The New YorkerModify

For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka.

Shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, in 2022, he claimed that “removing child exploitation is priority #1.” It was certainly a noble goal—social-media sites had become havens for distributing abusive materials, including child pornography and revenge porn, and there was perhaps no major platform as openly hospitable to such content as Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which restricted nudity and pornographic videos, Twitter allowed users to post violent and “consensually produced adult content” to their feeds without consequence. Long before Musk’s takeover, Twitter had positioned itself as anti-censorship, the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” as Tony Wang, the general manager of Twitter in the U.K., once put it—less concerned with policing content than with providing a public square for users to express themselves freely. But what were the limits of expression? How was Twitter to plainly determine whether an amateur pornographic video featured a sixteen-year-old or an eighteen-year-old, or if that video was consensually produced or violently coerced? Were these distinctions always so obvious? Twitter staffed trust-and-safety teams, and built tools to scan for images of sexual abuse, removing content that violated company rules. These efforts, however, could not keep up with the sheer amount of explicit content being posted to the site every day. When Musk took over the platform, he wasn’t wrong for identifying child pornography as a problem the company needed to address. But how did he plan to prevent the dissemination of dangerous and illegal materials while also making Twitter a supposed home for free-speech absolutists?

These are open questions, and borderline crises, for the company now known as X. The platform has become a bot-ravaged wilderness where engagement-farming accounts and users who pay for blue-check verification run wild, with few meaningful guardrails in place for preventing abusive or violent content from entering algorithmicized feeds. Far from having scrubbed the site clean of “child exploitation,” Musk now has an even trickier issue to contend with, one he’s helped nurture and facilitate: the proliferation of sexual images created with Grok, the A.I. chatbot developed by Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, xAI. On New Year’s Eve, Musk asked Grok to produce an image of him in a bikini—“perfect,” he said, when the program obliged—contributing to the recent surge of user-prompted requests to “undress” images of real people, some of whom appeared to be minors. (One estimate found that, amid the trend, Grok had generated roughly one nonconsensual sexualized image a minute.) Wired reported that, on the stand-alone Grok website and app, these altered images and videos were even more sophisticated and more graphic than they were on X. In a bit of damage control, Musk took to X to threaten “consequences” for anyone who used Grok to create sexual images of children. The threat feels hollow; Grok, after all, is partly designed to generate sexual material, even boasting “virtual companions,” such as an anime character named Ani who blows kisses and becomes more promiscuous as users engage with her. The most significant change that Musk has made in response to this controversy is that he has started charging users to create images, sexual or not, with Grok, which seems less a deterrent than a way to profit from the popularity of the service.

You don’t need me to tell you that porn is everywhere, that it has never been so easily accessible. Pulling out your phone and watching a hardcore sex scene is now as simple and straightforward as checking the weather or sending an e-mail. On the so-called tube sites, which aggregate user-uploaded videos—Pornhub chief among them—any iteration or genre of porn can be discovered, with every imaginable category of kink and preference available for perusal. (Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Texas law requiring age verification for sites like Pornhub; twenty-four other states have passed similar laws.) But pornography, or at least provocatively erotic material, is not just relegated to tube sites; Instagram and TikTok overflow with soft-core content, some of which serves as advertising for porn performers and models to promote their accounts on OnlyFans, a platform where users pay a subscriber fee to view explicit, sometimes personalized, content. As more of our lives are funnelled into screens, the inescapability of porn—the ease of consuming it, the ever-present possibility of being aroused by it—has become perhaps the most undertheorized area of social upheaval in contemporary life.

Most mainstream pornography—specifically the kind filed under the “most popular” category on the tube sites, a category of porn that the writer Lillian Fishman termed “the front page”—follows a simple premise: a person appears to be pressured into sex they desperately want but which they are not supposed to want. Employees seduce bosses, teachers seduce students, stepchildren seduce stepparents, in-laws seduce one another, friends sleep with each other’s spouses—basically, any taboo that’s not biological incest or violent nonconsent is well represented in popular pornography. In these videos, many of which have millions of views, sex represents a dangerous and illicit possibility, something ravenously desired but ethically volatile. We wouldn’t do that, right? We couldn’t! But, when the characters in these videos indeed decide to do it, the release of the will-we-won’t-we tension exudes a thrill embodied by great, consensual enthusiasm. Abandoning all inhibitive and critical faculties in the face of extreme pleasure, no matter the life-shattering consequences on the other side of the pleasure, is a central tenet of mainstream porn, a trope that knows no end. As Fishman writes, “To consider these playfully coercive setups inherently nonconsensual or degrading is a deliberate misreading of this profound, ubiquitous desire, which must haunt every puritanical and sex-negative society: to disavow what we want and still get it.”

