constance was liable to press him to do the right thing and show up, and Bonny would love to get some grief on film, but, frankly, no dice.

Cooper was attached to his Cahuilla housekeeper, Gina, whom he had snatched up, decades ago, during a renovation of El Mirador; he’d had to compete for her services with the curators of the Elvis Honeymoon Hideaway. Gina was a small, self-possessed woman in her early sixties who wore colorful, freshly pressed clothes from the thrift store and who, over the years, had transformed herself into Cooper’s hybrid housekeeper-caregiver. Cooper liked to tell people that Gina’s family had got to Palm Springs ten thousand years before Frank Sinatra, adding, “She’s no Mexican.” Gina felt that Cooper was slowly returning to childhood, and she enjoyed looking after him but was indifferent to housekeeping. The place was a mess, and Cooper complained until Gina accused him of being persnickety. She made popcorn and watched “The Young and the Restless,” rising reluctantly now and then to unload the dishwasher or tweak the thermostat. Cooper liked Gina’s company and the peace of their life together. He had learned to buy groceries and watch sitcoms. The hours spent in his bathrobe had grown longer. Gina knew that he’d lost a sister but was more focussed on getting Bonny out of their lives. Bonny wanted Cooper to act his age, and Gina preferred him as a baby.

The remains were ready, and Constance drove over to the funeral home to get them. She was surprised by how heavy they were and was glad she’d declined the urn. Once she had the box in the front seat of the car, she was troubled by it. Those demanding ashes were Mildred saying, “I was always the pretty one.” She had been very pretty, and that may have been the root of her problems: pregnant in high school, lost the baby, and hit the bars. She drifted to Henderson, Nevada, for several years, and God only knows what she got up to there. That was a lie: Constance knew what she got up to. Mildred was quieter on her return, adopted awful Wayne, and spent the rest of her working life at J. C. Penney, and her Sundays in church, where her air of repentance was the talk of a ministry divided between those who admired her courage and those who thought that showing her face was shameless.

Drivers blew their horns at Constance until she got back in her lane. Times had changed in town; no hesitation on the streets went unremarked by horn-blowing. Once home, she was reluctant to haul the box into the house, on the ground that Mildred didn’t live there anymore. But she couldn’t leave it in the car, so Mildred was back home after all, and on the mantel.

Two doors down, in a handsome Victorian cottage, lived the long-retired Charlie Parks, who had gone to school with the sisters. Constance had dated him briefly when she was the captain of the cheerleaders, and Charlie had tried to feel her up in his mother’s car parked out by the relay towers. She’d told him to keep his mitts to himself, which had ended the relationship if not the friendship. Not long afterward, she’d married handsome Phil Akers, who played the saxophone in a rockabilly band with Cooper (who had no musical talent whatsoever but was awarded a consolation tambourine). Phil played at school dances, imitating a forties style: pompadour, Mr. B collar, one-button-roll powder-blue jacket, and pegged pants. The girls simply craved him when he leaned back from the waist for his honking solos. It was the high point of his life, and forty years in the railroad shops never quite erased it. He hung on to his cynical musician’s smile all his life. He left childless Constance with a sufficiency and memories of mostly placid times, with several trips to Phoenix in their R.V. and one to Orange County, where they paid their respects to Cooper’s furniture store without actually seeing him, since he was tied up. They took pictures of each other in front of the store, which was having a “blowout” on Sealy Posturepedic mattresses. “Treat yourself to better ZZZZZ’s! ”

Charlie Parks came by to offer his condolences, which was one of the things, besides duck hunting, that he did best in his retirement years. He had a pile of decoys under a tarp right in his yard, and a long-barrelled twelve-gauge shotgun in the front hall with a sign on it that said “Not for Sale.” When Charlie was commiserating, his chin hid his Adam’s apple and his fists plunged so far into the pockets of his cardigan that the sweater was permanently disfigured.

“I don’t suppose it was really unexpected.”

“You’d be surprised,” Constance said. She had just returned from taking a carton of unlaced shoes to the Goodwill. “I didn’t expect it.”

She brought Charlie a cup of coffee. He tested it with his finger.

“I thought Cooper might show up.”

“No. He has too much to do out there. Charlie, he’s a cowboy in the movies,” she added sternly. “With numerous business interests.”

“They don’t make cowboy movies anymore. And the one that won an Oscar—Cooper was just in the posse, but I don’t suppose you ever heard the last of it.”

“We were quite proud of him, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“I never saw him on a horse the whole time we were growing up, and, anyway, there’s nothing about that that prevents him from paying his respects to Mildred.”

“Well, something happened out there, something big, because he said he’s still . . . healing.”

“Yeah, right. ”

Constance let it go. Charlie had been such a good friend to her and Mildred, taking them to various activities once their husbands were gone: Zumba for seniors, genealogical research at the library, open mike at the Hot Tomato, where Mildred performed Kay Starr’s “Wheel of Fortune” with unforgettable antics and a sardonic expression. Constance was mortified, Charlie enchanted.

Bonny had the digital video camera she’d rented from Red Letter in Burbank on a tripod. She stood slightly to the side of it while she interviewed her father, who was wearing a white yoked shirt with pearl-snapped closures, black trousers with a button fly and peaked flaps over the back pockets, and a horsehair belt with a silver Santa Fe buckle under dart-shaped belt loops. A baby-blue silk neckerchief wound around his neck. His daughter, in a T-shirt and bib-front overalls, thought he looked like a damn fool. He dressed like this at his furniture outlets. It was embarrassing. The room was adorned with Western memorabilia and art, bronzes of horses and Indian braves in the Remington manner, old vaquero saddles on wooden stands, black-and-white photographs of William S. Hart and Yakima Canutt. Cooper was sitting on a Molesworth sofa with gnarled tree trunks for legs, stylized cowboys and young-lady dudes in huge hats embossed on the leather cushions. Gina brought him a Scotch-and-soda while casting a suspicious glance at Bonny.

“This is a significant day for you, Cooper Parrott. Your eldest sister, Mildred, has passed away,” Bonny said.

“You look like an out-of-work housepainter.”

“I’m not in the film, Dad. You’re in the film. You agreed to do this, Dad.”

“Unfortunately.”

“And you’re too upset to travel to your home town for the services?”

“That is correct.”

“Screw it, my shift is almost over, so let’s say it looks like a ram.”

Cartoon by Nathan Cooper

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“Or so you claim.”

Cooper didn’t reply to this.

“Did you have strong and affectionate feelings for Mildred?”

“She was like a mother to me,” he remarked with bland assurance.

“But you had a mother?”

“Sure did. She was no use. Mildred did the heavy lifting.”

Cooper stood.

“C’mon, Dad, I want this on film. Prize-winning documentaries are characterized by unflinching intimacy.” She stopped the camera, and her arms hung at her sides.

Cooper left the room. He was abruptly homesick. He pictured his town as something glowing from the American past, a Norman Rockwell kind of place, but the picture faded. Little remained but Constance and a dump of a house. Even so, Palm Springs and Bonny, that product of his loins, seemed like a forty-year wrong turn. He felt crushed. It was time to turn back, to heal, and to watch reruns. He considered what bad luck it had been to be named Cooper in the age of Gary Cooper. He’d accepted that he lived in John Wayne’s shadow, and once dreamed of a ruddy John Wayne face calling him a Communist and threatening to beat him to within an inch of his life.

At breakfast the next morning, Bonny dangled a piece of toast in his face and said she would be leaving that afternoon to film Mildred’s memorial. She didn’t know if there was one planned, but she meant to throw something together, a pinch of Americana with cars on blocks and locals on bad diets.

“Knock yourself out,” Cooper said. This was the love they had. What a mess.

“You really should be there.”

“I bet you’ve got a million more where that came from.”

“Aunt Connie’s all the family you have left. Except for me, mwahahaha.”

“Is this a purity test?”

“A humanity test, Dad. You need to show your home town that there’s more to you than a tinsel cowboy. A man with a heart, sort of, not just a hat.”

Cooper’s annoyance recalled his brief encounter with Bonny’s mother, a stunt double at a Nevada shoot and part-time dominatrix, and what became a very expensive quickie as he undertook the rearing of Bonny by extraordinary remote-control means: schools, nannies, camps, semesters at sea, wilderness studies for troubled teens, junior college, bail money, and abortions. Though he’d done what he could to help her career, invested in her films, she’d never felt that her efforts to reach out to her father quite landed. Bonny intended this documentary to flush her father out of hiding and—what? Revive his movie career? Make him admit that she existed?

Bonny’s documentaries were noted for their predatory skill. She was celebrated for her pitiless charm when interviewing luxury-car dealers, so well concealed behind the baby-doll outfits and the daffy bimbo act that she used to get her victims—a stream of fat cats and deep-pocketed suckers—talking. Aston Martin’s lawyers had described that film as “baseless savagery,” and she’d added the phrase to her business cards, along with “Jaguar, I’m comin’ for ya.”

Cooper considered the idea of attending Mildred’s memorial. It filled him with terror. Was there even going to be one? What if he went? What if he didn’t go? Should he man up? His anxiety was rising, and it overcame him. John Wayne would probably have gone, though it was not easy to picture the big doofus in such a shitty town. Cooper made himself a drink in the trophy room and left Bonny a message: “I’ll be there.”

She didn’t believe him, and went on ahead to the tired old town by herself. A lifelong Southern Californian, Bonny had rarely experienced such a gloomy hole. She had dressed to blend in, with a loud flannel shirt and mannish pants, as she strolled around trying to get a feel for a place that to someone from the Golden West looked like a wax museum. She didn’t see how to do this without Cooper—street interviews, maybe, or Constance’s lamentations at his absence. All of this changed when Cooper’s travel agent called to notify her of his arrangements and a room prepaid under the name William S. Hart. Bonny had better get a move on! She smelled blood.

Cooper arrived two days later, which was barely enough time for her to set the stage. She’d worked herself to exhaustion preparing for his arrival, getting minimal help from a chamber of commerce reluctant to deal with out-of-towners. Constance was alarmed at the idea that Cooper’s long-awaited visit would be filmed. She found Bonny peculiar and couldn’t understand why she dressed like a lumberjack.

Bonny met Cooper at the airport. He seemed dazed, pressing his closed eyes with thumb and forefinger.

“You all right?”

“Oh, hell no.”

“We’ll pick up Constance and . . . Mildred.” He raised his eyebrows as if to ask if she thought this was funny.

The moment that Bonny turned onto the frontage road, he opened his mouth and gripped the seat with clammy hands. The water tower emblazoned with the name of the town emerged from the skyline. Cooper looked away.

Bonny said, “Seems like a nice little place to me. Tree-shaded streets, well-kept houses, angry fat people.”

“What makes you think I’d enjoy this? I was a friendless loser here, O.K.? From a loser family, you follow?” She wanted to say that she would put her losers up against his any day, including her druggy waif of a mother.

Cooper averted his eyes as they passed the high school, the title company where, at age twelve, he’d mopped floors, Mildred’s Methodist church, and the windswept park. They stopped at the house, compact and armored with asbestos shingles. While Bonny filmed from the car, Cooper ascended the porch steps. Before he could knock, Constance opened the door. She was bearing Mildred’s ashes, gift-wrapped in red, white, and blue. She stared at Cooper, then said, “Hello, Cooper.”

“Hello, Con.”

“I wish you’d come sooner. Did you come in the helicopter?”

“Nah, commercial.”

“But here you are.”

“Yep.”

“Can you come in?” Constance asked, her eyes observing Bonny in the car.

“For a sec, maybe. Bonny’s got me on a short rope. Film deal.”

They sat in the living room. Cooper concealed his dismay by grinning in approval at all he saw. A bowl held ceramic fruit. He paused at a picture of their parents, dressed for the photographer. “Must’ve borrowed the clothes,” he said. The witticism fell on silence. “Ain’t it funny how time slips away?” Connie nodded and smiled at her brother’s awkwardness. “Love what you’ve done with the house,” he added. “Cozy. More furniture than when we were kids.”

“I like it well enough.”

“How long’s Phil been gone?”

“Eleven years.”

“I played tambourine in his band. Remember?”

“You were great.”

“Was I?”

“No. But Phil thought you needed something to do.”

“I found something to do.”

They said nothing until the pause became uncomfortable.

“We’re the family now, Coop. Does that mean anything to you?”

“I gotta think about it. We’ve gone separate ways. That’s a fact. That’s just a damn fact.”

“Certainly, you have. I haven’t gone anywhere except to the county building.”

Constance got up to pull dead leaves from a potted African violet. She watched Cooper staring toward the window.

“You’ll have to tell me about Bonny. She’s yours, right? She gives you such fishy looks.”

“Ha ha, you’re sharp, Con. Which reminds me. She’s waiting.”

“I understand. I hope you’ll stop back. Maybe you can see Wayne. He’s quite unusual.”

“I heard,” Cooper said, as Constance pressed the box of ashes into his arms. “Heard about him. Wow, these weigh like lead.”

“They’ll remind you of all we lived through.” Cooper shrugged this off.

Without looking back, he walked to the car. Bonny had her cell phone atop the steering wheel and was reviewing footage so far. “I’ll put this box in the back. Let’s not forget it.” He wondered if he had seen the last of Constance.

“I hate to rush,” Bonny said, “but we’re late for the parade.”

Cooper locked eyes with her. “What parade? Is it for me?”

“Yeah. Sure is.”

“A big one?”

“Let’s find out.”

Constance gave a small ironic wave from the porch, and Cooper felt a pang, remembering the humorous detachment with which she had kept trouble at bay when they were kids. When he waved at her, she stepped into the house.

“Nice old lady,” Bonny said.

Cooper sat in the back seat of a vintage Chevrolet convertible with fins, flames painted on its hood. A portable boom box atop the trunk played Buck Owens’s “Act Naturally” in a recurring loop. Since he hadn’t anticipated a public appearance, he was wearing a zip-up leisure suit and a Lakers baseball cap, rather than his usual Stetson. He felt naked. The audience for the parade, meandering along the sidewalks on their way to stores, appointments, and school, were strangers, and seemed baffled by the “Cooper Parrott” banner adorning the car.

“They were all born after you left, Dad.”

“Maybe this is the first time they’ve ever seen a cowboy!”

“No need to shout, Dad.”

The driver said, “There’s gotta be someone somewhere,” and struck out into the side streets, where seemingly uninhabited houses flashed TVs behind drawn curtains. At a four-way stop, an elderly man in dashboard overalls and carpet slippers wheeled off his porch and ran to the car. He shouted out his name to Cooper, and Cooper threw back his head in delight and said, “Ah!”

“Of course we know where you end and I begin.”

Cartoon by Victoria Roberts

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“Who’s this bird?” he asked Bonny out of the side of his mouth.

The man grasped Cooper’s shoulders and said, “You have no damn idea who I am, do you?”

“Nope, but you’re gonna tell me.”

“Our family took you in when the whole lot of yiz didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out.”

“Take your hands off me, Jerry, you dadgum jackass!”

Jerry tottered back to his house as Cooper straightened his clothes.

“Any more like that around here?” Cooper asked the driver.

Jerry’s eyes burned in the shadow of the porch. Cooper’s wave went unreturned.

“Lots.”

“You need to spray ’em.”

“Was your family ever homeless?” Bonny asked.

“Not always.” Bonny got this last in a closeup. Something about the way he said it told her that it would be very strong during editing. Then he said it again: “Not always.” That would have been a better take, but she’d missed it. Shit.

The driver and owner of the car, after describing its restoration in excruciating detail, offered to return Cooper to his childhood home.

“No! ” Cooper shouted, then turned to Bonny and said, “Get me outta here.”

The driver looked around at him, indignant and surprised. “No problem, pal. The young lady pays me by the hour.”

He drove the two to Bonny’s rented car, and stayed behind the wheel, staring straight ahead, as they got out. “Will this be an annual event?” he asked. Cooper told him to go to hell. Once in the rental car, he pointed through the windshield toward the airport and said to Bonny, “Thataway.”

On the flight, Bonny and her father sat in anguished silence. Though Cooper wanted to get back to Palm Springs, he struggled to picture his life there. It seemed like living in an aquarium or maybe a nice hotel. He had a fleeting hope that the plane would stay up in the air. Bonny’s heart ached as she flipped through the airline magazine. Cooper stared out the window until they crossed the Rockies, then slumped in his seat.

Back at Cooper’s house, they gestured toward a hug but then just leaned and bumped shoulders; it was the best they could do. They’d left the ashes in the rental car, but a kindly manager at Hertz shipped Mildred to Bonny once law enforcement had confirmed that she was not a bomb. Bonny left the box on the porch of Cooper’s house.

When asked by the backers of her documentary, “How’s the Cooper thing going?,” Bonny explained that she had punted. After the trip to his home town, she’d either been discouraged or lost interest. She felt that she knew her father insufficiently to give the film prize-winning depth. She’d lost the edge that had given such a sting to the Aston Martin piece, or to the brutes killing turkeys out in Lancaster.

Wayne turned up on the doorstep eight days after Mildred’s death. He said, “Mom was lucky to live that long.” Constance was startled by the cheer with which he delivered the remark. She asked him where he’d been. Since he felt that that was something she ought to know already, he declined to answer. Wayne was shorter than both his mother and his aunt, and stocky. He wore safety boots, loud on the wood floor, blue pants, and a shirt with his name over the pocket. He allowed that he would just go ahead and move in.

“Your old room?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Wayne departed to get his stuff from wherever he’d left it. Constance pulled the curtain back to see him drive off, then meandered through the house wondering which room Wayne would claim. She admitted to herself that, though she’d seen him grow up, she didn’t really know anything about him. Mildred had created a wall around Wayne to try to prevent Constance and her late husband from criticizing his erratic upbringing. All she knew was that Wayne had dreamed of being a surfer and often played “Wipe Out,” by the Surfaris, at top volume—especially the blood-curdling laughter. As Wayne had grown more difficult, a stretch of teen-age years in which the only respite was a brief residence at the Pine Hills youth reformatory, Phil and Constance had offered to move out of the house, but Mildred had rented a place a block and a half from Penney’s, a walk to work that she made daily for much of the rest of her life, from the time when she turned heads to when even the short walk was too difficult and she moved back in with her sister. Wayne was on his own by then.

Wayne chose Constance’s room, which admittedly had the best view—the back yard and not the street. She would move into Mildred’s, which looked toward the neighbor’s house, whose occupants Mildred had watched religiously, chronicling births, deaths, college departures, and hanky-panky. “Take all the time you need,” Wayne said. “I’m on the road.”

She packed up Mildred’s things squeamishly, fearing that they’d disclose something she would rather not know. There were packs of letters bound with string, some yellowing with age. Constance thought, I’m not going there, and burned them in the fireplace.

She cooked for Wayne. Sometimes he ate what she’d prepared; sometimes he disparaged it. Constance failed to determine a pattern. He smoked after dinner, staring into the middle distance, while Constance, pretending to cross her arms to keep her hand inconspicuously close to her chest, fanned the smoke away. She worked at being unobtrusive, only to have Wayne accuse her of tiptoeing around in a creepy manner. In the end, he resorted to fast food, which he ate in his truck, leaving the remains on the front seat—pizza boxes, waxed paper from turkey wraps, empty Diet Coke bottles. He was sullen and smelly, and frequently reminded Constance that he co-owned the house now.

Soon enough, she was fed up. They would sell the house, she announced. “Suits me,” Wayne said. “I could use the money.” Advertised as a starter home, it sold in the winter to a gym teacher in town, a pretty girl with a baby. Constance had expected to be crushed to lose her childhood home. Instead, she was elated. After several arduous trips to a storage container, she retreated to the Hillcrest Hotel, an old pile on Main Street, to think. Wayne went to California with no plan to return. “We’ll see how it goes,” he said. Constance lost the nerve to ask him to write if he got work. She was tired of losing her nerve. That was new.

Gina went to the door. Cooper, still in his bathrobe, watched warily from the corridor. “Who is it?” he asked, raising his reading glasses.

“I can’t tell. The Uber guy is still unloading her luggage. It looks like she’s here to stay.”

“Lock the door!”

“Let’s find out who it is first!”

“I know who it is. Do as I say!”

Gina glanced at him indignantly, then opened the door.

“Hello, Con,” Cooper said with an exaggerated baffled look. “Where’re you headed?” He tightened his bathrobe and twirled his reading glasses.

“Headed? I have arrived! Is it a problem?” ♦

I love to watch an oyster get shucked. The heft of a calciferous shell in a steady hand, the sweep and pop of the knife, the liquor-slick shine of the reveal. The setting hardly matters: in a wood-walled New England fish shack, at a dusky uptown boîte, before a table set up outside a Bronx fishmonger—an oyster is an oyster is an oyster. Still, there’s something especially pleasing about taking in that bit of invertebrate theatre in a room whose easy, briny sleekness matches the bivalve’s own.

