The New YorkerModify

Most Democratic members of Congress have criticized Donald Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran, with some describing Trump’s move as flagrantly illegal and others arguing that he should have at least come before Congress to lay out a clear plan of action. (In the days since the war began, Trump has offered numerous reasons for launching the war: the threat posed by Iran’s missile systems and its nuclear program, Iran’s funding of terrorism, Trump’s own desire for “regime change.”)

But Congressman Greg Landsman, a second-term Democrat from Ohio, is one of the few members of his party who has actively supported Trump’s war. Landsman, a strong supporter of Israel, has backed the coördinated American-Israeli military action and stated that “this was the moment” for war against the Iranian regime, citing the country’s abysmal human-rights record. “I hope these targeted strikes on the Iranian regime’s military assets ends the regime’s mayhem and bloodshed and makes way for this lasting peace in the region,” Landsman wrote in a statement on Saturday, just hours after the war began.

I recently spoke by phone with Landsman. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what the U.S. and Israel hope to accomplish with the attack; why he trusts the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio; and whether Trump cares about civilian casualties.

Why, unlike most of your Democratic colleagues, have you chosen to support the current war with Iran?

Well, I wouldn’t describe it as that. I’d describe it as what I hope is a very limited operation where we are destroying their weapons systems, particularly their missiles and their bombs, to stop the ongoing mayhem, chaos, and violence that this regime has caused.

So you wouldn’t describe it as a war?

No. No. I mean, it’s definitely a military intervention, and so far it has been targeted at those missile systems,and core military infrastructure. And my expectation is that remains the case and that this gets wrapped up fairly quickly. However, I do support and have introduced, with a few others, a War Powers Resolution. It allows for short-term targeted strikes and requires Trump to come to Congress for a vote. This is a constitutional democracy, and he needs to act accordingly. And it specifies no ground troops. We should not be doing nation-building.

How does your War Powers Resolution differ from the one that Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie are putting forward, which you oppose?

That would require the immediate removal of all military assets, which would make our American service members, our bases, and our allies very vulnerable. Ours requires the President to get a vote within thirty days if this thing were to continue or move beyond the very targeted strikes on military assets.

I’m not sure how targeted it has been. Israel recently said that it dropped more bombs in the past three days than it dropped in the Twelve-Day War against Iran in June. Trump has promised that bigger strikes are coming. There have already been civilian casualties. Americans have already lost their lives. This is the biggest story in the world.

Oh, sure. I’m not downplaying it at all. It’s a very big deal. I’m just saying that the strikes have been focussed, I believe, entirely on military assets.

Well, we are also assassinating the heads of the regime.

Well, the head of the regime was, in this case, the Ayatollah, who is the chief military commander who also happens to be a theocrat with apocalyptic plans for the world.

Sure, a very bad guy. I just meant that it seems like we were trying to effectuate regime change, which the President himself has said, rather than just knock out military targets.

Yeah. And let me also be clear. I’ve never trusted Trump on this, or on the economy, or on keeping us safe in general.

You are trusting him on this, though, right?

No.

You aren’t?

I’m trusting the military and our generals. I’m trusting what I understand to be the operation and the people leading it—that is, the generals and our military and our allies.

You’re trusting the people leading the operation who don’t include the President?

Well, I don’t trust that guy. Yeah.

He’s the Commander-in-Chief, right?

Sure. Yeah. But I can’t [trust him]. And he’s proven that over the past couple of days, being all over the place, unlike everybody else involved in this.

You saw the leaks before the war suggesting that the military, especially chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, were either opposed to the attack on Iran or did not think this could be done very easily, right?

Those are two different things. I can’t imagine anybody thought that this would be simple. If it were simple, it would have been done already.

Do you feel like you understand why Trump wanted to wage this war, or “military intervention,” as you described it?

Yeah, I think so. I think the Administration has writ large articulated that it is entirely about these weapon systems, which to me makes sense.

Nuclear weapons or weapons systems?

All of it. That is not just a threat, but an existential threat to us and our allies.

An existential threat?

Well, to our allies and potentially to us, yeah. There is a point of no return, arguably, with this regime, where if you continue to allow them to stockpile missiles and launchers and all of the things—

You think Iran having missiles and launchers is an existential threat to America?

I would love to finish my sentence. I was going to answer that question. This seems a little combative, which is understandable.

Sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have interrupted.

That’s fine. So their ability to get out in front of and stop Iran’s ability to do what they clearly are intending to do, which is to stockpile these missiles and launchers, which will create a shield for them to do the nukes, which would be an existential threat.

I know you were in favor of the strikes that President Trump launched in June, which he said obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. So your sense is that maybe the strikes hadn’t obliterated Iran’s nuclear program?

No, I never thought it had obliterated Iran’s program. It did serious damage, and it was very, very significant, but I always believed that additional strikes could be necessary.