Critics of pornography have often cited the objectification and degradation of women—both the performers themselves and the characters they portray—as reasons for the form’s irredeemable immorality. The scholar Amanda Cawston argues that “pornography is a mode of externalised sexism that provides a form of mediated domination and exploitation that bypasses the usual mechanisms of personal moral evaluation,” echoing the influential feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon’s belief that pornography sexualizes misogyny and fuels gender inequality. The philosopher Nancy Bauer, however, claims that “within the pornographic mise-en-scène, there is no space for the concept of objectification.” Within the “pornutopia,” as Bauer calls it, “the conflict between reason and sexual desire is eliminated, in which to use another person solely as a means to satisfy one’s own desire is the ultimate way to respect that person’s humanity and even humanity in general.” Other “pro-sex” arguments tend to center on porn not as demeaning entertainment but as a form of labor, one that, for its workers, can be both empowering and paradigm-shifting, a portal to a freer, more inclusive, less repressed society. Such a belief has made OnlyFans seem like a reputable home for sex workers, though the app, like many gig-economy platforms, has devised a model that favors few and silos many, excacerbating, per the writer Benjamin Weil, the “longstanding inequalities within the landscape of sex work.”

The taboos of porn aren’t just limited to those manufacturing pornographic content; they have always extended to the viewers who decide to look at it. But in our hyper-digital era, the problem of watching too much porn has become increasingly intertwined with the problem of too much screen time. In Daniel Kolitz’s viral essay for Harper’s, “The Goon Squad,” he reports on the “gooning” community, a group of people who masturbate to porn on a near full-time basis, extending climax for hours and sometimes days at a time. Many gooners identify as “pornosexuals,” meaning their sexual orientation is directed solely toward their porn consumption. Kolitz’s ethnography, crucially, does not portray gooners as some freakishly niche cohort operating at the outer edges of society. Their plight represents the plight of most people living in our tech-optimized world. Gooners can be our family members and colleagues, our neighbors and friends. Is it that difficult to imagine a person watching porn for multiple hours every day? Isn’t that how people consume social media, anyway—as an infinitely regenerating substitute for the real world?

That there are now X and Grok users who possess the power to create porn with A.I., rather than passively consuming it, indicates a further natural outgrowth of our pornified and overly technologized world. A.I. has been pitched to us, by the companies and people set to profit most from it, as a tool that will improve all areas of our lives: our jobs, our art, our heath, our longevity, our relationships, our productivity. Why would we be so naïve as to think that this logic wouldn’t also apply to sex? And, without regulation or responsible intellectual deliberation about the power and effects of these tools, why wouldn’t users push the limits of what’s possible? One might be tempted to believe that A.I. has the potential to mitigate some of the more problematic aspects of porn creation—that it might actually be more ethical to consume an A.I.-generated porn video, starring two computerized actors, than a real video filmed under more dubious circumstances. But, if mainstream pornography is predicated on the idea that the forbidden thing is always the most pleasure-inducing, then it stands to reason that, given the opportunity to make their own porn, people will hew toward real-life fantasies they “shouldn’t” have—hence the stream of deepfakes and nonconsensual images that have come to overtake X. Using Grok to develop child pornography, however, transcends any “front page” taboo fetish. Whether the bulk of people using the chatbot to sexualize images of children are rage-baiting trolls or actual child-sex offenders almost seems beyond the point; Grok’s ability to make such images in the first place is an indictment of Musk and the tool’s other makers, as it offers a new path for people interested in trafficking child pornography to do so.

In a podcast episode from 2023, Joe Rogan considered the potential benefits of an artificially intelligent President. An A.I. leader, he posited, would be “immune to bias, corruption, influence. Someone who looks at things rationally and in an intelligent way that spans all the disciplines.” This argument, though frighteningly specious, represents a growing belief that A.I. will be an all-wise, all-knowing, godlike operator, one that can benevolently guide life on earth, and beyond, better than humanity ever could. But the increased generation of abusive and violent sexual content with bots like Grok makes clear that machines do not possess an innate value system or an empirical moral code, let alone sentience. After all, these are products designed by people, and sold by corporations, with the goal of cornering as many markets, and netting as much profit, as possible. And sex sells. Musk isn’t the only person in the A.I. world to realize this. Recently, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, announced ChatGPT’s “adult mode,” which will allow for erotica. Altman said the company wanted to “treat adult users like adults.” It’s a justification that could be used when deregulating almost anything. ♦

Months before Christmas, Caracas was adorned with a surreal amount of festive decorations. Millions of lights were strung around the trunks of palm trees; public squares were ornamented with L.E.D. stars and satin ribbons. Back in September, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had announced that Christmas would come early: an attempt to raise spirits amid threats from the world’s greatest military superpower, and to boost the economy in a country with the highest rate of annual inflation globally. Ironically, this meant that by the time the holidays actually came around, the Christmas trees and fixtures looked depressingly weathered, exposed to the elements for far too long.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, my maternal grandparents and I put up our own decorations, bedecking our apartment, in the north of the capital, with vintage baubles, tinsel, and seasonal cushions. The holiday aesthetics had long lost their allure. Still, we each grabbed a corner of a festive red tablecloth and draped it over the table where we eat breakfast together every morning, cutting fruit and drinking coffee as the sun begins to rise through the wrought-iron windows, birdsong emanating from the tropical forest that separates Caracas from the Caribbean Sea.