Penny, a stylish new seafood bar in the East Village, has a polished, understated swagger that somehow seems to make the oysters taste even better—the same sort of alchemy that made now-closed, well-missed places like the John Dory Oyster Bar and Pearl Oyster Bar such perfect places to slip in after work, or for a lingering lunch, to slurp down a dozen and feel a little bit more alive. It is owned by the restaurateur Chase Sinzer and the chef Joshua Pinsky, and is situated just upstairs from Claud, its sister restaurant, a slinky little bistro that’s been a hit since its opening, in 2022. Where Claud is warm and sexy—soft light, buttery wood, tomato-burgundy accents—Penny is slick and sharp, all white and steel and marble. Even the illuminated exit signs suspended near the front door, and the glassy wall of frosted windows in the back, are a frigid blue, not safety orange. (Is that even legal? The effect is gorgeous, either way.) Despite the chilly aesthetic, the mood is welcoming and casual; there are no tables, just a long row of thirty or so seats set before the room’s infinite-seeming raw bar, behind which an army of shuckers and slicers shuck and slice, reaching up into shapely wall-mounted troughs for a needed mollusk or crustacean. On one of my visits, a lobster, perhaps sensing the imminence of its final hour, attempted an escape, waving its claws forcefully enough to hurl itself off the ledge to the countertop below, only to be picked up by a cook, gently scolded, and returned to its compatriots in the bed of ice above.

The best way to take in the bounty is by way of the ninety-eight-dollar Ice Box Plus, Penny’s version of a seafood platter. It’s an exquisitely arranged, gloriously over-the-top tray that on my visits bore brawny oysters, plump smoked mussels, tiny periwinkles (a type of snail), a huge scoop of lightly dressed Jonah crab, a slippery-sweet scallop crudo, and a tangle of vividly pink cocktail shrimp, tails entwined. Most thrilling, among the jewels, are two shot-glass-size portions of vichyssoise (a chilled potato-leek soup), dolloped upon arrival with voluptuous portions of caviar, green-gold and sublime, which slide almost seductively beneath the opaque surface of the soup. It’s not cheap eats, by any stretch, but it’s the sort of thing that makes money feel well-spent.

Two modestly hungry people could very happily make a meal out of the Ice Box Plus. (A smaller, less expensive option, the Ice Box, leaves out some of the more extravagant elements.) Order a bottle of skin-contact Spanish white to go alongside, or maybe splurge on a deep cut from the wine list’s striking collection of white Burgundies. You could throw in a dish of flamingo-pink tuna carpaccio, drizzled with olive oil and a bay-leaf-infused vinegar and enlivened with slivers of cipollini onion and smashed green olives, or the razor clams, which are chopped up raw and tossed with a zippy oregano-flecked, celery-forward giardiniera. (Celery, to my great delight, appears to be a secret theme on Penny’s menu, not only threatening to upstage the razor clams but zhuzhing up the mignonette that comes alongside the oysters with a whispery, watery, bittersweet note. And the only soda on offer is Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray.) Round things out with a petite, fresh-baked loaf of squishy brioche with butter, which is perfect for sopping up any lingering dregs of sauce or oil. (The bread shows up on the brief dessert menu, as well, sliced thick and sandwiching a scoop of vanilla ice cream plus a smear of jam.)

At Claud, Pinsky has displayed an aptitude for applying heat to marine creatures. His take on Spanish gambas al ajillo—in which a pile of sweet red shrimp are dropped raw into a serving dish that’s slicked with sizzling, garlicky olive oil, which cooks them just barely—is straight-up fantastic. At Penny, the all-seafood conceit gives him even more room to explore. Oysters are confited in chicken fat until sumptuously rich, and served with spice-dusted Club crackers and a blob of crème fraîche. Squid stuffed with tuna and Swiss chard is charred to a tender, near-caramel sweetness. Its smoky, paprika-laden harissa sauce—a shocking red against the cool-toned room—pools on the plate with all the elemental intensity of blood. Dover sole arrives in a thick hunk, with ribs intact, topped with wobbly bits of bone marrow and drizzled in sauce Bordelaise–a normally fussy fish cleverly recast as a diminutive carnivorous feast. My apologies to that lobster who was seeking liberation. He (or perhaps it was his brother) was delicious, poached in court bouillon, dressed in a brown-butter vinaigrette, and served in pieces, arranged around an aromatic bundle of fresh sage and rosemary. It’s easy eating, in all senses of the phrase.

Penny takes reservations, but it holds a considerable portion of the room for walk-ins, which gives the well-orchestrated operation a glittering edge of spontaneity. (When I did make a reservation, and had to cancel one day before dining, the restaurant charged me a hefty cancellation fee—possibly the first time that’s happened in my significant Resy-using experience.) It might be tempting to try to have appetizers at Penny and finish the evening downstairs at Claud, but it would be something of a miracle to get into both in the same evening—and, more to the point, why would you want to leave? Just as Claud has its showstopper dessert—a gargantuan slice of night-black chocolate cake—so, too, does Penny. It’s a tidy serving of chocolate mousse, splashed with grassy olive oil and crowned with hazelnuts. Made from a carefully calibrated mix of dark and milk chocolates, it’s dense and smooth and deep and sweet, a plate of pure, relaxed luxury. ♦

George Miller’s film career began with barely averted violence. In 1971, when he was a twenty-six-year-old medical student in Sydney, Australia, he took a job at a construction site while he waited to start an internship at a hospital. One day, he was standing next to another worker when a brick fell from fourteen floors above them and hit the ground between them with a crack. “This was in the days before helmets,” Miller told me recently. “I got an existential jolt.” He and his younger brother Chris had won a student film competition at the University of New South Wales. The first prize was a filmmaking workshop in Melbourne, but George had never thought to attend it; filmmaking didn’t seem like a serious career option. It was the falling brick that changed his mind. “I thought, Damn it, I shouldn’t be on this site,” he said. The next day, he got on his motorcycle and rode the nine hundred kilometres to Melbourne.

“Violence in the Cinema, Part 1,” the short film that Miller made at the workshop, neatly summarizes the themes that have preoccupied Miller ever since. It opens with a clinical psychologist sitting in an armchair, speaking to the camera. He bemoans the “heavy saturation of violence” in modern movies, gets shot in the face by an intruder, and then commits a series of sadistic acts himself. When the short premièred at the Sydney Film Festival, in 1972, it was as shocking for its self-assurance as for its content. Miller went back to finish his internship at the hospital afterward, and, though he quit medicine eventually, his films have always been marked by both gleeful mayhem and an uncommon sensitivity to its consequences. They’re action films, as he puts it, rooted in “the bewilderment I felt at confronting the aftermath of violence.”

“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Miller’s newest film and the follow-up to his Oscar-winning “Mad Max: Fury Road,” is all about that aftermath. Its heroine is kidnapped at the age of ten, held captive at a citadel ruled by a warlord called the Immortan Joe, and spends the next sixteen years trying to fight her way back to her family. It’s a tale of damaged souls and Darwinian selection, told with monster trucks, battle zeppelins, and hot rods mounted with turbo-aspirated V-8 engines. It’s about how children learn to navigate the world, Miller has said, and how character is revealed in extreme situations. But, like most of his films, it’s also about the thrill of people and objects hurtling through space.

When Miller made the first of his five “Mad Max” films, in 1979, action scenes were the province of hacks and assistant directors. “They were a kind of slumming,” he told me. “The director would deal with the main unit, and the non-talky bits were left to the second unit.” Miller saw something more essential in them. He longed for the purity of early silent films, which could tell a story with movement alone. “How can you take a series of events, none of which are in themselves really spectacular, and create a sequence of shots like a passage of music?” he wondered. “How can you make it greater than its parts?”

Miller is now seventy-nine. He has made everything from comedy (“The Witches of Eastwick”) and drama (“Lorenzo’s Oil”) to children’s films (“Babe”) and animated features (“Happy Feet”). Yet he always returns to action films. The “Mad Max” series maps both his personal history and the blazing evolution of film technology over his lifetime. When “Fury Road” was released, nine years ago, edited by Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife and close collaborator, it felt like the culmination of everything Miller had wanted to achieve as a young filmmaker: a gritty, fully imagined world conveyed with speed, fluidity, and visceral excitement. It went on to win six Academy Awards, including one for Best Film Editing, and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director.

“Furiosa” is a very different film—or, rather, the same film turned inside out. If “Fury Road” was all action, with the backstory delivered in staccato bursts, “Furiosa” is all backstory, punctuated with moments of frenzied action. One film is seamless, the other episodic; one takes place over the course of three days, the other over the course of fifteen years. A sequel should be both fresh and “uniquely familiar,” Miller has said, and “Furiosa” is true to that dictum. As the film’s arch-villain, Dementus, says at the end, “We seek any sensation to wash away the cranky black sorrow. . . . The question is: Do you have it in you to make it epic?”

A few months after “Fury Road” was released, Miller and I began a series of long, rich conversations about his career and craft. The script for “Furiosa” was already done—Miller had written it with his longtime collaborator Nick Lathouris before filming “Fury Road”—but it would be another eight years before he completed the movie. When we finally picked up our discussion again two weeks ago, over Zoom, Miller was in Los Angeles, promoting the new film. He looked fresh and dapper in a black jacket and shirt, and said that he was feeling “a surprising degree of equanimity,” given the pre-release scramble. The exchange that follows is drawn from all our conversations and has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

You were born in the small town of Chinchilla, in Queensland, Australia, a day or two’s drive from where “Furiosa” and most of the other “Mad Max” films were shot. How much are those films based on your own experience of that landscape as a boy?

I grew up in a remote rural community with my twin brother and younger brothers. It was a childhood of play. There were schools, there were schoolbooks, and there was the outside world. I’m not saying we were terribly adventurous; we were always quite cautious. But our parents didn’t know where we were until the sun went down. And I was lucky enough that there were Indigenous kids in the town, and we would go out in the bush with them. Their culture is said to be the longest extant one in human history—sixty-five thousand years old. It was very, very connected to the land, and some of those stories are still told. They explain everything in the world—its creation, where to find water, where to find food, and the stars and constellations.

There was one movie house, and every Saturday afternoon there was a matinée. It was a kind of secular cathedral. Every show would have at least one cartoon, one newsreel, and a serial—“Batman” or “[The Adventures of] Sir Lancelot”—and they would always end on a cliffhanger. Those had a huge influence. They were the fuel for my brothers and me playing in the bush. If the serial was “Sir Lancelot,” we would make swords and paint up rubbish-tin lids for shields. We put on little shows, in a garage like a shed. I remember, if you closed all the doors and kicked up the dust, there were little shafts of light coming through the cracks. So already in childhood there was an unwitting apprenticeship for what I’m doing now. One of the guiding, organizing ideas of these films is that everything has to be made from found objects, repurposed. And we were constantly doing things with our hands.

When I got to university, I made it my job to watch everything I could, to understand how movies are put together. What is this new language that is less than a hundred years old? So I went back to the silent cinema. I had read “The Parade’s Gone By” [a seminal history of silent film, published by the British film historian and filmmaker Kevin Brownlow, in 1968]. Its basic thesis was that most of the work on the language of film was done pre-sound. All the shots in this new language—the closeup, the wide shot, the moving camera, cutting from one thing to the next—were really defined in the silent cinema, and particularly in action movies. It’s an acquired language, and it’s evolving. When sound came along, it disrupted the normal syntax of cinema. The cameras were locked down, and things became very much like theatre, like a proscenium. But all the great filmmakers—John Ford, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton—they cut their teeth on the silent two-reelers and features. So I found myself going back to those and really trying to understand them.

What films from the sound era influenced you the most?

Obviously Hitchcock, “Bullitt,” the great action sequence in “The French Connection.” I was tremendously impressed by Steven Spielberg’s early film “Duel.” I thought, Boy, he understands the syntax so well and how to construct it. And the Polanski movies were brilliantly crafted, even though he didn’t do any action films. He once said that there is only one perfect place for a camera at any given moment. I was always struck by that, and I’ve gone on to prove that for myself in animation. You can take exactly the same ingredients and by shifting the camera and adjusting the pattern of shots you can turn the scene around. You can make it something else.

The chariot scene in “Ben-Hur,” in the William Wyler version, was huge for me. It was so beautifully constructed—the contours of it and the camera positions and the cutting. It was an extended sequence, and it was very clear what everyone was doing at any given moment. They didn’t just put out a lot of cameras and decide what to do with the footage in post. And what was being played out was the central rivalry between two best friends. When we were making “Fury Road,” I kept saying that the action sequences are the equivalent of dialogue scenes in other movies. When Max and Furiosa meet, no words are exchanged—I think he says, “Water,” and grunts. It was like a dialogue scene, except where you would usually have words you had fighting. But it had to be constructed in a way where you learn something in each moment. That’s certainly what came through in “Ben-Hur.”

In “Furiosa,” Dementus rides a chariot drawn by three motorcycles.

That was based on a black-and-white newsreel from the early thirties, when the local police used to put on these big pageants on the Sydney cricket ground. There was some footage in the middle of it of a chariot race based on the silent version of “Ben-Hur.” So, in a way, “Ben-Hur” influenced the police, and the police influenced Dementus.

The director Robert Bresson, in his book “Notes on the Cinematograph,” writes that a movie “is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.” Film editing is such a mysterious art. How did you learn it?

The best school that I went to was cutting the first “Mad Max.” It was shot for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It was very ambitious. Everything went wrong. I was completely bewildered by the project. For a year, I was confronted with all the mistakes I made: “Why did I do that? Why didn’t I do that? Obviously, I’m not cut out for this.” But, somehow, it worked. It was successful in Australia, then it became a huge hit in Japan, and then Spain and Germany—all around the world except the U.S. They did release it there, but it was a smaller distribution, and they dubbed all the voices with American accents. Even Mel Gibson was dubbed, though he was an American speaking with an Australian accent. It all came out in a badly dubbed Southern drawl.

But the movie was a surprisingly big hit. I felt a little fraudulent, but I was smart enough not to get caught up in the vanity of the artist. I realized, Wait a minute, something else is happening here. In Japan, they said Mad Max is a lone rogue samurai. A ronin. They said, “You’ve watched a lot of Kurosawa movies, obviously.” And I said, “Who’s Kurosawa?”—I probably shouldn’t say that. And immediately I watched everything that he did, and of course they ended up in the second “Mad Max.” In Scandinavia they said, “He’s like a lone Viking!” And the French said that “Mad Max” is like a Western on wheels. That nailed it for me.

By the time I made “The Road Warrior” [in 1982], I was a little more skilled. I knew a bit more about acting and writing. It was an opportunity to do the things I wanted to do in the first one and make them more conscious. We got very into Joseph Campbell [the author of “The Power of Myth”]. And I started to understand that somehow we had hit upon an archetype—that Max was kind of an aberrant version of the classic hero. A movie is a whole-body experience. You experience it in your viscera, in your emotions, cerebrally. But you also experience it anthropologically, in the way you come to the cinema spiritually—that ineffable stuff which is underneath a film—and mythologically, which is ultimately one of the most important. That’s what I have come to realize; you have to tick off all the boxes in some way.

Campbell had a wonderful definition of mythology: “Other people’s religion.” And it’s true. Humans have to make meaning out of a seemingly chaotic existence, so they find stories that help them survive in some way. It’s why people tell them. They have no idea that the Earth orbits the sun in an ellipse and on an axis, so they invent gods to explain the seasons. We all have stories, and the great ones, the powerful ones, become religions. Once you understand the seasons, those gods, those stories, evaporate and are replaced by others that are more useful.

“Furiosa” is the first “Mad Max” movie to pull back and describe the politics of this post-apocalyptic world. There are empires and nomadic hordes, trade negotiations and royal intermarriages. The wasteland is ruled by three fortresses, each of which controls an essential resource—food, gas, bullets—that the others need, and inevitably fight over.

Even though the “Mad Max” films are set in the future, they really go back to a neo-medieval time. All the behavior tends to be very elemental and, in a sense, universal. The MacGuffin is to be human. The thing that people are struggling over is to be human. And the film takes on a kind of authenticity, because we sense that this is how it has been throughout time. You have a dominance hierarchy with the powerful sitting on top of all the resources, trying to keep the people at the bottom from making their way forward. We see that play out over and over and over again.

I remember going to the citadel in Salzburg [the Hohensalzburg Fortress], and it’s amazing how similar it is to the citadels you’ll see all over India. The architecture of power is always the same. The great fortress is usually on high. The pathway narrows until you get to the pinnacle, where it’s almost impossible for anyone to get through. At one fort in India, it was so narrow that only one person could get through at a time. Its height and width were such that you couldn’t swing a sword or draw a bow. It’s the same in the cities where we live. We have gated communities, and the higher up you live in a big building the more powerful you are. Those constants are always there, and we keep finding new ways to express them.

When you made “Fury Road,” you hadn’t done a “Mad Max” movie in nearly thirty years. What persuaded you to dive back in?

Each time I finished a “Mad Max” movie, I said, “I will never make another one.” There always has to be some reason to revisit it. Something that really gets my juices flowing again. In the case of “Fury Road,” it occurred to me: How much of a story could you tell if the movie was constantly on the move? If you make an extended chase film, how much can you get across? How much subtext could there be? For any story to have any worth, there must be more to it than meets the eye, there has to be a lot of iceberg under the tip.

There is a kind of anthropological authenticity that we work really hard to get in there. Everything that is on the screen—not only the character but each piece of the wardrobe, each prop, each bit of language—has to have a backstory. The guy who plays the guitar—I can tell you who his mother was, how he survived the apocalypse and came to work in the service of the Immortan Joe. I can tell you where his guitar came from; it’s made of a hospital bedpan. And everything has to be multipurpose if it is to survive, so the guitar is also a flamethrower.

There has to be a backstory to that, and it’s not just frivolous. It’s the only way to keep the thing coherent. All the designers, everyone who worked on the film, whether they were making cars or masks in wardrobe, right through to the digital people, had to work to similar strategies. You’ll notice that the cars themselves are not modern cars, because those are very, very dependent on computer technology; they crumble under impact. The ones we have are much older, from the sixties through the eighties. Their bodies are much stiffer, much more likely to survive the technology; they were made way more simply, and with very basic mechanics.

Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Furiosa in the new movie, didn’t have a driver’s license when filming started, but she had to learn to handle a car like a race-car driver. She later said that making the film put her in better shape than the year of fitness training that she had done to prepare for it. She and the other characters do extraordinary things in the film, but they’re never really superhuman.

Even fantasy stories have to have some underlying authenticity. You have to have a skill set to survive in this world, in which there is really no rule of law. When you meet another person, you’re asking yourself, Is it conducive to my survival to kill them and take what I can from them, or is there any value in working together for our mutual survival? If any of the characters had done something like fly through the air or done an outrageous flying kick in the middle of a fight, that would have pulled the audience out of it. If you establish it, in something like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” or in “The Matrix,” the audience can enjoy it. But these films can’t do that. If you have a car flipping into the dust, you’d better do it as realistically as you can.

“Fury Road” and “Furiosa” were both composed on storyboards before they were shot—more like graphic novels than traditional scripts. How did you come to work that way?

When I was working on “Fury Road” with [the artist and writer] Brendan McCarthy, we sat down, mapped out the story, and wrote a quick, hurried version with no dialogue—or only snippets. But then I thought, If we are really going to make a silent movie that isn’t dependent on dialogue to get the exposition across, let’s do it in its proper form. So the real first draft was done in storyboards. We were designing and writing the movie all at the same time. We had two very fine artists, Peter Pound and Mark Sexton, and we would sit in the room together and sketch. It was all done visually. We had quite a large room, and the storyboards accrued all around it. We ended up with three thousand five hundred panels. They were very fleshed out; you could follow the whole sequence of the movie. A storyboard is a much more efficient production document. A designer can look at it, a camera operator, an actor, and they can see who is in the shot, and what angles they are in, and where everyone is in relation to everyone else.

On “Fury Road,” we had a big table where we would play out the shots before a stunt. Everyone had a toy to represent their role. If you were on a bike, you would have a little toy bike, or a cameraman would have a toy camera car. And everyone would say, “I’m moving this way.” “I’m coming in from this side.” “The camera is swooping down from this side and the second camera is coming in from there.” It was almost like a war exercise.

You are doing as much as you possibly can to fill in the story. What you can’t add is time. You can’t give an impression of how it unfurls rhythmically. So, on “Furiosa,” Guy Norris, the second unit director and stunt coördinator, and his son Harrison developed a proxy engine—almost a fast animation of the storyboards—to do things way more quickly. You can motion-capture the events happening onscreen and put in [virtual] cameras to build a sequence with a high degree of accuracy. We called it Toybox.

I remember going back to Hitchcock, who storyboarded his movies. He would say that, by the time you start shooting, all the work has been done. All the rest is execution. You try to get to that point, but of course it never happens. When you’re finally shooting, you get reality checks, and then when you get to the cutting room it’s even more brutal. You have to confront your failures. But you should go into the shoot thinking you’ve licked almost every problem.

Ingmar Bergman likened filmmaking to building a cathedral—an immense collaboration of mostly anonymous artists, workers, and master builders, dedicated to a common art. A film like “Furiosa,” in its sheer scale and numbers, fits the analogy even better than Bergman’s work: two hundred and forty days of shooting, ten camera trucks, nearly two hundred stunt performers, eighty-seven wigs, thirty-five sets of false teeth, fifty-five hundred sheets of tattoo paper. The film’s seemingly endless credits include an earthworks manager, salvage artists, corpse designers, a bird wrangler, a dog wrangler, a sidecar fabricator, a didgeridoo player, and a contact-lens technician.

Yet “Fury Road” was an even more complicated production. It was shot in Africa, rather than Australia like the other “Mad Max” films, and it was the first one that your wife edited.

