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The Washington Roundtable discusses the war that the United States and Israel have started with Iran, how the conflict might evolve and affect the whole region, and the Trump Administration’s rationale for launching the strikes. “I don’t think we have yet heard a clear explanation of what this war is about, what they intend to achieve, what the strategic goals are, and how it’s supposed to end,” the staff writer Jane Mayer says. The group also reflects on the lessons that they learned while reporting on the Iraq War about how conflicts such as these can transform societies.

This week’s reading:

• “Can Donald Trump Win a War with Iran If He Can’t Explain Why He Started It?,” by Susan B. Glasser
• “Do U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Declare War?,” by Jill Lepore
• “In the Texas Primaries, a Good Night for James Talarico, and a Bad One for John Cornyn,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
• “What Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Meant to Iran, and What Comes Next,” by Robin Wright
• “Has Trump Thought Through the Endgame in Iran?,” by Ishaan Tharoor

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

A doctor uses an initial instead of her first name when publishing academic papers, in order to conceal her gender and be taken seriously as a scientist. A woman who works as the secretary to a male police detective is the actual crime-solver of the duo but can’t get the job or the recognition she deserves. The prevailing moral code doesn’t prevent a policeman from sexually molesting a woman during a traffic stop but does prevent her from reporting it. In gangland circles, women are casually murdered and mutilated, their killers operating with utter impunity. Look around: positions of authority are uniformly held by men, and white ones, at that. And a woman who complains is said to be defying nature itself. It’s enough to enrage a woman past the breaking point, and what happens when that break occurs is the premise of “The Bride!,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s thoughtful and wild new film, which revisits both Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” and one of its odd cinematic offshoots, the loopy gothic shocker “Bride of Frankenstein,” from 1935.

That 1935 film, directed by James Whale, begins with a campy scene of Mary Shelley telling her husband—Percy Bysshe Shelley—and Lord Byron of her plans for a sequel, setting up the film as the fulfillment of that ostensible wish. In the new film, Gyllenhaal, who wrote the script as well as directing, borrows this idea but transforms it: in a furious opening monologue, Mary Shelley says that her novel was only half a story, that she is now bursting with the need to tell the other half, and that, to do so, she must enter the mind of another woman at breaking point. Shelley is played by Jessie Buckley, who also portrays the woman whose mind she is going to inhabit—Ida, a party girl on the fringes of Chicago’s gangland scene in 1936. First seen at a night-club table of menacing lowlifes, Ida, whose mother tongue is Brooklynese, suddenly switches to a heavy British accent and dispenses a torrent of highly literary sarcasms. To the film’s audience, this of course signals the presence of Mary Shelley, but to the audience at the table it looks like attention-getting or even madness. (It certainly throws off one gangster, played by Matthew Maher, who won’t stop pawing her.) When Ida leaps dramatically onto the table, the mobster boss, named Lupino (Zlatko Burić), has seen enough: he gives an underling the high sign. In short order, Ida is done away with.

Mary Shelley’s possession of Ida doomed her, but now Shelley’s original monster (played by Christian Bale) comes serendipitously to the rescue, emerging unexplained from the wilds of time to the turreted urban mansion of one Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), a modern practitioner of Dr. Frankenstein’s art of reanimating the dead. Frankenstein’s creature beseeches her for “an intercourse”—a woman, brought back from the dead like himself, whom he can love. This detail comes directly from Shelley’s novel. There, Dr. Frankenstein says no, but Euphronious, though she initially resists, ultimately decides to oblige the monster, apparently in the spirit of scientific research, and the fresh corpse she uses turns out to be Ida’s. The operation is a success, and, though the doctor wants to keep the couple in her tower for observation, they steal off into the night and begin making their romantic way through a cruel world that considers them monsters.

The path from death back to life has left the reinvigorated Ida with a permanent stain on her cheek, a side effect of the doctor’s treatment, and has erased all memory of her former life. She has no idea where she’s from or what her name is, and for much of the film she goes unnamed. Only much later, does she ask her companion—she calls him Frank—what her name is. At first, he teases her and says it’s Ginger Rogers; then he decides on the name Penelope, and Penelope she then becomes. Before her reincarnation, Frank has already scouted out the city and found his pleasure, in a louche nocturnal demimonde of sexual freedoms and extravagant costumes in which no one is treated like a monster. His scars and head staples are no object there, and he brings his newly created partner there. She fits right in with the women; one of them helps her with her makeup, after which the couple cut loose on the dance floor. But predators lurk; as they leave the joint, a pair of tough guys assault him and try to rape her. Displaying superhuman strength, Frank kills them both, in front of shocked witnesses. The killings make the headlines, and the couple go on the run, in an ever-more frenetic odyssey that leads them to New York City, to Niagara Falls, and eventually back to Chicago. They are pursued by a detective, Jake (Peter Sarsgaard), and his secretary—the one who actually solves crimes while he takes credit—who is played by Penélope Cruz. Also on the trail is a gangster named Clyde (John Magaro), who’s been sent to redo the job of rubbing out the mysteriously undead Ida.