Even so soon after the June, 2025, strike?

I’m surprised by that pace, but I think it had more to do with how rapidly Iran was rebuilding the missile capabilities that would protect them from another strike.

So just to clarify, they could have developed more missiles, which would have led to them being able to develop nukes, and the nukes would be an existential threat. So we have to stop the process somewhere along the line.

Yeah, correct.

What should or should not prevent a U.S. President from deciding that he or she can wage military action or bomb another country if he or she wants to? What should be the constraints? It doesn’t seem like Trump has laid out a clear reasoning for why he’s doing this.

I think the Administration has. I think Marco Rubio did lay out a clear reason for doing this now, why it was important, and why it will be limited. Again, Trump is not a disciplined person, and so his communication has been all over the place, and that is, in and of itself, bad.

Rubio also said on Monday, “There absolutely was an imminent threat, and the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believed they would be attacked [by Israel], that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.” What did you make of that statement?

I was really disappointed that he tried to lay the blame on somebody else.

Especially because Rubio is not the erratic one. That’s Trump.

Exactly. I was disappointed in that, but especially when he clearly set out to make one argument during that whole press conference, which was this is a focussed operation on the missiles and the missile launchers and the nukes and the ships.

Not the nukes. They don’t have nukes.

Sorry, you’re right. The facilities, the nuclear facilities. And he was locked in on that, and I think that is the argument. I think that is the operation. That has to be what they continue to focus on. That he would veer from that was disappointing, and I suspect he was disappointed.

That’s definitely telling us that he’s thinking about these things.

Yeah. Look, it’s obviously multiple countries and not just Israel. This is becoming a much bigger moment. Despite real tragedies here, which are awful—and there’s nothing to say other than it’s terrible—may this all be for something very powerful and good and transformative, which is the end of this regime. Absent Iran’s chaos, I believe there’s enough space to see the region come together and create an entirely different Middle East.

Trump said Gaza could be the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Well, I don’t share his vision in that regard. I believe that Gaza should be led by Gazans, and they should rebuild based on what they want without corruption and terrorism. The same with Yemen, the same with Syria, the same with Iraq. All of a sudden, you can imagine a Middle East where you land in Dubai, and you make your way to Beirut, down to Tel Aviv, to Gaza City, to Cairo.

It’s like the domino theory, but in reverse.

Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

You mentioned this becoming a much bigger moment. And then you laid out this positive vision of the region. Do you think there’s any tension between that and saying what you did earlier, that you wanted this to be a very limited, very small operation that you didn’t want to call a war?

There could be. Yeah, there could be. Yeah. There could be.

That’s what I was thinking.

Yeah, there could be, but I do think the first and most important step is to get in front of the rearming of this regime and hopefully get to a point where the regime walks away from its goal of causing chaos.

With Trump, it’s just hard to know what his aims are.

Yeah. There’s no question that this is a big risk, and I do trust our generals in the military and the folks on the ground. Trump is a chaotic guy, and my position in terms of this guy being chaos has not changed. But I trust the people leading the operation.

It would be nice to trust the Commander-in-Chief, but if you can trust everyone else, then it should be O.K.

I would love to get back to a place where we do trust our Commander-in-Chief.

You mentioned that some tragic things have already happened. I was thinking about the girls’ elementary school that was bombed in Iran, resulting in a hundred and sixty-eight deaths. Do you have a sense that the Prime Minister of Israel or the President of the United States cares about things like that?

I would hope so, yeah, I do. I would hope so.

Well, I would hope so, too.

Yeah, you know, look, I don’t know Donald Trump. I’ve never met the man.

All I meant, Congressman, is we’re putting the war in the hands of two people, and I asked you if you think that they would care about a girl’s school being bombed, and you—

Yeah. I mean, but again, I would certainly hope. But the people who are making these decisions, the folks who are on the ground actually executing these decisions, I believe they do care. And yeah, they care. And yeah, they care. ♦

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The rumbling of a hidden ocean, along a rugged coastline covered by mist. A symphony of insects chirping away in the crisp night air, spiky geologic formations silhouetted against a blanket of stars. Bright hot-air balloons dotting the pale sky over a striated desert. These are some of the striking scenes captured in “The Spectacle,” Yasmin van Dorp’s contemplative documentary short, shot at tourist destinations throughout Europe. The film shows places of uncommon beauty, along with the throngs of visitors who clamber to see them and, crucially, preserve their experiences in photos. On one rocky outcropping surrounded by fog which makes it seem to jut out beyond the edge of the world, a multitude of people chattering and maneuvering for pictures organize themselves into a line—giving each group or person a turn for a snapshot at the cliff’s edge, working together to manufacture the illusion of solitude. Without any commentary, van Dorp’s film offers the opportunity to enjoy some breathtaking scenery but also to ask what we give up when we focus so intently on documenting our time in such special places. How differently might the same vista appear when seen from amid a mob that’s been disgorged from a tour bus, through the rectangle of a cell-phone camera, or, more simply, while on a quiet walk?