In “Fury Road,” we had a chaotic relationship with the studio, and the two [lead] actors, Tom [Hardy] and Charlize [Theron], didn’t get on. Margaret was in Sydney and I was halfway across the Southern Hemisphere, in Namibia. We didn’t shoot as many scenes as in “Furiosa,” but we had multiple cameras on everything. Some were just little 2K cameras that we bought at the airport, but every vehicle had one somewhere. So there was a ridiculous amount of footage, and Margaret had to trawl through all of it. I would send voice notes, and in some cases I would do some very crude cuts while we were shooting, just to give a guide. Margaret was doing rough cuts and filling in holes with the dailies as they accumulated. Most of the footage had the sound of engines, or people shouting instructions—there were very, very noisy vehicles or wind machines—so we had temp dialogue that we knew would have to be replaced. If anything was confusing, Margaret knew we would wait until I got to Australia. But, by and large, she was working by herself and just trying to assemble the movie, not cutting it in a fine way.

I really thought we had so much done in the storyboard stage, but then you have this massive amount of footage and you have to forge a movie out of it. And that is a herculean task. What some editors do is just put everything in, and you end up with a five-hour movie, and then it becomes a struggle to edit that down. All the fellow-collaborators—everyone has an opinion and an approach and their favorite points in the movie. They’re saying, “Why did you cut that? That was my favorite shot!” We had to just forget all the noise. I’m pretty good at that, but Margaret is fantastic. She has a very, very low boredom threshold. She will sit in a movie with me and I’ll see her fidgeting and I will ask her what’s wrong, and she will say, “My God, we already know this! We’ve already been there.” She was the only one who could say this to me. Because I completely trust her. And, I have to tell you, I think it made the movie.

How did you know that Margaret could handle such an enormously complex film?

I had seen her cut “Happy Feet,” and I saw that she had an astute, inherent understanding that film narratives have a kind of musicality to them. They unfold in time, at rhythm. And she also had the granular skill of being able to make micro-cuts. Margaret just has something. There’s something about the way she thinks, which I’m still trying to process. I find that I’m pretty meticulous, but I get lost in the weeds where I can’t see [a film] as if for the first time, or see the opportunities where by one gesture you can solve a lot of problems. Where everything slots in and feels self-evident. She’s just one of those people who can do it.

Margaret will read the script once. But she won’t look at the storyboards or read the script [after that]. Because the film is in front of her. If you get caught up in what the intention was, you’re not seeing it dispassionately. And that ended up being a very important part of the process.

A really good example is when we made the film “Babe.” We had just got together, and she wasn’t working on the film at all. So I showed it to her, thinking, Ah, she is going to be charmed by this. She sat down and watched the film, and I turned to her and said, “What do you think?” And she was silent. She said, “You’re not going to release it like that, are you?” And I said, “What’s wrong with it?” And she said, “George, it has no dramatic tension, and it’s very episodic.” This was after we had locked the cut. And I realized she was absolutely right.

It’s one thing to diagnose a problem. We can all do that—This is too slow, etc. It is very, very hard to actually define the cause of the problem—It’s too slow because of this. But the thing that’s rarest by far, is being able to come up with the remedy that cures the problem. And she did that. After about twenty minutes of discussion, she said, “Why don’t you use chapter headings? Just own up to the fact that it’s episodic.” And that was the cure.

There is a long tradition of women editors in film: people like Anne Coates, who edited “Lawrence of Arabia”; Dede Allen, who edited “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Dog Day Afternoon”; and Thelma Schoonmaker, who edited “Raging Bull” and “GoodFellas.” In Michael Ondaatje’s book “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film,” Murch, who worked on “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now,” among other classic films, says that editing was once seen as a woman’s craft: “You knitted the pieces of film together.” How does Margaret fit into that tradition?

Margaret herself says that it’s not driven by gender. I think it’s intrinsic to how she views the world. She happens to be a really great gardener, on any scale—whether a big thing like a farm or a small back-yard garden. And she’s comprehensively good: everything is taken into account. I think that is where the same skill sets overlap. To make a great garden, you have to understand all these hidden processes and dimensions to a ridiculous degree: the soil, the geology, the sun, the light, the weather. You have to know the plant and when to put in the seed or seedling. But here’s the thing: somehow, in that process, you have got to anticipate what will happen a year down the line, or five years down the line, and how all those variables will fit into a graceful whole. I knew that’s how she approached gardens; I have seen gardens that she has done that are twenty-five years old. And I knew that is how she approached editing.

How often do you and Margaret disagree on a cut?

When something works and there is an elegant solution to a problem, it’s unmistakable. It’s usually the problem scenes where debates happen. In the past, I’ve always been the one who has to go off and worry and solve those problems. I usually see the best solution available, but I am always delighted when an editor can see something I didn’t. With Margaret, that happened a lot. It’s like someone showing you a magic trick and then showing you how they did it. And I think, Oh, my God, that is so obvious now. Why couldn’t I see that?

We didn’t drop many scenes in “Fury Road,” because everything was so hard won, but everything had to be interrogated. It’s very Darwinian: it won’t survive unless it earns its place. By that stage, you pretty well know every frame of the movie. You can tell whether you have to cut off one frame, two frames, or three frames; when you are cutting for action you have a strong sense of that. It’s fine, granular work, and I find that it takes a particular kind of neurology to do it—to bounce back and forth between the holistic view, the bird’s-eye view, and the detailed, microgranular view—because fatigue steps in. You need someone who has a great sort of creative stamina to do that.

You do all sorts of tricks. In the old days, painters used to look at screens in a mirror. I do that. It drives people crazy. I’ll flip the screen a hundred and eighty degrees. And it’s really interesting. When you play a bit of music, you know which notes are coming next: once you have heard it, your brain is already anticipating the next moment. Well, it’s exactly the same thing visually and dramatically. You’re ready to see the next bit of information, and you don’t because it’s flipped around. It’s quite an aggressive assault.

What you are trying to accomplish is to have the audience lean into the film. So that you are there. But, as scenes progress, you can’t repeat the same shot. There has to be something new so that there is a progression, a crescendo and decrescendo. The moment you get a repetition or redundancy—that is a signal to the audience that, O.K., you can back off. I call it falling off the wave. I used to surf, living in Sydney, so I know that if you stay on the wave it will take you all the way to the beach. You say, “I got from here to there and I don’t know how it happened.”

It’s not just in the formal progression of shots but also in the content, which is the more subtle thing. You’re always thinking, How does this action inform the character in whom we’re invested? How does it inform what we’ve seen before? It can’t just be empty action—noise and movement without any shift in dynamics. That can fill up the space and be very distracting and engaging, but it doesn’t follow you out of the cinema. And, to me, the measure of a film is how long it follows you out of the cinema.

Michael Ondaatje writes that, when he watched Walter Murch editing “The English Patient,” he knew “that this was the stage of filmmaking that was closest to the art of writing.” Murch goes on to tell Ondaatje a number of his tricks of the trade: lingering on a character’s face after he speaks a line, to show the audience that he’s lying. Adding a reaction shot of an actor forgetting her lines, to add an embarrassed, vulnerable honesty to a scene. Cutting right after a character blinks, because it signals the end of a thought.

The big moments are important, but it’s the precursor shots that really make a dramatic effect. That is where a movie can be made or lost, and there is often a better movie there than you think. It’s really a cumulative effect. We call it referred pain. If you have something wrong in your diaphragm, you might feel it in your shoulder. It’s the same in movies. The scene might feel slow, but it’s not the scene itself, it’s what came before. A critical scene might seem boring, but it’s usually because you’ve given that information earlier.

There is a tendency in people to base their cutting patterns on already established tropes. They do action sequences with fast cutting, where the scene is refreshed every two seconds without any causal relationship between one shot and the next. Margaret won’t stand for that. The pace has to be narratively based. It has to be character-based. It’s not just refreshing the scene for its own sake. The final version of “Fury Road” has more than two thousand eight hundred cuts, but you’ll see there is a tremendous effort to have some connection between one shot and the next. Just as in music there is almost a mathematical relationship between a chord and the progression. That is why we experience it as music and not noise. If you change your rhythm in the middle of a song for no good reason, it’s the same thing. Once you cut your early scenes and you develop a pace, it’s really interesting how quickly a perfectly good scene can become boring if it doesn’t follow that pace, or build or enhance it.

I’ll give you an example. At the beginning of “Fury Road,” all the wretched people who live below the citadel, in this dominance hierarchy ruled by the Immortan Joe, they all scramble toward the platform that rises up into the citadel. There was a scene that I had to cut, where a woman holds up her baby and says, “Take my baby! He has a warrior’s heart!” And one of the masked henchmen, the gatekeeper, looks at the baby and says, “It’s got lumps. It won’t last a year.” And he throws the baby back. Then she hands the baby to someone next to her and says, “Take me, I’m a milker!” and exposes her lactating breasts. And he says, “Yes you are, little mother! Come up.”

It’s a very cynical scene, but it was useful, in that it said that humans are a commodity, and mother’s milk is important. Now the problem was, we also have a scene where we see the milking mothers, and they’re referred to later. If we added this scene, it made those other scenes a little redundant. Plus, you’ve just met Max; you’ve met Furiosa briefly. You can’t stop for incidental characters or moments. You want to get on with the principal characters. The scene itself was done well, but devalued what was done later. It tells you a lot, but it’s not moving forward.

“Furiosa” was shot back in Australia rather than Namibia. Did that change the way it was edited? Eliot Knapman is credited as the lead editor, rather than Margaret.

We had bought a farm in a valley outside of Sydney, and Margaret had been working strenuously on it during severe flooding. So that held her up from coming to the shoot. I remembered Tilda Swinton showing me a picture of Bong Joon-ho [the director of “Parasite”] working with his editor on set. They assembled the film right there. I thought, O.K., Eliot was Margaret’s assistant on “Fury Road” and “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” So, during the shoot, he assembled the film, and then Margaret came in and did her part. It was much more efficient.

Halfway through “Furiosa,” there is a pivotal scene in which Furiosa stows away on the War Rig—a monster truck filled with “two thousand tits of mother’s milk”—only for it to be attacked by a band of hijackers. The sequence has a hundred and ninety-seven shots and took seventy-eight days to film, but the most startling moment may be when it’s over, and Furiosa gets thrown off the truck.The din of war drums and gunfire suddenly stops, and she stands and stares at the empty horizon in total silence. She has finally escaped, but now what? The world is still a wasteland. “Where did you think you were going?” her co-pilot asks, when he comes back to get her. “There is nowhere else.” “Furiosa” has a number of moments like this, when the pace slows and the silence is more dramatic than any music. It’s a startling change from the headlong rush of “Fury Road.”

You can say that “Fury Road” was a presto movement, for the most part. “Furiosa” has a few more moments of adagio.

How did you approach the sound design of these films?

Too often, people cut with sound in action sequences mainly to overcome visual deficiencies. Quite often, you can see things with your ears. With the right punching sound, we really do think someone punched someone. But, if you are doing without sound and someone punches somebody, you’d better make sure that the punch looks real. When we were doing “The Road Warrior,” the theory was to cut the film as a silent movie. If it plays silent, it will play with sound. But, in those days, I was less confident as a director. So, when the score would start, it was the full orchestra.

In “Fury Road,” the initial idea was to have only music that was practical. In a lot of cases, the music arises imperceptibly out of the ambient sounds you’re hearing in the movie—the music of the vehicles, and all those people fighting. So it was much more integrated. That’s why we had the drummers in the back of the truck and the guitarist. And then, once there was some humanity creeping into the story, when Max was finding his better self again, we could bring in some orchestral music. If you use music at these moments, it does something very important. It allows the audience to take the specific reality of what they’re seeing on the screen and put it in a larger context. It allows them to accept that it’s allegorical. It’s not just that event. It represents all such events. It goes from the specific to the general.

I remember, in a relatively early test screening of “Fury Road,” the guitarist tested poorly. Every time we saw him, he would be playing the same guitar riff all the time. People thought he was annoying. Why was he here? The temptation was to cut him as much as possible out of the story. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the repetition of the music, in a movie that wouldn’t tolerate repetition. Again, it was a kind of referred pain. Now, Margaret and I knew that the music hadn’t been orchestrated yet. It was temp music. So I kept on saying, “It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right.” And, of course, when we did the final test screening, he scored incredibly high. In fact, he is one of the iconic characters. Had I been less experienced, I might have panicked. Oh, that’s not working, let’s get rid of it. Usually, it’s not working for a reason that we can solve. But it’s amazing how often people throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The “Mad Max” films trace not only the evolution of filmmaking and special effects but the evolution of our ability to watch films—to absorb more and more information.

When Warner Bros. remastered a print of “The Road Warrior” [a few years ago], it was wonderful to see it again, like time travel. I was surprised at how it still played after all this time, and how much cinema has changed—the agility of the camera, and the plasticity of the images. You can change the colors, change the framing, and add so much digitally. But the biggest thing is the way that audiences can read films. We are actually speed-reading movies compared with those we saw in the past. “The Road Warrior” had twelve hundred shots in ninety-six minutes. “Fury Road” was a hundred and twenty minutes, yet it had two and a half times the number of shots. I think the average shot in “The Road Warrior” lasted four seconds or even more. The average shot in “Fury Road” was two seconds.

How do you decide how long you can linger on a shot? In “Fury Road,” there is a quick shot of a tattoo on Max’s back that says “O-Negative. Universal Donor.” This is a vital piece of information—it explains why he is used as a blood donor by his captors and why he can later save Furiosa’s life with a transfusion—but it goes by in a flash.

That shot of the tattoo was in the storyboard, and all that information was designed to be in there. But, if I held on to that shot a lot longer, and gave the audience fifteen seconds to read it, it would be terrible. You’re trying to invite them into a moment they’re sharing with the character. I do hope that most of the audience can read the tattoo—and later on it’s reinforced a little more in two scenes—but you can’t stop to do that.

When you are watching a movie like “Fury Road,” it sort of hurtles forward, and you can only pick something up in passing. How do you learn things on the fly? That is really, really key. Storytelling is the well-orchestrated withholding of information. It goes back to: What does the audience need to know, and when does it need to know it? Time goes forward at sixty seconds a minute, and most of us are going to watch the movie in one pass. You are tyrannized by time. You have to orchestrate the information as you proceed through it. That is one of the biggest tasks of a movie like this.

Is there a limit to how much information a viewer can process?

That is something that Margaret I constantly discuss in the editing room. Deep down, you don’t know. You have to take your best guess. You are thinking of the audience all the time, and somehow have to trust your own instincts. How do you take a series of shots that are very, very fast and cut very, very short and still make them coherent spatially in terms of the events? You spend a lot of time talking about “eye scan”—knowing exactly where ninety per cent of the audience will be looking on a big screen. You’re trying to avoid eye jerks, often by reframing a shot, vignetting a shot, or sharpening a part of the screen, so the scan across the cut is going to be smooth. That is something Margaret is really very strong at. If you put a lot of effort into that, so that from one shot to the next you are not jarring the eye, you can make it quite creamy.

Do you think the pace of film editing will continue to accelerate?

I don’t think that this will naturally lead to faster and faster films. But you should be aware, as you are making the film, that the audience is capable of understanding things that it couldn’t in the past. I remember a quote: “Individually an audience might be comprised of idiots, collectively they are never wrong.” I really think that’s true. People come to cinema loaded to the gills with all this learning of a relatively new language. They watch movies and pick up the rhythm of them. They are visually literate. They are narratively, dramatically literate, but not necessarily in a way they can articulate. And, collectively, it is quite astonishing.

Very early on, I made a point of rewatching films in the cinema when there were lots of people. One film that had a lot of influence on “Mad Max” was “What’s Up, Doc?” Every Saturday night in Melbourne, I would go and watch the film, because I just loved the audience’s laughter, and knowing exactly where that laughter is. Then I went to Hong Kong, in a packed cinema with standing room in the aisles, and the laughing was consistent with Melbourne. There is a collective response of audiences that is constantly playing in the back of your mind. You just have to trust it.

You want a film to be all there in that first impact. But that’s not to say that if you go back to it, you can’t pick up more. If a film is rich enough, multiple viewings will be rewarded. Every time I put on “The Godfather: Part II,” which is my favorite movie, I can’t stop watching it. I know exactly what’s going to happen, but it’s like hearing a great song or symphony. There is pleasure each time. Why is that? It’s extraordinary that it doesn’t diminish in any way. ♦

In your story “Thataway,” two elderly sisters live together in their run-down childhood home in a small prairie town, which their brother has escaped—first by playing bit parts in movie Westerns and then by establishing a line of discount-furniture stores. How did these three characters come to you?

In glimpses! In this case, an older woman smoking a cigarette in a doorway, reluctant to walk to work. After that, the usual writer’s musings, dead ends, and drafts—it’s like trying to start a fire in the rain.

The siblings have lived quite different lives. The brother, Cooper, got away and parlayed his modest movie career into a very lucrative if ethically questionable business; Mildred also got away, at least as far as Nevada, after running wild as a teen-ager, but returned chastened and spent the rest of her life in her home town; Constance married a high-school boyfriend, worked for the county clerk, and never left. Why do you think that three children of the same alcoholic, “shiftless” parents would diverge in these ways?

Families, even dysfunctional ones, seem to have an early stable period when the children haven’t yet learned that there’s something wrong with their lives, when their chaotic or unpredictable days are all they know. In this story, one child repeats the poor choices of her parents, another forges a modest life of acceptance, and another breaks out in a big way. The question remains which of the three lives, if any, could be called a good one.

Can you imagine writing a story about these three siblings at an earlier age—when they were in high school, say, or in their twenties?

It would be interesting to try! Seeing how people’s lives turn out in light of what they expected when they were young is a universal preoccupation. Doing that in reverse with a story would be fascinating—even if it raised doubts about the story itself.

You went through a few versions of this story, trying to balance the narrative between the sisters and Cooper. In the process, the story deepened and expanded by fifty per cent or so. How hard was it to go back into a story that you’d written and imagine more to it?

I’ve written many stories, but I can think of only one that came out right on the first try, and it was utterly different from the story I thought I was writing.

In your revision process, the proportions of comedy and poignancy in the story shifted a little, and the ending changed.

This is a daily struggle! My sly literary heroes—Italo Svevo, Nikolai Gogol, Miguel de Cervantes, and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis—found ways to address the human condition with all their might and without losing their sense of humor. That’s the dream, but it’s hard to get right.

What’s the appeal of the American small town as a setting for your stories?

I grew up in a small town and now I live out in the boonies, two miles from a town of six. I don’t see as many people as a writer should. Whenever I’m in a bigger town for new tires, doctors, or groceries, I’m on red alert. Someone said, of these underpopulated places, that people there have the dignity of rarity. That may or may not be true, but they sure stand out! ♦

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Thomas McGuane reads his story “Thataway,” from the May 27, 2024, issue of the magazine. McGuane has published more than a dozen books of fiction, including the story collections “Gallatin Canyon,” “Crow Fair,” and “Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories,” which came out in 2018.

In the nearly two years since the Supreme Court eliminated a constitutional right to abortion, support for that right has been rising. The extreme measures that anti-abortion forces have taken in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization have made that almost inevitable. In February, the Supreme Court of Alabama seized the opportunity to define frozen embryos as children, imperilling the practice of I.V.F. (State legislators knew that this tack was a loser: they hastily passed a bill protecting fertility treatment.) Earlier this month, a Louisiana state legislative committee rejected a bill that would have allowed exceptions to the state’s abortion ban in cases of rape and incest for people younger than seventeen. A policy blueprint prepared by the Heritage Foundation for a new Trump Administration calls for an all-out assault on abortion pills, urging officials to wield an antiquated anti-obscenity statute to ban them from the mails. And, in the coming weeks, the Supreme Court that brought us Dobbs will decide whether hospital emergency rooms in Idaho can deny abortions to patients who could suffer dire health consequences, but not actually die then and there, if they don’t terminate their pregnancies.

Maybe the most persuasive factor is simply the realization that a bedrock decision about such intimate and life-altering matters could be wrested away by the state. According to a new survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, a majority of adults in most states, including those where abortion is now effectively banned, say that the practice should be legal in all or most cases. That includes seventy per cent of blue-state residents and fifty-seven per cent of red-state ones. In 2022, there were seven states where less than a majority favored abortion rights; last year, there were just five. According to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, nearly forty per cent of suburban women voters cite abortion rights as a top priority, and nearly three-quarters of them believe that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances.

So it’s not exactly surprising that Donald Trump, the man who pledged to appoint Supreme Court Justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and then did so, lately prefers to say that what he really did was hand the matter over to the states. “Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives—they wanted to get abortion out of the federal government,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin. “Basically the states decide on abortion, and people are absolutely thrilled with the way that’s going on.” He’s also taken to saying that he doesn’t support a federal ban—the ultimate goal for many in the anti-abortion movement.

“Absolutely thrilled” is a preposterous Trumpism in this context, but he is onto something. For decades, a dominant critique of Roe was that it short-circuited state-by-state democratic deliberation on a uniquely contentious social issue. Even some liberals who supported abortion rights—notably, Ruth Bader Ginsburg—shared this view. But it was most forcefully expressed by, and proved most useful for, anti-abortion jurists, including the Justices who overturned Roe. In a recent Harvard Law Review article, the legal scholars Melissa Murray and Katherine Shaw argue that “the appeal to democracy and democratic engagement” served a rhetorical purpose, insulating the Court—or aiming to—from charges of judicial overreach.