In late November, when U.S. President Donald Trump had announced that he was closing Venezuela’s airspace—tantamount to an act of war, given that Venezuela is a sovereign nation—many of us had worried about Christmas. The country has a diaspora of nearly eight million; more than a quarter of the population has left in the past ten years alone, primarily owing to economic hardship. Inflation is so severe that, in the past two decades, the nation’s currency has been declared void and substituted with a new tender three times. The streets of Caracas glitter with discarded, obsolete money, not worth the time it would take to bend over and pick it up.

There is a long-standing custom of Venezuelans who live abroad coming home for the holidays, and, in many cases, bringing much-needed cash to their loved ones in a country where the minimum wage is less than a dollar per month, but everyday life remains expensive. (Because of the unreliability of Venezuelan currency, U.S. dollars and cryptocurrency are used for most meaningful transactions, which has raised the cost of living significantly.) With almost no international flights entering or leaving Venezuela, many families had to make alternate arrangements for Christmas this year, living rooms and bellies much emptier than anticipated. On top of this, the country’s dwindling but nevertheless extensive tourism and hospitality industries were sent into deeper financial distress, as December is typically the busiest period of the year.

This Christmas, it was just my grandparents and me. They have both lived through more than ninety Decembers, but this was the first one we’d shared in a long time. In 2002, after an attempted coup against then President Hugo Chávez, leading to a period of unrest, my parents had decided that we couldn’t live in Caracas, and we settled in London. We visited Venezuela occasionally, but the situation in the country became so extreme that, eventually, we couldn’t do even that. In my early twenties, I moved back to Caracas, though I would leave again to complete my postgraduate studies in the U.K. I returned to the city roughly six months ago and moved in with my grandparents.

We spent Christmas Eve driving around Caracas, revisiting familiar places, such as San Agustín del Norte, the neighborhood where my grandfather grew up, and Bellas Artes, the picturesque museum district. My grandfather, despite nearing his centenary year, insisted on driving—his way of retaining a sense of control among the local and geopolitical chaos. During the crisis years, in the second half of the twenty-tens, when poverty, violent crime, and civil unrest reached a fever pitch, my grandparents had purchased an armored Toyota Camry, the only bulletproof vehicle they could afford. But the car—small, low to the ground, and exceedingly heavy, owing to the ballistic steel and glass—is not suited to a city like Caracas, which is rife with steep inclines and deep potholes, and is best travelled in a four-by-four. The car was surely designed for a foreign diplomat to drive down one straight road between an embassy and a hotel; instead, it suffers greatly at the twists and turns of this city, and at the hands of my grandfather, who drives boldly.

When my grandparents felt that Caracas was at its most dangerous, around 2019, they rarely left their neighborhood at all. In recent years, as violent crime has declined, they’ve become more willing to venture out, eager to reconnect with a place that, for years, they felt they could not explore. On Christmas Eve, we looked through the car windows with awe at a city that my grandparents had almost forgotten, and that I had never got to know in the first place—a mosaic of colorfully painted houses and narrow favela streets, loud with the sound of motorbikes and music, interspersed with walkways wrapped in Christmas lights.

There was something slightly comical about the aesthetics of Christmas, shaped as they are by the colder global North, being superimposed on this tropical landscape. But the humor quickly turns dark when you cross the Río Guaire into San Agustín del Sur, the hillside favela near my grandfather’s old quarter, and arrive at a pyramidal building called El Helicoide. A wildly ambitious brutalist project, the structure was intended as a luxury shopping mall, complete with a four-kilometre ramp that loops around it, allowing vehicles to drive right in and park inside. It is now one of the most notorious political prisons in South America. For the past three months, it has also been a Christmas tree. An L.E.D. star sits atop the pyramid, and strands of colorful lights encircle the structure, like tinsel.

Inmates have reported cruel and inhumane treatment: electrocution, beatings, and simulated executions, among other horrors. Many were arrested for protesting Maduro’s regime, after he stole the Presidential election, in 2024. Some were detained for simply sending texts questioning the government’s legitimacy—messages that were uncovered during the phone searches that have become a routine part of law enforcement in Caracas.

Trump’s aggressive actions toward Venezuela only worsened the Maduro regime’s paranoia, and, in turn, its authoritarian grip on power. A common slogan, written on the armored personnel carriers that could be seen coming and going from El Helicoide at all hours of the day, translates to the declaration “To Doubt Is Treason.” The city’s most ubiquitous image, painted all over Caracas by government-commissioned muralists, is of the eyes of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, watching us.

In September, after the Trump Administration had begun striking boats off the coast of Venezuela, I was out photographing the local flora, a few streets down from where my grandparents and I live. After taking a picture of an unusually overgrown kapok tree—which, my neighbors later told me, was near a property owned by a high-ranking government official’s daughter—plainclothes officers approached me. They asked fairly banal questions about my employment and my reasons for taking photographs, and they looked through my phone, where they discovered that I had some text messages in English, further arousing their suspicion.