Early on in Shakespeare’s comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” the con man Pistol is scorned by his friend Sir John Falstaff, who refuses to lend him money. Enraged, Pistol issues a thinly veiled threat: “The world’s mine oyster,” he snarls at Falstaff, “which I with sword will open,” thereby inaugurating one of the best-known idioms of the English language. What is now thrown around as a starry-eyed declaration of free will began as a violent pledge—if you don’t give me what I want, I’ll take it anyway. A few moments later, Falstaff offers the money to a maid instead, and Pistol, rebuffed, makes another, not so famous announcement: “This puncke,” he proclaims, “is one of Cupid’s carriers.” At the time, London was a mecca of crime, illness, and tyranny. Amid that chaos, a legion of “punckes,” or sex workers, hawked their bodies in brothels south of the Thames. The maid, in Pistol’s chivalrous estimation, belonged to their lowly number.

Centuries later, these themes (sex, violence, punks, self-determination—even pistols, albeit the lowercase kind) reappeared in another work of serious literary merit: Richard Hell’s “Godlike,” which, twenty-one years after its initial publication, has just been reissued by New York Review Books Classics. Hell moved to New York City in the late sixties, a seventeen-year-old runaway from Kentucky, and began a career as a poet. In 1973, he and his childhood friend Tom Verlaine founded Television, a seminal rock band that, alongside the Ramones and the Patti Smith Group, spearheaded a new kind of musical attitude being heralded across lower Manhattan, one centered on a brash physicality and no-frills instrumentation that produced a visceral, cathartic effect. It didn’t take long for the rest of the country to notice. Nearly four hundred years after Shakespeare’s time, punckes had arrived in America.

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Though “Godlike” is inseparable from the downtown scene in which it is set, the word “punk” fails to make an appearance in the book. In fact, save for an isolated reference to Andy Warhol, most of the prominent cultural figures of that era go unmentioned. The novel concerns itself, instead, with the fictitious poets Paul Vaughn and R. T. Wode, the former a twenty-seven-year-old member of the East Village literati, the latter his teen-age male lover. For a hundred and forty pages—which, we are told at the outset, comprise the journals of the now fifty-three-year-old Vaughn, housed in a psychiatric unit on the Upper East Side—Hell charts their relationship in vaulting prose that jumps with audacious velocity from the sacred (“This I love, to be borne by love. The only person to tell it to is Jesus. My head is a church”) to the pornographic (“What does the tiny spurt from Cupid’s penis taste like? Like displaced space”).

Vaughn and Wode have sex in back alleys, decrepit apartments, motels, and hotels. They take LSD in gelatine form and write frenetic poetry and have even more sex. They drink to excess in storied haunts of seventies New York (at one point, Vaughn recalls how Wode “stood on a tabletop in the noisy little dark back room of Max’s Kansas City and pissed into a champagne glass”) and spend “the greatest amount of their time together reading and writing and sometimes talking” in Wode’s apartment. Eventually, they lose interest in the city and go south, first to Memphis, then to Florida. In a sweltering, roach-ridden house, the two begin to tire of each other, and their debauchery transforms into disillusion. As the aging Vaughn finishes recounting this tumultuous chapter of his life from the confines of a hospital bed, he’s faced with a startling revelation, and the whole enterprise concludes with a devastating dénouement.

“Godlike” is a poet’s novel, a dazzling Künstlerroman that touches on art, love, aging, and queerness, punctuated with verses by Hell (in both Vaughn’s and Wode’s voices) and his “translations,” or interpretations, of poems originally written by Frank O’Hara. The prose is dotted with allusions to the works of Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges, and Bob Dylan, to name a few. The Bible makes an appearance, as does the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, an ancient Buddhist text. Hell’s greatest feat, however, is a studied transposition of the infamous affair between the nineteenth-century French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud onto the lives of Vaughn and Wode. Verlaine and Rimbaud’s eleven-year age gap, their elopement, even the final, turbulent act of violence between them, make an appearance here, in the waning years of Nixon’s America.

Hell’s previous novel, “Go Now,” from 1996, about a drugged-out musician-slash-writer on a cross-country road trip, drew criticism for closely mirroring his own life. With “Godlike,” Hell told an interviewer in 2005, he wanted to tell “a story about somebody as different as possible” from himself, and consequently “ended up writing a book about young, gay poets doing acid.” At certain points in the novel, that distance calcifies and restrains his writing. Moments of physical intimacy between his protagonists are often relayed in rigid and frustratingly inexpressive language, which occasionally veers into the tiringly smutty. If Hell hoped to capture, in first person, the volatile thrills of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s whirlwind affair—one so profoundly intense that some argue it led Rimbaud, by his early twenties, to quit writing forever—he falls short.