That appeal has come to seem more and more like a fig leaf. The conservative majority in Dobbs clearly imagined that the abortion issue would be taken up mainly by state legislatures, and that they would produce more restrictive laws—and some twenty-one states did ban or severely restrict the procedure. (In the majority opinion, Samuel Alito wrote that Roe had closed off the democratic process for “the large number of Americans who dissented” from it.) As Murray and Shaw point out, there is some rich irony here: the majority that declared itself so committed to the democratic process where abortion was concerned has been busily undermining it in a series of cases curtailing the scope of the Voting Rights Act and allowing gerrymandering.

Yet the version of democracy that many of Roe’s critics invoked was, it turns out, limited. Dobbs also triggered a citizen-organized ballot-initiative movement. In seven states, residents have gone to the polls to weigh in on whether and to what extent abortion rights should be protected. In all seven, they voted to uphold those rights, in some cases by enshrining them in the state constitution. In November, voters in a dozen or so more states could be deciding on similar referendums. The reaction from Republicans at the state level has often been to quash the initiatives, will of the people be damned. In Ohio, when it became apparent that an initiative that would guarantee reproductive rights in the state constitution had garnered enough signatures to get on the ballot, the state G.O.P. engineered a special election to raise the threshold of voters needed to approve such an amendment. (Voters rejected that effort and later amended the constitution.) Republican-led legislatures in Missouri and Arizona are reportedly trying similar tactics. In South Dakota, a group called Dakotans for Health has gathered enough signatures to put an initiative on the ballot to overturn that state’s law, which bans abortion except to save the life of the mother. In anticipation, the legislature passed a bill—which Governor Kristi Noem signed—permitting signatories to remove their names from such petitions. A Republican legislator justified the bill on the ground that people could have been fed misleading information and not understood what they were signing. But many South Dakotans must have easily understood what the legislature was trying to do: keep them from having their say on reproductive rights.

Trump’s convenient embrace of the state-by-state approach is unlikely to drive away his anti-abortion and evangelical voters. They know that he’s still by far their best chance of locking in more restrictions at the national level, even if those stop short of a federal ban. They can reasonably assume that he’ll say whatever he thinks he needs to now, and then come through for them if he wins in November. But the abortion-rights initiatives could boost Democratic and independent turnout; the swing states of Arizona and Nevada are two of the states poised to vote on them.

And, of course, those initiatives and the effort it took to get them on the ballot matter in their own right. Justice Alito wrote in Dobbs that the Court could not possibly assess “the effect of the abortion right on society and in particular on the lives of women.” The past two years have shown that many Americans have no trouble doing so. ♦

In 2015, the comic Jerrod Carmichael co-created and starred in an NBC sitcom called “The Carmichael Show.” Shot in front of a live audience, the show had a retro feel, gesturing back to the nineties. But it was also part of an exploratory and influential wave of “auteur television” that was flourishing at the time, with the semi-autobiographical work of comics and actors like Louis C.K., Lena Dunham, and Issa Rae. Set in Carmichael’s home state of North Carolina, the show was based on his own family, including his devout Christian mother and his rigid father. In its first season, Carmichael’s character decides that he would rather lie to his parents about the fact that he’s living with his girlfriend than bear their disapproval. “My mom’s going to give a million reasons from the Bible why that’s wrong,” he argues to his girlfriend, as she pleads with him to tell the truth.

These days, Carmichael is less interested in keeping secrets. In fact, he is building an entire phase of his career around obsessively dragging skeletons into the light. In 2022, he released a quiet, artful standup special called “Rothaniel,” in which he came out as gay and talked about the revelation that his father had kept a second family secret for decades. For the past two months, HBO has been airing “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” an invigorating and discomfiting new series about the personal fallout of that special. Visually, tonally, and substantively, the series makes a thrilling leap from the staid comedic and narrative conventions of “The Carmichael Show,” and is evidence that there is still fresh terrain left to be explored in our social-media-addled era of oversharing and innovative ideas to be wrung from our largely unimaginative landscape of meta-culture.

Despite its title, “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show” lives somewhere in the electrifying intersection of documentary and reality television. In between confessional standup sets, Carmichael explores the various characters and subjects that are plaguing him: an unrequited love, sexual compulsions, old friends he is inelegantly trying to fit into his new Hollywood life, and semi-estranged parents who are still grappling with his sexual identity. To Carmichael, nothing is sacred but the truth. He invites the camera to record precoital make-out sessions with anonymous Grindr hookups, therapy sessions discussing his irrepressible sex habits and infidelities, and a series of awkward conversations with his parents about his love life and about their own past choices. When showing his father a photo of his boyfriend, Mike, Carmichael chooses one that seems designed to maximize discomfort. “That’s him out the shower the other day,” he says, holding up a shirtless photo on an iPhone. His father lets out an uneasy grunt, and the scene lingers on the stunned silence.

Is Carmichael submitting his loved ones to untold humiliations for the sake of the cameras? Absolutely. But he admits that he might need the cameras as emotional life rafts more than they need him as a subject. As he confronts his father over his extramarital affairs, the atmosphere between the two grows unbearably tense. His father says, “I got feelings, too. The way that you don’t want to be hurt, I don’t want to be hurt. . . . This is not to be discussed on cameras.” Carmichael responds, “If the cameras help me, then they fuckin’ help me. . . . Your way is silence. Your way is death.” He adds, “Yes, I’m afraid to have these conversations without them.” The mood of the series would verge into sadism if Carmichael weren’t so willing to appear in an unflattering light. There is, somehow, very little posturing in such an otherwise slick and cunning project. The comic is often depicted in various forms of bratty unrest, pacing around his luxury apartment, trying on designer clothes and bailing on his most important social obligations in dramatic fashion. “I’m selfish all the time,” he says at one point. At the beginning of an episode, he tells a standup audience, “I have this problem.” He continues, “I only like to do exactly what I want to do.”

Carmichael and his co-creator, the director Ari Katcher, sneak plenty of heavy topics—sexual identity, religion, friendship, family, celebrity, trauma—into the bingeable series. But at the heart of these musings, some of which are more successful than others, is a potent question: Is the point of comedy to make people laugh or excavate your demons? One of the most affecting episodes of the series focusses on Jamar Neighbors, a close friend of Carmichael’s who is also a standup comic. The two represent opposite sides of an evolving comedy landscape that increasingly favors personal history and revelation over conventional joke writing; whereas Carmichael sticks to the confessional, Neighbors still prefers traditional setups and punch lines. Carmichael brings his friend on the road with him and urges him, sometimes condescendingly, to lean into his past, to “just be a victim.” “Man, I don’t want to do fucking therapy comedy!” Neighbors protests. “Jeff Bezos is going to space, Why are you still thinking about your motherfucking foster mama?” he continues. “Jeff Bezos is going to space because it’s some shit he can’t talk to his mama about,” Carmichael responds. This lightning-in-a-bottle conversation illuminates the purpose of this project, and validates Carmichael’s emphasis on the personal: the exchange is much more vivid because it’s not just clever dialogue written into a script; a real friendship is at stake.

Many have lamented that pop culture is in a death spiral, devoid of original stories to tell and in a state of hopeless, navel-gazing stagnation. Reboots, never-ending sequels, and I.P.-churning “ripped from the headlines” films and series are perhaps the most demoralizing evidence that culture is eating its own tail. “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” although ethically dubious, creates a hall of mirrors that is impossible to turn away from. Its success lies in an uncanny hybrid of access journalism and fourth-wall breaking. Carmichael has financial and professional power over most of the loved ones that he features in the series, and he is able to coerce them into filming varieties of difficult conversations and confrontations. (For one, there is the coup of getting Carmichael’s friend, the famously press-wary rapper Tyler, the Creator, to talk about his feelings on camera.) The crew and cameras develop new layers of meta-narrative: Mike, a fiction writer and the moral bedrock of the show, allows the camera into their couples’ therapy sessions. At one point, the therapist asks Jerrod how he is feeling about monogamy. He stumbles over his words, and the camera zooms in. “And then the cameraman just leapt to get in his face,” Mike says later. “And I knew then, that they know something that I don’t.”

In the season finale, which culminates in his mother visiting him in New York, Carmichael sits in a theatre alongside a masked friend who’s been counselling him on the project throughout the series. (This person is believed to be Bo Burnham.) The figure cleverly serves as a proxy for an audience. “What the fuck is this show? That is so upsetting,” the friend tells Carmichael as they watch footage of a heated conversation in which his mother argues that homosexuality is a choice. The episode then jumps to footage Carmichael shot as a teen-ager on Mother’s Day. It’s poignant evidence of the past bond between Carmichael and his mother and of the comic’s lifelong need to narrativize his life.

Early in the series, Carmichael explains, “I’m trying to ‘Truman Show’ myself.” But the work that “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show” resembles most intensely, whether intentionally or not, is that of the enfant-terrible experimental filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, who has lived in relentless pursuit of on-camera truthtelling for four decades. Like Carmichael, Zahedi is a compulsive person, and he once made a film about his sex addiction. More recently, he created an experimental and sometimes virtuosic Web series called “The Show About the Show,” which includes an episode about the aftereffects of the taping of the previous episode. The series, though obscure, was a brilliant feat, successfully capturing the realities of being an artist. It also exploded Zahedi’s personal life and led him to divorce his wife, who became increasingly vexed by his insistence on putting their family’s life onscreen.

Carmichael, to his credit, seems to be loyal to forces greater than his own art and his own idea of truth. For one, he seems to have an unbreakable fealty to his audience. The people who watch him perform standup receive the best version of Carmichael: thoughtful, relaxed, warm, open, and engaging. Often, he will send a stressful text before getting onstage and then hash out his anxieties with the audience while he waits for a response. He earnestly welcomes insight and feedback on his life from his crowds, and he often regales them with secrets he has not yet confessed to his loved ones. Watching these scenes, you can almost feel his family members yearning to be treated like these strangers. ♦

A friend of mine knew a wealthy man who had decided to live forever. That made him hard to be around, my friend told me, in an e-mail, because he was “always dropping to the floor to do ab crunches or running out for bottles of water or falling asleep or outgassing Chinese herbs.” Immortality is attractive to rich people because simple arithmetic shows that if they live a normal lifespan they won’t have time to spend enough of their money. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, has expressed interest in receiving blood transfusions from young donors, an intervention that apparently adds weeks to the lives of laboratory mice. Jeff Bezos’s chiselled physique suggests a similar concern. The longevity evangelist Bryan Johnson, who sold a company he’d started to PayPal for eight hundred million dollars, wears a device that monitors the quality of his nighttime erections.

Life extension is a trade-off, though. You have to weigh the time you stand to gain against the time you lose while trying to gain it. When Jackie Onassis learned that she was dying, of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she is said to have regretted having done so many pushups. There’s also the discouraging fact that extra years, if any, come at the end of life, when even many rich people have begun to think about winding down. A wealthy bridge partner of mine, now deceased, told me as she approached ninety that she was already feeling a bit bored.

Einstein wrote that “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He presumably didn’t mean that, after death, he expected to travel back and forth through his life, as though riffling the pages of a book. Or maybe he did. At any rate, his statement hints at a better strategy, one that I myself have practiced for decades. The simplest, most foolproof way to extend life is to do so backward, by adding years in reverse.

During the summer of 1975, following my sophomore year in college, I got a job as a secretary at a book-publishing company in New York. My main task was typing letters from editors to authors. I used a typewriter, because there were no personal computers yet, and to create duplicates I used copy sets, which were sandwiches of carbon paper and thin regular paper. Carbon paper—for those too young to have any idea what I’m talking about—is paper or plastic film that is coated on one side with semi-gelatinous ink; when you press something against the un-inked side, the inked side leaves a mark. Carbon paper barely exists nowadays, except at some rental-car counters and in the etymology of the “cc” (which stands for “carbon copy”) in e-mails. At my publishing job, I placed a copy set behind a sheet of letterhead and rolled the two together into my machine. When I’d finished typing, I had an original plus one or two flimsy but legible facsimiles, for filing.

That same summer, inspired by my job, I began using carbon paper to make duplicates of my own letters. I was writing a lot of poetry at the time, and I believed that the copies would be useful to my biographers, whom I assumed I’d have someday. I gave up on poetry and literary immortality a year or two later, but I continued making carbons, and I saved letters that people wrote to me. Because of the pack-rat instincts of various members of my family, I also have the letters I wrote home from summer camp; the letters my father wrote home from the Second World War; the letters my wife, whose name is Ann Hodgman, wrote to my parents before and after we got married; the letters Ann’s mother wrote to her father when they were dating; and thousands of other letters, documents, e-mails, and texts. In recent years, I have digitized most of that stuff, so that I can search it.

When I was in high school, I tried several times to keep a diary—again, thinking of my biographers—but I was never able to stick with it for more than a week or two. This is a common problem. A dozen years ago, I found a diary that my daughter, Laura, had started when she was ten. It had a pink cover, more than a hundred ruled pages, and a lock on the front, which she hadn’t locked. The entry on the first page was about her piano lessons. It said:

EXTRA MINUTES PRACTICED

Wednesday—1 min.

Saturday—8 min.

All the other pages were blank.

Soon after I had begun making copies of my letters, I realized that if I saved them in chronological order I’d have the equivalent of a diary. I eventually bought an electric hole punch and filled many three-ring binders. In the late eighties, I started another kind of quasi-diary by making a written record on my computer of funny or interesting things my children had said or done. I got that idea when Laura was three and her brother, John, was in utero, but I was able to extend the entries back to the day of Laura’s birth by inserting material from letters I’d saved. I called it my “kid diary,” and I kept it going, with several lapses, for about ten years. The completed text contains almost ninety thousand words and is, by far, my favorite thing I’ve ever written. It’s the one thing I would save if I could save only one.

Of course, most of the real work on my kid diary was done not by me but by my kids. Laura, at four: “Dave, is cheese vegetables, or what is it?” (She began calling me Dave when she was three, and John eventually did the same.) John, at almost six: “God didn’t make people, Dave. Monkeys did.” Laura’s favorite feature in the children’s magazine Highlights was the advice column, and she used to make up readers’ questions and the editors’ replies. When she was four and a half, I overheard her, in the playroom, pretending to read aloud from a recent issue:

When I go to school I have a hole in my pants near my penis. My friends call me “penis-puh.” What should I do? Tom.

I understand how you feel, Tom. Ignore your friends and find a nice quiet place where you can concentrate. Raise your hand if your friends have a problem with your penis.

Me, when John was two and a half:

My mother was reading John one of his dinosaur books and leaving out occasional paragraphs, so that she could get him to bed quicker, but he caught her. “You did not say ‘fleet-footed,’ ” he said.

Me again, when John was in kindergarten:

Yesterday, John sat at the kitchen table writing ransom notes, with spelling provided by Ann. One of his notes read “INQUISITIVE PERSON. 1,000,000 DOLLARS.” To write his notes, he put on snow boots, knee pads, and non-matching mittens.

Laura, when she was four:

Why am I not a grownup? I’ve been here for so many years.

And so on, for three hundred and fifty typed pages. I’m now keeping track, on a smaller scale, of funny or interesting things that my grandchildren have said or done. Alice, the eldest, when she was three: “Mom, I’m just going to relax and ring this bell.”

The final stages of Alzheimer’s disease have been described as living death: if you can’t remember your life, can you truly be said to be alive? I worry about that, of course, but I also worry about perfectly ordinary memory loss, which shortens a life more subtly, by allowing great swaths of it to leak away. My memory works pretty well, but writing things down has made it work better, and many of my favorite moments from the past forty years exist only because I kept a record. My kid diary has lengthened my life just as surely as rolling back my biological age would have, and it has done so without ab crunches, pushups, or erection monitoring. It has also lengthened the lives of Ann, Laura, and John, as well as reminding Ann and me that our children’s childhoods didn’t go by in a blur, as parents often feel when they look back. A friend told me recently, “If G.P.S. had existed from the time I got my driver’s license, I would have lived an entire second lifetime with the time I’d have saved not getting lost.” That’s the same idea, more or less.

Preserve too much, though, and you’d recreate the dilemma that Jorge Luis Borges explores in his story “Funes the Memorious,” from 1942. The title character is a young man who, after being thrown from a horse, discovers that he now remembers literally everything. “Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day,” the narrator explains. Funes “knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once.” He’s so entranced by his new ability that he doesn’t realize it has impaired him. “To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions,” the narrator reflects. “In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.”

Funes is a fictional character, but there are real people with a similar ability. One of them is Jill Price, who can remember her life, from childhood on, in extraordinary detail. In her autobiography, “The Woman Who Can’t Forget,” she writes, “My memories are like scenes from home movies of every day of my life, constantly playing in my head, flashing forward and backward through the years relentlessly, taking me to any given moment, entirely of their own volition.” Price was the first person to receive a diagnosis of hyperthymestic syndrome, later renamed highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM. Both terms were coined by James McGaugh and his colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, where, starting in 2000, Price was studied extensively. Researchers would mention a news event, and without hesitating she would give them the date and the day of the week it occurred, or they would give her a date and she would give them an event. “And she was flawless,” McGaugh told me recently. He asked her if she knew what had happened to Bing Crosby. She said that he died on a golf course in Spain on Friday, October 14, 1977, when she was eleven. She remembered because his death had been mentioned on a news program she’d heard on the car radio that day, as her mother was driving her to soccer practice.

Price has been, at times, an obsessive journal-keeper, and some people have wondered whether she had simply memorized the entries. But she abandoned her journal on several occasions, once for years, then changed her mind and filled in the hundreds of missing days retrospectively, entirely out of her head. She makes the journals to tame the flood of her recollections, which she views as a torment. “If I didn’t write things down, I would get a swimming feeling in my head and would become emotionally overwhelmed,” she explains in her book.

McGaugh and his team eventually identified about a hundred people with HSAM. One is the actress and author Marilu Henner, who starred on the television show “Taxi” and was fired by Donald Trump on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Henner, unlike Price, revels in her ability. “It’s something that makes me feel really good, and I can’t imagine not having it,” she told me. “My siblings will say, ‘Come on, Mar, do a week from our childhood.’ ” Henner’s book “Total Memory Makeover,” which was published in 2012, is an effort by her to help the rest of us develop what she refers to as our “brain muscle”—a desirable goal, since she agrees with me that memory can be a powerful time-expander and longevity-increaser. “By really exploring your past, or remembering it in some way, you get a piece of your life back,” she said. “Your life becomes longer and richer, and kind of stretches in the middle.”

Henner describes a good autobiographical memory as “a line of defense against meaninglessness.” For those of us who, unlike her, can’t do it all in our heads, old letters, diaries, and photographs are indispensable aide-mémoire. On Presidents’ Day in 1988, Laura came home from nursery school and said, “Abraham Lincoln was shot!” I said, “I know, honey,” and she said, “But I’m keeping him alive in my thoughts. Emmy is keeping him alive in her thoughts, too.” She and Emmy, a classmate, were three years old at the time, so they probably wouldn’t remember today that they had taken on that chore if I hadn’t written it down.

My mother will turn ninety-five in June. She was my family’s principal historian until I took over the position. She made two photo albums for me as I was growing up. The first covered my birth through sixth grade, and the second covered junior high through college. She invented analog image-enhancing techniques that anticipated, by decades, digital tools that are now standard: using nail-scissors and glue to replace my brother’s frowning face with a smiling one in our Christmas card from 1966, when he was four; using an X-Acto knife to give me a haircut and to slice an uninteresting background from a family photo a decade later; eliminating red-eye with a black Flair pen. I studied both my photo albums so often over the years that they began to fall apart. I have now preserved them by extracting the original pages and placing them in individual sleeves in large archival portfolios.

For many people, documenting family life in this way is no more appealing than doing pushups or ab crunches. But I don’t think of it that way, and neither did my mother. “I have been pasting my scrapbooks,” she wrote to Ann and me in 1980. “I get more fascinated with them every day. I don’t know when I’ve had a project I’ve enjoyed so much.” For her, documenting the history of our family was an immersive hobby, like making quilts (my sister), photographing birds (my brother), or gardening and playing ice hockey (Ann). By the time I graduated from college, my mother was mainly researching genealogies, writing reminiscences, and organizing ancestral photographs, documents, and ephemera. I’ve relied on her work several times when researching things that I’ve written, most recently an essay about her own family.

Nowadays, producing and saving images is so easy that few people bother with paper prints, photo albums, or even cameras. They hold up their phone and click away, hoping to end up with something decent, which they then post on Facebook or Instagram or whatever. But a digital camera roll containing thousands of unsorted, unedited, contextless images is not an intelligible narrative of a life. Turning the pages of a physical book is a different experience from swiping a finger across a screen, and, if you don’t store your memories on paper, you allow your past to be held hostage by a potentially obsolete digital format or by Google’s unpredictable commitment to the cloud.

I’ve made dozens of physical photo albums, first by gluing paper prints and other mementos into the kinds of blank scrapbooks my mother used, and, then, since 2006, by uploading images to companies that produce paper photo books. (My favorite is Mixbook.) In addition to making annual family scrapbooks, I’ve documented vacations, visits by grandchildren, moments from the life of a friend who had just died, two years that Ann and her parents spent living in Germany when she was a baby and her father was a U.S. Army doctor, the history of the place we visit every summer on Martha’s Vineyard, the wedding of our guinea pig and one of our dogs, and trips that my father’s parents took between the nineteen-forties and the nineteen-sixties. The project that I’m the proudest of is a hybrid: two eleven-by-fourteen volumes containing the complete text of my kid diary, illustrated with several hundred corresponding snapshots.