After roughly half an hour of sitting with the officers in the shadow of the kapok, being interrogated about my thoughts on the government, a four-by-four pulled up. Officers from SEBIN, the country’s intelligence service, dressed in black balaclavas and combat gear, with semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, emerged from the vehicle and said that they were going to take me somewhere for questioning. They explained that, for my own safety, they were going to have to restrain me, and, in a gesture painfully symptomatic of the fact that I have spent far too much of my life in England, I made sure to shake the officers’ hands before they zip-tied my wrists.

I was guided into the middle back seat of the car, the SEBIN agents sitting on either side of me, and a plainclothes officer up front. My eyes were covered with a blindfold. I could feel a cold pressure just below my ribs, and, looking down out of a small gap in the eye covering, I saw that both of the agents beside me had drawn handguns and were pointing them at my waist. They took me to El Helicoide for interrogation, on suspicion of being a spy who was using the pretext of photography to document what they called “a street where important people live”—all of this for a photo of a beautiful tree, and a language shared with a potential oppressor. After grilling me for hours, the officers decided that my intentions were more artistic than political. But they insisted on driving me back to my apartment so they could check the validity of my story about living with family near the site of my arrest. When we arrived on my block, an uncle who could vouch for me was thankfully present and smoking on the porch, and I narrowly avoided introducing my grandparents to the masked men with rifles. It wasn’t too long after this encounter that El Helicoide became a Christmas tree.

All throughout December, fireworks punctuated the tropical nights, set off by families and delinquents alike, who took advantage of the pyrotechnics sold by street venders around town. Many times during the holiday season, I flinched at the sound of a celebratory rocket or a confetti cannon, mistakenly thinking that the U.S. had begun its ballistic campaign. The most extensive American-military buildup in the region in decades, featuring missile destroyers and the world’s largest warship, along with a reported fifteen thousand troops, was less than twelve kilometres off our coast—and yet the fireworks persisted. It is a testament to the Venezuelan people’s resilience that, even in the face of a possible war, they were celebrating loudly with pyrotechnics; it is also horribly annoying if, like me, you have an anxious disposition and spend too much time reading the news. It wouldn’t be until the day after Christmas that Trump announced the first air strike on Venezuelan soil, targeting a port facility that he claimed was used for drug-trafficking. Though the strike itself was a dramatic escalation, few people here were surprised. If anything, the most unexpected aspect of the attack was that it had come so late in the year: the naval fleet had already been present, in the Caribbean and in the public imagination, for more than four months.

On the evening of January 2nd, my grandparents and I drove out to El Paseo Los Próceres, the site of Caracas’s most elaborate holiday display, to see the Christmas lights before they were taken down. It’s a long boulevard flanked with statues, which connects monuments to the country’s independence heroes with a sprawling military complex, Fuerte Tiuna. The Paseo was commissioned by the mid-century dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, whose modernizing campaign saw the construction of El Helicoide. We spent a quiet evening watching the twinkle, and my grandparents told me stories about dances and parties they’d attended in venues nearby. My grandfather said that, at the invitation of a friend who was in the military and had access to the private venues reserved for the armed forces, he had once attended a party there with Pérez Jiménez himself.

I went to bed early that night. At roughly 2 A.M., I woke to a loud humming noise, which I realized was coming from fighter jets overhead. This was followed by the sound of bombs dropping, rattling the padlocks on our windows, which my grandmother had bought, during the crisis years, to prevent break-ins. After the first rush of terror subsided, I realized how foolish I’d been to think that the fireworks that went off in December were a possible bombardment. This current noise was unlike anything I’d ever heard, so utterly and unequivocally an instrument of death. The best way I can describe it is as vividly three-dimensional: in the same way that hearing an echo can sometimes allow you to visualize the shape of the room it is coming from, each blast seemed to occupy space solidly, leading me to imagine a thick sphere of fire. I felt the sound in my chest, like the negative impression of a heartbeat.

I woke up my grandparents who, being slightly deaf, had not yet realized that anything was happening. Throughout the night, more than a hundred and fifty aircraft would fly over Caracas and nearby cities. At the time, none of us knew how discerning the troops would be in their campaign, or how long it would go on for. Ultimately, the bombardment would last a little more than two hours, with the noise from the aircraft continuing almost until dawn. Fuerte Tiuna, the military complex near the beautifully illuminated boulevard where my grandfather had partied with Pérez Jiménez, had been partially reduced to rubble. It is where Maduro and his wife had been staying when they were captured by U.S. forces.

Later that morning, after news of Maduro’s capture had circulated, the mass panic-buying began. People across the city scraped together the little money they had, sometimes draining their bank accounts entirely, to buy food and other necessities. Queues for gas stations and grocery stores, where shelves were increasingly empty, grew to be several blocks long. Prices, meanwhile, began to skyrocket: a single plantain now costs three dollars—six times what it used to.