Still, “Godlike” is commendable for Hell’s fastidious re-creation of that relationship, remarkable for his faithful transmission not only of minute biographical details but also of Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s artistic philosophies and religious beliefs, which he translates into the vernacular of seventies New York via meticulously written, wine-addled dialogue. Hell (né Meyers) has denied taking his adopted surname from Rimbaud’s iconic work of prose, “Une Saison en Enfer,” or “A Season in Hell,” but admits to keeping an entire shelf of the poet’s writing at home. His Television bandmate Tom Verlaine (né Miller), however, was outspoken about the commemorative nature of his own onomastic choices. The two weren’t the only artists of their era to have been inspired by Rimbaud and Verlaine—Patti Smith, throughout her collected works, writes with great admiration about those poets and others like them, including Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Jean Genet. How is it that these punk rockers, godparents of a musical movement fundamentally attuned to the present, owed some of their greatest artistic debts to a group of French poets, most of whom had been dead for nearly a century?

I first learned of Richard Hell shortly after moving to Brooklyn in the early months of the pandemic. I was jobless then, and my only goal was to form a rock band. By the time some friends and I found an apartment—a cheap five-bedroom place under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway—quarantine was still being enforced, but a crowd of restless New Yorkers had begun to flout its restrictions. The city felt like one big lawless secret, and music was its lifeblood, from illegal parties in downtown hotels to sweaty D.I.Y. raves in industrial warehouses. Within our apartment’s small, semi-subterranean living room, my roommates and I set up a drum kit and a couple of guitar amps, and opened our doors to friends, neighbors, and strangers alike. It was something more than social catharsis, though it was that, too. The music was an accessory to a way of being that celebrated and took solace in sound, movement, and life—not just our own lives, but in the fact of existence itself.

One morning, I found a battered copy of “Please Kill Me,” Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s oral history of punk, on our coffee table. There was Hell, in the middle of the cover, his right hand resting on his bleeding chest. New York in the seventies was a different city, shaped not by a pandemic but the material constraints of poverty, crime, and urban decay. Still, I felt a sense of kinship with Hell and his peers—the Blank Generation, as he called them, signifying, in his words, “the idea that you have the option of making yourself anything you want.” Like them, I was trying to live freely in a world defined by its limitations.

It is that way of living that drew Hell and his contemporaries to the works of Verlaine and Rimbaud. These poètes maudits, or “cursed poets,” as they came to be known, championed the duality of high and low. They were tragic figures, scantly recognized, often working on the fringes of respectable society, devoting themselves to a poetics that operated via transcendence—they stretched the limits of social norms, experimented with drugs to expand their conscious minds, and pushed the boundaries of the written word in bold new directions.

In her new memoir, “Bread of Angels,” Patti Smith waxes nostalgic about discovering Rimbaud’s “Illuminations” at a Philadelphia bookstall when she was just fifteen, “drawn to the face of the young poet on the cover.” Smith steals the paperback, feeling an urge to follow Rimbaud “down his shattering spiritual path.” Later, “A Season in Hell” becomes a “furious guidebook” within which she recognizes “a relatable duality, the demonic hand in hand with the charitable.” Upon first hearing Bob Dylan, Smith writes that she “could well imagine Rimbaud stretched out in a field listening to It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” because “both poets’ words seemed as if they were written for the tribe of black sheep.”

Smith extends that sense of kinship toward her contemporaries, too; she describes Hell and Tom Verlaine as “art rats embracing then breaking apart a vast cultural history, scurrying into the future with speedy and productive energy.” Within her acknowledgment of “embracing” and “breaking apart,” Smith demonstrates an implicit understanding that the movement she helped spearhead was not wholly original but a resurrection, in the Biblical sense of the word—a resuscitation of a stagnant poetic tradition that she and her peers fashioned into a soundtrack for their age.

That Smith and Hell turned to the poètes maudits as sources of inspiration should perhaps be no surprise. Like them, those poets were broke members of the demimonde whose careers began in a city as culturally vibrant as it was materially bleak. They were purveyors of grace; they sought to create their own kind of beauty. Many of them, like Smith and Hell, were outsiders to their adopted home towns, called to the metropolis by the intransigent demands of their own artistic odysseys. They viewed their medium as a mystical communion, a means of transmuting language into feeling. Theirs was a rebellious poetics of beauty, or a beautiful poetics of rebellion. And “Godlike,” through Hell’s incandescent, maximalist interpretation of Rimbaud’s voice, provides a visceral sense of the spirit of that era. Take the following passage, in which Vaughn and Wode drop acid in a flophouse by Washington Square:

The idyll of the cheap hotel room, pencil and paper pad, doughnuts, streaky window, sex. Fear of looking in eyes (and then they sadden). Cheap portable typewriter and the burnt, charred, purple-looking letters of the alphabet it smacked into the white, fibrous paper. You could almost smell them—the words—they smelled like burning teeth, the fumes from dentists’ drilling. Rich and hot and deathly innocent. There should be a law against something looking so pretty, because it was a crime the way they promised so much.