At some point during COVID, I realized that I could create a truly comprehensive chronicle of my life if I consolidated all the best parts of my hoard of digitized text into a single document. The result is a million and a half words long, and it grows by roughly five hundred words a day. My goal is to come as close as I can to a day-by-day record—but not one like Jill Price’s, which consists mostly of brief mentions of things like the weather, the names of TV shows she watched, and what errands she ran. I’m trying to do what Elmore Leonard said he tried to do with his novels: leave out the parts that readers skip. I’m the only reader so far, and I may be the only reader ever, but I don’t want even my own interest to flag. I haven’t added photographs yet, but someday I will.

One of my richest sources of material in recent years has been a small e-mail group that my wife and I are part of. It began around 1996 (no one remembers exactly when), and currently includes ten participants. We’re all within ten years in age: the youngest were in their thirties when we started; the oldest are in their seventies now. All but one or two of us are self-employed. Most are writers. In the early months, I often worried that the others would lose interest and disappear, but the group has never been in serious danger of disbanding, and the lineup has barely changed. No member has died yet, although one spouse died last year. Two children and eight grandchildren have been born. Several children have married. All the parents who were alive when we started have now died, except for Ann’s mother and my mother. Despite our long history, the ten of us have never all been in the same room at the same time, except online. The first full in-person gathering, if there ever is one, will probably be a funeral.

Ten people who’ve spent almost three decades getting to know one another turns out to be the ideal configuration for a social network; it’s the scale at which Facebook and X would feel like life-enhancing communities of human beings, rather than ego-driven, soul-destroying, democracy-undermining time-sucks. Our e-mail exchanges are the kinds of conversations that people who have worked together for years sometimes have over lunch or cocktails—and our exchanges are mostly coherent, even grammatical. I used to brood that civilization had suffered a huge loss when people switched from sending paper letters to sending e-mails, but I now think the real loss occurred when people switched from sending e-mails to sending texts, which young people in particular tend to fire off in bursts of unpunctuated sentence fragments. E-mails are actually superior to paper letters in many ways, because they easily accommodate thoughtful, extended multi-user back-and-forth, in real time.

In the early years of our group, it somehow almost never occurred to me to save anything. Eventually, though, I began preserving notable e-mails, which I later combined into PDFs. I now copy funny or interesting passages as they arrive, and paste them into my burgeoning chronicle—including that line I quoted at the beginning of this essay about outgassing Chinese herbs, and the later one about G.P.S. and getting lost. Also this, from Ann:

I helped at the Epiphany pageant at another church yesterday. The girl who played Mary carried a doll. After the pageant, she said, “Jesus looks hella real.” . . . I recently gave blood at the school she goes to. Two students, a girl and a boy, were staffing the snack table. An older boy who had just donated came and sat down. The girl told him, “We saw your blood.”

And this, from me:

I woke up at 3:00 this morning and lay awake for a long time. I would have thought I never fell back asleep except that I know Henry [our poodle] can’t talk. He told me that he thought some ants that were crawling inside a rotten tree trunk looked as though they were carrying parachutes. I didn’t think it was odd that he was talking—just odd that he would describe ant eggs that way.

I’ve also saved many serious, poignant, and distressing discussions—of life, work, children, pets, politics, religion, marriage, divorce, cancer, everything. Many of those discussions unfolded over days, and almost all of them are too personal to share with strangers. My solipsistic record has thus evolved into more than the story of my own life, and is now also a steadily growing group autobiography. Every so often, I’ll quote something back to the others and, even if it’s just a couple of years old, it usually turns out that everyone has forgotten it.

Someday, I’ll turn my archives over to my children and grandchildren. I hope they’ll be interested in at least some of it, because it’s important for young people to be reminded that old people had pre-decrepit existences. But I would continue collecting, organizing, and preserving even if I knew that no one but me would ever look. Thinking about my life and the history of my family is interesting to me—just as it was for my mother—and I agree with Marilu Henner, who writes, “We all owe it to ourselves as living beings to take full advantage of our own experiences.” My preservation projects have given me a nearly Einsteinian view of time and mortality. I picture myself in a nursing home—not soon, I hope!—surrounded by photo books and letters and e-mail excerpts and portable hard drives, busily adding images to text, reading and rereading everything, creating compilations of compilations, contentedly living forever, backward and forward, until the end. ♦

There’s something awful about a lost picture. Maybe it’s because of a disparity between your original hope and the result: you made the photograph because you intended to keep it, and now that intention—artistic, memorial, historical—is fugitive, on the run toward ends other than your own. The picture, gone forever, possibly revived by strange eyes, will never again mean quite what you thought it would.

“Here There Are Blueberries”—a new play at New York Theatre Workshop, conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman and written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich—begins with the discovery of a well-curated album of photographs. It’s not just one misplaced dispatch from a former world but whole pasted-together pages of them, carefully arranged in order to tell a story. The album was found in the nineteen-forties, after the Second World War, by a man who describes himself, more than sixty years later, as an “87 year old retired U.S. Lieutenant Colonel.” It’s the early two-thousands, and he’s sent a letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The photographs are from Auschwitz.

“Blueberries” moves forward artfully, telling the true tale of the pictures and their march through public consciousness. The photographs show Nazis at ease at the site of the world’s most famous death machine. The Nazis lounge at a chalet, flirt with the secretarial pool, offer cheese smiles to the camera. None of the camp’s Jewish prisoners are pictured in the photographs, only their murderers, in the moments between murders. The album is a placid, subtly horrifying log of the mundane aspects of those people’s daily lives.

Rebecca Erbelding (Elizabeth Stahlmann), an archivist on whose desk the lieutenant colonel’s letter lands, recognizes the faces of notorious Nazis. There’s Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, and Rudolf Höss, the administrative architect of Auschwitz, “responsible for everything we think of as the camp: the barracks, the electrified fences, the guard towers, the extermination infrastructure . . . the whole organization.” After some detective work, Rebecca discovers that the album was apparently created by an upwardly mobile functionary named Karl Höcker. He probably put it together in a triumphal mood, thinking that it would be behind-the-scenes evidence of a heroic victory. Later, in the war’s aftermath, having lost the thing, maybe he thought of it compulsively, hoping it stayed lost, wishing he could have set it ablaze. The pictures—thirty-two pages of them, a hundred and sixteen images in all—had escaped his intentions not once but twice (so far).

Kaufman’s staging of the play is noble but simple. Characters approach the lip of the stage and state their thinking plainly. Besides Rebecca, there’s the director of the museum’s photography collection, Judy Cohen (Kathleen Chalfant, a brilliant performer whose mere presence gives the proceedings a fitting gravity), and the museum’s director, Sara Bloomfield (Erika Rose). The lighting, designed by David Lander, is bright and clean, just how we imagine the back rooms of a great museum might look (the apt scenic design is by Derek McLane), except when it dims a bit, the better to illuminate a picture from the album. Sometimes the flexible ensemble (which also includes Scott Barrow, Nemuna Ceesay, Noah Keyishian, Jonathan Raviv, Anna Shafer, Charlie Thurston, and Grant James Varjas) acts out a scene from a photograph—playing an accordion, laughing like schoolchildren on an exhilarating trip.

This is an institutional saga, the story of how a memorial museum—meant to honor and dramatize the lives of victims, not the idle pleasures of their captors—learned to metabolize Höcker’s difficult artifact. The play is based on real interviews conducted by Kaufman and Gronich, a documentary technique that Kaufman also employed for “The Laramie Project,” his renowned play about the death of Matthew Shepard. That method matches the art form that is this play’s spur: photography. Just like an interview, a photograph is a quivering, ambivalent, sometimes deceptive form of evidence, especially when the photographer is an amateur. You can suss out mood and tone, discern planetary facts like weather and time of day. But the spaces between exposures, before and after the questioning begins—who knows?

Even as “Blueberries” went about its business—it has the often dutiful tone of a high-quality PBS docuseries—I kept thinking about the lieutenant colonel who held on to the album for so many years, whose story the play must reasonably sweep past on the way to its forensics. In his initial letter to the museum, he says that he was sent to Germany to “do some work for the government.” What that work was he doesn’t specify. “While there,” he says, “I was housed in an abandoned apartment where I found a photo album. I salvaged the album and have kept it in my archives now for over sixty years.”

Sixty years! One wonders who, if anybody, he told of the record of horror living with him like a roommate in his home. How often did he look at it? How perfectly, over that span, had he memorized its faces, whether or not he was able—without a museum’s resources—to assign them any names? Why keep it for so long? What had he been thinking, at the outset and then for those many decades? That unknowable mystery, about the allure of evil and the power of photography, is sometimes captured by this play and sometimes not—a casualty, perhaps, of its fealty to pure fact.

One central concern of the play—what it means to look at the mundane when, somewhere just beyond the frame, there’s a massacre afoot—makes it a kind of companion piece to “The Zone of Interest,” the recent Oscar-winning film by Jonathan Glazer, very loosely adapted from the novel by Martin Amis. The movie tracks the home life of Rudolf Höss, the administrator who, with his distinct high-and-tight haircut, slick and floppy up top, recurs throughout the Höcker album. “The Zone of Interest” uses sound design—the crackle of flame, cries coming from invisible mouths—to create an underhum of terror, to make an unseen context the whole point of the domesticity that shows up onscreen. “Blueberries” makes that irony a clear pain point. The museum’s staff worry about showing the photographs, but eventually, and rightly, decide that there’s no way not to. To understand sickness like this, you need to see how the perpetrators are—in more ways than you might like—just like you.

Blood underpaints today’s world, too, no matter how many lovelier colors fill our normal days. You go about your business; attend meetings on Zoom or at some office; ride the subway and watch the faces, with their plural origins, blur past; take walks through the warming spring air, admiring the onrushing green. Now and again, you look down at your phone, and here come the images: a bloody limb, a shell-shocked parent, a dead child caked in rubble and dust. Photographic evidence, the irrefutable cinematography of the smartphone amid emergency, death in vivid hue: this is how we know that things are wrong.

There is no leisure in these newer images, no blueberries and cream eaten by smiling accessories to a heinous passage in history—just the news, seemingly simultaneous with its happening. I sometimes wonder if these images and videos, for now fleeting on screens, illustrations on a scrollable feed, will one day adorn the walls of museums, or whichever repositories the people of the future choose for the display of their collective glories and great shames.

Auschwitz and the other camps whose names haunt our textbooks were mysteries to outsiders—this was part of their power. It took so many efforts of reconstruction like the one dramatized by “Here There Are Blueberries” just to know, belatedly, what exactly went on. Photography will also be part of the story of today’s traumas, but in a very different way. We won’t be able to say we didn’t see. ♦

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The Washington Roundtable discusses the unusual and dangerous aspects of Donald Trump’s reëlection campaign, from his quid-pro-quo offer to oil executives to his daughter-in-law’s new leadership position in the Republican National Committee.

This week’s reading:

• “On Trump and the Elusive Fantasy of a 2024 Election Game-Changer,” by Susan B. Glasser
• “Can You Believe What Michael Cohen Just Said at the Trump Trial?,” by Eric Lach
• “It’s a Climate Election Now,” by Bill McKibben
• “Stormy Daniels’s American Dream,” by Naomi Fry
• “The Historic Trump Court Cases That We Cannot See,” by Neal Katyal

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

Earlier this year, the singer and songwriter Billie Eilish, who is twenty-two, became the youngest two-time Oscar winner in history, collecting the Best Original Song award for “What Was I Made For?,” a delicate existential ballad that she co-wrote for the film “Barbie.” (She also won in 2022, for “No Time to Die,” a moody and portentous Bond theme.) Incidentally, Eilish is also the youngest person ever to have a clean sweep of all four of the main Grammy categories (Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year), which she achieved in 2020, for her début LP, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” At that year’s ceremony, moments before Album of the Year was announced, Eilish can be seen mouthing, “Please don’t be me”; onstage, standing alongside her brother Finneas O’Connell, who is also her co-writer and producer, she seemed bewildered, if not mortified. “We wrote an album about depression, and suicidal thoughts, and climate change,” O’Connell told the crowd. “We stand up here confused and grateful.” It’s both heartening and slightly mystifying that Eilish, who writes sombre, idiosyncratic, goth-tinged electro-pop about her loneliness and boredom, has become such a lodestone for industry accolades. “Man am I the greatest / God I hate it,” Eilish sings on “The Greatest,” a forlorn, walloping song from her compact but powerful new album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” which was just released.

Eilish is known for taking her time in a song, sometimes crawling through a melody as though it were a bowl of molasses, and she often chooses to sing in a whisper, letting a note hang in the air before it dissipates entirely. Her vocal style reminds me of an evanescing cloud of smoke after someone blows out a cluster of birthday candles—beautiful, fleeting, a little bit haunted. Yet, on “The Greatest,” Eilish belts and bellows. “I waited / And waited,” she wails, her voice getting bigger and bigger. It’s rare to find Eilish in bloodletting mode, but fury and loudness suit her, too. Lyrically, much of “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is about wanting a relationship but failing, in some fundamental and inescapable way, to sustain closeness with another person. It’s an interesting problem: desiring something, but also realizing you are incapable of having it. The twists and turns of Eilish’s emotional journey are reflected and amplified by O’Connell’s production; these songs are prone to sudden changes and reinventions, ups and downs. Faster, slower, close, far, here, gone. “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” a new song about a soured relationship—“You were so mediocre,” Eilish sings—shifts from a lovelorn, jazz-inflected torch song into a pulsing club banger, cold and threatening. In less assured hands, that transformation might be disorienting, but Eilish and O’Connell are masterly at finding the connective tissue between disparate feelings and sounds. Why can’t a love song be gentle and aggressive, grounded and spectral? Isn’t love?

From the start of her career, Eilish has never been particularly comfortable with celebrity, and at times she has appeared viscerally repelled by it; the anxiety and paranoia brought on by global fame are another theme here, and are perhaps directly responsible for Eilish’s romantic angst. On “Skinny,” the yearning ballad that opens the album, she reflects on coming of age under the scrutiny of strangers. “People say I look happy / Just because I got skinny / But the old me is still me and maybe the real me / And I think she’s pretty,” Eilish sings, her voice feathery and resigned. (“The Internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny / And somebody’s gotta feed it,” she points out.) “Skinny” is a gorgeous song, wounded and fragile, with a whiff of Lilith Fair folksiness. It ends with a mournful string figure by the Attacca Quartet, the only other musicians featured on the album besides Eilish, O’Connell, and Eilish’s tour drummer, Andrew Marshall.

Eilish writes often about control, an idea that manifests in images of closed doors and lyrics about feeling caged. (The cover art features a photograph of Eilish sinking into a deep-blue abyss, just below a white door.) “When I step off the stage I’m a bird in a cage / I’m a dog in a dog pound,” she sings, on “Skinny.” On “Chihiro,” she is imploring: “Open up the door / Can you open up the door?” On “Blue,” which closes the album, she returns to both images:

Don’t know what’s in store
Open up the door
The back of my mind
I’m still overseas
A bird in a cage

Claustrophobia, darkness, fear—these are all ideas that Eilish and O’Connell luxuriated in on “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” but here they feel deeper, broader, and more dramatic. Partway through “Blue,” Eilish starts chanting, her voice so flat and filtered that at first I thought it might be O’Connell. For Eilish, fame and depression are entangled, heavy predicaments to endure and, she hopes, survive:

And I could say the same ’bout you
Born blameless grew up famous too
Just a baby born blue now

Musically, “Hit Me Hard and Soft” lands somewhere between “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” and Eilish’s second album, “Happier Than Ever,” from 2021. In recent years, Eilish’s songwriting has felt more indebted to jazz-adjacent pop singers such as Peggy Lee and Amy Winehouse than to the spooky despondency of Nine Inch Nails. “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is mature and nuanced, and that feels appropriate—the spiritual distance between seventeen and twenty-two is vast—but I sometimes miss Eilish’s giddier and more puerile side. Many listeners first came to know Eilish through “Bad Guy,” the fifth single from “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” It’s a funny and inventive track, featuring a campy synthesizer riff and a dramatic tempo change. What made “Bad Guy” so intoxicating was the artful way it balanced youthful insouciance—that “Duh,” delivered at the end of each chorus, was so perfectly saturated with teen-age disdain it felt like getting hit in the face with a water balloon—and a kind of playful, empowered sensuality. In the song’s video, Eilish sports blue hair, and blood is smeared across her face; her eyes are vacant, unfeeling. But she also dances around like an enormous goof, wearing an oversized butter-yellow sweatsuit, and leads a gang of dudes down a suburban street from behind the wheel of a toy race car.

That particular combination—“Bad Guy” is equal parts serious and silly—reminds me of a lot of things, but especially of sex, which can be solemn, sometimes sacred, but also completely absurd. Eilish embraces her carnal appetites on “Lunch,” a new song about pure animal lust:

I could eat that girl for lunch
Yeah she dances on my tongue
Tastes like she might be the one

For all the hand-wringing about the lagging sex drive of younger Americans, Eilish has been outspoken about the ways in which that sort of physical communion can be healing. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, she endorsed the myriad benefits of masturbation—“People should be jerking it, man”—and of female sexual pleasure more generally. “I think it’s such a frowned-upon thing to talk about, and I think that should change,” she said. “You asked me what I do to decompress? That shit can really, really save you sometimes, just saying. Can’t recommend it more, to be real.” “Lunch” is a weird, pulsing track, vigorous and horny. It’s also my favorite song on the new album, in part because Eilish sounds incredibly free, which is to say, she sounds like herself. ♦

On Tuesday afternoon, at the defense table on the fifteenth floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, Donald Trump was in his customary position: eyes closed, suit jacket splayed open, paunch sagging, arms crossed in a pose of utter boredom and contempt. Some said he was sleeping. I’d say more like anti-woke. Behind Trump, in the first row of the gallery, his son Eric was sitting upright, intently watching the witness on the stand: the former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen. Trumpworld—the swirl of relatives, hangers-on, opportunists, and would-be accomplices that surround the former President—has had many defectors over the years. But Cohen is the only one who spent a decade working for Trump and his kids. He admitted, on the stand, to having once thought of the Trumps as his “surrogate family.” Now that family was watching him air their dirty laundry. Eric Trump sat beside his wife, Lara Trump, the current co-chair of the Republican National Committee. At one point during Cohen’s testimony, Eric placed a hand in Lara’s lap. She placed her hands on top of his, as if to comfort him.

Cohen’s testimony is the crux of the Manhattan District Attorney’s case against Trump. This trial has also been Cohen’s Super Bowl. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to illegally paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film star, in the lead-up to the 2016 election, to keep her from going public with a story about having sex with Trump in 2006. Cohen spent thirteen months in prison, and, since his release, in 2020, he has been out to get revenge on his old boss. He has published tell-all books, hosted anti-Trump podcasts, and posted gleefully on social media about Trump getting indicted. “You know who I am, don’t you?” Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s attorneys, asked Cohen, at the start of his cross-examination. “I do,” Cohen replied. “As a matter of fact,” Blanche said, “on April 23rd—so after the trial started in this case—you went on TikTok and called me a ‘crying little shit,’ didn’t you?” Cohen didn’t flinch. “Sounds like something I would say,” he said.

On direct, Susan Hoffinger, an Assistant District Attorney, had asked Cohen about the scheme she and her fellow-prosecutors have sketched out in their case, in which Trump allegedly directed an illegal effort to bury negative stories about him before Election Day, 2016. Cohen did his best to confirm the story Hoffinger coaxed from him. When asked on whose behalf he’d paid a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to Daniels, he said, “On behalf of Mr. Trump.” And, if not for the Presidential campaign, would he have paid the money to Daniels? “No, Ma’am,” Cohen said.

Cohen was the prosecution’s final witness. The witnesses who preceded him had foreshadowed much of his testimony. Various former Trump aides said that Trump had signed checks that reimbursed Cohen for the payments to Daniels—and copies of those checks were shown to the jury. (One lesson future Presidents should take from Trump’s trial is not to sign their hush-money checks in Sharpie.) The jury has also seen handwritten notes jotted down by the Trump Organization’s C.F.O., Allen Weisselberg, detailing the hush-money reimbursement. (To settle the Daniels payment and some other outstanding business with Cohen, and to account for taxes, Weisselberg “grossed up” the reimbursement to three hundred and sixty thousand dollars, and then added a sixty-thousand-dollar “bonus.”) The D.A.’s office subpoenaed the publishing companies that have published Trump’s books, so that executives had to read out authenticated excerpts from Trump’s business-advice books, in which he has revelled in his reputation as a miser and boasted about reviewing each and every one of the checks he signs. (From “Think Like a Billionaire”: “When you are working with a decorator, make sure you ask to see all of the invoices.”) And yet, the only person able to tell the jury that Cohen committed his crimes at Trump’s behest was Cohen himself, who testified about a number of conversations in which he and Trump were allegedly the only participants. “You cannot make a serious decision about President Trump relying on the words of Michael Cohen,” Blanche told the jury during the defense’s opening statement. But the D.A. was asking them to do just that.