“I always wear a sports jacket so whenever anyone calls me ‘sir’ I can attribute it to my jacket and not my age.”

Cartoon by William Haefeli

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Outside the overpopulated supermarkets, Caracas, which is normally a mad bustle of people and motorbikes, was eerily deserted. The city’s colorful outdoor food markets lay abandoned—the usual smell of ripe papaya replaced by the stench of yesterday’s scraps, rotting in the heat. Even the police and military presence was strangely understated. Caracas feels like a war zone at the best of times, with uniformed men on so many streets, but now that we were actually at war, they were nowhere to be seen. The only body that has come out in force in the wake of the bombardment are the colectivos—paramilitary groups that monitor the roads on motorcycles. These ad-hoc patrols, who defend the regime, make up for their lack of official authority with sheer intensity. Though superficially less intimidating than the National Guard and intelligence agents, who wear expensive gear and are evidently trained, it is the colectivos who inspire true fear, partly owing to one crucial detail: they, unlike official law-enforcement officers, tend to keep their fingers on their triggers.

Maduro’s ouster initially led to a sense of relief in Venezuela, for people across the political spectrum: those who supported U.S. intervention celebrated Maduro’s capture as a sign that regime change was imminent, whereas those who feared American military force hoped that the capture would at least mark an end to the imminent threat of violence. That relief quickly faded, however, as we realized how much uncertainty lies ahead. We in Venezuela are well aware of the Trump Administration’s mistreatment of Latin American immigrants in the United States, including the two hundred and fifty-two Venezuelan men who were sent to CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where their heads were shaved upon entry and some were severely beaten. Hundreds more Venezuelan immigrants have been sent to Alligator Alcatraz, where the Miami Herald reported that two-thirds of the more than eighteen hundred migrants detained last July had essentially disappeared from public records. Many Venezuelans fear that Trump’s brutal treatment of the Latino population on U.S. soil is indicative of how he will proceed in terms of his foreign policy, even with Maduro, one of the main targets of his ire, gone. Trump’s rhetoric has decidedly shifted away from the prevention of drug trafficking toward obtaining control and resources, underscoring that this operation was never about democracy or the Venezuelan people’s right to self-determination. After Trump stated in a recent Times interview that the U.S. is going to be running Venezuela, apparently for years, and shared an image on Truth Social of a doctored Wikipedia page calling him the “Acting President of Venezuela,” some of us fear that we have swapped one unelected despot for another, and that we might even join the ranks of Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Or, based on the recent chaos, that we might return to something like the crisis years.

The morning after Maduro was captured, as the sun rose over the mountains at the edge of the city, people had stepped out of their homes in a daze. This city, with its long history of civil disobedience and violence, where so many people distrust their neighbors, was suddenly buzzing with conversations between strangers, as everyone tried to figure out what had happened the night before, together. But that brief moment of connection was something of an isolated incident. The country is becoming more and more polarized, as the many Venezuelans who are simultaneously angry at Maduro’s dictatorial regime and distrusting of the U.S. feel that they must pick a side, despite there being no good options. The extremists on either end of the spectrum—ardent supporters of the Bolivarian regime, and the disenfranchised ruling class who hated the revolution from its more democratic beginnings, long before it spiralled into a dictatorship—are both disproportionately loud and paint a picture of the country and its people that is far more ideological than the reality. The diaspora, too, with their safety from the mechanisms of state repression and their distance from the bombardment and the mortal fear it spurred, cast a skewed image. “Don’t try and explain Venezuela to Venezuelans” has rapidly become a popular slogan of the diaspora, especially in right-wing cities like Miami, where it is often used to shut down criticisms of Trump’s actions. I would retort with, Don’t try to speak on behalf of Venezuela if you are not here. If you heard the bombs on the news instead of feeling them in your chest, you’re bound to have a different reaction to the situation. There is neither celebration nor lamentation in the capital right now, only immense uncertainty as we try to make sense of what comes next. With the city in such a state of suspension, no one has bothered to take down all the Christmas lights. ♦

In “The Chronology of Water,” the actor Kristen Stewart, directing her first feature film, confronts the thorny question of literary adaptation far more innovatively than many veteran filmmakers do. Based on a memoir of the same title by Lidia Yuknavitch, the film crafts a cinematic correlate for the author’s distinctive narrative method. “I remember things in retinal flashes,” Yuknavitch explains in the book. “Without order.” In another passage, she says, “All the events of my life swim in and out between each other,” adding that, although her memory is nonlinear, “we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.” The liberation of time is central to modern cinema, because, once a movie is acknowledged as a work of first-person art as much as a book is, subjectivity itself becomes its overarching subject. Stewart confronts the literary source head on, making the authorial voice, in voice-over, a full and crucial part of the movie. Moreover, because of Yuknavitch’s distinctive approach to her story, breaking through familiar modes of storytelling in movies then becomes an essential challenge, and Stewart, reconceiving Yuknavitch’s art of memory as her own, takes up that challenge with skill, imagination, and audacious freedom.

