The Stars on Jodi Kantor's Laptop
On She Said, Jeanne Dielman, and life with the dull bits left in.
People talk a lot about whether movies make them feel seen. Considering that I’m a member of the most overrepresented demographic there is, you wouldn’t think this would be an issue for me. But while the movies have offered me a wide range of imaginative possibilities, a long list of all the things someone who looks like me can be—billionaire, president, adventuring archeologist, etc.—it’s rare, verging on exceptional, to see something that resembles what I actually am, what my life looks and feels like. Hitchcock said that drama is life with the dull bits cut out, and lord knows I don’t want movies about people folding their laundry or running out to the co-op for whole milk, but life—mine, anyway—is mostly made up of dull bits, or at at least moments so unexceptional that they’re not even worth summing up at the end of the day, let alone transmuting into cinema.
People in movies are smarter, stronger, more interesting, and better-looking than we are, or else flawed in more tragic and fascinating ways, and we all know and tacitly accept that. If real life was enough, we wouldn’t need fiction at all. But when you cut out the dull bits—which is to say, when you make a decision about which parts of life are worth taking note of and which are not—a lot goes with them: stuff that doesn’t seem important, but bit by bit removes the lives on the screen from the ones we really live, until we not only become accustomed to seeing something other than our own realities but come to think of them as basically unworthy of attention.
I liked She Said, the movie version of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about how they broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault, quite a bit—it’s a smart and solid procedural with some dynamite performances, especially by Samantha Morton as Weinstein’s former assistant Zelda Perkins. (It also makes some interesting decisions about how to depict Weinstein himself.) But where it really excels, and where it differentiates itself most sharply from obvious predecessors like Spotlight and All the President’s Men, is the attention it pays to what Kantor and Twohey do while they’re not reporting—or rather, when they’re not just reporting. Early in the movie, Kantor, played by Zoe Kazan, gets a call in her kitchen from a important source, and seamlessly shifts into reporter mode while continuing to pack her kids’ lunches for the next morning. Twohey, played by Carey Mulligan, is struggling with postpartum depression as the investigation starts to take off. They have husbands who take up the slack when they’re suddenly called out of town, and children who ask them what they’re working on, often a question with an uncomfortable answer.
One detail struck me in particular, from a scene in which Kantor and Twohey grill Weinstein’s lawyer Lanny Davis in a New York Times conference room. Twohey does almost all the talking, but what caught my eye was Kantor sitting, mostly silent and attentive, behind an open MacBook, its back decorated with stickers of butterflies and rainbows. And the reason it caught my eye is I have one just like it. The stickers are different—mine features a smiling star, a pepperoni pizza, and a cat with a unicorn horn eating a doughnut—but it’s an employer-issued MacBook Air embellished by my daughter when she was probably 8 or 9, not long after I got it. I knew in an instant how those stickers got on Jodi Kantor’s laptop, without the movie telling me, or even prompting me to ask. It’s just an incidental detail in a scene that’s about something else entirely, in a movie that suggests that the things we pay attention to aren’t always the most important ones—and the same goes for the people we consider worth listening to.
In a conversation on Twitter, Kazan told me that the detail came straight from Kantor’s real life, and also said that it “chimed with my own experience.” Which is to say that while it came from Jodi Kantor, it could have come from almost anyone. Maybe it’s a child’s way of attaching a little piece of themselves to this device their parent spends so much time staring at, or maybe they just feel a compulsion to glam up that matte silver rectangle with something a little more colorful. But it’s apparently a more common phenomenon than I’d ever considered, and in a movie that’s otherwise fairly alien to my experience, it felt like seeing a little piece of myself.1
I thought about that moment in She Said again this week, when the results of Sight & Sound’s poll of the greatest films of all time were released. Conducted once a decade, the poll is about as close to a collective understanding of the canon as film criticism gets, and although polls in general and this one in particular tend are notoriously resistant to change—Citizen Kane spent 50 years in S&S’s top slot—the profession has changed a lot (although not nearly enough) in the last 10 years, and the voting pool was also doubled this time, which led to a good amount of speculation that a new No. 1 might be crowned.
And lo and behold, there it was, in the top slot: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
Jeanne Dielman makes Akerman the first female director to top the Sight & Sound poll, but that’s not the only thing that’s significant about the milestone. Citizen Kane may be a canonical masterwork, but it’s also an absolute blast to watch, and while Vertigo is creepy and weird even for Hitchcock, it’s still the work of a master of the Hollywood thriller. Chantal Akerman was … not that. The daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, Akerman was raised in Belgium, where she started making films at the age of 18, in a spirit that can be described by the title of her first short: Saute ma ville—blow up my town. As she told me many years later, “I practice the policy of scorched earth.”