You can almost see the bruised typewritten letters, and feel the psychedelic maelstrom whence they originated. By inhabiting the same aesthetic ideals that the poètes maudits did, which were both inspirational for and infused within the punk movement, Hell manages to gesture at the sense of transcendence which fuelled his nineteenth-century forebears.

The authors of “Bread of Angels” and “Godlike” have in turn become the stuff of legend. Unlike many of their peers, Smith and Hell have lived to see themselves canonized. In 2004, the Fales Library of rare books and manuscripts at New York University acquired a collection of Hell’s archival materials; six years later, Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. CBGB, the legendary punk venue where they got their start, closed its doors two decades ago, just a few months after “Godlike” was first published. Though the building’s façade still retains its iconic scalloped awning, the logo has been replaced with that of a high-end menswear store. Inside, three-packs of socks are sold for more than two hundred dollars apiece. Twenty blocks uptown, the Hotel Chelsea, once a ramshackle hangout for the city’s most promising artists, has been turned into a puffed-up luxury establishment run by a conglomerate of multi-millionaires. “Horses,” Smith’s groundbreaking début record, recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and tickets for her memorial show at the Beacon Theatre started at more than three hundred bucks. The city, as Thomas Pynchon once put it—in the liner notes for an album by the relatively unknown rock band Lotion—is being “vacated and jackhammered into somebody’s idea of an update.”

And yet, the artists are still here, and their music survives, cropping up in dingy basements and bar back rooms. There, in the face of cultural homogenization, artificial intelligence, and corporate overhaul, the vestiges of the Blank Generation remain, and their stories, now immortalized as myth, continue to propel New York’s creative engine. There is no such thing as the past, Vaughn writes in his first journal entry—only that which is “actually forgotten, unrecorded, unknown to anyone.” Everything else, he tells us, “is really the present.” Somehow, a stubborn glimmer of the old scene persists. ♦

If you are a fan of the thirty-nine-year-old comedian Chris Fleming, you might have trouble setting foot in a Trader Joe’s grocery store without thinking of a standup bit of his, known as “the Snacks at Trader Joe’s that Only Women Can See.” In the segment, which was filmed at the cozy Los Angeles venue Dynasty Typewriter, where Fleming is a regular presence, he puts forward a theory that women experience Trader Joe’s, with its ever-evolving inventory of newfangled snacks, as a kind of witchy laboratory of gastronomic discovery. Unlike most men—who make a beeline straight for the “same blue-corn tortilla chips that have been there since pre-Obama”—women swan dreamily through the store, “guided by their foremothers” toward the strangest possible products. “A woman’s relationship with Trader Joe’s is abstract,” Fleming says. “It’s like the way women see Trader Joe’s, it’s the way the aliens from ‘Arrival’ view time.”

The riff, which has more than a million views on YouTube, has become, over the past year, an in-joke among my female friends, who feel both seen by it and also even honored—a rare feeling when it comes to comedy that makes sweeping generalizations about feminine habits. From the outset of the bit, Fleming notes that he feels a certain kinship with women, by dint of his theatrical background, which includes training in acting and modern dance, and because of his androgynous physical appearance. Onstage, Fleming dresses in glam-rock getups reminiscent of both Mick Jagger and Cher. He has the shoulder-length curly hair of a pre-Raphaelite or an eighties mom with a perm. “I’m allowed on the perimeter of the coven,” he says. The punch line of the Trader Joe’s routine, in the end, is not that “women be shopping” but that women, at least in Fleming’s estimation, are enviably able to convert even the most mundane tasks into opportunities for creative transcendence.

In a way, this could also serve as a mission statement for Fleming’s own comedic philosophy. He revels in unearthing the weirdness of the everyday, and in pointing out that most people he encounters are simply not weird enough. There is an art-school mentality to the way Fleming splits up the world: there are the “freaks,” a group to which Fleming enthusiastically subscribes, and the “normies,” a catchall category of run-of-the-mill types who provide fodder for him to highlight his own hard-won quirks. He is a keen observer of the way in which eccentricity, once the provenance of true outcasts, has been gradually co-opted by corporations and by financially comfortable regular Joes who risk nothing in expressing it. Shortly into his new HBO special, “Chris Fleming: Live at the Palace,” which débuted in February, Fleming launches into a spiel about a hypothetical, utterly average man who is touted by his girlfriend as being “fun” because “he does interpretive dance at a wedding for a laugh.” “Listen, normies,” Fleming says, his voice growing gruff. “There is nothing fucking funny about interpretive dance. My costume is not your culture. Interpretive dance is how I keep my lights on, and pay my astronomically high emergency-vet bills! ” Wearing a bright-purple jumpsuit with a bejewelled waist and glittery, red Dorothy-in-Oz loafers, Fleming caps the assertion by performing a balletic lunge across the stage.