Yuknavitch’s book starts somewhere in the middle of her story, with a stillbirth that she experienced during her first marriage, and proceeds to zip back and forth through her troubled childhood and adolescence, her experience of motherhood, and the discovery and development of her literary talent. Stewart slightly tweaks this format—the movie keeps the stillbirth in its chronological place in Lidia’s life story—but within that framework, she takes the retinal flashes literally. The film teems with quick cuts to distant moments in Lidia’s life. Some are from the past—whether events that have already been shown or ones that surge up from unmentioned regions of experience. Others depict things described in voice-over—either as part of Lidia’s internal monologue or from her written work. Most strikingly, some are from the near future, and have an uncanny resemblance to premonitions. Working with the editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Stewart has made one of the most startlingly assembled films of recent years. What’s more, this formal ingenuity never distracts from the emotional intensity of the story but, rather, amplifies its force by simultaneously compressing and expanding the action.

Lidia (played as a child by Anna Wittowsky and, when she’s older, by Imogen Poots) grows up in a household of horrors. She is aware that her teen-age sister, Claudia (played at that age by Marlena Sniega and, in adulthood, by Thora Birch) is being brutalized by their father, Mike (Michael Epp), and stops her ears to seal out the sound of her being beaten with a strap. Lidia also comes to realize that Claudia is enduring sexual abuse, though initially she doesn’t recognize it as such, simply sensing in her sister a profound injury beyond the familiar cruelty. Their mother, Dorothy (Susannah Flood), an alcoholic, is passive, withdrawn, and terrified of Mike. After Claudia leaves home, Lidia, too, is sexually abused. Lidia’s escape is swimming. She becomes an accomplished competitive swimmer in high school—and Mike, openly controlling and candidly cruel, does his best to prevent her from going away to college on a swimming scholarship.

But get away Lidia does, and, finally free of paternal authority, she’s out of control: drinking and taking drugs, partying hard, flunking out, targeting a gentle guitar-playing boy named Phillip (Earl Cave) for a hearts-and-flowers romance even as she mocks and berates him. She goes to rehab, marries Phillip, gets pregnant, leaves him, and moves in with her sister. Through it all—her terrorized childhood, her reckless young adulthood, her bereavement—she writes in journals, fervently and lyrically, grabbing at experience and emotion with desperate urgency. At a roommate’s urging, Lidia joins a creative-writing workshop taught by Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi). Kesey recognizes her literary talent and also empathizes with her over the loss of her child, having been deeply marked by the death of one of his sons in a road accident. As Lidia’s literary career takes off—and she begins to write the book on which the movie is based—aspects and figures from her turbulent past reappear both in memory and in physical form. The effect, as seen from the relative serenity of a family life that Lidia eventually forges, is of a retrospective sense of destiny—of a life that writing has, in both senses of the word, saved.

“The Chronology of Water” compresses the overflowing story of Lidia’s turbulent life into aphoristic flashes and lyrical outpourings. The leaps in time have the eerie effect of effacing time—the layered succession of images implying their simultaneity in Lidia’s mind. Stewart’s method of memory leaps suggests that a storehouse of memories is, essentially, simultaneous, with no fixed sequence beside the deep grooves of connection cut in the mind by the inescapable force of emotion. The movie’s remarkable approach to memory presents it as the opposite of free association—call it compulsory association, the suppression of freedom by the power of ingrained and imposed patterns.

The movie is built around such patterns, and its constant leaping among emotionally explosive fragments reflects the subject of Yuknavitch’s memoir. The film’s relentless intensity, its concentration on highs and lows, on extremes of sensation and emotion, is in itself a profound view of the very nature of trauma. This is a childhood that had all its ordinariness burned out of it by the linking of even seemingly trivial gestures (an offering of candy, a bath, a swim, the dust in a corner of a room) to an entire array of physical and mental agonies. Stewart conveys the idea of physical pain and physical pleasure with imaginative fervor, and one of her prime inspirations—in a scene of Lidia and two other women in a sexual relationship—is to evoke, by way of extreme closeups, a sense of carnal textures. This is eroticism without prurience.

The punctuation of the narrative with non-chronological flashes and scene is consistent through almost the whole film. Sometimes Stewart runs clusters of powerful moments together to play like mini-episodes. Yet the dramatic effect of this fragmentation is to suppress any sense of an arc. As a result, “The Chronology of Water” is a movie with little forward motion; it lacks the dramatic momentum to carry the story through its series of immediate sensations. This is where fidelity of adaptation suggests its limitations. The film’s impression-based form is caught between sensation and approximation; very little is presented with concrete directness. A more tensile drama would involve stepping back, seeing Lidia in a wider context, observing her literary activity and her literary life—the present tense of the writerly memory—in more practical detail. Instead, “The Chronology of Water” risks depicting the present tense of the established writer’s life as a predestined triumph rather than an ongoing activity. The result is a first-person story with much of the person removed.