Almost 50 years after its creation, Jeanne Dielman remains a startling and demanding work. By conventional plot standards, almost nothing happens during its three hours and 21 minutes. Jeanne, played by Delphine Seyrig, performs mundane domestic tasks like polishing shoes and boiling potatoes in what feels like real time, often in solitary silence, sometimes in the company of her indifferent teenage son. Each afternoon, she welcomes a man into her bed and has sex with him for money. That's about it.2
After some time, you start to fall into the rhythms of Jeanne’s life yourself. So much so that when little things start to go wrong, it feels like something is terribly amiss. The first time I watched the movie, Jeanne accidentally let a spoon clatter to the floor of her kitchen, and I jumped as if I’d been stung. It’s a movie that demands your full attention, to be watched in one sitting and without distraction, and in return it forges what feels like an almost physical bond with its heroine. It makes you newly aware of how you move through the world, down to the tiny vibrations that move into your arm as you flip a light switch. It’s as if Akerman took the “dull bits” Hitchcock cut out and made an entire movie out of them.
Akerman disliked labels, lesbian and feminist3 among them, but Jeanne Dielman is an almost literally monumental tribute to the hidden domestic labor usually performed by women. The aristocratic Seyrig didn’t even know how to make coffee, but Akerman told her to watch her aunts in the kitchen, and to practice their movements until they seemed second nature—not just perfected but worn into her bones. “It was what I saw when I was a kid,” she told me. “My aunts and the aunts of my mother. The gestures of the women around when you are a child. What else are you looking at? What they do, the women. Usually, the man isn’t there. The man is working. And you have the woman, if it was a mother, or maid, or aunt, someone taking care of you as a child, 99 percent of the time it’s a woman.”4
I don’t see myself, or my mother, in Jeanne Dielman. But because of Akerman’s movie, I can feel what it’s like to inhabit her body, and settle a little more fully into mine.
So anyway, hi!
If you’ve gotten this far, you probably know that I write about movies, television, and other kinds of popular culture for Slate, and maybe that I ran a blog at Indiewire before that, and that I’ve written for lots of other places. (You pretty definitely follow me on Twitter, since I haven’t told anyone who doesn’t that this site exists yet.5) I envision this as a place where I write about things that don’t fit within the boundaries of my day job, or point you to things I have written for it, and maybe republish some of my older pieces, for one reason or another, no longer exist on the internet. It will be more personal, at least in tone, than my usual writing—there’s a good chance I’ve already used the first person more times on this page than in my six years at Slate—and a lot less driven by web analytics and trending topics. I’ve gotten pretty good over the last 10 years at reading metrics and calculating how to choose and frame ideas so as to catch cultural currents on the upswing, and I want, frankly, to try being a little worse at it here. I may regret that almost immediately, but for now, it feels like the right way to go.6
The Case of the Missing Blockbuster: This week at Slate, I wrote about Glass Onion, the hit sequel to Knives Out that you currently can’t see anywhere. Netflix made the singularly odd decision to release the movie in 700 theaters, many of which sold out screenings over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and then disappear it entirely until it lands on streaming Dec. 23. What’s going on here? Allow me to explain.
Steven, Taylor, Carol: I was a guest host on the Culture Gabfest this week, where I was meh on The Fabelmans, steaming mad about Ticketmaster, and talked about the songs that make me cry. I also gave a special shout-out to Jefferson Mays’ A Christmas Carol, a one-man version of Dickens’ story that unexpectedly blew me away. Listen away.
A note on the title: Things We Lost in the Fire is extremely temporary, chosen offhandedly to replace Substack’s default text which was something painfully unfunny about … iguanas or something. It’s the name of an album by Low, who’ve been one of my favorite bands for close to 30 years, and whose drummer, singer, and co-founder Mimi Parker died last month. I thought a tribute to her might be the first thing I wrote here until someone at Slate suggested I do it there, and while that piece did not, as we say in the biz, “do numbers,” I got more and more personal feedback from readers than I have in a while—and writing it also made me weep, which is, to say the least, not a usual part of my process. Some of my favorite Low songs are linked in that post, but here’s another, more holiday-appropriate.
The other detail in She Said that struck an immediate chord was less heart-warming: the moment in a parent’s life when you realize your daughter knows what rape is.
With one notable exception, which, if you’ve gotten this close to watching the movie, you might as well find out for yourself.
The creators of the miniseries Mrs. America certainly considered Jeanne Dielman a feminist landmark, enough to show it playing on a screen at the National Women’s Convention in 1977, and to trap anti-ERA campaigner Phyllis Schlafly in an ironic recreation of one of its iconic tableaux.
Kazan made a similar point, not just about her character in She Said, but about herself, writing about the “usually invisible” labor of raising children and pursuing a career, and thanking both her nanny and her parents for taking care of her daughter so that she could shoot the movie and her husband Paul Dano could make The Fabelmans.
In fact, at the moment I’m writing this still-unpublished post, “you,” my imagined audience, technically don’t exist either. Whoa.
I also planned to keep posts relatively short, which I’ve completely failed at right out of the gate, so God is already having a good chuckle.
Thank you, Sam. No need to keep it short.