Fleming’s HBO special, his first for the network, is his chance to tip into mainstream comedy after more than a decade as a cult figure. (Or, as he puts it at the start of the show, “I’m trying to grow my audience beyond women who brought a knife to prom.”) It is also, by far, his most accessible work, ouching on various ostensibly conventional millennial-friendly subjects, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, kombucha, Fleet Foxes, and the interviewing technique of Terry Gross.

What keeps Fleming’s observational humor from being banal—and shifts it into almost a meta-statement on banal observational comedy—is the oddball physicality that he brings to his act and his ability to extend a bit, through exaggerated pantomime, past the point of logic and into a more heightened and absurdist realm. In his bit about the toppings at ice-cream shops, he first notes the way that Oreos tend to be pulverized beyond recognition, then muses that whoever is responsible for the brand at Nabisco must be a sadist. He then launches into an invented phone conversation between “the frozen-dessert world” and “Mr. Nabisco,” a sinister character who sounds not unlike Hannibal Lecter, who, when asked about how he prefers Oreos to be treated by ice-cream purveyors, answers, with a creepy flatness, “Do whatever you want to them. Disgrace them. Degrade and humiliate them. Chop them up.” His Terry Gross reverie climaxes with him yelling, at an imaginary Adam Driver, “You don’t get to call me Terry Gross. Terry Gross is my nickname. My real name is Theresa Disgusting!”

At the same time, the new special marks a reining in of some of Fleming’s more experimental instincts. He first gained notice online in the mid-twenty-tens for a series of D.I.Y. short films that had the feel of messy, spontaneous performance art. His characters included Gayle Waters-Waters, a histrionic suburban woman based, in part, on his own mother, who co-starred as Gayle’s friend Bonnie. In “DiPiglio,” perhaps the most beloved of those early segments, he struts down a sunny street while being chased by a tiny, toothy monster created by primitive computer animation; when a bystander mentions concern for his safety, Fleming asks, ungrammatically, “Should I run about this?” He made a barely comprehensible sitcom pilot, called “i’m the Mayor of Bimmi Gardens,” which he posted directly to YouTube; it follows Fleming as he swans around a “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”-esque set of a fictional Florida hamlet, playing a mayor who is trying to save the town’s “Boba crops.” A 2023 special, “Hell,” which aired on Peacock, was only slightly more approachable, involving surrealist skits and filmed segments featuring papier-mâché-like crafts.

When Fleming’s lo-fi approach worked, it felt like a delicious secret. During the pandemic, he released a series of short free-form disquisitions delivered from his car, and a series of original “songs” in which he’d monologue and warble over computer-generated synths, like an internet-addled Laurie Anderson. I first discovered Fleming’s work when I stumbled across one such number, called “Sick Jan,” in which he relayed the story of his accountant, a frumpy woman named Jan who played fast and loose with tax law. (“Sick Jan, we don’t have to claim a home office/If it means we’ll both go to jail,” he sings.) The song was so intricately detailed, its protagonist so particular—she has a “gray buzz cut and enough turquoise to get into Stevie Nicks’s house”—that it sparked within me a sense of sudden understanding. I didn’t know Sick Jan, but I’d known many Jan-like women, who before that very moment I’d never quite had the language to describe.

A similar linguistic specificity and precision-guided kookiness animates Fleming’s standup work. He is a master of the unexpected, idiosyncratic analogy. In one popular bit, in which he talks about baby boomers’ attachment to using Bitmojis, he says that “not since Goodall went into the jungle have we made such strides towards comprehending such a mystifying population.” He starts out another much-shared routine with “You know that thing where the most toxic person you’ve ever met over-relates to woodland creatures on social media? I call it ‘vibe dysphoria.’ ” He continues, “I don’t know how you got under the impression that you are a mouse in a jean jacket. You are an eel with a gun.” In “Live at the Palace,” one of Fleming’s biggest laughs comes when he describes his fellow-comedian Mike Birbiglia as looking like “a father and son ‘Freaky Friday’-ed into the same body.”

Even Fleming’s more conventional observational humor is inextricable from his outre bodily maneuvers onstage. Early in the special, he trots like a show pony, explaining that he got a jaywalking ticket in Los Angeles for his tendency to engage in “fanciful street dressage.” He impersonates a Clumber spaniel by freezing in a plank pose, crashes to the floor to depict a kid falling under the weight of a tuba, scuttles around like a crab, takes a running, belly-first leap onto a stool, and undulates on the ground to suggest the germs crawling around on an unwashed cast-iron skillet. At one point, he thanks the spotlight operator, who he says “was on the team that got Osama,” then scurries frantically around the stage, tripping over his own legs, in an attempt to outrun the spot. Fleming’s long hair and prancerly mien have led to much puzzlement over his gender identity, or what he calls in the HBO special “a nationwide manhunt for my pronouns.” In the show, he makes no pronouncement, but just tells the crowd, “You tell me. You’re looking at it.” Fleming’s defiance of categorization is what makes him feel like a generational talent: he is both a wordsmith and a clown, a person obsessed with “normie” habits who shows us just how alien the normal can be. ♦

For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Alex Barasch is filling in for Kyle Chayka.