The solid dramatic framework that Gyllenhaal establishes drives events onward with relentless force, and her film is devilishly clever in its fusion of gothic horror and film-noir tropes. Its true precursor, however, is the pair of “Joker” movies (from 2019 and 2024) directed by Todd Phillips, in which Joaquin Phoenix plays the Gotham villain as a comedian and song-and-dance man manqué. “The Bride!,” despite the compact fusion of its conception, ends up following the “Joker” movies into an expanded fantasy spectrum of spectacle and exaggeration. In doing so, it also shares those films’ debt to the genre conventions of superhero franchises. The fundamental trouble with such franchise films is that the construction of character is usually no more than gestural: with all the emphasis on extravagant spectacle and on backstories in the franchise universe, there’s rarely any room for personality, experience, or knowledge.

Unfortunately, “The Bride!” falls victim to this hollowing out of character, and the result feels simultaneously like a reduction and an expansion—or call it an inflation, an accretion of curious traits that crop up conveniently but remain undiscussed and undeveloped. Like “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the film is something of a musical, filled with song and dance, but what inaugurates that theme goes far beyond the ordinary delight of night-club revels. Frank is a movie buff—in particular, an obsessive fan of the (fictional) musicals star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose routines he loves to emulate on the dance floor. To evoke Frank’s passionate fandom, Maggie Gyllenhaal films ostensible snippets of Ronnie’s work, black-and-white pastiches of nineteen-thirties musicals, and then grafts Frank himself into some of them, as he imagines himself in the place of the actual star.

In genre terms, this makes a cute kind of sense: after all, the trope is familiar going as far back as the silent era (as in Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.,” from 1924). But in terms of character, there’s a problem: Frank’s Ronnie Reed obsession isn’t harmonized with anything else in his personality. What do movies even mean to Frank, given that he’s a character who came to life even before photography did? Frank, early on, astonishes the doctor by emphasizing that he was “born” in 1819 (the year after Shelley’s novel was published). But where has he been and what has he been doing all that time? What has he made of the changes that he has surely witnessed? (Frank burbles a line about the First World War in relation to Ronnie. Is it a memory? A fantasy? A memory of a movie?) It would be poignant to imagine Frank as an overflowing, overwhelmed stockpile of personal and historical memory, especially since his partner’s blanked-out memory renders her a kind of tabula rasa. But “The Bride!” completely ignores these implications. Similarly, though Frank must be more than a hundred by the nineteen-thirties, he doesn’t look a day over fifty; do the regenerated not age at all? If so, what does Frank know about his physical and mental capacities, and what can or does he tell the woman in his life about what her revived state promises?

What Gyllenhaal’s movie shares with far less substantial big-budget spectacles is the delivery of effects without causes. Thanks to Mary Shelley’s telekinetic puppeteering of Ida/Penelope, the feminist rage that sets the story in motion generates exciting and spectacular events. Gyllenhaal conveys the sensationalistic scope of the two creatures’ wild exploits with newspaper headlines, and it’s no spoiler (it’s part of the movie’s log line) to say that Penelope’s notoriety sparks a major social movement, a public expression of women’s long-stifled rage at the injustices they bear. But that movement is rendered onscreen in just a few brief flashes: a headline or two, a few shots of women running rampage in Penelope-style makeup. It gets about as much time and attention as the would-be bride’s eyebrows and proves even less consequential.

Gyllenhaal makes the past a parody, with cartoonish types and overdone styles, and dialogue spoken as if through megaphones. (Moreover, her filming of dance is disappointingly bland, done with mere snippets of gestures and offering neither the power of artifice nor the wonder of observation.) The movie may be set in a particular place and time, but she makes little of its specifics. There’s a notable contrast here with another historically based fantasy set in the nineteen-thirties—“Sinners.” In that movie, the writer and director Ryan Coogler establishes social and cultural specifics with fanatical attention, even including a biting reference to Ida’s home turf, with one character calling Chicago “Mississippi with tall buildings.” But race relations play no part in “The Bride!” There’s no Depression, either. (Just as the Depression-era hit “We’re in the Money” says, “We never see a headline / about a breadline.”) Nor are there Nazis or Fascists or Communists or any other contemporary details of importance.

Yet Frank is well spoken and well read and would surely be up on what’s going on, as well as on what had been going on since the age of Beethoven and Goethe. And Ida, both before and after reincarnation, is as sharp and bold as he is, but Mary Shelley’s telekinetic control of her undercuts the character. Although it’s an extraordinary conceit to endow Ida, the wisecracking night-club denizen, with Shelley’s knowledge and literary flair, giving her the author’s accent as well is unfortunate, adding an element of social snobbery and exoticizing Ida’s intelligence. The quick-change switch in accent and vocabulary gives Buckley some moments of theatrical virtuosity, but it diminishes the character’s range. So, by the way, does the fact that Ida doesn’t seem aware that the novelist has possessed her at all. “The Bride!” consistently offers little sense of states of mind and levels of self-awareness—factors that are central to the enduring fascination of Frankenstein’s monster.