Going into Cohen’s cross-examination, the reporters who have been covering the trial mostly agreed that damaging Cohen’s credibility was the defense’s last and best chance at avoiding a conviction. The prosecution had been frank with the jury, not hiding the fact that Cohen is a confirmed perjurer, who carried himself like a gangster, and who was despised by almost everyone he dealt with. Could Blanche convince any member of the jury that Cohen wasn’t a scoundrel truthteller but merely a scoundrel? On Tuesday, Blanche mostly meandered. After his “crying little shit” opening gambit, he asked Cohen to confirm that he’d once referred to Trump as “dictator douchebag.” Did the jury get anything out of knowing the answer? (For most of the trial, the jurors have sat stone-faced.) Did Blanche’s client enjoy being there as he asked the question? (“It’s a disgrace what’s happening. This is something that shouldn’t be happening,” Trump told reporters in the hallway outside the courtroom.) “By the way,” Blanche asked, late in the day, “is it fair to say that you are motivated by fame?” “No, sir,” Cohen replied. “Is it fair to say you are motivated by publicity?” Blanche asked. “I don’t know if that is fair to say,” Cohen said. “I am motivated by many things.” Blanche did eventually get Cohen to acknowledge that he has lied to Congress, to Robert Mueller, and to the judge who sentenced him to three years in prison. Still, the legal analysts and professional Trump watchers in the gallery didn’t think much of Blanche’s work. “He needed to come out swinging, impose his will on Cohen, rattle him & make impression on jury,” Norm Eisen, a co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, posted on X. “Not happening.” George Conway, the ex-husband of the former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, reposted Eisen and added his take: “Blanche just isn’t very good.” But Blanche has only been Trump’s lawyer for a year. Cohen has years of experience on him.

For how historically significant the Trump trial is, and how serious its consequences may be, the case is built around almost unbelievably childish behavior. On direct, Cohen testified that he and Trump spoke about the payment to Daniels numerous times, including during a phone call on October 24, 2016. Phone records show that at 8:02 P.M., Cohen called Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard, and that the call lasted a minute and thirty-six seconds. Hoffinger had asked Cohen why he’d called Schiller that night. “Because I needed to speak to Mr. Trump . . . to discuss the Stormy Daniels matter and the resolution of it,” Cohen said. He said he often called Schiller if he needed to reach Trump. (Hope Hicks, Trump’s former communications aide, said Schiller often helped in “facilitating” phone calls for Trump.) On Thursday, Blanche asked Cohen about the October 24th call. “Do you remember at that time—October 22, 23, 24, 2016—you were receiving a bunch of ongoing and continuing harassment phone calls?” On screens, Blanche showed the jury text messages between Cohen and Schiller on the night of the 24th, in which Cohen asked Schiller how to report to the Secret Service the phone number of a teen-ager who’d been prank-calling him. A few minutes later, Schiller had texted back, asking Cohen to call him. “You had enough time in that one minute and thirty-six seconds to update Mr. Schiller about all the problems you were having with these harassing phone calls,” Blanche asked Cohen, “and also update President Trump on the status of the Stormy Daniels situation?”

Cohen said yes, he’d talked to both Schiller and Trump on the call. “I always ran everything by the boss immediately,” he replied. “And, in this case, it could have just been saying, ‘Everything is being taken care of, it’s going to get resolved.’ ” It was an awkward admission—Cohen had said nothing about having problems with a teen-ager, or talking to Schiller, earlier in the week. “That’s not what you testified to on Tuesday,” Blanche said, his voice rising. “That was a lie: you did not talk to President Trump on that night.” Blanche hit his high note. “You can admit it!” he screamed.

“No, sir,” Cohen said, coolly. “I can’t.”

On direct, Cohen had admitted to bullying and lying for a living when he worked for Trump—and to loving his job at the Trump Organization. “The only thing that was on my mind was to accomplish the task to make him happy,” he said. Witnesses usually dread cross-examinations, but in some ways Cohen seemed to be having a better time under hostile questioning from Blanche than he had while being led along by Hoffinger. Bullshitting, obfuscating, conflict—these are professional skills that Cohen still clearly enjoys indulging in. Blanche questioned him about a surreptitious tape he had made of Trump discussing a hush-money payment to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate who also said she had an affair with Trump. “You understand that it’s not ethical for a lawyer to record a conversation with their client, correct?” Blanche asked. “That’s correct,” Cohen said. Blanche continued that “unless there is a very specific circumstance, you’re not supposed to record your client, correct?” “You’re not, except, of course, [for the] crime-fraud exception, Rule 12,” Cohen said. Blanche sputtered. “I was just giving the example,” Cohen said, softly.

Of all the Trumpworld apostates, Cohen is the one who has remained most Trump-like. On the stand, he acknowledged that he saw many of his own qualities reflected in his former boss, and that he had adopted Trump’s playbook as his own: never back down, never admit error, never show embarrassment. A jury may well decide to take him at his word, but it is impossible to think that any one in the jury box completely believes him. The question is whether they’ll believe him more than they will Trump. The former President has expressed outrage that Cohen—a rat, a traitor, a “sleaze ball”—might do him in. Cohen has said that doing what he did for Trump ruined his life. In this way, they deserve each other. Nearly a decade ago, they cooked up a hush-money scheme so crooked that it’s still jamming up the gears of American politics. Seven years ago, one became President, and the other allowed himself to fantasize about becoming Attorney General, or maybe White House chief of staff. Now one is an ex-con, and the other may soon be branded a felon, and then, in a few months, maybe President-elect. ♦

Some Hollywood clichés are so well understood that they become shorthand for improbable events in the real world. Among pregnant women, the expression “Hollywood birth” is often thrown around to refer to instances of childbirth that follow the tidy trajectory seen in movies and TV shows: A woman feels a dramatic gush of fluid between her legs, screams vigorously en route to a hospital, yells profanities at her husband, and, with a few Lamaze-style breaths, pushes out a healthy baby. (Sometimes there is a threat of delivery in the car.) Although childbirth is always momentous, the reality of it—an unwieldy and unpredictable process that often unfolds in the course of many days, and with varying degrees of medical intervention—does not fit neatly into most screenplays.

As with childbirth, the humdrum or unpleasant realities of pregnancy are often smoothed over in popular culture. “She runs to the bathroom, she throws up once, and then, in the next scene, she’s in overalls painting a barn, like, ‘Yay! I can’t wait to meet you!’ ” Amy Schumer joked in her Netflix special “Growing,” from 2019.

That special was filmed when Schumer was pregnant and suffering from an extreme and poorly understood version of morning sickness called hyperemesis gravidarum. Though the pregnancy debilitated Schumer physically, it ignited her creatively. As she toured the material for “Growing,” she was also filming a three-part documentary series for HBO, titled “Expecting Amy.” The experience of gestation and hyperemesis had such an impact on Schumer that she continued to explore it in her work, even after giving birth to her son. The second season of her Hulu series, “Life & Beth,” which was released earlier this year, is a loosely autobiographical chronicle of Schumer’s pregnancy and her marriage to the chef Chris Fischer. In the season finale, Beth (played by Schumer) and her husband (played by Michael Cera) head to a hospital with the calm, distinctly un-Hollywood air of the overly prepared: Beth is having a scheduled Cesarean section.

Schumer is just one of the many female comics who have reëxamined pregnancy on the stage or screen in the past decade. In 2016, Ali Wong had her breakout moment with “Baby Cobra,” a special filmed during the third trimester of her first pregnancy. In the performance, Wong skewered the progressive gender ideals of her generation with raunch and candor. “Bitch, shut up!” she said of feminists who paved the way for women to enter the workforce instead of staying home and watching “Ellen.” “They ruined it for us!” At one point, Wong jokes about miscarriage with a shrug. When she lost a child, she explained, she used the experience to extract generosity from her husband. “He took me to see Beyoncé. He bought me a bike off of Craigslist,” she said. “That’s my miscarriage bike.” “Baby Cobra” transformed Wong into a star not just because of its content and her shrewd jokes but because of her physicality. Seeing a large baby bump proudly displayed in a bold print, body-con minidress, rather than concealed, felt like a revelation. When she released her next special, “Hard Knock Wife,” Wong had a built-in callback available, and a sight gag; she was pregnant with her second child.

In a 2016 New Yorker profile of Wong, Ariel Levy described pregnancy as “the last taboo of female sexuality.” In facing the subject head on, “Baby Cobra” was seen as a watershed moment in comedy, ushering forth a new wave of artists for whom pregnancy and childbirth were not professional liabilities but platforms on which to build new material. Pregnancy proved to be an excellent vehicle for frank body humor, and also a lens on class and social mores. Millennial women are armed with more information and reproductive technology than any previous generation. They were—and are—having children later in life, and are ready to discuss the experience openly. A 2021 standup special from Ester Steinberg was even billed as a “postpartum special,” filmed just six weeks after she gave birth. Pregnancy was still fresh in her mind, and she likened her unborn baby to a guy who was catfishing her. “There’s this guy . . . I have these two really blurry pictures of him, and I’m ready to rearrange my entire life,” she joked.

The actress and comic Jenny Slate, ten years after starring in an indie rom-com about a romance that blossoms in the wake of an abortion (“Obvious Child”), recently released a standup special, “Seasoned Professional,” which centers largely on pregnancy and labor. Like Steinberg, Slate saw the raunchy potential in the birth process, which she describes as “exploding a baby out of my vagina.” The pop-culture images of pregnancy of these comics’ adolescence were those of young women saddled with unexpected pregnancies, like the protagonists of “Juno” and “Knocked Up.” For Wong, Slate, and their cohort, pregnancy was a carefully considered choice, and the focus of these projects is on the destabilizing experience of bearing that choice. (Perhaps comics of the post-Roe era will contend with the diminished choices available to so many women.) Moments after giving birth, Slate jokes that she immediately wanted to watch “Paddington 2,” one of her favorite movies. “I wasn’t allowed to watch it right away because they were, like, ‘You have something else to do right now,’ ” she jokes. “ which is, you know, what parenthood is—it’s not all about you.”

Few have spent more time pregnant onscreen in this era than the comic actress Ilana Glazer. Best known for playing a younger version of herself in the New York City buddy-comedy series “Broad City,” Glazer made her name as a roguish stoner who was allergic to adult responsibilities. She may have surprised “Broad City” fans, then, when she announced that she was pregnant in 2021. The subject had long been on her mind: She’d been working on the screenplay for a horror film called “False Positive,” a kind of “Rosemary’s Baby” for the I.V.F. class. Glazer, who was pregnant during the film’s rollout, played a professionally ambitious and reproductively challenged woman named Lucy. With the help of a fertility Svengali named Dr. Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), Lucy becomes pregnant with triplets. In “False Positive,” the minute-to-minute body horrors of pregnancy are overshadowed by a ghastly and somewhat muddled portrayal of the medical establishment’s mistreatment of women. Lucy’s fertility doctor has impregnated her with his own sperm—with the approval of her husband—in an attempt to fulfill his own perverted God complex.

The mood is lighter in “Babes,” a new film co-written by Glazer and directed by Pamela Adlon, the force behind the FX show “Better Things.” In the movie, Glazer returns to a familiar mode, playing a hapless single woman named Eden, who teaches yoga in her fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Queens. Like Ilana in “Broad City,” she is hopelessly attached to her longtime female best friend, Dawn (played by Michelle Buteau), and she pines for their adolescent dynamic. Dawn, however, has a husband, a toddler, and a newborn to care for. An unexpected pregnancy resulting from a one-night stand brings Eden’s path closer to Dawn’s, but it also underscores the chasm that exists between the life of a pregnant person and that of a woman raising children. Eden lives in a world of anticipation and imagination; she still has the free time to make an elaborate scrapbook outlining her birth plan, with an accompanying playlist. Dawn, meanwhile, is forced to be a tactician, living her life from one breast-pump session to the next.

As a document of adult female friendship, the film brings to mind the dynamics explored by Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph in “Bridesmaids.” In that movie, two lifelong best friends come to a crossroads when one (Rudolph) is ready to move forward in life and get married, while the other (Wiig) is suffering from arrested development. But, although “Bridesmaids” was an antic, slapstick comedy, “Babes” is comparatively understated, playing out more like a series of vignettes and half-finished thoughts. Adlon, whose show “Better Things” featured a single mom named Sam Fox raising three teen-age daughters, has a subtle, indie touch that she applies to “Babes.” The film does not reach for any broader lessons about pregnancy or early motherhood, except to suggest that they’re muddier than previous depictions have led us to believe. Eden’s experience is strained by her status as a single parent-to-be, but we also see that Dawn, who is well off and happily married, is full of turmoil and confusion, too.

The humor of the quiet “Babes” emerges in small moments of absurdity, like when Dawn trips on mushrooms and says she “feels like she could breast-feed the Knicks,” or when Eden interviews a male doula. The film is openly aware of the lineage of pregnancy onscreen. “In the movies, it’s like this whoosh,” Dawn says in the movie’s opening scene, as her water breaks. “But this is just a light pussy drizzle.” Later, when Eden reunites with her distanced father on the day of a crucial prenatal appointment, he tells her, “I know this would be, like, a great time for this to turn into, like, a Nora Ephron movie, and for me to come to all your appointments”

It’s a tough task, it turns out, trying to say anything new or interesting about such a universal experience. And pregnancy is a tricky experience to render onscreen: It is long, often dull, and full of private discomforts and epiphanies. “The days ticked inexorably past,” the novelist Anne Enright wrote in “Making Babies,” her memoir about motherhood. “I did not feel like an animal, I felt like a clock, one made of blood and bone, that you could neither hurry nor delay.” Much of the acting Schumer does in “Life & Beth” is wincing from the ambient unpleasantness of her growing belly.

Pregnancy, at any stage of life or time in history, is an experience of cognitive dissonance—a purgatory between a former life and a future one. Slate, for her part, deftly describes how surreal this can be, in her recent special. “I had a baby, I’m not trying to skirt the issue. . . . But, like, it does still feel, like, it was me? Like, I did it?” she wonders. “I was pregnant for a long time, and I understood that I was, but, like, even on the way to the hospital . . . I was just, like, kind of feels like someone else is going to sub in here, though. . . . It’s just such an extreme experience . . . It just doesn’t feel like something I would do.” ♦

When the Senate Judiciary Committee met for a hearing on two nominees to the federal bench, on the morning of December 13th, only one of them was considered controversial. Nicole Berner, a lawyer in her late fifties, had served as general counsel to the Service Employees International Union and, before that, as a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood. Biden had nominated her to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, Virginia. “Historically, she’s the one who would get all the attention,” a senior committee staffer told me, referring to Berner’s work on labor and reproductive rights. “This is stuff that tends to be red meat for Republicans.” Sitting next to her, in glasses and a navy suit, was the other nominee, Adeel Mangi, a forty-six-year-old corporate lawyer from New Jersey. Mangi was born in Pakistan, educated at Oxford and Harvard, and has lived in the U.S. for more than twenty years. A partner at an élite law firm, he has amassed a long record of pro-bono advocacy on civil-rights and religious-liberty cases. His nomination to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in Philadelphia, was historic: if confirmed, Mangi would become the first Muslim to serve as a federal appellate judge. The White House, along with top Democrats, was eager to celebrate the achievement.

By ten o’clock, as the hearing started, the room was unusually crowded. Berner’s supporters from the labor movement had turned out, expecting a showdown. The exchange went as predicted for half of the hearing, with the first five Republicans grilling Berner about her time with the union. But when it was Ted Cruz’s turn, two hours into the proceedings, he didn’t address Berner at all. “Mr. Mangi,” he began. “Last week, the American people were horrified to watch the testimony of the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn, where all three of them failed to speak clearly, denouncing antisemitism.” This was a reference to a contentious hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in which Republicans, led by Elise Stefanik, the party’s Conference chairwoman and a Harvard alumna, had badgered university presidents about incidents of antisemitism on their campuses. Their cautious, legalistic answers caused a controversy that forced two of them from their jobs. Now, Cruz told Mangi, “I’m perhaps most troubled by the fact that you served as an advisory-board member for the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers Law School from 2019 to 2023. And, sadly, I think that center embraces the same extremism and myopia that we saw on display from the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn.”

Other Republican members had mentioned Mangi’s association with the center. Lindsey Graham, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, had cited a symposium co-sponsored by the center in 2021—“Whose narrative? 20 Years since September 11, 2001”—which featured one speaker who once pleaded guilty to a terrorism-related charge and another who’d helped found Students for Justice in Palestine and had called for “an intifada in the United States.” Mangi wasn’t involved in the center’s daily operations, however, so Graham could only insinuate that Mangi should have been better informed about the event. “I don’t want to belabor it,” Graham said, before moving on.

Cruz, for his part, read from a 2021 letter co-signed by the center’s director and posted on the group’s Web site which decried the “colonial conditions of structural violence and inequality that Palestinians live under.” Did Mangi agree? “Any calls for genocide of any people are absolutely horrific, horrific,” Mangi replied. Cruz grew more combative. In a raised voice, he asked Mangi about October 7th: “Do you condemn the atrocities of the Hamas terrorists?” “Yes,” Mangi began, before Cruz cut him off. “Is there any justification for those atrocities?” he asked. Mangi replied, “Senator, I’ll repeat myself. The events of October 7th were a horror,” adding, after another interruption, “I have no patience—none—for any attempts to justify or defend those events.” When it was Josh Hawley’s turn to address the nominees, a few minutes later, the inquisition continued. “Does Israel have a right to exist?” “Should American Jews be safe in their homes and on their campuses?” Would Mangi say whether he felt that Israel was a “violent colonialist state”? After the hearing, several members of the committee’s staff apologized to Mangi personally. “I’ve sat through hundreds and hundreds of these nominations, Dick Durbin, the chairman, went on to say. “I will tell you what happened in this committee . . . to this nominee is a new low.”

A month later, the committee’s members gathered for a vote on Berner and Mangi. Several other Republicans on the committee spoke out about Mangi’s association with the Rutgers Center; another flash point, which had not come up in the previous hearing, was that he’d also donated some six thousand dollars to the group, with his law firm contributing more. “Do we really believe he had no knowledge of the deeply hateful and antisemitic nature of the institution that he advised and donated to and worked for for a number of years?” John Cornyn, of Texas, asked. At one point, Marsha Blackburn, a conservative hard-liner from Tennessee, held up a Washington Times op-ed that called Mangi “Hamas’ favorite judicial nominee.”

What Cornyn, Blackburn, and the others failed to mention was that, since the first hearing, prominent Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, had come to Mangi’s defense. These were hardly groups known for their tolerance of antisemites. The Republican senators’ questioning of Mangi on Israel amounted to “inappropriate and prejudicial treatment,” according to a statement from the A.D.L. “This was an attempt to create controversy where one did not exist.” Nevertheless, neither Mangi nor Berner received any Republican support. Each passed out of the Judiciary Committee on strict party-line votes—eleven Democrats to ten Republicans.

On March 19th, the full Senate voted on Berner’s nomination, confirming her to the Fourth Circuit by a razor-thin margin. Mangi’s nomination, meanwhile, never came to the floor. A few days after Berner started her new job on the bench, her son Mattan Berner-Kadish, a union organizer, published an op-ed in the New Jersey Star-Ledger. “Adeel Mangi should be a judge right now,” he wrote. Mangi’s credentials weren’t “the things keeping him off the bench. Racism and Islamophobia are.”

Republicans may have smeared Mangi, but they weren’t the reason that his nomination was stalled. Three Democratic senators opposed him. Without their support, given the uniformity of the Republican opposition, the Democrats lacked the votes. Joe Manchin, who claimed that he couldn’t support a nominee without Republican backers, was the most predictable of these Democratic holdouts. The other two were more surprising: Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, the Nevada delegation.

Cortez Masto, a moderate with law-and-order bona fides (her husband is a retired Secret Service agent), was the first to issue a public statement, which made no mention of Mangi’s association with the Rutgers Center. Instead, Cortez Masto raised another issue: his role on the advisory board of Alliance of Families for Justice, an organization that supports people with relatives in prison. Mangi had already disclosed his ties to the group, which were minimal. In 2016, A.F.J. brought a case to Mangi’s law firm, looking for pro-bono counsel. It involved the death of Karl Taylor, a mentally ill inmate at Sullivan Correctional Facility, in New York, who’d been beaten and choked to death by prison guards the year before. Mangi spent the next few years investigating the case and bringing it to trial in the Southern District of New York. In 2020, on the morning of closing arguments, the prison agreed to a five-million-dollar settlement. The terms included a requirement that the prison install cameras and microphones throughout the facility. Mangi later pointed out that this “will increase safety for corrections officers and help protect them against any attacks from inmates or any false allegations of misconduct.” When A.F.J. asked Mangi to serve on its advisory board, he agreed, though the board never actually met. “It exists to serve as a resource in particular areas of expertise,” Mangi said.

A.F.J. often takes progressive positions that might make centrist Democrats uneasy. Its members and affiliates have, at various points, pushed for the humanitarian release of aging inmates serving long sentences. The group has sponsored events where attendees criticized the carceral system. But Mangi’s detractors gravitated toward what they considered A.F.J.’s original sin: Kathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground activist, who served twenty-two years in prison for her role in a botched 1981 robbery that killed two police officers and a security guard, was a member of the group’s board of directors. Mangi had never met Boudin, who died in 2022, but Cortez Masto still found the connection “deeply concerning.” She and Mangi had a conversation over Zoom in which he tried to address her problems with the group. Afterward, though, she told the press, “This organization has sponsored a fellowship in the name of Kathy Boudin, a member of the domestic terrorist organization Weather Underground, and advocated for the release of individuals convicted of killing police officers.”