The form also has an effect on Poots’s performance. At one level, it is remarkably virtuosic, displaying an uncanny ability to incarnate Lidia persuasively from high school to middle age. However, it’s constrained by Stewart’s snippet-centered style, which means that, instead of developing emotion, Poots can only emblematize it, including in scenes of the limited and clichéd passage between laughter and tears. Stewart’s rapt attention to Poots’s powerful extremes of expression is at odds with the dramatic unfolding of character along with narrative. Still, the fragmentary approach does allow a few supporting performances, in roles clipped into dispersed bits, to shine. Epp, as Lidia’s father, offers a wide variety of expressions in a narrow spectrum of tyranny; Belushi plays Kesey with gravelly whimsy and lifeworn charm; and Birch, as the adult Claudia, projects in each glance an abiding poise that’s a constant exertion of inner strength.

Even with its elisions and frustrations, “The Chronology of Water” reflects a directorial conception that escapes from the familiar pathways of narrative filmmaking and grafts an element of the avant-garde into its drama. In the process, the film evokes a basic tension in the history of cinema: the eternal directorial struggle to turn cumbersome equipment, organizational complexity, and the sheer fact of collaboration into a form of personal expression. To Stewart’s bold defiance of the habits of narrative, she adds another layer of difficulty in finding a way to personal expression: the film’s relationship to its literary source. Devotion and fidelity may constrain imagination rather than inspiring it, and Stewart’s adaptation, for all its ingenuity and audacity, falls short of transformation. ♦

Over decades of travel to Iran, I’ve regularly returned to symbolic sites of the Islamic Revolution as a way of assessing the national mood. One is the ornate mausoleum of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which features a huge golden dome and four spiny minarets visible for miles, a sprawling parking lot with space for twenty thousand vehicles, and a mall of souvenir shops and kebab restaurants. The shrine remained well attended during official government events, but, as the years went on, I noticed fewer and fewer visitors—usually tourists and Shiite pilgrims, plus the “dusters” in charge of cleaning the elaborate enclosure in which the Imam is buried. I have also routinely attended Friday prayers at the University of Tehran, where senior clerics, and occasionally the Supreme Leader, give the sermon. Over time, the crowds got older and older.

“It is almost impossible to keep the revolutionary élan alive and to transmit it down generational lines,” Anne O’Donnell, a historian at New York University, told me. “There’s something about revolutions as social experiences, almost independent of the ideologies that they are engaged in, that leaves an imprint on the generation of people who make them.” But, she went on, that early enthusiasm or euphoria “has a shelf life, a time stamp.”

It’s been almost a half century since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi boarded the royal Boeing 727 at Tehran’s airport for an extended “vacation.” He reportedly wept while bidding farewell to his staff and inner coterie, and took a vessel of Iranian soil with him. At that point, after fourteen months of nationwide protests, his exile seemed inevitable, the culmination of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Now the theocracy that succeeded his rule is in its third generation—and in its own desperate struggle to survive.

After two weeks of anti-government demonstrations in all of Iran’s thirty-one provinces, more than five hundred people have reportedly been killed, and thousands more have been detained. “The Iranian regime has faced and brutally repressed repeated rounds of popular uprisings since 2009,” Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, posted on X. “Never has it struggled with the kind of perfect storm it’s sailed itself into.”

Iranians have plenty of reasons to feel angry, betrayed, vulnerable, or insecure. In the last two decades, several major protests have erupted. In 2009, millions took to the streets in a series of demonstrations dubbed the Green Movement over alleged political fraud in a Presidential election. Between 2017 and 2019, the soaring costs of basic items sparked protests in dozens of cities. (The price of fuel, managed in part by a government subsidy, rose by three hundred per cent.) In 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for improperly covering her hair, produced the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising, led largely by young women. The current protests erupted on December 28th, after merchants in Tehran’s lofty Grand Bazaar shuttered their shops as the value of the rial, the national currency, went into free fall. When I first went to Iran, in 1973, a dollar could be exchanged for roughly seventy rials; this month, a dollar bought 1.4 million. Annual inflation has exceeded forty per cent, and soared to seventy-two per cent for food. The revolution was carried out in the name of “the oppressed,” but Iran’s population has almost tripled since then, and the government has been increasingly unsuccessful in feeding, housing, educating, and employing them.

Politically, the regime has rotted from within, discarding, discrediting, or detaining its own kind. Ali Kadivar, a sociologist at Boston College and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, said that the turning point happened last Thursday, January 9th, the beginning of the Iranian weekend and the sabbath, when vast crowds joined the protests. “That’s the point where people saw each other,” he told me. (Kadivar’s father, Mohsen, was an outspoken critic who was imprisoned at Evin Prison and now teaches at Duke University. His aunt, Jamileh, was a reformist Member of Parliament who was put on trial for attending a conference in Berlin and banned from running for a second term. She now lives in London.)