Horror is a genre of upstarts. Many of its strangest, most striking films, from “The Night of the Living Dead” to “The Blair Witch Project,” come from first-timers working on shoestring budgets—and these days the first-timers can be found, increasingly, on YouTube. In 2018, Kyle Edward Ball launched a channel where he released videos based on users’ descriptions of their nightmares. The entries, with such deceptively simple titles as “sound in the hall” and “grandma,” are lo-fi, no more than a few minutes each; they dial into dream logic, primal dread, and a viewer’s instinct to fill in the gaps, a grainy shot of a bedroom door inviting the question of what’s waiting on the other side. The shorts paved the way for Ball’s experimental film “Skinamarink,” which became a word-of-mouth phenomenon in 2022. That same year, a teen-ager named Kane Parsons began posting a series of creepy, atmospheric clips set in the Backrooms, an endless, harshly lit liminal realm drawn from the crowdsourced mythology of the internet itself. (The look and vibe influenced the TV show “Severance.”) A24 is now producing his début feature, aptly named “Backrooms.” The studio has also partnered with Danny and Michael Philippou, who were vloggers before they broke out with “Talk to Me,” a movie that intimately understands the perils of a viral challenge: the inciting incident is a demonic possession documented on a dozen smartphones. Curry Barker, meanwhile, established himself on YouTube as a sketch comedian before playing a murderous influencer in “Milk & Serial,” an hour-long slasher which he uploaded directly to his channel; his first full-length film, “Obsession,” will be released by Focus in May. And then there’s “Iron Lung,” the new movie from Mark Fischbach, which reached theatres in a far more unorthodox way.

When Fischbach started shopping around “Iron Lung”—a self-funded horror film based on an indie video game of the same name—it was effectively turned down by every major U.S. distributor. He reasoned that the thirty-eight million YouTube followers who know him as Markiplier could fill at least fifty theatres, and decided to negotiate a limited release himself. After he announced the plan on his channel, noting that fans could also request showings at their local multiplexes, they did so in such numbers that some business owners apparently suspected bots. Fischbach and his wife fielded queries and handled bookings directly; Regal Cinemas’ head of content, Brooks LeBoeuf, lobbied by Markiplier subscribers on his own staff, eventually agreed to carry “Iron Lung” nationwide. Other chains followed. In the wake of interest from abroad, Fischbach had to text the game’s developer to check that he had international rights. Soon, “Iron Lung” was slated for four thousand screens. Since it opened, on January 30th, it’s earned upward of forty million dollars—trouncing another, far costlier horror movie of a sort, “Melania.”

Unlike other YouTube creators turned filmmakers, Fischbach made his name online not through sketches or shorts but via “let’s plays”: a genre in which someone runs through a video game for an audience, their face visible in a corner of the screen as they narrate and react to the proceedings. Fischbach rose to fame navigating indie horror games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, usually with jokey commentary punctuated by jump-scare-induced exclamations of “fuck!” He played Iron Lung in 2023, and the film he’s produced is remarkably (and perhaps regrettably) faithful to his experience with the source material. The movie’s opening voice-over explains an event known as the “Quiet Rapture”: the day the stars winked out and whole planets disappeared, leaving a handful of humans to settle on a distant moon. Fischbach plays one of the survivors, a convict deemed expendable and thus dispatched to explore an ocean of blood in a rickety submarine. For long stretches of “Iron Lung” ’s hundred-and-twenty-seven-minute running time, he’s the only person onscreen, attempting to reach a series of coördinates and taking X-ray images of what lurks beneath the depths. Seeing a skeletal creature materialize in the darkness is ominous; returning to the site to find that it’s disappeared is even worse. As his oxygen supply dwindles, he searches for answers and sketches out a crude map with such landmarks as WEIRD TUBES and ALIEN SHIT. Occasionally, we get hints of a larger, more complicated universe. Mostly, we hear Fischbach saying, “Fuck that,” “Fuck me,” or “I’m fucked.”