Cortez Masto declined to speak with me, but a senior staffer told me that the senator “has heard from law enforcement in both northern and southern Nevada about their concerns with this nominee.” I called the leader of one group, Andrew Regenbaum, who heads the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers. He’s originally from upstate New York and still has a cell phone with a local area code. Boudin’s crime took place in Rockland County. “That’s where I grew up,” he told me. “The push to get Kathy Boudin out of jail”—which began when she was first up for parole, in 2001—“was pretty controversial back then.” Usually, Regenbaum didn’t follow federal nominees from the East Coast, but in late January he started receiving e-mail blasts from groups such as the National Sheriffs’ Association and the National Association of Police Organizations, calling on local officials to oppose Mangi. “I looked it up and agreed,” Regenbaum told me. (Other state and national law-enforcement organizations did not agree: eight of them, including the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, endorsed Mangi.)

It wasn’t difficult to identify the source of the controversy. The e-mails Regenbaum received coincided with the publication of a story in the Washington Free Beacon, an online right-wing news outlet, which claimed to have discovered Mangi’s connection to “a left-wing group with extensive ties to convicted cop killers.” It ran on December 15, 2023, two days after Mangi’s Senate hearing. Senators had a week to submit further written questions to the nominees. Yet, among the three hundred and twenty-eight follow-up questions Mangi received, not one of them mentioned his affiliation with A.F.J. In the January committee vote, the issue didn’t come up once. To my Senate sources, the disparity—another line of attack that none of Mangi’s Republican opponents felt the need to take up—was proof that those fighting his nomination were willing to dredge up anything.

“The traditional pattern that we see is that the controversy seems to blow over, then the dark-money attacks pick up,” the senior staffer on the Judiciary Committee told me. All through the winter, vulnerable Democrats in Montana and Pennsylvania were targeted with digital ads accusing Mangi of antisemitism. One of them, run by the Judicial Crisis Network, included footage from 9/11. “What we’re used to is that the line of attacks stays the same,” the staffer continued. “This one was different.” Another Democratic staffer told me, “These are two prongs of the same attack. When the antisemite line didn’t work in scaring away Democrats, they turned to the idea that he was anti-cop.”

Mangi is now in the peculiar limbo state of a doomed nominee. His nomination is close to being dead. All that’s left is a pronouncement that Democratic leadership is reluctant to make. The White House has continued to defend him, out of a combination of principle and pragmatism. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals is currently tilted in favor of conservatives by a single judge; if Mangi were confirmed, a Biden nominee would even the balance. The Administration could also claim a historic victory for Muslim representation, at a time when the left wing of the Democratic Party has assailed the President for his handling of the war in Gaza. Top officials, including the President’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, have been making the case to senators. “The smears have been painfully frustrating on more levels than I can count,” another White House official told me. Earlier this month, on the Senate floor, Durbin lambasted Republicans for vilifying Mangi and called for a fair consideration of his credentials. He “deserves to be evaluated based on his record, not on bad-faith falsehoods and innuendo,” Durbin said. It was a plea to Democrats disguised as a criticism of Republicans.

Mangi himself won’t speak to the press while he’s still, technically, under the consideration of the full Senate. His most vocal defender has been his home-state senator, Cory Booker, who first brought him to the attention of the White House. We spoke on Tuesday, as Booker was returning from a trip to Nevada, where he’d just attended a fund-raiser for a House member. “I did not see this coming,” he told me.

In New Jersey, Booker relied on a bipartisan group of lawyers and state representatives to find moderate candidates for the federal bench. “We never tried to propose someone who’d be a firebrand, especially not a Third Circuit judge,” he said. “We wanted a consensus-building candidate to avoid, frankly, any kind of partisan attacks.” He likened Mangi to Ketanji Brown Jackson—someone who, in Booker’s estimation, wasn’t just “eminently qualified” but also radiated a sense of uncommon decency. Booker referred to this quality, in Mangi, as the “apple-pie earnestness” of his “American story.” He added, “I could just see the moment he was sworn in.”

After Mangi’s hearing, Booker printed out the transcript of Cruz’s questions and read parts of it aloud, first to his colleagues behind closed doors, and then on the Senate floor. Each time, he told me, he did it “without injecting any emotion, just reading the dry transcript. It was so on-its-face appalling. . . . It was so stark.”

Still, there was no escaping the fact that Mangi had lost support among a few key Democrats. What did Booker make of the criticism, advanced by Cortez Masto, that Mangi’s association with A.F.J. was a dealbreaker? “I have seen this happen a lot in American politics,” he said. “The far-right wing throws fifty stink bombs and mud against the wall, hoping that something will stick and get picked up by the mainstream. So you see all these personal takedowns.” He saw his role as telling other Democrats, “If you have come to hear these things, let me show you this fact pattern. If you’ve come to have someone in your state, whom you trust, that’s telling you x, let me show you why that person is mistaken.”

Booker himself was shaken by how Mangi’s nomination had been “dashed and dirtied.” But he wasn’t yet prepared to concede that a judgeship was out of the question. “This is not over,” Booker said. “The reality in politics is that things change. People have been known to change their minds. People have been known to give an honest consideration of facts. I hope this is not an epitaph.” ♦

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On the afternoon of March 30th, Magnus Torén, the director of the Henry Miller Memorial Library, in Big Sur, California, had a plane to catch, the first leg of a long-planned vacation in northern India. Shortly after three o’clock, he and his wife, Mary Lu, left their house in Big Sur and drove north along Highway 1 toward Monterey, where Torén planned to get a bus to San Francisco International Airport. But shortly after crossing Bixby Creek Bridge, the ravine-spanning landmark featured in the opening credits of the HBO series “Big Little Lies,” they saw a truck pulled over with its lights flashing. After a rainy weekend, a piece of the southbound lane of Highway 1 had slid into the sea. “It looked like a big shark had taken a bite out of it,” Torén later recalled.

The couple figured that Caltrans, the California state transportation authority, was likely to close the road. Mary Lu, who was driving, steered carefully past the crumbled edge of the highway, staying in the northbound lane, so that her husband would make his flight. They were on a stretch of coast with no cell service, on the sole road that gives access to their region.

There are no official borders to Big Sur, a seventy-five-mile span of the California coast which, because of both challenging topography and strict land-use regulations, is one of the few remaining shoreline areas between Los Angeles and San Francisco without wide-scale development. Since the winding ribbon of Highway 1 opened, in 1937, driving the route—past vistas of the Santa Lucia mountains flanked by redwood groves and moody views of the Pacific—has become a rite of passage for tourists from around the world. Mythologized by Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan, and the photographer Ansel Adams, the landscape of Big Sur has a storied place in the national imagination. Henry Miller, who lived there for eighteen years, wrote a memoir titled “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch,” in which he described “skies of pure azure and walls of fog moving in and out of the canyons with invisible feet.” But since January, 2023, when, after heavy rains, a major landslide on Highway 1 blocked access to most of Big Sur from the south, it’s been impossible to take the iconic road trip through the landscape in its entirety. Two more landslides on the southern portion of Highway 1 earlier this year, caused by heavy rains, further limited access.

After the collapse that Torén witnessed near Big Sur’s northern end on March 30th, the two thousand or so residents who live in Big Sur found themselves almost entirely cut off in both directions for more than a month. The state parks were closed; the McWay waterfall made its plunge from a cliff to the ocean without any tourists photographing themselves in front of it; and the monks at the New Camaldoli Hermitage reached new levels of reclusion. Residents rode horses and went jogging along the normally busy highway; they pulled over at empty turnouts to look at whales. But beneath it all was a simmering anxiety: tourists are the foundation of the economy here; without them, most of the people in the region were out of work. “One has to be a little sensitive to the people living paycheck to paycheck,” Torén said. “But, for those of us who can survive these periods of isolation, then, of course, they are the best times of them all.”

Until May 17th, when a traffic light was installed which allowed northbound and southbound traffic to take turns along the single open lane, access to Big Sur was limited to twice-daily convoys monitored by the California Highway Patrol, in conjunction with the California Sheriff’s Department, which guided cars past the road failure at seven in the morning and five at night. I visited Big Sur on April 20th on a press pass. At the time, only residents and essential workers were allowed through. The day was an unofficial holiday for weed smokers; it also happened to be a Saturday of exquisite spring weather. I was hoping to get there early and visit a craft fair for marooned residents at an event space called the Village, which had been advertised online as “Quiltchella.” But I woke up to a flat tire and missed the morning convoy.

Instead, I met up with Sam Farr, who represented Big Sur as a Democratic congressman, from 1993 to 2017. Farr, who lives in Carmel, grew up spending summers in Big Sur and owns a property there. Over a Diet Coke at a restaurant, Farr gave me a history of the area. Originally the homeland of the Esselen people, it was mostly avoided by Spanish colonizers because of the steepness with which the mountains descended to the sea. Ranchers and farmers only began settling there in significant numbers in the late nineteenth century. Construction of the highway—which entailed blasting cliffsides, filling canyons, and felling redwoods, along with dumping a massive amount of debris into the ocean, possibly contributing to the extinction of the local abalone population—began in the nineteen-twenties; until then, much of the region was accessible solely by horseback.

The completion of the road coincided with many Americans’ desire to escape rapid urbanization and return to nature. Early ordinances limiting billboards and regulating construction sought to preserve the “unspoiled” appearance of the coast. In the seventies, Farr told me, there was a campaign, led in part by Ansel Adams, who photographed California’s landscapes, to designate the area a national seashore. It was met with pushback from homeowners, who did not want the land to be managed by the federal government and opened to mass tourism, and who argued that the human community of Big Sur was as important as the scenery. These residents, many of them wealthy, instead developed their own conservation agreement, which was adopted by county and state agencies in the nineteen-eighties. Among other measures, it banned new construction in the “viewshed,” or areas of land that could be seen from Highway 1, with the aim of preserving the visual experience of driving along the road.

“This is natural,” Ryne Leuzinger, the board chair of the Community Association of Big Sur, who is also a librarian at Cal State, Monterey Bay, told me, of the landscape. “But it’s not that natural, in the sense that a very carefully engineered preservation here took a lot of work and purposefulness to pull off.” Highway 1 was always a delicate prospect: a major fault line, the San Gregorio-Hosgri, runs through the area, and a combination of steep slopes and weak rock make the earth prone to movement. From above, the mountains erode toward the sea, causing landslides; from below, waves pound at the cliffs, compromising their stability.

Aside from a school board, there is no municipal government in Big Sur. Dome-shaped cabins, rustic redwood homes, and glassy mansions are hidden in off-the-grid hollows behind private gates. Living here is a lot of work: the local electricity provider reaches most but not all of the coast; sewage is handled through septic tanks or leach fields; and water comes from wells or rivers. Politics in the region are negotiated among competing interests: wealthy homeowners and retirees who dislike all the tourists; businesses that depend on them; teachers and carpenters who struggle to find affordable housing; government agencies that manage the state parks and national forest; and countercultural pilgrims still drawn to the idea of an Edenic place removed from society. But all these interests are heavily dependent on Highway 1. “The locals know every detail and history of the highway,” Farr told me. “Their ancestors helped build it, along with convict labor, in the nineteen-thirties. Every spot has a local name, like Grandpa’s Elbow, Rain Rocks, Cow Fence.” Every road failure, too, is given a local place name. The March 30th slip-out has been named Rocky Creek, in reference to a nearby bridge.

A lot of residents keep a stock of food in place in case they’re cut off. Many recall the ten-week closure of the highway in the early nineteen-eighties. That was when locals first learned the meaning of an El Niño year, when a shift in Pacific Ocean currents brings heavy rains, which in turn result in landslides. For a long time, however, a local east-west road out of Big Sur offered an alternative. But a combination of wildfires and prolonged rainfall in 2021 washed out multiple sections of that road, too, and it has remained closed ever since.

Indeed, the past decade has seen an unrelenting series of calamities, some related to climate change. A forest fire started by an illegal campfire in 2016 destroyed more than fifty homes, at the time California’s costliest wildfire. A bridge collapse and a mudslide on Highway 1 in 2017 left one section of Big Sur accessible only by foot for eight months. This was followed, in 2020 and 2021, by fires and pandemic-related closures, and a rare winter wildfire, in January, 2022. Then the heavy rains of another El Niño year arrived, and in early 2023 came the landslide that closed access from the south. Between 2016 and 2023, Caltrans spent three hundred and fifteen million dollars in unplanned emergency work in the area.

I asked Farr if anyone in Big Sur was currently experiencing existential doubt about the future of the highway. (“Why Highway 1 Is the Climate Challenge that California Can’t Fix,” a recent Washington Post headline read.) He countered that if the road through Big Sur were left to decay, then the entire state of California, and maybe the whole country, would experience existential doubt.

“This old two-lane craggy road along the coast is probably becoming one of the most expensive roads on the coast of California,” he admitted. “On the other hand, it is classic California. It’s the Yosemite of the coast.”

Just before five, I pulled my Subaru into the tail end of a long line of cars, behind an S.U.V. with a Big Sur-themed vanity plate and a bumper sticker that said “HONK IF YOU’RE LONELY.” We were in the prettiest traffic jam in the world, overlooking the Pacific’s milky blue, which faded out into the distance. The sound of the surf filtered in through my open window. A temporary cell-phone tower had been set up so that the people in line would have service, and a couple of cows, who had been grazing nearby, scratched their heads against it.

A sheriff drove slowly down the line to verify documentation. A few cars of what appeared to be tourists did U-turns and headed back in the direction of Carmel. Nearly an hour passed before the line began to move. The convoy followed a truck with flashing lights, passing through the choke point where construction crews were installing steel dowels into the rock cliff beneath the ruptured highway. After the truck escort pulled over, the cars sped up and spread out. It was strange to see the place so desolate.

The first sighting of people was at Quiltchella, which was winding down. Muddied four-wheel-drive trucks were parked along the highway, many with dogs’ noses sticking out of the open windows. A small group of people dressed in flannel shirts sat drinking in the back of a pickup; a d.j. was playing a rap remix of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” I decided to watch the sunset at a place called Vista Point, where the white waves crashing against the rocks below took on a cast of pink. For the better part of an hour, only a single car drove by.

The next day, I went for breakfast at Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, one of the few places that was open. The restaurant was decorated with a kind of nineteen-eighties whimsy: statues of angels, harlequin dolls, dried flowers, and string lights. I chatted with three locals partaking in a ritual of coming in on Sunday for “church”: Clovis Harrod, who is ninety-four, and her friends Kevin Southall and Shelley Newell. Harrod had moved to the area, in 1959, as a single mother with kids. Southall gave up a career as an academic at Berkeley to live here. In the mid-sixties, Newell had come down from Pacific Grove, a then dry town thirty miles to the north. “It was wild down here,” she said. “Down here, I was not a weirdo. I didn’t stand out.”

They reminisced about a different time. “It was all shacks,” Newell said. Harrod said that for twenty years she had lived in a cabin that had access to a private beach, paying only seventy-five dollars a month. Newell and Harrod had both worked at the restaurant where we were eating, and at Nepenthe, which Kerouac describes in his 1962 novel, “Big Sur,” as “a beautiful cliff top restaurant with vast outdoor patio, with excellent food.” Kerouac had come here after the publication of “On the Road” to avoid his fans and to try to dry out from alcohol. (He died in 1969, at forty-seven, of a hemorrhage that was likely caused by drinking.)

The trio admitted that they were enjoying the respite from the crowds. “You just get so killed with tourists now,” Southall said. It was a refrain I heard over and over in Big Sur: the precarious road was a known quantity. The new kind of tourist was a more perplexing crisis.

Big Sur attracts more than four and a half million visitors a year. Most drive through, take photographs, and leave. If they stop, it’s usually to spend time in Big Sur Village, which lines a northern section of the highway there. Many of the businesses and hotels there are family-owned. The business owners I spoke with estimated the landslide that cut off the highway to the south in 2023 reduced their foot traffic by twenty to fifty per cent.

After breakfast, I headed to Nepenthe, which was about to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary. The manager, Kirk Gafill, whose grandparents opened the restaurant in 1949, told me that he first noticed a new kind of tourism emerging around 2005. “Good old Facebook,” he said, sitting in the shade of a back patio. His restaurant, which would normally be serving about a thousand visitors a day, was currently closed. In Big Sur, as in many places, tourism had reorganized itself around people’s desire to document their visit in a photograph and then post it on social media, creating a feedback loop. “All of a sudden, you can’t get near the Eiffel Tower or all these iconic locations throughout the world,” Gafill said.

In the past decade, visitors have descended on a few photogenic spots in Big Sur: McWay Falls, Pfeiffer Beach, and—the place that came up the most often in conversation—Bixby Bridge. Whether their interest was sparked by “Big Little Lies”—the HBO show—or the chance to get a real-life photo of one of Apple’s classic screen savers no one could say, but suddenly tourists were parking their cars on a turnout near the bridge to take selfies; this caused traffic jams, something many residents told me was once unheard of. When I looked up Bixby Bridge on Instagram, I saw dozens of iterations of the same photo: women in styled hair and leggings gazing out at the sea, the arch of the bridge curving behind them. Not usually pictured: the traffic. A viral video taken on July 4, 2019, shows a line of cars backed up for miles on the north side of the bridge. Days later, someone hung a yellow banner from the bridge which read “OVERTOURISM IS KILLING BIG SUR.” As in Venice, or Kyoto, residents have started discussing methods to limit the influx. These include capping the number of vehicles allowed in per day and, controversially, reducing access to the beach.

It was hard not to feel nostalgic on the empty grounds of Nepenthe, which was designed by Rowan Maiden, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, with a round fireplace at its center and patios overlooking the Pacific. Inside the main dining room, photographs hung on the wall from the era when Henry Miller would sit at the bar with local poets and artists, telling ribald jokes. Gafill, who was born in 1961 and grew up in Big Sur, spent his childhood around hippies who washed dishes at the restaurant after having dodged the draft. Today, a rib-eye steak there costs sixty-eight dollars.

Gafill wore glasses, a polo shirt, and khakis, and had a tape measure attached to his belt loop; he is the president of the local Chamber of Commerce. As a third-generation business owner, he is tasked with balancing the restaurant’s bohemian legacy with the reality of modern tourism. As a result of the highway damage, ninety per cent of his staff of a hundred and fifteen was out of work; a third of his workers live on the property. With every road closure, he told me, social life in Big Sur reconfigures itself: people break up or fall in love; they get new jobs or they move away. And although he’s always run Nepenthe conservatively, knowing that years of lost revenue are a part of doing business here, the reserves can only last so long.

Despite the wishful thinking of some full-time residents, Big Sur cannot sustain itself alone. Its fire department is all-volunteer, it has a health clinic but no hospital, and it has no municipal law-enforcement agency, just county and state police. “All of the services, everything from gardeners to plumbers to just getting groceries or gas or being able to go out and go to a restaurant for a meal and have a social kind of environment, to have a school here, to have law enforcement here—all those things require visitation,” Gafill said.

When state politicians argue for continued government funding of Highway 1, they frame it in terms of the route’s economic contribution. The state’s tourism agency, Visit California, estimated that the 2017 road closure in Big Sur cost businesses from Los Angeles to San Francisco almost half a billion dollars. “This is an icon that people will delay trips to the state for if it’s not available,” Ryan Becker, a spokesman for Visit California, told me, adding that state and local tourism agencies are now promoting “Big Sur North” and “Big Sur South” and emphasizing the beauty of the wine country in Paso Robles, along the inland detour of the 101 Highway.

When it is fully open, Big Sur receives more visitors than Yosemite National Park does, but unlike the park it does not have the infrastructure—big parking lots, public rest rooms—to handle large crowds. Earlier this year, the Forest Service closed Big Sur’s only free beach campground after visitors left it littered with garbage and human waste. The land-use plan that protected Big Sur’s viewshed in the nineteen-eighties—a document that locals refer to with the same reverence as the Constitution—is currently undergoing an update, a contentious process involving fierce debates over an increase in the number of hotel rooms, the construction of new public rest rooms, and other topics. The new plan identifies four major crises: the lack of affordable housing; the overcrowding of Highway 1 brought about by increased tourism; the inadequate management of public land; and the threat of wildfires.

“Highway 1 sits at the edge of a continent on a rapidly changing planet,” a representative of Caltrans wrote to me. “But Highway 1 isn’t any ordinary road. There are few, if any, more iconic routes not just in California but anywhere in the world.” In public statements, the department has made plain that the repair currently under way at the Rocky Creek road failure is only temporary “until a permanent fix can be designed and constructed.” Fixing the landslides to the south to fully reopen the highway is also a longer-term project.

One thing that most people here agree on is that conditions, some made more extreme by climate change, are unlikely to get better: the combination of more wildfires, which increase the land’s susceptibility to erosion, and heavier rain storms is a recipe for an uptick in landslides. Geologists with the United States Geological Survey conduct some six flights a year over the coast of Big Sur to catch changes that might indicate a forthcoming landslide. A crumbling cliff, like the one that damaged the road on March 30th, is harder to predict. “It was a pretty simple rock fall on a fairly vertical face of rock,” Jonathan Warrick, a U.S.G.S. geologist who studies Big Sur, said. “And typically those things happen real fast. You have no warning.” Then again, he added, “No cliff erosion is really a surprise when you’re a geologist because that’s what cliffs along the coast do.”

When I walked into the Big Sur Taphouse on Saturday night, I had the feeling of being a stranger in town, as if a piano player had suddenly stopped playing in an Old West saloon. Everybody seemed to know one other. But their short period of isolation was about to end. Post Ranch Inn, a luxury resort, was going to start helicoptering guests in later that week—those who could afford it would enjoy the tantalizing prospect of seeing Big Sur empty. (“We don’t make any money,” Mike Freed, the resort’s managing partner, told me, “but it cuts our losses, and the key to it is it keeps our people working.”) The convoy would open to tourists a few days later.