The ideology invoked to justify Iran’s revolution has become increasingly untenable since the emergence of accusations of voter fraud in the 2009 election, which put a hard-liner in power, according to Charles Kurzman, a University of North Carolina sociologist and the author of “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran.” Since then, “people just didn’t buy what a leader was saying anymore, and were looking for a way out,” he said. Iranians have occasionally rallied around reformist candidates, but they, too, have been undermined by hard-line revolutionary purists. “Many Iranians who share the ideals and goals of the reformist movement no longer believe that reform is going to lead to those goals,” Kurzman said.

During an event at the Atlantic Council on Friday, Rob Macaire, a former British Ambassador to Iran, said that the regime in Tehran “does not have the answers to any of the challenges that it’s facing.” The inner circle of power has become “tighter and tighter,” so the government “finds it very difficult to do anything other than to circle the wagons and to double down on a repressive policy.” Guy Burgess, a sociologist who studies conflict and co-founded the blog Beyond Intractability, said that prospects of the Islamic regime collapsing have increased. “These are the sort of things that happen when, all of a sudden, people decide that the brutal force that kept the regime in power can be overcome.”

But the Islamic Republic still has the forces—in the hundreds of thousands—to repress the current uprising. And it has been ruthless. Videos circulating online from one medical center showed a computer screen displaying digital images of the deceased in its morgue for families to identify. Other videos published on social media have shown the dead zipped up in black body bags, laid outdoors for families to claim. The BBC quoted Iranian medical staff who described people blinded by pellets, a tactic used by Egyptian security forces during the Arab Spring, in 2011.

In the days, weeks, and months ahead, much will depend on sentiment within these security forces. In June of last year, Israel and the U.S. destroyed military installations and nuclear sites in Iran and killed key leaders and scientists, leaving the Iranian military feeling vulnerable. In addition, the rank and file share the same (increasingly existential) economic challenges faced by most Iranians. While the security forces are often lumped into an ideological monolith, there is a wide diversity among their members, as nearly all men are required to serve. Some opt to join the Revolutionary Guard because they get off earlier in the day than conventional soldiers, and thus can earn money at a second job. For others, having the I.R.G.C. on their résumés helps them later when applying for jobs in government or at government-funded universities.

O’Donnell noted that a critical juncture in the fall of the Berlin Wall was when upper-level officials in East Germany were no longer assured that the Soviet Union had their backs. Mid-level officials, in turn, were no longer convinced that their superiors would protect them. “So then they started to ask questions whether they should fire on crowds or not and think to themselves, ‘I’m certainly not going to put my neck out if no one’s going to cover me,’ ” she said. Ultimately, the erosion of morale at mid-level positions was what ended Communist rule in East Germany. “It was very unexpected.” Burgess added, “Once you get to the point where some of the regime’s forces decide that they’d be better off siding with the uprising, then the regime collapses quickly, and you find guys like [the former Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad suddenly finding new housing in Russia.”

The first generation of Iranian revolutionaries—including octogenarians like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—have long fooled themselves about their future. In September, during the U.N. General Assembly, I was part of a group of journalists and scholars who met with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, a political centrist, at a hotel in New York. He explained that the U.S. and Israel wrongly believed that, after the attacks in June, “people would take to the street and things would come to an end.” This assumption, he argued, did not “understand the Islamic Republic.” But on Sunday, faced with nationwide protests, he had to acknowledge his government’s shortcomings. “Our responsibility is to solve and address people’s grievances,” he said in an interview on Iranian state television. Other government officials have branded the demonstrators “terrorists,” which qualifies them for the death penalty.

The main obstacle for the protesters is that they have not yet formed a cohesive movement with an easily articulated goal. Nor have they established infrastructure or announced some form of centralized leadership. As with the Arab Spring, which toppled leaders in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen but failed to establish democratic governments or address economic inequality, protesters in Iran know what they are opposing but haven’t landed on a viable alternative. In the short term, any action taken by the Trump Administration may do little to provide clarity to the situation. On Saturday, the President posted on Truth Social, “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!” Later, Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a golfing buddy of the President, posted that the Iranians’ “long nightmare” was “soon coming to a close.” He continued, “President Trump understands Iran will never be great with the ayatollah and his henchmen in charge. To all who are sacrificing in Iran, God bless. Help is on the way.”

Another site I’ve often visited while in Tehran is the Paradise of Zahra—or Behesht-e Zahra, in Farsi—the sprawling cemetery on the southern outskirts of the city. A big section of the graveyard is devoted to “martyrs” from the eight-year war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties. Martyrdom, a commitment to die fighting for justice, has been central to Shiite Islam since the seventh century. Over the weekend, CNN and other media posted a video of mourners carrying the body of a protester into the Paradise of Zahra for burial. The mourners shouted, “Death to Khamenei” and “I will kill the one who killed my brother.” Security forces reportedly used tear gas to disperse them. A new generation of martyrs is being created. ♦