The couple on the run, whooping it up at high speed on the open road in a stolen car, plays like the sci-fi counterparts to Bonnie and Clyde, but, without psychological construction or historical context, both characters are merely a collection of mannerisms. (The movie’s winks and nods—as at Ida Lupino, Ginger Rogers, and Herman Melville—are among them.) Buckley and Bale, though prodigious and fervent in their craft, don’t have much substance to work with. The direction reduces the lead performances to flash and flare, while actors in supporting roles are left inhabiting stereotypes.

For “The Bride!,” the original “Bride of Frankenstein” is both an inspiration and a target. The 1935 movie is an enduring frustration. When I first saw it, as a child obsessed with monster movies, I had the same trouble with it as I have now: the eponymous bride, played by Elsa Lanchester (who also plays Mary Shelley in the prologue), is onscreen for only a few minutes, near the end. The bride is utterly underrealized; it’s the male monster’s movie, and Boris Karloff, in that role, dominates it. Insofar as Gyllenhaal’s movie offers a corrective—emphasizing the social realities faced by women at the time “Bride of Frankenstein” came out, establishing the title character early on, and giving the couple a passionate and eventful relationship—it’s a conceptual delight. But, ultimately, the movie has the form of mismatched pieces stitched together and brought to life more willfully than coherently. ♦

In the director Yuval Sharon’s book “A New Philosophy of Opera,” he reflects on the plight of contemporary artists interpreting classic works, writing, “We can choose to either reinforce a studied and traditionalist view of the piece—as preservation—or we can attempt to liberate the spirit of the music, to present it in a way that’s completely of the moment.” For the past twenty years, Sharon has largely embodied the latter path, for which he has been recognized as one of the world’s foremost modernizers of opera. In 2020, he staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in a parking garage in Detroit. In 2023, he directed a version of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” in which the titular hero mourned his lover, Eurydice, by listening to a turntable recording of her voice. Next week, the Met Opera will première his new production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” in which the mythic couple appear onstage dressed like any other contemporary pair. Not long ago, he sent us a few notes about books that relate to his simultaneously reverent and refreshing work.

Purgatorio

by Dante Alighieri

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Last year, I decided to stop pretending I had read the Divine Comedy and actually make my way through it. To my astonishment, the classic poem became one of the most mind-expanding literary experiences of my life. After finishing it, I immediately went back and started a very slow second pass, accompanied by Mark Scarbrough’s extraordinary podcast “Walking with Dante.” (I can easily imagine starting all over again, for a third round.)

This time, I’ve been reading different translations. I particularly admire the poet Mary Jo Bang’s unabashedly contemporary version, which weaves in pop-cultural references with unfussy, plainspoken American English. Her version evokes what it must have felt like to be a contemporary of Dante’s, reading his poem and being addressed in your own language. Dante’s bracing directness, his pathos and humor, and his invention feel effortless. I also sense a kinship between Bang’s approach to the text and the way I interpret classic operas: “translating” them with immense care, but also an eye for how they land in contemporary life.

The Disappearance of Rituals

by Byung-Chul Han

Amazon | Bookshop

Han is a Korean-born philosopher living in Germany, who is noted for, among other things, his critiques of neoliberalism. I love all of Han’s writing, but this book has been especially meaningful to me as an opera director: without speaking specifically about the highly ritualistic art form of opera, he diagnoses why it struggles for relevance in our culture. Han’s observations on ritual in contemporary society became a guiding force for our production of “Tristan.”

Han’s overarching argument is that the deterioration of our social fabric is due to ritual evaporating from everyday life. The result, he says, is an increasingly atomized and narcissistic society, where symbolic action gives way to digital data and wordless communion is replaced by rapid communication. This book is a powerful reminder of the purpose and potential of ritual actions, and what role the arts can serve in our alienated and desacralized times. As he writes, rituals “are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house.”

Starbook

by Ben Okri

Amazon

Okri’s storytelling fuses the ancient and the contemporary so effortlessly that you can’t quite tell whether it is science fiction or age-old saga. In this speculative fable of initiation, Okri depicts an African prince becoming a master artist and learning that “works of art could not be understood.” And, if someone presumes to understand what an art work is about, “its magic is dimmed, not in the work, but in the person seeking to understand.” The magic act of Okri’s writing is his ability to maintain ambiguity while always keeping his language limpid and direct. The central love story in “Starbook” also culminates in an ecstasy that comes as close to the heights of “Tristan” as any contemporary novel I’ve read: “All love must lead to death. And out of this death a new man or new woman is born.”

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. ♦

The New Yorker Documentary

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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?