One of the locals who advocated for letting tourists who had hotel reservations join the convoys was Matt Glazer, the manager of Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn. Glazer is bald and tattooed and in his early forties, and is known locally for his cooking; while we were standing by the driveway, someone pulled over and asked for his advice on braising a pork shoulder. That day, he wore a tank top with a picture of Walter Sobchak, John Goodman’s character from “The Big Lebowski,” and his catchphrase, “Calmer than you are.” Originally from New Orleans, Glazer told me that Hurricane Katrina gave him an initiation into recovering from natural disasters. “But Big Sur is unique in that it’s a revolving door of disaster,” he said. In his argument to local officials, Glazer had maintained that tourists were just as “essential” to the functioning of the local economy as many of the essential workers allowed through.

Glazer took me to a bend in the Big Sur River where locals gather on sunny days to go swimming. It was an idyllic scene. Restaurant workers and U.S. Forest Service firefighters were sunbathing and drinking wine. A group of them was planning to go hang out at the hot springs at Esalen that evening. Esalen, a retreat center, is normally open only to residents and registered guests: the cost of bunk-bed accommodations and a course in Relational Gestalt Practice, say, is twelve hundred dollars. Now it was offering a thirty-dollar day pass to locals. Glazer had just gone with his young son: from the swimming pool, they had watched whales breaching in the ocean.

Later, Glazer showed me around a residential neighborhood. I saw homes nestled into the green hills and, far below, a stunning beach that was closed to the public. I decided that Big Sur must have among the most No Trespassing signs per capita in the country. “NO BEACH ACCESS! RESIDENTIAL TRAFFIC ONLY! *VIOLATORS WILL BE TICKETED AND TOWED!* -TURN AROUND-” a handwritten sign on neon-orange poster board threatened. The scene reminded me of Malibu, that other famous stretch of Highway 1, where the hoi polloi must study the intricacies of public-access points hidden between multimillion-dollar homes in order to go to a beach that state law insists is public. Houses here sell for millions of dollars. I looked at the local rental listings on Zillow. The cheapest place was more than twelve thousand dollars a month.

Big Sur’s renter class, which includes much of the area’s workforce, is politically active, and several renters told me that they wanted to make it possible for regular people to still find their way here. But Big Sur can no longer pretend that it is a bohemian enclave; there is an affordable-housing crisis, as in much of California.

Short-term rentals are restricted by county law, but long-term renters—hotel workers, teachers, state-park employees—have traditionally lived in property managers’ cabins on the grounds of bigger homes. Many here now commute from the Monterey Peninsula. “People who’ve been around for a long time, they’ll say there were more people here in the eighties and nineties, and it felt like a more vibrant community,” Leuzinger, the Community Association of Big Sur chair, told me. Glazer said that when Deetjen’s, which operates as a nonprofit, temporarily closed, in 2020, he was inundated with calls from investors hoping to buy the place. In 2021, when a group of private-equity investors flipped a high-end Big Sur resort called the Alila Ventana, which they had bought in 2015, it sold for a hundred and forty-eight million dollars to the Hyatt Hotels Corporation—a deal that has been described as the most expensive price-per-key transaction for a North American resort.

Younger generations still find their way to Big Sur, but making a living can be hard. I spoke with Andrea Caruso, the owner of a Big Sur Village gift store called Mother Botanical & Shop, which opened in 2019. Caruso had just gone through a difficult year; the lease was not renewed on her longtime rental home, in Big Sur, so she had moved with her family to Carmel, and the closure of Highway 1 from the south had resulted in a fifty-per-cent drop in business. Caruso also does flowers for weddings—two planned for the month of April had been cancelled. “At this point, it’s devastating, to be honest,” she told me.

The highway had been open for only twenty years when Henry Miller fretted about the special character of Big Sur being spoiled. “The number of sightseers and visitors increases yearly,” he lamented. In “Big Sur,” Kerouac wrote about the loss of a dream, too. It is while watching “sleek long station-wagon after wagon” of tourists pass him by, with his thumb out on Highway 1, that his autobiographical narrator realizes hitchhiking culture has changed. “They see in me the very apotheosical opposite of their every vacation dream,” the character muses.

On my last afternoon in Big Sur, I pulled over by the side of the road, where a group of four friends stood watching a rookery of seals barking on some rocks. I met two old-timers, Dale Diesel and a man who introduced himself as Tiger Windwalker. (“My spirit name,” he said.) They told me about the time they had spotted an endangered California condor flying over this very highway turnout, and Diesel remembered selling sunglasses to Neil Young and Tibetan singing bowls to Robert De Niro, while working at the gift shop at Nepenthe. They attempted to describe Big Sur.

“It’s a spirit,” Diesel said.

“It’s a partnership between human and spirit,” Windwalker added.

“Us from the sixties can find that spirit pretty easily,” Diesel said.

Later, over the phone, I caught up with Magnus Torén, who had returned from his trip to India. A friend dropped him off at one side of the convoy, and his wife picked him up on the other side. Torén had sought out a particular kind of tourist experience in a little-travelled region of northern India, what he described as a “vain attempt at finding the autochthonous voice in a place.” It was what people still came looking for in Big Sur, too. ♦

Richard Brody
Staff writer

Filmmakers are considered storytellers, but the industry’s golden rule is to show, not tell. One such artist who deftly overcomes this paradox is the prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo. He develops sharply contoured yet formally audacious stories—most involving crises in the lives of artists—from the wispiest of premises. Then, working rapidly with scant budgets, he turns them into some of the talkiest movies this side of Wes Anderson, and invests them with dramatic power and confessional candor. Hong’s thirtieth feature, “In Our Day,” opens on May 17, at Film at Lincoln Center. It exemplifies his singular style: in its simplicity, it turns out to be immensely complex, and its modest domesticity touches on matters of life and death.

A still from “In Our Day.”Photograph courtesy Cinema Guild

The movie contains two stories packed into one, about two trios of acquaintances. Sang-won, an accomplished actress who has left the profession, has recently returned to Korea. While staying in the apartment of a middle-aged woman named Jung-soo, Sang-won is visited by her cousin Ji-soo, a young aspiring actress in search of career advice. Meanwhile, an elderly poet named Hong Ui-ju, who’s in ill health, is being filmed at home for a documentary portrait by a student named Ki-joo; during the shoot, a young aspiring actor, Jae-won, comes to see the elder artist, seeking his wisdom. The two fields of action, subtly connected, are intercut throughout, and what emerges from both is a quiet yet furious desperation. Ui-ju’s frozen solitude makes his creative ferment feel vain and his life pointless. As for Sang-won, she repudiates the film industry in a remarkable monologue in which she decries actors’ lack of freedom on movie shoots.

That’s not a problem for actors in Hong Sangsoo’s films. He grants his casts enormous leeway; performers improvise as if on a tightrope, in extremely long takes that offer no chance for cutting within the scene—providing them splendid showcases. One actress who has embraced Hong’s method is Isabelle Huppert, who has made three films with him. The first two—“In Another Country,” and one of his most daring masterworks, “Claire’s Camera,” shot at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival amid its events—are available to stream. The third, “A Traveller’s Needs,” which was completed after “In Our Day” and premièred in February, at the Berlin Film Festival, is still unseen here.

Photograph by Burak Cingi / Getty

Kelela, starting with her 2013 mixtape “Cut 4 Me,” has been the mononymous force at the center of an R. & B. mutation, delivering a sleek, sharp-edged upgrade with an embrace of electronic music. She has spent the past decade building upon a reputation as a futurist—from the high-powered début album “Take Me Apart” to last year’s “Raven.” The latter, which ended a five-year hiatus, was inspired by the early-pandemic renewal of the Black Lives Matter movement, which stoked in the artist a desire to, as she put it to Billboard, “create a more liberatory model for myself.” That vision led to a more ambient sound, in pursuit of egalitarian dance-music practices. A remix album, “RAVE:N,” only furthers this fantasy of an all-inclusive club.—Sheldon Pearce (Blue Note; May 28-29.)

A strange early chapter of reality-television history resurfaces in the Hulu documentary “The Contestant”: in the late nineties, an aspiring young comedian, Tomoaki Hamatsu, thinking he was auditioning for a chance to hitchhike across Africa, was taken to a small Tokyo apartment, instructed to strip, and told that he couldn’t leave until he had garnered a million yen’s worth of magazine prizes. Fifteen months of solitary, naked travails were filmed for a segment of a show, making Hamatsu—whose strikingly long face earned him the nickname Nasubi (Japanese for “eggplant”)—an unlikely celebrity. A quarter century on, Nasubi is still reckoning with the consequences of his confinement, but it’s the story of Nasubi’s post-TV life that elevates “The Contestant” from a chronicle of exploitation to a tale of resilience and reinvention.—Inkoo Kang (Reviewed on 5/2/24.)

The Queens-raised singer-songwriter Yaya Bey’s voice has a naked honesty that fits her songs of self-guidance and candor perfectly. After three albums of quieter, acoustic musings, she finally broke through, in 2022, with “Remember Your North Star,” a bluesy, grounded soul record about trusting yourself. Her new album, “Ten Fold,” broadens the scope to include a greater range of dance-music forms, drawing from collaborators such as the drummers Corey Fonville, of the jazz group Butcher Brown, and Karriem Riggins. Both groovy and expressive, the music makes more space for cathartic humor amid inner turmoil, leaning into a boogie awakening—upbeat energy that Bey brings to a home-town show in Brooklyn.—S.P. (Elsewhere; May 23.)

Photograph courtesy Siren - Protectors of the Rainforest

Most years, alongside a bazaar, the honoring of elders, and performances from local groups, BAM’s long-running festival DanceAfrica celebrates the mother continent by zeroing in on a country or region. This time, it’s Cameroon. The guest company was supposed to be Cie la Calebasse, a notable troupe from that nation. But, in a late substitution, Siren - Protectors of the Rainforest, a Brooklyn-based pan-African group, performs instead, leaning into the native traditions of its Cameroonian-born leader, Mafor Mambo Tse. The mighty vocal-and-percussion company Women of the Calabash is also on the bill.—Brian Seibert (Howard Gilman Opera House; May 24-27.)

“Under the Bridge,” a new Hulu crime drama, is based on the real-life murder of a fourteen-year-old Indian Canadian girl named Reena Virk, by her peers, in 1997. The show’s interest lies in the following trial, and in the dynamic between the girls from a local group home, called the Bic Girls for their perceived disposability, and the uncool, middle-class, tragically impressionable Reena (Vritika Gupta). A disaffected Riley Keough plays a fictionalized version of Rebecca Godfrey (the author of the book from which the show is adapted), who is old friends with a policewoman (Lily Gladstone) probing the “schoolgirl murder.” The show is bloated and occasionally preachy, but it’s built on a shrewd, bone-deep understanding of how dopey and dangerous adolescent girls can be.—I.K. (Reviewed in our issue of 5/20/24.)

Photograph by Monique Carboni

For all of today’s clamor around diversity, disability is still a term that many people fear to use. The New Group’s play “All of Me,” vividly directed by Ashley Brooke Monroe, has no use for such tentativeness. It tracks a burgeoning romance between two twentysomethings: the reflexively sardonic Lucy (Madison Ferris), who uses a mobility scooter, and the sweet-natured Alfonso (Danny J. Gomez), who uses a power chair. Militating against the match are their overprotective mothers (Kyra Sedgwick and Florencia Lozano, respectively) and socioeconomic tensions. (Lucy is on disability welfare; Alfonso has a trust fund.) Laura Winters’s mercilessly funny script gets even funnier in the hands of Ferris and Gomez, who leverage their physicality as often-ironic counterpoints to the robotic intonations of their augmentative-communication devices.—Dan Stahl (Pershing Square Signature Center; through June 16.)

Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary “Let It Be,” presenting the Beatles rehearsing and recording the album of that title in January, 1969, was doomed by circumstances: the band broke up the month before the movie’s release, and as a result it was treated like a preprinted death notice, dour and unsavory. The film was long unavailable, and its outtakes were mined by Peter Jackson for “Get Back,” his three-part, nearly eight-hour 2021 documentary. But the original eighty-one-minute movie, also restored by Jackson and now streaming on Disney+, is the superior work; here, Lindsay-Hogg offers tightly composed, patiently observed scenes of the foursome riffing, working out ideas, musically hanging out. When the Beatles move to the rooftop of their studio—for what would be their last public concert—the screen radiates irrepressible, cheeky joy.—Richard Brody

1. My job necessitates the consumption of a staggering amount of aspirationally funny stuff—a thousand-plus cartoon submissions each week is just the beginning. So naturally, in my free time, I consume even more comedy. I recently enjoyed “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” a film by and starring Joanna Arnow, as an aimless thirty-something in various B.D.S.M.-ish relationships. Writing it inspired Arnow to start drawing single-panel cartoons, and you can see why—the script feels almost like a montage of cartoon captions, with hilariously jarring segues. It makes sense: Arnow’s depiction of casual sadomasochism and cartooning both thrive on trivial humiliation, dryly recounted. I’d love for someone to reverse-engineer a drawing for the line, “Thank you for forgiving me for mansplaining about L.A.”

2. I also saw “The Fall Guy,” which, though it’s not one of my picks, I mention because of my preparatory viewing: Buster Keaton’s stunt-filled “The General.” Ryan Gosling may be the Paul Newman of our era (or so I argued, after two spicy margaritas), but Buster Keaton is the Buster Keaton of all time—no one is funnier when silently almost getting hit by a train.

3. In honor of the hyped new production of “Uncle Vanya,” I then proceeded to rewatch one of my favorite sketches, “Germans Who Say Nice Things,” from the lone, 1996 season of “The Dana Carvey Show.” Russian realism is fine, but can it beat Steve Carrell, in a turtleneck, bellowing, “It was a pleasure babysitting Kevin!”?

P.S. Good stuff on the Internet:

• Fonts hanging out
• Chess club for bad actors
• The fantastical, Proustian imagery in the newest Casey MQ release

The subject of “Megalopolis,” Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature in thirteen years, is time. The movie begins with an image of a large city clock, and Coppola repeatedly invokes time’s relentless forward march. Yet the very nature of the movie, which is by turns aggressively heady, stubbornly illogical, and beguilingly optimistic, is to question our understanding of time as a finite resource. It muses about how we as people—designers, builders, inventors, artists—might succeed in circumventing time and bring about a utopia that resists the natural slide toward entropy.

Coppola’s protagonist is a controversial architect and designer named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who has the ability to pause time. “Time, stop!” he says, and everything freezes: people, cars, the clouds in the sky, even the crumbling of a public-housing development that was being demolished on Cesar’s own orders. But his supernatural powers are limited. Eventually, he must allow time to start up again, with a reluctant snap of his fingers. (The film is laden with references to Shakespeare, Emerson, and Sapphic poetry, but the temporal gimmickry reminded me, irresistibly, of the late-eighties sitcom “Out of This World.”)

Once time resumes, every passing moment brings human civilization closer to ruin—a catastrophic collapse foretold by the fall of Rome. In fact, the film takes place in a city called New Rome, though it is quite visibly New York, with recurring shots of the Chrysler Building and the Statue of Liberty. (The movie was filmed, with much visual and digital trickery, in Atlanta; the cinematographer is Mihai Mălaimare, Jr.) New Rome abounds in classical motifs: Doric columns prop up buildings adorned with Latin dicta, and a remarkable number of citizens wear gold laurel leaves, even the ones who aren’t riding chariots around a mock Colosseum. The plot, a laborious but lively enough contraption, comes to us straight from the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 B.C. Cesar is an update of the politician Lucius Sergius Catiline; his chief nemesis, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), stands in for that other Cicero, the famed consul whom Catiline sought to overthrow.

The movie’s full title is “Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable,” but Aesop might have blanched at Coppola’s weakness for overexplanation. He has made a declamatory epic, in which the actors recite as much as they perform, and meanings are not suggested but superimposed, with baldly allegorical intent, over thickets of narrative. Cesar believes that New Rome’s future rests on the construction of an experimental city, Megalopolis, which will be fashioned from a miraculous material called Megalon. By all appearances, Megalon’s chief property is a pliability that enables it to be molded into giant, trippy structures, which resemble flowers and mushrooms; picture a Frank Gehry-designed “Alice in Wonderland” and you’re halfway there. Mayor Cicero resists such costly, high-flown futurism, which prioritizes beauty over practicality. “People don’t need dreams—they need teachers, sanitation, and jobs,” he snarls at Cesar. No points for guessing whose side Coppola, now eighty-five and still one of the great dreamers in American cinema, is on.

Most of the other major characters are delineated by their symbolic function. The face of economic excess is Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), a lecherous old schemer and the city’s wealthiest man. The role of unchecked ambition is handily filled by Crassus’s troublemaking grandson, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf). The venality of the media is embodied by a financial reporter, memorably named Wow Platinum, who is played with acerbic mischief by Aubrey Plaza. (“Fuck your stupid Megalopolis!” she yells at Cesar, perhaps trying to get ahead of the film’s reviews.) There’s more: an old murder investigation, an assassination attempt, an election campaign, night-club revellers posing on a unicorn, an outré fashion show, and a sex scene containing the unimprovable line “I want to fuck you so bad, Auntie Wow.”

Amid this debaucherous sprawl are sustainingly poignant pleasures, starting with the presence of Coppola veterans such as Laurence Fishburne and Talia Shire (the director’s sister), in small but striking roles. There is also the significant character of Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, who ultimately joins Cesar’s cause, first as his employee and later as his lover. Tellingly, there are also Cesar’s mournful visions of his late wife, who was such a luminous life force that Coppola has bestowed upon her the name Sunny Hope—a groaner, perhaps, but one I couldn’t bring myself to groan at. I was too preoccupied thinking about the death, in April, of Eleanor Coppola, the director’s wife and longtime creative partner, to whom “Megalopolis” is movingly dedicated.

When Coppola brought “Apocalypse Now” to the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, he famously declared, “My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.” It was a testament to the film’s extraordinary scope, scale, and verisimilitude, but it also spoke to the temperament of a filmmaker defined by outsized ambition and ego. Now, decades later, his latest movie has also premièred in competition at Cannes, and I am tempted to test out a similar formulation: “Megalopolis” isn’t just about time; it is time—at least in the sense that the film, more than forty years in the making, comes to us as an astounding repository of the past.

Coppola first conceived of “Megalopolis” in the early eighties, hoping to follow “Apocalypse Now” with something comparably epic. But the project was scuppered by the critical and commercial failure of “One from the Heart,” in 1982, after which a series of escalating personal and professional crises kept “Megalopolis” on the backburner for decades: actors came and went, and 9/11 forced a serious rethink of the material. Coppola ended up financing much of the production himself, selling off part of his wine business and reportedly putting up a hundred and twenty million dollars of his own money.

Such is the past of “Megalopolis,” whose future looks equally uncertain. In Cannes, where the movie is in contention for the Palme d’Or—a prize that Coppola has won twice, for “The Conversation,” in 1974, and “Apocalypse Now”—its fortunes have seemed to shift by the hour. A recent piece in the Guardian detailed anonymous complaints from the film crew about Coppola’s unorthodox techniques; more troublingly, some alleged that the director had behaved inappropriately toward women on the set. (Coppola’s team has issued a denial.) As for the movie’s box-office prospects, no one expects Wow Platinum numbers. A global IMAX release has been announced, but, as of this writing, the movie still lacks an American distributor.

This is not the first time a Coppola vessel has risked being dashed by the free-flowing waters of art against the unyielding rocks of commerce. But what is inescapably moving about “Megalopolis,” and what throws even its strangest excesses into meaningful relief, is the degree to which it has evolved into an allegory of its own making. Coppola has made a defense of the beautiful and the impractical, not just as principles of urban design or meaningful living but as art-sustaining forces in the cinema itself. This picture may find him near the end of a long, embattled career, but the mere fact that it exists, in its breathtaking and sometimes exasperating singularity, feels like an expression of hope.

The Rome-New York allegory, with its blunt collision of ancient and modern, creates its own aura of temporal dislocation, as do many visual and atmospheric peculiarities. Some of Coppola’s devices—three-way split screen, fadeout iris shots, spinning newspaper headlines, and the like—belong to an earlier era, as do such design flourishes as Cesar’s dark fedora and the Art Deco touches in his studio. At moments, the artifice seems to bend in two directions; when Cesar and Julia ride in an exposed outdoor elevator, the buildings we see passing behind them seem to be a C.G.I. background, but they also call to mind one of those Old Hollywood rear projections. Here, as in a vertiginous sequence in which the pair walk on suspended construction beams, New Rome barely looks real, but that doesn’t feel like a mistake. In Coppola’s view, the city is a gloriously teeming abstraction, the stuff of dreams, open to endless possibility and reinterpretation.

Midway through the Cannes press screening of “Megalopolis” that I attended, a light suddenly appeared in the theatre, illuminating a man speaking at a microphone in front of the screen. I assumed that this was a temporary fix for a scene that was unfinished, but a representative for the film later told me that the moment was entirely deliberate, and that a live actor will appear at future screenings of the movie. How this could work for a commercial release, especially when it comes to streaming, will be a matter for the distributor and maybe TaskRabbit. Still, it was a quietly spellbinding moment, a rupture in the usually taut membrane between the bright fantasy of the screen and the dark reality of the theatre. For one instant this cinematic vision of the future, steeped in the ghosts of the past, spoke to us, hauntingly, in the register of the now. ♦