As a movie, it’s impenetrable. As a long-form let’s play, it starts to make more sense. Fischbach has tailored the structure to his native medium in more ways than one: as he told Variety, “Hopefully, people will have a good time, but leave it saying, ‘What just happened? I might need to see that again to really get an idea, or watch someone do a breakdown of it later.’ ” True to his wishes, videos from fellow-YouTubers with such titles as “Iron Lung Lore Explained in The Simplest Way Possible” and “The TERRIFYING Iron Lung Monster EXPLAINED!” quickly materialized. “Iron Lung” ’s jury-rigged theatrical run has been extended, and Fischbach’s fans, by and large, have loved it. A comment posted the day of the film’s release beneath his years-old video about the original game, asking “Who’s here after he did an IRL playthrough,” has nearly a hundred thousand likes.

That “Iron Lung” isn’t very good is almost beside the point. The underdog narrative around the movie is infinitely more appealing than the one onscreen: an aspiring filmmaker poured years of his life and his own money into a movie that’s become a hit. He broke down in tears while thanking his fans for their support. Having made back fifteen times the production costs at the box office, he’s giving bonuses to his scrappy crew. But a win for the little guy is also a win for the much bigger guy. As Fischbach put it recently on the industry podcast “The Town,” “YouTube is the thousand-pound monster lurking over everyone’s shoulders.”

YouTube’s C.E.O., Neal Mohan, has declared “Iron Lung” ’s success evidence of a “new era in Hollywood.” An audience transferring so decisively from one medium to another is almost unheard of: just try naming the last YouTuber (or TikToker, or Instagram influencer) who has made it as a leading man. Fischbach had the benefit of an unusually active fandom—one that had been getting steady updates on this particular project for years—and of working within a genre optimized for such an outsized hit. It’s unlikely that anyone else could reliably replicate the outcome. But YouTube, which has around 2.5 billion monthly users and last year generated some sixty billion dollars in revenue, is already the No. 1 streaming platform in the world. Studios are now contending with it in a different way—and even Netflix and Amazon, themselves born out of Big Tech, recognize it as an existential threat, poaching vloggers and video podcasters in a bid for their audiences’ attention. (MrBeast, who hosts the competition show “Beast Games” on Prime, and Jake and Logan Paul, who engage in stunt fights live on Netflix, are among the more unfortunate exports.) Mohan might still prefer that directors come to him, rather than have YouTubers “graduating” to the traditional film industry. As another YouTube executive told Bloomberg, the goal is to get to “a place where anybody who’s taking a movie to Sundance might look at us as a potential distribution platform or an opportunity to go direct to consumer.”

Fischbach himself thought of “Iron Lung” ’s fate in terms of the war between YouTube and Hollywood. In one video, he talked about how “there is something fundamentally broken with the movie industry,” even as “there is a want to go see movies.” During the film’s first weekend in theatres, he started a live stream, entitled “ACTUAL EMERGENCY MEETING!!,” urging fans to help maintain a shrinking box-office lead over Sam Raimi’s starry, forty-million-dollar horror-comedy “Send Help,” which had opened the same day. (In the end, “Send Help” narrowly outgrossed “Iron Lung,” though the latter sold more tickets.) Fischbach framed it as a way for a tiny indie to give Disney, which had distributed “Send Help,” a run for its money.

There’s irony in Fischbach seeing Raimi, who got his start making home videos in which he and his friends aped the Three Stooges’ antics, as the establishment filmmaker to beat. In 1981, when Raimi completed “The Evil Dead”—a gory, gonzo story of demonic possession, made for a few hundred thousand dollars—it, too, was roundly rejected by American distributors. It’s since become a cult classic. In a 1982 interview about the making of “The Evil Dead,” Raimi, still in his early twenties, sounded a lot like the YouTube generation, dismissing “the films that are glutting the market” as “re-creations of the ones that have made money.” But he was optimistic about the future of horror movies. “There’ll always be a market for them,” he said. “There always has been.”

Forty years on, Raimi’s view has been vindicated. Where romance and comedies cycle in and out of fashion, horror is the only genre that consistently gets people into theatres, even amid a post-pandemic decline in moviegoing. We never lack for fresh phobias to metabolize and exploit—witness the number of horror movies made lately about social media—and there’s a particular catharsis that comes with being scared together in a darkened room. Crucially, these films can also be made cheaply: the suggestion of a monster is often scarier than an expensive C.G.I. rendering. Studios have long since discovered that producing or acquiring one for a modest sum can yield a high return on investment. Perhaps the most dramatic case study is “Paranormal Activity,” a 2007 indie about a couple who suspect they’re being haunted and set up a camera in their bedroom to investigate, which was shot for fifteen thousand dollars and went on to gross nearly two hundred million. For every schlocky, derivative entry, there’s one that endures.

“Iron Lung,” originally slated for a one-weekend domestic release, is still in theatres around the world—but Fischbach is already back on YouTube, uploading more let’s plays. In the comments, some fans have begun to speculate about which game might be the seed of his next feature-length endeavor. Others are negging him about his big-screen accomplishments. “Wow the director of Iron Lung made a youtube channel,” one user wrote. “Hope it goes well for him.” ♦